Peripheral Visions: In Sickness and In Health

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

In Sickness and in Health

I was twenty-eight when the Exhaustion hit me. My lifelong best friend, Jon, stepped in to save me, and that's the only reason the state didn't put me down. Otherwise, I'd have ended up like so many people who got sick: Homeless, living and dying on the streets. It was bad PR, a tangible reminder to the commoners that America wasn't "great" again, hadn't been "great" in a very, very long time, and wasn't on its way to "greatness" any time soon.

President for Life Kirsch sent in Domestic Security to "clean up" the "public hazard" of so many sick, homeless people. He sent in the Army and the National Guard to help. His mobilization of the troops proved effective: Millions simply disappeared – not to an outcry, but to a sigh of relief from an America that had forgotten how to care, had forgotten why they should.

No one knew what the Exhaustion was, except that it was viral and belonged to the general class of SARS. Virologists gave it the tentative designation SARS-Cov-6, but it was more than that; despite being an RNA-based virus, it also it carried some of the genetic sequencing of gammaherpesvirus-4, better known as Epstein-Barr, which is DNA-based.

Such hybrid viruses do exist in nature, but they are rare. SARS-Cov-6 never revealed definitive signs of artificial origins, but it was so communicable, and its effects so malicious, as to make it seem engineered. After a brief initial phase, when symptoms were so mild that they were often overlooked or dismissed as the result of a poor night's sleep, the "long COVID" symptoms set it... and they were severe: A constant sense of physical depletion, mental fogginess, lack of memory. Some likened it to the down-swing of manic depression: All one could do in severe cases, like the one I had, was sleep.

It was that overall constellation of symptoms, along with its combined RNA/DNA nature, that made the conspiracy theorists – and a large fraction of the epidemiological field's experts – convinced that the Exhaustion was created deliberately. The question was: By whom? And why?

The latter question seemed easy to answer with every option on the multiple-choice answer. It was Egypt. It was North Korea. It was deep state separatists. It was (the looniest of the loony theories suggested) George Soros, a billionaire who had been a bogeyman for generations, and who was certainly dead. Or was he? Some said he had cloned himself. Some said he had become a digitized personality in the cloud. Some said he had financed an immortality serum, or that he was and always had been a vampire... or a demon... or a reptile alien, whatever that might be.

Whatever traces of democracy were still to be found vanished when the Exhaustion appeared. A good deal of common sense and science-based medicine vanished, too. After the blowback from the COVID-19 years a generation before, no one wanted to revisit unpopular efforts to contain the spread of the disease, especially not the Theopublicans, who had long since outlawed the use of face masks in public and placed federal prohibitions on states or localities initiating health-related lockdowns. The Theopublicans soon started advertising their commitment to blocking any attempt to revive COVID-era public health policies; they saw it as a PR gift ahead of the 2054 midterms, which was laughable since almost no elections featured more than one candidate and "opposition" leaders were locked up as soon as they emerged under "anti-divisiveness" and "anti-woke" laws.

Still, it was that advertising campaign that prompted megachurches to declare "New Revivalist" events, combining religion and politics all over again in a fresh wave of paranoia around "big government" and the "deep state" trying to "persecute" Christians. It worked: Megachurch memberships swelled to peak numbers not seen in years.

But then the epidemiological bill came due. Six weeks after the first reported cases of the Exhaustion, tens of thousands were sick with the extreme long tail of the disease. Two weeks after that, hundreds of thousands. A week later... three-point-seven million.

I was one of them. I'd joined one of the local megachurches with my girlfriend... I say girlfriend; what I mean to say is, beard. She and I never had any erotic sparks between us. We did have an arrangement, though: I slept with guys, or rather, one guy – Jon. She, for her part, slept with women. It was an arrangement that served us well for a few years, until people started wondering when we'd get married, when she'd get pregnant, when we'd prove our moral fitness with an exchange of rings and a brood of children.

