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I started spitting blood at one in the morning on April 1st. After ten minutes, Leah managed to calm me down enough to see what was going on. There was a bleeding wound on my tongue, at the end of a crimson line leading up and across the left side. At least it wasn’t coming from my lungs. Leah helped me stuff ice and paper towels in my mouth to slow the bleeding.
I sat on the floor against the fridge and sobbed. It was a good sob, the kind of once-in-five-years type that American men are lucky to get, since we’ve been so deeply and subconsciously trained not to cry. I hate this about myself and everyone else. I spent the next hour watching Red Dwarf on the floor, periodically changing paper towels and getting more ice, while Leah held me. Since I’m all but non-functional, she holds us together emotionally while I try to keep the apartment clean and the cats alive.
Our first theory was that my HSV1 infection had been triggered by stress, and served me a nice exploding blister for my trouble. This still sounds right, as anything in my body that can be triggered by stress is getting triggered right now. I did a video call with my doctor and he shrugged and suggested I probably cut myself and didn’t notice. My doctor is very good about sending me to all the tests if he suspects something bad might be happening, so I thanked him and let him get back to his next fifty video calls.
Tongue explosions are not a currently known symptom of the coronavirus, but when the tongue does explode during a pandemic, one tends to worry. Every taste and smell is as sweet as anything I’ve ever tasted or smelled, which is why I refuse to look up any more symptoms. There doesn’t seem to be a point. I’ll obsess over them to no purpose: there won’t be a bed in a hospital for me unless I’m obviously near death. The city health system is already breaking down, and the worst is yet to come. My hope is I’m immune, or if I get sick, I get sick in a couple of months. Next in line is dying in my sleep before I notice, because dying alone in a hospital is way down on my list of preferred deaths.
People in the neighborhood seem to be getting the message. We did a supply run yesterday, because we were out of wine, and had a virtual fancy dress dinner party that evening. We hoped to make a pork dumpling recipe full of sweet tangy tastes that would alleviate any fears that we couldn’t taste. Leah picked up the wine, and was going to wait for me to get out of the grocery store until she saw me still in line outside of it, and just went home. The line was beginning to wrap around the block, but it was artificially elongated by everyone staying roughly six feet from each other. The people behind me, lacking masks or gloves, stayed a constant three-to-four feet away. Unable to safely punch them, I tried to subtly inch forward whenever the equally unprotected woman in front of me took a step.
The CTown was not messing around. What I assume were its two largest employees were standing at the only open entrance, wearing masks and face shields, distributing gloves to anyone not already wearing them. Every employee inside was wearing the same protection, and the registers had giant sheets of plastic hanging in front of them, with holes for passing food in and out. I kept seeing people I’d seen in line, because the only people in the store were people I’d seen in line. It was like a video game that pinched pennies on the art department. Even the public interactions in a city of eight million now lack a variety of strangers.
When I got to the register, I passed my goods through a hole in the plastic sheet, pulled them out from the the other hole, bagged them in my own bags, paid with a credit card, and the cashier told me not to worry about signing. I almost made it home before a guy burped at me. He apologized, so if I get sick, I’ll spare his children.
There was no pork left at the store, so we just drank a lot of wine at the Zoom party. At one point, someone started talking about how they would have to drive through Staten Island to get to Jersey at their new job once they had to go to the office, and we realized that, trapped in our homes, as close to the end of the world as we’ve ever been, we were still complaining about commuting.
We drank too much and laughed and fantasized about the end of this.
But the end won’t be a party. It won’t be everybody bursting into the sun and hugging strangers. It will be slow. Things will get better, but probably worse again, because everyone will be too eager to get back to normal. A generation or three will see an uptick in agoraphobia. Crowds will be frightening by nature. Masks will be normal. Not touching each other will be normal. Fear will be normal. This will all be normal because normal is yesterday, and when today is finally okay, yesterday will be terrifying, numbing isolation and fear. Yesterday will be being forced to work or starve, when working might mean death. We will come out slowly, a few at a time, nervous, staying apart, hoping we can love without fear.
