THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 25hopefully extending the interval between
infections so that my wife recovers from
hers before I show symptoms of mine.
In the meantime, it’s important for me
to be tender and cool in equal measure.
Musically, the master of this combina-
tion was Miles Davis, and so, on the rare
occasions that she ventures from her bed,
I express my affection in suitably Davisian
style: “Keep your distance, motherfucker.”
I’ve always done the cleaning in our
place, and the new need for enhanced
hygiene means that I am now cleaning
all the time that I’m not cooking and car-
ing: a limited life that is also quite ful-
filling. There are other ambiguous posi-
tives, too. I liked the way the virus put
an end to the hug as greeting, something
that I started doing after moving to Cal-
ifornia even though I always felt that ev-
eryone could tell I was just going through
the motions. But now there’s no one to
greet. Still, it’s good that the recent mean-
ing of “cancelled” has sort of cancelled
itself out. For a while, it was an opinion
or a demand elevated to the level of fiat
about someone who had given offense
of some kind: part of a cultural move-
ment, a cumulative total of grievance.
Now it once again refers to something
that has had to be called off, to unani-
mous disappointment and the satisfac-
tion of no one. The cancellation of the
Big Ears music festival and, recently, of
Wimbledon hit me hard. These are events
I was looking forward to. Now there is
nothing to look forward to except being
able to leave the house and not fretting
constantly if my wife is getting sicker or
I am starting to get sick. Normally, a can-
cellation is a source of personal affront,
but now that everything has been can-
celled everywhere it has become part of
the general condition of existence. That’s
what happened during the First World
War, when, after worrying that they might
miss out on the fighting—because it
would all be over by Christmas—people
settled into the feeling that it might never
end. The proposed end dates of the cur-
rent lockdowns and closures are pretty
arbitrary in practical terms, but they serve
the useful function of making life seem
manageable. The alternative—everything
shut everywhere for the foreseeable fu-
ture—would make us feel like we had
fallen out of time (at a time when it’s al-
ready difficult to remember which day of
the week it is, when the main way of dis-
tinguishing one day from the next is the
mounting toll of deaths in whichever city
has assumed the unwelcome distinction
of becoming the latest viral hot spot).
On a larger scale, the fact that men
may be at a higher risk of fatal infection
is perhaps another sign that we might
be living—or, more accurately, dying—
through an eagerly anticipated phenom-
enon, the end of patriarchy. Like any rea-
sonable man, I was rather looking forward
to this but am now worried by two things:
the vexed political chestnut of whether
the ends justify the means, and whether
I’ll be around to see it. Meanwhile, that
throbbing embodiment of patriarchy,
Donald Trump, is emerging from the
pandemic with his reputation consider-
ably enhanced. The old accusations—
that he is a misogynist, a racist, and so
forth—now appear parochial and nar-
rowly partisan. They may not have been
laid to rest, but they should, at least tem-
porarily, be set aside while a sense of his
true stature becomes clear: as the enemy
of all the American people. Having made
that claim, I feel the need immediately
to qualify it, since Trump remains a true
friend of the terminally poor: those so
reduced in spirit that their only way to
measure the value of life is by the single-
minded accumulation of wealth.O
h, but here’s another late-breaking
bit of news. After a week of almost
motionless sickness, my wife discovered
that she could get tested. Driving us up
to the edge of Brentwood on the 405, I
was filled with a sense of pur-
poseful adventure—we had
left the house!—that she felt
too ravaged to share. A jour-
ney that might normally have
taken ninety nerve-shredding
minutes took less than twenty.
If only L.A. were always like
this! Then things took an om-
inous turn. Following direc-
tions from Google, we found
ourselves in the Los Angeles National
Cemetery, a vast and beautiful expanse
of white headstones and emerald grass
that made it seem as if that earlier crack
about the elision of test and postmortem
had become an actuality. We had made
a navigational error, but only a slight one:
the drive-through testing site was just a
couple of minutes from the cemetery.
And there it was, our first real sightof the new and hitherto invisible apoc-
alypse: hazmat suits, police, barricades.
But still the main impression was of ab-
sence. We had expected to be in a long
convoy of congealed traffic, but there
were just three cars ahead of us. It was
as if we had turned up for an outdoor
concert so far ahead of time that only
the security had arrived.
In California, one’s interactions with
people tend to be every bit as pleasant as
the weather, and so it proved here. I had
read that you were meant to wear a mask
to the testing site, but mine (part of a
packet sent by a friend in China) broke
as I put it on, so it dangled pointlessly
from one ear as we drove up to the check-
in area. “Your outfit is almost as good as
mine,” a person in a white hazmat suit
and shaded goggles said. The voice say-
ing this was a woman’s. Deeply hidden,
there it was, the voice of the opposite sex,
with all the mystery and wonder that en-
tails. In the midst of a situation demand-
ing military efficiency, there was room,
still, for charm. She checked us in, asked
us to close all the windows except mine,
which was to be kept open only five inches.
We moved up to another hazmat suit,
who, having handed over a test-kit box,
told me to wind my window all the way
up so that we were securely locked within
our own potential contagion. I wished so
badly that my mask had not broken that
my instinct was to ask my wife if I could
borrow hers.
We moved on, put the car in Park,
and scrutinized the kit’s simple instruc-
tions as if our lives de-
pended on them. My wife
swabbed her mouth and
sealed the test stick in a
tube—not as simple as it
sounds: the stick was too
long and had to be broken
on the edge of the tube,
but it was yoga-ishly bendy
rather than brittle—before
sealing the tube in a plastic
bag, which she then sealed in a bubble-
wrap bag before returning it to the box.
We crawled forward, broke the seal on
the window, and tossed the box into a
blue bin indicated by a final hazmat-
suited sentinel, who waved us on. We
drove out past the huge and patient cem-
etery. All the time in the world, it seemed,
resided there. The sky was its usual ex-
pectant blue.