Train to Boston: Zombie Plague Times on the MBTA
For those of us living in the U.S., the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is the horror show with no happy (or even bittersweet) ending in sight.
If the late 20th century’s chosen monster to represent the horror of the AIDS crisis was the blood-sucking (and gay-coded) vampire, the 21st century’s mythical beast appears to be the zombie. The 2002 film 28 Days Later popularized the idea of zombism as a virus—rather than the shambling reanimated dead of George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, living humans in 28 Days Later became infected with the “rage virus” which turned them into fast-moving, flesh-craving (but still technically alive) ghouls. The popular TV series The Walking Dead (2010-) has the zombie virus lurking dormant within every living human, ready to strike after death. So at the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it felt like we were in the opening montage of a zombie movie or TV show—panicked news reports, picked-over supermarkets, empty cities, social unrest. The “United States federal government is lying and incompetent” trope checked out. The “scientists with their charts are ignored and silenced” trope came sadly true. The crisis felt both shocking and inevitable, the terminal outcome of a failed state.
Plague diary entry #1
March 2020. I was sick—runny nose, headaches, coughing, fatigue (but luckily I didn’t have COVID-19’s typical fever or dry cough). But the worst part was the brain fog. I was unable to do the simplest tasks. I would take an afternoon bath and afterwards I would be so wiped, I would fall asleep. I looked at my dirty laundry and would be confused as to what to do next. I was afraid to answer emails and say the wrong thing. Making dinner more complicated than boiling spaghetti felt like rocket science.
My entire life, I almost never get sick for more than a day so I didn’t know what to do. I was bored with sleeping and that I kept sleeping all the time was making me angry (is it possible to be bored with sleeping?).
My whole household came down with the same symptoms. My housemates had all been similarly housebound for weeks, so we weren’t even sure where we got the bug from. When my live-in partner Stephen called his primary care doctor to see if he should get tested for COVID-19, the doctor told him not to bother—our household likely had it, so we should all self-isolate for the next few weeks as a precaution. Since all of our work had been cancelled due to the shutdown anyway, this was easy enough to comply with. We staggered around the house, unable to do more than eat soup, drink fluids, use the bathroom, and go to sleep.
For those of us living in the U.S., the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is the horror show with no happy (or even bittersweet) ending in sight. While other countries slowly get back to normal, U.S. COVID-19 cases go up by the tens of thousands every day, and almost a thousand people a day die from the virus. It’s a painful death of organ failure and drowning in one’s own lungs. Even those who survive COVID-19 are often left with lingering (possibly lifelong) health issues. It isn’t even known if surviving COVID-19 gives an individual any immunity from getting the virus again. Yet due to unscientific (and frankly stupid) leadership from the White House and a frighteningly large group of Americans who do not believe COVID-19 exists (or just don’t care), COVID-19 feels unstoppable. Zombies often represent the heartlessness of humanity, and zombie narratives frequently hinge on the living being a more dangerous enemy than the undead—and if that is not the metaphor of the COVID-19 pandemic, I don’t know what is. Anybody with an ounce of empathy and self-preservation is left feeling hopeless. What is the point of our masks and hand-washing and social distancing and self-isolating if a substantial number of people blithely dance right into danger? Horror movies did not prepare us for the number of people desiring to waltz up to the deadly virus and kiss it (well, maybe Cronenberg did).
Plague diary entry #2
June 2020. I was on my way to the grocery store in the posh suburb of Boston I had recently moved to. I was wearing a vintage-style polka-dot dress and a face mask. I walked past a neighbor who was taking out a trash bag to the curb. This neighbor was straight out of a Karen “I Want to Speak to Your Manager” meme—beige-blond mushroom haircut, square-frame mauve glasses, khaki slacks. She was not wearing a mask and she was glowering at me. I maneuvered into the bike lane so I didn’t block her path to the trash bin.
“You won’t catch anything,” she said to me in a voice dripping with contempt.
I was so shocked, I whirled around to look at her. She shook her head at me and went back into her white suburban house.
