The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  Still, I was disappointed that my plans had been disrupted, so I scheduled a short trip to Merja Zerga, 140 miles north from here. Have you been? Oh, you’ll have to visit someday. It’s a tidal lagoon, a Ramsar-designated site in fact, home to an impressive variety of bird species. I wanted to see waders and marsh owls and, with any luck, flamingoes and marbled teals, which migrate through the area this time of year.

  Before that, of course, I had to suffer through the wedding. It’s not that I don’t want to see my brother happy, you understand, it’s just that he has terrible taste in women. All of them young, naive, and in awe of him. At the ceremony—invariably a lavish celebration that saddled his in-laws with debt—he would stand beside his new wife as if he were posing for a fashion magazine. My role was to be the dowdy older sister, completing the family tableau by standing in the background, slightly out of focus.

  I had played the part often enough that I arrived at the ceremony ready to take my cues. There were a hundred guests this time, a modest number by my brother’s standards, but still enough that it took a long time to make the rounds, being introduced to people and exchanging congratulations and well wishes. The bride’s parents were full of questions. “You live in California?” the father asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “In Berkeley.”

  “And what do you teach?”

  “Computer science,” my mother replied for me. It’s a point of pride for her, I think, because initially I said I wanted to be a painter, which she found impractical.

  The father’s eyes widened, and there was a murmur as the news traveled to the aunts and uncles and cousins who stood nearby. California, someone whispered. Berkeley. But the bride was unimpressed; she peered at me with unbounded pity. “How hard it must be for you,” she said. Her voice was a squawk. Standing beside her, my brother nodded in agreement.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Living so far away.”

  “Living anywhere can be hard.” Wait till you’ve lived with my dear brother, I thought, and then we’ll see who finds life so difficult.

  But her attention was already drawn elsewhere. “The photographers are here,” she said.

  We posed for pictures—the bride and the groom and their families and friends, in different permutations. I started to feel hot flashes coming on, even though I was in a sleeveless gown instead of a heavy caftan. I was rummaging through my purse for my hormone pills when the bride motioned for me to step out of the frame. “Now, let’s do one with Moroccans only.”

  Can you believe it? I was about to say something sharp when my brother intervened. His new wife didn’t mean anything bad, he said, it was only that the color of my dress clashed with her caftan. He pulled me back into the frame, beaming his bleach-white smile for the photographers. But I don’t think he minded it all that much. Deep down he resents me because I left home at 18, while he lives in the house we grew up in, taking care of our mother. Maybe things between us would be different if he’d stayed single like me, instead of flitting from wife to wife every few years.

  With all the commotion, I forgot to take my pills. After a few more minutes under the photographers’ lights, I got dizzy and tumbled down, catching the bride’s train to steady myself. The last thing I heard before I passed out was the flutter of the fabric as it fell to the floor.

  The next day, I was preparing for my trip to Merja Zerga, feeling profound thrill at the thought of being on a boat in the lagoon, when I received word that Morocco was closing its borders. I rushed here to try to find a seat on an outbound flight, but no luck so far. Speaking of which, here come the consular officers. I recognize the young man in the blue shirt. He was here two days ago. He’s already walking in this direction; he must have noticed the blue passport in your hand. Go on. Perhaps I’ll see you on the other side.

  nd then, at some indefinable moment between the first rays of dawn and the dazzling light of midday, time stopped making sense. There was no fanfare, there was no noise, no din to announce something so atypical. You might have imagined clocks paralyzed, calendars muddled up, days and nights melding into one another and tingeing the sky gray, but there was none of that. Time stripped of meaning was a collective happening, and yet a strictly intimate one. It prompted nothing more than torpor, indifference, a peculiar and profound kind of despondency.

  It is hard to conceive of the variety of ways the nonexistence of time affected each home, each individual detained in an infinite hour. Some increased the pace of their trivial tasks, covering up the silence with automated actions, washing their hands incessantly, obsessively cleaning living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms. Others couldn’t stop the torpor from taking hold of their bodies, and remained sprawled on their sofas, inert and impotent—following with vague attention the news that is always the same, the whole mathematics of tragedy. It was still possible that some relic of time might yet allow itself to be measured, not in minutes, hours, days, but in the accumulation of deaths on the television graphics.

  I watched everything from the window, letting my gaze wander among the neighboring apartments, distracting myself with that life in the gaps that the landscape offered me. At the exact moment of the death of time, if I remember correctly, I was lying in the hammock staring out over nothing but empty streets. I felt that moment straying from the previous one and the next, becoming eternalized in its insignificance, gaining weight. The present swelled, as if its bulky figure became so fat that it obscured the past and blocked out the view of the whole future. Even very recent days, sunny days of liberty and innocence, now seemed to exist only as distant memories, laden with nostalgia, on the edge of forgetting. As for the future, it was so uncertain that it canceled itself completely, rendering foolish any plan I might hatch, any love I might covet, any book I might long to write. The paralysis of time, I understood, overtook houses and bodies at once, condemning to immobility legs, and arms, and hands, and existence.

