Mental Diplopia: A Tor.com Original

By Julianna Baggott

There seems to be a strange new disease spreading around the world. People are getting stuck in the past in mostly happy memories. They are straddling the line between now and then. Although the disease ends in death, the infected seem to go willingly. The epidemiologist seeks the answers to this viral mystery while she is falling in love and yet trying not to get infected, in Julianna Baggott's Mental Diplopia.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780765397430

Julianna Baggott

Julianna Baggott's work has appeared in such publications as The Southern Review, Ms. magazine, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2000, and read on NPR's Talk of the Nation. The nationally bestselling author of The Miss America Family and Girl Talk, as well a book of poems entitled This Country of Mothers, she teaches at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee with her husband and three children. Visit her website at www.juliannabaggott.com.

Book preview

I was among the first group of epidemiologists to be called. Wearing the white contamination suit—what has since become a second skin—I walked into Patient Zero’s quarantined hospital room, slipped into the sterilized tent surrounding her bed, and saw a beautiful, distracted, wide-eyed contentedness.

Patient Zero was a seventy-two-year-old woman who had been polishing a coffee table when she heard children loudly singing an old Russian lullaby she hadn’t heard since her own childhood. It was called Bayu Bayushki Bayu. It sounded so perfect that she first walked to the radio, thinking that somehow it had turned on by itself. But her radio was off. She unplugged it for good

Reviews for Mental Diplopia

[theidlewoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the not-so-distant future, an incurable epidemic is sweeping the world: irrevocably fatal but, strangely, not resented by its sufferers. For this virus brings you to death by steeping you in one moment from your past, often happy. Those who die do so in the presence of long-lost family and friends, reliving a moment of sheer joy. Around them, epidemiologists move in sealed suits, trying to understand the disease. As the survivors are driven into ever smaller retreats, our narrator, her colleagues and her lover Oliver continue to fight against the virus - even as security cameras reveal its cause. And Baggott asks us to think: how do we react, in this apocalyptic scenario? Do we fight on, regardless, facing the potential horror of utter loneliness in a deserted world? Do we try to understand? Or do we bravely go out and greet our doom, in all its glory? A beautiful and thought-provoking read.