The Flu

Whatever the final death count, the emaciated, delirious man tied to a rusty metal bed in a small sparse boarding house room would never know and had he known, would not have cared so much, except for the fact that he had somehow contracted the illness. Fear was all he felt once the realization set in that he would likely perish. Even that fact quickly deserted him, as his terrified mind collapsed in a boiling fever. The subsequent fevered screaming and wild thrashing was simply his body’s instinctive and extremely agitated immune response to the invasion of that hellish virus.

The progression of the illness would not be easy nor would it be quick. There was a deep thirst and deeper confusion; the man hallucinated that he was scorching in hell just as his mother had always predicted. He blinked at the ghost of her, more alive and animated than when she lived, kneeling at the foot of his bed dressed in her widowed black, chanting prayers, worrying a rosary, glaring up with her cold dark eyes, shaking a boney finger in his face, offering no more comfort or love than she had in life. Her scowling expression was as hard and as twisted as ancient bark; scolding that the devil will take his rotten soul just as the great dark fiend devoured the souls of his vile father, criminal brothers, and slut sisters. She shrieked that this illness was punishment for his wickedness, blasphemy, and carnal thoughts. Like all men, she ranted, he was impure and evil, deserving of any suffering the lord chose to hand him. If he had stayed in

the Azores and become a priest as she had wanted, none of this would have happened. Although more than fifty years had passed since he had last seen her, he cowered in fear.

Drifting between a coma and semi-consciousness he imagined visitations from a long procession of shapeless papaya-yellow faces real or fantasy, dead or alive, wandering through his room, disappearing into the walls as a strange, confusing pageant ebbing or flowing with drifting shadows and scorching pain. Voices echoed at a great distance down a long black tunnel, familiar yet unidentifiable and muffled. Thumping, scraping, shuffling, tapping; odd noises at times soft and other times loud crowding in, thrusting him along on a lava flow of hot agony. There were terrifying screams from the imps that danced about the darkened room; ragged shrieks from their misshapen mouths that he could not recognize as his screams.

A few tattered memories rose above the confusion, the oddly detached snippets of his life shattered and falling like random autumn leaves lifted on a wind devil, uncatchable, unrecognizable, then gone. Other thoughts brought strange terrifying images of leaping demons, turning him slowly on a fire spit, his flesh roasting black and crackling over a great snapping bonfire. During fleeting moments, there were brief instances of sparkling clarity, his eyes wide open,

seeing but not seeing, raising and struggling against the tight ropes that cut bloody trenches into his chest and legs, before slamming back on his squeaky metal bed and into the long murky confusion of tangled shadows and roaring pain. Trapped thoughts hovering behind his eyes, unfocused, swirling as dizzying brilliant splotches of bright yellow and red flames danced around and stabbed thru him, burning his flesh over and over in an unending nightmare of hellish boiling agony.

Mrs. Shultz, his landlady, appeared and disappeared as a terrifying apparition, barking orders at his attendants in her booming German voice. There was no recognition on his part, although he had known her for decades. A big meaty woman, speaking in an unintelligible amalgamation of Hawaiian, English, German, Kanaka pidgin bogged down in the syrupy ooze of her native Bavaria; her authoritarian tone blasting through his delirium, startling, deafening, and as thunderous as cannon fire. 

Roaring fever, icy cold chills, or dread made him shake violently, twisting against the ropes that held him secured to his bed, desperately trying to flee as he imagined his jealous and murderous older brothers, large menacing hulks, hunting for him in the night, moving slowly back and forth crisscrossing fields of tall grass and stunted trees, lanterns held high, swaying long dull shadows methodically seeking him as if he was a rabbit or pheasant to poach and slaughter. The two finally finding him in his hiding place, dragging him out, their hard fists pummeling, hobnailed boots kicking, damning him to hell, as their sharp curved knives slashed in the moonlight. He screamed and tried to run, but could not escape this time, paralyzed as they beat and stabbed, laughing and cursing him.

At some point a priest came. Mrs. Shultz bellowed, “Better late than never, you dog collared bastard!” The slamming of the door then the younger man’s blurred face floating in and out, saying the words of the last rights, in Latin. He understands none of it except the chilling word, “extremauncion.” Blessing or damning, he did not know which.

Much later, he felt a pure piercing chilliness come over him; a dousing ocean wave; a violent shaking in the cold wetness of it; there was an ending somewhere; a foggy shore rising from the ocean, a safe harbor if only he could find it. The coolness came on the flow of a deeply silent calm. There was an overwhelming sense of peace. He was drifting on the silent black ocean, the moon shining on gentle waves that rolled onward to the endless horizon as if the sea was a living tide of liquid silver. Reaching for the memory of something he could not quite recall; a fragment that hovered on the edge of thought as light and as elusive as the whisper of a ghost. Then abruptly there was something he could grasp and hold, if only for a moment. In the echoing quiet of his room, he listened, hoped, and drifted on the placid forgiving sea of his dreams. Into this cavernous silence, a single sighing breath laced with the sweet scent of lavender and cinnamon opened his weary crusted eyes.

“Maria?” He saw her standing outlined against shimmering amber light. Maria Silva's quiet, soothing beauty, gesturing and whispering to let go of the life he was clinging so desperately and stupidly to. Her small delicate hand held out to him; reaching across a lifetime of distance and space. She stood for a perfect instant, at an unreachable distance, a young woman still, thigh-deep in a lime green pasture on the heights of Sao Jorge's verdant slopes, at her back, the sheep speckled hills cascading gently to an ocean at dawn iridescent in turquoise and jade. Across the sparkling channel, Mount Pico's dark mass rose steeply to its snowcapped summit ablaze in the rising sun.

"Home?" he thought, "Home." Then in a rusty voice, he whispered, "Maria, sweet, Maria, please wait. Please, wait for me." He strained weakly against the death bed ropes trying desperately to rise and reach for her hand, to hold her once more in a warm healing embrace. Helpless, the last reserve of his strength spent, his voice lost, his hope gone, he watched as slowly, silently she faded into the soft light, her black hair shining silvery-white, adorned in a crown of wildflowers and fern, smiling, speaking words he could no longer hear, beckoning arms outstretched, so close he could almost touch her, so real he wept.