Once upon a time in another world
On life, death, distance, and normality B.C. and A.C.
The great brake started almost imperceptibly, freezing the world slowly, then suddenly. Its random swiftness swept through as if a death angel passed in silence over the planet, all at once. Before we fully realized what was under way, the agent of a vast deceleration was everywhere, a ubiquitous virus on the air, microns in size but capable of disrupting lifestyles, businesses, economies, governments, lives.
The tally of the viral specter, case load and body count, grew exponentially. The virus traveled like the weather; the pundits and analysts charted its movements on maps similar to the ones they used for benign local forecasts. Wave after wave was predicted, and those waves arrived, continent by continent. Over time — days stretching to weeks — the natural world and the animal kingdom did what should have been expected. They returned, abiding by an irresistible law: Whenever a displaced species finds the opportunity to return to the wider habitat it was once a part of, that species flows back in.
Thus liberated by the profound and tantalizing absence around them, coyotes strolled the streets and alleys of San Francisco with impunity. Wild boars wandered the urban centers of Italy; sika deer were discovered in the streets and subway stations of Nara, Japan; monkeys held meetings in a plaza in Thailand. The environment made its own comeback. Satellite images showed the skies over Europe cleared of pollution; the water in the canals of Venice was said to have been completely refreshed, thanks to an absence of the city’s legendary boat traffic.
◊ ◊ ◊
The world of humans was something else again. We moved on the surface world the best we could, sequestered, with masks on and tissues slathered with sanitizer, sitting and standing tape-measure distances one from another, washing hands like surgeons, suspicious of the very air we needed to breathe. The ultimate human contradiction was in force: Distance would keep us together. There was unity in isolation.
Sirens were a fixture of the evenings in New York City; in southern California, a news helicopter hovered over children playing soccer, surveying them in the context of criminals. The new criminals — “social distance violators.” People stayed off the streets. They relished the only concerts available to them: the impromptu performances of citizen musicians, singing and playing from their balconies, in honor of the exhausted health-care workers and doctors and paramedics who wept in their presence, before returning to the ER hot zones.
We lived life by workaround: We came to define ourselves not by where we were but by where we were not; not by what we did, but by what we did in spite of everything, or what we were forced to do, because of everything.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Stay at home” was the prime directive. Stadiums and plazas were empty, college campuses, restaurants and bars were shuttered — all the places where humanity once gathered riotously, raucously, virally. The venues of physical interaction were transformed in a relative instant; videoconferencing was the campfire of the times. The stoplights changed colors, presiding over empty intersections.
The glitz of television, its circus aspect, was dialed down. The slow-rolling tragedy, the way it was navigated in real time, inspired a new intimacy on television. News programs were broadcast with anchors in different locations, one or both of them safe at home. Late-night hosts cut back on the snark factor, recognizing their emerging role as national cardigan sweater.
We were invited more and more often into TV studios that were never intended to be studios: the spotless kitchens and spacious apartments of Washington-based reporters; the book-lined studies of Pulitzer winners and bureau chiefs; the tastefully appointed living room of the mayor of Miami. We glimpsed what mattered to these talking heads-turned-people: the street-sign collection of a principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater; the playbill horde of the well-known stock market reporter; the two irresistible daughters of the “Tonight Show” host.
◊ ◊ ◊
Like all of them, we stayed at home so we watched more TV so we watched more commercials. We were startled, if only for a moment, at all the pre-outbreak ads still in rotation on TV, ads with actors seriously violating the social distance protocols. Hugging! Kissing! Deep canoodling! Romping at close quarters with grandparents and dogs!
When you changed the channel, you were up to the moment. Other ads began with minor-chord piano, a cello in a poignant ostinato. Half-speed images of empty streets; vacant ballparks; wind-swept playgrounds; hollow theater marquees; men and women, their faces behind masks, their eyes the eyes of those always on the verge of crying. The common theme: “In these tough/troubled/uncertain times … we’re all in this together.”
And there it was, as fast as you could tap the remote — the dichotomy, the before & after, the snapshot distillation of events: Life B.C. and A.C., before and after the coronavirus left its mark on our life and time. The demarcation was that stark, that dramatic: In a flash of time we went from laughing and drinking with friends and not having to go outside looking like bandits from a bad Western to … a different world. One with fewer and fewer of those friends.
◊ ◊ ◊
With downsizing as a new rule — the result of business closures and curtailing of services for businesses that survive — the benchmarks of economic success in Life B.C. were different, more restrained models during Life A.C.
The idea of paid sick leave, anathema to politicians and inconsistently received in the business world, gained a new volume in the national conversation. Video-chat tools were making slow inroads into the world of work; that accelerated as employers sought alternatives to working from the confines of an office.
The nation’s larger municipalities made changes needed to accommodate the everyday of Life A.C. In Los Angeles and New York, for example, with six-feet-of-distance as the new rule of mass transit, the transit systems of the nation’s two largest cities increased the number of cars in service, to accommodate something close to the number of daily riders before the outbreak. That meant increased police presence, more rolling-stock expenses, higher utility and maintenance costs, much of which was forwarded to the passengers, dutifully riding six feet apart, juggling their own precarious economies.
◊ ◊ ◊
Then a vaccine was discovered, tested, synthesized and distributed … becoming just one more shot we’d come to tolerate every year or so. The curve was flattened into predictable submission, and some healthy percentage of public life began to get back to what it was B.C. Joy that day was unconfined: On every cable channel, music came from everywhere; time zone by time zone, fireworks of thanksgiving exploded around a grateful planet. The sika deer of Japan sprinted back into the wilderness.
The coronavirus pandemic irrevocably altered the speed and trajectory of our lives. We were compelled, and maybe destined, to be smaller, quieter, a little less collectively arrogant than we were before the virus arrived. Our taste for spectacle was muted forever. Our place in the true Scheme of Things hadn’t changed, it was just freshly revealed to us, in a way we couldn’t ignore.
The message couldn’t have been clearer: “It’s not all about you, and it never was.” And when you’re used to riding herd over the earth and its resources, when you’ve commanded the animal kingdom like the transformative emperor you believed yourself to be, that comedown from the status of a god was hard to get our heads around.
◊ ◊ ◊
But we did. And when that happened, in the first heady days of A.C., we began to forget about living in any “new normal.” The unspooling of events, the unraveling of the complacent fabric of life undercut the notion of normality, the word suggesting a uniform baseline of human experience that never really existed. By definition, the endlessly individual varieties of “normal” — yours ain’t like mine ain’t like his ain’t like hers — made normality, as an absolute circumstance, impossible.
Some called it “the new common,” or “the new everyday” or something else that made clear it was big and wide and high and inescapable, and not going anywhere, and nothing would be what it was before.
And some had the courage, or the nerve, to call it that which excites and terrifies us more now than at any other time in any of our lives. To call it what it was from the beginning:
“The future.”
