It started with my nephew. My girlfriend and I were watching him for my brother. He was a cute kid. Round little head. His mom had put him in some sort of funny fleece hat that drooped at the top, like a wide, loose sock.
“He’s got a bit of a cold,” she’d said as she left. “Maybe keep the hat on him if you can.”
We were putting away lunch, and I’d nearly finished filling the dishwasher when all of a sudden, from the other room I heard the baby say very loudly, “Ebida, eh-bida, eh-bbbida…” There was then a long pause, followed by, more strange babbling: “Ah-snee… I-ah-sneee… I-ah…” And then the sound abruptly stopped again.
It sounded bizarre. I looked over at Josie to see if she had heard it, but she was looking past me, through the cutout between the kitchen and the living room. Before I could turn my head to see, a blast of noise hit me with the most distinctively enunciated and loud Ahhh-choooooo I’d ever heard. In its wake, a literal rush of wind slammed into the back of my head, sweeping my hair upwards and fixing it in place.
We rushed over to the room. My nephew was grinning happily at us. Papers were strewn everywhere, and a lampstand had been knocked over.
“It was exactly like that old cartoon, Cal,” Josie whispered. “Like, it sounded identical.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, she’d pulled out her phone and started furiously typing in the browser. She found what she was looking for and flipped it to show me. It was a clip that I recognized from a cartoon several decades old. Two small, white-bearded, rosy-cheeked men in funny hats are looking at some flowers when one of them starts to back away and wave his hands wildly, wiggling his nose.
Josie turned up the sound. It started: “Ebida, eh-bida, eh-bbbida…” The rest was the same. Identical.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Is he doing a bit?”
“He’s a baby, Cal, so, no, he’s not doing a bit. His cold just has some weird symptoms, I guess?”
She was tapping at her phone again.
“Ha! See? It’s a kind of rhinovirus.” She held her phone up to me. “Nicknamed Billygilbertitis, after the voice actor who originated this style of cartoon sneeze.”
I laughed and asked if it was contagious.
“Looks like it is, in fact, quite contagious,” Josie said, looking bemused. “Nice of your sister-in-law to have told us.”
He didn’t sneeze again after that, so I thought we were in the clear.
Five days later, biking home from enjoying a Sunday morning breakfast with my parents, I felt my nose begin to tingle. “Ebida, eh-bida, eh-bbbbida,” I heard myself begin to mumble. The tingle in my nose intensified exponentially. It was resonating like a tuning fork. My eyes had started to run, and then I started “Ahh-ing” like a revving engine or a belligerent 50s TV husband. I was “Ahh-ing” in waves and little bursts – louder and louder, until I was certain my vibrating nasal cavities would collapse or explode. Desperate, I quickly held my finger under my nose and somehow swallowed the sneeze. My sinuses squeaked like a baby elephant.
Relief, I thought.
I sighed, about to resume my bike ride, when suddenly the onslaught of the sneeze was on me again, about to unleash itself like an erupting geyser. I couldn’t hold it in. I inhaled fifty lungfuls of air in a half-second – “Ahhhhh” – and then it burst from every orifice on my face: “Chooooooo!!” It not only sounded like a hurricane: an actual wind exploded out of me, strong enough to push me backwards on my bicycle a full twenty feet. I lost balance somewhere near the end, the gale all but spent, and I flipped over backwards into the grass.
Things got far wilder from that point on as Billygilbertitis spread to the rest of my family members. The wider it spread, the stranger it became. Initially, our sneezes had just mimicked the beloved Billy Gilbert one from the old 1930s cartoons. Pretty soon they started to diversify, though.
I woke up last night with such an irrepressible sneeze that it sent me flying out of my bed, through my bedroom door, and directly onto a wall-mounted ironing board I forgot I had, which promptly folded back up into the wall, trapping me briefly inside.
And then yesterday, my dad did a quadruple-flip while sneezing. He was walking in his garden, stopped to smell a rose, and then sneezed so forcefully that he found himself pitched forward in a kind of horizontal tornado that hung in mid-air, until he stopped with a screech and landed on his backside in a dense cloud of dust.
The symptoms have started to expand beyond sneezes, too. My mom tripped on the stairs the other day and, instead of just catching herself, she did a literal cartwheel down to the bottom and landed in the splits, yelling, “Ya-who-who-whoeee,” as she fell.
Bewilderingly, though, we’re all fine. More than fine, actually. There isn’t a bruise on any of us. We’ve flipped and fallen and gone flying down the street like a punctured balloon, but we just seem to bounce back from it every time. We’re laughing a lot more, too. True, it’s a kind of chaotic cackling that we have a hard time stopping once it gets going, but it does seem to release a lot of endorphins. I honestly wonder whether we should get some scientists to do a study.
We’re all still sick and with no cure in sight, but I suppose this is just to say we’re also all a bit happier than we were before. And a lot of people can’t say that.
