Not everything is lost

Not everything is lost. There is a tenderness when people come close on the street, a little embarrassed nod toward each other saying, “You know why I’m stepping away from you, into the gutter, into the gravel of the parkway”. At normal times we wouldn’t even see each other. Now, staying apart, we appeal to each other to understand. To acknowledge that we know this new reality – it isn’t that I don’t like you but I have to step away and avoid you.

A shared sense of purpose, then, breaking through the miasma of individuality. We are being fragile together. In ridiculous bandanas that only the most cliched cowboy would wear. Even that looks familiar now. Where’s my pop-gun when I need it?

Part of my fragility is that I staked a claim about this being serious early. Amy said she thought I was overreacting. My family was surprised when I told them we were under self-quarantine on March 2. So, weirdly, I have a stake in being right. When I heard about a Bishop in Virginia who refused to shut his church down and then died of the virus I wrestled with my smarmy thoughts: “That will show him…See? We who believe in science told you so…What’s the matter with you? You put all your parishioners in jeopardy.” What’s wrong with me? I’m so busy being right, and righteous about being right, I have lost my compassion.

I know acting strange is part of this. A friend says she was talking to a bunch of girlfriends and one thing they had in common was eating more bread. Lots more bread. Another friend still isn’t sure this is happening and doesn’t see why all the precautions are necessary. Our President is trying to shut down the US Post Office just as we depend on it for increased package delivery. The animals have taken back spaces we occupy: coyotes roam the freeways, bears lumber between the tents in Yosemite, bobcats take naps on sunny, quiet blacktops. For the first time in several generations the people of India can see the Himalayan mountains.

And then there is the not-so-strange. Battered boxes of Scrabble are unearthed and set up. Chairs are dragged around the old card table and a new generation learns the complexities of Texas holdem. Candles light the dinner table. We openly share our gratitude for ice in our drink, food on our table, lights in our kitchens. Such moments, such feelings, have to mix-it-up with worry and loss and dislocation. It is easy to lose our bearings: I look for my phone while it is in my hand, or hunt for the glasses that are on my head. I forget what day it is. But maybe this is as it should be: who cares what day it is if we let homeless people rot in our cities? What is a little forgetfulness compared to the gigantic abandonment of common decency? I include myself among the guilty: in my imagined peril I felt a smug satisfaction about being right when Bishop Glenn died. I have been infected with the greater pandemic of our time: loss of kindness and goodwill.  

I find myself rushing

I find myself rushing. Not sure where. I eat fast, I hurry across the house to do some task. I gobble up posts on Facebook and Instagram, scrolling impatiently. Why? There is nowhere to go. There is no list of things I must do. It's nervous energy - like everyone, I'm not used to such prolonged uncertainty. I'm not used to feeling out of control - not only in the political sphere and the social sphere but also in the biological sphere. I'm used to fires, evacuations. I'm used to some kinds of flooding, to storms, to torrential rain and snow. But I've never felt like a door handle could be lethal.

We are all living with ambiguous loss; a sense that there is no new normal, or fear of what it might be. Plus, we have no idea how - or when - it will emerge. We see armed men storming the capitol buildings in certain states, demanding that the governors open up the economy and stop the shelter-in-place orders. Trump cheers them on. We see horror stories of the scale of death in places where they never did close the economy. South Dakota comes to mind - in dozens of enormous meat packing plants there are scores of workers infected with Covid-19, yet the governor refuses to make a stay-at-home order. In other places it is the retirement homes and veterans rehabilitation centers where the percentage of people infected and dying makes one think of concentration camps. We know that in prisons and detention centers, where people are forced to live packed together, the death rate is skyrocketing. We hear about the way this disease may cause millions to die south of our border: in Mexico, Central and South America. Brazil is already having a massive outbreak because, like America's Trump and England's Boris Johnson, their president didn't listen to medical predictions. He didn't want to shut businesses down. Consequently, the death toll is way higher than if he had. We hear there are resurgences of high death rates when the economies of Asia open up, suggesting we don't yet know even rudimentary things about how this virus acts, replicates, and re-surfaces. We have no idea what the time frame is - J and I talk about being in our house for a year or maybe even two; basically until there is a vaccine - IF they can make one.

