The Plague Diaries Part 4: Who Wants to Live Forever

There’s an old saying in my language. Roughly translated: “At first, you think you’re inside Freddy Mercury. Soon, you realise Freddy Mercury is inside you.”

I am the sole occupant of the six-story Freddy Mercury building, my world, my prison, and my home. I tread the balconies, ride the lift up and down for hours, and stalk the corridors, where a thousand images of Freddy gaze down at me, moustaches bristling.

Every day, I mark the passage of days with a five hundred Franc Mont Blanc pen. I stumble like Jack Torrance every night through the hotel’s capillarian corridors. Lift doors open and drench me in floods of red wine, pigtailed Swiss girls ride emission-free electric scooters around the corridors, doors open onto brick walls, and the building morphs and shifts around me.

My attempts at drawing a map are repeatedly foiled when rooms I once visited no longer exist – new floors loom beneath me. Once, I heard someone else crying out from the lift, but when the door opened, no one was there, only my reflection, staring back at me from the elevator’s mirror.

As I write this, the Swiss sun is beating down with all its force. The crags of the distant mountains glow above the silent lake, and my skin turns from the colour of a Rizla to the colour of a Raw under a swollen orange sun.

Gainfully employed, physically healthy, yet starved of human contact, I wander the streets of Montreux crying out in a high-pitched sing-song. Mothers pull their children away, yank down blinds and shutters, and old men mutter and bury their heads in their beer steins. I tread a lonely path by the lake’s edge, shouting curses at the vile effigies that guard the water’s edge.

I gather 60 Francs daily for a single pain au chocolat, which I eat in small pieces over eight hours. I stare at photos of myself before the quarantine, struggling to recognise the joyful eyes and youthful smile. Time has become a thick fondue, days a blur of treacherous memories, viscous seconds and weeks that fly by like swallows.

I am on the outside looking in. Between me and this quiet Swiss urbane life is a veil I can never pierce, not if I spoke perfect French, smoked a pack of Gauloises a day, and ate fondue with an army knife. I am l’etranger anglaise, the ghost in the shell, a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a ski jacket. 

At night, dead silence reigns, except for the ominous hourly tolling of the bell in the town Church. From the roof of the Freddy, I observe the dying hum of the lamps and the tranquillity of the darkened town. Last night, I noticed something strange—a twinkling light from the mountains, far away and hard to make out.

Something is burning in the darkness.

I fear the worst is yet to come.