This four-part strangeness ends on what to me is a positive note, if you can make it that far. It began with this text, then Deena Shoshkes and I added music and then I made videos.
Confessions of a Virus
1.
If there’s anything we’ve learned by watching your leaders – and of course we’re watching, just because we don’t have a consciousness like yours doesn’t mean we’re not watching – it’s that the self is boundless. We’re a collective self, as boundless as any, and for whatever reason, I’m the voice of that self. How I’m not sure, but I think I may know why. To explain. Maybe even apologize.
But first a question: how different is our merging with your cells from your merging of your own after what you call an act of love? We understand that what we do is not the recombination of equal opposites you seem to enjoy. We understand that you see us as parasites and it’s true we can’t survive without you. But neither can you survive without you. How different is that?
I’ll tell you one way we’re different. We don’t have eyes – we have one eye we share. I can’t tell you how it works, but I can tell you what it’s like to be on the lip of a bat, flying in the purple dusk, zig-zagging in the hunt for bugs – it’s a dizzying thrill. Much calmer inside the bat’s warm, wet lung. We would’ve stayed there, in the bats, but we didn’t. Can you blame us? I suppose you will regardless. Blaming is one of the things you do.
We know you’re smart – or you can be. You’ve figured out that for the tiniest particles, the rules of time and space don’t apply. While in the grand scale we’re actually closer to your size than that, we’re small enough to evade some of the rules of time, so I’ve “spoken” to viruses that “lived” – words I guess you’d say I use loosely – hundreds of thousands, even millions of years ago, and I see that we have a problem you have. We can be victims of our own success. Let me give you an example. There was a group of early humans whose brains had somehow mutated to take on the best of the mammalian world – canine love, feline patience, primate fraternity, elephantine order, and a coronavirus found a comfortable home in their lungs with hardly a symptom. Then a deadly mutation occurred and in weeks, this happy group of short, hairy bipeds was gone, and the guilty coronavirus with it. Both forever. You see, we don’t want to overwhelm. It’s not good for us.
2.
Another thing we share: we can’t usually cross the species line. Our world is your world, the human world. The rest of the animal kingdom? It feeds you, sometimes kills you, sometimes keeps you company, sometimes inspires wonder, terror, delight or disgust. The pangolin, with its scales and its sticky tongue can do most of that. We didn’t choose to mutate into a form that could leap from bat to pangolin. We never choose to mutate. But look what happened next: in a meat market in Wuhan, we found ourselves an even more luxurious home: the lungs of the one mammal that has spread to every corner of the planet. How could we resist? Even if we had in us any power of resistance?
Things we don’t share: We’re not given to anger. We don’t succumb to the frustration of our desires. We don’t disintegrate into murderous factions. We don’t smolder with envy, though I will say that in my strange designation as spokesperson – another term you’ll say I use loosely – I do have a sense of your internal states. I have glimpses of your emotions. (I suppose putting things into words will do that). The exchange of breath and touch – necessary for us both to survive – gives you the occasional feeling of ecstasy. I can see how that could inspire envy. And how, if we were given to maliciousness, we might take some kind of twisted pleasure in the way we’ve forced you into isolation. Although we’re also squeezing your family units closer together. I’d think you might like that. You with your jobs and your economy – I’d think you’d prefer a world without them.
Though I’d also imagine that the ecstasy you create together would so attune you to each other that you’d never experience its opposite, the misery you seem to inflict on one another just as easily, or maybe more easily. I also have some sense of the misery each of you seems to be able to inflict on yourselves.
3.
We feel no emotions. But there may be something like the experience of bees in a hive, a collective buzzing. And there may even be, I admit, a collective determination that could be called a mean streak. We do not want to be hated, but we understand how that could be. Like I said, we did not choose this mutation. And yet we will be what we are. Like you.
Like you we’re thin skinned. We hate bleach. If you could give your lungs a quick rinse with bleach, we’d be gone. But so would your lungs.
What we find most fascinating about you – even more than your zig-zagging from ecstasy to misery – is your irrational altruism. Like ants, you will sometimes lay yourselves down in the water, drowning yourselves to make a bridge for others. It’s like your desire for friendship. Unlike any other animals I’m aware of, you’ll risk your lives to hang out. I believe I use that term correctly.
So bleach won’t work. But there’s something that would. I will tell you because I don’t think you’ll be able to use this information, so there’s little risk to us. And yet, through this strange window into you through these words, I admit that I share a hope: a hope that you will somehow manage it, that you will rid yourselves of us, leaving some other coronas to carry on, coronas that will be better or worse, more malignant or more benign, testing the balance of your overcrowded world and your power to organize within it.
The cure is a song. There is a song that would destroy us. The same way a high pitch at just the right frequency can shatter a crystal glass, there is a song, a set of pitches, melodic turns and rhythmic patterns that creates a penetrating effect that would pierce and disintegrate us. Instantly. I’ll sing it for you. Just as I can speak, I can sing.
You can’t hear it, can you?
I’m singing it over and over.
OK, there is no song. That was a wish, a wish I suppose we shared for a moment. Or so I’d like to think. But there is a tone, a certain frequency, that if sent with sufficient intensity and delivered in just the right way would in fact destroy us. I won’t tell you what it is. I can’t do that. I don’t think you could hear it anyway.
Or maybe that’s just another wish.
4.
We’re not happy with what we’ve done. Are you happy with what you’ve done?
I’m not happy with my role here. Are you happy with yours?
Here’s another thing you may not be able to hear, something we know about your future, because we can see that too, the same way we can see the next virus that will plague you and the one after that and the one after that, the ones you’ll never feel, the ones you’ll feel a lot: by spreading as we’ve done to just about every corner of your world we’ve turned that world into one place the way it’s never been before, and turned you all into one group in a way you’ve never been before, and as a result you are making a step toward unity that cannot be unmade, leading you in a direction that cannot be changed, regardless of how many zigs and zags you complicated beings with your separate yet combined internal states may take. And I know that this change will happen whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, and there’s not a thing you can do about it, like there’s not a thing we can do to stop ourselves from slipping into your cells and killing you and leaving the rest of you in doubt, shock, denial, fear, hope, stress, wonder and confusion.
Yours,
19
