Strange Times
03/26/20
by Mairead Case
Image Background by Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix
I first heard about the virus in January, through Guo Jing’s diary on BBC Europe. I am a teacher, and some mornings I sit in the parking lot for a few minutes, to listen to the radio and drink coffee and breathe. I rub my upper arms and pop my neck like I’m about to walk onto a basketball court. In her diary, Guo Jing mentions buying salted eggs. She doesn’t like them, but after the lockdown ends, she can give them to her friends. That was the only part of the diary that scared me. I trust science, I have weird faith in chaos, I am reasonably okay on my own, and because I am no longer surprised by the foundational inequities in my country, I am no longer afraid of them either. I do worry about my friends and family a lot. When I heard her talking about the eggs, my brain glitched to a place where I was the only person left (which is not supremacy, it’s a helplessness), unable to leave my apartment and eating only salted eggs. I sat there, in my car and in my mind. Then told myself this would never happen, and so I went inside to work.
*
A few weeks later, my friend, a writer who is also Chinese, and a dad, and other things too, said a person spit on him on the subway. Don’t infect me, the person said. Before all this, my middle school students frequently asked if I thought the world was ending. They showed me articles about ocean acid dissolving crab shells and temperatures graphed into oranges and reds. They don’t need to hear about my friend in the subway to believe in racism and aggression, which they already know are viruses too. Many of them are already also caretakers, and survivors. Only slightly differently, my MFA students, the writers I work with in jail, and my artist friends have generally always shared some sense that we are making work, afterwards. And we are making work for ourselves. We are rebuilding and failing better, or we are making what we’ve always needed but not yet had, outside of our heads.
This is about money and time. It’s about medicine, and access to it, and hope and beauty and access to them too. I am not naïve about it. When middle schoolers ask if I think the world is ending, I ask what they think, and they rarely say yes. I say I agree with you. I think it’s important to notice the difference between something that’s scary because it’s a monster, and something that’s scary because no one else is looking at it with you. You’re not alone, I tell my students. Because they aren’t, and for me to say so with conviction I must believe that I am not either, which is how I know that vision of me as the last person on earth, eating salted eggs alone in an apartment, is also just a dream.
*
The week before our school went asynchronous, I asked the emerging bilingual kids to teach us about the shape of COVID-19, as they’re the ones who actually know what a corona is. We talked about physical v. social v. economic fears (and shared ours if that felt okay) and the difference between being a vector and being diagnosed. We played on the playground a lot, with sanitizer chasers, and we watched “36 Questions That Lead to Love (Again),” a short film at the New York Times Learning Network. In it, three couples sit in senior centers and apartments, talking in English and Spanish about what it’s like to love someone for a long time. I wanted kids to see people who had been through things, and I wanted them to hear love in different voices and languages.
*
My third summer in graduate school, I made three long lists of books. The work was to read all of these books, to write essays about why I thought they mattered, and finally to use my essays as energy, color, and shapes in my dissertation. My lists were about race and racism in U.S. jails, Samuel Beckett and clowns and death and silence, and Descent (basically, stories about people who have to leave everything familiar, if not everything they love, to be a helper. Helpers are not always martyrs. Many of the helpers I read about were also teenagers, like Antigone and Persephone). And I did it, and later on I finished, but afterwards I felt anchorless. I was grieving, for many reasons, many of which don’t belong on the internet, but one huge one was the gap between naming a specific problem and actually being able to do anything about it.
Knowing, now, that this feeling of helplessness can feel like an ocean but will not actually drown you, is very helpful. That feeling is not permanent. Our country is often a mess, but we are not helpless or alone. Everything could change for good, now. As a bonus, without realizing it, I made myself a very intense but mostly useful self-isolation re-reading list.
*
Time is strange in quarantine, and I am grateful for my books and music because they show me that strange time doesn’t have to be scary, a side effect, or hallucinatory. I am grateful in particular for the books and music my friends make, because they hold me when I can’t hold myself, and in this way I know that I am not that monster. During other periods in my life when I couldn’t move or keep time the way I wanted, after a week or two went by I would experience sudden disconnects, like the weather changed inside my apartment too. I trained myself to understand these as strengths, and so usually they were. I felt friends who had been dead for years, I remembered song breaks but not their titles, I dreamt Mom and I were the same age, and one morning I was sure I was about to eat a very specific pistachio muffin I only ever found at one grocery store chain in Indiana, on Sundays. They taste like sweet soft grass with hard salty parts. They’re incredible. I think all these possibilities and people are with us, all the time, even though I couldn’t draw you a map for it. I couldn’t draw myself one either.
