Tag: c-19

Coalsack Nebula

Dear Tokyo in the rain, お久しぶりです。(It’s been a while.) Here you are: your veiled blue of a sky papered in clouds and smog. The slight chill of the air feels as restorative, as I step off the crowded bus, as a cool drink of water. Silently, my fellow commuters and I pop open our clear plastic umbrellas. I feel it then: that druggy, half-present feeling of being halfway between work and home. As resonant and resolute as rain itself. You know the feeling. The mind wanders somewhere secret, while the body is securely in transit. Stasis of the physical form, while the mind parachutes out from 20,000 feet. It’s how I imagine comets: swinging around a corner of space with periodic cosmic regularity, their rocky bodies tearing through space on a prescribed route, while their hearts dream of the void beyond.

The walk from the bus stop to my doorstep takes fifteen minutes and cuts through a tunnel, into a shopping street, up a hill, down a hill, and past a ludicrously pricy dentist. I hear the call and response of the station announcements and the answering thunder of footsteps boarding a train. I hear a cheery, high-pitched supermarket jingle. I hear a deliveryman call out good evening in a loud, spirited voice. I hear a neighbor cough throatily from beyond a mossy wall. Meanwhile, the current of my own thoughts blooms and fades in a constant cycle.

The sky darkens to a deep lilac. Rainwater seeps through the sole of my right shoe. Last month, I superglued these old sneakers in a final attempt to prolong their usability, but I must face the reality that they are at the end of their lives. When I flipped them over to apply the glue, I saw, for the first time, that the chevron indents that patterned the bottoms had almost entirely rubbed off, leaving behind a smooth, frictionless surface. After nearly two years of living in the shadow of c-19, I notice that something similar has happened to my feelings about the future. Even when circumstances were dire and hopes burning at their lowest, my future used to feel patterned, textured, nuanced, possible. Now, I think of the future as something like the flat, imposing line of the horizon of each night, followed by day, followed by night. A perpetual rainy walk in which I approach home, but never reach it.

I described a similar sensation in March 2020 like so: “The future immediately twisted into nothing as the present eats itself.” Those were the early days of c-19. Not much in my life has changed in this time, but something fundamental about that sentence rings less true in 2021. Now, I feel that I have to flip the terms. The present has twisted into nothing, as the future eats itself.

Fons et Origo

I sit in the bathtub with my hair braided into a loop and pinned to my head. In two weeks, Strawberry and I will be moving out of the dorm and into our first real place together. Now, when I run errands, I try to be intentional about where I look. This neighborhood will soon become another silvery scale in my armor, another scalloped edge in the closed book of my past, and, before I go, I want to notice everything.

The ginkgo leaves like tiny open fans, the setting sun herniating over chrome buildings in a torrent of blue, pink, and orange. The corner greengrocer with its plywood walls and gold-and-purple stacks of fermented radishes and pitted plums. Moving downhill through the red, saturated air, my breath hot inside an ice-blue surgical mask. Eyes darting. The butcher’s display. Styrofoam trays of eggs and dangling cuts of meat (I stare, disgusted and mesmerized, at the florid fat swirls surrounded by ribbed tissue, swaying on a hook: the colors and textures remind me of a ruffled cream-and-crimson underskirt in a Rococo-era painting). The dilapidated double doors leading to the dormitory’s underground passage. The old cork bulletin board with its evolving sequence of neatly-typed notices about the pandemic. The dark mouth of a sprawling garden.

Jumping across stepping stones. Climbing up a ladder and then sliding down several rungs. A cicada struggling on its back. The perennially empty flower store with the striking, blue-veined blown-glass vase in the window. Rain smacking the pavement with the flat of its hand. Waking up fully rested and clear-eyed, like a woman newly escaped from an enchantment. A stray phrase catching on an edge of my mind like unraveled thread on a thorn.

Five Minutes to Midnight

For obvious reasons, I have been thinking a lot about sickness lately. The sweet-smelling sweat, the gunky vomit, the hacking cough, the hushed room with the shades drawn at noon. Foil packets of pastel-colored pills, alphabet pasta in thin broth. A body existing only in stasis, waiting powerlessly for healing. The terrifying hypotenuse formed by joining death and life at the hip.

Sickness has a way of kidnapping me from this time and place and plunging me back into the misty dreamworld of my childhood. I am again surrounded by the arcane, occasionally goofy artifacts of medicine: the toy-like stethoscopes, the multi-colored tubes snaking into the bed, the intricate anatomical charts, the clunky machines whose beeps, clacks, and dings live in my mind so obstinately I recollect them better than symphonies. As sickness escalates, every feeling is eclipsed by pure panic; rationality topples headfirst into heightened vulnerability. Red-hot bile, chilling fever, and the wails of an ambulance speeding through the velvety, all-encompassing darkness.

