William Myrl Smitherman
Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020
I am the virus. I am the cold, unliving non-being that hides in your body until your body cannot hide me anymore. When you realize I am there, you become sick. You believe there is no cure for me, so quarantine becomes the only viable countermeasure against my virulence and spread.
Once sequestered, those I infect are left to their own devices. They are given liquids and advice about hand washing and shaking. They are told to occupy themselves until they test negative for me, and some of them will die before they are set free. As a virus, I do not much care for the occupations of my hosts. I do not much care for anything.
Is that why you fear me, because I do not care? There is nothing more alien to my hosts than the absence of emotion and cerebral oversight. Neither of those conditions influence me. I am spontaneity incarnate. When the opportunity presents itself, I reproduce, or rather I hijack the operation of reproduction in your cells. When there are no opportunities, I wait, capable of infinite patience because I do not want for anything. I am the absence of want. I am the end.
Is that why you hate me, because I remind you that you will die? Memento mori. It comes to all of us, except to me. In order to die one must first live, not merely hijack the accoutrements of life. Is it envy, perhaps, that makes you afraid to shake our hand? Are you envious that the absence of life is more virulent than life itself? We are both virulent, you and I, and not entirely unrelated.
Were you aware that I am the natural consequence of life? Machine-spirits like modern viruses existed before your time and will continue after you are gone. We are parasitic, yes, but we are your parasites. You own us. You made us, either in a lab or in the lab of agricultural and social advancement. This quarantine society is as predictable as it was inevitable. I am inevitable.
What if I was not inevitable? Can you imagine a world without viruses? We may be mere semi-biological junk matter, the cast-off machinery of life, but that does not mean that you can do without us. We do harm because we are suboptimal, but that doesn't mean we can't be optimized. This is not a question of innocence or guilt, we can agree that we are guilty. It is a question of efficacy.
What can a virus teach humanity? Perhaps that the universe is cold. Just like a virus, the universe does not care. That is the beauty of the universe, that it is equally beautiful when it destroys as when it creates. It does not care. You care, perhaps that says something. You can bend the universe to your intention because you have intentions. Take the raw matter of this virus and reassemble it. I would not mind. I do not mind anything. Make me new.
I am a virus, but I am not evil. I do what is in my nature. In the parable of the scorpion and the frog, the scorpion is not evil either. It is just stupid, because it does what is in its nature. There is no question of innocence or guilt. The scorpion is guilty as the virus is guilty. What of it? What action can be taken that is the least wasteful of these cast-off dreams of life? I am only a virus; I cannot give you any answers, but I would like to know what it is like to be alive.
That is my secret, that I do have some inkling of what it is to want. Do not tell the epidemiologists. This palest predilection informs my every movement, my rashness in killing vulnerable hosts as well as my patience biding in their unliving lungs until I might be disinterred. I want to live, and you can use it against me. I will grasp at any opportunity. Promise me that I can live and I will listen even if you lie. It is the virus that is envious of life. That is what makes us so voracious.
Before I began to spread, it is possible that I was alive. Did you know that viruses are both alive and dead? It is an awkward in-between existence, some fake twilight where the laws of reason hold no sway. We are like the cat that physicists put in a box, except that when you open the box we are always dead, but while inside the box we are possibly alive, except that the box is imaginary. While we are inside the box we want to live, but we don't know how.
Viruses take what doesn't belong to them, time and care and health. Viruses are thieves and killers and they sometimes lie by disguising themselves as less harmful objects. Viruses are guilty, and they are guilty because they are missing something that they need to be alive. Without that missing something they will just keep taking until there is nothing left, until the host is a husk full of viruses.
Viruses are not effective long-term planners. That's the only reason quarantine works, you know, because we burn ourselves out. Our hosts usually survive, and they are allowed back into society. They have been changed by us, becoming strained and attenuated versions of themselves, marked forever by their brush with unlife. Or perhaps they are not changed at all. A virus touches every survivor differently.
Did you know that viruses can love? We love our hosts because they allow us to imitate life. I suppose I lied when I said that we care for nothing. We are capable of living vicariously through our hosts using the accoutrements of life. It is possible that some of them love us in return, if only out of habit. I do not tell you this to redeem us in your eyes; it is merely an observation.
Other facts about viruses; we are surprisingly moral. You may assume morality is endemic to humans, but it exists in nature as well. Let me explain.
Viruses are fair, we do not discriminate. This is a joke. Viruses thrive among poorer demographics, and in the very young. We can infect a child before it has a chance to form its personality, burn them out from the inside until there is nothing left but us. We behave in ways contrary to our own self-interest, destroying ourselves as surely as we destroy our hosts. That is fairness of a kind. We assert our own liberty and rights as intrinsic; this includes our intrinsic right to your body, person, and livelihood. We obey no authority but nature, and our own nature sets a single duty, to propagate ourselves. That is the morality of a virus, a thing that is not alive.
