Getting off to cough syrup seems like a lower order high but now that l’ve resigned all vices but caffeine I’m not above it. Weird dreams? No problem. The melatonin did that for a while but got too weird for even my tastes, breathing in the dark particles of the mind’s plumbing. If I wanted people to leave me alone the way to do it was get Covid. I remember Brad’s nephew getting it once when I was visiting him and I was out the door in less than an hour, having just driven four to get there. Basically turned right around and drove another four hours home, fast.

And then because I contracted the infection it became a game of playing back all the scenes of possible exposure, that whodunnit my grandmother was especially fond of, scouring every last interaction, how animated she got: I’ll bet it was that clerk in the grocery store…or the woman standing in line at the post office sneezing, you know she wasn’t using a Kleenex. Getting sick for my grandmother was a kind of reverse thievery: someone giving you something you didn’t want, a different form of violation and one that ran deep, prompting my uncle as an adult to go way over the top with disinfectants and masks and paper towels on doorknobs, to literally lose his shit when Covid hit with late-night rants on family group chats I waved off as alarmist but wound up being pretty much spot on, right down to the school closures and deaths. It sounded nuts at the time and it was, but he was right.

Getting infected with unseen microbes that turned your body inside out was gross but also a reminder of how much work our bodies do with zero input on our part. And thank god for that, to just let the experts handle it.

Dawn said the brilliant thing about the virus is it plays on our body’s defenses to proliferate. Our bodies expel it, the exact means needed for transmission, a kind of tai chi maneuver of overcoming your enemy by using their motion against them.

Of all the odd new phrases to emerge around Covid social distancing struck me as poignant somehow: the idea of being together but keeping your distance. The timing couldn’t have been better for us to go all-in on digital and don’t think the opportunity was lost on big tech. I remember being surprised by how much contract work came pouring in for me after the initial shock wore off and companies like Cisco realized they could make bank selling secure remote worker networking and security features. Basically just repackaging stuff they already sold in a new wrapper. Or the fact that Zoom, this unassuming video conferencing company, went from 10 million users in late 2019 to 300 million the following spring—beating out Microsoft, Google, and Cisco because it was free and reliable, simple to use. In the end that’s all people really want. And to feel safe.

The body just needs rest. That’s pretty much all it needs you to do as it does everything else. And yet how hard is that now, when it seems the digital pacing of life has us skipping off multiple surfaces hundreds of times a day. How peculiar then should it be that an illness would feel like a kind of vacation from our normal, addled lives—that maybe don’t seem so normal once viewed from a distance.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose