Scenes from a Masquerade

The other day we had a Walmart grocery pickup scheduled, but Petra had also ordered some non-grocery items “for in-store pickup.” Groceries for pickup are brought out to your car but non-grocery items are picked up inside—or at least that’s how it was Before.

“We aren’t supposed to do that,” said the woman at the inside pickup department. Petra had called to ask if the inside-pickup items could be brought out with our groceries. “But call when you get to the grocery pickup area and we’ll see what we can do.”

So maybe I would have to enter the store after all, which meant I’d better bring a mask. I run the City of Waldhurst’s Facebook page, and I’m always reposting advice to wear masks in stores, so I probably shouldn’t be caught without one.

Petra dug into the closet under the stairs and pulled out some of the N95s she’d bought a long time back during a carpentry project. She had two kinds, one with a vent and one without. If your N95 mask has a vent, I understand, you are supposed to put tape over it, or else your exhalations are completely unfiltered. You’re safe, but no one else is.

I picked one of the ventless ones.

After pulling the car into one of the parking spots in the curbside pickup area and using the Walmart app to tell the grocery porters where to find me, I dialed the store number and worked my way through the phone menu to the non-grocery pickup department. I explained the situation in essentially the same words Petra had used earlier, on speakerphone, next to me on the bed. It sounded like the woman she’d talked to then, the same kind, grandmotherly voice.

“We should be able to have it brought out with your order,” the woman said.

I was filled with relief. I didn’t want to go into the store and risk getting infected.

I really didn’t want to have to walk around in public with a mask on.

* * * * *

The day after the CDC changed its mind about masks, one of my neighbors posted a photo on Instagram showing himself and his wife, heads leaned together, faces hidden behind matching masks in an understated houndstooth. “Freaking out our neighbors walking the dog in our new masks,” said the caption. His wife had made the masks, we were informed. One of the hashtags was #obeytherules. Health department officials had detected this county’s first case just a few days earlier.

What to make of the feeling of revulsion that came over me?

* * * * *

When I carry my parents’ groceries into the garage, it’s strange to notice my mother backing away from me.

Ours has never been a particularly touchy-feely family. A hug here and there on holidays and for long goodbyes. So it’s not that I’m missing some formerly constant barrage of kisses and hugs from my parents. But that doesn’t make it less odd when my mother keeps her distance, treating me like the potentially deadly threat I am, even as I am delivering her food. Which I transfer from the store bags into her waiting totes before backing away, myself. She loads the totes onto the cart she will use to carry it all into the recesses of a house in which I cannot be safely welcomed anymore.

Strange to think how heedlessly and promiscuously we all shared the same air Before, without once thinking how dangerous the mere breath of a loved one might be.

* * * * *

The pet store wouldn’t do curbside pickup for living creatures and we needed crickets for our latest pet, so Petra had to go into the store. She’d captured a tree frog in the backyard over the weekend, and she and the children had converted one of our old aquariums into a habitat.

At the store, the crickets were bagged up by the register, waiting for her, so the transaction was fast.

“I wore the mask,” Petra said. The one I’d taken to Walmart had still been in the car. “I was the only person in the store wearing one. I felt like an idiot.”

* * * * *

I wore a mask for the first and, so far, only time about two weeks after they detected the first case in our county.

A local farmer sends out an email every two weeks listing produce and meats he has for sale. You tell him what you want, then meet him in a downtown parking lot and wait while he assembles each order in the backroom of his brother’s bar and then brings it out to you.

I’d never done one of these pickups before, but my mom wanted radishes and I wanted some of his ribeyes, so I sent in an email for both households and was on my way out the door to the rendezvous point when I realized something. The produce was organic and the beef was grass fed, so my fellow customers were probably going to be wearing masks.

I stuffed a red bandana in my pocket and did not spend a great deal of time thinking about the fact that I was less worried about infection than about not fitting in.

It was a long wait for my order, almost an hour in my case. People stood around the parking lot six feet apart, chatting through their masks. There were dust masks, bandanas like mine, surgical masks, and handicraft masks.

