The Cold War

I’ve never recovered from COVID-19. Before you soil your jeans with dirt patches at the knees, praying for me, let me explain:

Not the infection. It’s the paranoia I feel during bar banter when tiny droplets of saliva escape from the interlocutors’ mouths like tiny non-discriminating missiles of mass destruction. The sound of a cough or sneeze causes my fists and sphincters to clench. The handshakes. Man, I dread handshakes.

You wouldn’t know I dread handshakes though; I find myself initiating them sometimes. My own worst enemy.

Immediately after shaking someone’s hand, that hand goes numb. I let the hand hang. Quarantined. Like you do when searching for that elusive clean napkin at a barbecue when you want to reclaim the fork and formality after handling and hogging the assortment of meats with your bare hands.

You wouldn’t know I’m struck with this affliction though; I think I hide it well.

I still care what people think. I still like being liked. I don’t want you to think I think you’re dirty and infected, so I battle my compulsions privately, away from your gaze, sprinkler mouth, and dirty hands.

Feeling that first itch in the throat always plunges me into a panic.

If you’re a parent, you know how terrible it is when your child gets ill. If you’re not a parent, you know how terrible it is when you get ill.

I’m terrified of the flu because of the blocked nostrils that cause compulsive mouth-breathing, the dehydration-induced headaches, the fevers and lethargy; and the violent sneezes and chocking coughs that fling your body forward like you braked suddenly in a new German car at a red light.

I don’t know where he got it, but my 1-year-old son got the flu and that was the beginning of this winner-less war.

About 2 weeks ago, my sister noticed my son was coughing while he napped in the afternoon, and like an arrogant parent with a perfect child, I taped my ears shut. My child wouldn’t be one of those kids who always has a cough. You know that cough, right? That cough that interrupts belly laughter with a loud guttural sound reminiscent of a rocket launching, or the death-on-two-wheels your neighbor bought after binge-watching Sons of Anarchy. The bike was meant to ease transportation during the lockdown, but now it’s just a loud representation of a mid-life crisis interspersed with overcompensation.

I digress.

I lifted my son up from his crib after his afternoon nap:

“Kadekadee!” —cough, cough—”kadekadee,” little Zion said eloquently, practicing his future award acceptance speech.

You can always tell the difference between a one-off cough and an illness-related cough. This was the latter.

We walked into the living room amid song, dance, and giggles and once he coughed a few more times, I wrapped him like a $20 burrito.

After the cough, the runny nose followed closely behind like a sycophant scampering to the ruling party’s soiree.

Cleaning a baby’s nose is another part of adulting no one warns you about. File that under the same category as the price of curtains, the unreliability of carpenters and tailors, and the cost of retiling your living room when one tile decides to break formation and come up for air.

Do you know your mother had to fix her lips to suck mucus out of your runny nose? She held you, tilted your head for optimal access, and used the lip suction applied to soda bottle straws canvassing the bottom of the soda bottle for the last soda drops to vacuum the mucus out of your nose.

To think teenage Shem thought his mother was an enemy of progress to overcome and circumvent rather than embrace jealously.

I digress.

We’re dotcommers though. There are machines for mucus suction now. Phew!

My son doesn’t know what boundaries are. I hope he learns this some time between now and before his first date. My son believes his mother is an extension of his body. This explains the violent crying when she leaves the room. This also explains my wife contracting the flu from my son shortly after his symptoms started symptoming. Steamers steaming, Dawa tea on tap, and meals ferried to the bedroom like contraband on the Uganda-Congo border. My wife doesn’t do anything in half-measure, including being ill.

The bedroom becomes a Netflix theatre, a control room, and a pharmacy. She even wears special pajamas as she convalesces. Once I see those cute pink and white striped Ralph Lauren pajamas, I know she has assembled the anti-germ Avengers.

I hate the flu. I HATE THE FLU! I all but locked myself in a doomsday bunker to avoid infection: Suspended all forms of physical intimacy, including forehead kisses; all but erected a Berlin wall in the middle of our marital bed, placed hand sanitizer in all corners, and dodged my son’s efforts to put his hands in my throat every 30 seconds. I did good.

Almost 2 weeks went by and I was unafflicted by the mucus plague.

The other day, as my son’s nose cleared up, his coughs retreated, and my wife stopped turning every visible worn-out cloth into a hanky, I felt the emissaries of the mucus plague tickle my trachea at around 12.30 PM. By 6.30 PM, I was coughing violently. By 11 PM, my nose was running a competitive long-distance race like a true East African. By bedtime, I was an invalid.

The food ferry was up and running again in the morning, for my benefit.

I denied myself intimacy and still lost the cold war.

In between sniffles and reaches for my old shirt-turned-hanky, I urge you to go out and enjoy yourself this week. You never know how quickly you can be denied forehead kisses.

Have a better week than mine