Plague Journal, Day 6: "This one is a disease vector"

I struggled to file my weekly unemployment claim. Tried twice Monday, twice again Tuesday. New York State’s system, normally fast and easy, wouldn’t load, or loaded a single page every four or five tries, then required a similar effort for the next page, then would bounce to “Internal Server Error.” On the home page new filers are told they don’t have to wait the usual week to receive benefits. The system is clearly overwhelmed. Kept trying randomly, and about 4:45 p.m. Wednesday got through.  

Wednesday's battle on my Twitter feed, fought not just by trolls but by the White House’s official account: referring to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus.” I learned that Spanish flu is so called because Spain was neutral in World War I and had no censored press, meaning their newspapers, unlike any others in Europe or the U.S., reported actual numbers of the stricken. That won’t stop Trumpians from using their racist term and reveling in its distraction from the health-care and economic calamities they helped precipitate. Meanwhile, China is stepping into the role played for four generations by the U.S. and providing supplicant countries with help (tests, equipment, experts). Soon we may be supplicating. China also just kicked out a bunch of excellent American journalists, evidence (if more were needed) of Xi’s distaste for the free flow of information. Authoritarianism, on the march from the Yangtze to the Volga to the Potomac! 

Numbers, to the extent they convey anything: Covid-19 cases in the U.S.: almost 10,000, up about 3,000 each of the past two days. About 3,000 of those are in New York State (highest number in the U.S., just behind Washington per capita), and about 1,300 cases are in New York City. There were no recorded cases in the city or state as of March 1 (certainly the result of limited testing). 

Realizing the outbreak’s severity is like watching a sunrise: passing minutes affect my ability to see clearly. Tuesday I went to a Gap Outlet on Flatbush Avenue to replace a pair of jeans. Shop workers outnumbered customers; changing rooms were closed. Still, I was glad to buy the jeans. Today I suggested buying running shoes, my delayed response to a Christmas present promised by The Girlfriend. She said it was a bad idea. She didn’t know why New York City’s mayor (pro) and governor (con) were debating whether to follow the lead of seven Bay Area counties and shelter in place. There’s not much to debate, she said. Given possible disease curves and the state of readiness of our health care system, the only responsible path is to limit human interactions. It feels drastic, but the more extreme our social isolation, the more lives we save. She then called to cancel a couple of long-scheduled medical appointments.

She’s right, I realize. But the realization doesn’t displace a lifetime of habits. Leaving the apartment, I open the building door with my ungloved hand, then wipe my face with that hand seconds later. 

More people on the street — 15 percent? — are wearing masks. I note what I describe as my “ingrained” distrust of masked faces — what are people hiding? The Girlfriend says, “Uh-huh. When everyone has them on, that feeling lasts for about 30 minutes.” She was in Hong Kong in mid-January for an academic conference, when things were getting bad in Wuhan and Hong Kong began to shut down. Few people were out, and everyone, including her, wore masks. For the first couple of days she spent her downtime traveling the city, which she’d never visited, taking ferries and buses. Every time she returned, a hotel staffer took her temperature. After a couple of days, she realized she was harming the city’s collective effort, and stayed in.

When I lived in Padang, West Sumatra, in the early 1990s, between a third and half of women wore the hijab (headscarf) and a much smaller percentage wore the niqab (which covers the face). Even at that, after about a week the sight was quotidian, lost its strangeness. 

We walk to a friend’s house in Bed-Stuy. The friend recently recovered from cancer — one of the many immuno-compromised people in our lives. We plan to chat from the street, but she doesn’t hear our phone call; we walk on, texting her a selfie. Later, she says she was vacuuming, a new chore since she’s paying but not employing her twice-a-month housekeeper. The Girlfriend had the same housekeeper clean her house this morning; her work has been cut in half, and she’s worried how long she can hold out. 

We jog home. I notice less. 

A block from home I pull up and walk between two women in their 40s, one on the street-edge of the sidewalk, one in her doorway with her teenaged daughter. 

“Best to stay back,” doorway mom says. Pointing to her daughter, she says, “This one is a disease vector.” 

