Critical Conversations

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

 

My first professor freshman year—she was also my academic adviser—was a historian named Beth Kraig. There was something I admired about her name, which in retrospect, I realize was probably the fact that it was (is) a spondee: Beth/Kraig. Neither the first nor the last name carries more weight. The two beats are perfectly balanced.

 

I also appreciated that “Beth” was a traditionally feminine name, while “Kraig” (usually spelled with a “C”) was masculine. Perhaps she was balancing feminine and masculine energy, too, embodying Virginia Woolf’s notion of androgyny from a book I was just reading for the first time then—A Room of One’s Own. The best mind, according to Woolf, was the androgynous mind, and I knew that Beth (she told us to call her by her first name!) was possessed of the very best mind.

 

I used to brag to my mother about Beth Kraig—how smart she was, how incisive. She taught an Honors seminar I was taking called “Critical Conversations: The AIDS Pandemic,” which made my mother’s brows arch and stay arched every time I said it.

 

“I’m surprised they’d allow a course like that to be taught at a Christian school,” she once remarked.

 

“You do know anyone can get AIDS, right? It isn’t a disease that only affects the gay community.” I tried to channel my inner Beth Kraig—succinct, clear, confident.

 

“But it started in the gay community,” my mother replied. “Unnatural acts have consequences—and some of the casualties are innocent people.” My mother was succinct, clear, and confident, too, an eerie alter-ego to Beth Kraig.

 

Ralph Drollinger (there’s nothing inspiring about this name) is an evangelical preacher who runs a Bible study for members of Trump’s cabinet. A few weeks ago, he published an article on his blog called “Is God Judging America Today?” in which he makes a long, convoluted argument that boils down to something quite similar to my mother’s: the coronavirus, a pandemic of current global attention, is “God’s consequential wrath on our nation.” Many people will die because gays and lesbians have forsaken God with their “degrading passions.” In a new twist on the old argument, Drollinger also cites environmentalists as incurring God’s wrath, since they serve “the creature [by this, I guess he means the world?] rather than the creator.”

 

Angie and I try to make jokes about anti-gay extremists. We try to focus on their absurdity rather than the fear they inevitably incite in our hearts. More visible right now is the blame and vitriol directed toward Asian Americans—some of whom, of course, are also gay. I remember reading about an Asian man who was sprayed with Febreze on the subway in New York, presumably because the passenger assumed he was a carrier of coronavirus. When I looked up the incident, I saw it was filmed on another passenger’s phone and shared on Twitter on March 4. A news story which incorporated this video on March 6 concludes this way: “There were 22 reported cases of coronavirus (Covid-19) in New York State. None of the reported cases was in an Asian person.”

 

Today New York is reporting “at least 202,208 total positive cases,” and livescience.com notes that “these statistics likely represent a tremendous undercount” because so many people are ill, suffering, and dying in their own homes, and thus not included in the official tallies.

 

I think how much Beth Kraig wanted to empower us with knowledge. Anyone could become HIV- positive. Being positive did not have to be a death sentence. There were precautions we could take, ways we could protect ourselves. “AIDS is a health crisis, not a moral crisis,” she used to say in her succinct, clear, confident way.

 

My mother suspected Beth Kraig must be a lesbian. “Why else would she teach a class on a topic like that?” But there was nothing to “suspect.” Beth was open about her life, candid and unafraid. She self-identified as a lesbian. She had a partner named Suzanne. They met in graduate school, and Suzanne was a librarian for the University of Washington. (Two women who met and fell in love in graduate school—one who became a professor, the other a librarian! I couldn’t have imagined then how much my own future life would resemble my teacher’s!)

 

Once, when my mother came to visit me on campus, we ran into Beth Kraig in the University Commons. Nervously, I introduced them. Beth shook my mother’s hand and said something about what a promising student I was. Probably she could tell my mother was sizing her up. Probably she could feel my mother’s scrutiny. Still, she didn’t squirm.

