56 4.5.20
I call to my husband from the living- room fl oor,
where I now sleep each night on a roll-up foam
sleeping pad that my daughter has used on
camping trips, topped with a couple of thin
blankets. It’s quite literally hard to sleep on the
fl oor, but after trying the couch and then, on
the fl oor, the couch mattress — a bit of fabric
stretched over some coiled rings — the fl oor
itself has been a relief.
‘‘I need some help,’’ he whispers hoarsely, shiv-
ering inside the wool undershirt and sweater he
insists on wearing. ‘‘I didn’t want to wake you.’’
I forgot to put the Advil in the plastic dish in
the bathroom that is now his. I can’t leave the
bottle in there; it has to stay uncontaminated
in the other bathroom, so that I can dispense
the capsules into the dish and keep the bottle
protected. Anything my husband, T, touches has
to stay in his room or be carefully taken from
his room to the kitchen, where I stand holding
dishes while our 16-year-old daughter, CK, opens
the dishwasher and pulls out the racks so I don’t
have to touch anything before she closes it again.
She turns on the faucet for me, and I hit the soap
dispenser with my elbow to wash my hands.
My husband, a tall, robust 56-year-old who reg-
ularly goes — who regularly went — on fi ve-hour
bike rides from our Brooklyn neighborhood to
Jamaica Bay in Queens and back, has been lying
on his back, staring at the ceiling, or curled on his
side, wearing the same pajama bottoms for days
because it is too hard to change out of them, too
hard to stay that long on his feet, too cold outside
the sheets and blankets he huddles beneath. It has
been 12 days since T woke up in the middle of
the night on March 12 with chills. The next day,
just as reports were growing more urgent about
the coronavirus spreading in the United States,
he thought he felt better, but then the chills came
back, along with aches and a fever of 100.4.
Since then, T has been confi ned alone in our
bedroom at the front of the apartment, where
he complains of hearing trucks idling at the
curb just outside and long blasts from the ships
in New York Harbor a few blocks west. He creeps
out only to go to the bathroom. The bedroom
door stays fi rmly shut to keep out the cat, who is
determined to get in and who howls outside it at
night. ‘‘What to do if you are sick with coronavi-
rus disease 2019 (Covid-19)’’ reads the sheet T is
handed at the clinic two days after his symptoms
begin. ‘‘Separate yourself from other people and
animals in your home.’’ By then he has a fever of
101.5. He tests negative for the fl u. Then, because
he is considered high risk with what his medi-
cal chart calls ‘‘severe’’ asthma that sent him to
the emergency room with an acute attack a few
months ago, he is tested for Covid-19, the disease
caused by the coronavirus — just days before a
national shortage of testing supplies emerged
and the restrictions were tightened further.
Now we live in a world in which I have planned
with his doctor which emergency room we should
head to if T suddenly gets worse, a world in which
I am suddenly afraid we won’t have enough of the
few things tempering the raging fever and soak-
ing sweats and severe aches wracking him — the
Advil and Tylenol that the doctors advise us to
layer, one after the other, and that I scroll through
websites searching for, seeing ‘‘out of stock’’ again
and again. We are living inside the news stories
of testing, quarantine, shortages and the disease’s
progression. A friend scours the nearby stores and
drops off a bunch of bodega packets of Tylenol.
Another fi nds a bottle at a more remote pharmacy
and drops it off , a golden prize I treasure against
the feverish nights to come.
His doctor calls three days later to say the test
is positive. I fi nd T lying on his side, reading an
article about the surge in confi rmed cases in New
York State. He is reading stories of people being
hospitalized, people being put on ventilators to
breathe, people dying, sick with the same virus
that is attacking him from the inside now.
CK and I had settled in to watch ‘‘Chernobyl,’’ the
HBO series about the 1986 nuclear accident and
its aftermath, when T fi rst felt sick and went to
lie down in the bedroom. We stopped after three
episodes. That time, when we would sit on the
couch watching something together, is behind us.
Now there is too much rushing back and forth,
making sure T has a little dinner — just a tiny bowl
of soup, just an appetizer, really, that he is unable
to smell, that he fi ghts nausea to choke down —
taking his temperature, monitoring his oxygen-
saturation levels with the fi ngertip pulse oximeter
brought by a friend from the drugstore on the
doctor’s advice, taking him tea, dispensing his
meds, washing my hands over and over, texting
the doctor to say T is worse again, standing next
to him while he coughs into the covers, rubbing
his knees through the blankets.
‘‘You shouldn’t stay here,’’ he says, but he gets
more frightened as night comes, dreading the
long hours of fever and soaking sweats and shiv-
ering and terrible aches. ‘‘This thing grinds you
like a mortar,’’ he says.
CK’s high school, closed on March 13, is now
preparing with the rest of New York City’s public
schools to begin distance learning. For days she
and her classmates have received instructions
about what to expect, turning administrator and
teacher directives into endless memes, feeds fi lling
with repeated admonitions: This is regular school.
This is not vacation. I start an email to her prin-
cipal, guidance counselors and teachers. ‘‘I am
writing to let you know what CK has been going
through at home.’’ The draft sits open all day.
I am texting the doctor. I am texting T’s fi ve
siblings on a group chat, texting my parents and
my brother, texting T’s business partner and
employees and his dearest friends and mine, in
loops and loops, with hearts and thankful prayer-
hands emoji. He is too exhausted, too weak, to
answer all the missives winging to him at all
hours. ‘‘Don’t sugarcoat it for my family,’’ he tells
me. He has asked for the gray sweater that was his
father’s, that his father wore when he was alive.
He will not take it off.
It’s as if we are in a time warp, in which we
have accelerated at 1½ time speed, while every-
one around us remains in the present — already
the past to us — and they, blissfully, unconscious-
ly, go about their ordinary lives, experiencing the
growing news, the more urgent advisories and
directives, as a vast communal experience, shar-
ing posts and memes about cabin fever, about
home- schooling, about social distancing, about
how hard it all is, while we’re living in our make-
shift sick ward, living in what will soon be the
present for more and more of them. ‘‘I took out
the kitty litter,’’ CK says, ‘‘and I saw some people
standing on the corner, and I was like, I want to
see strangers! And then I heard them saying: ‘It’s
actually been really nice. It’s been a chance to
connect as a family.’ And I was like, No, actually,
I don’t want to see strangers, and I came back in.’’
CK and I confi ne ourselves to the half bath-
room, the one with the litter box, which she is
now in charge of. Over the past days and days,
drifty, dreamy CK has become my chief assistant
on my nursing/housekeeping/kitchen rotations,
feeding the cat and cleaning the litter box, fold-
ing laundry, preparing T’s small meals, washing
dishes and pots, coordinating with me in a com-
plicated choreography when I come out of the
sickroom holding dishes so we can get them into
the dishwasher without my touching the handles
or having to wash my dry, raw hands even more.
‘‘I feel like we’re talking to each other more like
equals now,’’ she says. She is right.
I am consumed with trying to keep us safe. I
wipe down the doorknobs, the light switches,
the faucets, the handles, the counters with dis-
infectant. I swab my phone with alcohol. I throw
the day’s hoodie into the laundry at night as if it
were my scrubs. I wash all our towels, again and
again. When CK wants to shower, I wipe down
the whole main bathroom — where T refi lls his
water cup, where he has had diarrhea, where
‘‘How are you
doing, love?’’
