Late last October, when the plague had reached its nineteenth month, and the latest attempt at loosening the quarantines had only flooded the hospitals with another wave of patients; when we had stopped following the daily numbers, the press briefings, the evening footage of gray-green helicopters; when, fearing the alms-takers, we no longer opened the doors except to collect the sealed and sterilized Cal Emergency Management Agency food boxes; when, in sum, what had come to pass was exactly what any student of history, any devout millenarian, any B-movie hack, could have told us was going to pass—I received an email from a long-ago acquaintance and editor asking me to write, for his obscure journal, a short piece of fiction about the pandemic and its bearing on the future of the human soul. There had been a lot written, he said, about the biology, the epidemiology—this was all people were writing about, really—but very little on the soul.
