Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Like any respected illness, it is quickly spread, highly contagious and fatal. Like me, the television has no memory. There is only now. I live in an eternal and ever expanding present. I am from the city of SARS, always have been. The first case was uncovered only a couple of months ago and the headlines followed soon after, hospitals were secured, health officials appeared so often in the media we wondered if they had time for much else.
Their pictures are intended to calm and reassure, though Toronto is a city so concerned with work deadlines that anything as involving as panic would have to be planned and inserted into already crowded civic schedules, squeezed in between gulps of cappuccino and committee meets.
Toronto is a city built on the superego, requiring endless sacrifice, tireless work hours and devotion. SARS could not be better contained anywhere else. This is the distance of the superego, the judge, the one for whom nothing is ever enough. Not even SARS. Along with a new disease, a new word makes the rounds of the city, at once quaintly old fashioned and terrifying.
It is a word so powerful it threatens to loose the hold of the microchip which has already possessed us in a viral replication all its own, converting our everyday into two kinds of time: on-line and off. Cowering beneath its three syllables, the steady march of progress itself seemed in doubt, threatening to turn us into a living museum of the middle ages.
They were actually talking about putting people in quarantine. Maybe the whole city, who knows? For this contagion could pass through the air. Lie waiting on door knobs and elevator buttons. No surface, no matter how familiar, could be entirely trusted, assumed benevolent, safe. This is part of the power of a plague, like an avant work of art, it overturns assumptions, upsets the easy jog between experience and its naming.
