A Dispatch from Month Four of Quarantine

Without looking it up, I know exactly when lockdown got serious:  Friday, March 13.  The entire day felt off.  I remember parking my bus in the evening—the lot was uncharacteristically quiet—and thinking, “Yeah, I won’t be doing this again for a while.”

Later that evening, the county I work for closed down all the schools.  The closure would last until the end of the term.  My child’s school, in Maryland, would shutter the following Monday.  

In preceding weeks, the seriousness of the novel coronavirus didn’t register with me.  I had a sense that it was a potential disaster, and that it was causing a lot of trouble in China, but couldn’t imagine at the time how it would devastate the USA.  Part of it was my own provincial ignorance and part of it the fact that politicians kept telling everyone not to worry.  They’re professional liars, sure, but still managed to create an environment in which worrying seemed overwrought.  (And then blamed everyday people for this failure of leadership.) 

But on the week of that dreadful Friday the thirteenth, things changed rapidly.  Washington state was suddenly overwhelmed by cases.  Tom Hanks tested positive.  The NBA shut down its season.  By the end of my afternoon shift, there was a whiff of melancholy in the atmosphere.  The world no longer existed as I understood it. 

Officials warned that the lockdown could last two weeks, maybe an entire month if things went poorly.  I knew the prognosis was bullshit.  We were looking at many months, or years, of disruption.  I suspected that the two-week timetable wasn’t false hope so much as a strategy to assuage people unaccustomed to restrictions.  It’s hard to tell.  Ignorance and dishonesty tend to inhabit the same language. 

I immediately took stock of my situation.  Not fat, per se, but definitely portly.  But for some periods of self-discipline, a lifetime smoker.  Mid-forties.  Terrible diet.  Clinical anxiety.  I didn’t like my chances with this thing.  We went to Wegman’s.  I waited in the car, with the windows up, while my wife and son bought a cartful of provisions.  The introduction of “co-morbities” into mainstream discourse probably compelled lots of people to assess the general state of their health.  Or maybe I’m projecting. 

*****

I stayed at home for over six weeks.  At least once a day, I tried to walk around my neighborhood.  Lots of people did the same, but it was easy to maintain distance.  It didn’t help that April and May were cold and wet in Northern Virginia.  Still, I understood the importance of being outdoors and skipped the walk only when it was raining steadily. 

On these walks I began to notice a strange phenomenon:  civic life, something normally absent in the DC suburbs (unless you count mindless consumption on private property an expression of community).  Suddenly people were out and about, on foot, chatting in distended circles and waving at neighbors on their front stoops.  Everyone was friendly, solicitous even, and we had no would-be Barney Fifes policing the premises.  It was a sharp departure from the horror stories I read about in other locales. 

I live in a mixed working class/lower managerial subdivision of townhouses encircled by parking lots with little playgrounds scattered throughout the grounds.  It’s not a place conducive to street life.  The subdivision, with over 500 units, is zoned residential, so uniformity stretches in all directions:  rows of eight or six set at irregular angles with brick walls surrounding each back garden.  No cafes or bodegas.  Shopping is confined to nearby strip malls.  The quiet can be nice, but I badly miss the sonic chaos of Beirut, my prior residence. 

My neighborhood lacks the spooky vibe of places like Great Falls and Arlington.  We have the standard array of minor technocrats and Maclaren strollers, but work vans and pickup trucks also fill the parking lots.  It’s a multiethnic pastiche within a lifeless region and for a few weeks after lockdown the place was actually pleasant.  

But people were out of work, physically insecure, worried about foreclosure.  Whatever pleasure could be derived from upheaval came at the expense of health and livelihood.  In the sprawl of US capitalism, the economy is incompatible with a meaningful civic life.  We can have one or the other.  In fact, “the economy” immediately asserted itself as a sacred body that supersedes any consideration of public welfare, a term at once impossibly abstract and painfully specific. 

*****

I’m among the group, small but significant, that enjoys the pace of lockdown.  I embraced the sudden lack of pressure to socialize or consume, and staying at home (“sheltering in place,” according to the nomenclature) caused no dismay.  It was normal life for me, only this time validated by common wisdom.  Not so for essential workers and medical professionals, who suffer tremendous risk and the trauma of frontline exposure.  A more relaxed pace was given life by increased mortality.  Again, you don’t get the one without the other. 

Until mid-March, I never realized how much I cherished my strange ritual of wandering around grocery stores, usually without a shopping list but picking up a few things just the same.  Perhaps I have an unacknowledged attachment to consumerism as sublimation or catharsis, or perhaps I’m simply bored and curious, but I find a sense of peace walking through the aisles and looking at all the superfluous products in their gaudy, boastful packaging.  At the end of April, I decided to shop. 

Thinking I was being smart, I showed up to the grocery store at 7:00 AM, opening time, only to find that it was already packed.  (Being smart was never my strong suit.)  I immediately regretted the excursion.  The atmosphere was gloomy, almost hellish, filled with once-human automatons looking for sustenance.  We wouldn’t find it in this big-box funeral home. 

At one point, I was preparing to pass a slow-moving woman from behind when suddenly she whipped around and pointed a long metallic object right at me.  I jumped back, terrified, as images of guns and swords flashed through my mind, before I realized that she was holding…a tape measure, clicked into place with a cool six feet of slack. 

