The By-Any-Other-Name Virus Story

With no idea how she got there, or in fact, how anyone could get there, Maggie concluded she was in an Art House film. Or she did later when it became possible to ask the question, when curiosity returned to help separate herself a little from the scene. Less a key player with no insight and more an observer looking through blurry perspex. Either way, the paint of the cupboard was drifting slowly downwards, picking up some of the blue and red of the person next to it. Tonally congruent, the pigment became dilute, going from light summer sun to the shade it looks through rain. Maggie watched all this unmoving, a placid statue waiting for the next frame in the film.

When it came, she found she had moved a few feet away from the cupboard. She couldn’t see herself; she was the main character but she had no script. Critically, she also had no thought about scripts, no sense of a plot or even if there should be one. Time moved like glycerine.

Maggie drifted in this tide like seaweed, observing herself through impressionistic filters with no sense of urgency or alarm. It would be some days before she had the capacity to reflect on this, to get somewhere beyond the automatic, although she had a lot to thank her automatic for – the subroutines that kicked in without needing to be thought about, and executed as though she were in full cognitive charge.

She wasn’t. She was an old PC with Windows 95 loaded and, lacking any input device, was just running housekeeping. Luckily, that included feeding the cats, letting them in and out, and putting them to bed. Or so it seemed from her diary, which was another subroutine that had chugged into action without need of active initiation.

Outside the diary, the days were all one. Inside it, there were delineations; records relating to eating, to having no taste or smell, to not knowing how long anything in the fridge had been open or if it might have gone off. The diary told Maggie she had made herself eat and that she had been as unenthusiastic about this as a child confronted with tasteless lumps of wet cardboard.

It also recorded a clearing out of anything that might no longer be edible, and remarkably, how the bed had been stripped, the sheets washed and dried, and clean bedding put on.

It did not record a call for help because, as she later realised, she could only do what she had done before and she had never done that. Her diary also had no record of any sense of alarm about not receiving help. In the absence of any executive decision-making capacity, her obsolete PC was stuck in a continuous defragging loop.

There came a day eventually, when Maggie had an original thought. She should update her diary, fill in the blanks as far as possible, and make a note about this being retrospective. How long it took to get to this point is unclear, but when she did open up OneNote, to her incredulity, she found there were already entries which, when she checked, covered all the missing dates. They were surprisingly coherent, objectively describing events and showing no sign at all of the cognitive disintegration she was still experiencing. Much later, she would realise how valuable her life’s lessons had been, the skills she had picked up from one place or another and which had surfaced when needed like trapped air from the bottom of a muddy pond. Tying a towel around her ribs to make coughing easier and less painful, for instance; a relic of her nursing days.

Two years on, give or take, with the world back to normal, she had forgotten about this too. Remembering had become a game of billiards, firing off events up the table with the aim of pocketing them in memory nets where she could see them, rather than losing them down holes that led to an underworld of chaotic mis-filing. Too many were still disappearing; or worse, becoming subject to reframing by projection of what-must-have-beens onto the empty green-screen baize. Writing – the journal in particular – was the lifeline. Accurate as far as personal perceptions can ever be, and as real-world as any but mystics and some philosophers will accept. Today, there are two pigeons, a collared dove, and a gang of juvenile starlings on the bird table, one of them missing a leg.

End of Record 22/07/2025

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 22/07/2025

This is a third-person account of my first-person experience of the virus that stopped the world in 2020. The photograph is mine and epitomises the empty skies of the time, but was taken much later.