Yet there is no time to grieve. If not for a person, for a world. For the world as we knew it before this. Which was only 60 days ago, or less. In this new world we have a constant sense of foreboding, a sense of invasion from somewhere strange. We feel like we're in a horror movie, and the music is caught in a loop and we can't change the channel We feel threat. We feel dread. Threat from men in plaid shirts waving automatic rifles at nurses. Think about that for a second: those who want to shoot people dead trying to intimidate those who are risking their lives, and those of their loved ones, to keep strangers alive. At least that we can see - it is unnerving to the max to feel dread from something invisible.

These feelings are followed by anger at the stupidity and venal selfishness of our President, our leader, and our resignation that we can't influence him and those that he intimidates into being his sycophants. Even if  we feel smug at how right we were, that he is incapable of leading or caring, our smugness is unsatisfying - a thin windbreaker in a furious hurricane. We still can't believe there are millions of people who don't see him for the ridiculous charlatan he has always been, a giant baby careening around the world smashing things and crying out with glee. We know that forty years from now people will look back in wonder and horror at how we elected a scurrilous, narcissistic, pathological liar whose credentials were that he was a cruel television host and a failed real estate tycoon. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well now we know.

So we eat. Or bake and then eat. Or we rush. Or we watch too much TV and feel bloated. Or eat too many potato chips and want to purge. Nothing feels in balance because nothing is, and our sense is compounded by the feeling that no one has any idea how far the scale might tip before it rights itself. Are we talking months? Years? A generation? Ever? Is it true, as other prophets are saying about climate change, that we could tip the scale so far it will come crashing down on us, on our species?

I remember people talking this way about nuclear warfare. We built our defenses so we could blow the world up many times over, as if any time more than once was greater protection. I remember we felt vindicated for winning the arms race when the Soviet Union fell. And then we began war after war, mostly in the Middle East, to secure the greedy needs of oil profiteers and their refusal to change patterns of transportation. "It fuels the economy," was the justification, though the inequalities of who fought and who profited were always glaring. Our enormous military budget needed a war periodically to justify its existence; creating bogus wars got us into the ones we are still trapped in.

We didn't plan for other kinds of war, and what we did was torn apart by our current administration. Today our Pentagon gets $617 billion and the National Institute of Health gets $41 billion. The two wars that have brought us to our knees - the cyber attacks that got us this President and the virus we are fighting now - can't be fought with all the tanks, missiles, nuclear submarines,and Kevlar wearing ground troops we spent decades creating. It would be funny - ironic, a great joke of nature - if it weren't so tragic to watch the death toll mount and have no idea when it will peak.

JILL - I can't comment on your preview but OMG - you definitely found the way to tell your story. Your writing is beautiful and descriptive and emotional and thought-provoking and I can't wait until you finish this and I'm holding your book in my hands, grinning. Please keep going. There's a book and a movie and who knows what all else waiting on the other side.

    “Antoinette Simmons?”
    I pivoted toward that belligerent voice.  Miss Ruby Lee was the only person allowed to use my given name.  A svelte woman with engorged ruby lips mounted upon an anvil-shaped head beamed at me. She squeezed her way toward me with an outstretched hand.
    “Remember me?”
    I quickly grasped and released the woman’s sleek palm.
    “I’m afraid I—”
    “Don’t be embarrassed.  Most people can’t believe it’s me.”
    “Well—”
    “Rainier View.  You were always with those girls.”
    I turned my head toward the church door. 
    “Margeaux.  Tomorrow.  Grace.  Y’all was tight.”
    I studied the woman’s face.  Her skin, the color of maple sugar, was polished to a high lustre, her ruddy hair pulled into a chignon so tight she had slits for eyes.  A keen nose.  Angled cheekbones.  She didn’t resemble anyone I knew.
    “One of them was my cousin.”
    My left eye twitched, I shifted a red stiletto. The woman grabbed my arm.
    “Luiza,” she said.
    “Urgh—”  Though not a day passed that I didn’t think about my dead friend, it was surreal to hear her name ease from that obscene mouth.  I grimaced, then resting bitch face. 
    “Nips and tucks, sugar,” the woman whinnied.  “Diet and exercise.  Isn’t that what they all say? None of us looks like we did back then, thank God.  I favor Luiza more now.”  She scrutinized my ensemble, hesitated on the shoes.     
     “You’ve come a long way baby.  Done quite well for yourself, I hear.”
    I jiggled my legs, eyed the crowd.  The door was a few yards away.  I swiped a hand against my leather pants as if wiping it clean.
    “’Course, Luiza never got a chance to make her mark—”
    I drooped, then straightened.  “I’m sorry—If you’ll just excuse me—”
    “This isn’t a good time to talk about her, is it?”  The woman pressed a business card into my hand.  “I’ll call you and we can meet someplace more private. I want you to tell me about the fire.”
    I grunted and backed into the crowd.  The small square of glossy paper nearly singed my fingers as I willed shaky legs to carry me out of the throng, away from the church, and into the crisp evening air where I huffed as if stricken with an asthma attack.  I squinted through tears at the elegant script.  My life as I knew it was over.

