An A.A. Story

“My name is Marshall and I am an alcoholic!” I announce to a room full of strangers. 

“Hi Marshall!”

“I recognise that my story might be different, or maybe not, who knows. I sure as hell have never met anyone else in my position.”

My intro seems to have caught a few people’s interest, while others are still absentmindedly gnawing at their stale donuts. A pale looking man whose right foot is tapping at the speed of light, probably nervous for lack of substances, appears to recognise me. Something about his grin says he knows who I am, but we are anonymous here, so he won’t rat me out quite yet. He’ll let me finish my story. 

“It all started on the evening of August 27th.”

My story is ingrained in my soul because of the hundreds of times I have told it over the years, and yet I still have to find a person who believes me.

“At the time, I was working as a janitor for J.H.D. Pharmaceuticals,” a ‘ooh’ here and ‘aah’ there interrupt my flow, but I manage to keep going. 

“You see, I didn’t really like my job. I had to clean after all those pompous doctors and researchers, the kind of people who’ll act like they’re the top shit… and then shit besides the toilet, you know what I mean?” 

A couple of the people sitting in the first row laugh out loud and chuckle. The poignant smell of bad coffee invades my nostrils as I take a deep breath before my next sentence, before the big revelation. 

“Well, at the time, all these fancy white coats were trying to come up with the vaccine for Covid-19, y’all remember it, right?” A murmured ‘yes’ pervaded my small audience. How could they forget? That fucker damn near ruined everyone’s life!

It all started with the first lockdown. Hundreds of thousand of people across the world lost their job, and so many families got destroyed by the premature loss of a friend or family member. Everyone’s life changed radically overnight, and the fear of the unknown created a second worldwide pandemic. Now, mind you, I am not talking about a virus this time. Nope. I am talking about the mental health issues that arose in every community, from the richer to the poorer, from the doctors and nurses to your average Joe, whose personal freedoms had been severed by the governments and health officials all over the world. 

By the time the majority had started to understand the severity of the pandemic, the world was in chaos. Country leaders were making fools of themselves by suggesting desperate methods to protect the population from the virus. 

“Inject yourself with bleach!”, claimed one.

“Don’t wear a mask! You’ll just activate your own virus and you’ll get sick!”, foolishly tweeted another. 

It was all one and all the same. People were leading their lives like the proverbial headless chicken, and this was just the tip of the iceberg. Oh, had we known what we were about to witness. But of course nobody short of Nostradamus could have warned us. Wars, countries declaring bankruptcies, the deniers living life like nothing was, sparking even more infections… It was all a vicious cycle. It took the world nearly two years to start getting back to any sort of normalcy, at least that’s what I saw in my small, unimportant life. Soon I was able to get a job again, and despite my two Masters’ in Economy and Business Management, openings were severely limited and I had to accept any offer that might come my way. After all, I wasn’t the only one in that situation. But I didn’t need to tell my audience this story. They all had lived through it, and possibly it was what sent some of them here to this A.A. meeting. Desperation, unemployment, a worldwide pandemic… These are good enough reasons for anyone to turn to alcohol for relief. If only that would solve the problems, too. But of course it didn’t, and it doesn’t. 

“I had started to grow tired of working in such a shitty environment. Every day they would do human trials of their vaccine, and every day they would get news of people getting infected despite the vaccines. They weren’t working. So of course the tension in the lab grew everyday. I have witnessed things that I can only hope to one day forget… But this is not my point.”

“The night of the 27th of August, as I was saying, I found myself cleaning the ‘vaccine lab.’ Don’t ask me why they trusted me around all those Petri dishes and test tubes, the fact is that I was there and no one else was. I was so sure I was alone that I started perusing… everything looked so important and fascinating!”

“Of course, little did I know that I was not alone! Apparently some noob left one of the holding cages open, and, well, a small Rhesus Monkey found a lot of interest in what I was doing.”

I see that mentioning the monkey had sparked more interest. It always did. One particularly young woman is sitting on the edge of her seat, coffee in her hand, eyes fixated on me. Another young man on the opposite side of the room is playing with a fluo fidget spinner and teasing a long strand of hair that’s covering half his face. The overall tension is palpable, as the room is bouncing and shaking and fidgeting together. 

