Half Life: Notes from a Pandemic

During that time we were always waiting. Nothing much happened, but everything happened.

Maybe I was more attuned to what was unfolding when it started than I might otherwise have been because nine months earlier my father had died and loss had taken up residence in my life. I was familiar with the shape of it, which was absence, and its weight.

The crisis came slowly, with whispers of a distant illness. The rumours were infrequent low-level sound bites of information; they came from far away, a foreign place, so what could they possibly matter to us? There was that disturbing video of the doctor sweating and gasping for breath, but we went about our lives.

Gradually there were more eruptions of news, louder, closer, increasingly frequent, so that suddenly — standing in the grocery store with a package of spaghetti in our hands, or sitting at the computer at work one day, or on the phone with a friend — there was a wildfire in front of us and all around us. It seemed to come out of nowhere and then it was everywhere.

It was early spring, a cool spring, less overcast than spring had been in recent years, but also chillier. Near the equinox. A time when the year hung in the balance, teeter-tottered, transitioning from one season to the next: everything in flux. The yellow winter aconite was in bloom, with its delicate, frilly leaves, crocuses, galanthus, scilla, a little later chionodoxa, puschkinia. Later still species tulip. Forsythia bushes put out small, tentative blooms. Buds appeared on trees. The silver maples dropped their buds, a red carpet on the sidewalk. And still the snow silted down some days, slow, steady, silent. Or there was a storm, grey rain sheeting down, water churning in the gutters, the sump pump humming in the cellar. We wondered: would we get four inches of water the basement again? Sunny the next day, with a brisk, cold breeze. The season could not commit.

So we stayed inside, on the advice of those who had information. And when we went outside to walk the dog it was quiet — there were fewer cars, buses, trucks, or planes — except for the low-level hum of anxiety that thrummed everywhere, all the time, a constant background soundtrack to our days and nights.

We stayed inside mostly. Except when we didn’t. Taking walks was important we were told.

We stayed inside and worked. Or didn’t.

We got up early, or we got up late. It was hard to tell. No matter when we got up we felt vaguely fatigued. Not tired, exactly, but worn. As if we were thinning out, taking up less space than usual, as if we were gradually disappearing, bleaching away.

We lived in our sweats, unless we dressed up because standards had to be maintained.

The snow tires stayed on. We read an article that said it was no big deal.

We forgot what day of the week it was and had to trust that our computers weren’t lying to us.

It took an enormous amount of effort to begin what we needed to do: turn on the computer, log on, click, click, click. It took an enormous amount of energy not to do what we shouldn’t do: one more cookie wouldn’t make that much difference; one more silly cat meme wouldn’t take up that much time.

We ate too much. We didn’t eat enough. We slept too much. We didn’t sleep enough. We slept all night, like the dead. We woke up at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning and the first thing our mind went to, like iron flings flying to a magnet, was what was happening in the larger world we had exiled ourselves from. We learned that others woke up then, too, and we considered arranging a conference call so we could all worry together, but it was too much trouble, so we just lay in bed, our minds spinning, and stared at the ceiling, or at the alarm clock’s illuminated face. We learned that the dog snored.

Spring carried on, and on our walks — twice-daily, sometimes thrice-daily — we noticed the yellow daffodil blooms beginning to emerge from their sheath of green leaves. Dog owners and mothers pushing infants in strollers were the other people we encountered on our walks.

Wildlife seemed to reclaim the silent streets. Raccoons appeared, furry mountain-shaped creatures skittering up the driveway, scaling the maple tree by the kitchen door, a mother and kit, speaking to each other in low warbles, hanging over the edge of the fence and eyeing the emerging tulips until I spoke to them sharply. They looked at me neutrally and sauntered off along the fence, picking their way delicately on long, narrow feet that looked like flexible spatulas, in no hurry, pointedly in no hurry. Birds sang and called, and they sounded louder than usual, we thought, because of everything else being quiet. There was a report of a coyote a street over. Someone saw a red fox.

Nightly, the numbers on the TV, on the radio, accumulated, debris left behind by the virus, flotsam tossed from a sinking ship. The moon moved from waxing to full to waning, became a slender silver fingernail floating in the sky. Newscasters recited the rising tide of death in funereal tones as the moon ebbed.

