If There Be a Regal Solitude
by Merle Kinney
“If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed.” –Charles Lamb, “The Convalescent”
“Alright,” Dr. Powell swings the door closed, plants her sensible skirt on the stool next to the rack of diagnostic tools on the wall. “We’ve got your bloodwork.”
High cholesterol, Ethan thinks. Runs in the family.
“Cholesterol is looking a bit high.”
He loosens.
“We are seeing a positive for a stultus spurius infection, or what we call the ‘fuck you’ bug.”
A drag of silence. “I’m sorry?”
“The ‘fuck you’ bug,” Dr. Powell says, “You’d have noticed symptoms like nervousness, tripping over your words, difficulty relating to others, skin hunger combined with simultaneous touch repulsion, lying in bed unable to stop thinking about how the most significant source of human touch in your life was the kind that left bruises, making jokes that don’t quite land. Things like that.” She blinks at him.
Ethan settles on, “Am I going to need medication for that?” The paper on the exam table crinkles under him.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she says, “There isn’t any.”
On his way through his apartment parking lot, he scrolls on his phone. Headline: “Stultus Spurius Strains Continue to Prove Resistant to Antibiotics.” One commenter says, “sign of the end times. lets just say a lot of people need to start repenting real quickly.” And a reply: “Fucking sheep. This can literally be solved by spending time around people to strengthen your immune system. Swap some spit, idiot.”
Keys in hand, he tromps up the courtyard stairs to his third-floor apartment. His shoe meets a metal stair at a bad angle. He lurches forward. Shins clang against stairs, and keys slip through the open space between them, sailing back to the ground floor.
Down the stairs. Retrieve the keys. Up again. He’s twice out of breath.
From across the hall, the neighbor’s door scrapes open. “Did you just eat shit?” he asks, shuffling closer. This neighbor is always entering or exiting the apartment with someone in tow; friends or lovers or business partners or mortal enemies, Ethan has never been able to determine.
Ethan yanks his own door closed behind him but can’t bear to sit in his own rudeness. He reemerges to see the neighbor’s raised eyebrow with its annoying razor slit, to the nose that’s a little too big.
“What’s going on?” the neighbor asks.
An urge to grab his neighbor’s collar and bury his face into his neck. Instead, he says, “I’m ill.”
“Uh-huh.”
He squeezes his fists to keep from reaching out, from pulling the neighbor inside and finding out if he’s good enough on his knees for the neighbor to tolerate the rest of him and if it would make him feel more like a person and less like a vector for disgrace.
He could try.
But.
These things aren’t for him. Now that he can say as much with authority, it stings less. It does. “I don’t think I’ll be well again.”
The neighbor snorts, then sighs. “Uh-huh.” He taps his knuckles against the door frame. “Well, have fun.”
Ethan thinks he just might.
They’ve booked the meeting room with the chairs that compress his vertebrae.
“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe him.” The sales manager, who wears his Polos too tight, jabs a finger toward Ethan. “He’s not a data guy. I don’t know what he is.”
Ethan’s stomach twists. He toggles between the graphs he’d spent the last two weeks combing over. The red bloom of shame across his nose is undoubtedly visible to everyone in the room. His laptop is not big enough to hide behind.
His own manager waves her hands. “He’ll do it again, he’ll do it backward and forward, he’ll double and triple check it until his eyes bleed. My point is still the same.”
He thinks about the microbes in his blood. Where are the little things swimming? In the dark and sodden coils of his gut? Tucked in the flesh under his fingernails?
“Okay, but my guys actually have degrees, and they’re putting shit in their AIs, and they’re not seeing what he’s seeing.”
They are somewhere; he has proof. Relief breaks over him, viscous like an egg sizzling into a hot pan. The certainty of knowing things don’t get better—what a gift!
He lets his posture degrade and watches as the managers deliberate whether or not he deserves to pay for food and shelter. The energy he saves in surrender wells in his core. Is this it? Is this how he's meant to move through the world?
