Ordinary People and the Great Virus of their Lives

by Valerie Morales

The rough season brought us here, to papery thin patients drowning in Ebola. Ebola is not a beautiful disease with a sympathetic conscience. It is not a cellular country done in by conflict. Ebola drifts inside the body like a violent psychopathic nihilist on an aimless hunt. The infirmity and fever and pain drag the illness into a depressive realm- the cheeks sag, the lips dry out, the eyes are milky crusts with dirty lashes.

Without permission, of course, Ebola landed like a refugee. In America, the virus intended to welcome the unintended into an appalling, sad club of mothers weeping. It meant to reject the bereaved. There is not much to say about the missing ones, the ones Ebola has crushed into tiny ginger seeds.

Maneuvering the weave of traffic, crossing meadows and fields, ghettos, and farmland until the pores of two nurses were overwhelmed, the Ebola immigrant danced its way into our lives. Suddenly, there was no looking away. The truth of the ordinary was the truth of the African: Ebola was ours now. It was ours the way Tuberculosis was ours and Polio was ours and AIDS was ours.

Trust dies in this very complicated story, it dies and is replaced by fear, it dies and is replaced by self-segregation, it dies and is replaced by prejudice, it dies and is replaced by paralysis. In the long view, the rapid Ebola slaughter seemed imminent.

There is a premise here of being special, too special to be destroyed because we are American and we are free and we are a country of wealth and a country where religion and culture and prejudices collide. But Ebola is teaching us and at the same time reminding us we are not different enough to be given a pass. Our Americanization will not save us from infection. We can’t throw a rock at it or a war weapon to dissolve its brain. In that sense, panic is all that is left of our self-expression, the only vehicle available to communicate the vulgar nature of this tailspin on behalf of a disease we don’t really understand, one that affects tribal people and makes many of us so nervous that we waltz around its truth.

Which means we need the educated even more than before, we need their help. Dr. Thomas Frieden, the leader at the Centers for Disease Control, spoke of the fragile nature of the virus. “It is not particularly hardy. It’s killed by bleach, by autoclaving, by a variety of chemicals.”

Perhaps true, but the visual images splayed across the screen, the West African children dumped in a puddle at hospital doors, their bones looking like scissors, their dun-colored eyes melted deep into the flesh of their face, are reminders of grief’s invisible windows. So are the mothers, dead in wheelbarrows, the village sacrifices becoming the village whores. Perhaps the virus is a genetic matter wrapped in protein that doesn’t last long outside the human body. But the silhouettes of the almost dead, even thousands of miles away, can cause you to crawl into your children’s room at night, listening to them breathe.

Dr. Gil Chavez, an epidemiologist and deputy director of the California Department of Public Health, explained in more detail that the scare is a lot of imagination sans logic. “People cannot get Ebola through the air, food, or water. The Ebola virus does not survive more than a few hours on impervious surfaces.”

The thing is, the fear of death is no longer abstract now that Ebola has become our dance partner. The fear of death concentrates within the body while sleeping. It steals away desires before we give it permission to do so and that sort of contempt ruins all of our empathic instincts. We don’t care about who has it, we care that we don’t get it. It bequeaths strange behavior. We worry about people breathing on us or touching us. We think about fluids, whatever that means. We watch television with no sense of moderation for a glimpse of a new outbreak and another warning. We are sick before we are even sick, our illness is our desperate prayer to be one of the spared. We want to keep what we have for as long as we can.

We are born with this sort of ethic about time, that we control it, selfishly, and nearly everything around it, except when something strikes we were never expecting. It’s the catastrophe psyche given a large American whirl. Something is always waiting to get us.

Secretary-General Elhadj As Sy, the global head of the Red Cross, said Ebola can be brought under control. He gave a time span of half of a year. “It will be possible, as it was possible in the past, to contain this epidemic within four to six months.” His timeline was an attempt to rein in the hysteria. The disease has killed 4,500 people in West Africa and one sorrowful tourist on American soil. He went on to say, “This is our best prospect and we are doing everything possible to mobilize our resources and capacities to do so.”

Of course, it reminds us of AIDS. The parallels, though similar, are surface things, a virus, a fever, an illness. But Ebola and AIDS are not siblings, are not cousins, are not even friends. Back then, nearly three decades ago, gays were dying first. All the non-gays looked the other way or covered their ears because it was just easier to sink into pretense. But this is true: 50,000 new HIV patients are diagnosed every year in this country.

9 Ebola patients have been diagnosed and treated in the United States this year. Dr. Craig Spencer, a New York City doctor. Nina Pham and Amber Vinson, Texas Health Presbyterian nurses. Ashoko Mukpo, a Liberia NBC News cameraman. Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian tourist. An unidentified American who contracted the disease in Sierra Leone. Nancy Writebol, Dr. Kent Brantly, Dr. Rick Sacra, missionary workers in Liberia.