We did not listen to the resident of the White House because nothing he said had any meaning. He said “beautiful” as people died, their lungs shredded by the virus, alone in their apartment, or alone in a hospital room surrounded by healthcare workers wrapped in robes, N95 masks, Hazmat suits, strangers who could not touch or comfort them. He said “perfect” as people’s lives collapsed, their livelihoods evaporated, their families fragmented.

And what he really meant, he didn’t say. He didn’t say, “Your lives are nothing to me. I’m only interested in the stock market’s upward trajectory.” His meaning was obscene.

He lived in a separate place, surrounded by ghosts and wraiths. There was nothing in his world except his own image, reflected back to him on and on into infinity. He performed regularly in an echo chamber.

Things were different. Things were the same.

There were shortages. Some of the shortages made sense: hand sanitizer, bleach wipes. Some didn’t: toilet paper, yeast.

At first there was confusion at the grocery store: sanitize or not? Direct traffic or not? But rituals developed. We were good at creating rituals. Early hours were set aside for the elderly and vulnerable; this way they could shop in a store that had been cleaned overnight, this way they were able to avoid crowds.

Now we waited patiently in line outside the store, the way we had previously waited to get into a popular show, movie, concert, or museum exhibit, with resignation. On entering the designated door, we offered our hands up to be anointed with sanitizing spray. Then we continued inside to collect a sanitized grocery cart. There were arrows, made of colourful tape, stuck to the floor telling us which way to go. Many people obeyed them. The people who didn’t, oddly, were often the people in the most vulnerable groups: older people, frail people. They had their reasons, we decided.

Going grocery shopping became like planning a military campaign: what would we need in two weeks (the next specified pick-up time slot)? What would we have run out of by then? What was essential? What could we trim from our usual shopping list?

Sometimes there were tussles in the aisles over the last package of toilet paper, the final carton of eggs.

At the check-outs there were large circles taped to the floor with instructions printed on them directing customers to practice social distancing (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Some stores skipped the circles and simply taped off six-foot intervals where customers could wait until it was their turn at the cash. Some people took the intervals seriously and kept their distance; other people took the intervals more as a suggestion and nudged closer to those in front of them.

Overnight, Plexiglass barriers appeared between cashiers and customers. Cashiers wore disposable gloves. Between each customer, the cashiers spritzed any available surface — weigh scales, debit pad, conveyor belt — with sanitizing spray and rubbed each down with quick, fierce movements, as if they were angry. Maybe they were.

Or customers used self-check-outs, bagging their own goods while unconsciously scratching their faces or rubbing their eyes, some with gloved hands.

It all went like clockwork. Or as close to clockwork at humans can achieve, which means there were stutters, gridlock, carts bumped, glares exchanged, apologies offered, confusion. On the way out of the store there was another spritz with sanitizer. Finally we loaded the groceries in the car and drove home on nearly empty streets.

We went to the bank. The door was shut, and behind it, beyond the notice taped to the glass, three staff huddled, all women. The most senior — small, round, anxious, a worried sparrow of a woman with round glasses and an uncertain smile — said, we can’t let you in. It’s too small in here for us to practice social distancing. You’ll have to go to the other branch. We explained our Personal ID number had quit working for some reason. There was a hurried conference carried on in urgent whispers. Could we slip the card under the door and they’d help reset the PIN? It didn’t seem to occur to them that the virus could sneak in on the card. The card was passed, the PIN reset, we went on our way. All three waved good-bye from the other side of the door.

Our neighbour immediately to the north texted us: Our neighbour Leo, Katherine’s son, was taken away in an ambulance. They were giving him chest compressions.

Katherine was our immediate behind-hand neighbour. Leo lived in a tiny house between Katherine’s house and the other neighbour, the one who had texted us. Leo was maybe 28 or 29, married, with a young son. Too young for a heart attack, a later text said.

His wife was there when they took him. He looked grey. Definitely unconscious.

Later: There are people with candles in front of Katherine’s house.

I think Leo has died.

We stopped. We thought: the virus? Suddenly it was very important to let the kids know where our wills were, contact information: the lawyer, the financial guy.

