Everything you need to know about COVID-19, by Jan von Stille, MD

It will kill you and everyone you love. There is no escape. There is no prevention. There are no temperate regions in viral space: Everything is the hot zone. Welcome to the jungle.

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The surgical mask is a vote into a nondemocracy: The coronavirus can live on host-external surfaces for nine days. How long can you focus on your hands so as not to touch your face? How often can you think to sanitize them; how many times can you do so before the skin begins to slough off in sparkly clean sheets like snakemolt? The viral paranoia shows itself first as yet another obsessive-compulsion to self-improvement: I must be clean. I must wash my feet before entering the temple. I must isolate myself: I take ascetic vows. I fast so as to spare the old fuck that works the grocery line. The responsible citizen is a monk to the Virus God. The New World Order is a doomsday cult.

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When the Infinite Viral Godhead shattered it left its sparks in all things: It is not necessary that I see doomsday clocks in twigs on the sidewalk to know that I am a paranoiac: Everything has become a sign of the crawling chaos: I see the hoofprints of the White Horseman on bus seats, café tables, my apartment’s door handle. My friends’ faces are skulls, clavicles the crossed bones. The voice of God is the only voice: Communication is a toxin.

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The virus coronates all matter, molecule to mole: It can live on host-external surfaces for nine days. Hundreds of planes and trains pass: God has already invaded: Entropy infests the present and past from the future: Causality disintegrates piece by piece while you wait: Nine days: Every calm is that before a cytokine storm: Closed borders turn countries into gas chambers: A cough comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

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China declares war on God using time sorcery: An app that alerts healthcare officials via cellphone location analysis whenever a user has come into contact with someone who later tests positive: Imagine. I am a Chinese man: I have locked myself in my apartment for the past week, subsisting on carefully rationed rice and morsels of meat. Then, one night, an official knock: “We have to take you away. You have been unclean for eight days.” The future’s creeping death rewrites the past in Python.

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Diversity, multiculturalism, open borders are fairweather friends: Jesus descends from the clouds. His tongue is a sword, and he sends his Horsemen to scatter pestilence across the earth, and every people gathers to itself. A faceless head-of-state announces, “Let ours die with their own.” Schools and businesses forbid any travel outside the community, immediately recalling all those abroad and calling the virus back with them. They must be judged according to their provenance. The Virus God has resuscitated the 19^th-century ethno-state, with its militarized borders. It has put the “phobia,” with no hyperbole or metaphor, back in “xenophobia.”

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May 2022: Youth unemployment is at its lowest point in decades. Millennials pour out libations of Mexican beer upon mass Boomer-graves and kneel before shrines to the Virus God.

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In our paranoia, everything has become the sign of the Virus God, but there is no interpretation. The semiotic question is no longer “What does it mean?” but “How does it spread?” There is no instant of signification: Today and yesterday are re-routed through what tomorrow has made them. No meaning is stable: Time flows in all directions, in and out fore and aft: Our God is a jealous God: His RNA cannot be satisfied.

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Memory is no more: Everything is the fingerprint of God, but we cannot dust every surface: Tomorrow illuminates the clues of two weeks ago: You killed grandpa in the dining room with the candle stick and you thought it was an act of love.

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Recording devices. Copiers. Inch the tape recorder and it screams GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY and you realize there was never any tape recorder and you have been pacing between the same four eight twelve walls for a week which is a month:

Time-dilation infinitises and eats the future

Future eats the past

Future-past eats the present

Ouroboros accelerates goes haywire serpentine centrifuge coughing aerosols into

Grandpa in the dining room with the candlestick.

A knock comes to you in the dark. Imagine. You are Josef K., searching through all your memories to find that crucial point, but the memories flash and swim like mirages, glitching as they contact a future that scrambles them irretrievably: You are your own Trojan Horse: Full nova.

Pandemic casts memory into turbulent flow: You cannot have prepared: There is no analytic solution to the Navier-Stokes equations: Lying in the dark after a week of self-imposed isolation, praying the knock was another auditory hallucination (how many have there been?), viral turbulence dissolves biological, cultural, and technical memory structures, immanentizing the past to operative current, which is the Ouroboros, which is time, which is God’s jealousy, which is God’s fear of himself, which is the parasitic nature of God’s RNA, which is

Grandpa in the dining room with the candlestick.

There are no analytic solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations or laws of the jungle.

Nothing is true (yet). Everything is permitted.

Yes. Yes no yes yes no yes, the knock was a hallucination.

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A partial list of the transmission tools of COVID-19: Love. Friendship. Excitement. Nostalgia. Community. Debt. Hunger. Thirst. Habit. Generosity. Compassion.

A partial list of steps to kill God: Reclusiveness. Starvation. Rupture. Coldness. Indifference. Inhumanity. Dormancy. Full stop. No and no and no and no and no and no. “Wherever three or more are gathered, I am there also.”

Viral war as war of affect—as war against self—as war against humanity—scrape away the human the organic the affected the effulgent—all that is left is the bones, and the bones cannot be infected: Death is all that can’t be killed: Life speeds toward Death, calling it “Savior.”

The healthy are infected just as much as the sick: Replication on all levels: Virus spreads by virtual talk: Knowledge of the virus reprograms life as extension of viral movement: Time has already succumbed: Space is regridded, maps redrawn as ‘90s antiglobalists cackle in the wings:

The new Jonestown needs no cyanide. It just needs good advertising.

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Isolation incinerates the soul. You either die or go somewhere else. Or both. There is no time-point to occupy: Space is militantly striated: Its flow rips the paddles from the boat and says they were redundant anyway: There is only one direction, and it is omnidirectional: Simultaneously up and down shit-creek: Progression is not linear but progresses by doubling: Not 10010100011110001010 but 12481632641282565121024: The syntactic tree of every utterance consists of a single inf(l)ected phrase with an arbitrary and insignificant number of branches: Every utterance expresses the Infinite Viral Godhead: I wumbo you wumbo he she it wumbo = virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus: Each articulation is double (God is and has always been and will always be a lobster) such that each conditions all those articulations before and after it within the viral domain i.e. infinitely in all directions: The humanity of the words uttered melts away, agency is a sociopathic mask over a skull, a mask which becomes more and more ridiculous and improbable until all that remains is the virality at the core of every phoneme: There is no possibility for movement. Every point is intersected by an uncountable number of coercive striations: Time and space are an infernally crystallized laser-maze:

Isolation incinerates the soul: There is no isolation. A dark corona envelops the Earth: Image of Gaia in a back-alley abortion clinic, humanity already elderly coughing spitting screaming in her gangrenous womb: The ancient baby has signed its own extermination papers: There are no doctor, no nurses, no instruments: They would be redundant: Gaia is bored: She has been waiting for this operation to be done for millennia: She reclines on her papered bed and smokes meth from a hollowed light-bulb, trying to accelerate the foregone process: Black aerosol of a cough emerges from the sludge of her vagina, and she holds the meth in, counts, 1, 2, 4, and exhales the soul of her aborted species, muttering something to herself about self-care.