 

Later, my mother said, “It would be interesting to meet this Suzanne you mentioned.”

 

My own brows arched, suspicious. “Why would you want to meet my teacher’s partner? You don’t even think they should be together. You don’t even think Beth should be allowed to teach at my school.”

 

“I’m merely curious,” my mother said, followed by a long pause. She seemed to be mulling something over.

 

I knew I’d regret it, but I prodded just the same. “What? And please don’t make it offensive.”

 

My mother and I were never offended by the same things. “I’d like to see which one of them is the man.”

 

*

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on The View today, which I watched online, commercial-free, while I took my lunch break. The show is my guilty pleasure, Joy Behar my hero, the only truly progressive panelist. AOC talked about how her district has three times more deaths than other districts in New York, brown and black people without healthcare, with pre-existing conditions they can’t afford to treat. More children with asthma there than any other district, more children without the inhalers they need. 

 

Then, in my inbox, the latest update from my mother’s nursing home. Eight more Covid-19 patients for a total of 17. I do the math—now one out of 4.7 patients have it. My mom’s test hasn’t come back yet. The social worker’s email began, “It is with a heavy heart…” I knew it was bad news.

 

AOC kept her cool when Meghan McCain asked her why the government doesn’t send more doctors—from FEMA, from the National Guard—into poor neighborhoods. As though this problem just popped up overnight. The Surgeon General had the nerve to say black people should stop smoking. Suddenly it’s a lifestyle problem? A problem of personal responsibility?

 

I try to keep my cool and not lash out at Trump. My mother will need me to talk to her calmly, though if she lashes out I think it will be cathartic for us both. The Surgeon General might say my mother shouldn’t have gotten arthritis, heart failure, shouldn’t have gotten old.

Michelle Wolf has a new joke that reminds me of the preacher’s remarks in reverse. Wolf says that the virus is a way of nature saying to us, Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

 

I think of those of us lucky enough to have rooms. I think of my mother in her room in the nursing home, her roommate Joan, their whiteboard which reminds me of one in a college dorm. I think of myself as a girl reading with a flashlight under the covers.

 

Today when I get the mail, I see my neighbor Zach who was training the father of a little boy who fell to his death from the balcony the day before Easter. Zach, in perfect shape. Zach, the personal trainer who everyone in the condo seems to have a crush on. Today his smile was small, his eyes exhausted. My mouth was hidden under my mask.  I sit with the family, he says, but I don’t know what else to do.

 

The statistics all wash away, and it’s suddenly just that one child, his family, their grief. Zach tells me if I pray that I might want to know the little boy’s name was Jesse. My mother’s name is Janet.

 

Thursday, April 16, 2020

 

I remember once a professor in graduate school asked the class how atheists prayed. “Even though I don’t believe in God,” she said, “I still understand wanting to be heard and seen completely. I understand wanting something immense and super-human to intervene when I am at my most helpless.”

 

Maybe the answer was poetry? Maybe the answer was art?

 

This professor’s name was Carol Guess. I smiled to myself when I realized: Her name was another way of saying Song of Uncertainty, Song of Possibility.

 

Mantras, meditation, saying the name of someone to hold them in the light—surely these are all versions of prayer. Surely they matter, or at the very least, they don’t hurt anything, don’t cause any further harm. Sometimes, agnostic as I am, I feel open to anything. The more vulnerable, the more open—a predictable ratio. Right now, my heart is like a raised drawbridge over the Intracoastal, gaping toward the sky. What boats are passing beneath me? What hopes?

 

Today marks one month since we began writing together, back and forth each day. The beach wasn’t even closed yet. No one was wearing masks. Jesse was just a little boy playing at home with his sister, no end in sight. But Janet was already wise to the spread of the virus, already skeptical that we as a nation were well-prepared. Where are the tests? she was asking then. So many tests, she must be thinking now. And yet—

 

How do we not say Too little, too late? How do we still believe in happy endings (if we ever did) when there is no end to this pandemic in sight?