How could he have caught it, we wondered. We weren’t sure what his job was. We weren’t sure he had died. We waited. It was as if the world around us had suddenly grown sharper and clearer than it had been. We decided we wouldn’t think about Leo, but then found ourselves thinking about him, wondering what had happened. Would he come back?

The next day another friend emailed: I am sad to let you know Katherine’s son Leo passed away yesterday. It was sudden and acute. The cause is unknown.

We texted: Thank you for letting us know. That is so hard.

We texted Katherine: We are so sorry to hear about Leo’s death. We cannot imagine the pain. Tell us if there’s anything we can do. What more could we say? What more could we do? Any words or actions seemed inconsequential when weighed against what she had lost.

She replied, Thank you.

We left a loaf of fresh-baked bread on her front porch wrapped in several shopping bags so the squirrels wouldn’t eat it before she got it. Someone we didn’t know set up a dinner rota and we signed on.

The next evening 20 or so of us gathered at seven in a loose group in front of her house, all of us six feet apart, each holding a candle. The sky was still bright. We recognized some of Katherine’s co-workers, some neighbours, her friends, her late son’s friends. There were a few people we didn’t know. We stood chatting quietly on the sidewalks, in the middle of the street. Her neighbour across the road came out and stood on her porch with us. We said how hard this must be for Katherine, how brutal.

Katherine came out on her front porch to thank us. She was tall, with white hair and pale skin. A spasm of pain contorted her face part way through what she was saying. She had to stop. She was like a statue of grief carved out of marble. Someone seeing her 2,000 years ago would know what her expression meant. Someone from far away would understand. She hugged her other son and wept. Shortly, they both went inside. We stood in silence, our candles growing brighter as the sun set and the silhouettes of the houses and trees around us grew darker. It was very beautiful and moving, the darkness and the silence and the people just standing there with no noise.

After a while a couple of us looked around, moved restlessly. Then the rest of us began to shake ourselves as if we were waking up from sleep, and we left singly, or in a group, walking off into the dark.

A man in Arizona ate a chemical used to clean fish tanks and died. He had confused it with a drug that had a similar-sounding name and was rumoured by certain people — non-experts — to be useful for staving off the virus.

“I saw it on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?’” he said. It wasn’t.

Other bad decisions were made. The number of traffic accidents went down; the number of speeding tickets went up.

One of us developed a sore throat. Of course the first thought was: virus? A flare of fear. Suddenly all the symptoms seemed very near. The person with the sore throat breathed deeply; did their lungs hurt? It was difficult to tell. Perhaps. Was there a fever? Possibly. Aches and pains? Plausibly.

But then the sneezing started, and the scratchy eyes, and we realized it was allergy season. Not the virus.

A young woman from Texas declared the virus a hoax, shared a post on her Facebook page from a right-wing website, “This is what the beginning of socialism looks like! You don’t need hand sanitizer…You need common sense, a sense of direction, faith, a will to fight, and of course guns!”

Her obituary noted she was always the centre of fun, a loving wife, a devoted mother, a loyal and faithful friend, loved and missed by her husband, their two sons, and many friends.

We thought about the emptiness her death would leave in those lives.

The strangeness of those days can’t be exaggerated, or their normalcy. Every time we turned around there was something we couldn’t believe, except it was true and documented. People were kind, people were stupid in the same proportions they probably always had been; it was only the exceptional nature of this time that magnified their kindness or stupidity. Kindness when the stakes were high seemed saintly; stupidity when the stakes were high seemed criminal.

We felt like travellers in a foreign land, a foreign land where they spoke the same language we did, ate the same food we did, watched the same TV shows we did, a foreign land that looked exactly like where we lived, except —

We gardened. Our gardens were tidier than they ever had been or would be.

Our houses were clean, too — they would never be so clean again (who in their usual life has time to dust the basement?), but no one would ever see them in this pristine state.

Our doorknobs were disinfected regularly. We had the most sanitary doorknobs in history.

We baked. The internet flooded with sourdough recipes, no-knead bread recipes, unleavened bread recipes, cakes, cookies, complex and abstruse recipes.

We ran into a friend in a distant park. We had driven there for a change of scenery, to walk along the lake’s shoreline. In the time it took us to drive there, the weather changed. When we arrived the day was windy, overcast, and cold, so we only took a short walk.

