A J Berea

Glorious leader Biden spoke today! What a joy it was to hear his voice. I salute you, President Biden, wherever you are, with palm down and arm extended. Never have so few voted so many times to bring so much pleasantness to a nation. Our lives are certainly better (approximately 3% better according to the Dominion poll) than they were under the orange fascist, may his name never be engraved on a park bench! If only we had never had those four years of darkness. But as the saying goes, there’s a sliver of silver in every cloud.

I wave to my friend, Barry, who stands thirty-six places ahead of me in line. It was thirty-seven places, but a woman, with apparently no endurance, passed out an hour and a half ago. Survival is not for the weak as Darwin said, rest his soul or whatever we atheists have. I can’t understand why she went down. It’s only …

“Hey, Barry. What time is it?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“At night or in the morning?”

“In the morning.”

See. It’s not even noon. Less than six hours of standing, four for her, and she’s curled up on the ground like a dried-up worm. They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Letting a little hunger take her out. My word! Hunger is weakness leaving the body. Silent endurance is what makes a worthy citizen.

Ah, the line moved again. I bet I’ll be in the doors by two. Double or nothing says there’ll be toilet paper. Not that I mind using gravel to wipe. Glorious leader has taught me to be happy in all circumstances.

Today is an especially exciting day for me. It’s my birthday, and you know what happens on your birthday! I can’t decide if I’ll go for the slice of beef or the extra portion of beans. I think I’ll go for the beef. How long has it been since I tasted meat? Was it before or after I broke my wrist? Let’s see. I broke my wrist during the Winter Solstice gift exchange. The doctor saw me the week after the Barack Obama birthday holiday. So, definitely before.

Meat it is. I’ve had my fill of beans. Don’t take that as a complaint. I love beans! And rice! And that seasoning they add to everything. By everything, I mean beans and rice, and by seasoning, I mean dust. Mmm. Yum.

By the way, the doctor did a fantastic job. I’d recommend him highly. Sure, he reset my ankle twice before working his way upward. I assumed, when he saw my hand flopping, he’d naturally know what was wrong. It really was my fault, not communicating clearly enough what the problem was. While bandaging my wrist, the doctor confessed that he didn’t actually want to be a doctor and didn’t think he was qualified to go to medical school. But he had the correct intersectionality score, so glorious leader sent him. And glorious leader always knows best. I cheerfully flopped my hand at him as I left his office with my other wrist wrapped in the cast.

In case you’re wondering, my wrist eventually healed as all injuries do given enough time. I’m not sure why my thumbs point in the same direction, though. Has it always been that way? Ah, who cares? When life is this good, what difference does it make?

“Hey, Barry. Look! Over there.”

“Where?”

“Over there. Ah, dang it. You missed it, Barry.”

“Was it a good one?”

I laugh. “What I saw, yes. I only caught the end of it, but the look on the woman’s face as they dragged her out of the house. Oh, it was priceless.”

“What did she do?”

“I don’t know. Do I look like a mind reader?”

“Were her kids screaming and hanging on to her?”

“You know it!”

“Dang it! Those are always the best.”

“I know her.”

The person in front of me turns around. A man with a dull look on his face, a midwestern transplant if I’ve ever seen one, speaks. He smells of despair and ignorance. I decide to denounce him to the police the first chance I get. I better think of a good excuse. I bet he voted for the orange fascist. That’ll work. Who cares if it’s true? He makes me sick.

“I know her,” he repeats. “She cared for my wife after her surgery.”

“What was wrong?” I surprise myself at how well I fake concern.

“She went in for a checkup. Sometime during the wait, she caught pneumonia. They removed half her liver and her left kidney. While lying on the recovery gurney, her wounds got infected. They gave her antibiotics – and it only cost me ten more years of indentured servitude, might I add – which is quite the bargain. The antibiotics cured both her infection and the pneumonia. We were so blessed to get such a skilled doctor.”

“Yes. Such a blessing, heil Biden.”

“Heil Biden.”

A wave of relief passed over me when I realized he’d stopped talking. The relief turned to despair when he turned around to face me and begin again. A large rock to the side of his head shut him up and earned me one place closer to the door. The only downside is now I’d never know why the secret police dragged that woman away.

