You get the last seat on a bus. NYC to DC. There’s someone in the window seat next to you, but that’s okay. You’re grateful to get any seat at all. Plus it’s an early morning bus. You’ll be sleeping the whole trip, so it doesn’t matter. You settle down, you stow your things, you happen to turn and look more closely at the person alongside.

He is wearing a face mask. More specifically, he is wearing a mask over his mouth. A hygiene mask, the type worn by medical professionals. This mask covers his mouth.

But not his nose.

This is odd. (But the matter-of-factness with which he simply sits there, without controversy, works against your assessment.) You consider whether this is odd. (Mouth masks aren’t illegal. Who’s to say? You put a tarp over the pool but not the doggie bowls, right? Surely there are countries where mouth masks abound, or where they don’t, because they are reserved for clerks and heptathletes.) You consider whether this is something you have grounds to deem odd.

You nod and smile. He nods and maybe smiles, but you’re not sure because, well, the mask. You settle deeper into your seat, and adjust the seat back, and settle again into your seat, and close your eyes, and turn your head away from the man in 9A.

He couldn’t possibly pose a peril. If he did, he’d have been directed by his doctor and/or the ranking public health official to cover both nose and mouth. The fact that he wears the mask over only his mouth means the mask is a discretionary matter. It protects him from the world, not the world from him. He is a weakling. Not a danger.

Or it means this man is virulent as all hell, and he’s lowered the mask off his nose because it’s scratchy and uncomfortable and notwithstanding his doctor’s direction. You consider all the times you’ve disregarded a doctor’s advice, and increasingly you’re confident you’re sitting next to 170 pounds of contagion with a purulent throat angling into a pair of rifle-bore nostrils for launching disease straight into your face.

You shift in your seat, you resettle your body against it, you take in a deep calming breath, you realize too late this is exactly the circumstance that calls for a moratorium against deep breaths, and you start breathing breaths so shallow you’re sure the only air they implicate is the layer already coating your face, and you picture a toddler who has posed a question but not yet heard an answer because that’s who knows from breathing shallowly, and after three of these ridiculous expectant-toddler inhalations you achieve sudden certainty that there is no way in fuck you’ll be able to sleep with a person sitting just inches from you with a mask over his mouth but not his nose. You regret profoundly the deep calming breath of a minute ago. Indeed, it is dishonest to call it something as calm and deliberative as regret, because already it has flourished into full-blown mania, ignited by hot thrilling pulses of indignation and fueled by waves of howling despair, each of which you’re sure corresponds to an egg laid by the colony of antibiotic-resistant burr-tailed fireworms already feasting on your basal ganglia.

You turn back to your seatmate, nod, and smile, and he nods and maybe- smiles back. You decide to take this head on.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing that mask over your nose as well?” you ask.

He answers in a foreign language that runs plain and forthright, and he could be saying, “No, it’s not necessary to cover my nose for some medically valid reason that ensures against any risk to your health,” or “You’re absolutely right, I’m so glad our situations are not reversed because, believe me, this is not a condition you want to be contracting,” or “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English, and I don’t understand what you said, but it’s funny because two or three of the words you said sound familiar because forty other people have said to me exactly what you said to me and in the very same inquiring tone, so it must be a valid concern, and one I just wish I could comprehend in the slightest.”

You try again, this time putting the universal language of pantomime to work for you, and you make a mask out of your palm and hover it over your nose and say, “Your nose? Mask over your nose, too?” And your seatmate smiles broadly (you know this because his eyes crinkle like those of a fat uncle getting breakfast in bed) and says a few words in his matter-of-fact tongue (it is unfair that this stranger has recourse to a language so frank and benign and self-evident that the least dissatisfaction with what is said in it—no matter what is said in it—seems churlish), and he, too, puts the universal language of pantomime to work for him and gives you not just a thumbs-up but a vigorous thumbs-up that pumps up and down three times.

You nod for lack of any other response, you cross your arms against your chest to keep your hands from wandering into puddles of invisible plague, you turn toward the aisle and moreover hang your head into it so that your nostrils draw plumes of air from the channel running lengthwise down the middle of the bus and do not interfere with the miasma that bloats around your seatmate like a gravid cloud, and as you do this, your seatmate

coughs

and though you happen to catch only the most sidelong of glances you are prepared to swear that he covered his nose with the back of his hand as he coughed. He did not sneeze. He coughed. Yet he covered his nose when he did so. Why would coughing compel a merely weak and susceptible person to cover his nose with the back of his hand?

For the next five minutes you close your eyes and will yourself to ignore it all.

For the next five hours you know the worst sleep of your life.