There's a lady named Linda

There’s a lady named Linda at the Luxe Nail salon who doesn’t yet know her favorite customer from Grande Vista Retirement Home is never coming back. There’s the grandson of that retiree, a high school geometry whiz, who is bored and wondering if he can download Porn Hub and not get caught by his parents. There’s his neighbor down the block who reads two newspapers front to back and listens to NPR, and another guy who only knows what his Facebook feed tells him. There’s a woman who just moved to their block who has no private yoga clients now, and her three kids are fighting over Pokémon cards and it’s driving her crazy. There’s her husband, who thinks mind-over-matter will make the difference and hand-washing is over rated. There’s a man who lives behind them who shoots deer in Los Padres National Forest in the fall and has a huge locker of meat all ready to cook up, but he’s afraid if he does someone will smell the stew and break his door down and steal everything. There’s his sister, who lives across town, who went to the grocery store at 7:30 AM - because that’s when old people can go - and she almost slipped when her walker wheels skidded as she was reaching for the last can of evaporated milk. There’s her friend the cashier who doesn’t know she is positive. There’s the cashier’s mother, who has been quarantined for weeks, and can’t sleep, so she picks her hair and now her eyebrows and front hairline are gone. There’s her neighbor who left few days ago for her country get-away place. There’s her daughter who is trying to get her kids to be quiet while she has a Zoom meeting with her team at a local bank. There’s her friend at the bank who is hoarding soap. There’s their boss who is thankful he has money in his 401K. There’s his cousin whose girlfriend abuses her. There’s the campus security guard who is called about this but doesn’t want to go into the apartment because it smells like boiled cabbage and that reminds him of his time in foster care with a family that beat him. There’s his dispatcher who just ordered pizza from Woodstock pizza and now doesn’t know if she can touch the box it came in. There’s her co-worker who could solve the dilemma with the hand-sanitizer she has in her drawer but she doesn’t want anyone to know so she won’t have to share. There’s her 14-year-old at home who is tired of playing League of Legends and wants to go to Metro Entertainment to play War Hammer with his friends. There’s the clerk who works at Metro whose laptop broke just as the quarantine began and it is sitting in the repair shop, which is closed, for as long this goes on. There’s the owner of that shop who took his two daughters away to a friend’s cabin around Big Bear and is teaching them Whist, which his grandfather taught him. There’s his wife who is a nurse who has been working at the hospital on 24 hour shifts and sleeps in a motel since she can’t go home and touch her family. There’s her sister, who is pregnant, and terrified. There’s the baby’s father who is a guard in the local jail who knows prisoners are testing positive but is forbidden to tell anyone. There’s his aunt who lives in San Diego and has been taking food and clothes across the border to families stuck in refugee camps but now Mexico doesn’t want Americans crossing the border. There’s her roommate who keeps watching “Outbreak” and “Contagion” and it’s driving her crazy. There’s their other roommate who has been putting up cheerful messages on Instagram but who now can’t stop crying because her grandpa died in his bed because the hospitals are not resuscitating anyone with the virus who has a heart attack. There’s his widow who is terrified after creatures in Hazmat suits came into her bedroom and took her husband. There’s the mortician in one of the suits who wishes she could give the poor widow some words of comfort but when she tries to say something it sounds like Darth Vader and scares the old woman more. There’s the manager of the funeral home who has a refrigerator truck adjacent to his business because the bodies are coming in so fast. There’s the mechanic who worked on the truck who is a single parent with three kids and he hopes they are safe at home alone. There’s the oldest girl in the family who is watching her siblings and also a kid from across the street because their mom and dad are doing private grocery shopping for folks who can’t go to the store. There’s the customer the husband is trying to please who is asking him if they have active yeast which she needs to make bread. There’s the lady in Missouri who put up her bread recipe on the internet and now it has 182 likes. There’s a woman who hit the blue thumbs-up button on the bread recipe who wishes her boyfriend could come over but since he can’t she will spend this afternoon with her two favorite vibrators and a joint. There’s her boyfriend who hasn’t told her he wants to separate. There’s the guy he has a crush on who works at the 7-11 which for some reason is considered essential and is open. There’s the homeless woman who camps behind its dumpsters. There’s the cleaning crew who tried to get her to move but who now don’t want to be close to her so they leave quickly after tossing black plastic bags in the trash bin. There’s the garbage truck driver, husband of Linda at the Luxe nail salon, who lifts the giant dumpster and empties it upside down into his truck. He’s noticed he isn’t smelling anything today. There’s the broadcaster on CNN who tells him on the 6:00 news that is one of the symptoms of Coronavirus.  

