Isolation Protocol

Originally published in Berkeley Fiction Review, #43, Spring of 2023

Part 1: Common Exposures

Good news. It is not contagious.

Bad news. You can still catch it from anyone, anywhere, anything.

You might contract it at a funeral, crowded around the casket with the other mourners, surrounded by the heavy breathing, and the heavier colors.

It may come from a relative’s greasy lips at a holiday gathering, idly commenting on your consistent lack of a partner.

Your smartphone is a filthy, untouchable cesspool (and yet you still touch it, and let it touch you, your hands, your hips, your tender cheek).

Other risks include travel, especially on trains or planes or ships, steadily cruising into unseen and unforeseeable threats for which you have no natural defenses.

You could even catch it from yourself, as your own stale breath fogs up the bathroom mirror and reflects back into your trembling mouth, and you see how much you’ve aged, and how much less aging you might have left to do.

Part 2: Symptoms

Here follows an incomplete list of the symptoms you might (should) expect, if (when) you are infected.

Often, at the start, there are none. Hooray.

(At the start.)

People may live normal lives, completely asymptomatic, never realizing the illness fizzing and festering just below the level of awareness, building up pimple-like pressure until one final papercut-slice of stress causes it to burst. (Which it will, eventually. It will.)

At which point you may experience sweating. Nausea. Heart palpitations. Rapid breathing and lightheadedness. The feeling of being smothered, or crushed, or disemboweled. Flashes of truth, unshakeable truth, world-changing and world-ending truth (also known by the medical misnomer, “paranoid delusions”).

You may become acutely aware of your body, for it will betray you, locking you into its bony cage, temporarily, but permanently during that temporariness.

You may see your impending doom as a physical manifestation, a darkness sucking away at the edges of your vision, so subtly at first that you hardly notice it at all, but growing, steadily, and steadily faster.

You may hear voices. Your own. Screaming.

And you will know, then, that you are infected.

Part 3: Prevention Measures

None.

Part 4: Remedies

It is recommended that you strengthen your immune system by intentionally exposing yourself to the things that aggravate your illness, abandoning the isolation that has, so far, kept you safe.

It is recommended that you follow these homeopathic principles with gusto, traveling broadly and without preparation, eating and drinking foods of unknown origin, shaking strangers’ hands and entering into their breathing space.

It is recommended that you expose others, too, and congregate in groups for this express purpose, in restaurants and concerts and birthday parties, speaking and laughing and crying freely and splattering this…this disease over everyone else, and inviting them to do the same to you.

These are all lies.

The only effective treatment is to isolate completely, continuously, even terminally, to avoid worsening symptoms, or, once cured, reinfection. This is what I learned from my doctor, while in the hospital convalescing from my most recent attack, during our many misguided conversations about my illness and me and me and my illness, all of them so excruciating that I wanted to scream and thrash and throw things around, and truly might have, if the chairs weren’t bolted to the floor, and if they hadn’t sedated me, and if I weren’t afraid of needles. This is what I learned when my doctor sat sipping coffee from a blank-faced porcelain mug, and I sat twitching and sweating and drowning in the fluorescent floodlights, and she told me that she understood. This is what I learned when she lay one hand on the chest of her cashmere cardigan, the other on the shoulder of the shapeless gray sweatsuit gulping my body like bitter medicine, and she told me that she could help.

But I am grateful for these shameless lies, for they are what helped me realize that she and all the other doctors like her are, in fact, complete quacks, peddling elixirs and nostrums made of nothing but glittery well-wishes bottled in empty encouragement. And so I smiled and nodded and told her my symptoms had resolved, when, in truth, I was the one who had resolved, to escape and spread this unshakeable and world-changing and world-ending truth.

It is for this reason that I’ve created these informational brochures, which you may have found scattered across the sidewalk below my blacked-out apartment window, or uploaded digitally as social media ads that cost the last of my grocery funds, or attached with string and dental floss and shoelaces to foil party balloons that I purchased online with overnight shipping (please ignore the balloons’ messages, unless you are in fact expecting a baby girl, or you did recently graduate, in which case, congratulations, and given the circumstances, my condolences). What matters is that you have found them. Hopefully, you have found them. It is vitally important that you find them. You must understand. You are at perilously high risk. You can see this, in the infographic on the side panel, showing the global map of infection hazard.

Sections colored red indicate apocalyptic danger.

Sections colored green indicate safe zones (in one small square in the inset, off to the side, at two hundred thousand times magnification, representing my apartment).

The map has no other colors.

Part 5: Conclusion

Let us review.

To avoid illness, avoid everything.

Should you show symptoms, alert. Alert. Alert.

Report your symptoms, and you will face the consequences.

This concludes our review.

You may still have lingering questions. This is normal. I have them, too, all the time, all dire, all unanswerable. Any missives may be placed into plain white envelopes and slipped under the door. Rest assured, they will remain confidential. The door is locked, chained, deadbolted, barred, duct-taped, monitored with video surveillance. For my safety, not for yours. If you have enough anxiety to ask, you’re already infected.