Keep your distance: The fragile net of our bootstraps is breaking. This frayed net was never truly meant to hold the weight of the unwashed masses. See how we turned away as the undeserving slipped through gaps the size of our collective colonialism. See how we voted No when our neighbors were turned away from hospital doors; when they carted cans, blankets, and unrecorded histories in myriad shopping bags; or when they stared blankly at their children being lined up and moved to an undocumented location. Like Lady Macbeth, our hands will never wash clean; we will forever seek catharsis.
The During
We will witness the politics of indifference and inequity in the colors, lines, accents, and languages of neglect. Observe the chipped nail polish on the hand that slips from beneath the white sheet to swing bonelessly, the strained eyes of the warehouse worker who rests their burning forehead on the steering wheel for a final moment before clocking in, the brown legs on the bus that try to physically distance in an absence of distance. Observe the dry bottle of sanitizer by the cash register. Isn’t this absurd, the newly essential cashier says as their ungloved hand pushes your bags to the end of the counter. A virus may not discriminate, but the privilege of sheltering-in-place belongs to those with place, and money to make that place; money to be earned while sheltering in that place. Thank you, you respond. You stuff your trunk and backseat full with milk (3), pasta (5), paper towels (10), toilet paper (36), soap (20), eggs (24), salad mix (5), and the rest. Your hands wouldn’t stop pulling products into your cart.
We will observe the cost of our arrogance and exceptionalism by the depth of the holes the bodies are poured into and the number of ash-filled barrels secreted beneath a layer of soil. Fat rain drops echo on metal lids and ash settles on our shoulders slack with indifference. The dead will be carried from hospitals and bedrooms and shelters and prison cells by anonymous hands sheathed in sterile white gloves smeared brown by end-of-day. Our dead will be dumped into the backs of trucks atop the ones that came before. Except for the first of the day. Oh, what a dubious honor that will be: the first to press into a metal bed still slippery with yesterday’s effluvia. There’s nothing like the heat and humidity to make a body swell and summon sticky black flies. We’re tempted to scavenge for something sharp, a knitting needle or an unbound wire hanger. Shuddering with revulsion, we yearn to stab this grotesquery. Its reminder that we indulged in self-righteous denial of accountability.
[Isn’t this absurd, the cashier said. You wonder if they meant the six-foot rule, the shortage of beans, or the Texas lieutenant governor’s suggestion that seniors should sacrifice themselves for the bottom line. You ration toilet paper and contact high school friends on social media. You find this all rather exciting. Isn’t this absurd.]
A mound of human bodies falls from the back of a jacked-up truck bed. The arms and legs bend at the strangest angles, and the skin is tough like over-kneaded bread dough. We want to touch and make real that flesh sheened with sweat that is simply enzymes breaking down body into not-a-body. An Unbody created by bones shedding lifeless vitality. At what point do we become an object to which only science can assign personhood. If we follow this truck that is hauling our neighbors away [perhaps it is hauling you, perhaps tomorrow it will be you] that is what we will see. But we do not follow. We watch this through a glass pane that serves as a sensory barrier between inside and outside so that what is outside is only a projection at low volume. It’s like reality tv. What is outside is television, and television, well, you know, it’s just a hoax.
We will know the weight of our carelessness when we are begged to lift it. We crowd the ether with our bits of outrage, fatigue, ecstasy, and anxiety. The air thrums with our pixels of cats, Baby Yoda memes, and anti-vaxx screeds. Satellites ping our lols and fucks and good bois. But at some point a parent, a lover, a friend, or that Instacart worker with the big hair and anxious brow that dropped off take-out Thai last week cuts through the static. Now it is your turn to lift them into the truck that you suddenly realize passes by daily. There’s that tune it plays. You suddenly realize it’s Bohemian Rhapsody that song by Queen how could anyone think that was appropriate at a time like this. You realize that we live in a time like this. In a time like this you unlock your information system of choice, then google Symptoms. You google [CITY]. You google Who is At Risk. You google Am I Going to Die. You read that a fetish site donated its stock of scrubs to a hospital. You read that there are no more hospital beds. You read that people without insurance are not being tested and gun sales are up. You read that this will last for years and follow you into your next decade.
[Isn’t this absurd.]