I noticed that, even though the dust masks—some of which might even have been the gold standard N95s—were probably more effective than the craft masks, their dingy whiteness made their wearers look pathetic, unhealthy, desperate, somehow. Some of the craft masks, on the other hand, leant their wearers an air of bravado, a kind of post-apocalyptic tribal elegance.

“I went to Walmart to pick up orders for other people and no one was social distancing,” said one masked young woman. “I ran into people I knew who weren’t wearing masks and I had to shame them.”

“I haven’t been to Walmart in weeks,” said another woman. “Maybe we never need to go to Walmart again when all of this is over.”

* * * * *

Another weekend, another Walmart pickup. For two weeks there have been signs telling customers to remain in their cars “for your safety and ours.” It is psychologically difficult to remain huddled in your car while the Walmart workers walk around outside. A “no contact” pickup will keep all of us safer, but the person inside the car is the only one who is actually safe.

It’s been one month since the CDC changed its mind about masks, but this is the first weekend when all of the Walmart associates working curbside pickup are wearing them. It’s a motley assortment, suggesting that they’ve been procured not by the company but by the individual workers. The fellow loading my car is wearing an N95 with untaped valve.

I decide I’m comfortable remaining in my car after all.

What we might leave behind

Here and there I am seeing suggestions that we should give up any thought of “returning to normal” and instead consider the extent to which we might be able to sustain and extend our current level of sacrifice and privation for the good of all.

The thinking is that what we are now calling “normal” was, after all, a state of gathering crisis headed toward the crash of the world’s ecological systems and the resulting crumbling of what currently passes for “civilization” starting in as soon as a few decades. Mourn but move on, this line of thinking goes, and find ways to continue the current “suffering”—not to avoid the later crash, it now being well too late for that, but to soften the blow.

Weighty considerations would be required in the formulating of a plan along these lines. As helpful as it would be to maintain the currently drastically diminished vehicle emissions, for example, keeping millions of people out of work would not be a sustainable method for doing so.

There are some things, on the other hand, that it would be a pleasure to continue to do without: the spirit-breaking public school system, the necessity of wearing pants to meetings, and, of course, professional sports. Call me a curmudgeon, but one of my favorite things about the current emergency has been the fact that it has forced all professional sports seasons to a halt.

“There’s a way” of allowing the return of large-scale sporting events, the nation’s highest-ranking epidemiologist is supposed to have said on television the other day, before going on to stipulate a partial list of needed restrictions that were already so stringent as to make clear to anyone who was really paying attention that there is virtually no way at all. According to Fauci, players would need to be sequestered for the season in hotels under constant health monitoring and with frequent testing for the virus. As a given, their games would be played only for the television cameras, in otherwise empty stadiums.

Except  the stadiums wouldn’t be empty other than the players and television crews. Fauci either overlooked or failed to mention the many people besides athletes who are needed to put on the show of a major professional sporting event. How many of these people would want to come to work, by what twisted logic could they be designated as “essential,” and how many wrongful death lawsuits emanating from their ranks would league owners be willing to tolerate?

If we do end up having to do without sports for an extended period of time, I hereby propose that we continue trying to do without them even after this emergency is over, if in fact it ever ends. Although my fantasies about life post-virus are mostly pretty bleak, here is one of my fonder imaginings: Even once circumstances change sufficiently that we are once again willing to be in confined spaces with people we don’t already live with, there will come some sort of collective decision that, despite it then being possible to restart professional sports, we would just rather not.

In this fantasy, a new gravity and seriousness will have swept the nation after the wakeup call of this pandemic, and all Americans—including even the athletes themselves—would decide that, whatever nobility and benefit that spectator sports can contain and confer in the abstract, the particular shape that American professional sports had metastasized into by the time this virus reached our shores had become too demeaning and infantilizing to any longer be worthy of the attention of the people of a nation hoping to reestablish and, this time, put to better use its role as a leader among the nations of the world.

Now that’s a future worth hoping for.

* * * * *

Back here in the present, however, there is little sign that such events might come to pass. The president, for whom and for whose family and staff we can be certain there is no shortage of N-95 masks, has announced that he is “tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” and so wants professional sports “reopened”—along with everything else—as soon as possible.