“No hugs,” says sidewalk woman. “I miss hugs!”

“Elbow bumps are super comforting,” I say. “Someday, we’ll miss them.” 

“I can’t wait,” says the teenager. 

Plague Journal, Day 5: DrawingWiffWaffles

Fewer things seem normal. Governors in early-hit states like Jay Inslee of Washington, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsome of California, Larry Hogan of Maryland have chosen to avoid overwhelming hospitals, as happened in northern Italy, by acting early to radically restrict people’s movement, slow the virus’s spread. To avert a public-health calamity, we’re entering an economic maelstrom. 

Reality has dawned on sectors of the nation that have heretofore ignored it, including at Fox News and the Oval Office. The president alternated Tuesday between sober statements and harsh tweets. Of course, he said: he’s known all along this was a pandemic. (For two months he’s seen Covid-19 through a political rather than a public-health lens: downplaying it, calling it a hoax, comparing it to the flu, delaying action in the interests of public relations, caring intensely about keeping the numbers low and thus hindering early testing that would have precipitated earlier response and saved lives, sparking dismay among health officials who wanted to act faster but couldn’t piss off the peevish president — in short, violating every tenet of sound public-health emergency response.) U.S. officials said they’re considering spending $1 trillion to goose an economy that has shuddered to a near-stop. After Monday’s calamitous fall, the stock market bumped up. 

Tuesday’s walk, south through Prospect Park, sees more Brooklynites with masks and gloves, fewer cars, acres of parking on the commercial stretch of Vanderbilt between the park and Atlantic Avenue. Bars are closed, restaurants open only for take-out orders. New York’s governor and mayor are debating whether to emulate Northern California’s shelter-in-place order, but in the meantime I can walk the three or so miles between my three families: my apartment; the house of her mother (Co-Parent), where our 12-year-old daughter (The Kid) is staying for her first middle school-less week; and the apartment of my girlfriend (The Girlfriend), where one child lives in the second bedroom with their partner and her second child is parked in the living room after being required to leave his New Jersey dorm. So far the youth seem unperturbed: online school hasn’t ramped up, it’s like Spring Break, they have games and videos for 14 lifetimes of lockdowns. 

The Kid seems unchanged. I texted yesterday’s blog to her and the Co-Parent, and she sent a one-word response: “Father” 

That word often precedes annoyed responses. I waited. 

The Kid: “You need to write blog posts about MEEEEEE” 

I waited. 

The Kid: “I am important”

Co-Parent [chiming in]: “Good gravy.” 

Me: “Daughter. How much more solipsistic can you BEEEEEE?”

The Kid: “Solipsistic?”

Me: [Texts link to Oxford Dictionary definition of solipsism, “the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.”]

The Kid: “I understand that things other than me exist. I just think they are irrelevant”

Me: “That’s functionally no different.”

The Kid: “Irrelevance and lack of existence are different”

I left it alone. 

The morning rain has abated; it’s overcast and in the 50s. No one wears gloves except the mask-wearers. I leave the quiet streets and enter the park, sunny-Sunday busy with a stream of runners, bikers, power walkers, perambulators. The lawns are filled with disc throwers, ball kickers, but only one picnic: six college-aged women sporting six unnatural hair colors, looking grand on their blanket atop a hill. Many of the exercisers come in family units, with way more dads than usual. As a rule, younger kids seem happy: My parents are around all the time now! Teenaged kids seem unhappy: My parents are around all the time now! 

Some of the conversations are typical. On Vanderbilt, near the top of the park:

Mom [exasperated, to one of her two boys, 8 and 6]: “Oh, I’m very confident you can do it. I’m confident you have the capacity.” 

6-year-old: [Inaudible]

8-year-old: “Mom, he can’t do it.”

Mom [ignoring the 8-year-old]: “I’m not confident you have the desire to try to do it. But I know that you can.” 

6-year-old: “Mawwwwmmm!” 

In the park, two women in their early 40s walk north, one in floppy beach hat, school-marm glasses, the other in baseball cap, school-marm glasses. 