Ethan grips a beer he doesn’t want and presses his back to the cinderblocks of a music venue that seems engineered to attract only the most discerning trans girls and their tech-employed partners. The place is packed. As long as you take into account that the upcoming show is a niche Vaporwave producer whose music sounds like a ‘90s Sears ad echoing through an abandoned aquarium, it’s packed.
And now, a lack of obligation to speak to a single soul in attendance. The people around him—hoodies slung akimbo, jeans worn loose—do not suffer hair to go undyed. Clothing motifs include crucifixes, plaid, Sanrio characters, and fishnets. Doc Martens shuffle alongside Crocs.
If Ethan has anything, it’s this: the eye of the voyeur, the roving attention to detail that allows him the ability to identify the very heart of a place and its people. Maybe this is a hidden gift of the infection. Some abilities diminished, others enhanced. This is what he tells himself as he clings to the periphery, studying shoes and architecture.
Someone nudges him from the left. “You freak. You degenerate,” says his neighbor, “You’re telling me I had a Dreamscape 物の哀れ1987 fan living across from me this whole time and I’m just now finding out?” This evening, he’s characteristically un-alone, turned three-quarters out from a group of four.
“Oh, hey,” Ethan says. No pressure, really.
The neighbor gives him a sly look, the cruelty in the sneering lip perfectly balanced by the sparkle in the eye. “I’d have guessed you listened to like…Gregorian chant or something.”
“On my good days,” Ethan responds. He tries not to notice the fluid movement of the other’s hips as he shifts his weight or the topography of the hand that runs through his hair.
“But now I know you’re a weird hermit with taste, I gotta know what other bodies are in your basement.”
“Surely, you can’t think I’m boring enough to go for a basement. You’re gonna have to work harder than that to catch me,” Ethan says, praying that he’s correctly riffing the bit.
The red and blue lights from above carve purple polygons across the neighbor’s face. He leans conspiratorially into Ethan’s space. “I’m also very excited to find out if I’ve taken the right amount of acid for this.”
An insane thing to say to someone you barely know, Ethan thinks, but the proximity to the neighbor’s body and his secrets fizz up his spine. “If you pass out when they play ‘Capital of the Long Night,’ then you’ll know.”
“You’re volunteering to carry me home when that happens, right?” says the neighbor, “Since it’s on your way?” He winks and knocks his shoulder into Ethan’s.
At the contact, Ethan recoils. He sees himself from the neighbor’s psychedelically tinted vision—his shoulders rounded, desperation swirling out from his core waiting to wrap itself around any charitable attention that wanders into his orbit. A host, overrun with foreign life forms, perhaps even replaced by them. He pre-lives the neighbors’ horror when he realizes Ethan has mistaken a request for exchange as an offer of kindness. The humiliation of his attempting to coexist with the uninfected, the normal, the loved, the human. Potentially even irresponsible—what if his strain is communicable? The ambient chatter sounds like a roar. The lights burn his scalp. Thinly, he responds, “Ha, yeah.” The spectral screw on the side of his jaw tightens.
The neighbor’s head tilts just slightly and his eyes flicker around Ethan’s face, like he’s looking for something. But not for long. “Well,” he says, turning back to his group, “see you ‘round.”
A hiss from the fog machine heralds the arrival of the artist. From the speakers, a reverb-drenched sample of the Windows95 startup tune.
Ethan sits in his car after the show has ended. He lays a temple on the steering wheel and lets the blue glow of his phone into his eyes. Devoid of messages to read or respond to, he Googles “fuck you bug home remedies.”
No, that’s not right. He’d successfully given up. Why does it still hurt?
MommyNatureLife.com endorses a dash of peppermint oil emulsified in honey. In a thread on r/fybug, a Reddit user named bac0nb0ne has written, “Reach out to a loved one. When you feel like the universe is against you, it can help to remember who’s on your side.”
Merle Kinney is a Mississippian transplanted to Denver. They write about gender, work, and virtual spaces. Their stories can be found in Catapult, Columbia College Literary Review, and the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival 2024 anthology.