18 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
deeper into the risk demographic of
those susceptible to more-than-flu.
None of which seemed, a week ago,
to concern the students at the university
where I teach, in Los Angeles. They were
blasé about the whole thing, understand-
ably, since they’re young and, it seems,
permanently afflicted by the colds, coughs,
and sniffles to which I have developed
the immunity of age—which is not un-
related to the cunning of age. It required
surprisingly little maneuvering to make
sure that they were the ones opening
doors so I could squeeze in or out be-
hind them like a fare dodger at the gates
on the London Tube. Colleagues were
less easily duped. A friend who teaches
Faulkner saw exactly what I was up to
as I Englishly ushered him ahead (“Please,
after you, Brian”), but he stepped up and
reached for the bug-smeared door any-
way. Naturally, he was up to something,
too, and had taken measures to insure
that “As I Lay Dying” remained a liter-
ary rather than literal experience. He was
holding the door for me because he was
also, in drug argot, holding. Hand sani-
tizer, that is. My wife and I hadn’t stocked
up on it because we wanted to be good
citizens. Now we wish that we’d bought
a couple of gallons, before panic buying
emptied the shelves. (A terrible sight: Is
anything more un-American than an
empty shelf ?) In “The Plague” (itself
hard to find because of a sudden surge
in what the students insist on calling re-
latability), Albert Camus writes that in
times of pestilence we learn that there is
more in men to admire than to despise.
I want this to be true—to go back to
Larkin again, I want our almost-instinct
to be almost-true—but how does that
square with people hoarding toilet paper
and face masks in a city where, at the
time of writing, there have been rela-
tively few confirmed cases?
We’ve got just one little bottle of hand
sanitizer, which, in another potential
contradiction of Camus’s claim, I’ve made
clear that I deserve more than my wife
because, frankly, I paid for it. “Strictly
speaking, it’s not ours,” I pointed out.
“It’s mine.” The soap in our apartment
is still communal, though, so we’re al-
ways jostling at the sink, bleaching our
hands like the Macbeths. And what a
minefield of anxiety the simple act of
washing has become. Wash your hands
every time you come in the house, they
say. But, having got in and washed your
hands, you then touch stuff you had with
you in the viral swamp of the outdoors.
And although we turned on the tap with
a knuckle-nudge, those same knuckles
were used to touch the keypad on our
way into the apartment complex. Can
flawed washing become a form of spread-
ing? And how about the keys used to
unlock our door? Should we be wash-
ing them as well? Once you become con-
scious of the tactile chain of potential
infection, the ground rapidly gives way
beneath your feet. We’ve now got a rou-
tine, have established a sort of cordon
sanitaire, but how are we going to keep
this up? Maybe we started too soon, es-
pecially since my hands are already rashy
from the unprecedented orgy of scrub-
bing, soaping, and sanitizing. In spite of
evidence of panic buying, it seemed that,
in some ways, we were more freaked out
by the bug than were other people here.
Had they unconsciously absorbed the
lunatic message of the nation’s leader,
that the virus will one day magically go
away? Or was it part of that uplifting
Californian mind-set that says one must
never have—let alone express—nega-
tive feelings about anything?I
said at the outset that this account
would unfold in real time, and, sure
enough, the situation is constantly chang-
ing, and always for the worse. Certainly,
the mood on campus shifted dramati-
cally this week. Most doors have been
propped open so that no one has to touch
them. Until at least April 14th, all teach-
ing will be done online using something
called Zoom—yet another source of anx-
iety for older and technologically vul-
nerable faculty members such as myself.
Who knows when we will return phys-
ically to classrooms? On the plus side,
L.A., generally, is a far healthier city than
New York or London. It’s more spread
out, and the worst thing about it—the
relative lack of public transportation––
might turn out to be one of the best
things about it. On the minus side, I ride
the Expo Line train all the time—an-
other reason why I need the bottle of
hand sanitizer more than my wife does.
Besides, as a writer, I am uniquely at risk.
Although it’s a wretched life in some
ways, I’ve always been heartened by the
all-redeeming advantage of spending
one’s days writing at home: the freedomto pick one’s nose whenever the urge
takes hold—which is pretty much all the
time. That’s got to stop. But the writer’s
finger is vocationally programmed to go
up the writer’s nose. Even now, as I press
these keys, a dangerous counter-gravity
is urging hand toward face, nose, nostril.
Keep typing, keep pounding the keys
(which I’m touching now, seconds after
sending a text to my tennis partner, on
the very same phone that I checked while
out having breakfast, before washing my
hands when I got back).
Some changes are easier to make,
though not necessarily more effective
than others. My tennis partner and I
have abandoned shaking hands at the
end of a match—but, since I’ve touched
the tennis balls that he has touched,
what’s the point? Also, like many men
of my generation, I have a fondness for
paying with that filthy, contaminated
stuff called cash. (Speaking of which,
does anyone, even in London, a city of
proud and determined caners, still snort
coke through shared banknotes?) I’ve got
to start paying with a card, but, weirdly,
America seems less contactless than the
U.K.; you’re always having to touch
screens, trying quickly to choose the No
Tip option while the barista is looking
elsewhere. And why get anxious about
screen touching when the cutlery has
been touched, when you’re drinking out
of cups that have been handed to you by
the hands of others? Especially when my
wife points out that I’m holding the cup
not by the aptly named handle but with
my fingers round the cup itself in some
residual affectation of or longing for the
French style of drinking coffee out of a
bowl, as if we were back in those idyllic
times before every day was spent as both
victim and suspect in the ongoing fo-
rensic investigation into this hand-to-
mouth crime scene called life.
No wonder we’re conflicted. I say two
things to my wife all the time, one piti-
ful (“What will become of us?”) and the
other Churchillian: “Be of good cheer.”
It cheers one up, saying this, but while
I’m saying it I am inwardly clutching my
head like Munch’s screamer. There he is,
stranded in the midst of a blazing pan-
demic, gripped by the existential reali-
zation that shops are out of face masks
and sanitizer and—this is the killer—
that, while screaming, he’s also touching
his face. Aaargh!