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When I say this is a love story, I mean this is a story about someone who believed in something impossible and beautiful and dangerous with such strength of character and devotion that they followed the thread of it all the way to the very end, no matter what the world threw at them. Whichever way you try to tell it, that sounds like a love story to me.
It was clear her understanding of reality had dawned, but it was still incomplete. The inevitable, clanging acceptance was still due.
The thing about new people in the group was that it was another opportunity for the rest of us to tell our own stories again. We’re hungry for fresh listeners, because the more you tell your own story, the more it makes sense to you, and as Awad delights in pointing out, the more the cure works.
“You keep telling yourself what happened until you believe it.”
Isn’t it beautiful how stories can work like that? The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams.
Macey once told me the problem with the truth was that it was so poorly written. Given the choice, the pleasantly told lie is always more seductive. That’s why religion is so potent, she said. Why history and science are still considered up for debate. Myth is more appealing than verified truth because the grey areas between the facts can still be used against us.
Funny, isn’t it? You tell yourself that when the world ends, all of that nonsense will dry up. It’ll be like a purge of the banal, and all the trivia of the world will be the first down the plughole. But no, the same old shit floats to the top without needing us to be there to witness it.
Think about it. When the narrative has taken hold, it brings with it a constricting of focus; a tendency to only see what is perceived to be true at the expense of everything else. If any one of us were to look at the television and see it to be blank, or see only static or distortion, or a mass of images their brain refuses to process? Well, the security here is trained to spot that kind of “not seeing.” It’s a particular skill to notice someone who isn’t noticing properly, and you can imagine what happens then. The burlier supers—Danvers, maybe, or Thorn—they’ll come waltzing in, two-abreast
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They liked the weapons she had forged herself; they couldn’t stand the way she chose to wield them.
The canon of popular culture as candy-coloured gospels to be built up and torn down.
moment of clarity that might have saved me from the narrative. But I didn’t say anything, I let it pass until it was forgotten.
There was the infection and then there was the narrative, the one holding the door open for the other. These days, we still tend to conflate them: it’s easier to think of the infected, the uninfected, and the cured, but there’s always been a bit more to it than that.
And so, it is true to an extent that what I did wasn’t my fault. We didn’t know it, but we were the diseased ones and everyone we saw as an Other was not. We had the narrative—constructed over the long haul by misunderstandings, groupthink, pop-culture, and paranoia. It fed our brains the wrong signals. The infection boosted them, it stripped out everything else. God help us, it showed us what we wanted to see.
Does it take a certain sort of mindset to succumb to that sort of narrative? A certain sort of vulnerability to look at someone, a group of people and think: monster, zombie, Other.
The world has always been bigger than us as a species, and it’s only our own limited viewpoint that makes us think we’ll ever be in a position to destroy it so decisively.
It wasn’t the end of the world we had imagined; it wasn’t some magical utopia either, it was simply a place where life endured. A place where the balance had shifted. People still lived here, but their status had changed. They were no longer the dominant concern.
When someone is about to have a stroke, it’s said they can smell burning toast. To the infected, everyone else smells like rotting meat.
Maybe we’ll all have to get used to the uncertainty. Maybe that’s what frightens me. The way you can get used to anything if you’ve got nothing better to gravitate toward.
Stories within stories, some of which happen to be true.
Collateral damage to a story paced too swiftly for the owners to make sense of. Change crowbarred by a narrative sleight of hand that the house and the lives it had once contained would forever remain alien to.
“But we used to see them watching telly or looking at phones or computers. And all I could see were blank screens, snow, static, you know. Broken people poring over broken machines.”
“And I remember thinking to myself, look at these poor fools. They’re still going about what they think of as normal life. They’re still acting out impulses to consume, consume, consume. Staring at blank televisions, pawing away at phones and laptops like they actually mean something.
Since then, we’d both had only breadcrumbs. The news had mostly been kept from us, the truth rationed, so we only understood what we could witness for ourselves.
named. True compassion is never a last resort, wheeled out when all remaining possibilities have failed.
off. The consensus at the time was, given “normal” circumstances—such as they were—muddying a political argument is more likely to strengthen faith in it.
For followers of the narrative, this wasn’t entirely true. The narrative was sensationalist, already absurd. We followers wanted to believe it unconditionally, but it was occasionally a challenging pill to swallow. It was a story where the dead came back to life, for Christ’s sake, where corpses staggered around and ate the living! It takes a certain mindset to accept such circumstances as normal without question.
