COVID is not over

You are sitting next to a man who wants to kill you. He’s not wearing a mask. Neither is anyone else on the aircraft, even the stewardess who leans too close to your face to give you the special safety instruction for disabled people. You try to hold your breath.

‘Do up your seatbelt low and tight,’ she says, and you think about that word, ‘safety’. You can imagine how much viral load she comes into contact with. You can imagine the tiny red cells floating out of her lipsticked mouth, bright as her cheerful voice.

She’s trying not to look at your respirator. But by now, it’s just part of you, like your wheelchair. People take a step back in the shops, apologise to you as though you’re already sick from the plague they’ve just given you without a second’s thought. Some people look at you angrily, as though you’ve made them think hard about something they were trying to forget.

COVID is not over, you whisper beneath your breath. The man next to you looks up once, sharply, as though it’s inconvenient enough to be sitting beside a cripple, let alone a mad one. You smile at him with your eyes over the top of your respirator and wonder if he can even tell. You wonder if he has had COVID. You wonder if he has COVID.

You’ve been in the air less than twenty minutes and already it seems like a lifetime. There’s a trick that you use for safety now, being late to the airport. If you board last, there’s less chance you’ll catch the disease. They keep the air stale before take-off – the people who are boarding are more docile, like sleepy puppies.

There are all kinds of ways that they keep people quiet, well behaved, compliant, from feeding them and taking their time to collect the trays, to only filling the cabin with the good air, the HEPA-and-fresh air combination, when they take off. You have friends who are pilots. Sometimes they tell you things you just don’t want to hear.

Boarding late means being wheeled in on an aisle chair, so everyone can see. Having that second, special safety talk in front of everyone else, like you wouldn’t understand otherwise just because your legs don’t work. Its insanity, and degrading, but it’s also safer. And it’s all about being safe, now. All about making the right decisions, in order to survive.

‘You going home?’ the man asks suddenly, and you flinch against the imagined rush of air coming from his mouth. ‘No,’ you tell him curtly, and look down at your book, discouraging conversation. You feel bad – he doesn’t want to kill you on purpose. He might not even understand that he could, although you see the light switch off in his eyes abruptly. I tried, that look says. They all try to be as kind as they can to these new outcasts, those perplexingly present people they now call ‘at risk from COVID’.

You wonder why he’s not wearing a mask.

A memory comes flooding back and you try to push it away. It is of an almost forgotten boy, almost a man, grabbing you by the throat. He might have thought it was rough play, but it was too dark for him to see the look on your face as he thrust at you, grabbed your breast, choked you out. Lost in his own excitement, he couldn’t hear your words. I can’t breathe, you tried to whisper-scream into his mouth. He didn’t hear you, he kept on going. 

He kept on going.

You can’t even remember his name.

The man has turned to the window and is watching the clouds. You imagine asking him if he has had COVID but think that it will paint you even more as an outsider. Besides, he might be a COVID denier or minimiser, an anti-vaxxer. Cookers, they call them. A lot of people who you used to think were safe are no longer safe. COVID is like religion or politics, nobody talks about it anymore, just in case.

You’ve lost too many friends from the early days that way, talking about your risk and health, talking about science, about danger. Some of them drift away, preferring to turn their back on your inconvenient, burdensome existence. Some of them are angry or even violent. It’s hate, born of guilt and resentment. And some of them don’t care at all.

Eventually, that sweating boy in your darkened bedroom realised. But not until you’d gotten a good handful of scrotum, sunk your nails in and twisted painfully, pushing back up until he fell off. You're panting, silent, as you roll away, gasping for breath. Your throat is bruised; it feels as though the inner bloody meat of it is rising up into your mouth, cutting off your air. Your lungs hurt.

'Why didn’t you say?' he is asking but you can’t talk, only wheeze. You realise that you have peed a little. He probably thought you were just excited. You look up at him, the beginnings of a shameful apology on your practiced teenaged lips. His eyes are still gleaming with pain and derailed lust. In the dim light and dapples of shade, it looks like he is wearing a mask.

You think of this now, forty years later on a plane that is no longer safe, and your head feels just the same way it did back then, light and heavy and spinning all at the same time as your breath whistles through your respirator. Like you’re both visible and invisible; as if you no longer have the right to take up space, to breathe unapologetically in the world.

You imagine invisible poisonous red clusters swirling in the air, pulled into lungs and out through mouths and in through noses, depositing themselves in lungs and vascular systems, ready to wreak havoc. In the plane, the passengers smile and laugh, eat and breathe. You watch them and realise that like that long ago boy, they don’t mean to hurt you at all. But that doesn’t matter.

You’d be just as dead.  

The terror rises again, all bile and stifled breath in your throat and you still your facial muscles, force your eyes to go dull and vague and disinterested. You hold your body very still, become as small and inconsequential as you can, as though the virus is a sentient being that might just pass you by if you make yourself as small as it is.

As small as the regard that they have for you now.

The respirator isn’t the only mask the world is forcing you to wear.