Beach hat: “That’s so great! And it’s so great that it doesn’t involve any screens!” 

Baseball cap: “Oh, he does it on a screen. It’s on his iPad. It’s all set up with the grid and everything.” 

Beach hat: “Oh.” 

Baseball cap [defensive]: “OK, but here’s why I think it’s good for him…” 

Some of the conversations reflect the moment. 

Scene 1: Man [in his mid-30s, buffed like a personal trainer, in workout gear and a sheen of sweat, talking earnestly on his phone]: “Look, my meditation practice works for me. But if you’re busting at the seams, saying you’ve just gotta get out of there — I mean, I’ve told you what I can tell you.”

Scene 2: Woman [in her 30s, pushing a stroller, to a man in his 30s]: “I think we’ve got to get her out of there.” 

Man: [inaudible]

Woman [voice rising]: “If she doesn’t have visitors for — what? Two weeks? More? — I don’t think she’s going to make it!”

I continue south, pick up The Kid. She declined to leave the house early to meet me midway, so I tell her we’ll walk somewhere else. 

“But I want to walk in the park.”

“I’ve already walked in the park. You decided to wait, to do the thing you wanted to do more and put off the thing you wanted to do less. When you do that, sometimes you lose choices.” 

“But I needed to finish watching my video!” 

“That’s what I’m saying. You chose to do that. Now you don’t have a choice about where to walk.” 

“But it was an educational video!” 

“I’m sure. What was it called?” 

“DrawingWiffWaffles.” 

“Waffles? Why do you need to draw waffles? Or are you using the waffles themselves to draw? Is that with or without syrup?” 

“Dad. It’s not about drawing waffles, and it’s not about drawing with waffles. Waffles is an artist. She has a YouTube channel, and she shows you how to draw characters. She’s really good.”

“And the channel is called Drawing With Waffles?” 

“Not ‘with.’ DrawingWiffWaffles. The ‘with’ has two f’s. It’s all one word.” 

“That sounds annoying.” 

“You say that about everything!”

“I say that everything is annoying? That’s certainly not true.” 

“Dad. You say that about so many things. You say it all the time!” 

“Well, only about annoying things.” 

We walk east along Church Street, cross Ocean, Flushing, Bedford, Nostrand, to a small street featuring a row house where The Girlfriend last week had a purchase offer accepted. (Was it only last week?) Whether the sale goes through seems impossible to predict. (She has to sell her house in southern California; the owner wants to move his family to South Carolina. Are real estate markets frozen? Will banks be giving mortgages? Whatever answers seem right today will surely change by next week.) The “For Sale” sign remains up. The neighbor’s cherry tree has burst into blossom, making the whole block seem cheerful. I take pictures, text them to The Girlfriend. 

The Kid says a friend is drawing pictures of characters The Kid created for a story called “Spumoni.” My daughter wrote 70 pages last year; she likes the characters and the situations and the narrative arc, but she wrote it so long ago that now she hates the writing, has started over: “My writing’s changed a lot in the last year.”

“That’s good to realize. It’s also good to realize that you don’t have to throw the whole thing out — that parts are worth saving. You can revisit ideas through your whole life.” 

“Yeah. But I wish I was good at more than just one thing. Like my friend is good at writing and drawing. My drawing’s terrible.” 

“I don’t think your drawing’s terrible. But you have to be willing to be bad at something for a while to get good at it. Think about your writing from last year. Think about your writing from when you were 9, or 6.” 

[Theatrical shudder] “Anyway, it’s too late for me to start now.” 

“That’s the silliest thing you’ve said all day. Should I say something fatherly about that?” 

“Please don’t.” 

An ice cream truck’s siren song tinkles a block ahead. Two days ago I’d prohibited her from visiting an ice cream truck, but it turned out the Co-Parent had let her buy one if she promised to wash her hands upon her return. Hearing that, I let her get her usual: chocolate soft-serve in a cup. The seller wears gloves — did they always do that? 

I text the Co-Parent that the kid is walking the last few blocks herself, while I head south to The Girlfriend’s house. I text a picture of the kid eating ice cream. 