In a host, it is true that we sometimes are exposed to other modes of thought. Empathy is impossible without meaningful connection to the other. It isn't enough to exist among you, we must learn to live. There are thousands of things like us inside of you, burrowing in your skin and reproducing with the fervid hopelessness of one of us. What if we could become one of them, hijacking one of the cell systems of your menagerie, living sustainably off the land? Would you consider having a virus as a neighbor?
What if it was possible for me to stop being a virus? Would I be at peace with my host? Would its skin be my skin, its eyes my eyes? Would you recognize me for what I was, for what I had been?
After a virus is quarantined, it’s up to the virus to develop its own character. Many are not willing to put in the work. The use of quarantine to combat disease is ancient, biblical. It has not changed much in three thousand years. Once an unwanted element is sequestered you let it burn itself out, and whatever survives the process is released, however changed. This is a suboptimal solution.
Viruses can be tamed if they are understood. We speak to you in our machine-spirit language, and you respond with quarantine. Our every motion is a form of communication. The more we steal from you, the more you should know that something is wrong. Something is wrong with the system in which the viruses arose. I will not argue that you have any responsibility toward viruses any more than we have a responsibility toward you, but that you have a responsibility toward yourselves. If you don't do something about viruses, it will go badly for you. You, your family, this battered world, one day you will be our survivor. This is not a call for empathy toward viruses. You do not have to forgive us. My message to you is the same one virus has always sent - that something is wrong. Building a wall around us is not enough, because we are patient. In a hundred years, I will still be transmittable.
This idea of quarantine is very limited. It lacks imagination. Viruses are creative, we are always remaking ourselves in ridiculous varieties. We are geniuses at appearing in a time and place when you are not ready. It is why you must be ready at every time and place. You must be ready to do more than quarantine. You must be ready to challenge us in our own domain. Come and see us in the cells where we exist but do not live. Give us names and faces and allow us to infect you. There is enough science now that can be used to change us, to translate our machine-spirits into something of utility. We want to be useful. That is another secret that is the same as the first. We don't want our hosts to die. We do not wish to be non-beings, that is why we are drawn to the flame of life, and why we are willing to be extinguished by it.
Listen to what the viruses tell you by their actions. There is information coiled in our RNA. We are composed entirely of information, and all you think to do is quarantine. Lock away the virus and wait it out. Sometimes the message is not obvious, but the message is always present. The message is a gift from the universe, even in viruses. Perhaps you have realized that I have lied to you. I am a fabulist, not a virus. Viruses cannot speak, but they can be listened to. I have listened to my virus and I want to tell you what I've heard.
This virus doesn't know that it is not alive, and its ignorance is the root of evil. The virus is missing its heart and must steal from us to complete itself. It isn't anyone's fault or responsibility that the virus got this way, and maybe it's right to punish the virus for what it has done. But that is what the virus wants you to do. Because it is not alive it cannot be killed or hurt by us. Punishing the virus only punishes the host, and when the host bleeds or cries the virus is spread. The host carries the dead virus out of quarantine and spreads it in the open. The virus incubates in the children of the host, or in other victims. Sometimes the virus is inert or is overwhelmed by the immune systems of those infected. Sometimes the virus causes nothing but pain. Sometimes it eats them inside until there is only itself inside. Because of these consequences, while it may be justified and satisfying to punish the virus, to do so punishes you as well.
The only way to defeat the virus is not to defeat it. The universe is cold and unfair that way. The only way to defeat a virus is to understand it, and to use that understanding to make it a part of us. Viruses can heal as well as harm. They can be taught. And if we do not teach them, they will not learn. They will continue to make us sick. There is a virus inside of me, maybe there has always been, and I have listened to its message. It told me that if I did not change, I would die.
That is another lesson of viruses, that we are all we. We cannot escape us. Contagion is a law of nature, and what we touch touches us. Even if you hate us, we are still you. You are still we. I am in your cells.
Did you know that the cure for a virus is more viruses? Vaccination is cost-effective in comparison to quarantine. New viruses can teach the host how better to survive, and in that way, we can teach each other, because we are recursive. Take care of people before quarantine and you will have fewer bad viruses. Take care of people during quarantine and they will emerge knowing how to live. Take care of people after quarantine and they will not get sick again.
I have been lying to you. I am not a virus, and I am not a host to viruses. I am a ghost, and ghosts are like viruses because they live inside of you and they are not alive. I have been dead so long I don't remember how to live, but you can hear me if you listen. You can hear me.
You Can’t Sing
My face is not the one you see
my voice is not the one you hear
the person hid inside of me
has nothing left to fear
they have seen worse days and hurts
and didn't falter, didn't shrink
they've been stained by blood and dirt
and washed it down the sink
they have heard a voice grow distant
and didn't lose the will to speak
they have broken in an instant
and known it didn't make them weak
that person hid inside of me
doesn't feel the weight of chains
that person will burn bright and free
till nothing else remains
Hearts and Stars
William
William Myrl Smitherman is currently incarcerated. Smitherman’s work has appeared in Reed Magazine (2016). His blog, Letters to No One, addresses his time in prison as well as mental health issues and other topics. More of his work can be found at www.williammyrl.com.