re-learning to pray

If I were the sort to have panic attacks, which luckily I am not, (once I did start to, several times have on the train but said no very firmly very internally, interiorly, and settled into basic agitation, reasonable anxiety, which was lucky,) if I were that sort I would definitely definitely today have succumbed today on the train with the sniffling kid and the harrumphing throat-clearing suit leaning so close after the news last night, the report on the Flu, not your average nausea chills week in bed flu but H5N1 pandemic potential killer avian flu. In-flu-en-za. Pandemic influenza, not even yet at the tipping point, now only now transferable bird to bird or bird to human but deadly still, settling deep suddenly immediately in the lungs, even in birds the birds they cut open (dead) their lungs filled with fluid and blood. Fluid and blood, the virus woman said, the virus man said on the TV. Said worse than 1918, worse than the Spanish flu, they’re waiting for the tipping point Emily says isn’t it amazing. Isn’t it phenomenal, for the first time in the history of ever we are preparing for a virus that does not yet exist. Waiting for it to evolve. That’s the tipping point, when it makes that hairpin turn onto the evolutionary highway and starts human to human, no bird necessary.

Some things they said. The woman said her uncle now elderly sat in 1918 in the window of the family’s living room forbidden to leave the house for any reason counting hearses. A tally on a pad in his lap. Counting hearses, a special column for his schoolmates. A tally. The man the hospital man saying these showers, this emergency room, this is State-of-the-Art, here we could decontaminate 60 people an hour. And in an emergency (emergency room, disaster) we could move faster. But that’s for the nuclear detonation in a major metropolitan area portion of the show. That’s later. Now, the man says H5N1 we’d run out of coffins in three days. Stadiums full of cots full of the dying. Nothing to be done. First, Asia. First, countries that can’t afford the vaccine we don’t yet quite have perfected. A guy on a plane, the plane contaminated, the airport, the city, New York City, the subway train, here, this train car, but not yet, not yet the tipping point. Not yet a vaccine, or rather we have a vaccine it has to be made by hand inside eggs. Inside eggs! Each vaccine. A little embryo vaccine for maybe a dozen people. New York City! Thirty people in this traincar alone. No need to panic, smart people working hard in labs across the country. Around the world. A tally. 1918. Makes SARS look like the chicken pox. In case of an earthquake, stand against an interior wall away from windows. In case of a nuclear attack, anyone not immediately disintegrated should strip, should scrub down with water and soap, duct tape plastic over the windows and wait. The tipping point. Oh lord, my god, I pray that these things never end. The sand and the seed, the rush of the water, the crash of the heavens. The prayer of men.

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