Of course, sometimes the disconnects are nightmares. We can’t have the one without the other. None of it would work. Sometimes silence is a relief, is safety, and sometimes it is a threat. All of it echoes. In two days, suddenly I had to say goodbye, for now, to all my students in three places, and I helped industry friends apply for unemployment, and after that I sat in the car and sobbed. The only other time I remember crying like that was after being a legal observer at the NATO Chicago Summit in 2012. It hurt because we did everything we could to get everyone home safe, and not everyone did. Not everyone will. I am grieving.
There is strong evidence that COVID-19 spreads through respiratory, fecal-oral, and body fluid routes. I think about the toilets in the jail where I teach. There are no lids, meaning it’s impossible to completely prevent spray, and often the tank is also how people clean their face, hands, and teeth. Often there is no soap. This is true of most jails in the United States. Anyone who lives or works in these spaces is at serious risk.
Again, I am not saying that everyone will die. I am saying I see you. We are talking about this.
*
One of my favorite books I read that summer in graduate school was Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly, a biography of David Wojnarowicz. She writes that when David’s body was brought out to the hearse on Second Avenue, Diamanda Galas was walking by. Diamanda screamed, wordlessly. I read Fire in the Belly right after re-reading Stacey Levine’s Frances Johnson, and on the first page we learn that sometimes Frances is afraid. “Oftentimes, waking in the middle of the night, she was uncertain who she was. Frances did not like that. Stumbling to the bathroom, she feared that who or whatever she was would be inappropriate or cause a calamity of some kind—and that was the most frightening thing of all.” Next, Frances stands on a foot-rug and rubs her arms to get warm. I think about her and Diamanda a lot. I think they’re standing the same way.
*
What else am I doing, afterwards? I’m helping The Quarantine Times. This week I’m planning lessons and care for my eighth graders, and texting with them about cats and soccer. Our Zoom backgrounds are Edie Fake and Elijah Burgher, and cats and soccer. Twice a week, I send out a poetry newsletter with readings and prompts for kids and teens stuck at home (if you want one, email me: mairead.case @ gmail). Next week I’m making final edits on a book about Antigone, which is out in the fall from featherproof. I would have picked a different time to write final for-now thoughts on death and war, but hey: the world always informs our work whether we like it or not. This too is strength.
I work on the graphic novel I’m writing with David Lasky, and I make notes for the book I’m writing next by myself, which needs to be a romance. I run and stretch and try very hard to name my feelings specifically, and to drink water and tea when the specifics are bad. I eat and sleep, gently. I lost one big job, and a beloved popular music conference was postponed. I miss going to the movies so much, sometimes it feels like I lost part of my head. I think about the length of a year. I talk with people on screens. I tell my friends I love them, like I always have and because I do. I am sentimental, and realistic, and present.
I re-read one part from Anne Boyer’s e-newsletter, Mirability, over and over to myself: “fear educates our care for each other.” Education, at its root, is really just leading a person through a particular field. “We fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person’s life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves.
“I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear,” Anne writes, “for fear is a vital and necessary part of love. And this fear, which I love, is right now particularly justified… We now have to live as daily evidence,” she says, and we do and we are. Here we are. Hi.
Mairead Case is the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Each week, Mairead selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.
Mairead Case (maireadcase.com) is a writer, teacher, and editor in Denver and Chicago. She publishes widely, and wrote the novels TINY and SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (featherproof, 2020 and 2015), the poetry chapbook TENDERNESS (Meekling), and, with David Lasky, the forthcoming Georgetown Steam Plant Graphic Novel. Mairead holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Denver. She teaches English: full-time to eighth graders, and part-time at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. Mairead is a Legal Observer with the NLG and volunteers for a community response team supporting queer and trans survivors of violence.
Twitter, Instagram: @maireadcase