We came around a corner and there was our friend throwing a ball for his two dogs. He was very tall and very thin. He said he was there because he couldn’t walk his two dogs in the parks near his house. “They come up and tell me to leave,” he said.

“What are you up to?” we asked.

“Baking,” he said, and laughed. “If I see another cake, I’ll throw up.” He lobbed the ball and his dogs raced after it, barking. When we came back from our walk ten minutes later he was gone.

We forgot to look before crossing the street.

For the first time ever we read the Sunday newspaper, all five pounds of it, from beginning to end, even the business section, which turned out to be quite interesting.

Were our dreams different? We read an article that said, yes, people were having more vivid dreams. It said four times as many people googled “why am I having weird dreams” than usual. Many people were having bug dreams.

In the article it said that research had discovered officers held by the Nazis in POW camps where they were adequately fed and relatively safe (no torture), but whose freedom of movement was curtailed and their social interactions limited, had more boring dreams “on most dimensions” than was the norm. Their dreams had less good luck and friendliness, but also less violence, failure, and loss. They dreamed more about the families they had grown up with, and about the places where they had lived as children. And food. They dreamed about food deeply and rapturously. And escape. But escape posits there being some other place to escape to, and where could we dream of escaping to when the whole world was locked down?

Someone stole the welcome mat off our front porch.

People could no longer read books. They said they couldn’t concentrate that long.

All that some people could do was read books.

Bus drivers were heroes. Retail workers were heroes. Healthcare workers were heroes. We stood on our porches at 7:30 at night and banged pots to show our appreciation. Or hung brightly-coloured ribbons on the fences around hospitals, long-term care facilities, and clinics, with messages that said, “Thank you.” We waved buses through intersections and then waved at the drivers as they sped past.

The rich retreated to their aeries. Some reported how they were faring, self-isolating on their yachts, until someone pointed out to them the inappropriateness of this statement when people were losing their jobs, their houses, their lives. We were surprised they needed to have this pointed out.

South of the border the idea of “opening the country” was mooted at the highest levels, as if the country was a door that had slammed shut and all that was required were the correct words — “open sesame” — and all would return to how it had been before.

Pundits, politicians, captains of industry talked, quantifying the value people’s lives versus getting the economy “back on track.” A politician from Texas assured us that old people (“lots of grandparents” — he was one) would be willing to die to “save the economy” for the sake of the grandchildren. We wondered who he thought the economy was made of, if not people, and if those people died where would be the economy he was so determined to “save”? It was puzzling.

Skies cleared. Lakes and rivers cleared.

There were photos of New Delhi. The photos were split in half. It looked like someone had taken a cloth and wiped the grime off one side of a dirty window: on the left was pre-virus New Delhi, polluted and grey, the buildings blurry in the smog; on the right was new New Delhi, the air clean, the buildings’ details picked out clearly in the bright sunlight. There were satellite images of China; in the pre-virus image an ugly yellow mass covered Beijing and metastasized over the surrounding area, post-virus the yellow mass was gone.

Where we were, the birds returned from the south, honking and squawking as they flew overhead. A Cooper’s Hawk took up residence in the small park across the street. Beyond its sharp kri-kri-kri cries, we found evidence of its presence in the solitary pigeon wings we discovered left on the ground that we had to grab before our dog could get to them, lunging toward them, pulling his leash taut. To him, they were like finding a Montreal smoked meat sandwich would be to us.

Conspiracy theories were pandemic. It was the Chinese. It was 5G. It was bats. It was the CIA. It was contrails. It was in the water.

We had our own theories.

We were told, variously, that we’d be o.k. if we gargled with liquid silver, if we were covered in Jesus’s blood (which, by this time, was about 2000 years old, give or take, so had probably dried up and blown away; AB or AB+ it had been determined), if we believed, if we trusted.

When we went outside our problems seemed no less real, just smaller and less pressing.

We did everything together, from the time we got up in the morning until we lay down, sighing, in bed at night. Sometimes one of us took a walk alone, but we were together most of the day most of the days.

We were home so much the dog self-isolated upstairs, but when we went out for a couple of hours he’d be waiting — anxiously, it seemed to us, although we knew we shouldn’t anthropomorphize — at the door when we returned.