  On that day, or on some other, Brazil tallied 1,001 deaths. I suppose the symbolism of the number contributed to the failure of time, stealing even the fatal hands of its clocks, exhausting the final unit of measurement. The 1,001 deaths were like the 1,001 nights; they were 1,000 deaths and a death; they were infinite deaths plus one; they were infinite deaths. A whole population was discovering, in one interminable moment, that it was possible to experience in life the extemporaneous nature of death. That it was not necessary to experience pain and unhappiness to find oneself outside of time, that the imminence of pain and of happiness was enough—it was enough that this imminence become broad and impersonal for the whole temporal order to collapse.

  And then, when no further measuring was possible, when everything was bewilderment and fear and boredom, I noted that it didn’t take long for the opportunists to show up, those who wanted to make an old time out of the absence of time. Bit by bit, even though everything was assimilated into a single moment, the faces most commonly seen in the newspapers began to take on sinister features, their voices turning darker, their expressions coming to resemble, more and more, those from other decades. Anyone who looked closely could see in the country’s highest authorities the almost grotesque image of figures from another time—under their suits, the outline of uniforms; in the shadow of their shoes, the shape of jackboots; in their hands, pens as long as nightsticks.

  Hearing them could cause more desperation than examining their gestures and clothes. Their statements were the echo of other statements, ever outlandish and violent. They started off by scorning deaths and preventive measures, and contradicting scientific research, and preaching the use of an elixir capable of eliminating the pandemic. They proceeded to the need to resume work whatever the consequences, the desire to be productive and to cut wages and to pull down the forest and thereby open up land for growing. They culminated, always, in the persecution of any voice that rose up against them, in the direct assault on critics and dissidents, in the urge to subjugate their political enemies, all of them communists, te
rrorists, subversives.

  When they fell quiet, there was something that was more than silence. On that day, or on some other, there were in me the beginnings of claustrophobia and the irrepressible need to get away, abruptly. Leave behind the apartment in which I had shut myself up, leave behind that collective inertia into which I had passively and unwittingly subsumed myself. I remember walking quickly along the streets, and how my steps seemed to be producing seconds, restoring the pulse of time to existence. I remember feeling some hostility in the empty streets, in the shadows lengthening ominously, as if something dark and ancient might attack me on any corner. Still, I longed to see somebody’s face, the face of somebody who was not me, of whomever, somebody unknown, a stranger—any human face stripped of its mask or its window would be enough.

  I was not surprised to arrive at my parents’ house, though that had not been my conscious destination. I rang the bell with a hand protected by the sleeve of my coat, and I took a few steps back so as to maintain the recommended distance. My parents came out, in no hurry, each of them carrying a folding chair under an arm, arranging it in the front yard, a few meters from the sidewalk. There was serenity in their movements, peace almost, as if the meeting were in no way exceptional. Though they are these peaceable beings, they had themselves once been the dissidents, they had themselves been the subversives, the clandestine militants rising up against the dictatorship of other decades; they are now those more vulnerable to illness, and yet they resist, they survive calmly, ignoring my fear.

  I don’t remember what we talked about, but I have a vivid memory of the picture they formed before my eyes, their pale faces furrowed by the decades, in the background my childhood home, its walls stained by the years of happy neglect, above the roof the top of the tree we planted together, on a distant day that has become present. Time was living in this house, and just being here was enough for me to feel that it would keep running on, in an uncountable chain of events, and that one day time would erase the dark men governing us, and it would erase my parents, and it would erase me too, and it would keep running along the streets, across the squares, the whole city, leaving a whole future in its wake. There might have been something dizzying, something terrible in that thought, and yet, I don’t know, at that moment the certainty of time offered me only peace.

  erusha didn’t get where people had been going before lockdown, anyway. Besides the bowling alley—off-limits for Jerry now that the owners had gotten a beer license—there wasn’t much in Caddo, Texas, as far as things to do.

  On Embarcadero, you had the H-E-B, the Jo-Ann Fabric, the car dealership, and the Hobby Lobby; off the service road, the Chili’s, the Rosalita’s, and the Best Western. In the strip mall where Lawrence Tate was shot down by the police, bears and balloons marking the spot, there was a Walmart, a Ross Dress for Less, and a Starbucks, and down the way from there stood the gun store and range. As for the library, Jerry never went because the woman who worked the front desk didn’t let Black people or Mexicans check out more than two books at once despite the official limit being 10. “You don’t want to take on more than you can handle or you’ll end up with late fees you can’t pay. Start with two, and prove you can return those on time.”

  Five miles outside the city limits, the Caddo Creek Women’s Facility didn’t count as part of the town proper, which was a shame, because that was where Jerry’s mother was nine years into a 13-year sentence. It was the only place around here worth a damn—and Caddo wouldn’t even have that going for it once Jerry broke the woman out.

  Nobody watching KBCY newscasters gravely explain quarantine procedures on Channel 4 could really think they were missing out on much.

  “Jerusha, baby. Turn that noise off,” Aint Rita called from where she sat at the kitchen table. She was doing her daily cryptogram while waiting for Judge Mathis to come on in an hour. “I don’t know why these people think any of these measures matter when it is God who decides the fate of man. Let me see Governor Abbott repent on live TV, then maybe I’ll make time for what he’s got to say. Nothing’s going to stop the Armageddon.”