That's why she and I were so vocal about resisting any public health policies the government might try to impose. (Not that the Theopublican-controlled government, with President for Life Kirsch at its head, would have ever tried to impose any such policies.) That's why we made such a big deal about officially joining Mount of Olives Megachurch, posting video of our neobaptisms on social media and hurrying to answer the call from the feds for denunciations of family, friends, and colleagues who spouted anti-freedom rubbish around social distancing, or vaccinations, or any other liberal ideas that were now prosecutable under law. I never actually denounced anyone, but she exacted revenge on a couple of cousins she hated by claiming they had read books by Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood.

It didn't end well for us. Neither of us could work, debilitated as we were by the illness, which we both came down with nine days after attending a Group Prayer Event. Less than a month after we'd gotten sick, we were evicted. Her family refused to take her in; they came up with some BS reason – I forget what; my memory of those days is hazy. They probably didn't want to get sick themselves, but by law they could not acknowledge that the Exhaustion was, in fact, a communicable disease, let alone a pandemic. We ended up on the streets and were quickly separated. I heard about her death later, and from what I was told there was some question of whether one of her brothers or uncles had killed her... an honor killing because, I guess, her being a lesbian was sort of an open secret.

As for me? Jon, my best friend from childhood, was an Owner. Not that they had Owners when we were children, but when society reached the inevitable point where it finally broke down into Owners and workers, Jon – by virtue of his family's wealth and status – was comfortably ensconced in the thin layer of privilege that floated at the top of the economic pond. He took me in, gave me my own room in his big house, and even got his personal physician to pay me house calls.

"He's young," the doctor told Jon after examining me. (He wore a mask, I noticed, even though he was the same doctor our megachurch had hired to make a promotional video in which he declared that masks did nothing – nothing at all – to stop the spread of viruses. Rather, he announced authoritatively, disease was the result of either demonic possession or innate moral deficiency.) "From what we know about the Exhaustion, he's likely to be in rough shape for a long time, probably have no energy, and take years to recover. In the meantime, he'll be..." The doctor hesitated. Even in my dazed state, with my whole body aching and what felt like a black veil draped over my mind, I took a keen interest in that pause; I remember it vividly, despite so much of that period being an indistinct blur in my memory. I expected him to parrot the senators and the chat threads and the mainstream media, to say that I was now "a drain on society" and "an anchor around the neck of general prosperity," a "leech on taxpayers" and... shorthand for all of those slurs... a "loser."

A loser, in a world of many losers, few winners, and a vast gray demographic of the apathetic, the hostile, the pliable, and the frightened. Just another lost lamb to be culled while the country made its way toward "herd immunity."

But Jon was my best friend, and his family wielded enormous influence. The doctor seemed to swallow whatever he'd been about to say and consider carefully.

"In the meantime, he'll be in need of good care," the doctor said, his voice weak and unconvincing. He was far too used to parroting the party line, to specifying punishments and the justifications for them; he'd forgotten the ancient prescriptions of his trade.

"He'll get good care," Jon told the doctor. "I'll expect you back you back here next week, and every week, at this same day and time, until he's gotten better."

The doctor nodded and offered an agreement – he was mumbling, I couldn't hear it, but it was no doubt something like "Yes sir," or "Whatever you say, sir."

After the doctor left, Jon sat on the edge of my bed and looked down at me with tender concern. "You're going to be all right," he told me gently, cupping the side of my face, his thumb stroking my forehead and a lock of my hair. "I promise. I won't let you down like your family did."

I tried to tell him that he was my family; he was my soulmate, my true spouse, and the love of my life. I don't remember if I managed. I think I probably fell asleep before I could put any of that into words.

***

It did take years: Three years. The doctor showed up every week during that time. When he suggested injecting me with ammonia – something Kirsch had talked about in one of his televised addresses – Jon let him know, calmly but with a definite edge of menace, that he was never to bring up pseudoscience in connection with my care again. To that, he added: "Unless you'd care to demonstrate to me the curative effects of an ammonia injection right now, in front of my very eyes... on yourself."

