I ran out of things to say. Kat nodded silently, wiped her nose on the shoulder of her shirt, shut her phone off, and laid down again.
The fifth day we were there, the electricity went out. A few hours later, the water was off, too. It was the fifteenth. People couldn’t move houses, they couldn’t rent Airbnbs, but that didn’t mean they had to pay utilities on all the places they couldn’t be. Within hours, it was so hot in the house we stripped down to our dirty underwear and bras, fanning each other with our sweaty t-shirts.
“I can’t do this. We have to get out tonight,” I said.
Kat nodded. “The patrols are less regular now. I think maybe too many cops…” she trailed off but we both knew she was going to say “died.” Too many cops died to send them up and down every street in town. Besides, the only houses not taped up in this neighborhood were the empty ones. Even if they had enough healthy, living cops to patrol the neighborhood, why would they bother? Dead people don’t spread viruses.
Then, the awful thought: Fuck, what if they do?
I fought the urge to Google whether California was burning corpses.
“We have to wait until a couple hours after sunset, ‘til it’s really dark. We can do what you said, creep down that dirt alley until we hit Park Road and then… then we see what the hell is happening. Maybe if the cops aren’t around here, they’re not around your place, either.”
Before it got dark, we went into the garage and found the masks we’d cast aside when we were unloading the bleach and they made our faces sweat. I looked around, hoping the old owners had left a shovel or a hoe, anything that might work as a weapon if we ended up needing one. No dice. Kat used her teeth to break the plastic on top of the bleach pallet and then tore it away.
“These are a few gallons each. If we swing them, it’ll hurt. Maybe buy us time.”
“We won’t need to fight anyone. Everyone is at home.” Or dead.
Kat shrugged and pulled two off the pallet anyway. We went back into the dark house and sat. Then paced. Then sat. Neither of us looked out the window. There wasn’t anything to see, nothing to make what we were about to do feel safer. We couldn’t stay there, and that was all that mattered.
When the sun finally went down and the temperature started to drop, instead of feeling relief at the cooler air coming through the open window, the tension grew into ropes in my stomach and knotted together until it climbed up my throat and nearly choked me. I wanted to ask Kat if she was okay, but I knew she wasn’t. I knew if I asked, I wouldn’t be okay, either.
Finally, it was dark. I told Kat to turn her phone off and sit in the dark with me for a while so our eyes could adjust. We went out the sliding glass door in the back bedroom, each carrying a bottle of bleach and hoping we’d get to her place and laugh at how stupid it was to take a jug on a walk in a deserted neighborhood. The back fence was chain-link, and we both got over quickly, but Kat ate it on the way down and winced when she stood up and put weight on her left foot. Twisted ankle.
We talked about how important it was to stay silent as we walked through the alleyway. We couldn’t afford for anyone to come looking to see who was whispering. It was dead quiet, no lights on in any of the houses for blocks. I told myself it was the nature of quarantine. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, so you pass out at eight-thirty or nine when it gets dark and you’ve watched enough trash TV to last you all year. Kat was still limping. If we hit the end of the alley and had to sprint, we were in trouble. There was a lone streetlamp at the end of the walkway, and I kept staring at the area it illuminated, praying not see anyone.
When we hit Park Road, I paused to study the fire station a little further down. The bay doors to the garage were open, empty. I looked around, and only saw one house with a light on.
“OK,” I whispered, hoping Kat could make out what I was saying through the layers of bandana I had wrapped over my lower face before we left. “I think we’re good. We just have to get out of this light.”
We crossed the road as quietly as we could and ducked into a pocket of blackness on the other side. Kat led me to another dirt alley and waved me in after her. I followed her through the dark, both of us looking over our shoulders every second or third step. We got to her neighborhood and I had to keep myself from sprinting to her house. Her perfect little manufactured shithole seemed to scream at me, begging me to come inside and be safe.