Since the announcement of the shutdown, I have basically been a hermit. I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since early March. I’ve only left the house to work, get supplies, and/or to walk around my neighborhood. If I am in public, I always wear a face-mask that covers my nose and mouth. I wash my hands constantly. Any clothes I wear outside of the house get put in the hamper as soon as I come home. My beauty treatments have been done by myself or my partner. No summer vacations, amusement parks, pools, or beaches for me. I haven’t been to a single party, movie theater, or club. Except for helping two friends emergency-move, I haven’t seen my friends or family socially in months. I did participate in several Black Lives Matter protests (which thankfully were all-masked and not super-spreader events), but I had to stop for a paid gig I ended up not getting. At first it was somewhat novel to suit up in a mask and gloves to face the world—after all, I’ve prepared my whole life to dress up for the post-apocalypse that I always felt was coming. But the enforced isolation is wearying even on an introvert like myself.
Plague diary entry #3
June 2020. I was riding on the MBTA Boston subway to work. A man got onto the train car I was on—he immediately removed his face mask after sitting down. He looked dazed and unwell. In what felt like 2016 Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, the man started coughing directly into his hands. The few of us in the train car looked at each other, aghast. Without speaking, we moved away from the coughing man, further back into the train car (we were unable to get off, the train being in motion and between stops). The coughing man got up from his seat, hacking and almost choking on his own phlegm, and staggered from hanging strap to pole, smearing his germs everywhere. It didn’t even seem like a summer cold—the man appeared disoriented, as though in the grip of a high fever. The MBTA conductor, surveying the unfolding disaster, stopped the train at the next station and had everyone evacuate. The train was taken out of service for decontamination. I didn’t see what happened to the coughing man.
You might ask why I would subject myself to the possibility of getting COVID-19 via public transportation. Like many who live in the Metro Boston area, I don’t own a car. I depend on the MBTA (Boston’s subway/bus/commuter rail system) to get around for work. Owning my own pet-sitting business means I have no safety net. I lost months of work during the COVID-19 shutdown/travel ban. No bailouts, no unemployment, no work-from-home. Even if I could be paid to sit at home, I would quickly lose my business if I wasn’t available for my clients. Luckily, the job itself is very low-risk for COVID-19 because I am only interacting with cats, not human co-workers or clients. Public transportation is my sole work risk.
My cat-sitting territory spans the North End, South Boston, Beacon Hill, and other upscale neighborhoods. They are home to many restaurants, bars, and even beaches. I pass by the maskless people gathered in close quarters, all eating, drinking, laughing, sunbathing, flirting. Some of them give a double-take at my mask. I think, Am I the one who is insane? Did I hallucinate a pandemic that did not actually happen?
Plague diary entry #4
July 2020. I’m waiting for the #1 bus near Boston Medical Center. All around me are the denizens of the Methadone Mile, i.e the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue that is home to the victims of the housing and opioid crises. They live and sleep in makeshift tents or on the ground itself. With businesses closed due to COVID-19-related shutdowns, there are no bathrooms open to them for even a quick wash-up.
As much as I sympathized with their plight, I prayed nobody got too close. Few of the Methadone Mile denizens were wearing masks. The summer heat made everyone more dead-eyed than usual. I gave a wide berth to the small groups who ambled along with little awareness of personal space.
On the bus itself, I saw a man cough hard inside his mask. A few riders seemed content to let their masks rest on their chins. I stared into my phone and held my breath the whole ride.
My social media addiction has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis (I ruefully laugh now at my New Year’s resolution to spend less time on Facebook). With no other way to meet up with my friends and family, my social media apps are the only window to what is going on in other people’s lives. Zoom calls seem like the only proof of life. Some have already lost loved ones to the virus. A dear friend my age lost both parents in the span of a single month. Every death notice on social media quickens one’s heartbeat. Was is COVID-19? Do I know them? Are my friends and family next? Am I next?
The walls between reality and dreams seem softer. Part of the unreality is that we can’t see the victims of COVID-19 in real life—we can’t visit the dying in a hospital, we can’t say goodbye to the dead in a funeral parlor. All we have are video calls and Instagram pictures. It’s natural that those of us who suffer from depression and suicide ideation at the best of times are struggling to ignore that siren song now. I’ve already seen friends-of-friends in my social network who have succumbed to the call of the void. Giving up and letting oblivion wash over you rather than struggling through these daily horrors has its nihilistic appeal. I’m reminded of Peter in Dawn of The Dead (1978) who contemplates letting the zombies overtake him before deciding to fight his way out. It’s hard to keep fighting.