Thank government for the secret police! They are so much better than the old police we had who’d go shooting people of color willy-nilly. All that oppression. Ugh. I’m so glad we don’t have to deal with that anymore.

Uh oh. That woman escaped. She’s running back up the street towards us. Five policemen are following close behind. She’s pretty quick for someone so malnourished. There’s no way she’ll be able to put up a fight if they ever catch her. I’m kind of rooting that she’ll get away. Not because I’m on her side. I just know that, when they eventually find her, she’ll get a double re-education.

Go! Faster! You can do it!

Ah, crap. They got her. Oof. Oh my. That was a hard shot. I’m not sure I should watch, but I do enjoy a good beating. Oooh. It sounded like someone took a stick to a watermelon. I hope it wasn’t her head … oh, it was … ha, ha, ha. They’re going at her again. That young police officer has a quick baton. He should be on that reality show, the one where the noble youth of our land teach the stubborn, former conservatives to learn the joy of the socialist way. A few whacks from him and even Ben Shapiro will be singing a new tune.

She’s not moving anymore. The boot to her ribs makes it look like she is, though. Oh, well. Shows over. Time to get back to business.

“What time is it, Barry?”

“Eleven oh four.”

“Morning or night?”

“Morning.”

That’s good. I enjoy standing in line. It’s better than being in the house. That reminds me. I better call the city about the electricity. It’s almost the seventeenth. My day for hot water. I don’t want them to forget like last month. If they do, no worries. I’m sure glorious leader will solve this problem too. Just like he has every other one.

Darren didn’t want to be there. The moaning and crying, the smell of ointments and sterile surfaces mixed with blood and sweat, long lines of people with numbered tickets in their hands. It gave the building the impression of a haunted DMV more than a place of healing. He hadn’t visited a hospital since the day he fell off his bike and broke his wrist. Six years old was a long time ago.

An elderly Chinese man in a dash for a package of pork had blindsided Darren and knocked him off balance. The cold cement of the grocery store floor stopped his momentum. His outstretched arms cushioned most of the fall. His head absorbed the rest of the blow.

“I’m fine, Melly,” he told his wife as he dusted himself off, a few drops of blood staining the tile.

“You’re going,” she said with both hands on her hips as if she had the final say.

She did. And now he sat in a curved plastic chair with a ticket in his hand. Melissa made Darren take her home first so she could water the begonias. Apparently, he was injured enough to require a hospital visit but not so badly injured that he couldn’t drive himself there.

His eyes rose involuntarily to the clock. 11:22. The morning passed as slowly as a Friday afternoon meeting. He grimaced and resigned himself to his fate.

“Sixty-two!”

Darren looked down at the crumpled paper in his hand, then stood up and headed towards the voice.

“Room three,” a nurse, who had lost her pleasant demeanor around 8:30, said. “Down that hall and on your right. Dr. Chee will be with you momentarily.”

Sometime after noon and after a nurse with bright, blue gloves tested all his vitals, a knock sounded on the door. A second later, without asking permission, a man in a white coat entered. The stethoscope around his neck and the nametag that read, ‘Dr. Fow Chee,’ suggested that Darren would finally have his examination.

“What brings you here today?” Dr. Chee asked with the slightest of oriental accents.

“A ’68 Camaro,” Darren said. His attempt to brighten the gloomy room went unnoticed.

“I see on your chart that you had a fall,” Dr. Chee said. “What did you hurt?”

“My head.”

“Uh huh. Let me take a look.”

Dr. Chee spent the next few minutes probing, jostling, and pressing on Darren’s scalp. He felt the doctor’s breath rustle his hair every time the doctor exhaled.

“You have quite the nasty bump,” the doctor said.

“Is it that bad?” Darren asked.

“Probably not. But I don’t want to take any chances. I have to ask you a few questions first before we take the next step. Have you been feeling well?”

“I suppose,” Darren said. “Although, I’ve been sneezing recently. Seasonal allergies.”

Dr. Chee’s eyebrows rose at hearing the word, ‘sneezing’. “Mm hmm. And do you know of anyone else who has had a fall, say in the last couple of years?”

Darren thought for a moment. “My mother fell in the shower last year,” he said, “and my brother tripped over a toolbox when he was working on his car.”

“Ahh,” Dr. Chee said and scribbled on his notepad. “Family has a history of falling. Possibly hereditary or contagious. And how did you fall?”