We looked at each other, and, with a nod, agreed we were just going to do it. Out in the open, walking, not running. Just get to the house. We made it three steps before a stern, muffled voice said, “FREEZE.”
Kat dropped her bleach bottle. I held my breath.
The man in a Hazmat suit walked closer but stopped a good ten yards away. “What the fuck do you two think you’re doing? You think you’re special? You think this thing won’t kill you like it fucked over everybody else?”
Kat said, barely audible, “Please don’t shoot.”
The man came a few steps closer. “I can’t hear you, honey, but I have orders to shoot people breaking quarantine on sight. I can fucking see you, can’t I?”
Quieter, Kat repeated herself. She closed her eyes and held a wince.
I found the strength to speak from somewhere deep in my gut. Held up the bleach. “Sir, please. A friend left these outside for us. We needed to disinfect. That’s all. We live there.” I pointed to Kat’s house. “Just let us go back. No one has to know.”
The man didn’t take the gun off of us. I couldn’t see his facial expression. The flashlight he was shining at us made it impossible to see anything but his outline. His posture seemed to soften, though.
“Goddammit,” he said. “Fine. I won’t call this in. Just get your asses in the house. And do not fucking come out again. This isn’t a joke. If I see you again, I will shoot you. And if someone else sees you? Well. You’d better hope they’re as nice as I am. Go.” He motioned toward where I’d pointed with his pistol. “But I’m not taking this gun off of you until I see you inside.”
Kat slowly crouched down and picked up her dropped bleach bottle with a trembling hand. I noticed I was shaking, too. My breath was ragged and hot inside the folded-up bandana. We walked slowly around the man with the gun, keeping space between us, and then to Kat’s house. I wanted to run so bad I could barely stand it. When I looked over my shoulder, the man still had the gun on us. I put my hand on Kat’s shoulder to remind her to walk. To remind myself.
Kat tipped over a flowerpot and pulled out her spare key. When I head the lock click, my body relaxed. We got inside, locked the door, and pulled off our makeshift masks.
“Holy Christ,” I said, laughing.
Kat smiled big and walked toward the bathroom. “It’s my house, so I get to shower first.”
When I got in the shower, I turned the water so hot it burned. I scrubbed my body with the washcloth so hard it felt like I was using steel wool. I wanted to wash the last five days off of me—the stink, the sweat, the general grease of living without soap. I wanted to wash anything that might kill me off my skin, too.
When I came out, Kat tossed me a t-shirt and pair of shorts and pulled out her weed stash. “Let’s get so high we don’t wake up until this is over,” she said.
After two hits from her pipe I couldn’t handle any more. It relaxed me, but not enough to make me think I could afford to come off high alert. The idea of being too stoned to function was tempting and terrifying in equal parts. Kat took a third hit and started coughing so hard the vein in her temple pressed out against the skin and her eyes bulged. She kept coughing.
“Holy fucking shit,” she wheezed between body-racking coughs, her eyes red and wet. “Fuck. I hope I’m not sick.”
“You’re not sick. You’re sucking down shitty weed after a week of inhaling nothing but AC air.”
I believed it when I said it.
Kat turned her swamp cooler on high and we sat under the vent and stared up at it until we started to shiver.
“Come on. Come
to bed. Everything is going to feel so fucking awesome after a night in a real bed.”
I bet she believed that when she said it, too.
We got in under her sheets, no comforter, and she turned her back and pushed up against me. I put my arm around her waist.
“Hey, Annie?”
“Yeah.”
“When this is over, I don’t want to be friends anymore.”
My heart stopped; I instinctively pulled her closer. “What? Why?”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s always been us. We’ve always been together. I couldn’t have done all this shit with anyone else. I don’t want to. I don’t want to keep fucking around. I don’t want to be a girl to you anymore. I want to be your girl.”
“Ah, Kitty,” I said, nuzzling her neck. “You’ve always been my girl.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Of course it is.”
