THE JAB

“THE WORLD IS ENDING, THE WORLD IS ENDING!!!” everybody screamed. People buttoned down the hatches, but it really just meant firing people, and for others it was just generally lessening their loads so to speak. Nobody knew what to do in a time of virus, but do things they did. Ultimately the rich got richer, and with that the stakes became higher for them, and with that came even more misery worrying about keeping it. The poor got to be jealous of that.

You know, if you say an ignorant thing with some flowery language to it people are more inclined to take it as authority. The words themselves are indifferent. A lot of people are indifferent. If you say an ignorant thing in the common tongue of the day – you may be considered ignorant (almost certainly as everybody's truth is their own). They probably mean arrogant but, like I say, the words themselves are always indifferent.

A vaccination was made in record time and then people argued for a while about how to profit from it before it eventually became clear to somebody that people had to have something put in their arms to justify the state of the world, and sometimes anything will do. That’s what they say now – any vaccination will do, where at one point people had all different sorts of official information on which one did what. I didn’t know anything. I never know anything. I prefer not to know anything. While that may be some kind of moral crime in certain circumstances, it’s not a crime on paper that I can be charged with – I’m entitled to hide from the world; virus or otherwise. Some say inaction is a worse sin than acting where there is injustice abound but I really didn’t feel that applied here.

I phoned the doctor’s surgery and a lady answered with her name and announced such and such surgery.

“Hi, it’s Luke. I want to come in and get vaccinated”

“Oh yes, LUKE! Come now – I’m going home but there is another doctor here that will see you”

“Ok, thank you”

“Hey, did you hear, Dr Thomas and I had to isolate! For TWO WEEKS! MY GOD! HORRIBLE!”

“Really?”

“Yes, but I didn’t have to do it with Dr Thomas – otherwise we’d fight”

“Is that so”

“Yes, Dr Thomas makes me angry” and she went on laughing “ok, come to the doctor’s surgery now” and she hung up the phone.

I walked there and it was after months of hearing about getting vaccinated against this particular virus. People had very strong views on it. A lot of people had taken it upon themselves to do their own personal letterbox drops announcing the real virus was FEAR. To be honest the fliers they put in my letterbox were more terrifying than anything else – horrible fonts and nonsensical language. I mean, these things were just all over the place. I don’t like things not being set out nicely.

Apparently there were many viruses creeping around the streets. There was a virus on every corner and everywhere in-between, according to the maps. Nowhere was safe except where you lived. But in reality that’s sometimes the least safest place of all. On the walk to the doctor's surgery I overheard people saying "if I don't get this fucking jab then I'll lose my job! That CAN'T be LEGAL! and someone would be consoling them, smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee standing on the pavement together. But I digress. I took a seat at the surgery and waited for a while with an umbrella beside me. It always rains here.

I waited a while, nobody else was there but when I’d been there a few times earlier in the year surgery was always full. I walked in once to see a ragged man coughing in his seat and walked back out again, but on this occasion it was just me, and my umbrella of course.

“Hello?” I asked after ten minutes of sitting in a seat looking at picture of a forest on the wall that just repeated itself over and over again. The print was never ending.

“Wha?” a young woman sitting behind a desk with glasses perched up in her seat and looked over at me.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, I called earlier about the vaccine”

“Vaccine! Yes! Right this way” I followed her around a little corner.

“Take a seat right here” so I sat in that seat and observed the piss yellow walls.

After a while the doctor came in.

“Ah, you want a vaccine, yes?”

“No, I want a haircut and they won’t give me one unless I have a vaccine”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, that’s the state of things”

“Well, which vaccine would you like? Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, or Moderna?”

“I don’t like America so Pfizer is out, anything Modern terrifies me so I’m not going for that either. I hear Astra-Zeneca was made by our good friends the English at Oxford and we all love those quaint little people who live in hobbit towns in the woods and have murdered the Irish for years and years so why not go with that.”

The doctor looked at me.

“We really recommend, at your age, Pfizer for this sort of thing – there’s a low risk with Astra-Zeneca that you might get a blood clot, but it’s a very low risk”

I didn’t say it but maybe a blood clot was my free ticket out of this whole fucking mess.

“Hey, I remember you” the doctor said “I treated you once before didn’t I?”

“Yes actually” and she had “I was the guy who got concrete in his eye trying to move house and the more I scratched it the worse it swelled until I looked like I was a hobo wearing a red monocle made of jelly and veins”

“Yes, I remember. Well, you seem to be fine now.”

“That’s relative; or is it?”

The doctor had a syringe on the table with several pieces of paper. She began to laugh.

“You know, I want a haircut too. It’s been so long, look at my hair; it’s everywhere!” Her hair was black, and straight.

“It looks fine to me” I said, and to be honest I thought it did.

