As the evening Pacific winds flow over the downtown high rises and push south through his Balboa Park neighborhood, a young man sits alone on his front porch tiredly waiting for his Valentines Day miracle. “Before all this,” as seemed to preclude nearly every first-date statement he’d made since last March, Valentines Day had been his favorite time of year. The bearish acknowledgement of love and affection. And, yes, the decorations and sexy costumes were fun but, for him, it had been about a milestone. Valentines Day meant that his beloved San Diego Chargers Football Club was soon mobilizing for their small school pro day visits and the offseason evaluation of potential draft picks had always made him giddy.

Until 2017, that is, when that very Chargers Football Club ceased residing in San Diego to rehome just two hours (depending on traffic) up the road. Not coincidently, 2017 was also the year then-United States Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, secretly split his federal duties to sit on a Chinese joint venture board and, in a retrospectively poor attempt to reach a compromise in the midst of the US-Chinese trade war that threatened many of his personal investments in the middle kingdom, Mr Ross campaigned for the US administration to disband the Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit (responsible for pandemic responses) and remove over two-thirds of the disease experts the US had in Chinese labs. Both of these decisions had led to the dire situation presented before our subject this evening. The Chargers move more of a years-long attack on his mental health; Mr Ross’s selfish concessions only recently effecting this San Diegan personally.

But effected he was. There had been few responses from his motions to potential mates and none who commented on his spirited defense of this Hallmark Holiday. Sure it had been windy and this was one of the colder February Sundays but he’d hoped the spirit of Valentine’s would have meant more to these women. It meant more only to him it seemed. If he was the last lone Valentine’s Day romantic, sitting alone on his porch playing carelessly with his Padres cap as a lone sheet of discarded red tissue paper blew down the street, then everyone else had already joined Walgreens and was already on to Christmas season. He looked down at a heart shaped box of candy on his lap — purchased at Walgreens, in fact, at a discount because the stock team was already making space for candy canes — and removed the lid to snag a….a piece, whatever it was. Candy always made him feel better. He removed the paper and took a bite.

Peering inside at the cherry liquor filling, he tasted nothing.
The walk to the hospital, he joked to himself as he arrived at the door, was basically the 2020 Jacksonville Jaguars. After noticing his nonexistent sense of smell, he had hopped down his front steps and clicked his heels as he turned to march the four blocks down the sidewalk, feeling generally optimistic that his youthful stature and single-symptom may suggest that his own case of the, as he laughed when the neighbor would refer to it, ‘WuFlu’ would likely be as unceremonious as those of millions of other young men. But that jolt of optimism would soon turn to a stubbed toe on the sidewalk; a randomly-spraying fire hydrant; four consecutive houses of barking dogs charging him at the fence; and finally a road closure detour that sent him not only off course but, per AppleMaps, in pursuit of an entirely different medical facility.

Though arguably better than trying to maneuver through an emergency water main replacement operation at a busy intersection, the new route took him across a marshy outpost that he was amazed to have never before noticed in the city. Then again, he admitted as he wiped his feet before entry, there was much about this town that he hadn’t explored due to a general lack of interest. He tracked in marsh mud as he approached the intake desk.

Priorities, pandemics, and a hopeless romantic. A man who thinks the greatest challenge will produce the grandest reward though he has never received even a parting gift for his seductive efforts. But in a year when everything is different and on a day where longshots are winners, perhaps the most unlikely place to visit on Valentine’s Day is the most obvious place for the hopeless romantic? Or are the terms ‘hopeless’ and ‘desperate’ more synonymic when investigations surrounding loss of taste occur in a place where neither time nor romance are linear; in a place….like the Twilight Zone.

Having completing the necessary paperwork and ‘having a seat’, forty minutes into his visit a nurse opened the door and called for the next patient. The lone attendee in the waiting area, he was already flipping closed his Microsoft Surface Pro tablet while she perused the clipboard before her.

“Lucas? Luke S.? I can’t….I can’t read the name here.”

He politely held up his hand in acknowledgement and corrected the nurse on the pronunciation of his name as he stood on the scale — where he performed above expectations in both the height and weight results. Though he had knocked out a few pushups last Wednesday so who could be sure?

“Our touchless thermometer is out of order so I’m gonna have to stick you with Old Mercury here. Given that we’ve just met, I’ll ask you pull down your mask instead of your pants this time.” He could feel her magnetic smile even through her blue and white daisy printed mask.