“Sigh,” Co-Parent texts back. “I know I caved a couple days ago, but we are in a new world each day.” Pause. “Scared.”

“I hear you,” I write. “I agree. No more food trucks.” 

“No more anything,” she writes. 

“Check,” I write. 

Plague Journal, Day 4: Existential collapse

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.

Articles from The Associated Press

Eight clips from my reporting stint at The Associated Press.

The Buck In Baseball Stops At The Top. Almost.

What's best about Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred's response to the 2017-18 sign-stealing scandal is that which distinguishes it from the steroid scandals of the '90s/'00s: Executives responsible for the conduct of their teams are taking the brunt of the punishment. 

What's worst: It’s a policy from which team owners remain immune.

In the Steroid Era everyone in baseball, from the bat boys to Commissioner Bud Selig, knew players were doping; it was an open secret for 15 years. (The sport failed to take steroid use seriously until 2003, when, under public pressure, it instituted testing.) Yet the only people to receive punishment (from the arbiter of baseball history, its Hall of Fame) have been players. Tony LaRussa and Joe Torre, to name two managers, had clubhouses filled with steroid users. Yet they've been inducted with nary a mark on their reputations. Worse, Selig, who oversaw the era, is inducted as well. (He also bears large responsibility for the 1994 strike, which alone should bar him from entry.) 

If they didn't want players taking steroids, baseball poobahs certainly benefitted from turning a blind eye. Steroid use became part of the game's culture. The 1998 home-run battle between two prominent users, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, was, at least in lore, responsible for baseball's "comeback" to popularity after the disastrous '94 strike. I don't like cheaters, but this cheating was (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) ignored to the point of implicit encouragement. The subsequent hypocrisy is sickening. 

(For what it's worth, I'm in favor of a Steroid Wing in the Hall for the likes of McGwire, Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and, probably, David Ortiz. You can't tell the story of their baseball era without them.) 

Stealing signs in baseball is a time-honored tradition, but doing so using technology, such as binoculars or hidden cameras or, in the case of the Houston Astros, video monitors and signals banged on a garbage can, violates game rules. Houston's 2017-18 sign-stealing regime (the one we've learned most about; other teams, apparently including Manager Alex Cora's 2018 Red Sox, had them, too) was created by players, facilitated by coaches (including Cora, in 2017 with the Astros), and known throughout the organization. The best detail in Manfred's report is that Manager A.J. Hinch so disliked his team's scheme that he twice damaged video monitors used to facilitate it. But he declined to stop it or say as much as a word about it to his players. (Several told investigators they'd have stopped had Hinch asked them to.) That he and his boss, General Manager Jeff Luhnow, are the two to receive year-long suspensions shows that Manfred understands that greater responsibility for maintaining sporting integrity lies higher in a team's hierarchy.

No players have received punishment -- in part to generate their honest, if anonymous, testimony; in part because punishing players who've left Houston could damage blameless franchises; and in part because determining punishments would be a morass and the players' union would grieve their cases, drawing out the scandal and creating bad publicity for the sport. The report named only one player, scheme ringleader Carlos Beltrán, then in his final year and now the newly minted manager of the hapless Mets. What Manfred and the Mets decide to do about Beltrán remains this story's most intriguing remnant. (UPDATE: Hours after this posted, Beltrán resigned.) 

One major caveat to this praise of Manfred: Astros owner Jim Crane got off virtually scot free. (The team was fined $5 million, the maximum allowed, and lost four draft picks.) The report found no evidence that Crane knew of the sign stealing. But lots of baseball execs are angry that Crane skates away, his 2017 championship in hand and his franchise damaged but intact. 