“No, it’s all to scraggly here, and here” she pulled at the sides and lifted it over her ears.

“Well, I hear soon we’ll all be able to get haircuts”

“And not soon enough I think” she reached over and started to talk about some of the side effects “now, if you feel dizzy or have chest pains or any unusual symptoms you have to phone us straight away”.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to differentiate those from my normal symptoms of experiencing life, which fit that description entirely.

“So, do I lift up my jumper? It goes in my arm, right?”

“Yes please; do you write with your right hand? We recommend putting it in the left shoulder if that’s the case.”

“Yes, I write with my right hand” which is actually true. I write a lot of things down on paper with pens, I like the feeling of ink on a piece of paper. It’s soothing to me and it gives me someone to talk to. I also always get self conscious about showing people parts of my body. I think it’s why I choose to live in a cold climate, despite all the misery of the cold; I can cover myself with things, cover up all the pain and struggle of my own making. The masks had helped generally too. After two years of wearing a mask and not having to show people my face I was quite happy to never have to go out in public without one ever again.

“Oh, when did you get that?” she was looking at a tattoo on my arm of a woman’s face. It was meaningless but everybody asks about it when they see it. Maybe it wasn’t entirely meaningless – the meaning was that it was a tattoo and it was in my skin and it wasn’t coming off for the rest of my life.

“That was a mistake from when I was eighteen”

“Well, she’s looking at me to make sure I do I do my work right”

I didn’t feel anything like a needle. Seriously, they call it a ‘jab’ but I just felt synthetic gloves on my shoulder for a second and that was that.

“Now, you have to come back in six weeks to get a follow up – if you’d have chosen Pfizer it would be three weeks”

“Can I have it in three weeks anyway?”

“Well, in some circumstances you can have it in four weeks”

“What are those circumstances?”

“Well, we just don’t really recommend it – the immunity time might not last as long”

If this isn’t indefinite immunity anyway then why does it matter, I thought.

“All done” she said, “we’ll see you later for the booster shot”

“Thanks doc” I said and she stood aside for me to leave the room with a smile.

The receptionist gave me three pieces of paper to sign. One had boxes from top to bottom: ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions. I think they always write these things assuming nobody reads them, but I did. The answers for me were all ‘no’ and likely most people figure out from what the answer to the first question is that it’ll apply to all the rest so they just let fly with the pen.

“So, we’ll book you another appointment now?”

“Yes please”

“Would you like it in three weeks?”

“Um, let’s make it four”

“Ok, she said”

“How will I remember that? I have a memory like a sieve.”

“Oh, I’ll write it down for you”

I handed her back my papers and grabbed my umbrella, walked out the door and bumped into one of the other doctors that I see from time to time just outside on the footpath.

“Did you hear?” he said “I had to ISOLATE for two weeks”

“I did actually”

“Yes, some idiot, and I mean an IDIOT came to the surgery with the virus. He knew he had the virus and he came HERE!”

I wondered where someone ought else to go when they have a sickness. Probably the hospital I assume now. But would you walk there, or catch public transport? It seemed there was nowhere to go without feeling some sort of shame for having contracted it but I could only relate in terms of being generally an outsider in the community, not an occasional one.

Anyways, I left the surgery and walked down the road to get some tobacco and then returned home. I drank a bottle and a half of wine and got down to reading and hitting out words on the typer. I remembered I hadn’t gotten a card for the next appointment but I’m sure I can figure it from the date of this very story – if you can call it that. When I was tired I fell asleep and dreamed firstly about having river rocks in my hands, and then about being pulled off the bed. I thought both things were happening in real life but they didn’t bother me. Falling off the bed isn’t something to be scared of, and if someone is dragging you off then I expect they have a reason; celestial or not. Dreams are not uncommon for me.

I woke up early - 4:00am after going to bed just a few hours earlier. My arm didn’t hurt and while I could hear sirens in the streets in the nighttime darkness like I had been for the last two years straight, everything seemed to be like it had been in the days before it. People have rioted, screamed, torn their hair out, lost, won, lost again, made investments, lost, been fined, and whole lot of other things. One day there was an earthquake that lasted for much less time than people talked about it, and even that only lasted a day. The riots appear to have died down now and the seasons are changing again. While it was raining yesterday, the sun is coming out as I type this now. The police are tired, private citizens are tired; the world is tired. This city most definitely is now just worn out.

Science and politics have and always will be the businesses of being wrong with the benefits of hindsight. Opinions are things that change over time.

We have a record in Melbourne, at the time of writing this, for the most days in lockdown compared to anywhere else in the world. I’m expecting to receive something in mail from the Guinness Book of World Records any day now but while being in a world record book might be nice, really, I just wanted a haircut. I’m dumb, everybody is dumb, and if you think you’re not; you most certainly are dumb. But human, well, we’re all too human, aren’t we.