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            Walking through the ancient street of Spitalgasse, one sees a baffling sight. The once jammed shops are almost bare. People stare, then hurry on, run off to empty roads and fields. The tobacconist beckons to passersby, but none will come beneath his sage green sign. In the silver shop, routinely bustling with gentlemen buying baubles for their ladies, few move in and out. It is the same at the fish stall, the store of pestled spice, the shop for mending shoes. And those scarce customers who enter shops avoid one another as if each were stricken with the plague.

            Indeed, each infected man and woman has plague, but not a plague of germs. It is a plague of time. To be precise, a thickening of time. For when someone is tainted by the illness, hours are added to his waking world, until he has too much of time. His clocks move sluggishly, his days drip on and on. And with the glut of time comes that thing most feared of all, comes boredom.

            Last week, for instance, a woman returned from the apothecary after buying ointment for her leg. Although she tried to move about with care, keeping distance from others in her way, by chance she brushed against a man galloping down Kramgasse. For five days, nothing changed. She rushed to work, rushed home, then off to work again. On the sixth, the thickening began. Seconds turned to minutes, minutes turned to hours. Time appeared to pull apart while making folds of nothingness. Each day, she finished breakfast by eight fifteen. Accounting ledgers done by noon. Then, the vacant afternoons, the evenings, night. Time waits, and waits, and waits. What to do? She walks across her sitting room, across again, again. She looks at dust motes in the air. For an hour, she squirms and shifts upon her chair. Another oozes lazily as the Zytglogge plays its melancholy melody of time. Old photographs amuse a fraction of an hour. She checks the clock. More hours piled on hours, dinner, bed so far away. Outside her beveled window, little moves. Time drags on and on with nothing gained and nothing done. She dares not venture from her house, afraid of blighting others with the glut of time. At night, she wails to pass the time, in vain.

            Physicians say the illness started with a man from Fribourg, visiting for a day. He stayed the night on Amthausgasse, shared breakfast with the owner of the inn, and coughed and sneezed. Then it carried to the bakery on Chutzenstrabe, then Gargenweg, and on.  

            Some doubt this explanation. They say the illness came from God, displeased with rampant sinfulness. They pray.

            Some few souls applaud the slower life. When ill, they wallow in the folds of time and revel in the languid hours. They gaze with pleasure at the shadow of the sun, which slowly slides along the floor. They listen to the stillness in the air, inhale the scent of cinnamon. They read, they think, they dream. They wander through the mansions of their minds. They muse upon themselves, their former lives, the lives they hope to live. In afternoon, they stand upon their balconies and whisper sweet condolences to all who rush below. And when their plague has spent its course? They choose to stay within their homes, grown large with time and life. They celebrate the silences.

            And so it is in every town. The population divides in two: those with plague or past the plague, and those not yet exposed. Some say if needed they will shun all others to avoid the thing. They say that slower, thickened time is pointless time. For safety, they remain at home. Others say that they would rather have the plague than lead a hurried life. Intentionally, they expose themselves, then isolate.

     In time, the trolleys stop, the shops are closed, the only sound is wind. No citizens are found outdoors. All live inside their private rooms, their private worlds of time.