“Since I didn’t consider the possibility of being ratted out by a monkey on death row, I kept looking around, and, you know, at some point looking around wasn’t enough anymore. I felt the need inside of me to go and touch the Petri dishes, and mix whatever potions were left unattended for the night.”

“At this point the monkey was simply following me around, cautious. She knew that humans had a 50/50 chance of either hurting her or feeding her, so I think she was trying to figure out to which category I belonged. I tried to get close to her a couple of times to see her name, but she ran away from me and hid in her cage, which of course had her name printed on a tag. ‘Luna.’ Luna was her name.”

“After playing around with a few substances here and there, I got bored and decided to take a rest before facing the bathrooms. I sat on a chair, put my feet on the nearest desk, and took a short nap. When I woke up, Luna had taken my example and made a mess on the lab counters. There was stuff everywhere! I was so scared of getting caught and losing my job that I, well, tried to clean up to make it look like nobody had touched it. Took me nearly 3 hours, but I thought I did an ok job. In fact, when the lab assistants opened up the next day, they had no clue Luna and I had had some fun the night before.”

“Well, this is when everything started to happen. I was generally pretty much on top of the lab schedule, because, you know, I had to clean it. It probably had slipped my mind, or someone forgot to tell me.. fact is, the next day I came into work to find a long line of subjects for the new vaccine trial! I’m gonna spare you the gory details. A few people DID die because of me, and I have taken full responsibility for those deaths. I started suffering from severe insomnia and turned to alcohol to try and get some rest from my incessant thoughts and blaming myself.”

The room now is so quiet you could hear a monkey fart. Nobody says a word, nobody dares looking at me. I had just confessed to murder, pretty much. They were used to addicts-not murderers, for Christ’s sake!

If anybody judged me for my actions, they keep it to themselves. No hushed whispering nor subversive looks. I can feel the tension, but at the same time I feel the “don’t judge anyone” policy being put into action. 

“As some of you might have already figured out, I am the guy who took the blame for everything. The deaths-yes. But that’s not all. They also found that one of the test tubes I had messed with somehow produced what we now know as the vaccine for Covid-19.” 

The woman in the last row was the first one whose eyes started to water. And there it is. The first tear of joy. Behind her surgical mask, I see the woman’s eyes getting wrinkles around them, a clear sign that a smile has formed on her face. She uses the back of her wrist to clean up her tears and sends a nod in my direction, bringing the palms of her hands together in an international sign for ‘thank you.’

“The problem is that I didn’t do anything! As I have tried to tell the press over and over and over, what I did was pure luck. And if not, then it was Luna who did it! It was that little mischievous Rhesus monkey who saved humanity! Not me!”

But at this point my audience is no longer listening to me. It always happened. They get touched too personally to care. One of them knew someone who had died of Covid and therefore, I, the discoverer of the miraculous vaccine, am godlike to them. No matter how much I explained that it was an accident, that it was the monkey, they choose to believe it was me, a human, who saved them. 

I am not going to lie, the vaccine did save us all. Thankfully, they were able to replicate the concoction that I or Luna had put together and to mass produce it faster than anybody had hoped. Thanks to our mistake, millions of lives have been saved. Thanks to that foolish night at the lab, families don’t have to worry about losing someone dear because of the virus anymore. But my truth stands. It wasn’t me who came up with the mixture who saved all these lives. It wasn’t me.

As I try to keep my small audience quiet to let me finish my story, I see that it is too late. Someone is already on the phone telling a stranger how they are standing in front of the man who found the vaccine; another is coming to the podium to shake my hand (a social practice I despised before, during, and after the pandemic), and a third person is starting a chant. 

“Sa-vi-or! Sa-vi-or! Sa-vi-or!”

“Please, let me finish… please! It wasn’t me, it was Luna! Luna accidentally saved all of humanity!”

Nobody is listening to me anymore. Soon enough the crowd doubled. It’s incredible how fast news, even fake news, travels. 

Defeated, I step off the podium and start my usual routine.

“Thank you, Thank you.”

“I’m glad to hear I saved your grandma.”

“Sure, we can take a picture together.”

The truth is, I still haven’t found one single person willing to truly listen to my story. And while, yes, I might have started this whole thing that eventually led to the vaccine being discovered, I did not mix those test tubes myself, of this I am sure. 

Luna saved us, Luna allowed our species to go back to our old habits of destroying everything we touch. And maybe, just maybe, had she known what she was doing, she would have done something else.