Eight thousand, eight hundred fifty-six hours
A year in a life.
“...They’re really gonna shut down the NBA, huh?”
I shivered my head, blinked a few times, and looked at the pizzaiolo.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, they’re really gonna shut it down?”
Meaning the league, obviously. The two of us - had just watched ESPN break the news that the National Basketball Association was shutting down because at least one player on the Utah Jazz had tested positive for Covid-19. Earlier, we’d watched the local news affiliate report that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had also similarly tested positive.
The news served as a 1-2 punch, but the effect was less thunderbolt-like and more like watching a massive wave building offshore. You see it coming, you see it growing; as it gathers force and mass, you tell yourself, This is going to suck, but part of you refuses to accept the inevitable. Wildly, you spin up all the ways in which it will not suck. You tell yourself that it will not be as bad as all that.
But it is. It always is.
I pay; I get my pizza. That Wednesday - one year, four days Sunday - I left my Midtown office earlier than usual; probably around five or so. I didn’t know when I’d be back. It was the last time I walked New York’s streets without a mask. My company had - like most other companies - hurriedly implemented an emergency work-from-home plan in response to the looming pandemic. Hurried, maybe, but careful and comprehensive. I think I was the last person in the office; I made sure everything was secured, nothing valuable left behind.
I turn out the lights. The overheads are still on; those are out of my control, on an automatic schedule. But everything else? Dimmed; extinguished. No one left behind. I exit, board the elevator, descend down the escalator, and leave the building. The streets are still busy; it’s the last week that will be so for a long time. I enter the subway, then await a train. I board it; it’s crowded. This is the beginning of the last few commute rushes we’ll see.
Nervously, I gaze around. I wonder who might be sick already; every cough causing an involuntary spasm of terror. When the first Covid-19 were reported, they pique my interest. But I can’t help comparing them to the SARS epidemic of 2003. Intellectually, I know a pandemic is a matter of when, not if. But it’s hard not to think of it as a problem happening Over There™, not right here. Right here, things are going to be okay. Right? They’re going to be okay.
I tell myself this as a kind of prayer. The truth is, though: they’re not okay. I’m not okay. Because for the last month or so, I’ve known that Covid-19 isn’t a problem Over There™, it’s a problem right here.
It starts with missives from my friend Sara, living in Seattle. Seattle - and Washington state - were the first places to document American patients with Covid-19. Every email, every social media post, is increasingly dire. Whatever the optimistic disposition of our federal government response might be, Sara’s is not. Clear-eyed; level-headed; she makes it crystalline that we are in for a rough ride.
In short: this is The Big One. Covid-19 is the pandemic we’ve all dreaded, for twenty, fifty, one hundred years. Over and over, Sara says: it’s here, and we need to get ready, right fucking now. On her advice - and that of others - I start gathering emergency materials. From military experience, I know what goes into a “cold/flu pack”: zinc and vitamin D for alleviating the first onset of symptoms, decongestant and aspirin to treat symptoms like congestion and fever, ibuprofen for aches and pains, and so on. I don’t just hit up pharmacies; I hit up the South Asian-owned convenience stores in my neighborhood. Pretty soon, I’ve got two massive shopping bags full of medicine and supplies.
On top of that, I acquire a contactless thermometer; I live with two other people, one of whom works with the public. We need to measure each other’s temperatures in case of fever. I get a standard thermometer for myself. Alcohol to sterilize things. I pay close attention to the horrific symptoms described by emergency room physicians and nurses talking about Covid-19, so when more than one person suggests getting a pulse oximeter, I do not hesitate one moment. I buy one for myself, then buy a few more and ship them to friends and family, along with instructions on how to properly use them. The White House might dismiss wearing a mask as the plague gathers lethal force, but I am not so certain; as February drifts into March, I quietly purchase a couple of boxes.
As evening becomes night, I decide I want takeout; I don’t know when I’ll eat at a restaurant next, and the thought of ordering delivery seems obscene, somehow. I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to eat pizza next, so that’s what I settle on. I walk over to Portobello’s, one of the neighborhood pizzerias. I order what I usually get: mozzarella pie, with sausage, mushrooms, and black olives.
I allow myself this small luxury, because I don’t know when I’ll experience another in this time. You may not consider pizza a luxury; it is for me. The world is upside down; comfort is a luxury. I sit and watch the small television mounted on the ceiling. The pizzaiolo makes my pizza and slips it in the oven to bake. We watch the news of Hanks and Wilson’s diagnoses; then he flips the channel to ESPN.
