Have you caught the cold? Or a cold, anyway? One is going around. Or maybe it’s more than one. There are thousands of viruses wandering the earth: rhino, corona, mysharona. Each seems common, at least once you’ve determined, or decided, that it isn’t something less than common but increasingly prevalent, such as the Covid-19 variant known as Delta. This isn’t that. It’s the “reëmergence cold.” The plague after the plague. The thief who rolls in beneath the descending garage door.
We declare victory, remove our masks, go to a game or a movie or a show, shake hands, sleep with strangers, share cabs and salads and vapes, and suddenly everyone is sick, or “sick.” There’s no vaccine for it. Contact tracing is hopeless. This one got it from that one, who got it there, probably from him, who was just with them. Frank Sinatra had it. E.T. might’ve. Sneezy, too. It was mentioned, three and a half millennia ago, in the Ebers Papyrus, the ancient Egyptian catalogue of ills and remedies, which recommended a therapeutic spell: “Flow out, fetid nose, flow out, son of fetid nose! Flow out, you who break bones, destroy the skull and make ill the seven holes of the head.”
Seven holes! The thieves sneak in, and out. If a friend warned you, before coming over for dinner, that she had Covid, you might bar the door, but if she said “I have a cold” you’d open it wide. It’s been so long. We’ve been through so much. We’ve been retrained. We’ve all become germophobes. You say, “We won’t touch each other, not even with elbows or fists. We’ll keep our distance and wash our hands. We’ll break bread—separate loaves.” And yet, a few days later, gesundheit: son of fetid nose.
When you don’t have a cold, the prospect of having one—or the news that someone else does—can seem like no big deal. That’s why they call it the Man Flu. It’s a malady for whiners and wimps. But when you catch one—a genuine cold, not just some weak-ass sniffles or a performative cough—it can be a real hammer to the head. It gets your attention. You get to make your idling contribution to the tens of billions of dollars that the common cold costs the country every year, and to the billions earned by the purveyors of palliatives and placebos.
Amid the emergence, there have been other mini-plagues. Cicadas (though, in these parts, all but a scattering of Brood X perished prematurely beneath the soil), deer ticks (worse than ever, they say), nutty mayoral candidates. (Q: What was your favorite concert? A: The one where Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed.) But this cold, in the way its virality mimics the other virus that has ended and upended so many lives, comes off as some kind of sick joke, or joke sickness. It’s like the overture to an opera or a musical—introducing, in brief, the greater themes—except it comes at the end. It’s a dry run, after the fact. Flow out, flow out. ♦
