40 THENEWYORKER,APRIL13, 2020
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, BY RUTU MODAN
s a y, Really? The anxiety of quarantine,
sheltering in place, economic down-
turn—the anxiety itself is getting tired,
and when anxiety gets tired it turns into
despair. And now? Trump’s almost daily
voice has lost some of its velvet. It has
gone a little scratchy, like an old record,
as if he may have a sore throat. The
hospital ships are magnificent and un-
believable. The recovery later this year
will be just incredible. The experts are
tremendous.
So what are we dealing with? Let us
not make everything about Trump. (Al-
though a germophobe brought down
by a germ is a weird irony that one could
talk about for a long time.) Sometimes,
while we are socially distant, this all can
still feel strangely like an active-school-
shooter drill. Using a real but amateur
shooter? Let us hope so, since the nurse’s
office is in chaos. Still, as with active-
shooter drills, the P.T.S.D. of the enac-
tors is real, and we have no choice but
to follow instructions. Things are slowly
being put in place, but other things are
a mess. Most alarming are the statis-
tics on ventilators, respirators, masks.
The nurse’s office.
If one looks up the 2003 SARS out-
break on the World Health Organiza-
tion’s Web site, one sees descriptions
that are very like those for this new
coronavirus, which is a close relative.
Symptoms (respiratory distress), sources
(bats, civets). This go-round, the term
“SARS” has become simply “the corona-
virus” (a general virus listed on the can
of Lysol, which kills 99.9 per cent of
germs); Trump has tried to call it the
Chinese virus, because of the Wuhan
tie. Regardless, it is SARS again, mu-
tated only slightly. Why no medicines
were developed for the first SARS virus,
why no wartime effort was brought to
bear on it back then, remains a mystery
(though in 2003 the Bush Administra-
tion was very busy invading Iraq).
Meanwhile? We are in the zombie
apocalypse, which my students have
been writing about for well over a de-
cade, so young people are mentally pre-
pared. Is a virus not a kind of zombie,
a quasi life-form moving in and out of
inertness? It is zombie time: the virus
can’t be transmitted when all of its hosts
have died. So we are all social-distancing;
that is, pretending to have died, lyingvery still, so the virus—the shooter in
the school—won’t get us. “Nobody here
but us chickens.”
But such weird non-zombie sadness
in the world! As we work remotely and
remotely work and others lose their
livelihoods entirely. Who knew our so-
cioeconomic structures were so flimsy?
On our laptops, we spend a lot of time
participating in group e-mails and
Zoom parties and solitary tours of You-
Tube. Perhaps, like me, you have Goo-
gle-stalked Brian Stokes Mitchell, and
have listened to him sing “This Nearly
Was Mine,” from “South Pacific,” thirty
times in a weekend. No? The perfor-
mance takes place at Carnegie Hall, its
stage the very throat of civilization—
and of civilization now momentarily
shuttered. It is also a song made for
quarantine, with a bit of quarantine
written into it. Perhaps, after all the lis-
tening, and realizing that you are learn-
ing all the words—do not the hours fly
as day flies from moonlight?—for a mo-
ment you feel that you and Brian Stokes
Mitchell have somehow always been
soul mates (were you not born the same
year?) and that you need to tell him of