All across the city, people were making the choice to wait the syndrome out. They were all using different strategies to avoid H-8, none of them grounded in solid proof that they worked.

There was a group that felt they were being left behind in a rapture. Their theory was that everyone was misinterpreting the faces of those who became sick—that it was not grief but overwhelm in the face of the divine. One by one, Detroiters were being awestruck, leaving behind their earthly bodies. This group met up at Hope Community Church, weekly at first, then daily as work fell away. From there they would journey together around the city, looking for sick people. When they found one who was out in public, unclaimed, they would hold hands with each other, and then place hands on them and begin to pray. They prayed to be seen in their devotion, loving this neighbor and each other. They professed, again and again, their faith: Jesus came, Jesus gave his life for us, Jesus was the only son of God. They prayed in ripples of whispers and shouts, taking turns at the heart of the collective supplication, waiting to be blessed with the invitation to the other side.

Another group wore face masks everywhere they went, even when they slept, certain that there was something borne on the air itself, some particle, some fleck of death that simply needed to find its way into the lungs of a breather to infect them. They passed out flyers on the distinctions between surgical masks and the Q498 masks that were “actually safe.” They went to all the city meetings, advocating that industrial respirators should be made available to everyone still in the city limits.

A smaller circle had split off from the masked ones, a group that felt it was significant that the lungs were being targeted, as the belief in Chinese medicine was that the lungs actually hold grief. All of those struck with H-8 looked like humans in an advanced stage of grief. They wore the face masks too, but spent the bulk of their time in grieving rituals, convinced that, if they could face their grief, process it together, they would survive the syndrome. They approached the sick with mantras, “Go easy in your grief, we are the ones who suffer.”

The anarchists wore bandanas and harvested food from gardens all over the city, working in crews of three or five. They set up a headquarters in the Living Arts building in Mexicantown; several of them slept there, not wanting to risk dying alone. They partnered with the Honeybee Market, working as cashiers and stocking food, meeting vendors at the 75 South checkpoint to bring in fresher produce. When people got H-8 they walked them down the street to the clinic. They didn’t have life support capacities, but there was a team there who would work to slowly get water and broth into the bodies of the sick.