Free Viral by Emily Mitchell

California, you may feel you would like to stay forever. This is common among travelers from our country, where the weather is gloomy and cold and where, in the winter, it gets dark early in the afternoon. We arrive in California and are whirled around by the ubiquity of light, the trees that the sea wind has twisted into dark green candle flames, the way the ocean stretches out ahead of you as if it might go on forever. We feel elated, weightless and amazed. We feel that everyone we meet is someone we loved when we were very young and have not seen for years.
    This condition has come to be referred to as Golden Fever, and once it sets in it is difficult to shake. Our own researchers have sometimes fallen victim to it, and several of them have never returned home. To combat Golden Fever, there are now quite a few companies that make a business out of kidnapping foreign visitors whose families have become concerned about them. If your family hires one of these, masked men will come for you in the middle of the night and put a sack over your head, then drive you to the airport and put you on a plane that’s flying east. Unfortunately, this sudden departure can lead to withdrawal symptoms in certain travelers. In the back of the book, we provide a list of hospitals that can help you recover if you find yourself deprived of California and unable to cope emotionally with the shock.
    After several months of treatment, most of the afflicted are able to recover some sense of proportion and resume their ordinary lives. They will remember the feelings of mysterious elation they experienced as if they heard about them secondhand. Their memories of California will seem like photographs, static and arrested and somehow no longer their own. Eventually, they will be just the way they were before, as if they had never been away at all, except occasionally, when they will stare out the window at the heavy sky and early dark and start to cry.
    Even travelers from our country who are happy to be home may experience some strange emotions after they return. They may look around at our narrow streets and houses, our landscape that has been green and domesticated for a thousand years, or they may listen to the matter-of-fact way our people talk, their modest aspirations, their tendency to mock all that is too grand, and feel that there is something missing. This feeling will wear off after a while. For America, with all its beauty and variety, is wonderful to visit but not a place you’d really want to live. It lacks the substance and continuity of older, more established nations. Sometimes it seems to tremble like it might vanish at any moment; other times it seems like it is an imitation of a country, a set that will be taken down by a team of stagehands after you pass through it. After you have left, you may wonder whether it was real at all or just a trick of light and water, a mirage, a dream that you aren’t sure how to interpret. Was it good or bad or something else entirely? Most people who have been there find it is impossible to say for sure.

Three Marriages
    1.
    Shortly after they moved from their own house in Darien, Connecticut, into a retirement home near Fort Myers, Florida, Lucinda announced that she didn’t want to be married anymore to Fred, her husband of fifty-nine years. When she told her children this, they were first horrified and then dismissive. She could not mean it, they said to her and to each other. She could not possibly be serious. They interpreted it as a sign that she was becoming senile, that her mind and judgment, which had until then remained very sharp, were becoming impaired. They took her to get tested for other signs of reduced cognitive functioning, but the doctors they spoke with found Lucinda to be lucid and competent, her memory of recent and distant events remarkably intact for someone of her age, which was eighty-three years old.
    â€œBut what about this idea that she’s going to