Some Things in the Air

The last day before schools closed, I evacuated my classroom of all tissue, sanitizer, and alcohol wipes like some hastily redeployed soldier.  Every morning I wake in my king-sized, memory foam bunk without a cough or runny nose, I say a silent prayer then kick myself for not humping home the cheap one-ply from my school’s rest rooms.  My wife tosses and turns too.  Her employer instituted a telework policy: two weeks in office, two weeks remote.  Company woman through and through, a real lean-in trooper, she hunkered down in her deserted office every day last week, co-workers giving wide berth to the symptomatic: sneezers, wheezers, and geezers treated equally like modern-day lepers.

Paranoia is contagious.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re fortunate, thankful for employment, concerned for small business folk, but face it, people, we’re at war, our President says so, having just appropriated the notion from someone on tv with years of experience making serious faces for a network camera.  Even my wife can appreciate branding genius: Wartime President.  I’ve read enough post-apocalyptic novels, the weapon I need to defend my wife, my shelter, my hot tub, not a firearm, but information.  Information is truth, truth is power, power is survival.  This: a survival tale.  Me: Wartime Husband.

Friday, Cheryl comes home from work and, I kid you not – I’m in the kitchen, facemask secured (liberated from her metalsmith toolbox), blue nitrile gloves, taking steel wool to strawberries, dunking red peppers and summer squash in a 10% bleach solution – first thing she does, lifts my mask, kisses me.  On the lips!  Fuckin’ A!

Gloves on hips, I give her my best how could you look.  Bad enough the virus transmits through air, my wife seals the deal with personal contact.  Kicking off her pumps, she asks, how was your day, baby, what’s with the PPE?  Smells like a janitor’s closet in here.

Over her shoulder, Mike Pence’s face is on tv cable news, looking all solemn.

Hey you – Cheryl snaps her fingers – you haven’t been watching COVID news all day again, have you?

Pence looks as if he’s talking directly to a victim of a natural disaster instead of a pool of cramped, agitated reporters in a poorly ventilated room.  Pence nods and nods, the dignity in his face summoned straight from heaven, a divine gift.  His nod seems directed at one imaginary person, a victim, likely a hapless sort thinking of voting for Biden, a victim who’s lost everything, but in spite of it all clutches loyally to what matters most – an unflinching faith in federal government.  Pence turns from the imaginary victim to the camera, to me, tells me and all Americans what phenomenal strength and determination and leadership our President Donald J. Trump has exhibited (Trump nods, confirms the overdue accolade) by increasing test kit availability for all NBA players who want their family and agents tested, and the PGA too, the PGA champions getting priority frankly, Pence says, because, face it, they are really rich men with fewer tattoos.

Pence yields the podium to Dr. Birx who yields the podium to her shiny scarf which chastises the media for what it, the talking scarf just knows, the media will do, which is (based on soon-to-be released numbers, numbers privy to the White House COVID Task Force) to sensationalize that the U.S. is worse off than the others (China, Iran, even Italy where people are dying at rates so high proper funerals cannot be held, loved ones unable to mourn, bodies hauled away in makeshift coffins in large trucks).  In fact, the talking scarf says, the numbers will only make us – the richest country with the prettiest scarves in the world – look bad because of new testing, we’d look far better than Italy by running no tests at all, it’s only you the media insisting on tests.

Out of breath, the scarf covers its mouth, coughs, wraps itself back around the doctor’s neck, when Dr. Birx steps back, the tv ticker scrolling, blinking, bright red – DOW DROPS 7% !!! – the market circuit breaker has tripped, halting trades for fifteen minutes, just enough time for insiders and congressmen like Burr and Loeffler to enter buy or sell orders based on their latest classified meeting information.

Next, a New York doctor, name rhymes with grouchy, lowers the mike, suggests anecdotal evidence of malaria drug efficacy at which Trump stops nodding, white around his eyes glows whiter, Trump bumps Dr. Grouchy away, but not before shaking his hand again, touches the mike, says, I feel good about this drug, really good, in my bones, and, you know, I’ve been right, my bones are right a lot, a lot of people are saying it, one smart bone, the marrow, some people call it, smart people are saying things, you’ve heard, you know the truth, but that’s ok, the virus is Chinese, Chi-na.

After fifteen minutes, the market returns, digests Trump’s words, drops another 7%, tripping a second breaker.  The circuit breaker legislation written some time ago when Democrats controlled both chambers, allowing slow-on-the-option-uptake Democrats like Feinstein and Independents and whatever Bernie is, to gain precious time on the trading public, to get in on insider trading like those across the aisle.

Time for questions.  A reporter asks Trump if he’s sold any stock.  I’ve lost billions being president, billions, happy to do it, I’m happy, but it’s a nasty question, and you’re a nasty person, but it’s ok, good question, you should ask it.

Cheryl snaps her fingers.  I pull my veggies out of the bleach bath to dry, scrub my face, and ask if she’s transferred cash for us to take advantage of market hysteria (Mr. Market’s in a mood, after all, everything’s on sale, isn’t that nice, using my best Mr. Rogers voice played by once clean Tom Hanks, as I wave a book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street in her face).  She swats it away, gives me a how could you look, asks, where’s the channel changer?

Out the window, Cheryl sees a UPS truck, says, oh look, a box!