The doctor muttered something about it not being necessary since he didn't have any symptoms.

Sometime after that... I'm not sure when; that evening? A few days later? A few weeks later?... Jon, during one of his frequent visits to my bedside, told me about hundreds of people actually following this idiotic advice. Most of them died. This mass madness and all those wasted lives made absolutely no difference in public fealty to Kirsch, America's Divine Leader, the Perfect Vessel of God's Will.

I'm not even sure if Jon actually told me about that, or if I heard about it some other way. Certainly, the state-owned media would never have streamed news of the tragic effect of Kirsch's moronic comments. Nowadays, of course, there's no mention of it any of the publicly available historic archives. But then again, there's very little available in the archives about the Great Pandemic at all – not even much on the very fact that it happened.

***

News of the outside world trickled into my bedroom with Jon's visits and, eventually, my use of a laptop Jon gave me. I had been hoping to get back to work, at least part time, but my old job in the financial sector had disappeared. In fact, the company I used to work for had disappeared... despite the workplace boasts about us being "too big to fail," the firm had done just that: Failed. A lot of companies had collapsed due to a severe labor shortage. Seventy-two million workers were lost within a year and a half. While some conspiracy theories blamed North Korea, others blamed Finland, the leader of the world's few remaining intact democracies. Foe News Service – the state-run "official" news – blamed both, in contradictory but reliably enraged reports. Street thugs – the Promise Posse, the Blueshirts – directed their fists, batons, and long guns wherever the political wind blew, and the so-called "anti-fascists" responded by taking on the street thugs. The police, of course, joined the street thugs in beating the "anti-fascists," then placing them under arrest; no matter how out of hand the riots got that year, or how many billions in damage were caused to American cities, the Promise Posse and Blueshirts always ended up with medals while the "anti-fascists" (everyone from young left-wing toughs to grandmothers from the Millennial generation and pastors heading so-called Reconciliation churches) ended up dead, detained, or simply disappeared.

None of this was new, except for the scale of it. I picked up most of the political news from the laptop, and even then it was a matter of reading between the lines. Jon, being an Owner, had access to more honest reports about what was happening in the world, and he let a few tidbits slip once in a while; I remember the afternoon, the bedroom bright with sunlight, when Jon seemed especially upset. Kirsch, he told me, had unleashed the army on a park full of protestors. Only a handful survived; most of the casualties had died from the nerve gas the army had deployed, or else been shot in the back while trying to run. Armed drones and cyber-nines... robotic police dogs... had done a lot of the shooting, but the cops had fired thousands of rounds from their AR-18s, then walked among the fallen... gas masks firmly in place... and shot the still-living and dead alike in the head with their service sidearms.

"Why?" I asked.

Jon shrugged. "Because he's Kirsch," he said. "Because he wanted to send a message... because it made for an exciting photo."

"Photo?"

"Our president for life, standing in a sea of dead protestors, dressed in a bullet-proof vest and holding up a Bible," Jon said. "It's a meme." He showed me on his phone: Kirsch, as described, his face bare but wearing a black helmet, holding the black book up and saying, "Objective accomplished. Sleep safe, America." The clip repeated, and then repeated again, as I stared at it, trying to fathom what I was seeing.

"I don't understand," I said. "What does he gain from this?"

"His base is crowing," Jon told me. "As long a people are dying, they're happy. Stop the killing for too long, and the murmurs start up."

"What murmurs?"

"That Kirsch has gotten soft. That America is in danger of backsliding into chaos and moral decay."

I'd been feeling better that afternoon, partly because of the springtime sunlight. Now the light was fading as the sun, which still set early, slipped behind clouds that clung low to the horizon. My good spirits darkened, too. If what I'd just seen wasn't chaos and moral decay, then what was?

***

Jon gave me a new laptop – one with his Owner-level media clearance. I could now see all the reports that were kept away from commoners: Reports that would have inflamed opposition and resistance. Reports that showed Promise Posse members driving cars into crowds as they marched in the streets, singing gospel hymns and carrying placards that pleaded, "Stop the Violence" and "Make America Sane Again."

