The New York Times Magazine 71has ever exhibited any symptoms of Covid-19 (a
month later, we remain symptom-free), we’ll never
be able to know with 100 percent certainty that
we didn’t have it. I can’t know if our friends, the
ones we were with in Venice, had it (two of them
had colds, which we assumed they brought with
them from the United States). I can’t know if a
diff erent friend had it, the one who was in north-
ern Italy at the same time (we ran into him in the
airport), and who came down with a bad cough
upon his return and was told by his New York
doctor, who did not test him, that he was fi ne.
It’s nearly impossible for me to perfectly
recount or recall how our understanding of the
coronavirus, both its behavior and our relation-
ship to its spread, started, midway through that
fi rst week of March, to stunningly escalate every
few hours. What was deemed abundantly cautious
on Wednesday morning became common sense
by Wednesday night. Day 12, following our return,
is when I learned that Rhode Island’s fi rst two
cases were a man and a teenage girl who visited
Italy the same week we did. Ditto Massachusetts’s
second presumptive case. More and more small
outbreaks in the United States and elsewhere
could be traced to people who were in northern
Italy. I counted the few remaining hours until we
were technically in the clear. I asked my son’s
teacher, Should we have kept our son home this
whole time? I feared the answer. She said, some-
what warily, that we should talk to the principal,
but that the school didn’t have a policy about trav-
elers to Italy. It was clear, however, that it had only
just occurred to her that maybe — maybe? — we
should have. By the time our 14 days were up, on
March 8, the W.H.O. reported that Italy had 5,883
cases, the United States 213.
For such a calamity obsessive — for a person
with a rope and a knife in her bag, a person who
lives nearly exclusively in the future, running
worst-case scenarios — Day 12 was a moment
of reckoning. How, for the fi rst time ever, was
I slower, and less creative and less devious,
than reality? I’m still trying to understand how
I failed to activate the arguably most excellent
part of my mind — its department of disaster
preparedness — when it truly, from a species
perspective, mattered. Instead the only mes-
sages issued from that department were we’re
not sick, we’re not sick. (Some deeper and vaguely
threatening communiqué, sent by the director
of the department of disaster preparedness,
the one hired and given a lifelong appointment
by generations of my stoic ancestors, subcon-
sciously overrode all other messages with this
one: WE. ARE. FINE.) Here, presumably, was the
crisis moment the department had been trained
to competently seize over the past 50 years. The
one that warned my son, on high-wind days,
not to walk beneath trees. The one that insisted,
no matter the offi cial government threat level,
that my daughter never switch trains at Times
Square during rush hour. The one that saw or
foresaw danger everywhere, or, conveniently,
only almost everywhere.
Which makes the following seem even more
illogical, or indefensible, though I think it was
our futile clinging, for one last moment, to nor-
mality. With another school break on the heels
of the last — we were meant, on March 16, to
fl y to Colorado — we compiled, as we had not
needed to just a few weeks earlier, a list of ‘‘risk
considerations.’’ Our teenage daughter would
be staying home alone. Now we wondered if
one of us should remain with her, because who
knew whether the government would suddenly
restrict domestic travel, or if we’d be quaran-
tined in a town, or a hotel, or on a tarmac, for
weeks, waiting to be tested with test kits that
nobody had. Her public school, vowing not to
close, might change course. (A person I con-
sulted had to remind me about a variable I’d
forgotten to consider: What if your daughter
gets sick while she’s by herself ?) Regardless,
the consideration of whether to stay home,
again, focused solely on the danger the world
posed to us, or the losses we might suff er. If we
stayed home, we’d lose money we never even
possessed. The fl ight and hotel charges still sat
collecting interest on a credit card.
Despite the lessons supposedly learned after
Italy, it wasn’t until March 11 that we accepted
— we could not go, and not because we were in
danger of getting stuck. We could not go because
we risked being the unwitting mules of harm,
smuggling sickness in our bodies. We could bring
harm to Colorado. We could bring it home.In the mostly empty Columbia library, the hand-
ful of people worked at a safe distance from
one another, many vacant cubicles among them,
like ticks on a ruler. The feeling we speechlessly
shared was not fear or concern but respect and
good will, as well as the perversely energized
fl ush of end-times solidarity. As I walked home
through the campus, also mostly empty, the few
scattered humans didn’t wave or speak or in any
way acknowledge one another, but for once our
stress was the same stress, and something that
bound us.
Exiting the gates, I felt quite strongly that the
university needed, once this epidemic passed, to
think about removing them. That was cheery, the
idea of future tourists taking photos of the places
where the hinges once hung. When I got home, I
thought about how soon, depending, I might not
be able to leave it, because I’d come down with
a fever or developed a cough. For the fi rst time
ever, I wouldn’t be avoiding danger by staying in
my home. I’d be containing it there. I took off my
coat and washed my hands. On my computer, I
rewatched, for the 30th or so time, a pair of phone
videos I took in Venice, because they calmed me,as in they sobered me, and not just because they
were pretty, even though they were.
Part of the reason we went to Venice was that
we’d never been before, and we fi gured time
was tight. Soon Venice would be unvisitable.
The water that had so long protected the city
from outside contamination, whether humans
or disease, had, with greater regularity, become
that contamination. Up and down the Zattere,
the quay that lined the Giudecca Canal, so named
(though this remains conjecture) because the fi rst
Jewish settlers in Venice lived on the opposite
island, separated from the city by water, we
could see the darkened lines of the latest acqua
alta event, which reached a third of the way up
many of the front doors and surpassed the height
of the windowsills. When we planned our trip,
we didn’t know just how quickly Venice would
become unvisitable. Even while we were there,
the streets were eerily empty. We made jokes
about how travel magazines needed to recali-
brate their ‘‘the best time to visit’’ predictions,
in order to foresee brief Venn-diagram windows
of overlapping disasters, ones that would render
the streets of overtouristed cities like Venice less
swollen and stampeded by people like us.
The fi rst video is a close-up of a wall in the
Ca’ d’Oro palazzo, because the sun was refl ect-
ing off the canal, and the tiles, liquefi ed by the
fl ickery brightness, seemed to be moving. The
water of the lagoon that day, I clearly remember,
was a beautiful milky turquoise color that I’d
never seen before in my life. I told one of the
teenagers that I badly wanted to swim in it. She
recoiled in mock horror. She announced that I’d
get really sick if I did that. Even by suggesting I
was open to swimming in the canal, I’d become
contaminated, if not with a disease, then with
really reckless ideas.
The other video is of some swaying seaweed,
attached to the stone wall lining the Giudecca.
The seaweed is dark purple, like a marine milli-
pede with many legs frayed into willowy tines.
A length of dental fl oss is caught between a few
of the fi laments, and the whole mass, a joint
man-nature production, peacefully undulates in
the wake thrown by the vaporettos coming and
going along the lagoon, bringing the people with
cameras and masks deeper and deeper into the
city. When I fi rst noticed the dental fl oss, I was
sad that I hadn’t found a trashless stretch of sea-
weed to commemorate my visit to Venice, which
threatened to be, by day whatever (I’d lost count),
my only and last. But then, after watching the
video a few more times, the dental fl oss — a little
squiggle of optimism and humility (if dental fl oss
could convey either) — seemed oddly to belong.
I would never wish it gone, now. I always watch
with the volume up to hear the sloshing and
the squeaky rubbing of the docks. The lyrics to
a rousing, humble anthem could be written to
that music. You are the danger. You are the danger.
Or — too late. You were.COVID-19
(Continued from Page 53)