I did a shopping run a few nights ago—something that I almost, just now, described as “final”—waiting until around 11PM to hit the local ShopRite. The scene felt surreal: empty shelves; palettes of unpacked products everywhere; signs declaring shortages and rations. Through all this, the syrupy 80s pop music trickling down through the grimy little ceiling speakers…an eerily mundane backdrop to a situation that is looking more and more like anything but.
How the hell did it come to this? That’s what I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Every news source, everywhere: all-virus, all the time. I’ve gotten used to it already. It feels like it’s been the accepted state of things for far longer than it actually has, and it is amazing to me when I remember that even a month ago, I was blithely going to coffee shops, supermarkets, convenience stores; hopping in my car every morning to go spend between ten and fourteen hours around other people.
Which is not to say I was entirely carefree. I’ve always had, down in my mind, a sort of incessant end-of-the-worldness that seems to be a fixture in the consciousness of anyone who’s chronically anxious and spends too much time reading things online; clouds on the horizon, as always, but nothing that demanded an immediate, drastic chance in daily activities. There was no dark blot in the sky, shifting and getting closer like some increasingly un-figurative plague of locusts…
And in fact, scrolling back through the list of items I’ve saved to Instapaper—which is a pretty good graph of my reading habits, and a somewhat reliable slice of what’s going on in the world—I can see now that there was a time, quite recently, when the world was not sliding into the grips of some viral inferno; when I was reading things with titles like “Pete Buttigieg is More Electable Than Bernie Sanders” and “The Real Backstory of Why Trump Ordered the Killing of Suleimani” and “What Made Virginia Change Its Mind on Guns?”
And the Royals. Remember them? Did you even care? I didn’t. What a sad, sordid obsession that whole thing was, demeaning for everyone involved. Seems almost rose-tinted now, compared to tales of epidemics and recessions.
In fact, only a little more than a mere thirty days ago, there were many different headlines I crossed paths with: Democratic-primaries savagery; bad craziness in Iowa; tensions with Iran; the usual drumbeat of degeneracy from Trumpworld…and yet, scattered throughout all of it: small hints. The way a disaster film establishes what’s coming when the characters themselves have no idea.
The first flicker of COVID in my saved items is from January 19: a New York Times article titled “China Reports New Cases of Deadly Virus, Adding to Outbreak Concerns“, later retitled “Deadly Mystery Virus Reported in 2 New Chinese Cities and South Korea”. I remember reading that. It sounded disturbing, but what are you going to do about something like that? Bad news everywhere…let’s just hope they get that under control. You move on.
Five days later, January 24, there’s another article in my reading history, this time from Wired’s Adam Rogers: “Would the Coronavirus Quarantine of Wuhan Even Work?” This was right after China abruptly announced a quarantine of Wuhan and several other major cities—a move that, given the general opacity of the situation over there, seemed both absurdly impractical and ominously desperate.
“To be clear,” Rogers wrote, “that’s nuts.” He saw two possibilities: either that this was a massive overreaction—or they’d lost control and they were trying anything.
“The horse has probably already left the barn…In the worst case, that horse is a pale one, and death is riding with it.”
I visited the paper products aisle first. It was a wasteland. I’ve never seen shelves so empty, not even before the worst storms. There seemed to be nothing there, besides signs announcing shortages and limits. Then I noticed, a little farther down the aisle, a number of open cardboard boxes with paper towels in them, probably pulled right off the truck. That was the state of the rest of the store: stuff that hadn’t even been shelved yet, just sitting out there. It looked less like a supermarket and more like a staging area or a supply depot; something the Red Cross might set up.
The ShopRite people were out in force, unpacking and stocking as best they could amidst the chaos. They seemed in good spirits—something I realized I hadn’t expected. I’d had in my mind some pre-apocalyptic take on Black Friday—signs of the old ways setting in, Darwinian instincts in the cereal aisle—None of that here, though, at 11:35 at night; just a few people wandering around, looking relatively unhurried. The relative calm was almost disorienting.
Hard to say…maybe I’m more comfortable, ultimately, with discrete disasters that make no bones about what they are. Something like 9/11, or Hurricane Sandy—some wild, vicious bolt from the blue that feels like an honest-to-god disaster. The pandemic didn’t come like a bolt from the blue. It came like a pandemic: slowly, at first, taking hold in parts of the world that feel safely out of reach; the galaxies far far away, the places where anything could happen anyway. A wet market in Wuhan, China—all sorts of things happen in China. Why worry about this one?
And then, as exponential events will do on an intricately connected planet, it somehow magnified and shifted at incredible speed—creeping out of China and into Iran, then Italy; a little while later, it appears on the west coast, and next thing anyone knows, it’s here: Dutchess County, New York. About 50 cases, so far…that we know of, at least. Hundreds of thousands coming if we—and a lot of other people who can barely think past lunchtime on a good day—don’t get it through our heads that we’re looking down the barrel of something that has engineered itself to be the absolute best at what it does, and could not give one damn what you think of it.
Shop Rite: A staticky voice is reminding any remaining shoppers that we have fifteen minutes before the store closes to get our shit together and get the hell out.
Strange and nervous times tonight. Nobody’s talking about it—no anxious conversations, nobody going wild at the cashiers because they can’t walk out with 28 rolls of toilet paper, none of the dismaying episodes that crop up on Twitter—but I can’t help noticing a sort of muted tension, the carts piled high, the preponderance of stuff like canned food and dry food and cleaning supplies. There is definitely an atmosphere…something I only see before a major weather event. Shit is quietly getting real.
Somewhere overhead, I recognize the tinny strains of The Cars singing “Let The Good Times Roll” from 42 years earlier, and you might mistake the upbeat melody for a presciently optimistic look towards incoming Reagan-era prosperity if you didn’t—as I do, compulsively—read the Wikipedia article. “Good times” here means sort of what “interesting times” did in that apocryphal Chinese curse that everyone (well, me) likes to bandy about at times like this; it’s a cynical inside joke, a comment on “…what the good times in rock & roll really mean, instead of what they’re supposed to be…”
Let the good times roll
Let them knock you around
Let the good times roll
Let them make you a clown
“It was kind of a parody of good times, really…It was kinda, like, not about good times at all…”
And then: heading out into the night, the song still banging about my head like a trapped bird, as it will continue to do for the next day at least. I’m stocked up, ready to disappear into my apartment for the next two weeks—maybe longer, depending on who or what put its mark on me tonight. Vassar is shutting its doors, one by one. I’ve always wanted to work from home—no cluttered morning commute, no sitting in a windowless office for hours on end—and this is going to be a test of how long that situation remains appealing, to say nothing of tolerable. I have no hand sanitizer—there wasn’t any—and I’m not going to squander perfectly good vodka on microbes when all it would likely do is get them buzzed. Hand soap, which I have in spades, will do the job.
It’s a cool, ordinary night. The parking lot is deserted; not unusual for the average midnight in a shopping center. Somewhere out there, inconceivably remote and incredibly close, is that cloud of locusts—the proverbial horsemen coming home to roost. A reckoning is bearing down…the times, whatever they might be, are rolling. I guess we’ll see.