Streaking silver cars that sent bodies flying to one side and the other... and sent some of them flying straight up in the air. Even as a car skidded to a halt and survivors pounded on its doors, even after what seemed an impossibly long time after impact, bodies still tumbled down.

"What the fuck is going on out there?" I asked Jon, showing him one such clip.

"So much winning," Jon said, and I recognized one of Kirsch's famed slogans.

"Who's winning?" I asked. "The bad guys?"

John chuckled softly, took the laptop from my hands, and closed it up gently. "The bad guys never lost," he told me. "They're the ones who keep setting up the game, over and over again. The shell game. The confidence game. But you..." He set the laptop o the night table. "You need to focus on happier things. You're safe here."

"Am I?"

He leaned down to kiss me. "You're with me."

***

So I was: I was with the son of an Owner. An Owner in his own right, more so still when Jon's father passed away.

"What happened?" I asked. I was out of bed now and sitting at a table next to the vast South-facing window. The white curtains were pulled aside to show the estate where Jon lived – less impressive than his father's, but, by my standards, unbelievably green and well-tended and expansive.

"He died of..." John laughed grimly. " 'Unrelated pneumonia.' "

"What's that?"

"Another word for pneumonia caused by the Exhaustion," Jon said. " 'Unrelated' is just the politically correct way of saying that he died of the pandemic. It was totally 'related.' "

"The Exhaustion causes pneumonia?"

"For older people, or people with co-morbidities, it causes all sorts of health problems. Pneumonia; clotting and other blood disorders; even some types of motor neuron disease. And, of course, progeria and, along with it, dementia."

"What's progeria?"

"Rapid aging. That's what really got him. The pneumonia was a result of how the progeria compromised his immune system."

"Wait, it causes...?"

"It can cause all kinds of things, Danny." Jon sighed. "Which is how I know that it wasn't Korea, and it wasn't Finland, but the Exhaustion was definitely cooked up in a lab."

"Was it...?" I felt the fear and anticipation on my face as I left the question unfinished. Jon's family had made trillions in pharma and biomedicine. Jon had been telling me stories for years about the different things his dad's laboratories had going on, like research into half-cloning, or the different cures for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases they'd been experimenting with – most of the treatments remaining unreleased, not because they weren't effective but because they worked too well. The golden goose of pharmacology, Jon had explained to me more than once, was a cure that people had to keep taking in order to stay cured. "And so," Jon had explained, "not a cure at all, just a way of renting health."

"I'm pretty sure," Jon said in answer to my question... meaning he was pretty sure the Exhaustion was the result of work his family's facilities and researchers had done, probably on a government contract. Why else would they have created something like this? "I'll know more once I get briefed and have a chance to review more of the corporate documents."

"You're taking over for your dad? As head of the company?"

"Who else?" Jon asked, sharply. Then: "I'm sorry, Danny. I didn't mean to snap at you. Yes, I'm taking over."

"But you always said..."

"It's real now, Danny. It's not a matter of speculation or daydreaming about the future. The time is here."

"But you'll be..." I couldn't think of the word.

"Complicit," Jon said. "Yes – I know. I'll also be the one who takes up where my dad left off, leaning on the researchers, breathing down their necks to find a cure."

"I thought there was a vaccine now?" I said.

"That's not a cure," Jon said. "And the vaccines we have so far only work on specific strains. But, like all viruses, this one mutates quickly. All those people who refused to take any elementary caution against getting sick..." He sighed. "Every single one of them who got infected is a living laboratory. The virus mutates as it reproduces. And it only reproduces in the cells of the people it infects. New strains are popping up all the time. The virus was... was engineered to do this."

"That's suicidal," I said.

