The Suicide Bug

 

 

            It was a bug that made you feel like you were going to die. Not an insect kind of bug, external, but a germ.

            "They can't get inside you," said Julia, in Orwell's 1984. But they could, and that was just the point: They could get inside you, to destroy you. They could get to the marrow of how you thought about yourself. And of course, they were up to no good there; who is ever up to good when they get that close?

            It wasn't a computer bug – a virus, as they're called. It was the germ of an idea. It didn't have its own voice, so it spoke with yours – made your brain say things like, "You can't make it. You are going to die."

            See, your body was fine, it was left alone. The bug knew it was your attitude that drove the bus, and it set about to make you crash.

            For a while, the researchers thought it was a genetic weakness. They didn't realize it was a thing from outside that got in.

            It was like infant crib death – but these were healthy businessmen, one minute fine, walking the streets with briefcases! then lying on the sidewalk, giving up.

            It wasn't heart attack, though you could call it heart failure – they lacked heart to go on, after the thing spoke to them. And it didn't take long – the speaking, the convincing – because the thing was concentrated, a sudden dose of certainty, which countered all their certainty of strength. The Evil Sunrise, some called it, because it struck before the morning rush hour.

            It struck Bernard Mortimer at dawn, when he was jogging. His thoughts are preserved on a mini tape recorder, found on him when he died. "I must be coming down with something" was the last thing on the tape; he usually went twice around the reservoir, but that day he just stopped – a thing that Mortimer had never done, said those who knew him.

            See, this bug didn't take the weak. It took the strong. And that's what fooled the researchers until they studied Mortimer – not his body, but the notes he left behind.

            Mortimer was strong. He had everything going for him, and he knew it. He was a man of action, a take-charge guy. He got results.

            Before the researchers got Mortimer, they'd worn themselves out probing, testing, scanning. All the cadavers' hearts and brains were sound; there was no evidence of cancer, diabetes, hepatitis, HIV; no toxins or drug abuse. These were the healthiest specimens the researchers had ever seen. They should have flourished – and yet there they were, dropping like flies, thousands in just weeks.

            "They went so peacefully, their ties weren't even wrinkled," said the doorman at the Plaza.

            The pivotal point, with Mortimer, came when a certain lab assistant – let's call her Julia – was listening to his tape.

            "I recognized the flavor of his thinking right away," said Julia, in one of our many conversations. "How could I not? since I wake up every morning with that feeling."

            I asked her to describe "that feeling," and she couldn't really, though she tried.

            "It's like being in two places at once," she said, "or else, like none at all. Or like a puppet feels, after the hand inside it goes."

            "You mean, passive?" I said, trying to understand.

            "Not exactly," she replied. "More like you're already dead, and you're just waiting for your body to catch up."

            "It sounds like signs of serious depression," I observed.

            "I suppose. But I think it's more profound than that – more subtle and more profound." She laughed shortly. "And it can't be reached by taking Prozac, that's for sure." Then she turned the topic, asking me about my family and what it was like to be a reporter; I played along, knowing she would only go so far each time.

            Days later, she tried again: "It was the quiet certainty of Mortimer I understood – a kind of negative peace."

            "A resignation?" I asked.

            "No, that's too weary, too heavy," she replied. "It's more like, 'Oh, I see.' As if the door of someone's viewpoint suddenly opened up to you."

            "Or shut you down," I said.

            She said nothing more, and I kicked myself for having said too much.

            At any rate, the researchers, through well-placed hints of Julia's (she wouldn't tell me what these were), discovered that the bug spoke to its victim through his neural synapses, using a chemical code derived from his own DNA – speaking his own language, as it were. The bugs were smaller than bacteria, smaller than viruses, requiring the hardware of quantum physics to detect their traces.

            "I know this sounds really anthropomorphic," I said to her one night, "but I'll just say it: What does this thing want? It kills its host so quickly. What's the point?"

            "It wants what we all want," she answered. "To be heard."

            "But what a lousy point of view," I said. "I mean, 'Kill yourself' – that's a message?"

            "I don't think that's it. I think it's more like, 'You are going to die.'"

            "The Angel of Death," I mused. I said this because her voice had been so calm and pleasant – not "You are going to die" as threat, as a foreboding, but awareness in one's bones.

            I said as much, and she agreed: "Yes, because these types of men were only good at living – they weren't, as you might say, inoculated for death. It wasn't in their game plan."

            And that turned out to be the cure – the means of remission, anyway – a homeopathic dose of death, depression brought on by drugs and talk therapy – but therapy in reverse, therapy aimed at jarring loose the perfect integration of those most at risk: the world's happiest men.