You dream a roiling froth of dreams and dreams. A person awake has, at any given moment, only two or three senses at the forefront of her awareness. Walking downstairs in the morning, she might smell toast and see the stairs drop away and feel each riser press into the sole of a sleep-tender foot. While dreaming, the same person may find herself acutely aware of all five senses at once—the creak of each descending step, too, and the sour salt of freshly woken mouth. But normal dreams are not what you experience. For the next five hours, you are keenly aware not simply of all five senses, but multiple five-sense layers, whole pallets of them, and not simply congruent layers consisting each of a set of sense impressions specific to a real-world object or experience but rather layers that are themselves disjointed—you feel against your skin the sheen of polished pew while hearing photocopiers and smelling the lead and smoke and grass of a shooting range—layers and layers, so that you’re aswim in a fractured syrup, big dreams calving small dreams spawning big dreams yielding more dreams.

• You dream sixteen dreamlets. They are permutations: masklessness, mask over nose or mouth, mask over nose and mouth. In Dreamlet 1, neither of you wears any mask at all. This is the sweetest dreamlet; it is not asking for much—it is what one might expect from a normal everyday life. It is also the cruelest dreamlet, because you understand with a break of your heart that it is pure and impossible fantasy. Dreamlet 9 is the reversal: you wear a mask over only the mouth; he wears no mask at all; you wish he wore a mask over his eyes to contain their acid suspicion. In Dreamlet 16, you both wear masks over your nose and mouth, and you’re both content as babies.
• You dream about the foremost archetypes of the masked: bandits and surgeons. The first only threatens repeatedly to wound you and the second does just that. The second vows to do no harm and the first does no such thing.
• You dream about how potentates—governors, cardinals, executives— invariably wash before using the bathroom and not after, because for those of a certain station it is not about keeping their wretched parts off the world, but rather keeping the wretched world off their parts. About how confidence lives insensate to others’ perceptions and how wisdom takes them into abundant account, which is why the soul with both is a rarity. About how true love means, above all else, wishing your loved one dead, for the certainty that you and not she will bear the agony of terminal abandonment.

Five hours later, you stir. You open your eyes. It takes a few seconds to orient, to focus. To remember. You need not turn your head to see what you’re most interested in. Because in your sleep you’ve turned yourself around, and now your head faces—in fact, hangs over—the window seat alongside. You don’t think it could be worse. But it is. Because you look into that window seat and your seatmate is gone. The seat is empty. The stupefactions come one at a time. (They are stupefactions, not questions. Questions are words framed articulately for an interrogatory purpose, whereas what you’re harboring are ineffable dread and perplexity looking for a level place to pool.) Why would the seat be empty? You remember. New York to Washington, yes, but with stops in Wilmington and Baltimore. How could the seat be empty? You look down at your own knees, as if this were necessary, but of course looking is beside the point because your knees are braced hard against the back of the seat in front of you, the knees so squarely tight against the seat back, the thighs so rigid behind the knees, that it’s like your upper legs are an essential part of the bus’s infrastructure and in the event of collision would safeguard the chassis by going some way to absorb the impact. Could he have climbed forward or backward out of his seat and exited to the aisle that way? No. There are passengers in both seats ahead and in both seats behind.

And now, having betrayed yourself by letting yourself relax and slump all the way around and siphon into your lungs great rivers of air from the poison reservoir hanging over 9A, there will be punishments. You consider what you will say during the interrogations in sterile white hard- surfaced rooms to which you’ll surely be subjected, as much for your own good as for the safety of the nation. You consider what you will say, post-recovery, during the prime time news interviews, the brilliantined anchors no less brutal than the lab-coated inquisitors, a gauzy filter to obscure your disfigurement, no available filter to obscure the ignominy.

All you can say is this: “I was in 9B. The man they’re calling Patient Zero, he was in 9A. I don’t know much more. Except that, at some point, probably not wanting to disturb me in my sleep, he must have clambered over me. He must have been inches from my face. At some point I was straddled by the man in 9A.”

And the newsperson interrupts gently and thus infuriatingly, waking you finally from your daze, and says, “Sir? Sir. Let’s be clear about this for the folks at home. You were the one sitting in 9A. You, sir, are Patient Zero. Don’t you see?”

And then you wake up and a face is in your face and the man in 9A is straddling you at this very moment.

And as you reach out and shove him away but fail because your hand flits right through him, you realize you are, like any point on the line between New York and Washington, like any someone, a something without dimension. Infinitesimal. Valid only in a relative sense, for contingent purposes of reference and personnel rosters and Nielsen aggregations and fleeting acknowledgments from your loves and acquaintances—which is to say, nullities themselves—but without, in any meaningful sense, substance, or even existence, and plainly without significance. This is a trilling scream of a realization, and it jolts you clean awake.

And then you stop. You force things to stop. Because while you yearn to rise back up, to drag yourself out of the syrup world into the crisp one of air and logic and folks at home, you realize there is no resolution, no destination, because when you reach the surface what will you do then? Breathe deep? Isn’t that what got you into this trouble in the first place?

You will go from dreamlet to dreamlet without end. Molting one only to hatch into the next. Forever. What you’re reading is a dreamlet. All that you remember is a dreamlet. This story is the real contagion. Those sleep-tender feet of yours will never leave it.