Bodies of the living and the dead must be contained. The living need containers to divide the unfathomable vastness into knowable partitions. Bodies within skins, rooms within buildings, countries within continents. These boundaries create spaces that can be claimed, that separate us from them and me from you. The dead need containers to prevent them from wandering door to door like Amway salesmen of the damned selling our shameful pasts at wholesale prices. Flesh within bags, within coffins, within flame. When they are contained we sleep: I know where you are. The universe lacks boundaries, which is why the night sky provokes vertigo. Thus, we seek out the Big Dipper, the belt of Orion, the Seven Sisters, to quell our quiet, breathless terror. A virus defies containment. It lingers in the spaces between our words and on the cabinets we touched yesterday. It mutates and so is unknowable until it creeps through the ultimate barrier of our flesh, seeking to know us better.
Make distance, please. We do not have sufficient containers to hold all these bodies. Please, step back. Please, it is unsafe. This is moving too quickly there is not enough time.
The soil is crumbling beneath our feet and we are slipping.
The After
We will know the permanence of the virus by emptiness. The Emptiness. When we are allowed to re-enter those spaces barred for so long, we will find an emptiness coated in dust, reeking, moldy, and musty, that muffles our grieving soft-shoe shuffle through accumulated grit. Perhaps you ripped the apologetic closed-for-the-duration note off the glass door and still clutch it crumpled in your hand. The paper absorbs your sudden sweat. Ink bleeds into your skin. The electricity is off; no matter. Whether you come in daylight or darkness, you know that this space will not be filled again. Not for some time. Perhaps not in your time. There will be many spaces like this. You will keep discovering them, unexpectedly, just around the corner. You will press your face to the glass—always, there is so much glass—that contains empty chairs at empty tables, collapsed shelves, a decaying sandal laying precisely in the center of a worn tile floor. Sometimes, there are not enough people to occupy these spaces. Those bodies now occupy other spaces with other bodies pressed against them, pressed against other bodies. Sometimes, there is no money for them to be occupied, witness to the glory of capitalism.
We will craft these months (years) into narratives and share them at parties, funerals, support groups, and at incongruent moments. The anxious months will somehow be packaged into tidy parcels of narrative because we understand through story. Some will be framed in bottles of wine and bowls of pasta consumed while binge-watching The Wire, others in endless hours of crayons and tears for friends who won’t come over to play, and still others in the state lines they couldn’t cross for a so called medically unnecessary abortion. Untold narratives will be found in past-due credit card notices, sleeping bags in back seats, a pile of worn out ventilators, empty pews on a Sunday at Grace CME. Read the invisible marginalia in blank agendas: Hid in my room. Protest at Market & 10th. Eviction deadline. I didn’t get to say goodbye to my sister where is she now. Observe the quiet Twitter feed.
But we are resilient, we have grit, we persevere. Carefully wrapped packages of gratitude will nestle alongside those of despair. We will highlight our perfected biscuit recipe and the daily neighborhood song, in which we stood in doorways and leaned over railings to unite our voices in a call-and-response. Our abuela learned how to video chat and taught us the power of reclaiming our bruja spirituality. Our employer bought us sanitizer and guaranteed us sick pay. We had an employer. The non-wrapped narratives include myriad cross-stitched cats and brightly patterned face masks displayed on Instagram, bi-weekly bank deposits, and internet cookies from a virtual tour of MOMA. Hear the silent marginalia: I kept the siren calls of malevolent spirits at bay. I changed my shirt. The lot across the street is full of dandelions. I never realized how much I love you. Observe your grandfather’s hospital discharge papers.
So being pushed to the precipice hasn’t been all bad, amirite?
For some.
The Emptiness will be in the gaps we keep between our bodies and others’ because we can’t stop marking other bodies as cautions. It will be in the imperceptible beat between arms reaching out and reciprocal embrace. It will be in the birthday party RSVP marked as Yes, then Maybe, then Sorry, I can’t come. And some Friday morning you will find yourself on the 8:27am Red Line from Beaverton to Portland or the 029 from Crestmont Park toward downtown Houston, standing room only, hands stacked one above the other on a pole, when your heart will start pounding to a rhythm leaking from neighboring earbuds. The person across from you will frown when you wipe your hand across your brow. [Oh shit, I touched my face. Where is my sanitizer.] You mouth I’m sorry to the face that is now faceless. Now you are surrounded by featureless faces staring at you in disgust. You push your way through and out onto the street, where you inhale the stale scents of urine and decay, the sounds of raspy saxophone; this is not your stop you are still six stops too early. But yesterday it was seven. You exhale the sharp scent of panic. You’ve ignored your best friend’s invitations to a game night. You go to the laundromat in the wee hours, folding your shirts under flickering neon. Why is this so hard.