A vast number of Americans are of course in the market for various forms of escapism-by-screen, and many of them have finished Tiger King and would gladly switch over to one or another kind of sporting event. These numbers are driven by the fact that so many Americans are newly unemployed or working from home, with even the latter finding that they have greatly increased amounts of free time as a result of no longer needing to commute, at the very least.

One would hope that, in a time of such novel and widespread peril for our nation, our chief executive would have better things to do than watch television. But apparently he perceives there to be so little on his plate worthy of his attention that he is watching not just the occasional 14-year-old baseball game but so many of them that he has gotten his considerable stomach full of them. One wonders how much TV time New York City’s ER healthcare workers are getting, by contrast.

Much easier to imagine than my idealized vision of a sports-free future is one in which professional athletes have been determined to be “essential” workers and something like Fauci’s plan unfolds after all. I can already hear the peculiar way that the athletes’ sneaker squeaks will echo off of the thousands of empty seats, but certain other components of this vision of the future are less clear. Will the camera operators, towel boys, trainers, and janitors all be wearing space suits? Or will the essentially gladiatorial degree of self-sacrifice we were already demanding of athletes pre-virus also be demanded of these support workers, spacesuits being too inimical to the soothing effect that has always been the point of bread-and-circuses initiatives down through history? If the latter, perhaps Congress will include an allowance for substantial hazard pay in a bailout package intended to “make whole” the owners of these “essential” teams.

I’m no sports fan, but I can’t help thinking about what might be coming down the field.

After the end, then what?

One of the strange things about the current emergency is that, as much as I wish it were over, I feel no little anxiety about what will happen when it is. Or rather, what will happen when it is announced to be over. My concern is whether such an announcement will truly seem based on what will be able to be described as my and my family’s best interests or whether the interests of CEOs, politicians, and others with a much readier supply of N-95 masks and hand sanitizer will seem to have interposed themselves.

I am concerned, in other words, that “the end” might suddenly heave into view like a surfacing whale, a sudden dangerous fact too large to be ignored, too close to back down from, and difficult to maneuver around with any degree of finesse.

Considering the deep redness of the state where I live, our governor can be said to have taken dramatic enough virus countermeasures to suggest that he possesses at least some desire to be his own man. Still, with the release of the president’s plan, an increasing number of protests against social-distancing measures, and the president’s self-contradiction-by-tweets calling for various swing states to “liberate” themselves, there is across the nation what feels like gathering momentum toward some degree of easing of the current restrictions and a return to what a certain kind of person insists on thinking of as “normal” but which the rest of us are settling into thinking of as “the before.”

We hear that a handful of northeastern governors are working together on a “reopening plan,” and a headline I saw in the last couple of days suggested that even Fauci was looking on such moves with some degree of approval. To be sure, to the question of “how soon,” it seems likely that the findings of these governors and of Fauci and his colleagues is most likely to be “not very.” Nonetheless, the casual and/or undiscerning news consumer (i.e., many politicians and sizable swaths of their supporters), may now be forming the sense that this first phase of the emergency is on the verge of being concluded, that we are about to be “over the hump,” that, perhaps, “the worst is over.”

One of our biggest handicaps in all of this is that so many of our imaginations are simply not up to the task of contemplating an unhappy ending. The last hundred years of history have made it easy for Americans to form the impression, even if only subconsciously, that it is almost a law of the universe that America is owed success, that innovation and invention will save us as if through the operation of some inexorable physical law.

So it is that, as we mouth some variation of the phrase “this can’t go on forever,” we overlook evidence that the most accurate way to continue that sentence would not be with words like “and therefore soon everything will be better” but rather with words like “without severe economic damage that might nonetheless be unavoidable, assuming we can maintain consensus on not wanting to needlessly cause the death of additional hundreds of thousands of people, because, from an epidemiological standpoint, nothing really changes about either our infection risk or the measures necessary to reduce that risk until the release of a vaccine, which is still at least a year out.”

In the worst case, it might turn out that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is not the only one of this nation’s so-called leaders whose outlook is that “you’re going to see states inevitably follow, because one or two states do it [and] the other states are kind of going to be at a disadvantage.” There is in other words a real possibility that whatever “reopening” starts happening will be triggered not by sound public-health advice but by the psychological pressures of a nationwide game of economic chicken being played by moral cowards.

