The Model of Infection
I was in the hospital last week, for non-COVID reasons, when I had an asthma episode in the middle of the night. The respiratory doctor on call was handsome, and friendly, and exhausted. Not just 3:00 AM exhausted—month ten exhausted. Frontlines exhausted. Frontlines in a hotspot red state as a BIPOC provider in December 2020 exhausted. For context, I was in for a routine surgery and knew I’d be discharged in a matter of days. I felt guiltily awake.
The doctor hooked me up to a nebulizer and stood there, duty-bound, as the machine misted my breath drops throughout the confined space we shared. (I’d been tested prior to surgery, but still.) Looking back, I hate the stupid, privileged, unanswerable question I asked him while we waited—“How bad have things been?”—and more than that, I hate the answer he had to give. He told me he was one of two team members who had not yet contracted the virus, and he was just waiting for his turn. He said infection was inevitable.
It’s six days later and I’m at home, on bedrest, getting better while the country gets worse, always worse. I’ve got bottles of antimicrobial drugs lined up by the sink. A mask collection in my laundry basket. Factcheckers on my Twitter feed—scientists, experts, truthtellers—attempting to counteract the persistent spread of toxic “leadership.” And all of those defense lines sound unsurprising, don’t they? Normal, after the week I’ve had. After our 2020. Really, after the past four years. That’s what keeps nagging at me, since the doctor called infection inevitable—how the atrocities of COVID-19 have been both overwhelmingly, grievously devastating and overwhelmingly, grievously fitting, in an America where the model of infection has defined our national state of being since 2016.
The similarities seemed almost too easy, once I started to think about it. The virus preys on those made vulnerable by pre-existing conditions; Trump’s rhetoric has thrived in populations that harbored hate and anger long before his rise to power. In the US more than any other country, the virus has fed ravenously on misinformation and fear; these same gaslight evils have been key to Trump’s persisting popularity. The virus has spread this easily for this long because not even experts understand it; the virus has shone an overdue light on the horrors of classism and racism very much at work in our contemporary society; the virus has benefitted from constant underestimation—sub in Trump’s name for “virus” in each of these sentences and judge the fit for yourself.
The writer in me could go on and on, proving out the symmetry of her metaphor. And if the matter of the metaphor wasn’t, in this case, actual life and death, perhaps the exercise could be satisfying. But that’s the tragedy, isn’t it? Both this virus and this president have been catastrophic—deadly—beyond our worst-case estimations. And we’re living through a period in history when the ruin of these past four years has been so toxic and contaminating, preying on our most vulnerable, that this kind of infectious scourge seems at best, fitting, at worst, an inevitable destination. To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that the human truth of 2020’s unspeakable casualty—the heartbreaking 316,844 lives that have been lost as of this sentence’s drafting—makes any sense. Rather, they are 316,844 individual instances of inexplicable disaster. And if a 2020 comprised of 316,844 disasters seems to be a fitting, representative final chapter to the past four years, maybe somewhere as unknowably tragic as this was the only kind of place we could have ended up. Maybe we’ve moved even farther away from a place of sense or empathy or humanity than we feared. Maybe the road to some semblance of recovery, on all fronts, will be even longer than we think.
As that 3:00 AM doctor put it, an inevitability is still at play in terms of what happens next. Don’t get me wrong. I share in admitting these recent, late-breaking glimmers of hope—a vaccine! a new administration!—because we’re so exhausted, and they feel so good. But beyond those easy excitements, even as we try to look forward, it worries me that the writer’s metaphor still applies. Just as Pfizer and Moderna are no magic fix, neither is Biden-Harris. If the model of infection does fit the reality of the past four years, unknown consequences of both will likely linger, for no one knows how long. And the real inevitability may be never fully healing, from either.
Katie Edkins Milligan’s short story, Lucky’s, is forthcoming in FICTION No. 65. She is a fiction writer from Maine, currently living and working in Texas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review and North Dakota Quarterly, and she is the 2021 recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. She is the fiction editor at Gulf Coast and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She has received support from the GrubStreet Short Story Incubator program, the Aspen Summer Words Workshop and the Southampton Writers Conference. Find her at www.katieedkinsmilligan.com.