Declan McCreary
PANDEMIC
WE’VE RUN OUT OF TOILET PAPER!
Day 14: Two weeks into the worst pandemic modernity has seen and I’m pretty bored. The electricity went out after the first week so of course with it went the internet and my prime source of entertainment. The next week you can only meditate and read so much before you simply crave information or some kind of human contact. I’ve got enough food and water to last me another 2 ½ months, I was prepared supplies wise, though I always figured it would have been some kind of water crisis which kept me cooped up in my place. The couch barricades the door, so I just decided to stay put until the virus ran its course or a cure was found. There wasn’t a lot of information that first week but I could hear people leaving and screaming from their apartments, there weren’t even government emergency camps that I know of. And now I’m realizing that all the food and water still leaves me ill-prepared, a lack of social input is paralyzing my mind and dragging me down into an existential malaise which no whisky can remove. Time stretches, each second expanding longer than the last, each moment a deranged glimpse of the next—the only thing that is real is watching the water slowly run low. I can measure my achievements by the empty bean cans, empty fruit cups, crushed beer cans, and the used candy wrappers. I figure I’ll stay here until I have a couple days’ worth of food and water and then take off, look for my family, my girlfriend, anyone who isn’t trying to cut me up.
I know my neighbors upstairs are still there, I can hear them chattering in low whispers on occasion, but it’s their footsteps which really give them away. I hear the crackle of a radio, must be battery powered, and it might also have news, information about the outside world. My interest is piqued, giddy even but afraid to go and contact them. They could be armed; maybe they’ll assume I’m a marauder. What the hell is a marauder though and what would I even want, I just want to know the news or anything really. I’m also reticent because I don’t want to buddy up to them, I’ve got plenty of supplies and they might not have any, that’s the only reason I haven’t went out looking for people. I just didn’t realize the intensity of the human pull.
I put my Santoku knife in my belt behind my shirt on the backside, just in case. Damn thing isn’t even very sharp, and it’s a terrible stabbing knife, my reckoning however is that it’s a lot more terrifying to go up against a man with a knife than one without so may as well. I’m mostly muscle, lean, not large by any standard but I’m fast and when I squint my eyes I kind of look like a less badass Clint Eastwood. I head upstairs slowly but with purpose imaging what I’ll say and how they’ll respond. I imagine first them screaming, then bullets blasting through the door and they scream, “Get the fuck out you mother fucker!” I knock on the door. Silence, I knock again, crouch and say, “I’m from downstairs, I heard your radio and I just want to know what’s going on, if there are any points of interest or army camps setup.”
“We don’t have any food or water, go away,” I hear somewhat muffled.
“I don’t want your stuff, I just want to know if you heard anything on the radio,” I respond thinking this might be a bad idea. I stand there starting to sweat, it runs down around my eye and I start to really feel the heat out here, it’s been absolutely brutal without A/C, now add not having the water running for the past week and you got yourself a fine mixture for feeling real pretty. Anyways, the silence goes on so I knock again and repeat my request.
“All we’ve heard is survivalist nuts making racist jokes and saying you’re all fucked, this is god’s punishment, bullshit like that. Do you have any food or water?” they yell through the door.
“That’s it? No, I only have a couple days’ worth left. They didn’t say anything about which cities are still functioning, any reports about the virus, casualties, cures, anything else?” I reply taken aback.
“That’s it, go away, leave us alone.”
I head back downstairs through the thickness of heat, rotten food, mixed in with what I can only imagine is a rotting carcass behind one of these lucky doors. I haven’t really stopped to think about it before, but the misery and complete lack of anything good has become palpable, you can smell it in the air. Life hasn’t even smelled like this before, it means something, it smells as if a new age has arrived—I’m not the religious type but there is a categorical difference here.
I unlock the door, I’ve always been a stickler for locked doors, but only now has it actually become a life and death matter. An unlocked doors means you get raped and robbed at night, or so I imagine. Before all the fun and games it might have been your elderly Jewish neighbor wandering in asking for some sugar. O’ how interesting and deathly without levity things have become.
