How Do Plague Stories End?

In the literature of contagion, when society is finally free of disease, it’s up to humanity to decide how to begin again.
A man in the shadows filled with rats and eyes reaching out to turn the page on a large book
Illustration by Boris Lyppens

Last winter, when the gloom first fell, I saw an old woman, her back bent like a shepherd’s crook, walking watchfully through the freezing rain. She navigated the slush as she crossed the road, in black boots that she’d lined with plastic bags against the wet and the cold. She wore a mask the color of flesh, unnaturally smooth, but this was before everyone was wearing masks, and, at first, I couldn’t tell what it was: she looked as though she had no nose and no mouth. Closer, I could see the thing for itself, made—she must have stitched it herself—out of an old beige underwire bra, one cup cut off and turned upside down, the wire crimped onto the bridge of her nose, the thin nylon straps cinched around the back of her head. I stepped toward her, thinking I ought to say something: Was she O.K.? Instantly her eyes widened and she turned away, quickening her pace. I never saw her again.

Not long after that, I started writing an essay about the literature of contagion, stories about plagues. Days, I read books. Nights, I sewed masks out of scraps of fabric and rubber bands, with paper towels for batting, folded inside like panty liners. I wondered about how plague stories begin, and what happens next. “All the world is topsy-turvy,” a character in one story says. “And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.” Humans lose their humanity, according to the usual plot. As the pestilence spreads, people grow fearful of one another; families closet themselves in their houses. Stores take in their wares; schoolhouses bolt their doors. The rich flee; the poor sicken. The hospitals fill. The arts wither. Society descends into chaos, government into anarchy. Finally, in the last stage of this seemingly inevitable regression, in which history runs in reverse, books and even the alphabet are forgotten, knowledge is lost, and humans are reduced to brutes. In Octavia Butler’s 1984 novel, “Clay’s Ark,” set in the year 2021, the mutant survivors of an alien pathogen from Proxima Centauri 2 are “no longer human.” Lately, waiting for a shot of a vaccine, I’m hoping for another ending. Do the humans get to be human again?

Every plague leaves its mark on the world: crosses in our graveyards, blots of ink on our imaginations. Edgar Allan Poe had witnessed the ravages of cholera in Philadelphia, and he likely knew the story of how, in Paris, in 1832, the disease had struck at a ball, where guests turned violet blue beneath their masks. In Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” from 1842, Prince Prospero (“happy and dauntless and sagacious”) has fled a pestilence—a plague that stains its victims’ faces crimson—to live in grotesque luxury with a thousand of his noblemen and women in a secluded abbey, behind walls gated with iron. At a lavish masquerade ball, a tall, gaunt guest arrives to ruin their careless fun. He is dressed as a dead man: “The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat.” He is dressed as the Red Death itself: “His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.” Everyone dies, and because this is Poe, they die as an ebony clock tolls midnight (after which, even the clock dies): “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

More often, a remnant of life survives—a reminder of just how much has been lost. In Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague,” published not long before the 1918 flu pandemic, a contagion kills nearly everyone on the planet; the story is set in 2073, sixty years after the imagined outbreak, when a handful survive, unlettered, “skin-clad and barbaric.” One very, very old man who, a half century before, had been an English professor at Berkeley predicts good news: “We are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb toward civilization.” Still, he isn’t terrifically optimistic, noting, “It will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb. We fell so hopelessly far. If only one physicist or one chemist had survived! But it was not to be, and we have forgotten everything.” For this reason, he has built a sort of ark—a library—hidden in a cave. “I have stored many books,” he tells his illiterate grandsons. “In them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a key to the alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print. Some day men will read again.”

Some day men will read again. The first thing they’ll read, presumably, is the very book that chronicles what happened, in which a prophetic, Job-like narrator who has endured the disaster undertakes the sacred duty of addressing posterity. Like Ishmael in “Moby-Dick,” the survivor awkwardly leaves behind a manuscript—a message in a bottle, the very last book. “Yet I alive!” are the final words of Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” an account of the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague. Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” was published in 1826, eight years after the publication of “Frankenstein,” and between two cholera pandemics. In it, a man who believes himself to be the sole survivor of a worldwide contagion pens an account of the devastation—called “The History of the Last Man”—and then sets off in a boat whose scant stores include the works of Homer and Shakespeare. “But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me,” he writes, in the book’s last lines, “and in any port I can renew my stock.” He disappears in his “tiny bark,” as if the world were beginning all over again.