Manfred called the Astros' culture "problematic," blaming "an environment that allowed the conduct described in this report to have occurred." The report went out of its way to mention the team's disturbing response to an October Sports Illustrated story that detailed Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman's postgame outburst at three female reporters, at whom Taubman screamed, "I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna!" That would be closer Roberto Osuna, whom the team acquired from Toronto in 2018 in the midst of a 75-game suspension for domestic abuse. Many in the franchise opposed the deal. (Canadian prosecutors dropped charges against Osuna only after the woman, with whom Osuna has a child, returned to Mexico and declined to testify.) But Osuna is talented, and GM Luhnow jumped at the chance to pick up damaged goods at a reduced cost. Crane approved the trade. When SI reporter Stephanie Apstein wrote about Taubman's outburst, an official team statement slimed her accurate story as "misleading," “irresponsible,” and "fabricated." It took days of withering criticism before the Astros apologized and, ultimately, fired Taubman. 

The person most responsible for creating such an organizational environment is, of course, the person who leads it. But Crane sees no systemic problem. In the press conference announcing the firing of Luhnow and Hinch, Crane, asked about Manfred's criticism of his team's culture, simply said, "I don't agree with that." 

Manfred's problem here is at least in part structural. The commissioner's bosses are the 30 team owners, whom he will punish only if their actions directly threaten the game's integrity. (Former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and Reds owner Marge Schott are decades-old examples.) So long as that structure endures, baseball commissioners will continue to ensure that the buck stops with ... a team's general manager. 

"The Second Woman," Part 1

Friday night, 11 p.m.-1 a.m.

I leave my apartment and walk to BAM’s Fisher Theater. By now Alia Shawkat has been on stage for six hours and has performed her piece probably 25 times. She’s set to go until 5 p.m. Saturday: a 24-hour, 100-performance marathon of a single 10-line scene inspired by John Cassavetes’s film “Opening Night” (1977). The BAM show is called “The Second Woman,” also the name of the fictional theater piece in which the star of “Opening Night," Gena Rowlands, was performing. I’m holding a ticket for 8 a.m., but BAM has encouraged attendees to arrive at other times, especially in the wee hours when waits are likely to be no more than the 15 or so minutes it takes to run the scene. There’s confusion at the door as staff calculate how many of us to let in: those who started at 5 p.m. and have returned after a break? those scheduled to arrive at midnight? wait, you’re 8 a.m.? — oh, hell, let ‘em all in. More than half of the 250 seats turn out to be empty, and, oddly, almost all of the open seats are on the theater’s right-hand side, as if magnets have pulled patrons left. The attraction, it transpires, is that the two actors perform on that side of a stage bifurcated by an opaque red curtain that blocks upstage action, meaning those sitting opposite must follow via a large screen (stage left) showing a feed shot by six cameras, four stationary and two hand-held by black-clad operators with complicated gear on their backs, who between scenes sit to the side, like high-tech supplicants or priestesses. The rectangular half-stage set is simple: one orange and one green chair at a wooden card table; upstage, an armless chair lifted from a Mad Men shoot, perhaps, along with the stereo system beside it; cherry red carpet; a neon pink sign reading “The Second Woman.” Two sides of the set, including the fourth wall, are fronted with red mesh. 