THIS ISN’T REAL, it said in large letters, next to a photograph of a smiling man in a suit. Now, why hadn’t I noticed that before? I thought.
WAKE UP, IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD, NO OTHERS. NO MONSTERS. Not only advertising hoardings on bus stops and billboards, but actual road signs and street furniture. Number plates on abandoned cars read W4K3 UP, messages written on the tarmac where road-crossings should be read LOOKS NORMAL. It was absurd, it was funny. It felt as though the whole world was shouting at me and only me, because none of the rest of the crew saw a damn thing.
it’s a lie and none of it really matters. No one wants that. We read stories, watch shows on TV, and we appreciate they’re fiction. But when they come out and outright admit it, it pisses us off.”
reeling. I had known her since before the infection, but I wondered if it was something she’d always had about her. She had only needed the right time to be taken seriously, the right kind of chaos to allow her to rise gloriously to the top.
“It’s only that I don’t trust dreams. I don’t think it’s fair they don’t really mean anything.”
In a brief moment of disorientation and uncanny wonderment, the possibilities of objective reality danced before me, daring me to choose between them.
pan. “Do you think we are cured? I don’t feel cured, Spence. They say the infection doesn’t go anywhere. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Just because we’re not seeing dead people anymore, doesn’t mean we’re alright.” She looked at me directly. “Do you feel cured?”
“Cured is relative,” Leila said. “Infected is relative.” “That’s not what Doctor Awad says—” “Awad is relative.” “Leila—” “I’m not saying he’s wrong,” Leila said. “I’m not saying any of them are wrong. They’re right. We do have to look at all sides. Compassion, yes? It’s their . . . schtick. But that’s what I’m saying. It’s okay not to be fully cured. It’s okay that things aren’t exactly as they were. It’s okay that . . .”
“Maybe I want something to be real. After all that.”
A dreamlike conviction that disparate roads and neighbourhoods connected because an expediency of storytelling had edited out the parts in between.
Relationships aren’t scientific, they’re not mathematical. They’re chaotic, abstract, irrational.
But despite all of that, there was an aspect of him that fitted into an aspect of me—not biological, not chemical. Something else, something . . . different, unquantifiable. And for a moment, I suppose I did believe in all the silly nonsense I thought I wouldn’t.
Peter had an understanding of how stories could be infectious, I suppose. History is one long string of stories honed to sharpen one side over another.
The news was on, feeding me outrage and horror.
First thing I get when I got to the facility: It’s all okay! The world isn’t ending! It’s make-believe, and you? Well, you fell for it because you’re . . . weak, or stupid, or angry. You’re susceptible, that’s what you are.”
“Good news, it’s not your fault. Bad news, you didn’t narrowly escape from your husband and son who had turned into ravenous zombies, you murdered them both in cold blood because . . . fairy tales. But as I said, good news!”
Eradicate the story that way instead.”
“Because of course you think you’re going to turn and you’re afraid. But in reality, the actual pain of getting injured . . . wakes you up, I suppose. You don’t change, that’s clear. Maybe the narrative can’t work properly at a biological level. You see your legs have been ripped up by teeth, but your pain receptors are telling you something else. The friction between the real and the perceived becomes . . . tiresome, ill-fitting. The narrative feels trivial. So, it’s self-preservation that makes you refocus, so you can deal with your own injuries.
No, I miss the certainty of it. It made the world so . . . simple. It was us and them and that was that. The whole world was black and white. Everything was easy. And most important of all, I loved my son with such a ferocity it lit a fire within me and that fire fuelled me in the way nothing else could. “I miss missing him in that way. I miss loving him so unconditionally. I miss him and I miss the disease that made me see monsters.”
wrong. Maybe a love story is barely a love story at all when its machinery lies so exposed.
I’m fully aware of how cynical it must seem to so deliberately try to reinfect someone who was cured. Even if there was consent on her part, let’s be very clear: I was a man, gaslighting a woman. I was lying to her to send her back to a violent life because . . . well. I wish there was a way of finishing that sentence easily. I wish I could justify myself with complete confidence. I can’t, acknowledging only how we live in strange and unpredictable times. I’m not proud. And all it took was for me to tell her a story.
How satisfying, how humiliating to think the cure had always been so easily within our grasp. Kept distant from us by our own cynicism, our own jaundiced conviction that strength lay in complexity, in convolution.
And then, I suppose, you could say I wake up and I see my place in relation to everything else is tiny, insignificant, mostly known for having followed the straightest path without thought and done harm to others.
My favourite dreams are the ones in which I’m forgiven.