"In the case of my dad, you mean? Because he authorized research into a bug that would take people out of the workforce, make them unproductive for years at a time, basically kill them because our economic system doesn't let people live if they can't work? Yes. I think that's exactly true. He died of his own hand. But you get his motives, right? Big government money. And you understand the government's point of view in wanting a virus like this, don't you? Economic warfare is so much more... profitable... than thermonuclear annihilation. But a virus like this only works the way it's supposed to if you can direct it, contain it... and vaccinate your own people first. That's where the failure happened: Someone leaked it too early." He sighed. "It either happened by accident, or someone who thought they could short-circuit the program let the virus out on purpose, thinking it would be contained, corralled, cured... and in the aftermath my dad's company would be exposed and have to pay the price." John laughed humorlessly. "As if that ever happens."

"You really think someone let it loose on purpose?"

"I don't know. If they did, that's probably what they were thinking. But I'll tell you this much, it didn't originate in a barnyard or an animal market. That sort of thing is for natural diseases like COVID."

"Is a cure possible?" I asked. "I mean, if the virus was engineered to be that virulent, mutate that fast..."

"I really don't know," Jon said. He looked sad; grieving his dad, but also sorrowed by the harm his family had brought into the world. Crushed under the weight of having to correct what others had done wrong.

I reached over and took his hand. He looked up at me.

"In sickness and in health," I told him.

It had been our secret signal, our in-joke, for years – ever since we'd been teenagers.

Jon squeezed my hand back. "In sickness," he said. "And in health."

***

"It's confirmed," Jon told me one day, two years later.

By then, I'd been recovered for over a year.

"The trials show an 89 percent success rate," Jon said.

"What about the other 11 percent?" I asked.

"No cure is effective in every case," Jon told me. "Just like no disease affects everyone. Some people are aways immune – to the disease and also, I guess, to the cure."

I wasn't sure about that. Some reports said that the Exhaustion – or the Great Pandemic, or the Great Flu, as it was also being called now – had a 100 per cent infection rate. The only difference was a matter of how hard it hit you.

I didn't spend all my time in my room anymore. I was free to move around the house and the estate. I only ventured off the estate very seldom; I kept busy enough where I was, and the doctor warned that with so many different strains of the Exhaustion still out there I might get sick all over again unless I stayed home.

Home.

It was true: This was my home, here, with Jon. Without him, I would have been homeless – swept up by Domestic Security, liquidated, my body dumped in the sea or obliterated in an industrial microwave incinerator, along with so many others.

"Dissidents," Kirsch's regime called the people they murdered and torched. "Malcontents." "Anarchists." Or, simply, "Losers."

It made you wonder what it took to win in this world.

Jon and I talked about that, too. "My dad used to say the world works the way it does because that's the only way it can work," Jon told me one day after we made love, something we did more and more often with my returning strength.

"Do you believe him?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Because legally, I'm your property," I reminded him.

Jon flinched. "You've never been my property," he said.

"But my parents worked for your dad. He owned the company that employed them. Legally, that meant they were his property."

Jon threw an arm over his eyes, groaning, not wanting to hear, but I pressed on.

"You inherited the company, and the workers along with it. And after the way the Supreme Court ruled last year – "

"Ugh, that ruling," Jon shuddered.

It had been the most controversial ruling in decades; the Court had overturned its own 2048 ruling that white people could not be considered chattel. Even in 2048 it was obvious that the ruling would be undone, and sooner rather than later. Between the harsh measures used in the Great Pandemic, which disproportionately affected people of color (another engineered feature? Not even Jon knew for sure), and more than thirty years of forced expulsion of racial minorities from the country, big business was too desperate for workers not to make a full court press to get that earlier ruling voided. Finally, last summer, they succeeded.

"Yes, that ruling," I told him. "Now white people can own other white people again. And part of that ruling makes it explicitly clear that the children of your dad's... and now your... workers is also your property. So..." I snuggled into him playfully. "Here I am. What are you gonna do with me?"

