March 14, 2020 started as a day much like any other day. My daughter took the bus to school, in suburbia USA. I was on deadline at work. The world held just as many ways to die as it usually did—all the gruesome or mundane ways—choking on a peach pit, falling off a cliff, or driving along and getting smashed by a driver who misses a red light. Of all the many places death hides in wait for each of us each day, we ignore these dangers and go about our business. We take for granted the miracle of mutual cooperation. Each day, billions and billions of people across the world trust complete strangers to stop when a light is red. Billions upon billions of people around the world every day do not die, because strangers we would not otherwise trust, do NOT fail to stop because of the color of a light. We trust. We ignore. We live.
On March 14, that balloon began to leak. At 2:45 p.m., I received an email from the school superintendent that schools were closed until further notice. And… BAM! Abruptly reality was apparent, death no longer lurked but was everywhere, albeit, invisible—a mortal danger to simply breathe. There is nowhere to hide, to be safe.
We watched numbers climb. We learned a new lingo, a new language: social distancing, flattening the curve, RNA, N95. To stay safe, we broke the pattern of our daily lives. We canceled dinner plans, postponed birthday parties. We no longer had to drive to sports practice or cheer from the sidelines. As the days turned to weeks and our cars sat idly in the driveway, it became a new game to see how infrequently we could fill the tank. A month? Months?
But something else broke: our mutual cooperation. Wearing a mask—or not—instead of showing community cooperation and joint effort to promote public health (or, if you thought it was unnecessary hysteria, then even only to be a good neighbor—it wasn’t after all a big ask but only a bit of a nuisance) and help more of us escape death for another day. Yet still, this is the U.S., home of rugged individualism, where the “rights” of the individual triumph over needs of community. Forty-two percent of Americans say they will not get a vaccine when it becomes available—roughly the same percentage who voted for a certain demagogue.
For many of us, the virus has brought home the fragility of human life—of ALL life. Seen from a universal viewpoint, we and the virus are just two types of creatures with the same innate will to live, but who cannot do so without killing the other. I do root for the humans, even if I’m not sure they deserve it! Even the ones at the maskless rallies. Even the guy at the supermarket with the bandana around his neck. He’ll pull it up over his nose to avoid a fine. I so clearly see death hovering behind his shoulder. But I also see how we have all been lulled by a complacency particular to Americans, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness allow so many to stop the leak in the bubble with chewing gum, pretend for another day that death is not our constant companion—the one true commonality and the fate that eventually meets us all.
I have taken to reading masks as community gauge. It fills me with a strange pride and sense of being united in adversity when I enter a store and see everyone present masked either for their own sake, or for the tranquility they bestow on others, sending the silent message—we’re in this together. We see the red light and we’re applying the brakes.
Jennifer Herman-Kircher's short story, Past Lives, is forthcoming in Fiction No. 65.. Her work is published in numerous literary journals, including North American Review, Prairie Schooner Hobart, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, and The Nebraska Review, where it also won the Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she holds an MFA 251 from Emerson College. She is working on a novel and a collection of linked fiction, which includes her story Past Lives, forthcoming in FICTION.