Missoula Notebook
Give Me Fever
By Sutton Stokes, 4-12-08
I had a wonderful fever the other week. It was Thursday when it started. Amy had been suffering from flu all week, but, aside from occasional sneezes and the beginnings of a cough, it took me five days to succumb. Then the virus came for me all of a sudden, while we were watching Office reruns.
It was pure fever at first, with no runny nose or upset stomach to spoil the pleasure of it. First came the exhilarating chills and shivers that drive one to pile on the blankets and burrow deep underneath them, seeking warmth and safety like a small animal — and holding perfectly still like one, too, lest one disturb the barely sufficient pocket of warmth. Then came the langor that seeps through the limbs and returns one to a childlike state of helplessness. Then came the shifts in consciousness that loosen the tongue and inspire strange rants and flights of fancy.
The strange rants and flights of fancy may be hereditary. Once, when I was under the influence of a similar ailment back home, my mother told me I sounded just the way her father used to sound when the malaria he picked up in the Crimean would come back on him. Of course, his cure involved brandy, which might have distorted the effect.
My cure involves Nyquil, that syrupy sickbed absinthe. Amy shudders and gasps when she swallows it, and requires a chaser of chilled juice, but I find I quite like the taste and prefer to let it linger, so that I can savor its bouquet. Nyquil tastes to me sort of like Jagermeister mixed with a little cough syrup. Perhaps the bars should offer this combination, with a thermometer in it as a swizzle stick. Back in high school, a friend of mine and I were two of the only people who ever bought Dr. Pepper from the hallway soda machine. “But it tastes just like cough syrup,” I remember someone saying, to which my friend replied “What’s wrong with cough syrup?”
“What precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay On Being Ill. So at least I’m not the only one who knows the pleasures available in this state, a state so wonderfully similar to other forms of intoxication. With relief, one slides into fuzziness and apathy concerning the mundanities of life — tying one’s shoes, combing one’s hair — at the same time that one becomes more sharply attuned to the really important things, such as the secret lives of cats, the truly stupid thing about the new McDonald’s “napkin tuck” commercial, and other occult subjects.
Or perhaps it is just that a fever takes us home again — provided we were well cared for at home when feverish, which I always was, not to mention that, no matter how bad the illness back then, at least it meant I was safe from school. In fact, fever was one of the better ailments for the purpose of missing school. No one could claim one should go to school with a fever, yet a slightly elevated temperature didn’t necessarily detract much from the pleasure of reading Hardy Boys books or watching soap operas, in between servings of cold juice or hot tea, in between naps. Such, such were the joys.
During my recent illness, there was a moment that took me right back to those long-ago days. It came just after Amy took my temperature one afternoon. As she read out the numbers indicating that I still had a fever, I happened to notice that the time was 3:30 p.m. and a feeling of happiness surged through me. You see, in my family, the rule was that one couldn’t return to school until after one had been free from fever 24 hours. Though I work from home nowadays — and was in fact working during this fever, feverishly, no less, on a project for a client — I felt for a reflexive moment the old relief all over again: safe from school for another day.
If Virginia Woolf is right, that illness can take us to “undiscovered countries,” is it any wonder that I sometimes want to stay a while? But — like any voyage, not to mention any state of pleasant intoxication — all good things start to wear after awhile. Before long, my flu changed from a generalized, all-body ailment and began settling in the chest and nasal passages, just as the CDC web page from which I’d diagnosed Amy had predicted it would, and I began to think longingly of leaving this foreign country and returning home once again. When we travel, the unfamiliar sights and sounds are charming and exciting, but fatigue eventually sets in and we begin to think more fondly of the everyday sights and sounds we left behind. I remember that once, after a month in Germany, all I wanted to do was drive my own car, even if I had to do it on a road with speed limits. Similarly, as my sickness wore on, I began to look forward more and more enthusiastically to once again being able to breathe through my nose and swallow without wincing.
So it’s good to be back. But as I settle once again into my daily routines and try to catch up on missed work, one question plagues me. I watched a lot of television while I was sick, naturally, and we don’t get cable, and sometimes I enjoy watching TBN (the “Trinity Broadcasting Network”), just to keep my finger on the pulse of how batshit crazy some of you people are. It was pledge time on TBN — “God’s calendar” advertising some sort of “prosperity” or “anointing,” meaning viewers could “get out of debt” if they would just donate $88, $888 or $8,888 to TBN on this particular week — and I want to know: Was it just the fever, or did the preacher really say “The moment you pick up the phone, God releases angels for you”?
Did he really say “When you get up to go to the phone to call in your pledge, you’re saying, ‘Devil, I fooled you’”?
No, it must have been the fever.
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