A person I don’t know but with whom I share an odd assortment of mutual social media friends (grad school prof; college friend; my girlfriend’s academic mentor) wrote that she was on Day 16 of Covid-19-induced physical isolation. I don’t know where this person lives. South Korea? Italy?
“It gets more hallucinogenic but less freaky,” she wrote, responding to another’s post. “Days 5-7 were brutal though. Prepare thyselves.” Later: “Soooooo not kidding about Day 7. So far it’s happened to all of us. The existential collapse into cosmic event horizon. Curious to watch all ya’ll cuz I’m 2 weeks ahead.”
An event horizon is a point of no return. They border black holes, the theory posits, and no light can escape them. If the universe is expanding at or beyond the speed of light, then the “cosmic event horizon” means a boundary that cannot be reached by gravitational waves (which travel at light speed) or any other universal signals.
My Brooklyn family began staying indoors Friday, making this Day 4 of physical separation. Already I feel signal distortion. Some of it pre-existed, receptors battered by three years of the Trump propaganda firehose. But my spidey sense went into overdrive Friday, the day Trump, surrounded by corporate chieftains, gave the markets a 3:30 p.m. dead-cat bounce by declaring a national emergency; adding numbers to his repeated promise that Covid-19 test kits will be available to all who want them (1.4 million next week, 5 million next month, though “I doubt we’ll need that”); and breaking the story that Google had 1,700 engineers working on a site that by answering simple questions would direct Americans to proper testing and health facilities in their areas. The closest to truth that last story skated was that a small Google sister company was about to unveil a single Bay Area trial site and 1,700 Google engineers had volunteered to hypothetically help the project. The press conference was the handiwork of the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, paged by the president as supplicants once invoked Hermes (god of riches, fertility, travel, thieves) to guide us through his administration’s latest calamity. But neither Kushner’s cunning, nor the fact that the White House assured us that the multiply-exposed president had tested negative for the coronavirus, nor the soothing words sprayed over the weekend into solo microphones from the lips of the president and an assortment of officials always jammed behind him into camera frame in defiance of all physical distancing suggestions made by, among others, the CDC to help Americans as we began to restrict our physical and social and economic lives in ways none of us had ever experienced — none of that impressed traders when Wall Street opened today. The stock market opened badly, then went further south after Trump told reporters a recession is likely. It was the second-worst drop in stock-market history, erasing most of the last of the gains since the 2016 election and with it the main rationale for the president’s re-election.
Part of my signal problem is lack of activity; I’m out of work. I almost envy family members their professional woes. One sister runs a library at a university where four people tested positive last week; campus is now closed, and she’s struggling to support library workers struggling to provide resources to students and faculty, including a geriatric core newly confronted by the demands of online instruction. Another sister works for the mayor of a good-sized western city; she was at an almost-empty City Hall trying to set up virtual meetings on aging computer systems with no capacity. (The city tried to buy 40 laptops on Friday so staff could work from home; the local Best Buy had four.) A nephew who works for a non-profit was trying to help California’s educational bureaucracy conduct online business with no supporting infrastructure. Most state ed departments don’t use cloud-based file sharing, for instance; almost none provide staff with laptops. The seven Bay Area counties announced that starting Tuesday all residents would have to shelter in place; much of the rest of California was expected to follow suit. How is my brother, a salesman who drives to retail stores up and down the state, supposed to make a living for the next three weeks?
For my part, I’ve been accepted into a New York City Department of Education program meant to move mid-career professionals into teaching jobs in schools of need (mostly in the Bronx and eastern Brooklyn). The program is supposed to start in June. A program “ambassador” with whom I’ve scheduled a 10-minute phone appointment spends 20 minutes telling me that no one knows anything about how the program will proceed. The city decided Sunday to close all public schools for at least three weeks, and guidance from the chancellor’s office is changing literally by the hour. Summer is eons away. She advises me to use my time to prepare for the three standardized tests I have to pass to earn a teaching license.
“We understand everyone’s concern, but we can’t predict what’s going to happen even tomorrow,” she says. “I’m telling everyone: study, study, study!”
Around the time of market close I take a walk around my northern Brooklyn neighborhood, to wash my eyes, clear my circuits. Streets aren’t deserted, but it feels more like a 10 p.m. weeknight than a Monday afternoon rush hour. The air is cold — normal for March, but this winter has been unusually warm, and weekend temps touched the 70s.
— The mayor has closed bars and restaurants starting Tuesday, meaning tonight is last call. Some restaurants have already moved to delivery-service only, stacking chairs on tables, but not all. Lots of bars have sidewalk signboards out. (“Don’t be mean to the bartender.” “Karaoke Tuesday!”) “No no, we’re open, we’re open,” says a man on a cell phone outside of Peaches Shrimp & Crab (contemporary Southern, Grand Avenue off Lafayette, seats about a hundred); inside, a lone couple chats up the lone barkeep.
— Most people are walking in couples or small family units. More than a usual number of us singles seem willing to connect. Lots of “Good afternoon” and “How’s it going” and “Hanging in there.”
— Exception: the few people wearing masks, who tend to avoid eye contact.
— Exception to the exception: a man who’s pulled his mask down to eat a candy bar, with whom I exchange nods.
— An unusual number of dads are accompanying kids on bikes and scooters and strollers. No nannies. Nannies and their children usually congregate in my local library branch, but Brooklyn libraries closed starting today.
— I hear an unusual number of sirens, most ambulances. It may be that relative quiet heightens the sound. Or maybe nerves are distorting my reception.
— A Chasid hurries with a staple gun to affix laminated city Department of Buildings flyers (permits and such) to green plywood around the recently closed Salvation Army building on Quincy off Classon. He has more stops to make. If you’re counting, that’s four Salvation Army buildings gutted for new-fangled apartments: Williamsburg (2012), Greenpoint (2015), Bed-Stuy (2016), Clinton Hill (2020).
— A lone mother pushes a lone toddler on a single swing at my nearby park, which over the weekend was filled with familiar screams. Maybe it’s the cold. Or maybe more parents have read that the coronavirus lingers longer on hard surfaces like playground gear.
— A boy in his father’s arms watches through a chainlink fence as a construction claw wrestles concrete foundation slabs. The dad and I agree: there’s nothing like the rapt gaze of a toddler awe-struck by a building site. I welcome the note of familiarity.
I walk home to eat a comfort food dinner (buttermilk roast chicken, roasted vegetables, chocolate-chip cookies) and to read signals from the stock market, and from Italian epidemiologists (where an older population combined with unusual age-group mixing is leading to an alarmingly high death rate), and from the Ohio governor (who’s defying a court order to delay state elections, which may be smart but fills me with fear about November) until I can read no longer.
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