Sometimes we glared at each other across the dining room table, irritated by the other’s constant presence. Other times we laughed simultaneously at an odd turn of phrase on the radio.

We wondered what it would be like after this, when we reverted more closely to how we used to live, leaving for work at different times, travelling separately, living our separate lives. Would it feel odd, unmoored?

There was less garbage in the streets. There were more ducks in the parks, in church yards, and outside the coffee shop at Princess and Clergy.

There were videos of people in foreign cities singing beautifully on their balconies: soaring opera, stirring songs. There was a video of one country’s air force pilots flying in formation to a rousing soundtrack. We did not sing on our front porch. It would only have made things worse.

When we ran into people we knew on our walks, we all shook our heads and said, “Strange times,” in subdued voices, not quite smiling.

Dentist appointments were cancelled. Mammograms were cancelled. Hernia appointments were cancelled. Driving classes were cancelled.

Restaurants closed. Cinemas closed. Theatres closed. Festivals were cancelled. Book stores delivered.

We didn’t think about after because we read (in two different places) a story told by a man who had been a prisoner during a war. We forgot which war.

The man said that when he was a prisoner there were other men, prisoners in the same camp, who would say, “The war will be over by Easter.” Then, when the war wasn’t over by Easter, they’d say, “The war will be over by Labour Day.” When it wasn’t over by Labour Day, they’d say, “It’ll be over by Christmas.” When Christmas came and went and the war raged on, they died of disappointment.

He, on the other hand, didn’t think in those terms. He knew the war would end, but he didn’t tease himself by setting a date. He just got through each day as it came. It was better not to be disappointed, he said.

So we resolved not to talk about after. Except sometimes we slipped and said, “When this is over — ” but then we’d catch ourselves and stop. This was not the new normal: this was the new now.

They closed the park across the street. Signs appeared one morning, stuck into the newly-thawed ground on slender metal legs, like the signs candidates sprinkle around during elections. They said, “Stay safe. Stay home.” We thought it would have been more effective if the sentences had been reversed: “Stay home. Stay safe.” But no one had asked us.

Someone from the City came and wrapped yellow caution tape around the swings, the slide, the jungle gym. They did this invisibly. It seemed to happen between one breath and the next.

Anyone could have torn down the caution tape. It was thin and flimsy. But no one did. It stayed there for weeks, fluttering in the slightest wind. Sometimes a teenager on a skateboard rattled along the asphalt path that ran around the perimeter of the park, otherwise everyone followed orders. Except for dog walkers and mothers pushing infants in strollers. But no one could blame them.

Time went fast: was it really a whole month since Linda in Admin had shared pictures of her new grandson with us on her phone? We remembered standing in a circle, elbow to elbow, peering at the tiny screen and knew we would not be comfortable doing that now.

Time went slowly: Was it only two days since we’d applied for the emergency relief benefit?

At night, when we walked the dog there were lights on in every single house we passed.

It was a sunny day, harsh in its brightness, two weeks after Leo, one week after our friend who would throw up at another cake. We ran into a friend walking her dog in the park.

“Gerald has left me,” she said from six feet away, in an even tone, airily, we thought, almost off-handedly. A statement of fact, not feeling.

“Oh, no,” we cried. “That’s too bad.” We meant it. They were both nice, smart people, thoughtful and interesting. “Because of — ” we held up our hands — the empty park, the silence — this?

“I think it exacerbated it,” she said. Her dog was tugging on its leash, pulling her away from us, her right arm extended straight out. She gave the leash a jerk, corrected course. “He left me last year for three days.”

Oh, we thought. Last year? Three days?

“He’s gone to Joffrey’s.” A friend of theirs, an acquaintance of ours. “Joffrey went to the city to live with his girlfriend when this all started. Gerald is staying at his apartment.”

“Ah.”
“Gerald has a dark side.”

“Yes,” we agreed. “There is a lot unsaid about him, in interactions. We like Gerald,” we rushed to add, because we did, but we had already recognized this aspect of his character. He is a musician. Musicians are like this. “How are you?” we asked.