    "So, you switched sides, huh?" Christopher Patterson wheezed as he flung his straw hat on the table.

     This old man wasn't ever going to let me live down working for Exxon-Mobil.

     "'Bout time somebody stepped up and fought for us. We are being poisoned and nobody's doing a damn thing about it."

     Vincent, was, of course, once again, out of the office.

     "How can I help you, Mr. Patterson?"

     "How do you sleep at night after what you did to the Gulf?"

     I sighed. Did I personally light a match and set off the explosion that caused the worst environmental disaster in US history?

     "I'm just a lawyer, Mr. Patterson. I never worked on an oil rig."

     "Shrimp born without eyes. Fish oozing sores. Clawless crabs. Good eating, huh?"

     "..."

     "But you didn't grow up around here. I've lived in this town all my life. Went to the Fifth Ward elementary school where our babies are being inundated with polluted air twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

     "Well, that's why we started Fair Fight."

     He raised an eyebrow. I didn't flinch.

     "And my daughter-in-law—hell, the daughter I never had—almost didn't marry my son once he told her where he was from. She didn't want no parts of this place, so scared she was going to get cancer. Then she did."

     He wouldn't ever let me forget this chapter of the horror story either.

     "Vincent should be back before long, Mr. Patterson."

     "You'll do," he said. "Just wanted to make sure you knew about the rally at Tabernacle tomorrow evening. Don't know how many will show, but I, for one, will be there."

     I studied his face. Like so many of the residents here, he'd lost too much. I couldn't begrudge his anger, but I wasn't going to let anyone disrespect me.

     "Fair Fight will be there, Mr. Patterson. We invited the chemist who's going to share her air analysis with us."

     "Oh, so now it's us," he said and shook his head. "Particles so fine, we can't even see what's killing us. But bad days, which is most days, we can smell it."

     "Yes—well, I do have off-rig work to do," I said, and rose.

     Mr. Patterson studied me.

     "Never could trust no flip-flopper," he said before retrieving his hat.

     "Have a good day," I said.

     He half-turned and opened his mouth, then clammed it shut. The glass rattled in the door.

     Would my punishment ever end? Wasn't it bad enough that I now lived in a place where the air smelled like rotten eggs and permeated my body enough to plant tumors in my marrow? That sweat beaded on the surface of my skin as soon as I stepped outside the range of air conditioning? Where I couldn't throw a stone and

miss an oil refinery, or compressor station, or warehouse stuffed with toxic materials, or metal recycler, or salvage yard? Where people burn down their houses by using candlelight instead of electricity they can't afford, or the oil runs out so they use faulty heaters, or are on respirators because of the foul air that caused their asthma in the first place and the electricity just goes out? Where the air is contaminated as much as the water is poisoned and even the land itself is too foul to grow life-sustaining food?

At A Time Like This

At a time like this we need wonder.
At a time like this we need courage.
At a time like this we need each other, but not holding hands.
At a time like this we need neighbors, to share lamb stew even if it  is virtual; to share jokes on our Facebook feed, to share a high-five from across the street. Which looks surprisingly like a hello wave, which is what we really wanted anyway.
At a time like this we need to get to the back of the freezer and clean it out, decide about that half package of frozen peas in a new way, balanced against painful possibilities like food shortages. We aren't used to such things. Frozen peas would always be in plastic bags at Smart&Final. If ours were old we could toss them without worry. Now, we worry. Over Peas. And futures. And green-pea-less futures.
At a time like we need to snuggle and hear each other's heartbeats. When I'm scared I put my head on J's chest and the lub-dub of his heart calms me. When I'm calm I move my ear down to his stomach, where a small symphony of gurgles and bubble-sounds meet my ear and I laugh, which makes my head bounce on his tummy and he laughs, even at a time like this.