She sighed what sounded like a happy sigh and wiggled her butt against me. A few minutes later her breath went slow and steady. She was asleep. I held her close against me and tried not to think about the heat coming off her skin or the rattle that came with every exhale.
I tried not to think about the article I read on my phone while she was in the shower. Symptoms can take up to a week to show in an otherwise healthy patient. Once coughing and fever are present, the virus progresses quickly. Death can occur in as little as 24-48 hours.
By Scott Adlerberg
The bureaucracy never rests, and neither do those who guard it. Here’s what I mean:
The virus had been spreading and killing for three or four weeks when the commissioner gave the telework order to our agency. Everyone considered non-essential to the agency’s operations would, until further notice, be doing their job from home. Since our agency is the one that collects taxes and fees for New York, you better believe that most every employee working for it is essential, but what the commissioner meant is that everyone who could conceivably work at home would do it that way. Needed for that: a personal computer, not much else. We’d be given remote access to the agency data systems we used all the time. There’d been talk over the last fortnight that telework was coming, but the actual implementation of it happened fast. We came in for business as normal Monday, and the commissioner sent out his agency-wide decree via email late that morning. Tomorrow, on Tuesday, we were not to come in, and our lives as public servants who could work with a laptop in bed, wearing pajamas, would begin.
That final afternoon was hectic. I transferred necessary files to a Zip drive, gathered papers and notes. Is there anything I’m forgetting? I kept thinking, because I didn’t know when I’d be able to return to my office. They might lock up the municipal building until the virus danger passed. Or they might allow in commissioners and division heads and upper-echelon people like that and prevent entrance to regular staff and the midlevel managers like me. Plus, since I am in charge of fifteen people, I had to hold a meeting with those reporting to me and lay out a plan for how we would function as a unit from our homes. Nobody sounded upset to be going under lockdown, not with the virus on the upswing, ravaging the city, the death toll increasing daily, but they had their concerns about working under quarantine.
“My computer is old and slow.”
“If City Time doesn’t work, can we do our timesheets manually?”
“Hope this doesn’t last too long. My wife and I together all day…”
I clocked out two hours later than usual, and not until I was in my apartment, sitting on the couch having dinner, the TV on across the room, did I think about the one thing I’d left behind that I should have taken home with me—my plant. Somehow, unfathomably, I’d forgotten it. I’d overlooked it because of the day’s craziness, the thousand little things I had to arrange and remember. Fuck!
Pachira aquatica, my lovely Guiana chestnut.
It stood on a corner of my desk where it could catch sun through the window. Bright green leaves, the tall braided trunk, the white pot. I had it on a tray covered by wet gravel. No one knew how long this telework situation would last—maybe weeks, perhaps months—and my little money tree required water often. The species I had comes from Brazil, the swamplands. A long lockdown would desiccate and kill it. And don’t get me started on the fertilizer I use, a top-of-the-line product. If I didn’t retrieve my plant soon, it would die, and I couldn’t allow that to happen. The plant meant too much to me. It connected me to what I could not give up. I saw Octavia, my wife, watching me with her arched-eyebrow doubtful expression, and I said to myself I couldn’t let her down.
“I won’t disappoint you,” I said. “I’ll get the plant.”
I hope she believed me.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
I went back to eating, shaking my head, laughing while I chewed my food, aware of what grief can do to a person.
Whatever. We all suffer and have our relapses.
Octavia had bought me that plant, and I couldn’t let it sit in my office and die.
In the morning, I phoned the head of my division, an assistant commissioner, to inquire whether we’d be allowed back into the municipal building. As non-essential employees, that is. I explained that in yesterday’s rush, I’d neglected to copy a file on my computer desktop, something I had to get as soon as possible. It would help me with a project, viral outbreak or not, uncertainty in the city and world notwithstanding, I was expected to finish by deadline.
“The one you and I discussed,” I said. “With the commissioner. I’m supposed to give him an update by next week.”
