“Keep playing,” I tell Aki. I light a stick of incense. I squeeze his shoulders and wipe a tear from his cheek. I pick Hollywood up off the floor and his legs tread the air. Hollywood tells us it’ll be cloudy with a chance of rain. He tells us that plague deaths are at an all-time low. I imagine part of my wife’s spirit floating inside this tiny plastic body, wanting to connect us, waiting patiently for its turn.
Songs of Your Decay
Most medical doctors in the plague wards are working toward the goal of keeping their patients alive, intact. It’s my job to study how we fall apart. At the forensic body farm where I work, I’m researching the multitude of ways the Arctic plague transforms the human body, planting liver tissue in brains, heart tissue in intestines. I compare the Siberian strain to the Kindergarten strain to the latest mutations that have pulled the stricken into comas, made their skin glow with stars. Most of my cadavers come to us nameless, donated for research by their families staying at elegy hotels. Laird is a special case, though. He volunteered on his own and he’s still alive. I compare the virus in his cells from before and after the most recent drug trial. The part of me that’s spent hours listening to music with him late into the night wants the drugs to work, but my scientist heart knows studying the contagion both in life and during decomposition will help us gain a better understanding of how the virus functions in the body’s ecosystem （and how it managed to survive in a Siberian cave for thousands of years）。 Beneath my microscope, I see Laird is losing, cell by cell.
My phone vibrates in the metal tray next to me, lying there alongside the many vials of skin and human hair.
How about pizza for dinner? A text from my husband.
Didn’t we just eat pizza the other night? I respond after removing my gloves and sanitizing my hands.
We can order something else.
I imagine Tatsu searching through local delivery options that aren’t Chinese or pizza. Don’t bother, I message. I’ll be late.
This probably isn’t a surprise to him. I’ve been late every night this week. Sure, there’s my workload—the pressure from the state and feds to find answers, anything that can help the infected—but I’ve also been revisiting my old self, the punk rocker who thought she could save the world with music and a microscope. Tatsu and I have been married for seven years now. But only our first was pandemic free. I can barely remember those early days, how he once bought us tickets for a punk festival even though I only ever heard him listening to Mariah Carey as he studied for his EMT exams. All my friends thought he was a complete square. I told them that’s what I loved about him. He wasn’t like my other boyfriends, those assholes with their leather jackets and their rock star dreams who ghosted you in their quest to be an artist. But when the plague hit American shores in 2031, something slowly changed between us as the virus evolved—maybe it was the lack of space, being trapped together like that all the time, apart from the hours we spent at work, everyone afraid, with no place to go.
“Are you gonna sit around and feel sorry for yourself all day?” I recall saying to him, about a year after the first wave. Tatsu was in his recliner, still in his uniform, a stethoscope dangling around his neck. A two-way radio sat beside him next to a glass of whiskey. “Do you know how many bodies I examined today?”
“But you don’t have patients, Aubrey,” he said. “The body bags are delivered to you for lab work. You hear stories about people’s insides glowing, their skin turning to jelly. Try running an IV in someone’s arm as their veins turn into Christmas lights. How would you prefer that I respond to my day?”
My face stiffened and I stood there for a long while, wanting to be anywhere else, staring at my car keys on the end table overflowing with utility bills, letters from family notifying us of relatives who’d died of the plague. We’ve had this argument before—with him trivializing my work because I’m not doing CPR in the back of an ambulance or listening to someone’s last words. But the dead speak as well.
“I—am—trying—to—save—people,” I said, enunciating for emphasis. I sat across from Tatsu, turned off the music. “Obviously, not the people on my lab table, but I hope my research can help someone, someday, maybe make their deaths count for something.”
The next day, I’m finishing my lab report as Tatsu’s rattling off restaurant names over the street noise in the background. He’s clearly calling from outside his ambulance. After those early fights, we made a pact to work on our marriage. He still tries, and I love him for it. My boss glides past my workspace but doesn’t chide me for taking a personal call, let alone on speaker.