She shrugged. “Good days, bad days. I slept last night — seven hours! He left last week and I’ve only been sleeping for three or four hours, but last night I slept for seven hours. I felt tireder when I woke up than when I only slept for three or four hours.” Her dog pulled again, investigating an interesting smell. She stumbled sideways. “And now I have to go teach 200 people remotely.” She worked at the university.

“When it’s warmer — ” A stiff breeze had sprung up during the conversation and the day had grown chilly — “come over. We’ll sit in the back yard, six feet apart, and have gin and tonics.”

She shrugged. Her dog pulled her again.

“Are you o.k.?” we asked.

“Managing,” she said, as the dog continued to pull her farther away.

“Bye,” we waved.

She waved back.

We walked home. In her manner, she seemed disconnected from what had happened, as if she was separate from her words, the experience, floating off to one side. Was it that she wasn’t connected, we wondered, or was it — we glanced around: the vacant street, the lack of traffic, the lack of people — all of this? Just last year she and Gerald had been discussing a wedding, shutting down the short dead-end street they lived on, a marquee, games for friends’ children.

We saw footage on the news, which we watched on our laptop, of people in another country sitting in 5-mile-long traffic jams to get supplies from food banks. One car after another, and people sitting on the roofs of their motionless cars. We read statistics about food banks. How much they had spent last year during this period, how much more they were spending now. How many people they had served last year, how many more they were serving this year. We read about a single father who had left work early, picked up his three young daughters, and driven to the food bank. By the time he got there, the food bank was empty. He had to turn around empty-handed and drive home. We thought about how hungry those little girls would be.

When we walked around the neighbourhood there were pieces of white 8 ½ by 11-inch paper taped up on people’s front windows with riddles on them printed by hand: “What runs around the yard without moving?” A fence, we thought, feeling secretly proud of guessing the answer. “I am a word with six letters. Take away one and 12 are left.” There were also drawings made by kids, and small heart-shaped notes: “Thank you health care workers” written by adults. We wondered, would health care workers stroll down this narrow, empty street? We decided it was the thought that counted.

News outlets, suspecting that we were not feeling anxious enough, ran articles reminding us that climate change and global warming were still threats. Where we lived, spring was cooler than normal

We weren’t supposed to wear masks; they wouldn’t help and health care workers needed all the masks. Then we were supposed to wear masks because they helped slow the spread of the virus. On Facebook someone posted an animation made by some scientific organization with those odd, smooth, human-like figures that science videos often use — facial features and gender characteristics sanded away — that in fact look like aliens, which showed what happened when people coughed or sneezed. The clouds of droplets that resulted were quite pretty. We decided 6 feet was a reasonable distance. We also learned empirically that wearing the masks fogged up our glasses, introducing new risks into our lives, and that after a while the masks smelled unpleasant. But we wore them anyway.

There was a shortage of masks for healthcare workers. Yet here was a picture of a legislator, showing up for a vote to lift shelter-in-place orders, wearing a hard-to-find N95 mask. Upside down. “You couldn’t write this stuff,” we said to each other, shaking our heads.

The price of oil dropped below $0. “Does this mean they’re going to pay us to fill up our cars?” a friend quipped.

One of us developed a cough. One of the symptoms of the virus was a dry cough. The rest of us listened to the coughing person. “Wet cough,” we decided. “Good thing, too. If it had been a dry cough we’d have put a tarp down in the back yard and pitched a tent for you to stay in.” The coughing person was not amused.

People in that other country began to demonstrate against the shelter-in-place orders. These protests were referred to as disturbances. We watched them, shrunk small on the computer screen. We found we were leaning back, putting distance between us and the groups of people on the screen. We were looking at the screen sideways, as if that meant our contact with the screen was more limited, as if that meant our contact with those people was more limited.

It was a sunny day where the protesters were and we were a bit jealous because it had been a cool, rainy week where we were and it would have been nice to be able to stand outside in the sun in dark glasses and shorts the way they were. We would have lasted three minutes outside if we’d tried that on our front porch.

The protesters seemed to be charged with anger. It seemed to flood through them, making their voices roar. They held up handmade signs that said, “stop the quarantine start work,” “my constitutional rights are essential,” “give me liberty or give me covid-19,” “live free or die in lockdown” and “I want a haircut.” No matter where the protests were, the signs all said more or less the same things, word for word.