 

My inbox, like yours, like everyone’s we know, is flooded daily with messages that vacillate between encouragement and outrage. Every CEO and company spokesperson is weighing in on Covid-19. Is it a tacit public relations war—who can spin the coronavirus better? Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Barack Obama have all endorsed Joe Biden, and now Biden’s campaign is emailing me asking for my endorsement, too. Isn’t it enough that I’m going to vote for him because I have to, because we all have to? (#votebluenomatterwho) Do I really have to pretend I’m happy about it?

 

Yesterday Equality Florida sent this email:

 

It’s a tragedy: Deputy Shannon Bennett was exposed to Covid-19 on the job and lost his life. But just days later, Davie Police Chief Dale Engle allegedly remarked that Deputy Bennett died from the virus because he was a “homosexual who attended homosexual events.”

 

Do I need to know this? Do I want to? Of course I believe plenty of people think this way. I heard far worse in my home growing up.

 

It’s that word allegedly that stays with me. Allegedly is an agnostic word—a loophole in certainty. Maybe, maybe not. Plucking flower petals: She loves me, she loves me not. I call myself an agnostic, not an atheist, because I don’t want to commit to a world without God. I just can’t commit to a world with God either.

 

Allegedly, a local chief of police said this hateful thing about his colleague who is gay and died of coronavirus. There must not be recorded evidence, so in the end, it’s conjecture, hearsay. Allegedly. The word can also be deployed in a hopeful way. Allegedly, we’re going to make it through this. Allegedly, the economy will bounce back, our social distancing will pay off, and our planet will get a break from abuse. 

 

I don’t believe prayer is really a form of activism, but maybe it’s a form of self-care?

 

Today for my National Poetry Month Facebook post, I chose a poem from my mentor Bruce Beasley’s collection, Spirituals. Bruce is agnostic like me, someone who has built a prodigious canon around doubt—his childhood in the church, like mine, nearly all-consuming. But instead of avoiding the subject of God, Bruce writes headlong into his liturgical past, studying faith like a relic he can neither truly possess nor truly ignore.

 

I shared the poem “Benediction,” a beautiful agnostic blessing. In it, Bruce writes,

 

Let the children go on wishing

on the stars’

borrowed light, even when

it won’t help, when the moon

is spare, three-quarters black,

lodged

at the night’s rim […]

         Let us

believe there is someone

when we mourn or pray

who will listen,

who will bend down.

 

*

 

I light a votive candle I bought a while ago for hurricane preparedness. I put my mother’s picture near it, creating a makeshift altar. I’ve done this for family and friends before. And after my parents’ accident in 2003, I said novenas like crazy, as I was feeling crazy. My heart would wake me in the middle of the night like a crying baby—thump thump thump.

 

I wait all day to write this entry.  I wait all day for the results of my mother’s latest Covid-19 test.  I play games with myself—if she’s negative, I’ll get the Greek salad with garlic rolls at the condo restaurant. If she’s positive, I’m not sure I can eat. I figure the gods and goddesses I pray to are sick of my nonsense, that they see me as a bad friend who just shows up when she wants something. Now it’s 5 pm and no results.  Maybe the lab is slow this round.

 

It’s too rainy to walk tonight. Too windy, too. Surely I won’t be able to hear well if my sister calls with news. The trees are waving their palms as if to say “help.”

 

Sharyn sends me a video about how to breathe should you get the coronavirus.  Five deep breaths held for five seconds, and after the sixth breath, force a cough.  Do this twice and then lie down on your stomach for ten minutes, breathing as deeply as you can.  I learned something new—that the lungs do the most work from the back; that if you lie down, your head looking at the ceiling, the lungs are stressed that much more. The virus could settle there and give you pneumonia. I wonder if my mother will have a better fighting chance if she gets it since she sleeps upright in a lounge chair.