I arrive during one of Shawkat’s 15-minute breaks, which she takes roughly every two hours. We listen to a recording of a solo pianist pounding out a stately song whose low chords sound like distress or mourning, followed by a theme stroked on single keys that’s similarly cadenced but more plaintive. Shawkat — Virginia, though the character’s name goes unspoken — walks on stage at a similarly unhurried pace, in black 4-inch pumps and a shapeless red dress, pushing a drink cart, then carrying a wicker waste basket. She walks to the card table, pulls out a chair, and sits silently for more than 5 minutes, staring into space. Audience members chat, check phones. The music shifts; the camera operators rise, one moving to front stage center, the other downstage right. We put our phones away. Shawkat, her brown curls (familiar from Arrested Development and Transparent and Search Party) stuffed under a blonde wig, strolls downstage, turns her back to us, and stares upward. A camera shoots her face through the red mesh; we see her wide brown uplifted eyes in closeup projected stage right. A man enters — Marty, carrying a paper bag. He looks at her back, approaches, sniffs or kisses her neck. He moves away. She turns. He apologizes for acting crudely before, saying she had shocked him. She asks how he is, what he’s thinking about. He answers, asks if she wants a drink. She does. He pours two, sets them and the bag on the table. They drink, eat with chopsticks from two cartons of thin Chinese noodles. She wants to tell him something. Is it the end of the world? he asks. No, she says. “I’m too good for you,” she says. “I don’t want to hear that,” he says. He kisses her cheek. She stands, pours another drink, apologizes, says “I’m begging again,” sits back down. “I don’t care if you don’t think I’m beautiful,” she says. “I do,” he says.“You don’t think I’m funny,” she says. He says she’s hilarious. “You don’t think I’m capable; all I want is to be capable,” she says. He tells her she’s capable, then lists approbative adjectives: She’s smart, beautiful, talented, wonderful, outstanding, great. A pause. “And I love you,” she says. “And you love me,” he says. She dumps her carton of noodles on him. She walks to the stereo, turns on a peppy, syrupy R&B number (“Love To Touch Your Love”?). He approaches, wraps his arms around her. The embrace turns into a dance. After a while they separate, and she turns off the music. She moves to the drink cart, where she takes a $50 bill from her wallet, extends it to him, and asks him to go. He says one last sentence, then leaves. The camera operators sit. The piano music resumes. Shawkat with a steady precision picks noodles from the carpet, throws away the garbage, rearranges furniture, returns glasses, lines up bottles, and, with the set back to its original state, sits at the card table for three or four minutes as we check our phones until the music shifts and the camera operators rise and the next Marty enters. Shawkat will perform the scene with 100 different Martys, most not professional actors. 

In two hours I see seven or eight scenes (I lose track), but the extremes of Marty behavior are set by the first two actors. Marty No. 1 plays it fast and goofy. His line deliveries are stilted, and he does a lot of stage business. He and Virginia get into a chopstick fight. He seems to forget lines. (At this point I don’t know the scene and can’t be sure.) They break up laughing at least twice. None of the dialogue registers; they could be saying nonsense words. She throws her noodles as if at a 4-year-old. They conduct their dance in an awkward hug, with exaggerated back pats, as if Pee Wee Herman were forced to slow dance with a lady who smelled bad. The audience laughs steadily. Marty No. 2 plays it slow and sexy. He lingers at his initial approach to her neck, comes back for a second whiff. Their gazes crackle. HIs approach is lupine, his lust overt; audience members groan in distaste. Each line of dialogue registers. When she says “I’m too good for you,” Marty falls back in his chair; his delayed response (“I don’t want to hear that”) speaks a jilted lover’s pain. When he lists her positive adjectives (“You’re great, outstanding …”) his measured pace makes their increasing vacuity distressing; when she says, “And I love you,” she’s finishing his thought, indicating that as the next line she wants him to say. When he answers, “And you love me,” the pronoun reversal is too much: she dumps her noodles with rage. When she turns on the music he waits a long time, then seems to win her back with a dance that’s slow and heated. Her request that he leave and his departing “I love you” register as equally wretched. 

None of the other Martys approach No. 2’s considered pace or his charisma, and without heat the scene plays as comedy. Shawkat’s stage business varies. She feeds noodles to some Martys, taunting or silly. She mugs with others, sticking out her tongue or making faces. Each of her dances is different: she collapses to the floor solo; slides slowly down one’s torso; provokes another into a brief dance battle; theatrically eschews a battle with another. When one Marty neatly folds his paper bag, she spends a long minute opening it wide, jamming a fist into it, standing it upside down on the table: a protest against his anality. 

Shawkat’s line readings are almost identical in every scene, conveying emotional neutrality. After three or four scenes their flatness starts to seem odd. At first I attribute this to her need to conserve energy. But I’m disappointed: Why not try different colors? Why not play giddy, or sloppy, or morose? Wouldn’t that keep her interest over 100 performances and 24 hours? Then I consider: Maybe her role is as this experiment’s constant. Start and speak from the same point on the horizon, and see what the 100 Martys can evoke or provoke. In my two nighttime hours, the Martys save No. 2 generate little but silliness. 