Day 19: 626 steps if I walk only along my walls, I’ve counted 58 times now. I’ve counted the floor boards in the hardwood floors, 1,283. I’ve taken the television apart and tried to put it back together, I’ll never know if I succeeded though. Food and water looks different, there’s less of it. The bathroom is like a place if you took all the hipsters of San Francisco, put them inside of a dog kennel, fed them the worst organic diarrhea inducing burritos for a week and had them all shit on the same toilet at the same time. I don’t even sit on it anymore; I just sort of crouch over it hoping to god my body doesn’t touch it anymore. You can’t flush when there’s no running water. Before this all went down I used to imagine it and it sounded fun, I legitimately thought my life was so boring that it needed a veritable global pandemic to make it interesting. I was so egoistic that my boredom demanded a global crisis to alleviate any existential ennui. Now that I’m finally on the greener grass side of the fence, I have to say, it really sucks and I say so unabashedly. I was wrong before, I prefer dull and clean to dull and rotten. My beard is getting pretty gnarly; I can smell my balls without even having to take my pants off, even in a standing position. I’m constantly itchy, my head is like some kind of ant hill of activity without the bugs, I fantasize about removing all the skin, just tearing it off so it would stop fucking itching. Eating only canned beans, fruits, peas, chili, tomato sauce, cold soups, and various packaged goods like dried ramen gets old fast. I was never a gourmand; in fact I made fun of my yuppie douche bag friends who obsessed about food but this has taken me to a new level of desire. Just a simple fucking sandwich, with turkey, tomato, cheese, lettuce, mayo, and some solid non shitty bread-a freshly made sandwich-what I would give for it. I’d kill my neighbors for it, maybe, probably, certainly, maybe not.
Humans evolved to run, jump, and move. All I do is pace which is better than nothing, but not enough. The only things keeping me sane are Anna Karenina, one of the few books I have in my collection that I haven’t finished, meditating, and looking out my window. There’s nothing to see from the window, it’s essentially a small plot between apartment buildings with your usual assortment of junk and plywood. As if the universe had in mind a very particular assemblage of various shit that all plots of land of this variety must have, a strange occurrence. I also write, I’ve been writing some erotica, to which I later jerk off too. I wrote one called Sexy Sorority Robot Time Machine Dinosaur Adventures. I figured I may as well make it funny as well, I haven’t really laughed since all this started except the usual chuckle at the absurd, it helps prevent suicide.
Day 38: 2, that’s how many shits I used to take per day. Now I just shit diarrhea constantly throughout the day. There are no known words in existence to describe the bathroom anymore; I can smell it throughout the entire apartment if the door is open. I’ve started to just shit and piss in a bucket and throw it out the window, fuck the police I say. They never did me no good anyhow and I don’t believe in victimless crimes anyways, so fuck order and sanitation, pretty much nothing matters anymore. I’m pretty sure there’s a new ecosystem growing on my balls, and I’m afraid to look at my asshole in the mirror for fear of finding intelligent life; my fear isn’t the life itself, but that they might be Klingon types who start to wage war on me. I don’t hear my neighbors upstairs anymore. A couple of nights ago I heard screaming upstairs, a door slamming, and then silence. I feel terribly lonely, I can’t shake a heavy feeling in my heart but it’s actually become quite difficult to discern various emotions at this point. Everything is mired with a kind of nausea, from the shitty food but also from facts; the fact of the world, the fact of my isolation, and the fact of my profound ignorance of what is currently happening anywhere else but here. My entire scope of reality has been severely limited to a studio apartment, my body, and my disordered mind. It’s a new kind of myopia, not medical, but pandemic. I look at the gallons of water I had collected before all this, I might have miscalculated before, or maybe not, I don’t really know, but it looks like I’m over halfway through the water, and water is more important than food. I try not to drink too much, but I find that I have constant headaches either way.