It is somewhat reassuring to hear  this state’s governor say “I don’t want to send everyone dancing out into the streets quite yet” and that “we don’t do anything if we think or the experts are telling me that it is going to endanger us.”

But only somewhat.

* * * * *

A friend of mine from high school died last summer at his home in England. On Easter Sunday, another old friend got in touch to advise that he and the decedent’s mother are planning a memorial event for June 15, a date he blithely captioned as “post-COVID.”

“I’m hoping we can make it a two-day affair cause there will be people from France and the UK flying in plus all over America,” he wrote, claiming that the confirmed guest list already included our friend’s widow, who would be one of the ones flying in from the UK.

This plan struck me as utterly disconnected from reality, so I screen-shotted part of the exchange and forwarded it to another mutual friend to see what he thought.

“We are still hoping to travel in June and July, so I guess I’m hopeful,” he answered.

These are all intelligent people, so I am forced to consider why we seem to see such different possibilities in the same set of facts. If the current restrictions are warranted by the facts as they are understood now, what is it about these facts that can reasonably be expected to change quickly enough that we can contemplate a return to discretionary travel and large social gatherings as soon as early summer?

Perhaps my one friend was overstating the widow’s commitment to attending on this particular date. Certainly it is hard to imagine a well-informed adult buying an air ticket for two months out from now. And yet my other friend told me that he and his family—which includes an asthmatic—are “hopeful” on a similar point.

What can reasonably be hoped for, exactly? As mentioned earlier, there seems no reason to hope for a vaccine any sooner than a year from now, possibly not even then, and at any rate certainly not by this summer. To me, this means that nothing about the basic infection-risk picture can change by then either. The only thing that will have changed will be the shape of “the curve,” but of course any flattening thereof will only have been the result of the stringent restrictions we are currently under and—in the absence of a vaccine—would be quickly reversed as soon as those restrictions were appreciably loosened.

There are some not completely unreasonable possibilities that could conceivably nibble at the edges of all of this. Perhaps, as the data picture firms up, it will turn out that the virus’s infection or death rates are not quite as high as first feared. Perhaps extremely effective treatments—and paths to distributing them efficiently at massive scale—will be devised. Perhaps—despite counter evidence from southern hemisphere countries where the virus is going gangbusters—there will turn out to be some noticeable degree of seasonality to this virus.

Even if all of these possibilities come true, my willingness to actually risk contracting the virus—and thus risk transmitting it to my family, including my elderly parents, not to mention any number of other people’s loved ones I might encounter before showing symptoms—will not be appreciably increased. And all of these possibilities won’t come true, not all at once, of course. Not by summer, anyway.

The most it seems reasonable to hope for by early summer, then, is that our restrictions will be having a strong effect. But it seems to me that that will be an argument for continuing most of those restrictions, not abandoning them.

* * * * *

My friends’ “hope” in the face of all this makes the ground feel unstable under my feet. If even they have not yet concluded that summer travel and socializing as usual are not off the table, how prevalent must such hopes be among the general population?

In other words, how much hope is there of not getting sucked into the aforementioned game of interstate economic chicken by a collection of governors and state legislators comprising a considerable number who campaigned on their unwillingness to be persuaded to action by anything other than ideology and certainly not by some dumb fact?

When the loosening begins, we can be sure it will be led by politicians mainly motivated by concerns around economic harm and not by evidence of a significantly decreased infection risk.

First through the gate will be states whose governors have simply decided to require a greater degree of sacrifice from the poor and the vulnerable in service of something they conceive of as “the greater good.”

The rest will follow in an order dictated by where they fall along a continuum of the number of otherwise unnecessary deaths they are willing to tolerate as part of the same calculation.

And many of us will then be forced to decide whether each of our state’s leaders have enough of our individual best interests at heart that we feel comfortable following their lead, or whether we think it seems more sensible to follow our own instincts, even if those instincts require actions that will have increasingly less cover of law.

