A Report from a Period of Plague
CLAY REYNOLDS
May 13, 2020
I am doing well. Never better, in fact. In this period of plague, this order of isolation, this quandary of quarantine, this stasis of social distancing, I’ve remained nailed up at home with some disciplinary fervor, well stocked on toilet paper and ammunition with which to defend it.
I’m determined to make the most of my time. So, I've taken up a daily regimen. I expand my routine by sitting in a totally dark room for hours at a time and contemplating the mysteries of the shapes of swirling dust mites in ambient light while chanting Krishna monotones and attempting to feel my entire body without physically moving. Then, each night, I nestle down in a deep pit of itchy leaves for a couple of hours, clad only in an adult diaper but with a mouthful of tin foil. Such exercise keeps me mentally stable and prevents my mind from wandering to the more assiduous dangers of human contact.
I'm giving deep thought to applying a new coat nail polish to my toenails every day as a form of artistic vacuity and varying mood; and I'm taking up the harmonica, seriously. I quit trying to stop smoking, figuring, what the hell; it has the added advantage of keeping almost everyone away from me at far more than six feet should I go out in public. Smoking through a mask, though, is challenging.
I am drinking more alcohol than usual, a celebratory nod to the exemption of liquor stores from forced closure, as they’re deemed “essential.” And, of course, they are, and they are now allowed to deliver without a food order accompanying. I also notice that hardware stores, gardening shops, and car washes are operational. Fixing up one’s most prized possessions is definitely “essential,” which makes one wonder about such niche businesses as clock shops. If one’s timepiece is broken, then how is one to know how many hours are in a day anymore?
I noticed that while auto repair shops are deemed essential, bookstores and libraries are not. One would think that a bookstore would be at the top of everyone’s list of essential businesses. Some are offering curb-side service, but to use that, one has to know what one wants to read—in advance. Almost no one ever does. But then, when one has video streaming and Kindle readers, who needs books? Hobby shops are also shuttered, which makes one wonder, since this is an excellent time to learn how to crochet winter bedspreads or build model cars from popsicle sticks or apply sequins to almost anything with hot glue. I’d love to try that on the cat.
I've mostly given up TV and watching movies, also, having determined that there's not a detective working for any police department anywhere who does not suffer from one of more of the following maladies: a bad childhood; a scarring divorce and burden of a child now torn between the former partners; a sexual identity crisis; a dark and potentially career-destroying indiscretion or crime in the past; or a troublesome parent suffering from age, disease, or a dark and troubling past of his or her own.
Most drive old vehicles that are in want of repair or at least a good wash. None of them ever does laundry or goes to the cleaners, but they always have crisp shirts and well-pressed suits to wear and a variety of scarves, ties, and sometimes even headgear. They also never charge their cell phones; they have instant internet connection on their laptops, anywhere, even in speeding cars in the remotest of locations. Their hair doesn’t grow, their teeth never ache, and almost none of them needs eye-glasses, or much more than a small bandage should they be shot or badly beaten. They never shower or bathe. I wouldn’t want to be near any one of them, which is possibly a great deterrent to crime.
And I avoid the news entirely, particularly when I began to notice that even the lowliest cub reporter’s home, from where he or she is broadcasting, is neater, cleaner, better and more tastefully appointed than my own. How do they afford such comfortable furniture on what they make? Apart from that, the News stopped satisfying, so I stopped when I found myself watching the 1752nd “Former Director of World Health” being interviewed by Anderson Cooper, and I wearied of the screed of misinformation that is disseminated by FOX News only to be repeated word-for-word by the president, who I’m now convinced may well be the cosmic cause of all of this. After all, we receive no worse governing than what we deserve, indicating that we have been a bad people indeed.
And I quit reading newspapers and magazines, as I’m not entirely sure who has previously handled them or where they might have been. I find that disposable sanitary gloves make it difficult to turn the pages, anyway. Instead, I get all my information from the mystical patterns of birds and insects, which seem to be doing a lively business buzzing around my neighborhood and leaving messages by dropping them onto my now totally useless—but totally unpaid for—car in ugly white splotches from the pristine blue heavens, that are somehow utterly free of both pollution and jet airliners.
These observations and activities all provide a grand stimulation for my mental capabilities and psychic exercises. I think I will be levitating myself by the end of next week. I can already pick up a bottle of hand-sanitizer and can move the cat without touching him, a boon since I'm so slick from the former that I can hardly work the zipper in my pants without rubber-handled pliers and in the case of the latter am allergic. I will confess that waiting until he falls asleep and then using the airhorn helps, although it causes the dog to bark madly—a welcome respite, though, from her howling when I practice the harmonica.
I occasionally venture out of doors for an afternoon stroll in the sun, but as soon as I see some neighbor doing the same, I scamper back inside and douse myself with raw bleach and inhale propane from the canister under my cooker to clean out my lungs in case some microbe has migrated across the street or down the block. I have found that imbibing disinfectants provides some eternal peace of mind—Lysol and Drambuie make a fantastic cocktail with a near-fatal kick to it, and I’m trying to find a more efficient way of shining light into my body than to ram a floor lamp up my rectum and firing it up. The efficacy of this treatment is questionable, I think, as I’ve heard nothing about the colon being particularly vulnerable to the virus; but getting a 60-watt bulb into the lung is proving to be a formidable challenge.
I despaired of my ability to make a mask to wear during occasional outside forays, but I have constructed a special helmet out of old pie tins, with braided twist-ties for antennae, and a pair of plastic jar bottoms secured by old inner-tube rubber for goggles. These devices had the salubrious effect of putting me in communication with alien life from the planet Xeron XVI, as they come into orbit around the Moon and monitor the regression of our civilization with an eye toward taking over as soon as most of us die from ennui or kill each other as a result of close and continual association with family members.
They assure me that those of us who are completely in touch with the Yang of our Yin will be spared from the forced hard labor of dismantling all synthetically constructed edifices and gathering all issued MAGA hats into one place for a bonfire that will likely emit sufficient carbon to warm all the oceans to near boiling. They also assure me that relocation camps for us survivors will be characterized by productive labor and progressive experiments on our species that can only result in harmonic cooperation and physiological improvement.
The total eradication of opera is high on their list of priorities, as is the elimination of situation comedies, game shows, reality TV, talk radio, hockey, soccer, golf, poker, bowling, as well as all commercial advertising of pharmaceuticals, insurance, new cars, and Viking River Cruises down the Ruhr Valley. Later, they promise to eliminate wobbly tables for outdoor diners, parking spaces that are too narrow to open a vehicle’s door if it’s parked next to another, waitresses who call themselves “servers” and cooks who call themselves “chefs,” workers who are called “team members” or “associates,” all televangelists, particularly those who think that upon ordination their first names all become “Reverend,” and the use of “impact” as anything other than the noun it was meant to be.
In the meantime, I hold extended conversations via Ouija Board with several of my long-dead ancestors, a handful of former presidents, all deceased, Ty Cobb, Ethel Merman, Thomas Hart Benton, Pancho Villa, Buster Keaton, George Washington Carver, Grace Kelly, Yul Brynner, Eugene V. Debs, and two or three dowager poets from nineteenth-century England.
In short, life is good.
Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, literary critic, and pundit CLAY REYNOLDS is a retired professor of Arts and Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. He and his wife, Judy, dog and cat live on an acre of rain-soaked prairie in Lowry Crossing, somewhere east of McKinney, TX. His numerous published works can be located and in some part obtained from at least some on-line bookstores, and from his website, www.clayreynolds.info.