I warn her from the kitchen.  SARS-type viruses can survive on cardboard, you know, up to 24 hours.  She puts the Ulta box on our dining table where we never eat more than once a day and I am relieved, knowing Ulta sells ointments and such.  In the box, a tube of rouge lipstick, but wait, no sanitizer?  My wife touches the faucet with her contaminated hand, then the pump dispenser of Softsoap Coconut and Warm Ginger soap, tears enough towel to staunch a river before I can even get to six Mississippi.  You know, I say, the virus lasts 2 to 3 days on metal faucets, 1 to 2 days on plastic soap pumps, and maybe we should conserve paper, in case your sister is as stingy with her hoarded Charmin as her Chardonnay and I duck, nearly hit by the Coconut and Warm Ginger soap bottle flying over my head.

I need some fresh air, out the backdoor in agreement with Cheryl’s non-verbal suggestions as I hear the lock click immediately behind me, secured for safety from a vague undefinable neighborhood threat (she’s finally getting it, I think), when I realize I’ve got my phone in one hand, contaminated soap bottle in the other.  I pump a dollop, wash my hands and face in our patio’s water fountain.  The sewer smell is distressing but green scum growth on the fountain a good sign, I think, photosynthesis and oxygenated water and sure, yes, maybe microbial schools of amoebic protists swim in there too.  Chewing, the scum has a spinach-like texture, I think, spitting most of it out, but like our leader, I am hopeful (nothing wrong with hope, okay, smart guy?), hopeful the dysenteric protists will devour any coronavirus on my skin or down my throat the way T. Rex devours Godzilla.

Feeling hygienic and exposed, I take a random walk and see neighbors I’ve never seen walking before in clothes I’ve never seen them wear.  College girls live in my neighborhood now, and they wear athletic shorts, looking like asymptomatic carriers.  It’s a tango, as we pass: they do not acknowledge my higher risk demographic, I do not inhale.

Prickly seed pods tumble in the vacant parking lot of the elementary school, the sign out front reads Keep Calm Colts and Gallop On, which I mistakenly read as Dolts and stop to wonder about the nature of panic while I sit on a bench in a pocket park that connects the elementary to the middle school, the high school where I work just beyond.

On my phone, an email reads the high school is open, one hour per department, for teachers to retrieve materials they left during the abrupt shut-down.  I am visited by a vision, stall after glorious stall of bathroom tissue, a hero’s welcome upon my return home.

The three schools in a row, same side of the street, separated by clusters of wood – sprouts of magnolias, Sweetgum, Bradford pears, evergreens – the greenery like halos around each school, connects them.  Reminds me of the fuzz-stalk attachment proteins sprouting on the periphery of a coronavirus that connects it to healthy cells.

Don’t forget 504 documentation, it’s the law, reads another email, teachers required to provide remote accommodations, an ominous tone, don’t even think you’re playing the global pandemic card.  Next email, an administrative request for thoughts on how to balance asynchronous and synchronous instruction remotely.  I make a mental note to google asynchronous remote instruction right after I google hospital beds per 1000 sorted by country.

On Facebook, I watch a Weird Al inspired, My Corona youtube video, then a NY Times article on Camus’ philosophy of the human condition as told in his 1947 novel The Plague.  Hopeful for a remedy, a happy ending, more laughs like My Corona, I read Camus’ theme, “all human beings are vulnerable to being exterminated at any time, by a virus, an accident or the actions of our fellow man.”  Didn’t expect Camus such a downer.  Like the people in Camus’ 1940s Algierian city, I cannot accept that plagues happen to me.  A modern man: I possess an iphone, themed window stickers on my SUV, and a CD collection.  Technologically, I am untouchable.

Or am I?  Am I no better than, as vulnerable as, a peasant from 17th century London wailing in the dirty, waste-bucket slopped streets?  The pocket park is empty.  In peace time, I feel safest alone, but the world is out-of-joint.  A Killdeer in the grass, pretending its wing is broken, hops away from me.  Just fly already.  You’re not helpless.  Faker.  A burst of angry energy, I fling my phone into the air, mesmerized by the beauty of its trajectory, the wobble of its case, fluttering, demonically, a possessed wobble, center of mass tracing a Newtonian-predicted path, expanse of sky, magical, healing clouds afloat, cotton swabs, what an army of antibodies racing to the rescue might look like, the phone reaches its apex, begins to arc down, and I’m reminded how flattening the curve is possible, the success of autocratic China, locking down their citizenry, staunching the viral spread, I literally lift myself off the bench, grabbing the seat of my pants like the Lorax speaking for the trees and I get nowhere because my pants pull me down with equal and opposite force – so I switch tactics and virtually lift myself off the park bench and, voila, like the Lorax, I’m off the bench, off and running now, at a gallop after my phone like a dolt before it can hit the ground.

My phone survives the fall.  On the road back to my house I think of the father and son, characters in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, their journey.  They walked under a bleak ashen sky in October, moving south, worried for the winter ahead.  In their knapsacks, tins of fruit.

The Bradford pears along my walk are blooming, pink petals waiting to bleach, wither, collect along the street’s edge, a light rancid perfume from the pears when the wind dies like a ferment neglected for years in a dark drawer.  It’s an odd feeling, outside, walking in the land of the less populated, quieter, fewer cars, some too fast, others too slow, confused, the sun hidden now, clouds coalesce from nowhere, a gray miasma, a shiver, first hint of something ending.  Spring not supposed to go down this way.

Back on my pollen-coated porch, I knock and wait.  When my wife opens the door, I will give her a kiss, if she lets me.  I think of Camus, the possibility of death in an instant, absurd, how the very condition of life plagues us all.  The lighter side of Camus – if you can’t laugh, you can’t live.  Be generous, because all of us are on life support, every instant of every day, and right then my wife opens the door, and she kisses me, and she asks if I’ll sit with her and watch something other than coronavirus cable news, and I say that’s a really good idea.  And when she turns, I wipe my mouth on my shoulder, careful not to touch the door again.