The banter had a serious edge, and we both knew it. Homosexuality was punishable by death under the Christian Nationalist Penal Code, but even superseding the Code's Sex and Gender Laws was the sanctity of private property. If I was Jon's property, he could do with me as he pleased, sexually or otherwise. No one talked about this – not preachers, and not politicians. Jon might not consider me his property, but the state did, and that wretched fact was the only thing keeping us safe.

We didn't even have to try to conceal our relationship any longer, though we still did cling to old habits of discretion.

"Will Kirsch let you deploy the vaccines?" I asked. We'd discussed this before, many times. Unless Kirsch granted an exemption through executive action, the vaccine would be useless because vaccines, like face masks, remained illegal – despite the ravages of the Great Pandemic.

"There's a loophole," Jon said. "Owners can buy it and self-administer. It's not a 'vaccine' then, it's a 'wellness supplement.' And anything Owners can do for themselves..."

"The Patriarch of an Owner family can do for his subordinate family members," I said. Whether they wanted it or not – which went against the whole narrative that making vaccines illegal had been a triumph for personal liberty.

"And an Owner can mandate vaccinations for all of his workers, too," Jon said. "So, yes, the vaccine is already in high demand. Pre-orders are pouring in. We'll be months, if not years, in producing hundreds of millions of doses, not just for here but for every other failed democracy in the world."

"While Finland..." I began. "And other surviving democracies..."

"While Finland, and the rest of the EU, makes vaccination a universal requirement," Jon smiled. "Which means another fat contract for us."

"You've gotta love that European 'socialist nightmare,' don't you?" I smiled back.

***

Six years after the Great Pandemic, after various court decisions and impenetrably-worded bills advanced by a U.S. Congress that grew more adept every year at making laws that benefited the Owners while punishing everyone else, Jon and I finally felt secure enough to set aside our habitual secrecy and more or less come out as a couple.

Thanks to the new Manumissive Act, an Owner could declare any of his human property as Free and Elevated. That gave former property the status of legally protected family.

Marriage between men – or women, for that matter – had long since been criminalized, and yet the Manumissive Act made it possible for an Owner to determine exactly what sort of familial connection a formerly-owned person would have with respect to him. In our case, we chose the category of Domestic Contract – like a marriage, but without the sacramental overtones of a mixed-gender marriage within the state religion.

The sheltering effect of the Manumissive Act protected us from the legal and social pressure to produce offspring – pressure that was only likely to intensify when the Supreme Court came back into session and considered the legality of state and federal laws making it a crime for men over the age of 30 and women over the age of 17 not to have borne children. (The laws made no medical exceptions, of course, for considerations like infertility or health conditions that made pregnancy potentially lethal.)

Though it would never be considered a "marriage," Jon and I celebrated our Domestic Contract in a lavish ceremony that included 400 guests – the kind of party that the years of the Great Pandemic had extinguished, but that were now making a comeback in society's upper echelons.

We said vows. We had a dance, just the two of us, after which all the guests took to the floor as the live band played. There was a fancy supper, and there was a massive cake.

And, once we were alone, there was the usual soul searching.

"We're just perpetuating the status quo and all of its injustices," Jon fretted as we lay naked and spent in the nuptial bed.

I gathered him close. "We're doing what we can, with what we have."

John sighed. "Trillions of dollars, the power of life and death over a workforce of tens of thousands, and yet... what power do we really have? What can we really change?"

"The world," I told him. "We can change the world."

"How?"

"Just by living our lives as we see fit. Being seen, being known. Giving a word of encouragement or stepping in to make someone's life better."

"When I think about it," Jon told me, "I get sick to my stomach."

I held him close, kissed the bony protrusion at the back of his neck. "In sickness and in health," I told him: Our vows, all our lives; our vows that very day.

"Sometimes it feels like you're the only part of me the world allows to be healthy," Jon said, his voice muffled in the pillow, his hand on my arm.

We lay together quietly. Then, exhausted by the day's festivities... and by the wider world around us... we fell asleep – safe, grateful, together.

Next week we survey the splintering reality of a man called Benny, who finds himself veering between different versions of his life. Which is real – both of them? Or... are they both fake?