Work Text:
Venice, 2020
The apartment was too quiet in the way only isolation could make it. Outside, a city that should have been loud had flattened into a distant, occasional hum, like something heard through water. Feli had not opened the windows. The air inside still carried the faint smell of the vitamin c tablets he had attempted to drink earlier.
A blanket had long since migrated from neatly folded to vaguely inhabited, tangled around him on the sofa like it had given up trying to impose order. He had not moved much that morning. Moving required energy. Breathing already felt like enough of a project.
The television had been talking for ten minutes before Feli started listening. He had just left it on for company, the modern equivalent of a monastery bell tolling somewhere in the background, except far less dignified and significantly more repetitive. He’d been staring past it, eyes unfocused, trying to decide whether he was cold or warm and concluding, irritably, that being both at once was unacceptable.
“…current guidelines recommend a self-isolation period of fourteen days…”
He looked up. He stared at the screen. He stared at the screen. The effort alone made his head throb faintly, a slow pulse behind the eyes that suggested his body was still arguing with the concept of recovery.
“Fourteen days,” he said aloud.
The television continued, very pleased with its graphics. Bright colors, helpful arrows, and little animated particles floated across the screen with an enthusiasm that felt wildly inappropriate given the subject matter.
“Fourteen days?” he repeated. “Do they want everyone to die?”
He leaned back, squinting at the screen like it had personally offended him.
“Forty days, it’s not that hard, people.”
The presenter kept speaking in the tone of someone explaining a new kitchen appliance, while a banner scrolled beneath them with alarming numbers and reassuring slogans that managed to be neither alarming nor reassuring enough.
Feli sank further into the sofa. The cushions accepted him without resistance, which was exactly the sort of defeatist attitude he expected from modern furniture. He rubbed his temples, pausing halfway because apparently even that was tiring now.
“Quarantine,” he said, to no one in particular, “is literally in the name. I invented it.”
The room did not respond. The television, traitorously, continued explaining things he had personally supervised half a millennium ago.
Centuries of institutional memory versus modern optimism.