Authoritarianism takes getting used to. When I lived in Indonesia, during the pre-digital 1990s, no one trusted the Suharto government. News organizations, knowing their licenses could be pulled any time, doled out data cagily.
Early in my stay The Jakarta Post, an English-language daily, wrote about marijuana arrests in Aceh, a province of northern Sumatra. Late in the story, apropos of nothing, the story cited an unnamed government official denying the arrests were tied to Acehnese independence. What was that paragraph doing in the story? I realized: That was the story. The government, which routinely denied an Acehnese independence movement existed, was arresting rebels under the guise of drug busts. The story was told as a negative image: the foreground was the denial depicted in the background.
Such routine obfuscations led Indonesians, while paying obeisance to authority, to profound levels of distrust. Superstitions were common. Societal support systems — cops and hospitals, courts and post offices — failed as often as they worked, despite the good will of most. If you wanted something you called a powerful friend, or, if you could, paid a bribe. People visited doctors only after a half-dozen home remedies failed, and they’d try a half-dozen more with their prescriptions. When anything unusual happened — a rise in cooking oil prices; a policy to rid Jakarta of bicycle pedicabs; a minister’s illness — conspiracy theories were as common as rice. The theories might be valid, might be bullshit. The powerful benefited by planting doubt among the powerless: the absence of certainty, the impossibility of explanation, gave enormous space for malfeasance.
We’re experiencing something similar in locked-down New York City in the data-rich Covid-19 spring of 2020, as our health care system buckles and doctors lack ventilators and nurses lack masks and The Mount Sinai Hospital erects triage tents in Central Park like a Civil War reenactment.
The scenes play out at the macro-level: the president in his press conference reality show floats distractions that reporters and Twitterati chase like soap bubbles (New York doctors are selling stolen medical equipment on the black market! The governor of Washington is evil! That reporter was mean to me! Have you checked my ratings?), obscuring the profound, continuing governmental failures that will kill, his top doc now estimates, 200,000 or more Americans. Politicizing science has worked so far for U.S. climate deniers; if it kills a few hundred thousand Covid-19 patients, well, we’ve got presidential poll numbers to boost.
(New York state numbers as of Sunday: 59,513 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 14 percent; 965 dead, up 33 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,462.)
The scenes play out at the micro-level. The Girlfriend still feels punky; it’s Day 7 of her illness, most of which she’s spent in bed, longer than she’s ever been sick. Part of her exhaustion comes from fielding texts and phone calls from well-meaning loved ones with theories, explanations, prescriptions, proscriptions: You don’t have Covid-19. For sure you have Covid-19. Why aren’t you getting tested? For God’s sake, don’t get tested. You need to stay in bed. You need exercise. You’re contagious four days after symptoms subside. You’re contagious 28 days after symptoms subside. We scan websites, study videos, scour citations. Whom to trust?
I feel better than Saturday morning but far less than 100 percent. We decide to spend the day in isolation. I cancel plans to see The Kid, who’s seriously bummed. I ask my sister, visiting Brooklyn to see her boyfriend after each has gone 14 days symptom-free, to do our weekly shopping; they drive from Crown Heights to Clinton Hill, use my credit card to buy $150 in groceries at the market across the street. I’m deeply grateful. Still, the psychological toll of missing activities I’d anticipated drags my mood to the Slough Of Despond.
After dinner The Girlfriend, brows knit, eyes like slits, says, “I feel different.” Her chest is tighter. Tighter than any time this week? Remember Thursday afternoon? “I think so.” She feels phlegm in her chest, in her throat: a new symptom. She retreats to bed, assures me I can go on a post-prandial walk without worry. I walk, but I’m worried.
It’s 8 p.m. I head into Bed-Stuy, call my college friend upstate, who for two weeks has been battling bronchial illness. He gives the best news I’ve heard in weeks: He feels great. My friend has spent his adult life braiding complicated strains of practicality and New Age-tinged spirituality, common sense and mystic woo-woo. How’d he get better? He decided Saturday to go into a 24-hour news blackout. He decided to move, to stop lying around, to stir up the shit in his lungs. He used a netty pot laced with tinctures. He huddled under a humidifier spiced with, among other things, eucalyptus drops. He did yogic breathing exercises (50 deep, intense breaths through the nose). He ate a special soup. I can’t track the remedies. The short version: 24 hours later, he feels better than in weeks, thinks he’s pretty much cured.
I come home, energized by my friend’s news as well as my walk. The Girlfriend looks a tiny bit perkier. Maybe tomorrow, I say, you could call him, ask about his cures. At the least, I say, we should try to walk. “I think you need to leave this apartment,” I say to the woman who on an average weeknight attends two cultural events, has to be talked out of a third.
“I think you’re right,” she says.
We pay $12 to stream from a local independent movie theatre website Vivarium (2020): a terrible choice. It’s a slow-burning, non-violent horror story of a couple trapped in Yonder, a dystopic suburban community; it's a mediocre Twilight Zone episode stretched to 90 minutes. The Girlfriend calls the ending in the movie’s first third. I protest, refuse to believe the filmmakers would be that stupid. She’s right.
After the movie, as seems to keep happening, our moods have flipped. The Girlfriend feels better. Though she has nary a drop of spiritual woo-woo in her veins and I doubt she’ll try any of my friend’s cures beyond exercise, the story of his recovery buoys her spirits. She says she feels optimistic, falls promptly asleep.
Me? Though inept, the horror movie works on me. I’m up for hours. We’re trapped for a third week in our apartment, cocooned in a five-mile radius in an urban landscape a shell of itself, its hospitals filled with the sick and dying, the most common sound an ambulance siren, the outside world a cacophony of contrasting dicta. What’s real?
I curl against The Girlfriend’s back, thinking of President Suharto.
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