Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

The virus got you early, Caroline. People said the best were taken first and I believed them. The average sinners would muddle along behind. And who’d be left? Aleksy was right about the immunes. We began to hate them without knowing who they were, without having any reason to believe they existed. After the first wave of deaths, we sensed the scale of the disaster, and the rumours began. It was impossible to tell who out of all those so far untouched might be actually immune, but people were accused anyway. A doctor on his way home after a sixteen-hour shift on a fever ward was attacked by a mob in a hospital car park. His death was applauded in chatrooms. Ha ha, not so untouchable now you smug fucker!

I feel the distance between me and the others – Aleksy, Deirdre, Django – Abigail even, and Maud. It comes to me with sudden force. Who are they to squat in my house? They’ve never been touched by the blessing, not one of them, never felt its power and sweetness. I’d go through it all again – I would, Caroline – to feel that exultation. I travelled on the Jesus bus, I spread the word of grace abounding to all sinners, but I was a creature of sullen clay until I lost control of my limbs, here in my own hall, and felt the first stirrings of divinity. And now they come snivelling round my house like the end of time is their loss. I’ll take Abigail’s gun to the lot of them. Ha ha not so untouchable now!

I’m raving, Caro. Jesus Christ, I’ve resisted worshipping this sickness long enough. Resisted the other as well – the frenetic scramble for safety. Who never dreamt of his own mountain, ice cold air at three thousand feet, an endless uncontaminated food supply and a flame thrower to keep the sweating scroungers at bay?

And there were enough in such a panic to survive they didn’t care what it took. Breathe in my direction, dickwit, and you’re dead.

But more went the other way, elevated the condition, deferred to the priesthood of suffering.

We learnt the stages to watch for. We knew their names almost before we knew that we knew them. The sweats, the staggers, the blessing, the burn, the pit. Only the virus itself resisted naming, until it didn’t need a name, because it had become the only topic of news or conversation.

It was the third stage that held our attention, the stage we were all induced to call the blessing, whether we used the word with awe or with irony, whether we whispered it or spat it out quotation marks and all. However we viewed it, the sight of it took us by the throat – always the same unmistakable thing and always unique. A moment of grace descending at last, too late, on every sufferer. Some talent previously unexpressed leaping towards consummation. People who had never drawn drew on pavements in whatever they could lay their hands on – mud, ketchup, plaster dust. The impulse held them sometimes for minutes only, sometimes for an aching half-hour of absorbed effort before the body rebelled. Often the impulse was to sing or pull music out of some instrument, intended or improvised. They might be thwarted by lack of materials, or by the collapse of the nervous system as the staggers merged into the burn. But the urge was always there.

It terrified us, as the thought of the Last Judgment or the Rapture terrifies true believers, with a terror that stops the breath and makes the hairs rise and the mind go blank. It was the only counterweight to the mundane labour of death. Because it wasn’t long before mass graves became necessary. Bodies were loaded on to trucks, carted in skips, lugged or wheeled to collection points. Soldiers and armed police patrolled with megaphones and automatic weapons, commandeering vehicles and food. Self-appointed militias cohered and fragmented. There was no shortage of guns. The dead became landfill, were stacked on abandoned construction sites, loaded into stadiums for burning, were left where they lay in empty houses or dumped like bin bags on the pavement.

People became obsessed with the science of it. They’d stumble hollow-eyed from their computers sounding off about processes of synaptic transmission. Or they got religion. Theological disputes sprang up among people who’d been godless all their lives. The blessing had a divine origin, they said, that was obvious. But were we witnessing a rent in the veil between our illusory world and the eternal? Or were the sufferers clinging ever more ferociously to the wheel, their egos clamouring on the shore of oblivion?

Others sneered at these squabbles. It was never about us. No carbon-based life form could hope to grasp the complexity of the event. To the invading race, the victims of the blessing were nothing more than an instrument, a keyboard. Minds greater than ours comprehended these individual acts of creation as notes – not even notes – harmonics within notes within melodies within symphonies of meaning, and in this way communicated with each other through our dying gestures.

And some said fuck you to all this talk, ready with chisels and bread saws to slash any throat that stood between them and their next meal.

So I steered clear of other people and locked Simon indoors. For a while there was TV. The statements from successive health ministers and secretaries of defence were incoherent, but some kind of explanation emerged. Government-sponsored research had gone spectacularly wrong, or exceeded even the most crackbrained expectations. Either way, the resulting microbe was never meant to leave the lab. The details were murky – something about a caprine pituitary gland, something about synapses harvested from a cloned ape. The spokesman who revealed its codename, the Othello Project, was forced to resign hours before the virus got him.

The web was seizing up. News sites crashed or froze on cataclysmic headlines. Links took you nowhere, or wandered randomly, the whole thing kept going by emergency generators and a scattering of servers whispering to each other in the dark.

One day the power went off in our flat and didn’t come on again. One day there was no more water. If I saw the last plane ever to curve over London towards Heathrow, the last bus to cross Blackfriars Bridge, I didn’t know it was the last until the absence made it so.

We skulked as long as we could, me and Simon, nine flights up with no lift. A hundred and eight steps. It discouraged visitors. There was the fear of contagion. And I was afraid more particularly for Simon, that people would remember who he was. I think maybe I went a bit mad, Caro, when you were gone. After a while it was only us still living on the top three floors, so I barricaded the staircase. We scuttled like mice through the empty apartments, living on handfuls of rice and pasta, the odd shrivelled potato sprouting new growth, tins gathered from the kitchens of our dead neighbours, melted water sucked from their freezers. Out on the balcony scraps of furniture smouldered in the barbecue. But all the mechanisms of input and output had broken down. How much of my life I’d devoted to this. Pumping water indoors to be softened, heated, distributed. Expelling it, filtered of hair and food scraps, shitladen and frothing with detergent. Creating temperate, odourless environments. Marking off territories, the indoor world of people from the outdoor world of weather, vegetation, sewage, maggots, dung beetles.

We experimented as our diet changed. We dropped little news-wrapped turds to explode softly out of sight. We squatted in the furthest bath tub and left the watery discharge to drain. We craved vegetables and fresh meat. But water was our biggest problem. It was thirst that drove me down to ground level, to weave through backstreets, dodging the soldiers and the psychos. Nine flights down with the shit bucket. Nine flights up with as much water as I could carry.