I could hear the AC’s dog barking and her daughter talking in the background. The AC would be spending the lockdown time with her family: husband, the two girls, their pet. That might not be so bad, really, if they were a family that got along and enjoyed most of their time together, and I compared it to my own circumstances.
With me, well, in my apartment, and what I’d be staring at during the quarantine period…
“How could you forget that file?” the AC asked.
“It’s not like they gave us much warning.”
“They didn’t, no. You should get it, though, yes.”
“The building’s open?”
“Far as I know.”
Clarity isn’t a strength of bureaucracy, even to answer a simple question like is our work location accessible, but I took what she said as good enough for a go-ahead. Come what may, I’d attempt the mission to rescue the plant. But if she was wrong and the building was locked, or if it was open and the security people on the ground floor refused to let me in because I didn’t have some special authorization, I’d be forced to figure out a way to break in, though my office was on the 24th floor. How would I do it? And what if I failed? I could see the news story already:
City Worker Arrested. Tried to Enter a Government Building to Get His Plant. Said, “Smirk if you must, but we all have our companions. I merely wanted to please mine by bringing it through this crisis.”
Yeah, if I got caught, I might just say this, and the more I imagined myself saying it, the more I thought I’d elicit sympathy if I did.
“The guy wanted his plant. He’s put in the time with it. Invested his emotion in it. Gonna throw him in prison for that? Now? Of all times? Fuckin’ people are dying left and right, losing their jobs, don’t know what the hell’s to come, and locking this guy up’s a priority?”
I laid out my mask and gloves, ready for the expedition.
With so few people outside, the playgrounds empty, the basketball courts chain-bolted, the delis open but quiet and somber, no one lingering at the counter to talk and joke with the person at the register, my Bed-Stuy neighborhood had an eerie feel, and when I descended into the subway, I found myself on an empty platform for the first time in my life. I could smell the disinfectant the transit authority had sprayed—another first—and listened to the loudspeaker tell me the importance of social distancing and of washing my hands regularly. No zombies or mutants or post-apocalypti
c beasts shambling about, but a number of solitary individuals were in the subway car I boarded, masks on, eyes wary, seated or standing as far from the next person as they could. These were the ones without a choice but to go to their low-paying jobs, I assumed, and the thin black lady with death in her face in the best of times was there, trudging through the cars begging for money, and so was the guy repeating his line that he hadn’t eaten in three days, could someone spare food or change, he’d appreciate a dime or a nickel, anything you could give him. The homeless remain homeless, I thought, and don’t change their routine one iota for the lockdown, and I did my best, despite my protective dishwashing gloves, to touch no one and nothing, not the poles or the seats or the doors. The train rattled and I stood with my legs spread for balance, stomach muscles clenched. I jumped out at Chambers Street, hurrying toward the stairs.
Fresh air.
But this goddamn mask.
It felt hot and itchy and I wanted to yank it off.
Don’t do that, not till you’re inside, and don’t touch your face.
Lower Manhattan and its grid of streets was nearly deserted, and I had no trouble keeping distant from others as I made my way to the muni building. I pushed the button, the doors swung open into the lobby, and the security crew glanced at me with their familiar disinterest. Okay then, no issues. I nodded hello and used my key card at the turnstile.
I was in.
Upstairs, after getting off the elevator, I swiped open the door to our unit’s area, a long and wide space filled with workstations—desks, chairs, screens, keyboards, partitions—and walked past everyone’s stuff to my office. Manager’s privilege, I guess. A spacious private office within the general office, with a door I could close. I didn’t need to flip the light switch; the sun was shining through the windows and all the blinds were up.
There it stood, verdant and healthy, on my desk. But why wouldn’t the plant be fine? Thinking about it all last night and since waking up today had made it seem as if I hadn’t seen it in ages, but it had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d been here. And I’d watered it two days ago.
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