Writing Through Covid
When better to start a new novel? While medicated into oblivion, of course.
It’s a nasty virus. Stings and barbs, rattles and hacking, burning and shivers, eyeballs on sticks. I guess I had a bad case. It attacked my life force and directed all my energy toward staying alive.
Okay, I’m a writer. I use hyperbole and go maximum drama queen in situations like this. If I’d caught the virus in 2020, in the early days before vaccinations and effective drugs, I would have been the fully congestive chest attached to a ventilator. That would have been me, composing this blog from the great writers’ colony in the sky.
As it was, I tested positive on Feb 17th, 2024, my birthday, the Saturday of a long weekend. I directed my (still considerable) energies toward finding a doctor to prescribe Paxlovid (not a trivial undertaking during a long weekend), sitting for hours in an urgent care facility, then finding a drugstore that actually carried the drug.
That drug—six giant pills a day inside my hapless gut—was sluggish in performing its magic. I hacked and rattled for four long days, enduring nausea and insomnia, and composing my latest crime novel during the endless open-eyed nights.
I’ve always been drawn to the dark alchemy of thrillers, chillers, killers, and evil-doers, the night walkers and stalkers who haunt the shadows. Constrained by virtue in my own life, my imagination is free to unleash monsters.
In the ghost hours of pre-morning, I quit my sweaty bed and stumble into the study. Through a Paxlovid-insomnia scrim, the smoky blue light is shimmering and iridescent, my crackling congestion following me in some fever dream.
I imagine details of the crime scene in my novel. A resort, with woods at the back of the hotel, a cabin in the night, a mysterious victim who’s going to be made to disappear under violent circumstances.
Crime clichés bloom in my head, which currently has an ache so severe that my brain is clattering against my eye sockets. I harness that pain to serve my victim, who is suffering his own kind of trauma, a secret from his haunted past.
Words bloom on the page. The eerie thrill of conjuring a diabolical tale out of smoke and mirrors. My Muse, who seldom desserts me, delivers a brainwave that carries my victim away onto a gravel road—the crunch of gravel in my chest—I hear it, feel it, the headache pain dissipating as my bloody victim is borne away by a diabolical woman—an Amazon—who is going to make him Regret a lot of Stuff.
I roll the tension out of my neck and shoulders and open a window to let in the cool night air. The woodsy smell of recent rain wafts in.
The ever-present heaviness in my chest has lifted—as my creativity waxed, the suffering waned. My brain couldn’t do both.
This is who I am.
I am not the illness.
It seems absurd to knock politely on the door. The woods absorb the sound, and there’s no reply.
I try turning the knob. The door’s unlocked! A musty smell hits me as I enter, stale sea air and rotting roots, wet leaves, and a more ominous odor of decay.
The light switch sticks as a pale light floods the room.
Damien’s cabin has been ransacked top to bottom, someone searching in drawers, the closet, under and in the mattress, papers strewn about and a bedside lamp overturned.
Where is he?
No clothes in the closet, just a few garments strewn about the floor, and a bag with belongings in the corner. Everything is flung aside. Did they find what they were looking for? I examine the items in the bag, and to my surprise they are his. A shirt that I recognize sparks tears at the corners of my eyes, and I hold the fabric against my face. I’m already in mourning.
At the cabin door, the beam of my phone picks up rust-colored drops. Blood. The coppery odor is unmistakable. Tentatively, I contaminate the crime scene by gently touching a drop. Still sticky.
Outside the cabin, I understand I’m searching for a corpse. Someone encountered my sperm donor, and it didn’t end well.