When Virginia ends one scene by carrying the wicker basket and pushing the drink cart off stage — break time! — I leave. I step into the autumn chill at the same time as Marty No. 2. He’s good looking, vaguely familiar. I tell him his scene was the best I saw. I mention the moment when he lists the empty compliments and she concludes by telling him what he should have said: “And I love you.” No other Marty provoked anger, which strikes me as the only way to make her noodle-tossing make sense. No. 2 says, “We got the pages three days ago, and I read it a bunch, but I never understood that moment until she did it on stage. She was furious. I’m glad that registered.” I want to praise his pacing, but we’re going separate ways. What’s your name? I ask. “Josh Hamilton,” he says. “What’s yours?” 

At home I look him up: the son of two actors, Hamilton has been acting since age 8 and trails a long list of credits in theater (The Cherry Orchard at BAM, Proof and The Coast Of Utopia on Broadway), film (Away We Go, J. Edgar, Frances Ha, Manchester By The Sea), and TV (ABC Afterschool Specials, Absolutely Fabulous, Louie, 13 Reasons Why). HIs résumé seems to stand in opposition to an effect sought by the play’s Australian creators, Anna Breckon and Nat Randall. Their format, including amateur Martys, they write in the program, “makes the show vulnerable to failure; it is also what makes it dynamic, live, and full of possibility.” Myself, I wouldn’t have minded a few more seasoned actors to push Shawkat harder. 

Loma Prieta

My mother, living in Marin County, sent an email this afternoon to me in Brooklyn and my sister in Delaware and my cousin near Devon, England:

Greetings,

The news this morning is telling us that 30 years ago today the Loma Prieta earthquake took place. Gavin, you had just moved to Santa Cruz, and as I recall you were shaken up for a long while. M., you were NOT on the bridge in a car but on BART. Right? How did you and T. land up having dinner at Aunt Sheila’s? Did you spend the night there? We felt one hard jolt in Stockton and that was about all. But the Bay Area did have considerable damage.

Who eventually won the World Series, the Giants or A’s?

It just so happens that we have had some minor shakes this week in the Bay Area.  We’ll see.

Love,

Mom

Mom (and M. and T.), 

I was working in Capitola, at ASAP Systems, ready to head home to watch Game 3 of the A's-Giants World Series, about to start at Candlestick Park. When things began to fall off the walls I have a distinct memory of scrambling under my large desk, but another staffer later told me she saw me standing stock still, frozen. I don't know which version is true. I also couldn't say how long the quake lasted: 30 seconds? 3 minutes? The power went out, but the office didn't suffer much damage, and I took my regular bus home, to Beach Flats, in Santa Cruz, right on schedule. As I waited three dogs trotted in triangle formation down 41st Avenue toward the beach, tongues out, eyes wide, tags jangling, disturbed but determined, as if on a mission. As the bus neared central Santa Cruz I saw more and more destruction -- trees fallen, houses off their foundations, a building partially collapsed -- and it slowly dawned: this was bad. But my apartment wasn't damaged, just messy. (I lived in a long two-story complex, likely built in the '60s, and my apartment was on its eastern edge; I later learned that apartments on the western side, nearer the ocean, had experienced a "whip-crack" effect as the ground rolled beneath them, and they suffered foundation and water-heater damage that required them to evacuate. But as my place was nearer the handle, as it were, little was disturbed.) I wandered around town, chased off a bridge by a solo cop, kept away by a phalanx of cops from downtown (where many buildings collapsed and several people died), picking up snatches of news from people with battery-powered transistors. (Freeway collapse! Bay Bridge section down!) Lots of people were hosting impromptu cookouts, and a kind stranger gave me a burger and some ice cream. (“It won’t last long,” she said.). I walked for hours, until long after sunset, dazed, opened up, unmoored. A visitor from Oklahoma told me he'd watched the parking lot where he was standing split right under his feet: "I have no idea how people live here," he said. (Don't you have entire seasons devoted to tornados?, I thought but didn't say.) The experience -- kaleidoscopic, vivid but turgid, as if I were moving underwater or in a dream -- made me realize that folks at the centers of news events can provide only limited witness: with granular detail but poor perspective, they can describe their tiny section of the elephant, with no idea of its size or shape or nature. 

