The Plague Diaries 2: The Ghost of Saturday Night

Saturday night in Lausanne, the streets are empty, except for us three, sloshing paper cups filled with red wine, inching our way through the streets. It’s the 15th of March, and the quarantine hasn’t come down in full force yet, but as we walk the streets, it becomes clear that Lausanne is a ghost town.

I am with two Americans and one French girl – the two Americans, Alex, and Cat, are talented cooks, and we are all stuffed with sausage, pasta and several bottles of red. In hindsight, going out might have been foolish, even irresponsible. Still, it seemed worth seeing the city like this, deserted, silent, an anticlimactic apocalypse, with no bodies on the streets, just closed doors and silent shutters.

We pass through a subway station and hear the thump of music. As we descend the stairs, we see a crowd of hooded men dancing to Swiss electro house, which is blasting from a portable speaker box. The air is thick with weed. They shout out hello as we pass by.

We continue, through the Flon district, usually alive and buzzing with bars and clubs. It’s dead silent. We hear a shout – a small group of men wave at us. “Salut! Voulez-vous acheter une bier?” The Swiss instinct to profit from catastrophe has not yet been extinguished.

We walk on. The only visible humans are hooded drug dealers, trying to make eye contact as we walk by, and a group of about fifteen police in yellow high-vis jackets standing by their motorbikes in the town square.

We decide to head home, but as we set off, we hear music coming from the smoking area of a bar. Outside, a group of people are dancing. They beckon us over and issue each of us with, what else, an ice-cold Corona. One even proudly produces a box of limes. We light cigarettes, crack beers, and drink – even though this isn’t technically illegal, it still feels strange.

When one of us drops a Corona, which explodes into shards of glass and beer, there’s a moment of uncertainty. But barely a moment passes, the glass is swept away, and a fresh new cold bottle is pressed into our hands. These people are here for a good time. Swiss civility prevails.

One man is heavily drunk, coked to the gills, dead shark eyes lolling in his head. He’s friendly but schizophrenic, jumping from subject to subject, almost shouting, a vein pulsing in his temple. He switches between French, Portuguese, English, and German, sometimes mid-sentence, and his topics include the virus, how he doesn’t respect the virus, the benefits of his Brazilian nationality, football, his wife and daughter (presumably both at home) and his affinity for light beer.

Suddenly, he seems to see Alex for the first time. Alex stands 6’7” tall, a Viking of a man, towering over the diminutive Brazilian (and me) with ease.

“Mein Gott,” mutters the man mutters in accented German, staring up at Alex. “ So Gross!… so viel Fleisch…”

“So much meat”… a strange sentiment at any time, but given the apocalyptic energy, it’s distinctly creepy. We have several weeks before we will be forced to eat one another, but it’s hard to escape the impression that Alex is turning into a chicken drumstick before the man’s eyes.

I watch a man in the corner. He pours some white powder onto his arm and, with his girlfriend’s assistance, manages to sniff it, although flecks of it are caught on his greasy arm hairs. The bars are closed, the toilet seats and loo-roll holder surfaces are gone, and now this man is reduced to taking drugs off his own body. The show must go on; life finds a way.

If ever there was a signal that it was time to go home, this was it, and we take our leave, while the music and party continue behind us.

We arrive home, pour glasses of Mezcal, chased with salt and ground crickets. I stare moodily from the apartment’s balcony across the lake, the surface rippling with lights.

I pick bits of cricket out of my teeth, washing them down with shots of the clear, burning liquid. This may be a vision of the future, I muse. The Burmese were ahead of us all – I should get used to the taste of insects sooner rather than later.

I lay down on the sofa, my eyes drifting closed. Preparing to sleep, I hear a voice echoing in my head.

So Viel Fleisch…