New York City is a city of humans. They walk about the streets pursuing human activities: working, shopping, eating, sleeping.
Some may know, however, of the existence of a special portal located near the East River. A Black Hole of sorts, it acts as a gateway to the peculiar Planet Enicidem. Some humans travel to this gateway on foot, tumbling in of their own free will. Others go more unwillingly, and a few even arrive in specialized vessels outfitted with flashing lights and cacophonous bells. Upon arrival, visitors enter an ordered chaos and are promptly arranged by the estimated proximity of their impending death. Occasionally, a human’s belly distends and bloats until they’re large enough to be pulled in by Enicidem’s gravitational field. They are sucked into the portal and closely watched until they burst, only to be discharged back to Earth with a small being possessing disproportionately large howls.
Planet Enicidem is a place of peril and wonder, and its denizens are a strange folk. They train for hours, willingly immersing themselves in the heady, heavy gas of the planet’s atmosphere. If they survive, their brains swell with obscure and mysterious facts about viscera, electrolytes, pathogens, and more. The blue, pajama-like garb is strictly regulated and routinely blasted with the harshest of chemicals. Each citizen of Enicidem possesses a treasured white jacket, and as they mature the sparkling cloth absorbs their wisdom and grows in length. Enicidem has a language of its own, and a visitor may marvel at its acronymic lexicon and undecipherable, coded phrases.
The day-to-day activities of Enicidem’s residents are highly unusual. They are required to spend hours sending missives into the Epic motherboard, a hungry chasm that feeds on intimate and tasty morsels of daily data. Enicidem’s residents form sacred bonds with the visitors, and the utmost care is spent creating PEARL adornments and weaving links of trust, compassion, and respect. These bonds lay the foundation to allow the residents to perform barbaric and daring acts, with great risk and greater reward. Tubing snakes into limbs and steals (or replaces) liquids, toxins irradicate unruly cells, and chemicals hunt down the body’s unwelcome invaders. Visitors may even return to Earth lacking bits of themselves that were sacrificed to sharp and gleaming things in cold and spotless rooms. All these acts are pursued in the name of the War on Disease and the Quest for Health which are said to provide the fuel that heats the molten core of the planet.
Sometimes there are visitors who leave Planet Enicidem too permanently or too soon. Some go where no one can follow, traversing the veiled realm from which physical beings are barred. Some pass Enicidem’s threshold to return to Earth against all pleas to the contrary. Thoughts reach for them, gloved hands extending to heal, and although the visitor is gone, Enicidem holds their stories. There are thousands of such stories, but here I will record one. A human with HIV, well controlled for 20 years, who stopped his medications 3 years ago after a Thanksgiving dinner. His family sat down to fine china and he sat down to a paper plate, barred from holding his little niece’s hand while his family said grace. When he walked out of his family home, he gave up on his medications and his life. Hopes soared when he walked back through Enicidem’s portal only to sink when he left less than 10 hours later. The denizens cursed the callous boundaries of the two worlds. Lifesaving, miraculous medications remained on this planet while the human was left at the mercy of 11 CD4 T-cells, a viral load of 65,400, and cruel stigma.
Such is the nature of Enicidem, a planet of sorrow and joy, peril and salvation, marvel and defeat.