A Jab and a Case

It’s not a shot, it’s a jab. Why? Because that’s what Brits say, and they’re so classy. “I say, old thing, if you don’t mind terribly, could you roll up your shirt? Must do the COVID jab all proper-like, don’t you know.”

“Jolly good! Glad it’s not in the bum. Or the trunk, as the Yanks say, referring of course to the boot. There, I’m rolled, old chap, jab away. Don’t want to be late for my lunch of beans and eel.”

I was jabbed last April. No 15-minute period to test for adverse reactions, because the drugstore shut down after I got the shot. A controversial police-shooting verdict had been announced, and the store owners believed that a “not guilty” would result in the place suffering some justice-related fire. A fortnight later, no such concerns applied, and I walked outside after my second shot feeling as if the world had turned a corner. I was now immunized, and the city was not on fire: Summer stretched ahead like a joyous revelry of freedom.

Masklessness was wonderful. I walked into my office building and savored the fresh clean tang of the air-conditioned atmosphere. Remember when you were a kid and you’d stick your head under the covers until the air was thick and stale, then throw back the blanket and drink in the fresh air? Like that — except I’d had my head under the blanket for a year and change.

When Delta started roaming the land, I laughed: Come at me, bro, I’m full of Pfizer. I would walk into the grocery store like Superman, grinning as the bullets bounce off his chest. Oh, sure, you’d hear a tale of someone who was vaxxed getting a “breakthrough” infection, which made you think of the Kool-Aid Man, bursting through a brick wall, glistening not with condensation but with fever sweat. But I didn’t worry.

At some point I mocked the gods, though. Looked up towards Olympus and issued a raspberry. I decided to go to England to see friends, because the U.K. had just relaxed its quarantine rules. Previously, you could come to the sceptered isle, but you had to stay in a small room for ten days before you could venture out. If you broke quarantine and hopped a train, you could face criminal penalties. Imagine phoning home about that situation:

“Hey, I won’t be home for a while. I’ve been sentenced to gaol.”

“What? You’ve been sentenced to jail?”

“No, gaol. Sounds the same, but spelled differently. It’s classier.”

I made plane reservations and figured out how to get tested while I was there. I also started wearing a mask, not because I was afraid of COVID but because I just didn’t want to get it and ruin the trip.

Of course I got it, which ruined the trip. But how? How? I was vaxxed and masked! My wife and I ran down the situations in which she could’ve gotten it and brought it home, like a version of the play La Ronde where you trace venereal disease from the gutter to the aristocracy.

There was that group of ladies she had over, everyone was vaxxed . . . but some had kids under twelve. Still, they were outside, and, as we all know, being outside is safe, because . . . wind, or something. Was there wind? No? You mean to say you spoke at length with a vaxxed person with young kids on a day when the airport windsock hung lank? Are you trying to kill everyone?

In the end I decided I got it from Colonel Mustard in the library when he handed me a lead pipe and I didn’t sanitize afterwards. Nonsense, you say: The whole thing about getting COVID from surfaces has been debunked. You must have let the mask slip at some point. You’re supposed to draw a bead of Krazy Glue around the edge so it forms a good seal.

Or the mask simply didn’t work. Some particles a few microns wide got through the perimeter. Impossible! Why, the mask is like a Maginot Line! Okay, then the virus came in through Belgium.

It’s hard to admit that you got it, because people think you’re a bad person. Did you go to Sturgis? Do you own a red hat? If you explain that you vaxxed and masked, it’s different, unless you’re a prominent Republican, in which case you should die from an aquarium-cleaner enema.

I suspect there are lots of breakthrough infections that will never be tallied because the vaxxed didn’t know they had COVID. I had no symptoms. We’ve probably had a 500 percent increase in cases, which sounds nightmarish, but it’s like saying 97 percent of the population has the bubonic plague but, thanks to the vaccine, the main symptom is dry eyes.

The media would jump on that, of course. As bubonic variant spreads, nation braces for Visine shortages. TikTok videos of exhausted ophthalmologists begging us to wear masks. And you’d be kicked off Twitter for telling people how to make their own saline solution.