And then it happens: the night’s game, cancelled, followed by the season, suspended.
We look at each other. I breathe in, and say: “Yes.”
“It’s that serious?”
Yes, I want to say. Yes, it’s that serious. You cannot fuck around with this. But all I can manage to say is “yes.” I feel like anything else will make me sound stark raving mad. We are weeks away from sirens echoing through the New York night, each a harbinger of death and disease, but neither of us knows that. None of us are ready for what the spring will bring: not life, but death, in its illimitable dominion.
The pizza is finished; I pay. I thank him, and wish him luck. I walk back to my place, and plate a few slices. I store the remainder for lunch the following day. It will be the last meal cooked by another person that I will eat until at least late April, maybe early May. I do not remember.
In between, I teach myself to be...proficient at cooking. I’ve never been confident in a kitchen, but now I have no choice. Slowly, trippingly, I learn how to cook: not randomly reheating pre-cooked meals, but actually preparing meals from individual ingredients, meals that I enjoy eating.
My grocery trips are less enjoyable. After reading this Jeff Wise story the week after my pizza dinner, lyrical terror suffuses through me every time I’m around other people. When the story drops, I read through it several times. Each time, my terror grows. I do not want to die, I tell myself. I share the story imploringly on social media. I urge friends to take this shit seriously. I wonder why our leaders don’t.
That week, finally, New York begins shutting down. That weekend, I head to the supermarket. I buy something like $400 worth of groceries, a massive amount for a single man. I wipe everything down assiduously with disinfectant wipes, then leave it to air out. I strip off my clothes, and immediately shower; I then launder those clothes through the deepest of washes.
I will repeat these acts a few times, until it becomes clear that the coronavirus doesn’t really spread through fomites (inanimate objects that can transfer infection). But the quiet terror remains. I have not felt death lurking this close, this quietly, since I went to war seventeen years ago.
----
The first few days, I work in my kitchen. I do not have a desk, or external monitors. This quickly becomes untenable. I cannot concentrate. The simplest tasks prove extraordinarily difficult. The world is collapsing. It takes heroic effort to focus on my work. I am very far from alone in this, but the forced isolation of our m akeshift quarantine is deceptive. I watch others bake sourdough and portray lives of brittle yet pervasive serenity and I wonder how much of it is real, and how much of it is the persistent performance of our mediated lives.
My housemate comes downstairs; she’s from New Zealand. She’d moved in a few months ago; now she wonders whether she should leave. Are you kidding me?!, I exclaim. You should absolutely leave. Do not hesitate. You need to be home for this shit. This place, I helplessly wave my hands, is going to be an utter shitshow. You need to look out for yourself, and take care of yourself. Don’t worry about me. She nods uncertainly; in two days, she’ll be flying home to Wellington. She leaves behind a desk. I take it, and pay her for it.
It will be my workstation for the next eight thousand hours.
I do not know this. All I know is that the wave is crashing all around us, and the world we knew is crashing down upon us. That wave comes, it recedes, and it crashes again. And again, and again, and yet again.
----
Eight thousand, eight hundred fifty-six hours pass. I’m still at my house. The waves no longer crash. I don’t know what’s next. The world we knew is gone. A new one struggles to be born.
I don’t know what to say. We all mark this leaden anniversary differently. All I know is I’m tired, and I don’t know which way to go except forward. I’m glad you’re still with me; I’m sad so many are not, and will not be. Occasionally, I watch TV. On a show I watch, a character tells a mourning woman he loves What is grief, if not love persevering?
The show is WandaVision. Yes, it’s a “comic book” show. So what? It’s the most eloquent description of grief I’ve heard recently, and it’s more in line with how I feel as I write this than our traditional expressions of how to deal with grief — a linear process, in which we leave grief behind.
We’ve lost more than 534,000 people to this plague. More than that: it’s only in the last couple of months that we’ve *begun* to process that grief. To acknowledge, to commemorate it. Remembering those we’ve lost; marking the eight thousand hours and counting of this ongoing tragedy, in so many ways a needless one, through malign neglect, we ought to note that our love, individual and collective, perseveres in our grief, communal and individual. Both for those we’ve lost and those we’ve yet to lose.
My grief endures, and my love perseveres.