The quiet numbers have not created censorship. The scheming cons of the Internet try to leverage their greed and lust by appealing to sectors of the nation who are anxious, depressed, and worried about the consequences of a disease in which you basically leak out all of your fluids. To cure the disease before you get the disease, you can try any of these harmless but counterfeit solutions for a price. You can drown in your own paranoia as you cross your fingers and purchase Vitamin C. Then swallow it in elephantine quantities.

Or you can go alternative and buy Tea Tree Oil. You can buy something by the name of Thieves Oil, a combination of Cinnamon Oil, Rosemary Oil, Clove Oil, Eucalyptus Oil, and Lemon Oil. These oils help and support the immune system. The American diet is not rich in essential oils, but, in an odd twist, the African diet is. It is the Africans, though, who are dying, not us.

Here in the kitchen, on the laptop, the purchase of an anti-viral protector pack, or the purchase of organic chocolate bars or Bitter Kola, which are the seeds from the Garcinia Kola Tree found in Nigeria is the hope for a nervous mind. You eat these. You eat and swallow. You eat and swallow and the panic which had rooted inside of you slips away quietly. Bitter Kola acts as an antibiotic and helps with arthritis, coughs, and sore throats. It has no proven effect on Ebola patients.

My personal favorite: you can bathe in saltwater baths as suggested by the monarch of the Igala Kingdom. Idakwo Michalel Ameh Oboni prescribed to his people a saltwater bath to cure the disease. It was further agreed to by Catholic priest Ejike Mbaka not to bathe in the salt but to drink it. Drink salt and water as they are the ingredients in the Holy Water that Catholics use for spiritual cleansing.

There is nothing noble about Ebola and its profiteers, these men with not much taste, nor ethics, the marketers who profit from disease and then wrap themselves in their capitalistic victory, men like Jon Schultz who bought the domain name Ebola.com for $13,000 in 2008. In the re-sell market, he planned for over a hundred grand. His fever of greed was almost, but not quite, as acrid as the Ebola fever itself. He told CNBC he was looking for the perfect moment to sell his prized possession. On Friday he sold it to a marijuana company for $200,000.

Or, if that is not quite your thing, you can buy an Ebola Halloween costume for $79.99, sorry, boots not included, because nothing says pain over trauma and panic and blind sorrow then booze and candy and wearing the uniform associated with a level-4 biohazard virus that has killed nearly 5 thousand people. To buy this “costume” you are buying an illusion that Ebola just isn’t that important in the routine ordinariness of your very own life, you are buying a theory that Ebola isn’t a legitimate slayer of mankind, you are buying a lack of grief for the wounded and the dying and the already buried and their families in despair, you are a buying a narrative that what happens in Africa, in particular, is a joke. Or perhaps when you buy the “costume” you are buying the truth. The image of Ebola is the image of mankind on a collision course with those things he cannot control.

We are, for better or worse, an aftermath people. We are obedient to our moaning reactions. We are defiant in our outrage that it happened to us. We are art forms of a bewildered nation. This was true after Columbine. This was true after Oklahoma City. This was true after 9–11. This was true after Newtown. This was true after Trayvon Martin. We have this thing about tunnel vision and then the tunnel breaks and we are caught on the wrong side of things, the side of our own vulnerabilities. Then, emotions take over. We coordinate and communicate and coalesce and yet we still stay in our lanes, our racial lanes and privilege lanes and religious lanes and business lanes.

Amber Vinson, the second Texas nurse to have contracted the Ebola Virus is free of the disease but will still need further treatment. Nina Pham, the first Texas nurse to have contracted the Ebola Virus, is improved enough to go home, meet President Obama, reclaim her dog Bentley and renew her life. We have come to know both of them through a heroic, compassionate lens but frankly, we do not understand either of them, the ministers of the tragic who accidentally fell into the Ebola crush by accident, just by being kind and a caregiver.

This is the contract of living in a world that is so determined to be connected and so worried about being distant. We are separated from the neighbors we loathe, we are together with friends we forgive. Somewhere in the middle of this lovely life of fear and panic and violence and trust and alienation where good men reside next to tainted men is the sense that we are not as grown up as we want people to believe. We were adults on August 7th. We were adult children on August 8th.

Remembering August 7th is to reinvent freedom; it was the glory of a summer fifty percent complete. There was a monotonous carelessness to our lives that had an exceptional quality to it, a purity as if our psyche recalled a simpler, more beautiful world, one of our restless imaginations. No one even considered the word quarantine or illness as part of the language to be spoken at the beach. It’s not in our character to think beyond the last miracle, to expect the dreary and bleak when the image of ourselves is the opposite.

And then on August 8th, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director of the World Health Organization, said, “I am declaring the current outbreak of the Ebola virus disease a public health emergency of international concern.” International meaning us. Us. Americans whose soil is scented with hyacinths and lemon leaves.

And 9 Ebola cases. One death so far.