I spent a couple of days helping at a Red Cross facility for the displaced set up at the county fairgrounds where I saw — could that be? it could only be — Mick Jagger, in Oakland for a Stones concert, having donated cash and now touring the epicenter, his body impeccably fit, his face remarkably lined, accompanied by a stunning blonde assistant; he sought conversation with nurses and volunteers, his manner that of a soothing, seasoned politician. Tremors were constant; the ground never seemed to stop moving. My office was closed and I had nothing to do. I slept little; I kept jerking awake, sturdy shoes and a go-bag by the bed. In the late afternoon of the second day, I was walking past a large, single-screen movie house (on Water Street, I think; the theater seems to be shut down) when I heard shopkeepers and residents exclaiming: power had been restored. Amazingly, the theatre manager was there -- by himself, as I recall -- and, when I asked, said “Absolutely!”: he was open for business. I bought a ticket and a box of Milk Duds, took my pick among the 250-odd red-velvet seats, and, all by myself, watched The Fabulous Baker Boys, which I've not seen since but remains in my memory a brilliant little film, a verdict no doubt tinged by my eagerness for escape. That night I called you and Dad and asked if I could come to Stockton, a trip that, for the carless, involved a van over the hill to San Jose, then a bus, then a train. I don't know that I was ever as happy to sit by the pool at 9030 Frankford Lane. 

They postponed the World Series for a week. The A's had won the first two games in Oakland, and they went on to win the next two delayed games at Candlestick to sweep a good Giants team -- perhaps the best single season in Oakland A's history, tinged if not tainted by the calamity. 

Here's to solid ground. Love,

Gavin

Quarter

My daughter, 11, wrote this poem this morning and asked me to post it.

i don’t believe in god

exactly

but i do believe in something

some force greater than us

some force that gave us life

maybe on purpose

maybe not

maybe our universe is a forgotten basement lego project

or maybe one of those old-fashioned arcade games

maybe somewhere out there, a little girl put in a quarter

and watched as our world started to spin

Medical History

(with thanks to Erika Meitner)

I have no 

Hospital visits worthy of mention, 

No allergies of any kind.

Confess contempt for you

Confused by ibuprofin, 

Tetracycline, anesthetic, 

Fluoride, latex, nuts, other.

I have no 

History of infective endocarditis, 

Fake valves, defibs, defects.

My heart beats in a steel box.

My cholesterol rocks. 

I have no 

Pneumonia, anemia, TB, apnea, 

Long bleeds from slight cuts.

My joints are original,

My prostate impregnable. 

Calcium, thyroid, hormones:

The opposite of deficient.

No jaundice. No kidney, no liver,

No duodenal disorders.

My chicken pox was epic,

And then it was over.

I take no statins, no supplements.

I am not, thanks for asking, pregnant.

My emotional pains are not to speak of.

I smoke nothing

But the occasional joint

Or vape or bong hit

Which I can take or leave.

Three drinks a week. Four. Maybe six

Or ten, depending.

Some days are better than others.

I have never had radiation therapy

Or contact lenses.

Could clearly witness my father

Tugged to sea on the tide of

A neurologic disorder.

My mom’s fine. She’s 89,

And when her salt levels soared

For reasons no one could fathom

And for days she lay listless, dizzy, 

Confounded by a simple query

And unable to swallow pills

Or to piss without my sister

Hauling her body to the toilet, 

Hauling her back to the bed

Where dad had died

Or might as well have

And we thought we’d need an aide

Or a nurse or a full-time 

Dependent living situation until

For reasons no one could fathom

Though it likely had to do with
A blood pressure medication allergy

Which as I mentioned I did not inherit

She got better. She’s fine. 

Did I tell you she’s 89? 

I need list no vitamins or medications 

Taken in the last two years for 

I bestride this chilled pea-green waiting room

Like a god, a hero, a conquering Titan.

I fear no needle, no X-ray, no survey,

No scan, no chart, no probe,
No doctor. No man. No woman. No other.