The Tick
I remember going for a TBE vaccination way back in ‘08. Before that things go kinda fuzzy around the edges. No. The first thing I remember is a few weeks before that.
We had been watching Stockholm Marathon. Everyone, including me, had been screaming their heads off for four hours, watching the agonised hordes (was it 40 000? 20?) stumble past us, sweating, puking, stopping to urinate in the bushes behind us. We munched on pasta salad sitting on thin blankets on the dusty curb of the road.
I was questioning my sanity after an hour. After four I knew I was bonkers.
I’m not a sporty kind of person. In fact this was the first sporting event I’d ever been to. I did it for love, of course: my wife is a runner and she knew people in the race. Her family is really into sports. She used to follow her football team around Europe back in the 90’s and she’s training for next years Stockholm Marathon.
I’m not a sporty guy, but I must admit a kinda enjoyed watching the marathon and screaming the same “encouraging” words at every tired runner that passed us. We made up a fictional runner — “Bengt” I think we called him — so we’d be screaming “Go Bengt! Go, go, go, go!” or “Forza Italia” at the Italians.
During breakfast the next day, as I was nursing a rather severe sunburn (remember, this was when we still had ozone so we weren’t wearing shields), I discovered a tick on my arm.
I had been putting off taking the kids to get TBE shot for months. The media were crawling with alarmist news of the spread of the disease and how supplies of the vaccine were running low, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. A thousand other things to do and thoughts to think, as usual.
If there is one thing I’m good at it putting things off. Another one is digressing.
I silently freaked out a little, went to get me and the kids innoculated and went on with life. Only, my memories from before the summer of 2008 were silently eroding at an accelerating pace.
Things before ‘08 sometimes surface, but never in coherent form. These days I’ll get glimpses of memories: pictures scanned from old albums, a few strange movies, scribbly old notebook pages. Apart from that it’s all blank. It’s like someone deleted the first 35 years of my life, and all I’ve got is an archive of disjointed snapshots.
So we finally got our shots, just in time for our sailing holiday in the archipelago. I guess it was too late, or my tick was carrying something completely different — maybe an early version of the Stockholm Virus.
These days the naïve fears of those early days seem almost quaint. We used to scoff at the bold headlines, shrug at the warnings. Sure, there was a sense of foreboding, but no-one could imagine the true scope and impact of a few diseased ticks in Stockholm. The media showed us maps of the spread of disease and warned us that TBE had been detected in ticks in the parks of central Stockholm.
I wasn’t alone in my procrastination: thousands of winter-weary, pale and fat people took to the parks that spring and summer, sweating and gulping down luke-warm beer. By October the the wards were full of drooling packages of expensive intensive care.
Not everyone became a vegetable of course, but like me everyone was changed in some way. The word “tick” has taken on a new meaning today: it no longer refers to involuntary nervous spasms or psychotic fiddling but to personality changes caused by the virus.
“So what’s your tick? I lost my childhood and became a piano virtuoso.”
The pandemic was fueled by carbon-heated summers and ever larger crowds in the city parks. Stockholm is small, but the parks and forests used to be choke-full in the summers.
The virus mutated rapidly over the next couple of years. By 2012 the situation was growing out of hand. The grass and bushes in the parks were black and crawling with ticks. Something radical had to be done.
Someone, somewhere (no one can quite remember) - someone in power - decided that the only solution was to get rid of the parks and the forests. It was holocaust. They had developed “safe” chemicals to kill off the plants, but when it really came down to it good old fashioned logging machines and fire turned out to be the most efficient solution.
There were a lot of dangerous looking machines on the streets of Stockholm that winter. They came out of the deep Swedish forests, like enormous yellow dinosaurs eating every tree and every bush in sight. They called the logging companies and said “get rid of this green stuff.”
There were a lot of fires too: both controlled ones, and ones set by desperados burning down their gardens. There were lots of out-of control forest fires, and quite a few burning houses too.
Pets were also put down by the millions. The vets dealt out death-by-needle at a scale never before imagined, and the crematories were over-loaded until the prefab crematories and inoculation centers went up where the parks had been.
The smell of death, and the smell of campfires. It’s the same smell.
Over the course of a few years Stockholm was transformed into a barren concrete and tarmac desert.
But it wasn’t just the city that changed. The people changed too — all of us. We turned inwards and shuttered our windows. We turned up the air-conditioning in our cars and shut the world out. We turned on our huge plasma screens and filled our fridges with fruit from distant places and logged onto Facebook.
What did we care about dogs and trees? There were no lethal viruses in World of Warcraft (yet). Yeah, the disease changes people — gives them ticks — but the biggest change comes from the threat of the disease.
We’ve all gone insane, even the ones who were spared.
But that was long ago. These days, the vaccines mutate as rapidly as the virus. Every day I get a DNA-tailored shot of the latest counter-measures. The stuff is state-of-the-art but goes by a sort-of retro name: it’s called Firewall. Just thinking about my procrastinating about getting a shot for one strain of a virus for weeks seems incredibly stupid. Now I feel vulnerable whenever my firewall update is a couple of days old.
