The Correct Rhythm and The Photographer

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

I’ve been preparing for the apocalypse since Y2K. We all have, really. We all stockpiled food and ammunition and feared our neighbors and waited patiently for global unrest ever since. I knew that out of all the people in the universe, I would be the Strong One. I would be The-One-To-Survive. I knew All-The-Things. Everyone knew this about themselves. Everyone is The One.

Yet my heart is spending a good part of its day just trying to figure out the seemingly mundane task of maintaining the correct rhythm. It doesn’t know that I am Stronger than Everyone Else, and it tries to take me out with a surprise panic attack here and there.

Night times are peppered with sweating through my jammies and waking up from nightmares. Pulse at 115. 102. 124.

Stop taking your pulse, he says sleepily. You’re making it worse.

But I’ve got to know. I need to know how the pandemic is affecting my body. I need to trace what it’s doing to my mind. I need to see an outline so I can prepare myself for I look like now vs. what I’ll look like later. So I can pretend I know what normal is. So I have a baseline.

Everyone knows the toilet paper is gone. The bread. The dog food. And laundry detergent. And onions and potatoes and frozen Marie Calendar microwave meals. And pizza.

We crawl back into bed and pull the covers up and listen to our hearts beat in our necks. We feel our pulse blasting away behind our eyes and the rhythm is too fast and everything around the edges starts turning black and we know we’re going to pass out so it’s a good thing we’re in bed already.

We’re all stressed. We’re told to pretend it’s a 2 week stay-cay. Because there is nowhere to work. But I’m not that good at pretending, and I know that they say two weeks and August in the same sentence. Which are Not The Same Thing. The hospitals are almost out of masks and my mom and her little crew of retired teachers are sewing new ones out of nylon and felt and emailing the hospitals to see who needs them the most. And I thought that was the sort of image history would only attribute to WWII. But now I imagine half-dying people with my mom’s cute little flower-covered nylon face masks and I wonder if that’s horrifying or sweet.

I know that so, so many people are going to die. But what does that look like? How many people is 2 million? Some says it’s the size of this city or that one, but what does that really mean? I click on a live counter of people who are sick, and those who are dead. We’re at 216,094 global status right now, and 8,894 fatal cases. That’s up from 203,000 and 8,200 from this morning. There were over 300 people who died last night in Italy alone.

We decided so many years ago that when it all went South, we’d head for the hills where we are safe. Where we know we could survive. It all did go South but for now, where we already are is the safest place. At least the most convenient. Home is where the supplies are. Home still has fresh water and gas and electricity, and after all it’s snowing outside so who the fuck wants to bust out the tent if you don’t have to? Plus, even if we left to go camping for a week, would we be able to get home?

Now the casinos have closed for 30 days and the schools are closed for the month or the year, and the president is telling the governors to look for their own ventilators because he can’t help them. All non-essential businesses are closed, but PetSmart is considered essential, so they’ll get more dog food in soon.

I just got back from Seattle where the interstate was bare and the 500 room hotel in Oregon had twelve cars in the parking lot. The front desk guy upgraded me to a huge room overlooking a lake. He was stoned and told me three times how clean everything was since no one was traveling. He pointed to a no smoking sign with a marijuana leaf instead of a cigarette and kept telling me there was no judgment but if I wanted to smoke weed, it just had to be 10 feet from the front door. Then he laughed and his voice rattled around the marble lobby. I didn’t know a hotel could feel so empty. Giant, long halls void of human energy. Now I feel like I want to be a photographer of this Invisible War. I want to go to more empty spaces and feel the lack of humans. I want be the one who gets the eerie photos of rows of closed casinos with one plastic bag and some little leaves in the middle of the street. You know the ones. The predictable photos which are so unbelievable that they’re famous anyway.

I look out my bedroom window and try to think of the positive. Like how pretty the snow looks on the mountains, and how there are so many fewer car crashes and pedestrians hit, and fewer splintered bones from sports. Because there are no sports. And there are no cars, and there are no pedestrians either.