I think of all the people on ventilators on their backs. Greg’s wife Kimberly was put in a coma in order to use a machine that would send oxygen to her organs.  She had the flu (the doctors think) and was put in an ICU bed on February 15. After a month, after her organs had healed, she was taken off the drugs that kept her asleep.  When she woke, she saw the coronavirus all over the news. She thought she was dreaming.  Because Kimberly was so still for a month, the nerves in her legs don’t work now. Another eight weeks of rehab so she can learn how to walk again.

 

Science, faith, and now the stars, as Bruce writes, who will bend down. Dr. Cara tells me her acupuncturist says this was all predicted in astrology, particularly by The Finger of Destiny over China. She says it’s significant that Covid-19 took its first deaths in the United States, Australia, and Thailand, all announced within a 12-hour period on Leap Day. When I press Dr. Cara further, she says she doesn’t understand any of it but wishes her acupuncturist would have given her a heads-up. Maybe she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. And we both laugh.

 

I google the Corona Borealis constellation after our PT session is over.  Though I’m anxious like everyone else to get on with reopening schools and malls and restaurants, I’m scared that without enough tests, we’ll just get a recurrence, a terrible setback. After all, the Australian Aboriginals called the Corona Borealis “the boomerang.”

 

My red Eternalux candle has burned all day and only a quarter of the way down so far. Its prayers are stamped on in Spanish and English, with white letters, that I may be worthy of your blessings.

 

Friday, April 17, 2020

 

Is it too simple and obvious to say I hate waiting? I hate waiting on behalf of strangers and friends alike, everyone cast into limbo. I hate waiting for you, for your mother, for Greg and Kimberly, for every person with a test pending right now. Yet, as much as I hate waiting, I’m skilled at it—maybe not innately, but I’ve learned.

 

This week I talked to my friend Matthew in New Hampshire. We were going to have a “brief chat” and ended up in a two-hour, all-consuming conversation on Zoom. Something I found myself saying, something I hadn’t realized until I said it out loud, was that academics and artists—many of us one and the same—are practiced at the long game, putting in time now for something that only comes to fruition later, if it comes to fruition at all.

 

Maybe for us it isn’t such a stretch to believe that precautions we take in the present can cut losses later on, even weeks and months from now. As you well know, there are no guarantees in literary life, waiting to hear back about a manuscript for as long as a year, and even then, a standard rejection letter can still turn up in the mail. Tenure is five years of work, then a full year of documentation and review, all for the prospect of a small raise and a title change.

 

But we still try, and we still hope. We don’t always like it, but we’re used to living in a holding pattern.

 

As I type this now, I realize that our waiting skills are largely self-interested, though. If I do such-and-such for so long, and then I wait, there might be something in it for me—a publication or promotion, say. Might is not a given, but it’s more than a can’t, more promising than a no way. Would we invest so much and wait so long if someone else’s prospects were at stake? What about someone else’s life? If I wake up and think, I feel healthy today and want to go outside, it’s hard to trace that impulse to an act of harm, especially when the person I might infect won’t feel symptoms for days or weeks if they feel symptoms at all. And that’s me, a person who courts the invisible as part of her job, struggling to connect the dots of consequence. Can’t I just touch that? Can’t I just go there? And if I can’t have it or do it now, all right—but when?

 

I’m thinking about Kimberly waking up in this “new normal”—such a macabre twist on Sleeping Beauty. I wonder which trauma is more visceral—not being able to use your legs or not being able to go where you want to go once you are able to use them. No family visits at rehab. No learning to walk again toward any certain destination.

 

I remember the thing that startled me most about Robinson Crusoe was not that the protagonist actually survived, not even that he was rescued after 28 years on the island. It was the fact that he began to lose his words. Muscles, I knew, could atrophy from lack of use, but vocabularies?  How was that possible?

