What literary discoveries might emerge from a list of books with chairs on their covers? My latest list-driven venture was musical: a playlist of twenty-four songs wherein each track is titled after an hour of the day. With cinema, for example, I have encountered remarkable variety in searching for films by their treatment of a particular object-cereal or telephones or eggs. Making lists has become a go-to method for expanding my tastes. This, as we steadily approach our various one-year anniversaries of local shutdowns, felt like an eerily uncanny framing of the narrative. At the novella’s center is the moment that Lexi infects the narrator (“Contagion Day”), with the story moving backward and forward in time from there, oscillating from a prepandemic Seattle to a postpandemic Iowa.
What struck me on this particular rereading, however, was the structure of the book. Peters has said she forgoes including “Trans 101” in her work, instead writing for other trans people and expecting cis readers to keep up, and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is no exception. Peters does a phenomenal job of examining the complicated, difficult relationship between the narrator and Lexi and capturing the social dynamics within their community. She infects our unnamed narrator with her virus, and five years later, it appears that society has collapsed, war has broken out, and things have gone full-on apocalypse. Actually, I’d kind of forgotten the complete centrality of a virus to the work and instead best remembered the magnetic, sometimes erratic Lexi and her unforgettable declaration: “In the future, everyone will be trans.” Of course, she’s referring to the pandemic itself-Lexi creates a virus that stops hormone production in the body, forcing everyone to actively choose their gender and seek out hormone-replacement therapy. So this week, when I revisited Torrey Peters’s Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, it was not in an effort to live out this current crisis in a fictionalized one. If anything, finding the waking hours difficult enough, I have largely avoided pandemic-themed works. I am not one of those people who, in the early days of the pandemic, watched Contagion and read Blindness.
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