The Funk by Miles Whitney

The Funk by Miles Whitney

It looked like a head. Then Megan saw a blackened hand sticking out from the dirt. The sod overhung the steep creek bank where the body parts protruded, grassy eaves dripping water as the snow above it melted.

Megan pulled her dog away by his collar before he rolled in anything. Megan knew she was outside cell service. She would call the police when she got home. The permafrost here had been melting for some time, revealing old burial sites. It was common knowledge that if you found a body it almost never involved foul play.

The body turned out to be over 1,000 years old. The discovery ended up being of such little interest that the story was never picked up by the local news. Megan posted about her experience on social media. Megan’s friend Sarah owned a dog that Megan had bred and saw the posts. Sarah lived in California and was glad that she was unlikely to run across any bodies when she was out with her own dog. 

Five months later at 6:00 a.m., Sarah’s alarm went. Sarah opened her eyes. She felt heavy, smothered by a deep sense of dread and shame, deeply hopeless. Nothing was new about that really, except that Sarah had been doing well.

Sarah searched her memory. Had something happened the day before that would have thrown her off? She couldn’t pinpoint anything. Sarah didn’t remember any dreams either, which sometimes would sabotage her day, even when she knew they weren’t real.  

Shit, Sarah thought. Maybe she needed to change her meds again. But now, she needed to get up and track with her dog. Sarah had her ways of coping with depression, when it came, which it always did. Sarah forced herself to get up, dress, and make coffee. She loaded Kitty into the truck and drove out to some fields on the outskirts of town. The roads seemed unusually empty, but it was early.

The things that normally might have helped Sarah’s mood didn’t seem to touch her. The sunrise was subtly beautiful. Kitty tracked well. Sarah saw a flock of sandhill cranes, many of them dancing. Sarah felt nothing but dread and emptiness.

This can’t be good, Sarah thought, as she loaded Kitty for the drive home. I’ll give it another day or two. It was a workday and her drive home fell in the middle of rush hour, but the roads were still almost empty. Was there a holiday she had forgotten about? The depression was especially aggressive this time. Sarah felt the urge to drive into oncoming traffic when there was any to drive into. She ignored the impulse. Thank you for your input, she told her brain, but no thank you.

Two days later, the depression was no better. Sarah called her psychiatrist. The office telephone rang and rang, then went to voicemail. There was a new voicemail greeting, saying that the office was no longer taking new clients and that there could be a long delay in returning calls. The voice on the machine suggested going to an emergency room. Puzzled and frustrated, Sarah left a message.

Something seemed really off. No one was texting or calling Sarah, not even her clients. Her emails consisted solely of spam. There still was almost no traffic although there seemed to be more sirens. Sarah’s mail hadn’t been delivered for days. Sarah tried to stay off social media and avoid reading the news when she was depressed, but this seemed like a good time to break that rule.

Indeed, something was going on. Months earlier, Sarah had heard there were a few remote places that had seen a sudden and dramatic uptick in suicides. There was some town in Siberia she remembered hearing about. This horrifying trend had spread, almost overnight. People were jumping out of windows when the windows were of the sort that could be opened. People were shooting themselves, OD’ing on pills, running into traffic. Everywhere. Europe, cities in Asia, North and South America.

Those who didn’t have the motivation or ability to kill themselves were not getting out of bed. They were not eating or taking showers. No one was going to work. Emergency rooms and doctor’s offices were overwhelmed, even when medical staff managed to show up. 

A significant number of people were wasting away in bed until they died. There were stories of whole families found, or couples, dead in an embrace. What the fuck? It started to dawn on Sarah that her mood might not have been solely related to her history of depression.

Maybe this was a contagion. The news suggested as much. The suicides and lethargy followed the pattern of the last pandemic. The behavior arrived first in port cities and radiated outward, along lines mirroring roads and airplane routes. The only place that was reporting itself free from any cases was North Korea.

The president had succumbed, having refused to get out of bed or eat. Congress was no longer functioning, with more than half no longer showing up to work. Quite a few congresspeople were already dead, and more were non-responsive. The vice president shot herself.

There were some upsides. No one wanted to show up for war, or if they did, they were eager to be obliterated. Soldiers would run toward danger, throwing down their weapons and tearing off their armor and helmets mid-dash. The sort of mad social upheaval one would expect to erupt as the police abandoned their posts was not happening. No one had it in them to rob or to loot, unless it was a liquor store or cannabis pot dispensary. Those places were hit hard, but there was no one left to care or to file insurance claims. When the stores were emptied, they stayed empty. Prisons and jails were letting people out, provided the incarcerated were able to walk out on their own. A surprising number did. No one immediately saw the clue in that development.

Everywhere, business was shutting down. Restaurants, gas stations, nail salons, and grocery stores remained shut. Utilities failed. Garbage piled up. Courts were entirely closed in some places, in others, remained barely open with a skeleton staff. Banks closed. PayPal stopped working. Shipping stopped. Huge tankers floated aimlessly in the oceans, a fleet of ghost ships. Bodies rotted where they lay.

Scientists were baffled. The pattern suggested contagion, but there was no outward physical sign. Nothing showed in the blood. How could depression, this particularly debilitating variety, be contagious? Scientists suggested wearing masks again.

