After Act
by Stephen Mansfield

I’m reading a short story by Michael Moorcock, in which the narrator describes his time in Hamburg, among friends who believed they were “descendants of those who had perished when Atlantis was destroyed by atom bombs dropped from flying saucers.”
At any other time, in normal circumstances, that is, I would be suitably incredulous, the mechanisms that operate suspension of disbelief, kicking in. In this Year of the Great Pestilence, 2020, little surprises me. I owe the improbable events of this annus horribilis, unforeseen by oracles or clairvoyants, to an expansion of credibility, a greater capacity to venture into new dimensions of truth, actuality, and untested probability.
Even the specifications of this modest Japanese home my wife and I share, are changing. Our casual scorn for the prefabricated poverty of the building has mellowed into something like affection and gratitude for a structure that has become a shelter. A home that protects us, its diminutive quadrangle of garden, a cordon sanitaire.
This pandemic must surely be the most exactingly documented event in human history. Future generations will be able to pick over the calamity in fastidious detail, with the morbid curiosity enjoyed by people standing at a distance, the safe remove of history. In these most existential of times, disasters are nothing if not associative. Watching the streams of masked pedestrians passing in front of the house, I think of Kamon Rider. Donald Trump talks of Zorro. A more literate friend asks me if the title of Mishima Yukio’s Confessions of a Mask has any bearing on the subject, or would he be better off consulting Albert Camus’s The Plague? In an effort to sound learned, I recommend the closing passages of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 1353 masterpiece, The Decameron, in which ten Florentines flee their death city for the hills, where they distract themselves by recounting a series of tales. A reading of the work is instructive. “What was particularly virulent about this plague,” he wrote, “was that it would leap from the sick to the healthy whenever they were together, much as fire catches hold of dry or oily material that’s brought close to it.”
Writers and scribes have left harrowing accounts of other catastrophes. The storms, crop failures and famines of 1315, for example, are remarkably well-documented. In Poland, the desperately poor, we read, fed off hanging bodies removed from gibbets. With bubonic plague, the Black Death, the end came within days. A third of the world’s population are said to have perished, the pestilence leading to profound economic, social and political change, the disease undermining those in authority, or at least, those perceived to have been wanting in their response or compassion. Before Constantinople was established as the source, many believed the infections came from China.
Perhaps there is something perverse about reading virus related literature, but, as chance would have it, I was half way through Daniel Defoe’s 1722, A Journal of the Plague Year, in mid-January, when the first intimations of the pandemic were sensed. Defoe wrote, “Many families, foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.” In cities like Florence, the wealthy, quarantining themselves until the worst was over, withdrew to spacious villas, sending out servants for food, wine and delicacies. Defoe’s plague, like Boccaccio’s, is an avatar of death, of history going up in flames, but also of enlightenment. Sifting even further back through my bookshelves, I find that Thucydides has a thing or two to say about plagues in fifth-century Athens, confiding, “There was especially high mortality among doctors.”
If there are disarming parallels with today, these writers would have no difficulty in recognizing many of our behavioral responses to a crisis of this magnitude: the selfishness, hoarding, official prevarication, finger-pointing, conspiracy theories, complacency, random acts of kindness and incidents of genuine heroism, the invoking of divine forces, the almost superstitious faith in new prophylactics. The fog of lassitude. Strange lapses into ennui. We believed in progress as a panacea for ill fortune, that the natural forces of history, in their darkness and malevolence, were safely behind us, consigned to an age when doctors bled patients with leeches, witches were drowned in village ponds, and peasant hovels, feebly lit with lumps of tallow.
It’s feasible that, if the virus doesn’t destroy us, our minds will. In this struggle for health and sanity, the beachheads will be research clinics and the insides of our skulls. Providence seldom conspires to bring about happy outcomes, but I am now of the inspiring conviction that, life being mutable, we possess the power to radically change, without precipitating fresh crisis. Camus’s narrative, we recall, demonstrated the possibility of human solidarity in the face of an absurd and hollow universe. For the time being, the planets are still in alignment.
It will be some time, though, before euphoria of the kind that follows the extermination of deadly diseases or vermin, is felt. Before temple bells are rung, hosannas sung in churches, ululations made in mosques, the stanchions and steel cables of Rainbow Bridge illuminated in lurid strokes of cellophane-red, green and blue. The cognitive effects of overlong confinement are still sinking in. In a prolonged miasma of patience and forbearance, I’m experiencing that kind of fidgety energy people feel before the airplane doors are opened.
To steady our nerves and refresh the senses, my wife is burning incense in the next room. The fragrance of camphor reminds me of the moxa Basho applied to his legs in order to fortify them before setting off on his great haiku journey to the deep north. We will soon be making our own journey, back into the world, into a newly shriven, disinfected multiverse we may not recognize at first, but will be grateful that it exists at all.

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The above was written for an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy to be publshed by Excalibur, an independent publisher based in Tokyo. It will be published in three parts, as an incomplete e-book in October (Part 1), then with additions in the spring. The paperback edition, along with another e-book, with all entries, will be published next July. The title is to be Dimensions Unknown Volume 3: The Phantom Games. 

For an account of Stephen’s lunchtime talk for WiK, please see here.

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