She complimented his smile while the thermometer rested under his tongue, telling him a little about how hard quarantining had been and how difficult men had been when they found out she was a nurse, lamenting that she now understood how veterans felt to be both an item of interest and also looked through as someone with invisible mental or, in her case medical, baggage that no smart dating interest wants to invite into their lives.

Once she removed the thermometer — an unexciting 98.8 Fahrenheit — he giggled back a quite-untimely response to her gag about him dropping his pants. A groaner, he could tell, even as it rolled off his tongue, she responded with a blushing positive affirmation and told him the wait for a swab would be a bit longer but she saw he had his reading material there and, by the way, what was it that he was working on? A boutique online bloggist, he proudly presented the nurse with his “about the author” to which she seemed quite impressed and promised to check out his work on her next break before a ringing phone in the hallway fully sheared her attention from him.

He sat in the exam room reviewing his About page and groaning that his most recent work, which is surely where she would start, was published in September. He was reading it and wondering how much she would or would not get about his sense of humor when a young aid cracked the door and asked to move him to another room for his swab and results.

“Quarantine. Sorry. We need to practice distancing until your instant test returns a negative,” he explained as he escorted his patient to the room at the end of the hall and flicked the unresponsive light switch, “Takes a minute for these old circuits to work but the light will be on shortly. Have a seat and the doctor will be in soon,” his demeanor went almost unrecognizably soft as he pulled closed the door behind him, “Mr Funny Writer Know It All Guy.”

“I’m sorry but is this related to my insurance because I spoke with customer service and –”

SLAM

— Door Flies Open —

Two completely gowned bodies entered the room as the light bulbs still strained to illuminate much more than the general shapes in the room. Feeling sweat trailing down his brow, his stomach developed a pit of uncertainty. Mumbles, hiccups, and grunts seemed to be all that came from the two bodies huddled in the corner, ripping off the paper covering disposable medical accessories and snapping on and off latex gloves.

They approached their patient who was now laying back in his examination chair, awaiting his own experience of this nasal sample collection. Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he felt his arms pressured down as leather straps immobilized his wrists against the chair.

“Very [hic] good, Ty. Do not forget the legs and chest.”

He would not forget.

In shock more than fear (though the proportions were changing by the second), he scoured the room to make sense of this sample collection. Having been in the dark for so long, even the minimal illumination provided him that the men in his room had disgowned and now stood with their back to him as they wheeled over a small medical supply table. The room, he also noticed, was an absolute dump. A prick hit his neck and the assistant offered his first words of the procedue.

“For you.”

“Don’t speak to our HILARIOUS guest with such manners, Zombie Tyrod Taylor! Don’t you know who this master of the written word is?! Don’t you understand how funny [hic] FUNNY our patient today ish?! Funny and romantic, let’s [hic] let’s see if he LOVES this.”

Jerking his head side to side, slowly building a clear picture of the details surrounding him, the patient jerked his chin to his chest and forced shut his eyes as the bright exam bulb over his chair clicked to life, emitting a low and consistent buzz. The steps around him continued though the sounds of the instrument preparation seemed to have ceased. Intermittent barks from the, he assumed, doctor at his assistant did nothing to either calm him nor educated him on the circumstances. He wished he had never opened that box of candy.

Breaking his paralysis of fear — but still unable to break the confines of the chair’s ties — he broke through with one question. “Who are you?”

The assistant yanked down the patient’s mask, causing him to jerk his head away at the putrid smell that engulfed the room. His eyes involuntarily opening to see the decrepit walls and soiled floor in all their glory, a blue and white daisy printed mask laying next to the medical instruments, its blood stained and ripped elastic hanging off the side of the tray. The doctor approached the chair, presenting his hand first as his finger morphed into a protruding instrument that, he feared, looked primed to reach further than just the back of his nasal cavity: “I guess you could just say I am An Old Friend Coming Home.”

Risk and Pain. Often correlated but never identical in scale. When hopeless turns to helpless, one may wonder if the search for true love is worth the potential for its antithesis. For some, the choice may be obvious. For others, the choice has already been made and their true destiny is simply waiting to be played out as soon as their romantic hopes take a detour through the marshy outposts of….The Twilight Zone.