Marriage-plot novels end with weddings; plague-plot novels end with funerals (so long as there’s anyone left to bury the dead). The reader of Jane Austen’s “Emma” never gets to find out how Emma Woodhouse’s marriage to Mr. Knightley pans out; the reader of “The Last Man” never gets to see whether life, after the plague, goes on. Still, the literature of contagion tends to end, like Shelley’s, with a new beginning, a Lockean blank slate—and, sometimes, even a hint that the evils of the old ways might not come back. As Biden’s campaign put it, “Build back better!”

In “A Journal of the Plague Year,” the pestilence, magnificently, passes. It is God’s doing, not the work of any medicine, Defoe’s narrator concludes. “Even the Physicians themselves were surprised at it,” he writes (although the public-health measures taken in London, including the quarantining of the sick, had made a great deal of difference). The disease retreats so suddenly that people “cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast.” One man, venturing forth, sees a crowd and throws his hands into the air, saying, “Lord, what an alteration is here! Why, last Week I came along here, and hardly any Body was to be seen.” Another man cries, “’Tis all wonderful, ’tis all a Dream.” Defoe, too, finishes his “account of this calamitous year” by giving thanks; his book is, like the lifting of the plague, “a visible Summons to us all to Thankfulness.”

Harder to bear, if you are fairly desperately clinging to the promise of building back better, are stories in which the problem, at bottom, isn’t pestilence but politics. José Saramago’s novel “Blindness,” from 1995, about a plague that reduces everyone’s vision to whiteness, ends with the blind regaining their sight and opening their eyes to find a world destroyed. But the story continues in a sequel, called “Seeing,” from 2004. Four years after the plague of blindness, the people in the capital vote in a municipal election. Yet most of them cast ballots that they’ve left blank. Somehow, the blank votes look like another plague. “What is happening here could cross the border and spread like a modern-day black death,” the minister of foreign affairs says. “You mean blank death, don’t you,” the Prime Minister says. Eventually, these leaders decide the blank votes must be the result of a conspiracy—a political contagion—and lay siege to the city. A sniper is hired to shoot the only woman in the capital who never lost her sight, who remained utterly innocent and truth-seeing. All along, the sightless government itself had been the real, enduring plague.

The basket on my radiator by the front door is filled with cast-off masks. They’re made of white paper and blue tissue and cotton—floral, plaid, plain. Most of them smell like sweat and spit and, less, of laundry soap. They are despised. Outside, people walk past, mourning, grieving, waiting, hoping. The last snow has melted. Even the slush is gone.

“In those days when the plague seemed to be retreating, slinking back into the obscure lair from which it had stealthily emerged, at least one person in the town viewed the retreat with consternation,” Albert Camus writes in “The Plague,” from 1947. The death count keeps dropping, but one greedy and hard-hearted man, Cottard, who has profited from the plague, and failed to help the plague-stricken, begins to panic. “Do you really think it can stop like that, all of a sudden?” he wonders. The people of the town inch toward what they call “a return to normal life,” like animals emerging from a cave after a storm. Not Cottard. “He seemed unable to resume the obscure, humdrum life he had led before the epidemic. He stayed in his room and had his meals sent up from a near-by restaurant. Only at nightfall did he venture forth to make some small purchases.” The gates of the city are about to be opened. The people are rejoicing. “But Cottard didn’t smile. Was it supposed, he asked, that the plague wouldn’t have changed anything and the life of the town would go on as before, exactly as if nothing had happened?” Cottard gets out a gun and begins shooting at people in the street. He has gone mad.

The narrator of “The Plague” knows what Cottard knew: that the plague pulled back the mask that hides the selfish, ruthless, viciousness of humans. But he also knows something that Cottard did not: that this is not the last mask, that beneath it lies a true face, the face of generosity and kindness, mercy and love. At the end of “The Plague,” its narrator unmasks himself: he reveals that he is a doctor, who, having cared for the disease’s sufferers, resolved to write, “so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” More things, human after all.