THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 27
During the lockdown’s early period,
sometimes my own instinct was to bur-
row even deeper into bed. I imagined
myself the nymph of a seventeen-year
cicada pushing blankets of dirt up
around myself under the roots of a tree,
looking to outsleep the predators. Often,
I failed, and didn’t sleep at all. The local
wildlife grew bolder while the humans
were staying in. As I lay awake, I could
hear animals abroad in the night. A fox
lives in our neighborhood; probably
there is more than one. Along with the
motorcycles, another recurring late-
night noise was the fox’s bark. It’s not
one of those romantic wildlife noises
like the call of the wild goose, which I
also heard. A barking fox kind of gags
and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair
ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s
enjoying it. Late at night a fox some-
times walked down the street and
stopped in front of the houses where
there are dogs, and then it hack-barked
for a while. If a dog happened to be out
in the yard, it would wake up and start
barking back in outrage. After getting
one dog riled, the fox would go down
the street and taunt another.
Once on a sunny afternoon I saw
the fox close up. I was sitting in a chair
on my patio when he walked quickly
across my small back yard. He was dis-
guising himself as one of those fleet-
ing things you see out of the corner of
your eye and aren’t really sure you saw,
and he went by in a “you don’t see me”
instant, the model of self-effacement.
A human equivalent would be one of
those stagehands dressed all in black
who come out and quickly and unob-
trusively prepare the set for the next
scene. The only difference is that the
unobtrusive stagehands don’t sneer. The
fox wore an expression of alienness and
contempt on his narrow, cartoonish
snout as he vanished behind the ga-
rage. Or maybe that look was fright.
M
y wife and I got our Covid vac-
cinations and boosters in a for-
mer Kmart in West Orange. The place
is huge, like a convention center, with
echoing far reaches and scores of vol-
unteers in white or blue-plastic lab coats
distributed throughout. They radiate
good will and civic-spiritedness as they
greet you, tell you where to go, handle
your paperwork, give you the shot,
tell you where to sit for fifteen min-
utes on the remote chance that you
will have a bad reaction, and send you
on your way. The whole experience
made me proud to live in New Jersey.
I would like to begin every day with
such positive-oriented interactions
with my fellow-citizens in an aban-
doned Kmart, even if I wasn’t getting
a shot. I can’t think of a better use for
abandoned Kmarts. Meet
there every morning, stroll
around, say hello, greet one
another; then back into our
cars to get on with the day.
We need something large-
scale like that to knock
back the isolation.
Making the common
mistake, I then became
overconfident, went out to
gatherings over the holi-
days, and caught Covid. The Omicron
variant, which I probably had—the tests
came back positive, but they didn’t say
anything about any variant—is sup-
posed to be relatively mild, but it wasn’t
for me. I have not been so sick since I
got pneumonia twenty-some years ago.
My main symptom was coughing, along
with sore throat, headache, body aches,
and a temperature. Plus, being freaked
out. This virus has a sneaky, foxlike per-
sonality. I could feel it go in various di-
rections in my lungs, meet vax 1, vax 2,
and booster, and sneakily withdraw.
Then it would try the throat, the si-
nuses; then sidle back into the lungs. It
was a wheedling, advantage-taking, con-
fident, and extremely weedy presence.
It spread like one of those trashy weeds
which fill a garden space overnight. I
remembered what a doctor at Weill
Cornell had said in a video, about how
Covid dies instantly in the presence of
disinfectant (the susceptibility, by the
way, that inspired Donald Trump to talk
about applying disinfectant internally).
In me, it was trying to win not by
strength but by gigantically amplified
and multiplied weakness. I felt as if I
had an infestation of weeds growing in
my lungs as I sat up coughing all night.
T
he headline of the Post article
about the Antarctica stabbing was
“He Tried to ‘Ice’ His Pal.” For a
while, the clipping of that article, held
by a souvenir magnet, occupied the
upper left-hand corner among other
clippings on the door of our refriger-
ator. I saw it every day and meditated
subconsciously on it. After a while an-
other clipping replaced it, but I kept
“He Tried to ‘Ice’ His Pal” close at
hand on my desk. I reread the story
from time to time, trying to extract its
true meaning. Or meanings, plural—
lately I’ve realized that the story wasn’t
only about “the close con-
finement in the camp on
remote Antarctica,” as the
Post put it. Another mean-
ing, buried deeper, had to
do with Russia. The world’s
fascination with the story
meant that we knew some-
thing like Covid was on
the horizon. We also must
have sensed that Russia
was going to go mad, and
do something violent and off the
charts. Russia is now committing what
may be war crimes against its neigh-
bor, and nobody knows the ending.
During Covid, Russia’s President dis-
appeared for weeks at a time, rarely
leaving his residence outside Moscow.
The isolation seems to have changed
him and made him ready to fight. His
particular case of Russian cabin fever
preceded terrible consequences.
On March 5th, the U.S. State De-
partment said that all Americans
should leave Russia immediately. My
son had lived and worked in Russia
for six years and eight months. He had
a whole life there—girlfriend, job, good
friends. Many of them, horrified by
their country, are trying to get out or
have left already. During the pandemic
my son read hundreds of books that
he ordered online. As he made ar-
rangements to leave, he decided to give
most of his books to Moscow’s Li-
brary for Foreign Literature. He com-
piled a list, sent it to the library, and
asked the people there which books
they wanted. They said they didn’t
need another copy of “David Copper-
field,” and they did not want the books
about the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. He boxed the rest, called
a taxi, and took them to the library.
Russians are big readers. That’s what
made it plausible that one Russian
would stab another for giving away
the endings of books.
