Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Plague Journal, Day 12: The Four Ts

“Daddy, you change things in your blog,” the kid said. 

“I do?” 

“You do.”

“For instance?” 

“When you wrote about ‘DrawingWiffWaffles,’ you wrote that it was ‘annoying.’ But in real life you said it was ‘gross.’”

“I did? That doesn’t sound like something I’d say.” 

“You did, and it does.” 

“Do I change more than individual words? Realize: you have a better memory than I do. I’m not taping these conversations. I forget stuff. And then sometimes I’m writing for effect.” 

Pause.

“You get most of it OK.” 

That was Sunday. Now it’s Tuesday, and I can’t see the kid because she’s in bed at her mom’s house, fevered, dizzy, listless. She had a croupy cough Monday night — her illnesses routinely include a croupy cough — but this morning that’s abated.

“We had to help her back to bed after breakfast,” her mom says by phone. “Her heart was racing. I’ve never felt anything like it. She hardly did anything and it was going a million miles a minute.” 

“That’s unprecedented,” I agree.

The Girlfriend, meanwhile, feels better — achy, weird body tingles, heaviness, tightness of breath, intermittent energy, but no cough, no fever. 

“I can’t tell if it’s real,” she says. She describes her symptoms as the Four Ts: “tired, tight, tingling, tender.” It’s worse when she reads the news, which she’s no longer doing at night. 

“It just makes me tense,” she says. “The fifth T.” She thinks: “Trumped out: There’s a sixth.” 

After breakfast I start to feel listless, like I’m wearing a lead vest. After lunch I feel achy, take a couple of acetaminophen. 

“You should take a nap,” The Girlfriend says. “You don’t have to write every day.” 

Writing every day feels important. I pound out an entry, say I want to take a walk. Normally I’d bike to my co-parent’s and walk with the kid. 

“I’ll come with you,” she says. 

We head into the thin spring sunshine. She’s walking at about a third of her normal pace. “I think I’ll just sit in the sun,” she says. We walk to a nearby park, find a bench.

“Don’t push it,” she says. “Job One is staying healthy.”

“Walking keeps me healthy,” I say. 

New York City remains the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter. (As of Tuesday the state has 25,665 cases, up 23 percent from Monday, three out of four in New York City.) Deaths: 271.

I go two blocks to DeKalb, head east. Pratt College has closed its campus. Bummer. The kid and I like to walk through its sculpture-filled courtyard. Some of the pieces are good, and even the bad ones shift our perspective, make us think about materials, form, beauty, craft. The city can feel relentlessly commercial but abounds in art. Now the culture industry is shuttered; my eyes and brain feel the lack.

Pedestrian traffic is thin: dog walkers, parents with strollers. Lots more masks — almost half of people are wearing them now. A young man emerges from an apartment building in a mask with black straps over his head and dual filters, discs on each cheek like miner’s lights, ready for casting in Mad Max. 

Car traffic is thinner: the quiet disquiets. I keep waking to the sound of birds; I can pick out individual cars or trucks or buses instead of the usual river of street noise. 

“It’s like living in Charleston, West Virginia,” I tell The Girlfriend, a city where every destination lies within a block of available parking. 

Most people on the street are laborers: movers, deliverers, truck drivers, sanitation workers, other city workers. Most are people of color. I turn south on Nostrand, see a dozen people awaiting a B44 bus (running for free during the crisis), keeping their distance along the block between DeKalb and Kosciuszko. All are people of color: a couple in nurses’ uniforms, men in suits, a security guard, two elderly women with shopping trolleys. It’s a visible reminder: as in most of this nation’s natural and economic calamities, the Covid-19 virus and recession won’t hit communities equally; more poor and people of color will sicken and die. 

I see several orthodox Jewish men; Satmar chasidim (originally from Hungary) have been riding the gentrification wave south from Williamsburg into Bed-Stuy for a few years now. I pass between two young men (black coats, black wide-brimmed hats) in intense conversation, speaking what sounds to me like German. (“Nein,” says one with a head shake.) Yiddish?
I head west on Clifton Place. Two clusters sit on stoops a few blocks apart: a group of oldsters with a boom box playing The Stylistics’ “People Make The World Go Round;” men in their 20s with unseen technology playing R&B-tinged rap (Childish Gambino’s latest?). The mood is friendly. Everyone practices social distancing. 

I head back to the park, turn on Lafayette. A young man on a stoop says to his phone, “I get a solid eight hours, I wake up, I tell you, I’m already exhausted. I go back to bed and sleep four more.”

I pick up The Girlfriend; we head home. She’s tired; I feel energized. I cook Cal Peternell’s recipe for white beans (soaked overnight, cooked with carrots, onion, celery, thyme, brown sugar, salt) baked with a top layer of crumbs (French bread pulsed in a food processor, mixed with olive oil and salt, baked golden crispy) and served with Swiss chard sautéed with garlic and chili pepper. Chopping, heating, stirring, tasting: the tasks and ingredients are simple, the results deeply satisfying. 

After dinner I run out of steam, take a bath. The Girlfriend’s energy returns; she takes a work call for an hour, works on a jigsaw puzzle. Before I fall asleep my co-parent sends pictures: the kid’s still in bed but has enough energy to mug for a couple of shots. It’s not compensation for missing our daily constitutional, but it helps. 

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