Pandemic #1 — Signs in Windows
Notes from a Pandemic
First, a poem:
It was the signs in the windows that finally made it real,
The Thing hovering over us.
The Thing that’s appeared,
Laid bare at our feet.
The Signs,
Messages of loss,
Of hopeful re-openings.
Of apologies for not being there,
To serve, to help,
Or just to say
Goodbye.
The Thing
Came so swiftly.
Invisibly installing itself,
Into our souls,
Our lives,
Our lungs.
Finding a way to multiply,
To pile up the coffins
As we stood unawares,
And said goodbye to love.
Anger and fear,
Frustration and killing,
This Thing will change
Every. Thing.
March 20, 2020
Today we crossed the line. The Governor of New York put the state on something he calls “PAUSE”, an acronym that was probably invented to sound a little less dire than “Lockdown” or “Shelter in Place”, both terms reminding me of pointless childhood nuclear drills. All workers (except essential ones, whatever that means) were told to stay home and our movements are limited to searching for food or medicine. Or maybe taking a walk outside. Alone.
I decided to immediately defy the order to run some last errands. With only a few cars on Main Street, I began to notice that something changed: no one was looking at anyone else. Before Covid-19 (BC19), most drivers subtly and almost subconsciously acknowledged other drivers, usually with a quick look or a nod as we maneuvered through traffic. But not today. With phones glued to their ears, everybody was busy trying to get somewhere else. Even the cars looked aloof, speeding through the intersections on their singular missions.
Then I saw them. Flashes of white copier paper hastily taped to all the doors. They stood out in contrast to the darkness of the empty offices and storefronts behind them. Uniform in size, each contained a slightly different message. I pulled over to park in a sea of open spaces and walked down an empty sidewalk to get a closer look. “Sorry, due to the Corona Virus, we find it necessary to …” Or “CLOSED, until further notice. Stay safe out there!” Or even just, “Good Luck. God help us all.”
Stepping back, I looked further down the street and realized you could see more of them in an endless row. All the way down the street. On both sides.
On Every. Single. Door.
It started quietly enough. Another sickness arising out of a market somewhere far, far away. I had heard of other viruses like it, but they were snuffed out soon enough and eventually disappeared from the news cycles. This virus would not be snuffed out. The continuous chatter of the 24/7 news cycle kept pinging it. Over and over and over again. It soon became The Thing.
Then, they gave The Thing a name.
Pandemic.
I wake up every morning now, forgetting even for just a few seconds how much the world has already changed. And then suddenly it all comes roaring back. (If I could only live more permanently in those innocent seconds.) The Thing is still here. The gnawing in my stomach starts up again. And I feel the cortisol rushing in.
Zombie-like I move to switch on the TV and CNN screams, “New Day, with John Berman and Allyson Camarata,” with the ominous “Breaking News” music and bloody graphic slicing through the screen yet again. (How is news “breaking” if everything is always breaking?
Great…another New Day with John and Allyson. Bring it.
And the cascade begins anew. Economies of unimaginable scale are crashing. Coffins pile up inside the cathedrals of Italy. The world is grinding to a halt. The magnitude of devastation is almost unimaginable. We stand at the threshold to an unknown future. Everything is surreal. Everything is changed. Forever.
And all I can do is write about it. And it seems I’ve been here before, years ago when different monsters threatened.
The first monster was more private and somehow shrouded in a sort of shame. It seems like all the world shunned us and didn’t want to hear about anything that was happening to our kind. Year after year, our president could not even utter the word. To do so would have made it more real to the world. But for us gay men, living in San Francisco in the ’80s, this monster was all too real. Every day someone fell sick. Every day someone died. Too many obituaries to read.
When 9/11 happened, we all watched in horror, holding our hands over our mouths for a few hours of unimaginable grief and shock. We watched people throw themselves out of buildings. And then watched the buildings themselves tumble into dust. A terrible loss that could be measured. And a response that could be taken.
But this time, the entire world is instantly involved. And I mean the whole entire earth. There is not a single place that will escape the ravages of The Thing. And The Thing will change us all — every person, every race, every community.
Unable to sleep, the cortisol levels in my body rise even as I write this at 1:00 in the morning. No one knows yet when it will end. No one knows yet when we’ll be able to step outside to laugh and sing and dance — and simply embrace each other again.
There is a terrible wonder in it, as we all stand at the edge of another cliff or maybe on one of those glass-floored balconies at the edge of the Grand Canyon. We hesitate to step out because it makes us nauseous. Without even looking, we feel in our gut how far below us the river flows. We are suspended, in mid-air, our brains not comprehending how we’re not falling a thousand feet down to the canyon floor.
This is what The Thing does to our minds.
We pause in this time, we begin to look around. Finally forced to stop the monkey-minds of our frenetic lives, we now can look clear-eyed at what we’ve become. And at what we hope to become. Our societies, our economies, our systems. We begin to see what we’ve done to the Earth and what we’ve done to each other. What is and is not important. How far we’ve grown apart.
What if this is the moment? What if this is the time we’ve been waiting for.
One thing is for certain:
This Thing will make us question.
Everything.