In a dastardly ploy, the store lined up everyone for checkout through the wine section.  Bottles were flying off the shelves.  I rarely consume alcohol and I was tempted to buy a few cartons—or to chug merlot while waiting for a register.  Anything that would make me feel less like a zombie with fogged-up glasses. 

*****

Since March, I’ve been out of work, albeit technically employed (i.e., I’m still getting paid).  I yearn for the sense of purpose and accomplishment that my job provides.  I don’t miss the cold early mornings, though.  A wash, all in all.  It’s not lost on me that my employment situation is better than many of my former colleagues in academe.  The virus has leveled bitterness into empathy. 

When public schools return, bus drivers will become essential workers, but I have mixed feelings about sharing a metal box with hundreds of youngsters while COVID is still a thing.  It seems like an easy way to catch the disease.  From the beginning, I’ve hated the necessity of viewing children as vectors of danger.  Adults have always associated children with pathogens—they’re notorious for being germy—but in this instance the joy of youth came to symbolize illness, an abiding fear, or death, our ultimate destiny.  A kind of divinity is lost in the world when we can’t physically interact with grandchildren. 

I’m extremely fortunate to be able to consider the possibility of sitting out work until the virus weakens or disappears.  But the ability to decide is ephemeral.  It takes little time for events of history to muck up the present.  Personal resources are less versatile than unseen forces of life.  Microbes, after all, are always around to help dispose of our bodies.  

Since March, I’ve been hyperaware of the interplay between relief and suffering.  Pleasure is a limited commodity, demarcated by hardship and misery.  Once aware of the balance, a functional human being cannot fully surrender to pleasure.  

*****

I spent the summer of 2000 in Palestine.  It was the greatest few months of my life.  Shortly after my return to the USA, the second Intifada began.  So much can change in twenty years and yet certain feelings maintain a timeless intensity.  That’s how it works for individuals afflicted by nostalgia and how it works for nations dispossessed of their ancestral land. 

I lived in a bottom unit of a house built near the top of a hill, and on clear mornings, with a bit of squinting, it was possible to glimpse a strip of Mediterranean.  Internationals and Indigenes affiliated with the local university (where I was studying literature and colloquial Arabic) would congregate by the dozen on the home’s large patio until mosquitoes forced us into my living room, always stocked with chips and bottles of Taybeh. 

After the gatherings broke up late into the night, a particular friend always stayed behind, sitting across from me on a rigid armchair, dust and sweat adorning her dark skin, and we’d talk over multiple cups of Tetley spiked with sugar until adhan, our signal to retire for the morning. 

I left first.  She rode with me as far as Ramallah.  I found my private taxi at the back of a long, noisy row of services and transport vans.  The driver carefully determined that I was the one going to the bridge.  Once I was in the backseat, he offered me a triangle of pita.  I declined.  “Take it,” he insisted.  “It’s hot where we’re going.” 

It was hot already.  My short-sleeve button-up shirt stuck to my chest and stomach in patches of sweat.  I turned and looked out the back windshield.  She stood in the road, hand on mouth, next to where the taxi had been parked.  When she saw me, she smiled and waved, a frozen image among so much hubbub enlivened by the August sun.  I forced the bread into my mouth to keep from crying. 

A few years ago, I was in Toronto giving some speeches and she got in touch.  I was booked up—a victim of other people’s scheduling—so she drove into downtown and whisked me away between gigs for a quick cup of tea.  She told me about her son.  I told her about mine.  They’re a year apart.  They both liked SpongeBob and finger painting. 

“I think about that summer a lot,” I admitted. 

“The intensity of the environment,” she said, her voice trailing off. 

“It intensified everything else.” 

“Palestine’s not just Palestine, is it?” 

“No,” I agreed, “I guess it isn’t.” 

She dropped me at my next meeting, whose specifics I don’t remember.  But I’m sure I was tasked with discussing the link between Palestine and freedom. 

*****

“Lockdown” isn’t a good word to describe the past four months.  Neither is “quarantine.”  “Shelter-in-place” comes close, but something about it seems off, as well. 

We’re not imprisoned, so “lockdown” is both inaccurate and insulting.  Being quarantined is an altogether different phenomenon than collective social isolation.  As to sheltering-in-place, few people are actually staying put.  And not everyone has shelter. 

Everything’s a mess, except that the mess is legible in binaries sharpened by the pandemic.  Billionaires grow richer while the precarious struggle to retain food and shelter.  Such is the cruel dialectic between accumulation and privation, intimacy and alienation, the logical contradictions of a society predicated on competition. 

And so we’re limited by the very promises of freedom that supposedly make us exceptional.  We can’t make sense of the pandemic because comprehension exists beyond the naked eye.  Illness and recession are a terrible way of introducing notions of community to a doggedly individualistic society.  The USA needs this kind of reckoning, though, even if the mere idea of recognizing other people is apt to produce violence.  Change doesn’t happen without states of heightened intensity. 

From the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been comfortable and tortured, immobilized yet strangely inspired by the ambivalence.  I’ve searched for wisdom or logic, but these things are mostly just plot conventions.  I don’t know.  All I’m capable of doing anymore is recording some random thoughts about an unusual experience and praying to nothing in particular that after a few generations human beings will still be around to read them.