It will be particularly interesting to see what happens, for example, in states that decide to reopen schools before summer, as our governor, for one, has refused to say he won't do, because “the children need hope.” Given that, again, I can’t see any likely developments that would make of reopened schools anything other than a massive infection vector (and cause the profoundly unhealthy teachers and school support employees to die like flies), our household has already decided we wouldn’t go along with any such order. Will we be considered truancy scofflaws? Will our children be held back?

No doubt ours is not the only household scanning the horizon uneasily, waiting for this whale to heave into sight.

The Walmart associate in the blue balaclava

Ever since the governor published his stay-home order, we’ve been using Walmart’s “Pickup” service to get most of our groceries. As few Americans now need to be told, you do this by filling and paying for a virtual cart of groceries using the Walmart app on your phone. Then, at the appointed time, you drive to a row of lettered parking spaces along one side of the store, enter your parking space’s letter into the app, and wait for a Walmart worker to emerge from the building’s side door, pulling a little flatbed cart stacked with plastic bins containing your groceries.

Not wanting the worker to touch your car, you will have already opened the trunk or the hatch back, and you will close it again when the worker is done. Instead of having to touch the worker's germ-laden tablet to sign for your groceries, it will be okay with you if the worker signs for you, naturally, and no, you won’t want to review any substituted or out-of-stock items. You’ll just for God’s sake want to get this over with, please.

At my first Pickup, our groceries were brought out by Sydnee, an elfin teenager with elaborately pierced ears and wearing a jeweled septum ring. Although this was still early in the course of the emergency, I already understood that Sydnee and I were looking at each other across some kind of divide. My wife and I had started working from home that week, and signs suggested that we might ride out this storm out in relative safety and with incomes intact. Young Sydnee and her coworkers, however, would daily face a grim choice between maybe/probably becoming infected if they went to work and definitely starving if they didn’t.

What was the emotion I felt toward Sydnee as I watched her swing the gray plastic bags into the back of my car? At the end of our interaction, it emerged as gratitude. “Thanks for being here,” I told her. “I know you’d probably rather not be.” She seemed gratifyingly touched by my words. “Someone’s got to do it,” she said, with a pleased little smile that warmed my heart all the way home.

What exactly was I thanking her for, though? Leaving aside that the practice of thanking soldiers for their service has always struck me as performative and self-congratulatory (as opposed to, say, actually supporting the troops by calling one’s senator to demand better-armored Humvees, voting out politicians who spend soldiers’ lives too casually, or even just anonymously sending a round of drinks over to the party of four in camo at an airport bar), any Walmart worker still willing to punch in these days seems at least as deserving of such tributes. At the margins, I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced a direct benefit from each new dozen of dead Iraqis or Afghans or seen how exactly my family would be imperiled by a shortage in the number of young Americans willing to do that work. But let Sydnee and her coworkers start staying home en masse right now and life in a lot of American households would get difficult, fast.

On the face of it, then, I was thanking Sydnee for her bravery in coming to work, just as—on the face of it—people thank soldiers for a similar reason. There is a key difference, however. No one enlists in the military without understanding—even if to varying degrees of remoteness and abstraction—that they are shouldering some degree of risk that they will be required to fight and possibly die in wars. It seems permissible to assume, of anyone we see wearing the uniform of any branch of America’s currently “all volunteer” military, that some weighing of this risk occurred before enlistment papers were signed and that the decision to sign was informed by a conscious acceptance of that risk.

We cannot assume any of these same things about Sydnee and all of the many others wearing Walmart uniforms in the year 2020, trundling our groceries out to our cars, stocking the shelves inside, or working the cash registers to serve those death-cheaters still willing to push their own shopping carts around the store. Certainly we can describe the service they are providing in some of the same terms we use for military service. Each morning, when Walmart workers put on their polyester vests, they do not know if they will come home again—healthy, that is—and so also do not know if they will infect family members when they do. And during each shift, by keeping open a channel through which a huge number of Americans now obtain their daily bread, they provide a service that it is no exaggeration to describe as being of life and death importance.

And yet something is missing, in the comparison between Sydnee and a soldier: any sense in which the former ever decided to take all of this on.