  But Proverbs 22:3 said that the shrewd man sees danger and conceals himself from it, and it’s the foolish one who keeps on ahead, for he will suffer the penalties. Wasn’t Aint Rita worried about people dying of the virus? Uncle Charles had COPD, and Aint Wilma had lupus and diabetes. Aint Rita herself was on dialysis.

  Most of all, there was Jerry’s mama, trapped in a crowded facility without masks or hand sanitizer. It was bad enough without considering she was also living with asthma, hepatitis, and HIV.

  Did Aint Rita want her niece to die? Probably. Jerry’s mama was an apostate, and to Aint Rita, that was worse than dead.

  Jerry was a judicious girl and didn’t speak these thoughts aloud. Like the shrewd man extolled in Scripture, she avoided the danger that was her great-aunt. A girl who knew how to conceal herself from those who would do her harm had more freedom in the world than the girl who flaunted her supposed freedoms to her enemy unthinkingly.

  “I said turn it off, ’Rusha.”

  Jerry pressed mute and turned on the closed captioning. Absorbed in her puzzle, Aint Rita wouldn’t notice the TV wasn’t actually off.

  “You think I’ll still be able to visit Mama tomorrow?” Jerusha asked.

  The grunt Aint Rita made was either acknowledgment or dismissal. Sipping from her mug of peppermint tea, eyes on her cryptogram, she was in me-time mode, that part of the day when she didn’t bother herself with what she called Jerry’s antics.

  “I could look it up online,” Jerusha suggested, playing with fire but intentionally so. If she never said or did things that Aint Rita didn’t like, the woman would think she was hiding something. Plus, being able to assert rank over her great-niece gave her a sense of purpose. No reason to take that from her. Very soon, she’d no longer have even that small pleasure.

  Aint Rita tapped her ballpoint pen against the table, brow scrunched. “No need to bring the internet into it,” she said. “I’ll call the ombudsman hotline tomorrow morning and see if visitations are on.”

  Her Aint Rita would do no such thing, but that didn’t matter because Jerry had no intentions of taking the bus out to see her mother tomorrow. The two of them would be long gone by then.

  * * *

  When Michael Pierce, warden at Caddo Creek Women’s Facility, killed his wife with a blow to the head, he couldn’t know anyone was watching. His daughters were staying at their grandparents’ cabin, and his dog, Sand Dune, was out back. It wasn’t a planned act of violence, but he did, as anyone does before committing a forbidden act, calculate the odds of his capture. Because of quarantine, Michael’s wife wouldn’t be missed for weeks or more, which gave him time to plan an effective cover-up. He had, he thought, accidentally come up with the perfect murder.

  Had Warden Pierce been a man of sounder judgment, he might have taken seriously the files for three potential babysitters his wife had presented him 14 months ago so that she could begin taking night classes. He’d have checked Jerry’s references and found them wanting. Not because she didn’t have good references available, but because she didn’t want her clients to find out she charged different people different rates based on what she thought she could get from whom. He’d have chosen Jessi Tyler or Isabel Emerson instead. Neither of them kept hidden cameras in their clients’ homes after the time they’d been accused of stealing.

  But when Michael’s wife presented him the information she’d carefully gathered into manila folders, he turned up the volume on the poker match he was watching on ESPN and said: “Whatever, hun. Maybe ask me after this is over?”

  His wife chose the girl who was rumored to be a Jehovah’s Witness because she’d heard they were a cult, and she had fantasies of helping the girl escape like she’d seen on TV where people saved young Mormon girls from polygamist marriage.

  And it would be good for her daughters to spend some time with a girl who dressed so modestly. None o
f that hoochie-mama crap. No. Nice, sensible clothes for nice, sensible girls.

  Were he a better man, he might have talked to this babysitter who’d been working for him over a year once or twice, and if he had, she might have had softer feelings for him and been more merciful about it all, but he hadn’t. He didn’t even know her name. Something biblical-sounding, the warden thought. Mostly he knew her as the Black girl.

  It was this fact that had started the fight with his wife. Jerusha had come by to pick up her last envelope of cash early ahead of the lockdown. After she left, the warden asked his wife half-jokingly: “Why do they all have butts and tits like strippers? What is she, fifteen? Sixteen? That’s not natural.” He shook his head as if to say, what has become of the world, and well, what had become of it? Caddo used to be different.

  “You’re not supposed to say stuff like that, Michael. They can’t help it,” his wife said. It was always something with her.

  “It’s just, are you buying that whole good-girl Christian thing?” he asked. He’d seen her looking at him, and yes, he’d looked back, and yes, he’d seen the solicitations implicit in the way her body moved.

  “Well, if you wanted me to hire someone else, you should’ve looked at the files. I’ll fire her if you want.”

  “I didn’t say you had to fire her. Don’t be dramatic. And what files? What are you even talking about?”

  She shook her head. “The files, Michael.”

  His wife had always been jealous, said he never paid attention to her, but the thing was, if she had interesting things to say, he would have.