44 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
a Dada acting exercise. “Fauci. Fauci?
Faucifaucifaucifauci. Fauci!” The sur
name belongs, of course, to Anthony
Fauci, the elfin, permanently smirking
immunologist who directs the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Dis
eases, and who has become an impor
tant player in the Trump Administra
tion’s farcical grapplings with covid19.
His obvious competency would be com
forting if his boss weren’t his own kind
of communicable plague.
For me, the syllables have come un
tethered from the personality. Fauci. I’m
not so much restless, or bored, as try
ing to ward off horror by submitting
my smallest thoughts to a kind of deep
sea gigantism—that weird process by
which creatures closer to the ocean floor
grow fearsomely huge.
On Wednesdays—only three so far,
but rituals tend to stick—I videochat
with a group of my highschool friends.
At the beginning of each call, we take
turns ranking how distressed we are, on
a scale of one to a hundred. (The stan
dard one to ten had insufficient texture,
we figured out early on.) Last week, one
buddy showed up in a tuxedo, as a gag.
He wore the pleated pants and every
thing—sipped on his vodka looking
like a cloistered first violinist.
I admitted that I’d been “eightyish,”
and ran down my list of complaints.
I miss the subway, toward which I
haven’t felt any special romance since
high school. I miss airplanes, which ter
rify me. I miss the Upper West Side,
where I spent my highschool years,
and where my mother still lives. I worry
about my daughter, who’s holed up with
her mom. I worry about my mother,
who lives alone. I worry about my wife,
who lives with me. I miss church, al
though the last time I participated in
the “sign of peace”—the part where ev
erybody shakes hands—I refused to
even look at my right hand until I got
home and could wash it.
The other sound that rings in my
ears, embarrassed as I am to admit it,
is Trump. Whenever I try to talk about
him, about how his addled response to
our crisis will surely lead to death, about
how quick he is to lie and how slow he
is to comprehend, the space between
my eyes starts to tingle and my nose
goes numb. CNN is all but abolished
in our home. Instead, I read books and
listen to the pigeons who hold meet
ings atop the airconditioning unit out
side our bedroom window. So far, they
don’t seem to notice a difference.
A few days ago, I walked around the
corner to the liquor store. This was be
fore the full urbansurgeon look—mask
and brightly colored gloves—had made
its way to Flatbush, where I live. Just
outside my building, a woman saw my
getup and shouted out, more to herself
and the others on the sidewalk than to
me, “That’s right! Haha! You ain’t fuck
ing playing!” I felt a bit silly, but left my
mask on. Every time I breathed, a bit
of steam escaped and fogged the lenses
of my glasses.
Later that afternoon, I think, al
though it might have been the next day,
I walked with my wife down Flatbush
Avenue, toward her mom’s house, where
we’d pick up some packages and wave
hello. It’s normally a twentyfive minute
walk, but now it seemed interminable.
Walking outside these days requires too
much geometry, too much spatial intel
ligence. Older men, apparently untrou
bled by the dictates of distancing, were
seated, as they always are, at folding ta
bles and on the hoods of sedans. They
played cards, made jokes, drank from
Styrofoam cups, blasted music. I tog
gled swiftly between annoyance at how
they clogged the sidewalk, concern for
their health, and then—probably fore
most—envy at what looked like a good
time. We took sweeping, parabolic de
tours around their tight huddles, some
times slipping between parked cars and
walking in the street. One persistent,
petty worry is how much of a dweeb I
feel like when I’m thinking about in
fectious disease.
Outside, I imagine that each strang
er’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of
fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of
my breaths into my body and cut through
my lungs like a spray of glass. I keep
thinking about the last party I went to,
a month ago: a small affair, over dinner,
in Harlem. We sat suitably separated
around the table, trading elbow bumps,
knowing that this was a last hurrah.
On the walk, as the sun began to set,
we passed a small storefront with a
cheaplooking banner across its front,
which read “In Search of Shalom.” In
a window was a smaller sign that said
“Shalom in real life: Is it possible?” Bothadvertised a Web site, insearchofsha
lom.com. I visited the site later; its con
tents are strangely vague—as far as I
can tell, it’s for a branch of Jews for
Jesus. But the question on the little sign
keeps coming back to me. If real peace
is indeed possible—either the inner
kind that casts out anxiety or the inter
personal kind that produces worthy pol
itics—I suspect we’ll find out very soon.
—Vinson Cunningham
1
FLIGHTHOMEO
n January 31st, my mother texted
the group. My uncle replied, and
then my aunt, my cousin, my mother
again, my uncle, my aunt. My aunt is
a nurse. She types very fast and some
times I wake up to twenty, thirty text
boxes from her. I did not reply imme
diately because I was still reading the
cycle of chats from earlier. My father
did not reply because typing Chinese
tires him out. My grandmother finally
replied to say that panicking was use
less—Delta had cancelled her flight
from Detroit to Shanghai, so we would
just have to rebook. China Eastern was
still flying out and we got her on the
next available flight, on March 30th, a
month later than planned. My parents
live in Detroit and my grandmother
was visiting them. She lives in Nan
jing. My uncle and aunt live in Nan
jing. My cousin lives in Shanghai. I live
in New York.
The new flight was to leave from
J.F.K. and my grandmother is eighty
seven. She is alert, funny and sardonic,
a retired city architect and a longtime
professor in the field. But her head can
tilt while she talks. She is hard of hear
ing and unsteady on stairs. She has hy
pertension, arthritis, insomnia. My par
ents planned to drive her from Detroit
to New York, where we would see her
off. Privately, my mother asked me to
find my grandmother a face mask.
I asked my closest college friend, a
doctor. She had been packing all month
to move into a condo that she and her
husband bought. He broke his leg on
a ski trip and couldn’t help. The week
of their move, because of firmer social
distancing measures, the condo board
asked them to wait. Unfortunately, they
could not—new tenants were about to
move into their rental. At a large hos