Coming to Terms with the Great Plague

by Brian Stableford

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I couldn't stay with Jill for more than an hour, even though I felt she needed me. I had work to do. I had to check the hard copy of my affair with Marilyn, which I'd made surreptitiously over the weekend, to make sure that no new details were piling up in the storeroom of my memory. I also had to file an account of my movements on the hard disc of my organizer — the disc which I must now be careful never to reformat or over-write. From now on, I had to keep proper track of myself, lest I lose my true past and my authentic being to the ravages of the disease. What will the historians of the far future make of all these documents? I wondered. Will they be grateful for the sudden glut of resources, or will they think it insane that we should devote so much painstaking attention to the recording and analysis of events which never happened? It was good to have the opportunity to indulge in such idle speculations. This was the first quiet moment I'd had all day: the first chance I'd had to assess my new situation calmly and without distraction. For a little while I was able to congratulate myself on how well I was doing, and how much in control I was, but I couldn't maintain a wholly positive frame of mind. I'd been shaken up by Jill's reaction, which had been worse than I'd expected. I was slowly overtaken by a sense of the enormity of it all. Where, I wondered, would it end — not just for me but for the whole human world? I knew that there was a real possibility that I and everyone else alive might lose everything, in spite of all our methodical recording and all our careful vigilance. If the biologists could identify the agent and devise an effective treatment, the plague could still be stopped in its tracks, but if they couldn't it might well keep on expanding its range and its scope. It was all too horribly plausible that the girls and the babies were just a passing phase, like the aliens and the child abusers before them, and that the next wave of fantasies might be altogether less comfortable. At the moment, I thought, I'm still the same person I've always been. Knowing Marilyn has hardly changed me at all — but even Marilyn could make a different man of me, if she plays an increasingly important part in my remembrance of things past. What are we, after all, but the sum of our memories? I could be embarked on a process of metamorphosis as profound, its own way, as that which makes a caterpillar into a butterfly. Even that, I realized as soon as I'd formulated the words, was a prettification: an attempt to make what was happening seem harmless, natural and progressive. There were a few enthusiasts on the lunatic fringe who were very fond of the butterfly analogy, proclaiming — as Aileen had briefly suggested in the pub — that the plague was no plague at all, but simply the next step in the evolution of Homo superior and the dawning of a new era of self-reconstruction. According to these particular lunatics, courage and cunning would give the bravest of us the ability to take control of the whole process, and thus remake ourselves and the whole world. They rejected the whole philosophy underlying the kind of record-keeping in which I was patiently engaged. CAST OFF THE CHAINS OF YESTERDAY was their slogan; ERASE THE FAULTS OF HISTORY AND WRITE THE WORLD ANEW! Admirable, in its way — except that neither courage nor cunning had yet contrived to make the slightest dent in the capacity which the plague had to defy and deny the consciousness of its victims. I remembered a day I'd spent in London with Marilyn — a day that never was, when we'd gone to see The Comedy of Errors at the Barbican and then to eat in an Italian restaurant in a paved alleyway off Charing Cross Road. I knew it wasn't in the record I'd made at the weekend, but I felt sure that it was just something that had slipped my mind, something that had been there all along, quietly unexamined, waiting to resurface in response to the right cue. It wasn't a sharp memory, but there was something so extremely lucid about it that it would have been ridiculous to doubt it if I hadn't been so sharply aware of the hazards of FMS. There's no way I can be absolutely certain, of course, I told myself, teasingly, that today's memories aren't false from beginning to end. In the final analysis, there's no way I can ever be certain of anything any more. Perhaps my memories of Marilyn are the only real memories I have left, and all that presently surrounds me is just the plague's way of breaking down that last stubborn residue of lost reality. Anyhow, given that the demons of delusion are free to ravage the world, hasn't the empire of reality already fallen? What profit is there in trying to sift the actual from the illusory? Wouldn't it be saner and wiser to make commitments on aesthetic grounds, preferring those memories — true or false — which are the most edifying? What possible reason is there for trying to cast Marilyn out of my past when her presence there is such a rich source of bittersweet satisfaction? Why should I try to contain and confine her, when she only ever wanted to make me happy? It was me who blew it, after all. If only I'd handled things better, we might still be together today . . . Jill put her head around the door, tentatively. "Are you done yet? Can I come in?" she asked. I finished the edit and closed the lid of my handbook. "It's okay," I said. "I'm up to date." She came to stand behind me, and put her hands on my shoulders, squeezing gently. "I'm sorry about downstairs," she said. "I don't know why I reacted like that. I suppose I'd been sort of expecting it, subconsciously, and all this stuff had built up, just waiting to explode when you hit the trigger. None of it's your fault — I know that. It's just a disease. It's not as if you can choose whether to get infected or not. I'm truly sorry." "It's okay," I said. "I understand. It's difficult. But we're sensible, mature adults. If anyone can cope, it's us. It's just a matter of coming to terms with it and seeing it through — together." "That's right," she said. "And when all's said and done, the past is dead and gone. It doesn't matter what happens to the past, as long as the present and the future are secure. Marilyn might be able to steal your memories — even your memories of me — but she can't steal you. I'll always have the flesh and blood, won't I? No matter how many yesterdays she swallows up, I'll still have all the tomorrows." I knew she must have been rehearsing that speech while she sat on her own downstairs, staring unheedingly at the TV screen. "That's right," I told her. "That's absolutely right. It's you I really love. It always will be." Was there ever a time when people didn't make such reckless promises? Was there ever a time when people didn't mean them? "I'll help you," she said, fervently kneading my shoulder muscles with her slender, insistent fingers. "I'll make sure you can't forget what we have. I'll keep on and on reminding you of the way it really was, and the way it really is. I'll never let you go." "I know," I said. "I'm glad I'm not alone. In a fight like this, the weight of numbers is vital. The power of consensus is what counts in the end. Consensus, and true love." I knew, though, even as I stressed the word with such scrupulous care, that "true love" doesn't mean "real love" at all; it means faithful love, true in the sense of being true to one's promises. Marilyn had made promises to me just as I had to her: promises we'd never broken, in spite of everything — including their unreality. Even phantom promises mean something, unless and until they're broken. If they can't be forgotten, they shouldn't be. "Are you coming to bed now?" Jill asked. "Yes," I said. I was very tired; it had been a bad day, memorable for all the wrong reasons. "Good," she said. "I'll fix my face and see you there." "Okay," I answered, patting her hand as she withdrew it from my shoulder. I continued sitting where I was for a few minutes longer after she'd left. Perhaps we should have had a child, I thought. Children are always there, always clamorous, never giving you a moment's peace for self-absorbed reflection. In the end, of course, they leave you — one way or another — but while they're around you really don't have the time to be ill. The I got up and went to the bedroom, wondering what my dreams would make of me, and who I might be when they finally released me to the cold bright light of morning. [ THE END ] BACK TO OMNI FICTION ARCHIVES