Where is your mask?

The reality is that we all share air and moisture, and microscopic life is transmitted hand to hand, breath to breath, around the world all the time. We live in an ocean that has no limit, an everlasting flood. My home is my sanitized ark.

At 4AM, in candlelight, I hear birds and cars. It is two days before April and cold. What plans can be made? What can be done? What should I do today?

I am going to check the mail. I will not touch my face. I will have to touch the door to the stair well and I will not touch the handrails and I will have to touch the mailbox and the mail and I will not touch my face and I will touch the door knob to my door and then I will wash my hands for twenty seconds with antibacterial soap.

Where is your mask?

Don’t you know this is a masquerade?

Why have you left your room? Your room is where you belong, where you are safe. And we are also safe when you stay in your room.

Why are you intruding on our masquerade without a mask?

Do NOT touch any other person.

Do not touch anything that may have been touched by another person.

If you and another person touch you will fall ill and die.

If you touch any thing you will fall ill and die unless you wash your hands with antibacterial soap for twenty seconds.

If you touch your face you will fall ill and die.

There are very few people on the street in Brooklyn and if we pass one of us walks off the sidewalk and into the street and other hugs the wall. We are shy or suspicious and aliens. The streets are de Chirico scenes.

We are playing virus tag. Whoever has the virus is IT. Whoever is touched by IT is also IT. The objective is to not be tagged IT because to be IT is to fall ill and die.

IT is out there and IT could be in here already waiting to be touched or inhaled or to be taken in, invisibly, through the eyes.

I never knew how many people we touch indirectly and how touch is transmitted skin to skin across national borders and state borders and through doors and across social lines, person to person.

Someone tagged someone in Wuhan a few months ago and soon we were all playing the World Cup of Tag. It’s us against IT. Humans against virus.

A friend posts on Facebook:

“Okay, it may be here. I have slight nausea, slight fever…

Apologies.”

Why the apology? A few days later he tests positive. We get updates from a doctor who knows a doctor at his hospital. His 67th birthday was a couple of days ago and he was in the hospital. Best wishes were posted on Facebook. Happy birthday, get well soon.

I’ve been flashing back to five years ago when Lori had taken a downturn. The dread I feel now is like the dread I felt then. I’m not so much afraid for my life. I’m where I want to be when I die. I dread this season of death that is coming.

I start each morning with a candle and I sit face to face with the facts of the matter and throw myself at the mercy of reality. This more or less describes what I aspire to in my meditation period. 

Breathe in life. As long as you breathe, you breathe life. From first breath to last you live and then you do not. At the end of life we are left with the facts of the matter, the stuff we leave behind, the memories that are remembered until they are forgotten. What consolation can I give the dying? What consolation could I give my dying wife. What could I possibly say? I listened to her gnomic phrases. We took care of her and her friends took care of me. We can try to take care of each other now. As Jacqui would say, that’s where God is.

I try to keep up on what is known about the pandemic and I know it is expected to soon get very bad and then gradually get better, although it might come back. Obsessive hand washing and keeping six feet away from the few people we see might be the way we will live for now on. Social distancing and the rest is something we’ll get used to, like we got used to the absence of the twin towers.