The Fall
13 Oct 2021
Snow had already fallen when Elouise left home for the first time in a month to meet Jane at a café. By the time the illness started to disturb Elouise, she still needed the fan to fall asleep at night. Then she grew weaker every day, and the surrounding colder. At first she wasn’t sure if it was fever that made her shiver, so after the doctor’s third visit she slept with the window half opened. It was a terrible mistake. She never left her bed in the following week, except for going to toilet and throwing up. Father took days off to take care of her and finally lost his job. “I’ve worked long enough,” he told Elouise. Perhaps quitting was but a step in his masterplan of retirement.
His retirement became another kind of labour for Elouise. She was never used to be taken care of or, more precisely, be served by bed. When Father informed her of the decision, she immediately knew the entire thing would eventually transform into a disaster, and time proved her foresighted. She couldn’t help but notice the clues of herself being watched, such as the light under the door and random footsteps or cough. After she became capable of leaving bed, she tried, once or twice, to listen through the door for knowing more, but all she could hear was silence.
She considered such silence trapping her in the house, or even in her bedroom. During the illness, she sometimes enjoyed having bad dreams, for the horror was outshone by the stillness in the air. Since Mother passed away, Father hadn’t had many words. On the day her body was burned, he sat in the living room for an entire day, refusing to eat, drinking only a glass of water. They were banned to hold a funeral, lest the pandemic should spread. By then, people were forced to wear masks on the streets. The regulation appeared weird at first, but for Elouise it eventually became a practice. She found masks warm on cold days like this one.
This is how the world moves forward. People create rules, obey them, and then break them. New rules would apply to her home, her life, the pedestrians on the streets, and even the leaves on the branches. They’re withering, she noted as she looked up. Her breath fogged up on her glasses with a mask shielding its normal path. Winter has come.
The funeral had brought winter to home, even longer ago. The living ones failed to find new rules to live on, and routines became random. They used to have breakfast together before going to work or school. At the end of the day, they used to argue. They used to know the meaning of weekends, as they visited mountains and the sea. Elouise had always preferred mountains. She liked to be protected, or be shaded. The shadows of the woods secured her.
She therefore kept dreaming of the forests while suffering from the illness, even if she tried to convince herself of the bedroom being the safest place for a patient. At times there were odours in those dreams. Moss. Streams and raindrops. Yet in most cases the scene appeared as if a sophisticated painting in a museum, and she but an excluded passer-by. Then the painting would burn out of her rage. From the ember she would recognise the taste of coal, ash, and dust.
Those tastes signalled the end of her lingering dreams, pulling her back to the reality, in which her forehead burned, and her chest ached. Endless fever. If she noticed Father nearby, she would shiver out of coldness. She could always tell whether he was standing by the door.
Whenever she sensed him she tended to stay silent, pretending to be asleep. That’s one of the new rules defined in the cage of isolation. Then she started to leave one third of dinner unfinished, lest she should wake up to vomit at midnight. It’s not a waste, she told herself. I can hardly taste anything right now. It was the disease that deprived her ability to tell flavours, and then to swallow. She had read many articles reporting the symptoms before. Not until now did she understand none of those words came from those who really suffered. The authors were but players of words, manipulators of minds.
“I’ll be fine.” She remembered Mother saying in the screen, with an overcrowded background stacked by wires and tubes. “Death rate is reported to be lower at my age.”
“You look tired,” Elouise said.
“I can’t inhale much air.”
Then the conversation was interrupted by a nurse in isolation gown, who reminded Elouise of a movie about monsters. She had only watched it once when she was small, but she remembered how the monsters considered a human child poisonous. The nurse led Mother off the sickbed, tilted it, and asked her to lie back facedown. It occurred to her that, in the movie, the monster in isolation gown would sterilise the infected monsters by shaving every inch of them.
