Laura Kasischke: In a Perfect World

When Jiselle’s mother asked her again if she planned to eat anything, Camilla finally said, in a quavering voice, “I’m not very hungry.”

Sam chased a snail around his plate with his fork, caught it, put it in his mouth, chewed, and said, “I don’t get why it’s such a big deal.”

Instantly, Jiselle recognized it as the worst possible thing he could have said, but by then it was too late. Sara whipped around to glare at her brother with her mouth open. Jiselle’s mother looked over. Jiselle cleared her throat nervously. “Sam,” she said. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

Obediently, Sam gave a world-weary shrug, and then he reached across the table for another slice of bread, dragging his elbow through the butter dish as he did. He wiped the butter off his elbow onto his pants leg, smiled pleasantly up at Jiselle’s mother, and continued to eat.

“What are we talking about?” Jiselle’s mother asked, looking around the table.

Jiselle cleared her throat, and then, under her breath, leaning toward her mother, answered, “Britney Spears. She died.”

Her mother blinked noncommittally. Camilla drew a ragged breath. Sara choked out, “Excuse me,” and stood up, heading for the women’s room. When she did, her linen napkin slid off her lap and onto the floor. They all glanced down at it, but no one made a move to pick it up.

“Britney Spears?” Jiselle’s mother asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Yes,” Jiselle said, scrambling to think of a way to change the subject. “The singer.”

“I know who Britney Spears is,” her mother said. “I just don’t know why we’d—”

Jiselle raised a desperate hand in the air over her mother’s head and began waving at their waiter. Her mother turned to look at him, too, and in one second he was beside the table. “Yes, ma’am?” he said to Jiselle, who opened her mouth with no idea what she should ask him for. Thinking frantically, she was surprised to hear herself say, as if she’d intended all along to say it, “It’s my birthday. Do you think we might have a cake after dinner?”

“Certainly.” The waiter smiled and bowed.

When he was gone, Jiselle’s mother said, shaking her head, “We haven’t even gotten our main course yet.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said. “I know. It’s just—you know. My birthday! I’m excited.”

Sam beamed. “Tell him to make it chocolate,” he said.

Far more people are not going to die of the Phoenix flu than die of it!” one television doctor said on a special news report. “We’d better keep attending school, paying our bills, and floating the economy. Otherwise, when the hysteria dies down, we’ll have something to be hysterical about.”

Healthy people, it was said, could withstand this rather minor infection. Drug users could not, of course. Nor the children of drug users. It was true that medical professionals and the depressed were at special risk. People who did not have the right attitude often succumbed, and that was why the Wholeness books and tapes, which could easily be bought off the Internet, were so helpful. Even if you weren’t sick, ordering and listening to the tapes, reading the books about how to strengthen your character, alleviate stress, clean yourself of unhealthy thought patterns could ward off the disease.

Jiselle was given one such book by the mother of Camilla’s boyfriend, Bobby Temple.

“Honestly,” Tara Temple said, “it changed my life.”

Jiselle had almost never spoken to the woman before that evening, although she had met Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, once or twice when he came by to pick Bobby up for some sort of lesson or sporting event.

Paul Temple was a tall man with the same sand-colored hair as his son. He taught history at the local high school, and Jiselle thought he looked knowledgeable and sheepish about being knowledgeable. When the subject of current events came up on the front steps as he waited for his son, Paul Temple referred to the thirteenth century as if it had been last week—but then looked embarrassed to have slipped it into the conversation, like the smart boys Jiselle had known in high school, who would rather have walked straight into walls than worn glasses.

His wife, Tara, seemed his opposite. Whatever she had, she had on display. That day, her hair was dyed a metallic blond, and she was wearing large silver-and-turquoise earrings and a sheer blue blouse. She said she was just stopping by to drop off Bobby’s track shoes, and Jiselle was surprised that she would think to give her anything at all—and especially surprised by the bright, lightweight book Tara Temple handed over.

Its cover was slick, shiny. A whiteness at the center of more whiteness. CURE YOUR SELF! was written in gold letters across it. It was no longer than fifty or sixty pages, and holding it in her hands, Jiselle had the feeling that if she didn’t hold on to it tightly, it might float away.

“Thank you,” she said, “but are you sure? I could get my own copy.”

“I want you to have it,” Tara Temple said.

Only later, turning the book over at the kitchen table, did Jiselle understand. On the back was written, Buy a copy of this book for everyone you know! Give this book away! It will increase your good fortune, and CURE YOUR SELF! This book—it was a kind of chain letter, spread from one person to another to another, mystically, like a virus.

“What we need are better vaccines and antibiotics, not good fortune,” Mark said, picking up the book and tossing it back down on his way out the door.

“It’s not my book,” Jiselle said to his back.

“Well, that’s reassuring,” he said.

“It’s Tara Temple’s.”

“Oh God,” he said. “That woman.”

“Mark,” Jiselle asked, “Do you think this is going to be a big thing?”

“The Phoenix flu?” he asked, and then shrugged. “That depends on what you mean by ‘big thing,’ I guess. But aren’t you glad you’re not flying?”

The media connected the fears of the flu, the war, global warming, and the end of the world to the number of women who were dropping out of the workforce.

What was the point of two incomes if your money couldn’t buy you the luxuries you worked for? If you couldn’t even afford to put gas in two cars, let alone install a hot tub, why not have someone at home watching the children, folding the laundry, making nice dinners during the day?

A stay-at-home mother was even one of Dr. Springwell’s secrets—number five or six on the famous list of “Immune Boosters” promoted by the portly physician whose popular show was devoted entirely to advice on avoiding an illness, which he never called the Phoenix flu but which was, of course, the Phoenix flu.

Jiselle had watched the show only once, in a hotel room in Minneapolis. “We are like fish in a small bowl,” Dr. Springwell was saying. He had two goldfish in a glass bowl on a table in front of him. Behind him was a painted sky, heavenly blue, in which a few cottony clouds sat motionless and serene. The doctor wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His bald head gleamed. “The slightest shift changes everything.”

Dr. Springwell tipped the bowl a little to the left then, and the camera closed in on the two bright fish, who had been floating in it peacefully, seemingly asleep, but who were now trying frantically to swim, with their tiny, fluttering fins, against the current. Those fins looked as if they were made of the thinnest tissue. Useless.

“See?” Dr. Springwell said. “This is the barely perceptible change in our climate, but it alters everything . The fish have to learn to swim all over again in this new world. Like us! What we experience in our fishbowl is the gradual shift in our resources, our economy, our way of life, and, most important, our immune systems.”