Reasonable people may dispute the degree to which people who join the military are fully cognizant of the risks they are incurring, and even the degree to which it is accurate to call our military “all volunteer,” since there are systemic factors that push many people into the military almost as forcefully as a draft. Nonetheless, whatever degree of autonomy and conscious risk acceptance we can agree to assign to military members, surely it would have to be much more than we can assign to Walmart workers.

In fact, given that both the military and Walmart draw disproportionately heavily from the same demographics, it might even be safe to guess that someone wearing a Walmart vest has chosen what she believed to be the safer of the two main job paths available to people like her (not to mention also being the path that, in Sydnee’s case, would allow more leeway in terms of visible body piercings).

* * * * *

By the time of my third Pickup, the emergency had intensified. For one thing, there was by then an actual declared state of emergency, both statewide, countywide, and in the city of Waldhurst, although these various declarations had not included much in the way of firm direction for the populace at large. The state had detected about 500 cases, there were 4 in our county, and the danger felt clearer and presenter even if not as pronounced as in so many other places.

The weather was cold and wintry, so perhaps that was why the heavy young man who brought out my groceries was wearing a navy blue balaclava. Even by this point it was not common to see masks and gloves in public, but it was no longer a surprise when one did. On the other hand, according to social media, hardly anyone was wearing these inside the Walmart, where whole families were still being observed grazing the aisles and reuniting with other branches of their clans for catch-up conversations, just like always.

At some point, as the young man was loading my groceries and breathing heavily through the cloth of his mask, it occurred to me that I was downwind of him, and I casually shifted position around him along the arc of a circle with him at its center and a six-foot radius. In addition to Sydnee, I had now tried out my gratitude line on two additional Walmart workers, with similarly gratifying results. It had become my ritual, my sacrament, and as I maneuvered further out of the zone of possible infection around this young man, I was eager to try it again. Perhaps an expression of empathy would distract him from the probably obvious way I was thinking of him as a biohazard risk to me and my loved ones.

“How are things going in there?” I asked.

“Pretty crappy,” he answered, without looking up from his work.

His tone did not exactly leave the door open for continued chit chat, and suddenly what I’d been about to say struck me as fake and worthless. When I’d asked a similar question of the other Walmart workers, I’d gotten downright cheery answers—“there’s some people that are trouble but most people are pretty patient,” that sort of thing—but of course those answers had been influenced at least as much by the cultural resistance in these parts to being seen as a complainer as by any real conditions on the ground.

But “crappy,” of course, was the first truthful answer I'd heard. I had asked one of the other workers if managers were letting people stay home if they felt sick. They were, she said—but basically on the same terms as usual, i.e., if they had sufficient sick or vacation time saved, with the exception being if they had a positive test, in which case they would be paid for the mandated two-week quarantine time.

I said that didn’t quite seem to be in the spirit of what public health experts were calling for, even if you left aside the fact that it was and remains nearly impossible to actually get a test. She replied that one store had tried a more liberal policy of granting paid time off to anyone who felt sick, even without a diagnosis. The next day, so many people hadn’t shown up to work that they’d had to close the store. I felt a bit of ice in my spine.

It shouldn't but of course does need to be said: no one working at Walmart wants to be there, a fact that infuses no little awkwardness into the paeans we keep hearing to how “brave” they’re being. The simple fact is that, for those of us lucky enough to get to stay home during the current emergency, there is a conflict between keeping everyone as safe as possible and our demographic's continued ability to buy groceries for our families.

As a thought experiment, imagine we had a draft. Now, imagine walking up to a quartet of drafted soldiers in uniform in an airport, on their way to a war zone. What would you think about thanking them for their service? I’m not saying gratitude would be unwarranted, but I suspect the range of possible reactions to that gratitude might be quite a bit wider—and the interaction considerably less predictable—than with soldiers who think of themselves as having volunteered. It would probably depend a good bit on the current body count.

When I’d thanked Sydnee and the others, and they’d thanked me for thanking them, we’d just been agreeing to pretend that there had been some sort of real choice involved and that, therefore, the concept of “bravery” was somehow a pertinent lens through which to view their actions.

Brave they may be—brave they are, no doubt about it.

But what they also are, more importantly, is fucked.

And it requires a high degree of obliviousness to believe there won’t have to be some kind of reckoning for that. “Thank you for your service” isn’t going to cut it.