She tried to lie as Mother was taught to, only to find her chest tighter. The warning sign refrained her from defining another rule for the ill lifestyle. Or perhaps it’s improper to use the word “lifestyle,” since she wasn’t living her life at all. She merely followed the flow of minutes, hours, and days.
The continuous flow was somehow embodied by still moments, she recalled and then realised, as she passed by a leafless maple tree in front of the post office. When she dropped into the mailbox the envelope should’ve been sent two months ago, even the surrounding air became brighter. Breathe. She took off her mask, and breathed again. Her vision reached no one. If anyone had been nearby, she would’ve had nothing to be afraid of, though.
The fear of human traced back to the first few months of the global chaos. It was then when Mother got hospitalised. Elouise trapped herself in the room for a few days because of the possibility of contracting the pandemic as well. When she and Father ate up everything in the refrigerator and were hence forced to visit the supermarket, every pedestrian appeared pathogenic to her. And they had reasons good enough to be afraid of me as well, she believed.
The thought initiated her escape. She left the club, fled from school, and even refused to confront her family face to face. She missed Mother, and their online chat comforted her. Mother got better and worse, then better and worse again. She witnessed the entire process in the 6-inch-wide screen, until it was forever locked by Mother’s death. Father was still working at H&M then. Elouise considered him exposed in great danger, and, consequently, herself as well. But he remained healthy throughout months and seasons, while she ended up sick.
“You’re well now.” She thought of the doctor’s words several days ago. She recovered, though Mother didn’t. In light of this she felt closer to Father once more, for they both survived.
Is the distant between two individuals defined by their similarity or divergence? Faces flashed though her minds. Her high school classmate. Cashier boy. Security guard. Professor. Some appeared clearer than ever, while the others faint. Ironically, things that should’ve been forgotten grabbed the chance to return to her mind. She thought of the presentation which almost drove her mad. She hardly remembered what she talked about, but the gaze—from hundreds of eyes—suffocated her. Among all the looks, the professor’s sight raged.
Elouise couldn’t help shivered, despite knowing she had gotten rid of him. It’s simply too cold outside. She comforted herself by telling a lie that no one would believe.
It somehow worked. At least it released her from the familiar anxiety of losing air. Her focus then transferred onto the snow, on the falling speed of snowflakes, and the time they halted in the air. Her time froze when she was trapped by the disease. The snow called her attention to the clues that hinted how the world was moving forward.
Then her vision managed to reach farther. The soft snow, and beneath, the damp pavement bricks. The kebab shop at the corner had aged a lot since her last visit. She usually dined there before drinking because the serving was appropriate in size. Her favourite bar went out of business during the second lockdown. She failed to bid farewell to it, and had never returned to the kebab store ever since.
Years condensed at the very corner, playing through as though an old song. If only the pandemic hadn’t broken out. If only misfortune hadn’t fallen on her and her family. If only she hadn’t quitted school. The unrealised fantasies shaped the world she once forgotten in a peculiar manner: She never learned how blissful those days used to be. The past sparkled. From some moment on everything gloomed.
She could but accept how the world had changed. It was never for individuals to decide which future to welcome, she concluded as she reached the café and saw Jane waving to her by the window.
“I expected you to arrive earlier.”
“I went to the post office for sending the withdrawal application.” Elouise replied, taking off the coat and the mask.
“Glad to see you finally made up your mind.”
“I decided to quit school shortly after the fall semester started, but I couldn’t go to school then.”
Jane nodded. “It’s not too late, though, is it?”
“Just on time. The deadline is next Monday. There’s only half a semester left.”
“Of course. It’s a fall semester, and now winter has come.”
Winter has fallen. Another year is reaching its end, but at her age Elouise began to realise that there’s no such thing as end whenever it comes to time. Time always continues—It’s the rule of the world. Minds might collapse, and yet things still move on as if a grand march. These years in pandemic didn’t trap the world, she thought. The world falls, but it goes forward. The world marches through falling.
Elouise took a deep breath. “I guess I’ve already missed an entire season.”