 

Surely Crusoe’s story highlights aspects of our present moment—isolation, trauma, an interminable wait which Crusoe surely hated, even as he became resourceful and somewhat resigned to his fate. (And how, I wonder, are we becoming resourceful, too? How are we becoming resigned to our fate?)

 

But it seems the book of Defoe’s that others are reading in earnest now, so many in fact that it was sold out on Amazon for a while, was published three years after Crusoe and is less frequently taught—A Journal of the Plague Year. I remember reading about it in school, though the book was never assigned, not even for comprehensive exams. I scan my shelves and find no copy despite nine years of Humanities graduate school.

 

Online, when I open the book—so much less satisfying than the tactile crack of spine and swish of pages—I find this note on the first page, positioned just beneath the title but before the drop cap of the first line: Being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a citizen who continued all the while in London.

 

If we change the place and the year, I can’t help but wonder if this is what we’re really writing here—we citizens continuing all the while in Hollywood, wearing our masks, washing our hands, lighting our candles, too; doing our best work, or at least trying to, while waiting, waiting, waiting…

 

*

Yes! A Journal of the Plague Year. Many of my other friends are reading it, too.

 

Today our friend Gregg put a podcast up on YouTube discussing an old poem of mine, a poem I’d forgotten I’d written. As he read it, my old self came back to me. The video even inserted pop-up pictures of Gregg and me—one from Boston in the early eighties and another from New York in the early nineties. 

 

Those years in between were our (first round of) plague years, when we’d go to clinics to be tested and have to wait two weeks to get an answer. These were the days of condoms, latex gloves, and drawing blood, humiliating questions about lifestyle and partners—contact tracing, if you will.  Then a trip back to the clinic to be called in one by one.  Three times I went to the one on West 29th Street. Patients came out from behind a wooden door, their eyes wet with tears or bright with the future. We were careful not to smile if we tested negative, respectful of the men and women on folding chairs waiting, waiting, waiting.

 

The social worker finally calls this morning to say my mother tested negative again.  My sister and I celebrate on the phone and try to concentrate on only today. The social worker says the nursing home is up to 21 cases, now one in four patients infected. When I talk to my mother, she says the nurses are all dressed like astronauts, covered in plastic. The nursing home is going on the assumption that any of the patients could be infected.  The nurses complain that it’s hot under their masks and visors, gowns and jumpsuits.  My mother and her roommate agree to let them open the window for air, even though it’s chilly, even though it is going to snow later today.  My mom is pragmatic—All they have to do is get me a blanket.  I’d rather have them comfortable—they’re working so hard.

 

I walk down Surf Road, a big smile under my mask.  But I don’t smile too much, not wanting to jinx myself. Not wanting to offend the other families getting different calls about their loved ones.

 

Instead, I think, why can’t condom factories make latex gloves? The ones I want are still on back-order. During the AIDS epidemic, we were told you couldn’t get it from kissing, from drinking out of the same cup. Now we’re told to disinfect our light switches and doorknobs.  When I watch a movie on Netflix these days, I’m distracted by the way people squeeze stair railings, shake hands with strangers, sweat on a basketball court, then hug it out.

 

Dr. Fauci says it’s probably not a great idea to hook up on Tinder, unless strangers want to wear masks, sit six feet apart, and get to know one another by talking. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Seems to me that could be erotic. Then again, I don’t have that app.

 

Do you know the poem “Quarantine” by Eavan Boland? It’s about the Irish Potato Famine, a husband and wife having to leave their village because the wife is sick. Here’s my favorite stanza:

 

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

 

“Quarantine” reminds me of A Journal of the Plague Year, Angels in America, The Normal Heart—a personal response to “the toxins of a whole history.”

---

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade are the authors of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, published by Noctuary Press in 2019.  Their collaborative poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, the Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Together they were awarded the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their co-written lyric essay, “13 Superstitions.” Duhamel and Wade both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and are at work on a new project titled In Lieu of Flowers: A Quarantine Collaboration.