A man looks up

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13366779

LEARNER full text (2024)

PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13381922

APPRENTI texte integral (2024)

Le monde paisible ou la mort

Transcript

­WORLD WAR COVID

From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld

Learner, begin

A Man Looks Up

Whenever I hear about the Spanish (honesty) Flu, or other vast fevers for that matter, a video reanimates in my mind. This is the story.

A desolate Kansas landscape out to the horizon. Trees, here and there. A few family farms and outbuildings linked far and wide by dirt roads and trails. Horse and buggy country. Probably a railroad line goes somewhere. A trickle of water downslope; here and there, cattle ponds, like that. The ground is dark brown and muddy with rare white patches of full shade snow.

In front of his house stands a man shielding his eyes from the sun and looking up. Average old man, shortish but solid and straight. Black wool suit; with the coat off? Just vested? Old style round, gold rimmed glasses, little European beard. Salt and pepper gray and short, black and bristly. Does he wear a hat, or shield his eyes with it? We see him from above, as if filmed by a drone he cannot see. He is looking intently at something else up in the sky, tracking it. The sun shines off his round glasses when he moves his  hand. Then goes back to staring in the same direction. Just don’t ask me where. I’d need Google maps and 1918, Stone Age prevailing wind reports. As usual, the first modern thing is mass murder, long before decent weather forecasts.

In Spring 1917, the USA proudly announced it will send its boys off to fight the Germans. Now it is March 1918; the American Army is churning recruits through its training camps.

This man is an American citizen of German extraction or allegiance. Naturalized recently or old blood Germano-American? Austrian? Swiss?

He may have been a doctor, a scientist, a bacteriologist, a microscope nerd, a widower, a bookworm recluse with occult knowledge of biology and a library of microscope slides that proved absolutely nothing.  Very frustrating for him, a slide stain virtuoso. The flu is a virus; he cannot get it to take stain like an honest microbe and show up under his microscope. Or he’s someone else entirely. All I see is him looking up and out.

Somehow he discovered the link between bird flu and human lethality. It was not bacterial, as his lifetime study had shown, to his great frustration. It must be some other invisible slime that spreads fatal infection. He has been using the usual precautions for decades and it never killed him.

Did he collect anecdotal reports from history and real-time? Reports from foreign correspondents about unexplained fever outbreaks or folk taboos against eating deadfalls of birds for fear of deadly consequence, in distant lands and tribes? Without the taboo, imagine a fishing village, say, discovers a field or more covered with dropped dead birds. It’s smoked duck carnival  time!

Birds have carried Flu virus since birds flew. Deadly strains often struck. Clovis Man may have succumbed to Bird Flu; or near-human strains,  mega fauna likewise.

German scholarship was astonishingly advanced in those days. Perhaps more meticulous than ours today, certainly more honest than ours. Just snail mail slower. Name your topic and region of study; he had access to it via the excellent mails. Packages, foreign correspondence, books and scientific journals from Europe, bird carcasses and bio samples from who knows where? Perhaps forwarded to some drop address and from some third party embassy? To avoid a fumbling Secret Service investigation of another German-American deep mole.

He may have travelled across far north lands, collecting specimens and remains of dead villages.

In any case, he collected the means, motive and opportunity to cancel America’s entry into World War I. Or so he thought. Single-handed, on behalf of his beloved Germany and perhaps with its help. Turned out to be as disastrous to Flu-sickened Germany as their injection of Lenin into Russian politics.

Means: he raised chickens, ducks and perhaps other birds in captivity. Not very many; just enough for his experiments.

Motive: see above.

Opportunity: He lives upwind of Camp Funston, Fort Riley, Kansas. 

At home, he makes little balloons set to carry his snap-toy, origami, fused puff bomb; drift over the camp, then burst  and preferably burn to ash. Or several of them, evenly spaced and anchored along a line as long as a football field. Pull a string, they all release downwind. 

He mails packages of his magic formula, set to infect those who open it up with a Pop! and breathe it. By long distance mail, he could have sent a package to any city in the world. I’m guessing Qingdao? The German China colony so ingloriously surrendered to Japan in 1914? Chicago, probably? Other infection nodes;  ports would spread infection speedily by sea and by railroad.

There appear to have been similar, earlier cases of fever among civilians in that region, prior to the Camp’s Flu outbreak in March 1918. Trial balloons gone astray? Packages mailed to close-by neighbors to assess results?  Rural hatreds can fester deep, long-lasting and passionate, then boil over lethal. No-one would suspect foul play if a few families came down with lethal fevers. 

Researchers should ransack local registers, diaries, church records and newspapers, from close-by to far upwind of that military base. His identity and location can probably be traced.

Of course, all this is pure speculation on my part. All I see is this old guy staring up.

Of the boys sent over to fight the Germans, many troopships packed with them landed in France as ghost ships with a skeleton crew, perhaps under tow, most everybody from the Captain on down carried out on stretchers to flood emergency field hospitals and emergency gravesites from St. Nazaire to Brest. Burials at sea? Those would make interesting public health statistics; extremely useful early studies of a pandemic. Probably buried in some obscure military archive.

California authorities braced for the wave of Flu that had not hit them yet. They telegraphed their East Coast peers: “What do we need to do first and foremost to prepare?” Answer: “Make more coffins.”

That balloon, (or line of balloons launched simultaneously) is what he tracked so intently. Did Kansas crows and ravens toy with his balloons? All I saw was him. I never saw a balloon, or the shadows of anything in the sky,  except subliminally, or anything else described above. 

This is how I imagined it might have happened. Like all my writings, speculative fiction journalism, nothing more presumptuous. Nice story though, don’t you think?

IN FRENCH

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net