Plague Chronicle

End of May, June and July

Some say ignorance is bliss, but I would have to disagree. Although after the announcement of the plague Oran was closed down and now neither I nor anyone else can move an inch outside the city boarder, at least I have an understanding and an explanation for the eerie things that happened in the beginning of spring. I am no more paralyzed with fear after every step I make, and finally every time I do not have to look at my parents and think that this might be the last time I see them. I know that I will have time to say good bye before they leave me forever, or on the contrary, I will have the chance to bid them farewell.

In the past couple of weeks after the announcement that Plague has hit our quiet and boring town my parents morphed from the busy and neglective type, to the type of parents that watch your every step and make sure I do not even sneeze without their knowledge. I cannot leave the house without going through the “Spanish inquisition”, reassuring them, that I do know that my life and their life is in danger and promising not to do anything foolish and thoughtless. Actually I do not have anywhere specific to go, but my goal is to get out of the house that has this resistant atmosphere. I cannot take a deep breath or think anything freely anymore, for I feel the weight of my parent’s sudden and surprising anxiety about my near future or my near future death. I would prefer that they fret over themselves and their lives than more about mine, for every second of worrying and fright seems to kill a little bit of us from inside. Although I realized that sometimes there is no wall to stop ourselves from worry, that might in the end kill us faster than the actual plague, for there is no known to mankind cure against anguish and apprehension.

So some fear keeps controlling my life, although now my fear is not of the unknown disaster that has hit my life and my town but, a fear of isolation, losing contact with the outside world and being so behind, as to not be able to catch up ever again. I fear that with skipping school I might never catch up to become an engineer, as was my dream from the time I can first remember myself. During the night, as I lay in the quiet and in the “safety” of my bed, I can hear the screams of the people that are taken to quarantine and the doctors’ promises that this is the best chance another victim the plague has to survive. I dream and in my nightmares see myself screaming my head off, after realizing that I am the next to be put in the capture of quarantine.

School has been cancelled, so now I sit at home and when I cannot stand another second after going through questioning I give my parents the false reason of my leaving “the safest place for me” right now. The reason varies from seeing friends, who are now not allowed to leave their rooms to getting another book, that I would not be able to read because of the pressure I feel anytime around my parents to going out to look for a lost bracelet, that I did not own in the first place. But once I actually get out of the restrictions of my house, I have nothing better to do than roam the streets and watch the people walk by, look at their faces and imagine what life that lead, back when the minds of people were filled with the next best way to make money, and what modification the plague brought into their previously tasteless lives. The pastern I noticed interests me greatly, for after the official announcement of the plague the people on the streets where mostly in a hurry or on the contrary, made each step with giving it so much though and wasting so much energy on the thinking process, that a six-cylinder car could easily use all the energy to make it from here all the way to USSR with no trouble. These were the type that had nowhere to go and no one to worry about. I knew this for a fact, for some of them I followed just to get a taste of the old stale life I lead before. The faces of the Hurriers (the ones who had somewhere to be) usually showed trepidation and alarm, their lips drawn tightly together, as they imagined what horrible news could await them at home. I observed that the Fuelers (those that could provide the fuel for a car by just thinking about their next step) had blank faces and vacant eyes, as if the humanness, or maybe it was their sanity, was gone. However this all changed for a while when people heard that the serum would soon be here, people wore smiles more naturally than ever before, for the smiles came deep from beneath where hope still lived, hope for salvation from the plague and I know that even I wore that smile for a while, for I was aware of that warm healing of hope inside me. But soon the smiles were not worn, but pasted, as everyone lost hope after the numbers of death climbed higher and higher. The only sweet moments where those when our city was contacted by others, and they sent their encouragements and sympathy, but even this soon turned in to a bitter and hopeless thing, for the people on the outside where of the opinion that we are to remote for any real action to be taken and that isolation was the only way. This wiped the smile off my face and all the stupid fairytale endings for my life out of my heart.