We thought the choices weren’t quite so black and white, that there might be a middle ground. It wasn’t just a matter of totally shut or totally open. There were degrees.

We were uncomfortable watching the protesters stand so close together. We didn’t understand why they were so angry that people were trying to protect them from getting sick. We decided they didn’t see it that way. Five days later there was a spike in cases in the state where the protests had occurred.

We stopped listening to the radio. We stopped reading the news. We stopped watching on the laptop. It was a constant barrage of numbers (either increasing alarmingly — the number of cases and deaths — or decreasing alarmingly — the economy). And when we bumped into the news, we ran the risk of encountering the one who’d been asleep at the wheel, who had made a bad situation lethal, and who now spent most of his energy and time denying responsibility and trying to shift blame elsewhere. Meanwhile, people continued to die.

He decided to close the borders against “the Invisible Enemy.” He seemed oblivious to the fact that the enemy had already made it through the door.

We texted and emailed people. We did this in concentric circles: first we contacted family, then close friends. Some lived far away. It was reassuring to hear they were all right. It also gave us a chance to think about the last time we’d seen them, out there in the country, away from all this. It was kind of like taking a short vacation to think of the trees and brush and chipmunks and sometimes bears. Then we moved on to the next ring and emailed those friends to ask, “How are you?”

One friend wrote back to tell us that shortly before all this began she had fallen and broken a bone in her foot. She’d had an operation to pin the bone, but there had been complications so, two days before lockdown began, she’d been in hospital again, having a second operation. They kept her overnight for observation and during the night she got out of bed, fell, broke another bone in her foot, and hit her head.

She sounded quite jolly reporting she was now house-bound, crawling from one room to another as needed, and experiencing concussion symptoms. The upside of all of this was that it made it a lot easier to shelter-in-place because she couldn’t get outside anyway, and less stimulation and more sleeping was good for concussion recovery.

We had zoom meetings. We struggled to get the program up and running. Our children told us, in tired, patient voices, which button to push, not to make the password too complex. Sometimes we got visuals and no sound; sometimes we got sound and no visuals. Sometimes one or the other of sound or visuals would blink on and off. Eventually we got both.

It was good to see whomever we were talking to, although sometimes it was confusing: Who was that person wrapped in a towel walking through the room behind them? And: Oh, here’s the dog. People often seemed to be looking down, their faces at an odd angle. Or they were dark, indeterminate shapes in front of a bright, sunny window. Oh, we thought, that’s a nice couch, or, that wallpaper is awful.

There was the half-second lag problem. Someone’s mouth would start moving, but we didn’t hear the words until half a second later, and sometimes their voice would be faint for reasons we couldn’t know and some of the sentence would go missing. We’d have to try and figure out what we’d missed. Then the person’s mouth would stop but the words kept coming. When was it o.k. to respond? We talked over each other. Some of us, aware of the geographical distance between everyone, spoke too loudly, shouted, almost. Our children — tired, patient — explained that was unnecessary. We should just talk in a normal tone.

We heard about zoom bombing, people who hacked into zoom meetings to show porn or to troll, but we never experienced it. Some of us felt this might have spiced things up.

It was good to see people, and to see they were all right. There was often an awkward 20 or 30 seconds of silence at the end of the meeting before one of us said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Next week?” When we waved good bye our hands were blurs on the screen.

A co-worker who had been pregnant when lockdown began posted on the digital staff newsletter that her daughter had been born. There was a picture of her baby asleep beside her on her hospital bed wrapped in a blue and red striped flannel blanket. The baby’s right hand peeked out beside her cheek, four fingers unfurled. She was the standard beautiful baby: snub nose, perfect complexion. Her date of birth and her weight were duly noted. The baby looked peaceful, calm, fine.

Across the street, as we read this news, one of the signs announcing the park closure bounced in a stiff wind. The sun was shining and sometimes, as the sign moved up and down, sunlight reflected off the sign and flashed into our eyes, some kind of indecipherable Morse code message.

Before, there had been stories with beginnings, middles, and endings, and when we read them or watched them or listened to them we began at the start and were always in motion, moving from the beginning to the end. But now the stories had stopped. Except the ones that hadn’t.

We were waiting. Everything was going to happen.

April 2020