Pazyryk Syndrome

I'm not sick, the world is sick. My symptoms: narcolepsy, muscle soreness, shortness of breath, cough, fever, chills, headache, sore throat. Can I buy antivirals? There are other symptoms as well. I have disdain for others which is never right. I have refused multiple calls and every time I feel good about it. I'm hot no matter where I go I throw up clouds of heat like I'm burning; I've eaten myself up, there are shivering ashes while outside imperceptible walls trap the heat.

I used to go to doctors but I don't bother anymore. Once I went to a clinic in Germany for a blood test. The doctor was an old vampire, around a hundred and ten, who spoke German. He insisted that they couldn't do it because there was nothing wrong with me, no recreational tests. Then he said it would be 200 euros. Then he said it would be 50 euros. My red cheeks must have won him over. A plump professional nurse pricked a needle in me and I passed out as soon as she found no blood and I sweated like a pig and somehow sat down and raised my legs onto a stool while being spiralled and kicked as if trying to throw me. But I couldn't be thrown and in twenty minutes I returned.

I became sick again and that sickness was the same as the last, the same as all the others, because every sickness is limitless. This time I went only to the pharmacy. I prepared a translation on my phone: I have a bad flu. My symptoms are: narcolepsy, muscle soreness, shortness of breath, cough, fever, chills, headache, sore throat. Can I buy antivirals? The lady went to the other counter mouthing out my symptoms phonetically. Feeling like a sinner I shuffled around and avoided looking as they momentarily discussed my case and presumably looked at me (the topic of the minute). The lady returned and dug a row of antivirals from out their pallet. She said: "one a day." And seeing I was holding a box of nurofen she dug out an array of cheap, hardy, unbranded ibuprofen, union construction workers smoking fags on break. I thanked her like a leper and left to cross the street back home in my bathroom flip flops. At home I lifted my cap to discover a film of sweat equal to myself eating my hair dripping down like the last judgement.

Soon after I took a sabbatical or retreat to nature where the air was still cold but at least "pure" and I could walk around hacking my lungs out because I had a new disease for which there was no cure. I downed Sea Buckthorn Tea until I felt sick and it did nothing because no vitamins could relieve me, I needed a man to rearrange my innards. I became a sort of Oblomov reading only out of the desire for a more perfect inactivity. For the same reason I walked, rode, lay on the floor, all the while doing nothing because during that time I escaped my essential task.

One night the sun was utterly red and real falling behind the back of a cow. Its tail was the apparition of an angel and in one hoof it held up an umbrella over its head guarding against the sky rather than the sun falling behind it. I looked at her longingly. When the moon came out it was two faces at once. I saw it often that night because every night that week I had to piss around ten times and each time I gathered my will to lift my heavy blankets and discover my slippers and slip out the wooden door in the dried out ravine I pissed without limit and the dog lay near me barking and the moon was a rosey cheeked woman with a man with a wisp of hair and dead, focused eyes at once. Below them rose an imperceptible city that had followed me with a cathedral and apartment blocks and a hotel with a terrible restaurant serving pizza drenched in fake cheese. The city rose over the grazed yellow grass that in the morning shade became white frost in a bric-a-brac pattern with where the warm sun hit and that afternoon I returned home to my flat to sleep for three days straight, really three days straight, and after that I slumbered for a week and after that I slumbered for a year until I was gray and old, and I found that I was immortal all along, the reanimated undead, vrykolakas, with a drum of a belly full of blood, and everyone I knew was long dead so I wandered through clinic after clinic, pharmacy after pharmacy, sampling new medicines in a foreign tongue (Ingavirin®, Bacillus calmette-guerin substrain connaught live antigen for intravesical use in the treatment and prophylaxis of carcinoma in situ (CIS) of the urinary bladder and for the prophylaxis of primary or recurrent stage Ta and/or T1 papillary tumors following transurethral resection (TUR), ImmuCyst, Miladean®, Pantocalcin®, etc.) and when I could finally sleep I dreamt beautifully of sausages wrapped in crispy fried hotdog buns and eggs with the yolk dripping on toast and unsugared water at just the right cold temperature.