[You’re embarrassed to find that you miss those community songs, borne from the sudden primacy of personal connection within uncontained space. Of course, you still exchange smiles, call out hello-how-are-you, but it’s just not the same.]
We will struggle to protect ourselves from the widened maws of the rich. Beware the precipice: the Jabberwock wait with eyes of flame, with jaws that bite and claws that catch. They have fed well this year on disaster capitalism. We will measure these months in survivors and dead, and profit and loss. The true loss is always uncountable. We’d have to go way, way back to the first time we realized that with enough power, a body always carries a price tag. Those of us who can pay the Jabberwock their tithes will emerge, damp, with fistfuls of currency in large notes. We got this by bottling the fear, and anxiety, and mortality, and selling it to the panicked and confused as prevention and cure. We trapped those essential workers afraid to abandon a paycheck into warehouses. We gave them plastic bags and gaslighted their requests for hazard pay and sanitizer and access to warm beds. We virtue-signaled compassion as we used a fragment of our stores of currency to donate medical equipment. We sang about the common people. We tweeted, We’re doing the best we can.
Where will we go from here? Within a blink, the flowers will creep across and autumn leaves fall upon the graves, burying the dead from memory. Living can be so exhausting; let’s just rest on that bench over there. Tomorrow comes too soon with all of yesterday’s debts to be paid. What will be the new normal? Another old white man with grabbing hands ascends the helm. The nation’s failings are scattered all around us like wind-caught ashes. It’s so hard for some of us to breathe.
It is told that a beamish boy once slew a single Jabberwock with a vorpal blade. But we will need a stouthearted many. Please, take up your blade. Please, take up anything that is unyielding and defiant. Bind it tightly to your strongest part. Yes, with the sunlight you stored for just a moment like this.
The Emptiness is whispering thoughts and prayers.
A Selected Coda
You have only just entered this new world. Barely nascent, you wail against a rising tide of soundtouchsmelltastesight that spits you on some rough shore you cannot name. You grow up quickly, as children often do during a time like this. Your becoming is shaped by choices made by feeling and unfeeling others and the choices made by you, which shape others’ becomings and unbecomings. You cannot grasp how intimately connected you are with the other billions of bodies.
I have so many questions about who you contain, and who contains you. I wonder what choices you have made for me, because there are limited choices in this land of limitless choice. I cannot always be who I am.
Sometimes I am the one pushing that cart of brooms and cleanser down an empty hall at 4am, alone but for the echoing of my steps.
Sometimes I am the one whose wages you cut as you sit in your glass-walled office in some remote location.
Sometimes I am the one you yell at as I wheel past you in the street; you don’t know that I am barred from moving alongside you.
Sometimes I am the one whose skin is the rich color of honey as it drips into a jar, and you refuse to pronounce my name.
Sometimes I am the one who climbs in bed with you, and you take my hand.
Yet I am always everyone and everywhere.
[Sometimes I am you.]
In this new world, your choices as both judge and jury will determine which of my bodies are allowed into the After. Unless you want to receive me in all my myriad forms, I fear you may not sing Happy Birthday twice; you may refuse to take a few steps back; you may see all of this as some sort of righteous cleansing of the depraved and undeserving. I I I am so much filler, like styrofoam peanuts that cling to your hand and you can’t brush off. Possibly, I am sentenced to die in your place. Possibly, one day that park over there, usually so green, so vibrant, so lush, will have gashes mounded over with tamped down fresh earth, which will be filled with your dead. You will carry the weight of those dead, your dead, on your body.
Or possibly I will one day carry you.
[Sometimes I am you.]
______________________________________________
*Thank you to Jason Clor and Toni Kostecki for their feedback.
**I found this image on Reddit and Twitter but I’m unsure where it originated.