In Tokyo, shorts weather begins. I shed my layers and eye the A/C. In a surgical mask and denim overalls, I walk to the convenience store to check if the change in season has prompted an update to inventory. With glee, I spot kakigouri, a dessert of shaved ice, condensed milk, and fruit jam, in the 7/11 freezer. I buy three cups, paying the cashier by sliding coins underneath a sheet of heavy plastic, and walk back home, irradiated by an early spring sun that feels stolen from midsummer.

(A confession in this luminous Tokyo interlude which no one wants to hear: I know from experience that, for some, healing from sickness is impossible. You don’t realize it at first, and even when you do, you do not recognize it as truth. Hope is so stupidly human, it might as well be chemically baked into DNA. You watch someone ride the wave of recovery high, inching away from pain and towards life, before throttling down into relapse. This has to happen a few times before you stop hoping they can get better. Comfort and cure become alien words. You sit alone at the bedside, as still as a potted fern or a pinned butterfly, an observer to the palliative trance of a forever sickness. You watch someone die in real-time.)

Back in the world of the living, Strawberry and I sit at the table and dig into the kakigouri. The jam gleams, slippery and delectable, as reflective as gemstone in the light pouring in from our dusty balcony windows. I watch Strawberry quietly, resisting the usual urge to leap into irreverent conversation. The glossy sunshine glances off the blond tips of his thick eyelashes. I think of the family gene for dementia, living by the billions in the body, strewn across the bloodstream like ashes carried by a river. I think of tumors cropping up in soft tissue like explosions of dandelions in a field. Underneath Strawberry’s right eye are five perfectly round, fawn-brown freckles: a tiny segment of Ursa Major cupping his cheekbone. I think of viral particles studding the air. Strawberry scrapes the bottom of the white plastic cup with a stainless steel spoon, and I think of bone-bleached hospital sheets and the metal, cool-to-the-touch rails surrounding the cot. He smiles at me, guilelessly. I think of how some sicknesses are invisible; how they replace the mind overnight with a dagger, perched in the skull, the blade pointing downwards, revving up.

Plague Doctor

Shinjuku, at night. The lights from the blinking cinema marquee are a funky, druggy rainbow of fuchsia, indigo, taxi cab yellow, sunset orange, and baby blue. On the screen above them, the mayor of Tokyo speaks into a standing microphone; the chyron below her displays the municipal virus helpline in rounded white numbers on a background the color of mint-green medical scrubs. In a printed ad, a tattooed, gray-scale male model reclines, frozen, with one hand in his hair. In another, a charmingly cartoon woman in a tube top poses behind bright coral-pink Japanese characters decorated with stars. The windows around them are dark with drawn blinds and unlit interiors. The rain shines on the tarred road like shattered glass.

I go downstairs, in a secondhand sweater and Strawberry’s old sweatpants, to check our mail. I find, to my dismay, a healthcare bill that I thought we’d already paid, but not the government-issued cloth masks we’d been expecting. Listlessly, I return upstairs and go through the textbooks lent to me by my adviser and find, like a good luck charm, an old postcard celebrating the Year of the Rabbit (2011). Bushy-tailed, bright-eyed, pencil-drawn Sylvilagus. I think, for maybe the millionth time, how reliant we are on the unknowns midwifed by the nebulous future and I imagine a new essential service: a forest oracle, a rabbit soothsayer, who could divine these outcomes. Located between the grocer and the 100-yen store, an oracle with the head of a hare, diving 24/7 into a slipstream of contingencies in order to fan out the future on a bed of predictive cards placed on pine needles. Emerging from a trance to assure me, most importantly, that I will be forgiven for making the wrong choice.

The tall concrete-and-tile buildings in central Tokyo seem gloomier than ever. At sunset, their roofs and upper floors are limned in clouds, steely, cool, and gray, while their massive lower halves are radiated by the dark rose glow of a dusky sun, looking for all the world like an enormous glass half-empty. I check video feeds of Tokyo’s prairies of zebra crossings; they are now drowsy, inert, bare. Occasionally, a masked pedestrian scampers across in slow motion, their movements translated inelegantly into staccato by the stuttering bandwidth. A municipal truck outfitted with a loudspeaker, driven by a pair of volunteer firefighters, blares the same message every Saturday and Sunday: “Please refrain from going outside. Please refrain from going outside.” The sound bounces off the buildings, pulled apart by the Doppler effect, and arrives to me as totally garbled, breathy, dystopian crooning.

