Death Fever 3000

I don’t get sick often, but when I do, the Death Fever hits hard.  I can usually feel it coming on.  There are warning signs: the flagging attention span, the warm gauzy feeling stretching underneath my epidermis, the loss of sexual appetite.  I snort that Pixie-Stix-type package of 1,000mg of vitamin C, go to bed early, and read the Old Testament, but these preventative measures are unreliable.  When I wake up the next morning, it’s full-blown like news coverage of an uncovered cult mass suicide.  There are no answers, only bodily wreckage.

I alternate in between needing extra blankets and packing the pillowcase full of ice cubes.  There is a headache roving across the hemispheres of my brain like a slow-moving tropical depression.  I can barely make the call into work, and when I do I frighten my manager, who is worried he’s getting white noise from the afterlife.  I lose two hours to a mid-morning nap, the worst kind.  Waking up at noon only feels good if you’ve let a liter of whiskey evaporate out of your body in the interim.  In this case, it’s only given the virus time to incubate.  I tremble, feeling like the first victim of an alien-host movie.  Some brusque man with a beard named Briggs will soon be telling the others that I need to be killed now before the contagion spreads.  “C’mon,” I cry out, my face buried in the pillow, “Briggs, we went through the academy together!”  During illnesses like these, the hallucinations are always the worst kind of real.  In the middle of the night I look at my girlfriend, wrapped up in a painters’ mask and plastic pajamas to avoid contagion.  I see light trails running over her outline as if she were a Tron racer.  My dog asks me, “Did I ever tell you how I got these scars?”  I eventually have to shut them all out, close the door, and surround myself with media.

It seems like a silver lining: one week off of work, taken off the hook for daily chores, hours and hours alone.  Time to catch up on all that backlogged culture.  The only problem is I feel like a baboon raging through a mating binge, unsure of what I really want, only that a certain level of stimulus must be maintained.  The fever can’t focus on anything for more than half an hour, so the books are rotated, and when my back locks up from being in a supine literary position for too long, I sit up with the laptop, running TV marathons in a jukebox format.  B7: Australian mockumentary.  C16: 60s British tour de force.  K3:  NBC Sitcom du Jour.  Comic books.  I’m getting back into them.  Or maybe the fever was telling me I was.  Word balloons and splash pages intersplice with the string cheese and fruit cocktail I eat for lunch.  Or is it dinner?  It’s dark all the time in the fever room.  I eat nursing home selections to avoid any circadian faux pas.

Music.  Albums accumulated like cancer cells.   So much music it could kill a man.  No time to think and plan now: just load up all 35,000 tracks in the player and hit random.  Now I have a soundtrack for the unending MTV promo clip that is unspooling in my mind.  On top of all the television and comic book garbage and memorized Free Cell games is a firm candy coating of Real Knowledge from the books.  The Plot Against the Medici.  The Unification of Asia Minor against the Oncoming Crusaders.  But the knowledge consumes me.  Complex patterns occupy my inner thoughts where there should be simple, DayQuil daydreams.  Conspiracy theories, rife with anachronisms, weave together in the deepest depths of the fever.  Eight hours in bed, no human contact, only the insistence of my own mind that it is the greatest mind ever formed from God’s breath and clay, the True Seer into the human condition, the solver of history’s equations.  What are the variables, what are the roots?  I had it all figured out, but it didn’t survive the antibiotics. 

I’m sane now, just ridding myself of the last bronchial leftovers.  But the room smells like I imagined the surgery tents in M*A*S*H always would, the dog won’t meet my eyes, and the girlfriend is always on the phone to someone named “Dr. Gavin.”  Going through death fever is like unleashing a new weapon in a war.  Kudos to you if you’re the one who survived, but understand that the world can never be the same.