Photo by Alexandru Rotariu on Unsplash

If it weren’t for the neighborhood dogs barking at whatever it was that neighborhood dogs tended to bark at, the evening would have been uncomfortably quiet. Sure, there were a few cars passing on the road, but the sounds they made were cold and mechanical. What the man longed for — and what, in their way, the dogs provided — were the sounds of lives unfolding in real time. He had grown accustomed to the reverberating clang of basketballs hitting the metal hoop on the court near his house and was used to the arrhythmic creaking of the rusty playground equipment on which the neighborhood children played. The sounds could be distracting, even irritating, but they were familiar and they were his. On that evening, following the anticipated yet still somehow shocking closure of the park, however, the absence of sound was as much a presence as the noise had been. His tinnitus embraced him and only the dogs interrupted the phantom shriek inside his ears.

Every few hours, he would hear an ambulance approach the hospital a few blocks away. A helicopter swooped in, too. The sounds of emergency vehicles, of course, were as commonplace as those of the playground or basketball court in the neighborhood, but they assumed a sinister quality that evening. The man knew, statistically, that the men and women riding in the ambulances were much more likely to be experiencing myocardial infarction than complications from the newly-discovered viral disease, but he couldn’t be sure. He had seen images from rural Italian village hospitals and knew that even if the ambulances he heard that evening bore nothing more upsetting than a few broken bones or chest pains, they could be transporting people with the new thing.

On some level, he knew that people died in the hospital every day, or nearly so. After all, it was a hospital and people die in hospitals. The last fall from which an elderly person cannot rise, the sudden allergic reaction that obstructs a child’s airway and ends a life before it really had a chance to begin, the overdose victim that just couldn’t come back from wherever he or she went on that final trip…

Those deaths, and the many others like them, happened all the time. They happened so often that the people eating cherry pie in the diner down the street never even paused to reflect on them as they enjoyed their desserts. Some people expired, others settled their checks, and that was that. But on that evening, the diner was closed and cherry pie didn’t taste very good at all. The virus had arrived, though without anyone really taking notice. It just slipped in, like viruses do and, suddenly, it was no longer just there. It was here, too.

So, on that evening, the man could not shake the feeling that in one of those ambulances, in one of those vehicles passing by his house like they did every day, there might be a person whose body had been hijacked by a bit of RNA and transformed into a factory for the production of more hijackers. He knew, also, that even if he was wrong, he was also right: at some point, an ambulance would, in fact, bring someone with the virus to the hospital. And then another ambulance would bring someone else. And then a third…

As the dogs barked in the darkness, the man could not help but think of that famous fly in Emily Dickinson’s poem buzzing around the death bed as the speaker passed.