This might be the first installment of a rewrite of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” but it will be written in real time rather than with the benefit of the fifty-odd years of hindsight that Daniel Defoe was able to draw on. If all goes well—or very badly—it might also be the last installment, because although we’re only at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, I’m close to the end of my tether. Physical effects lie in the future, but the psychic toll is already huge—and wide-ranging. At the top end: Am I going to catch it? This can be answered with a slight rephrasing of Philip Larkin’s famous line from “Aubade”: most things may never happen; this one probably will. Strangely, that comes far down on the list of worries. Dying, that most worrisome thing, occupies less head space than the most minute things. Don’t sweat the small stuff, runs the advice—and it’s all small stuff. Except the small stuff—so small it’s invisible—is the big stuff. See? We’re getting in a right old tizz, so let’s calm down and itemize our concerns, concerns about the virus which are also symptoms occasioned by it.
At the moment, the main concern is inconvenience. When trains or planes are delayed, the operators routinely “apologize for any inconvenience,” as though inconvenience were just a minor thing, as opposed to an “existential threat,” for example. But inconvenience is only inconvenient when it happens to other people; when it happens to you, it feels threatening. For most of us, our actual experience of terrorism, even at its most threatening, is of radical or habitual inconvenience. At present, this means asking ourselves if we will be able to go to X or Y and, if we go there, whether we will be able to get back. I can actually answer that quite easily. We’re not going. We’re not going to Indian Wells for the tennis, because it’s been cancelled, and we’re not going to Mexico, because we’ve cancelled, less owing to fears of catching the bug than to our desire to put an end to the are-we-or-aren’t-we? angst. It was a huge weight off our minds when we jumped ship (a plane, actually) so that we could stay home and contemplate the implications of existential inconvenience.
The good news is that, for many of us, the virus might amount to nothing more inconvenient than the flu. As someone who hasn’t caught even a cold in the past five years, the flu, until recently, seemed a dreadful prospect, but I’d settle for it in a heartbeat now. Book an appointment, put it in the diary, get it over with, and get over it! That’s basically what happened last year. After I turned sixty, my doctor suggested that I get the latest shingles vaccine. As an Englishman living in America, I’m often suspicious whether a new medical product is a genuine breakthrough or just the latest hustle from Big Pharma. So I quizzed her about the side effects and the price. Maybe a sore arm, she said, and my health insurance would cover the full cost. “Deal,” I said. “Let’s do it!” As advertised, my arm hurt a bit (couldn’t move it). I also went to bed feeling slightly under the weather. The next morning, I woke with a headache, a fever, and muscle aches that lasted for three days. It turns out that almost everyone I know who’s had this shot has reacted the same way. And not only that—you also need a follow-up shot three months later, with similar results. So I scheduled that for a quiet week and, right on cue, went down with this flu-ey thing again, for just two days this time. It was both thoroughly unpleasant—though a lot less unpleasant than shingles—and really quite convenient. A two-week helping of something like that at the time of my choosing now sounds very appealing—if it would content itself with being just the flu. I’ll be sixty-two in June, and I’m enjoying the perk of senior discounts while moving deeper into the risk demographic of those susceptible to more-than-flu.
None of which seemed, a week ago, to concern the students at the university where I teach, in Los Angeles. They were blasé about the whole thing, understandably, since they’re young and, it seems, permanently afflicted by the colds, coughs, and sniffles to which I have developed the immunity of age—which is not unrelated to the cunning of age. It required surprisingly little maneuvering to make sure that they were the ones opening doors so I could squeeze in or out behind them like a fare dodger at the gates on the London Tube. Colleagues were less easily duped. A friend who teaches Faulkner saw exactly what I was up to as I Englishly ushered him ahead (“Please, after you, Brian”), but he stepped up and reached for the bug-smeared door anyway. Naturally, he was up to something, too, and had taken measures to insure that “As I Lay Dying” remained a literary rather than literal experience. He was holding the door for me because he was also, in drug argot, holding. Hand sanitizer, that is. My wife and I hadn’t stocked up on it because we wanted to be good citizens. Now we wish that we’d bought a couple of gallons, before panic buying emptied the shelves. (A terrible sight: Is anything more un-American than an empty shelf?) In “The Plague” (itself hard to find because of a sudden surge in what the students insist on calling relatability), Albert Camus writes that in times of pestilence we learn that there is more in men to admire than to despise. I want this to be true—to go back to Larkin again, I want our almost-instinct to be almost-true—but how does that square with people hoarding toilet paper and face masks in a city where, at the time of writing, there have been relatively few confirmed cases?
We’ve got just one little bottle of hand sanitizer, which, in another potential contradiction of Camus’s claim, I’ve made clear that I deserve more than my wife because, frankly, I paid for it. “Strictly speaking, it’s not ours,” I pointed out. “It’s mine.” The soap in our apartment is still communal, though, so we’re always jostling at the sink, bleaching our hands like the Macbeths. And what a minefield of anxiety the simple act of washing has become. Wash your hands every time you come in the house, they say. But, having got in and washed your hands, you then touch stuff you had with you in the viral swamp of the outdoors. And although we turned on the tap with a knuckle-nudge, those same knuckles were used to touch the keypad on our way into the apartment complex. Can flawed washing become a form of spreading? And how about the keys used to unlock our door? Should we be washing them as well? once you become conscious of the tactile chain of potential infection, the ground rapidly gives way beneath your feet. We’ve now got a routine, have established a sort of cordon sanitaire, but how are we going to keep this up? Maybe we started too soon, especially since my hands are already rashy from the unprecedented orgy of scrubbing, soaping, and sanitizing. In spite of evidence of panic buying, it seemed that, in some ways, we were more freaked out by the bug than were other people here. Had they unconsciously absorbed the lunatic message of the nation’s leader, that the virus will one day magically go away? Or was it part of that uplifting Californian mind-set that says one must never have—let alone express—negative feelings about anything?