Going viral

Time slows down when you have a cold. The world shrinks in scale. You go from life’s medium-to-fast pace, and its broad scope, to staring at your microwave clock, counting down the minutes until the start of “The Price is Right.” And the contestants can never correctly guess the price of a toaster. Ever.

 

Sacked out on the couch – that’s me at present, glancing at my surroundings with the dopey wonder of a small child. There’s something about succumbing to a virus’ evil machinations that reverts me to boyhood and its small-time worries and fascinations. Right now there’s a particularly large dust mote twirling in the slanted light of a living room window, gyrating lazily like a hungover gymnast, and I can’t keep my eyes off it. Healthy, my brain might devote 0.0001 percent of whatever power it has to noticing this microscopic happenstance. Sick, it’s all I can think about. Being riveted to such a trivial matter is usually something that happens only after taking psychoactive drugs engineered in a government laboratory. Or so they tell me.

 

My suspicions tell me that Bermuda – or perhaps the ship that took me there – is responsible for this mushy-minded state. While I luckily enjoyed tip-top health for the duration of the trip, I awoke on the morning of my arrival back in the States to the kind of sneezing that makes it difficult to perform simple tasks. It’s hard to eat food or read a book when every 10-second interval heralds the kind of bodily convulsions typically reserved for NFL players and electroshock patients. These are often the same group, by the way.

 

Despite the difficulty in dragging my butt ashore, what awaited me was a parallel universe of diet soda and daytime television. I don’t experience these things at any other time. Call me crazy (it’s probably accurate), but I actually sort of enjoy it. While I’d gladly choose health over sickness any day of the week, there’s a kind of release in being surrounded by a waist-high fort made of tissue boxes and Alka-Seltzer. If there’s something in the human condition that occasionally yearns for laziness and vapidity, it’s realized in the hacking coughs of the common cold.

 

That languid little dust mote is a keyhole peeking backward toward youth. Cue dreamy flashback music.

 

The year was 1986. Or ’88. I was about five. Or eight. Or 11-and-a-half. Doesn’t matter. I mean, who opens up their diary and writes, “Today I made prolonged eye contact with my cat?” Never happens, outside of Woody Allen movies.

 

Yet there I was, a small boy, stretched out on my stomach on my parents’ living room floor and locked in a staring contest with our orange tabby cat, appropriately named Garfield. I was still at the age during which you take studious stock of the minor phenomena: the curlicue shag of the aging carpet, colored patterns hiding animal faces and rocket ships; the springs underneath Dad’s favorite recliner, dully reflecting whatever light managed to excavate its way to the chair’s cobwebby underbelly; and Garfield’s overlarge face, white whiskers rising from matted fur like trees towering above a grass meadow. Little things. Little moments.

 

Winning a staring contest with Garfield required concentration. It’s not that he was trying to win, of course; he was a dumb-as-nails cat who had no idea what in tarnation was going on. Dumb creatures, though – whether they be human or animal – are especially good at looking blankly at things for long periods of time. To hold your own in an imagined test of wills, you have to be equally dumb, or bored, or both. I was definitely bored. Jury’s out on the other thing.

 

He’d have this way of making you blink by being insanely, almost illegally cute. A pink sandpaper tongue would dart from between his lips and lick the tip of his button nose, and you’d be so overcome with love and affection you’d have to squinch your eyes shut just to keep from groaning at yourself. I was holding my own, keeping him locked in my crosshairs, when he broke concentration and glanced upward toward the ceiling, arching his neck back and revealing the wintry sheen of his snow-white neck.

 

Let the record show that I totally won. Let the record also show that, being curious, I glanced up to see what had caught his attention. It was a little dust mote. Blasted into relief by a pie-slice of sun, it rocked gingerly from side to side as gravity pulled it toward the carpet; Garfield and I watched as it sunk between our two faces, rapt as churchgoers on the Sabbath. 

 

Even at that age, I had the presence of mind to reflect on what an oddly wondrous occurrence this was. Think about it: The universe is billions of light years across. Throughout it, supernova explosions are pumping out light and energy that dwarves the output from entire galaxies. Stars so massive that they fuse hydrogen and helium in nuclear reactions are pulling planets and moons into an orbital dance. And on one of those planets, on a medium-sized chunk of rock and dirt, in a modest house, on a tiny section of carpet – there, miraculously, two living creatures of differing species both lie staring at a speck so minuscule it almost isn’t there at all.

 

That’s sort of beautiful.

 

Or maybe it’s fever-induced insanity, who knows. These are the kinds of thoughts you have when you’re either young or sick. They’re odd time machines, these viruses that fell our bodies, but they’re incredibly effective; our methods for coping with them never change, the TV-and-cough-syrup strategy unaltered from adolescence to old age. It’s a shame to squander our time on this celestial rock, and so rather than mark these sick days as lost causes, I’ll choose to let them carry me into whatever whimsy seems most appropriate. It’s kind of refreshing to cede control for a little while.

 

Oh, hey, my game show’s about to start. Let’s see if the contestants can guess the going price of a washing machine.