In The Days Of The Pandemic By Howard Simmons, Illustrated By Joseph Lappie
1. Everyone cleared out the bread aisle, so you’ve decided to make your own loaf. Face down, concentrating on the movements, you knead the thoughts that swell within your head, which must be softened, shaped and pummeled into submission. Why hasn’t she called? How much longer do we wait in our houses? Is she okay?
2. You’re overreacting, you think – but are you? How can one ever know, when overreacting assures that you’ve exceeded the reaction that wasn’t enough?
Your grandfather kept a gas mask in the closet. It wasn’t until he died from lung cancer and you were cleaning out the closet that you really looked at it and saw the swastika under its tin filter. He hated Germans and you called him a bigot on his 80th birthday when he called your new boyfriend a ‘Kraut. You’ve never been really sure what that was about, he was only 10 when World War II ended.
3. “Maybe I’m not reading enough,” he says, putting down his phone. He’s been watching makeup tutorials on YouTube for the past 30 minutes. No real reason, he just found it soothing.
“You don’t have to be productive,” you tell him, eyeing the dishes in the sink. Most of them are from today, which seems okay. “Pizza?” He raises his eyebrows and you know he’s thinking of the $400 you just spent at the grocery store last week. But you don’t feel like cooking and besides, it’s important to support local restaurants. Papa Johns are franchised, right? So that counts.
4. “Ugh,” he grunts from the other room. He’s looking at Instagram. One of your friends posted a series of selfies.
Hard to be alone and in my head all day. Wish I had something to do #extrovertedintrovert #spendamomentinmyshoes #everydayhero
“What do those hashtags even mean?” you ask.
5. Your mom finally calls. She was just at a movie, she says. A MOVIE – WITH STRANGERS. You could kick her. You can practically feel her rolling her eyes at you when you tell her she’s being irresponsible. But she holds her tongue for now. A small blessing, although you imagine that she will bring this up later, if things turn out to be okay and it’s, as your uncle wrote on Facebook, “just a scare tactic by liberals to shut down the economy.”
6. “Honey, I think you may have been right.”
She’s called you in the middle of the night and you’re sitting up, already wide awake.
“I’ve got an extra toe,” she says, as if she’s calm although you can feel the panic in her voice. That thinness at the edge of her words, like it’s gonna start flaking and crumbling away.
“On the side of my foot,” she says. “Oh, about the size of the others. Not as big as my big toe,” and she tries to laugh.
You think of the time she called you from the supermarket, upset because they didn’t have salmon. She’d been angry at you because you told her it wouldn’t be an issue, plenty of salmon for everyone and so she’d listened to you even though she shouldn’t have and now they were going to have to have tilapia. Fucking tilapia. And she’d ended the call before you could respond.
7. You’re reading the latest update from the CDC. No one knows why this virus mutates the way it does. The President is claiming it was created in a lab by Russians as a way to eliminate their enemies. He does not acknowledge that many in Russia have suffered the worst.
Don’t think about the photos you saw with those initial stories: a woman with an arm growing from her elbow. The man whose abdomen swelled so much they had to roll him to the hospital. A child with three extra sets of eyes, each of them wobbly and milky and leaking tears down what little face he had left.
8. Various pharmaceutical companies are racing each other to create a vaccine. One says it is very close and that they will likely only sell at a 75 percent markup. Its stock soars at the news that amidst a global catastrophe the company could make a hefty profit. The President takes credit for the good news.
9. “Googling is not going to help,” he says. He’s massaging your shoulders, kissing your neck. You look up, wanting to say Really? But instead you accept his kiss, let him lead you away from the endless search queries that will not help you understand what is happening to your mother.
For a little while there is pleasure in the forgetting. Just the feeling of skin on skin, sticky frictions. Afterward, you think how lucky you are to have someone with you. Poor Dominic is stuck in his studio alone. You feel bad for laughing at his post. You suggest FaceTiming him, but neither of you act on it.
10. She sends a photo. She has another row of fleshy little digits on top of her foot. “Doctor Pierson is removing them Friday. They’re just little sacs of flesh, no bone or anything. I feel fine!” You pretend to agree with her that it probably won’t get any worse. “I’ve had two facelifts, hon,” she says. “This will be a piece of cake!”
11. You go for a walk, let him hold your hand. There’s no one else out. No cars on the street, everything is so quiet. By the time you’re home, you’ve seen more birds than you can count, four rabbits, a raccoon, and a chipmunk. As you go back in, you take another moment to take it in, the world without us in it. It’s beautiful, you think. You call your mom.