& & &

Terrifyingly, nobody responded to the existing treatments for depression. No antidepressant touched it. Nor did electroconvulsive therapy. There were reports that some people managed to live, eating food out of boxes and watching endless TV on the streaming channels that were still operating. Their survival seemed precarious. They couldn’t clean, they couldn’t get out to shop. Eventually, something would happen that would require their active participation. Who knows if they could rouse themselves?

Sarah took a break from reading the news. She called Kitty to her. Kitty looked at her quizzically through his long eyebrows, then jumped onto the couch. Sarah stroked his wiry coat. This was bad. Sarah had a small family, at least counting the ones she was not estranged from. She had a sister in Florida. Sarah tried calling, but the phone went straight to voicemail, which was full. Sarah tried texting and reaching out on social media. There was no response.

Sarah decided to check up on her friends on social media. Most of the larger platforms were still functioning, but Sarah’s feeds were almost empty of new posts. Sarah posted, Hello? Is anyone out there?

What if no one answers?

Almost immediately, Sarah received a notification. Her friend Molly, from AA: Shit, friend, what the Hell? Are you OK? Then another AA friend, and two people she knew from her survivor support group. A few others reported in throughout the morning. All expressed feeling worse than usual, but not debilitated.

Each of these survivors had something in common. Sarah would have said they were the least likely people to have endured this calamity, had she been asked to speculate beforehand. These unfortunate ones, mostly women, had barely been able to manage when things were good. Their pasts were shot through with trauma, loss, and horror. Most struggled with lifelong depression, anxiety, or some combination of related afflictions. Most were desperately poor. The majority were, now that she thought about it, members of some oppressed minority. Sarah hadn’t thought about that at first, because she was too, being wildly queer and Jewish. Sarah asked her friends whether they had noticed this pattern. The word came back, unanimous. Yes.

Sarah stood up. Kitty jumped down from the couch, looking at her expectantly. The sky was overcast. “Let’s go, Kitty,” Sarah said. Sarah loaded up the dog into her truck and went tracking.

Scientists figured it out eventually. First, they found the culprit where most expected it would be. A virus of sorts that lodged in the brain, hiding itself and mutating, resistant to drugs or other treatment. There might be some mild symptoms at first, a slight fever, or sensitivity to light. Three to five days later came the debilitating depression. They called this virus “IVX,” but people started calling it The Funk. The population dropped precipitously, as in the days of the Black Death. Despite the devastation, society managed to limp along. There were enough survivors. Of course, not everyone was equally afflicted by the changes. Those who could work demanded larger salaries and bought houses and land. They took their superior’s jobs and hired their friends.

It took a very long time for scientists to see the patterns that Sarah and her friends had noticed so quickly. Whole classes of people survived, got out of bed, and didn’t kill themselves after being infected. These were classes of people that science tended to ignore.

One class consisted of those who had individually suffered trauma or abuse, especially as a child. Of course, the majority of that group was women. Another class was made up of people from groups that had been oppressed for generations. Black people in the United States. Jews, almost everywhere. Queers. Transgender people. The final class included people who seemed to be genetically cursed with depression. People in all three classes caught The Funk like everyone else but managed to go on despite it.

Science was unsure how to respond to the data. The theory was that some oppressed groups had collectively devised ways to endure suffering, even to thrive, when faced with hatred and persecution, poverty, and loss. These collective solutions must provide some protection, the thought was. The same could be true for individuals who had suffered horrific abuse. If they survived, they had managed to develop their own tools for survival, which provided similar protection.

The last category, those who seemed to have genetic depression, for want of a better term, provided the clue to their resistance to The Funk as well as to a possible cure. At first, the idea was that genetic depression was just another type of individual trauma. Like the trauma cases, the afflicted had to learn to cope, or they would have perished. But the data of this subset didn’t quite match up, so scientists kept looking. Was something in their genetic code giving them this resilience?

It turned out there was. The disease was ancient. Far older than the body that Megan’s dog had discovered in the melting permafrost. The virus had also been locked in the permafrost, but since before the Neanderthals had gone extinct. And there was a clue. Neanderthals.

Scientists had speculated that humans had inherited a propensity toward depression from our ancestors’ mixing with the Neanderthals. But why? they had wondered. How would depression aid the Neanderthals’ survival, in a brutal world that was probably already depressing enough? 

Scientists discovered that it wasn’t the depression that protected the Neanderthals from anything, it was a genetic ability to get up and go hunting or bury their dead with depression that saved them. The Funk had found them, and the few that had depression already and could function continued to be able to function. They managed to have children, who often also had the ability to survive depression, and then to survive The Funk when it came for them in their caves. The descendants of these troubled survivors live on today, not immune exactly, but resilient.

And this is how it came to pass that the depressed, the oppressed and the traumatized took all the good jobs. Sarah became mayor within a few years after she was infected. There were enough of these ragged survivors in the world, sadly (or thankfully), to pick up the pieces and start to rebuild. One day science might come up with some kind of vaccine, or cure, but so many scientists had died. It might take a long time.

In the meantime, those who survived had to decide whether they should expose their children to trauma, and thereby give them the tools to survive it, or to let them die for want of cruelty. In the end, almost no one hurt their children deliberately, but the world being what it is, enough were damaged enough to save it.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Miles Whitney 2024