“An old Chinese guy bumped into me. He must have hit me just right to knock me off balance.”

“I do not know why you need to bring race into this,” Dr. Chee said with just a hint of resentment.

Darren immediately regretted saying it, even though he had read on one of those alternate news sites that a new wave of occidental tipping had swept the globe with Chinese people posting their sneak attack videos to YouTube in the hopes they would go viral. He decided not to mention that to the doctor.

“Well,” Dr. Chee said. “This may be your lucky day.”

Darren didn’t understand the comment, yet it somehow made him uneasy. “Why is it my lucky day?” he asked.

“An epidemic might be sweeping the globe, and initial tests indicate that you may have contracted a new illness. You have some of the indicators: sneezing, falling, family history that makes you prone to falling.”

“How does that make me lucky?”

Dr. Chee laughed again, the quiet, polite laugh of someone who doesn’t want to offend others. “You’re one of the first thousand patients. There’s a probability, albeit slight, that they’ll name the disease after you.”

“Is this disease bad?” Darren asked.

“Oh, we don’t know. Some people, without medical degrees such as mine, say it’ll not be much worse than the flu. However, there are models that say twenty percent of the people in the world will catch the disease. That’s over a billion people. More than half will probably die. We can’t be certain, of course, although I’m not one to doubt the models. The top pharmaceutical companies, in a joint venture with WHO, developed them, so you know they’re accurate.”

“Are you saying I’m going to die?” Darren asked.

“I can’t say for sure. I’ll have to run a bunch of tests, send you for an x-ray and a CAT scan. They’re going to have to put you in isolation as well.”

“For how long?”

“Oh. No more than four to five weeks, at which point we will reevaluate the situation. It could be as long as a few months. Unless the epidemic continues. We envision that this self-containment may extend to the general population, also. Sooner than later,” he added.

“Why’s that?”

“We don’t want the disease to spread. Everyone will be locked down. They may have to shutter businesses for a while until we get this under control.”

“But won’t that destroy the economy?” Darren asked. “Especially if no one is allowed to work.”

“People’s lives are more important than the economy,” Dr. Chee said with extra emphasis. “It is quite immoral of you to consider your financial situation to be of greater concern than the billion lives that will be lost. Besides, many people will be able to weather this storm. The poor not so much, I admit, but I’m sure the government will step in and help them out.”

“That sounds like socialism,” Darren said. “I’m not so sure I want that, considering it’s track record.”

“A crisis is no time to think about the consequences. It’s all about making it through the next few months.”

Darren paused for a moment. “So, I definitely have this disease. This falling disease,” he said.

“As I said, I can’t say for certain,” the doctor answered. “We won’t know until we’ve run some more tests.”

A voice came over the intercom. “Dr. Fow Chee to the nurse’s station. Dr. Fow Chee.”

“They’re paging me,” the doctor said. “Go to x-ray and hand them this order. They’ll tell you what to do next.”

The doctor exited the room. Darren sat for a minute before heading to x-ray.

The next time Darren saw the doctor was the day he left the isolation ward. The warm sunshine of spring had given way to the cool chill of late autumn. A few yellow and red leaves still clung to the trees. Flocks of geese flew in a lopsided V towards their winter feeding grounds.

It turned out that all he ever had was a bump on the head. He never contracted the disease. Neither had the billions. Four thousand eventually succumbed to the illness, most of which already were weakened from pre-existing conditions. The updated models said that without the global shutdown, four thousand and fifty lives may have been lost. The WHO immediately labeled their work as an overwhelming success.

On the day Darren left the hospital, the clerk handed him his bill. Between the x-rays and CAT scans and experimental medicines and a host of other expenses, his insurance had stopped paying after the total reached two million dollars. Darren didn’t know what to do, especially since he lost his job after the second month. Even the first fresh air in five months couldn’t raise Darren’s spirits.

He took one last look at the bill. All those extra zeros stared back at him. So did Dr. Chee, who waved out the window of his brand-new Porsche. Darren crumpled the paper and threw it onto the ground by the shrubbery which grew outside the door. A balding man with a pointed beard and an uncanny resemblance to Lenin walked over to the trash and stabbed it with a sharp stick. A low cackle gurgled from his throat.