Maybe I just don’t pay enough attention during the day, but now it seems like earthquakes always happen at night. A little past 1 AM, Strawberry and I are jolted out of sleep by the shaking of the bed frame. In the dark, we stare at each other wordlessly as we decide, in that critical split-second, whether to stay put or move.

El mundo en que vivimos

At the drugstore while purchasing lock-down provisions, I spot a bar of chocolate wrapped in pink tinfoil. I devour it whole as I walk back home, carrying kitchen bleach and soy milk in a plastic bag. It tastes almost exactly like the strawberry yogurt cups of my distant childhood. I am drawn to the familiarity of that flavor, rather than its taste.

Familiarity anchors me in place. I work from home, and, at four in the afternoon, I call my parents and brother. They are spending their days indoors, enduring cycle after cycle of furious cleaning followed by listless channel-surfing on the couch. With all the investigative ardor of an archaeologist discovering a tomb of relics, my mother regales me with a litany of Hollywood-lite tinfoil-hat theories collated from WhatsApp chats. Gently, chidingly, I try to act as the counterweight to conspiracy, but frequently find myself an unsuitable challenger against its muddying, maddening rhetoric. My brother, sporting long hair and the beginnings of a scratchy beard, tells me he will use his time in quarantine to compose a sea shanty.

I drink endless cups of coffee and then, when that runs out, I start on a 100-bag stash of cheap, powdery Ceylon. I trawl through survivalist forums. I idly ponder if I have enough time to start a vegetable garden on my poorly-lit balcony before the apocalypse hits. I conclude that I will have to make do with four cans of red kidney beans and a liter of Aquarius. I answer e-mails, though not with much gusto. I write, though not particularly well. When Strawberry asks what it is I say “a travelogue about staying inside.”

Routine forms a chain that orients and re-orients me toward important tasks, though my thoughts tend to want to wander from the path. I think about my birthday, which was this Saturday. I turned 26, meaning that I have officially outlived Keats. I think about my dreams, which have become progressively darker and more wild. When I wake, it is with the sensation that my mind has trawled through wet, damp sludge, and made it through, but not unashamed, and not clean. I pull back the heavy curtains. The sun is shining, and chubby clouds dot the spring sky. I am riddled with fear. I have woken to a beautiful day with my heart already extruded into bloody pulp. How wrong it seems–that the weather should be so picture-perfect, at a time and in a world like this.

Time horizon

A gulf yawns between the past and the future. Supposedly, this space is meant to be filled with the present, but I’m not confident I know what this means nor entails. A wide view of the present contains yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A narrower view contains only a single fleeting, blistered millisecond: the now. The now is capricious. Sometimes she hovers above and below me, a current of gilded roses, rippling forward and saturating my perspective in optimistic golden tones. But at other times she is brattier and less eager to please, sticking to my soles and palms like dark, rapidly solidifying lava and pulling me deep into the Earth’s soft, burning-hot mantle. Either way, the now cannot be trusted, though irrevocably I am swept up into its deviousness, which has the same effect on me as impossible, fantastical dreaming.

I am always trying to pierce the waves of shifting transitions. I am always looking for the anchor that reaches from my heart (located so perilously in the now) into the securest version of the future. But I look at my life and can’t detect where now and present become past and future. Instead, I feel like I am swimming at the mouth of a river, unable to comprehend where I am located in the stream, and unable to see how to get out the sea.

I’m repeatedly told to “plan for your future” but, at what point, in “the future,” will I know the planning is done? When I try to settle on a personal deadline, the time horizon in my mind moves and smears like dragging a hand through a still-wet stripe of thick oil paint. There will always be something yet to plan, and something yet to decide. Past and future disappear, replaced by a constantly vacillating, wounding present.

I walk past the shuttered nature conservatory, the empty coffee shop, the quiet, sunlit park, and take two trains to campus, where I discover that the school library has been closed to avoid the spread of disease. On my way back home, I wait on the platform and stand underneath the Japan Rail digital announcement panel. In oddly spaced, blinking green 8-bit letters, the panel reminds me to wash my hands, avoid crowds, and wear a mask. Later, I read online that “for the time being,” public facilities will remain closed. Two weeks later, my brother flees his college dorm and returns home, to a country that closes its land borders only days after his arrival. A sense of dread shoulders into my apartment and watches as I line the walls of my kitchen cabinet with canned red kidney beans, “just in case.” My father texts me to tell me he isn’t busy during the day anymore, which is his way of asking me to call to check up on him. I think of the fish in its struggle to reach the sea, its scales like gold coins, surfacing, belly-up, on the shores of the river delta. The future immediately twisted into nothing as the present eats itself.