Plague diary entry #5
August 2020. A maskless man got onto my train car. He came in the back door, evading the sight of the conductor. He was carrying two open cans of beers, swigging from one, then the other. Sitting spread-legged across several seats with his head down and his elbows on his knees, he coughed and snorted loudly. After several rounds of this, he spat on the train car floor, again and again.
That was enough for the medical-masked woman sitting several seats over from me. She turned in his direction, furious.
“Excuse me, what are you doing? No mask, coughing and spitting on the floor? You are a germ factory and putting everyone at risk, get off this train!” she said with absolute authority in her voice.
She stood up to get further away from the spitting man and to attract the attention of the conductor.
“Excuse me, can you radio for assistance to get this man off this train?” said the woman in the direction of the conductor. “He has no mask and he’s coughing and spitting everywhere!”
“I got a cold, why are you narcing on me, woman?” demanded the spitting man.
“Dirtbag!” the woman shot back.
“I’m just tryin’ to—”
“Dirtbag!”
“Come on—”
“Dirtbag!”
I stood up in support of the woman and also asked the conductor for help. The conductor stopped the train at the next stop and got up from her driver’s seat to see what was going on. The spitting man hopped out the back door before the conductor could reach him. A minute later, a passenger who had left the train car to escape the spitting man came back.
“That guy just got on the train car behind us,” the passenger told our conductor.
Zombie narratives are always a balance of paranoia and trust. If you are too blindly trusting of everyone (e.g. not checking for zombie bites), you die. If you are too untrusting of everyone around you and don’t pool resources (food, water, shelter, protection), you die. The biggest villains in zombie stories are almost always the most selfish: the hoarders, the cowards, the bigots. On the surface, zombie narratives appear to play into right-wing fantasies of rugged survivalism. But seeing so many real-world survivalist cosplayers opposed to doing the bare minimum to avoid contracting COVID-19 (wearing a mask, social distancing, hand washing, etc.), it now seems unlikely such folks would make it past the first act of a zombie movie. The right-wing gun fetishists are prepared for everything except having a foe you cannot shoot or bomb out of existence.
Americans have always seemed particularly prone to conspiracy theory, maybe because the cruelty and ineptitude of our systems must be the machinations of a shadow government, rather than our actual government doing harm completely out in the open (see the jackbooted overreaction to Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, etc.). Conspiracy theories themselves act like a virus, infecting those who absorb their messages. With the increased isolation due to COVID-19 measures, more people than ever are glued to their screens, doomscrolling themselves down conspiratorial rabbit holes. The fastest-growing super-conspiracy theory is QAnon, which alleges President Donald Trump is America’s God-anointed savior to rescue America from a “deep state” pedophile sex trafficking ring (involving Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities, natch). It’s the 2020 remix of old conspiracy hits (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the New World Order, the Satanic panic, etc.) into one incredibly shitty song. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, 4Chan/8Chan, and even Instagram accounts have been spewing all-caps posts and memes about QAnon, despite some social media companies attempting to ban such content. And because it’s a super-conspiracy, COVID-19 is part of the ever-shifting narrative.
According to some QAnon believers, COVID-19 does not exist and was made up to “control the masses” (into wearing cloth masks and not coming to work? OK, then). Or it was a Chinese-engineered bioweapon that escaped a government lab. Some believers claim there is already a cure for it, but it is being withheld from “undesirables” in order to kill them off. Or Bill Gates has a vaccine, but it’s actually a ruse in order to inject a tracking device into every person. None of it makes sense because as soon as you find an inconsistency, there is another evidence-free “secret” that explains it away. The internet joke about QAnon was created so the stupidest people you knew in high school can feel smart doesn’t feel funny anymore, especially after seeing all the real-life “patriots” gather en masse and without masks to protest the COVID-19 shutdowns/safety protocols. Once films and TV shows go back into production, we’ll likely see a brand new horror trope of people not believing in the zombie plague and deliberately doing things that put themselves in harm’s way. I imagine such a scene will show a zombie infection ricocheting around a “zombie virus is a hoax!” protest like a ping-pong ball.
It all feels too much. It is too much. We look to fiction for escapism, but also for real-life lessons of how to navigate in the world. There is heroism and triumph in these horror stories, but sometimes the only “happy” ending to a zombie apocalypse is surviving. So I wash my hands, I put on my mask, and I try to survive another day.
