WHY AREN’T YOU DEAD YET
A living story
I don’t know when it started
and neither do you
So where do I begin…
I leave the grocery store, my hands weighed down with bags, and without warning I sneeze. The door opens onto the street where a woman walks into the mist of my mucous and looks at me with shock; betrayed, condemned to death.
COVER YOUR MOUTH
she yells at me
I’m not sick.
He insists he’s not sick, coughing into his arm, he just wants to buy hand wash before things get crazy.
By this time, it’s too late. The glass facade of my store gives me limited perspective out, a slideshow of reality flashes by.
Inside my fishbowl I watch as traffic in the mall corridor reaches a frenzy.
Soon doors will begin closing, staff will call in sick, and people will ask to wash their hands, but now they take their time.
We should go back, and you can’t say I didn’t warn you about an uncertain start.
I have to tell you something, and you won’t believe me, not at first, and that’s ok.
I’m psychic.
I know you don’t believe me— I wouldn’t believe me because I don’t believe in psychics.
But I have proof.
In 2009, as I was finishing my BFA in photography, I made a little picture book called
Wring Your Hands, Sing THE END!
It was to be the first installment of a series called Apocalyptic Bedtime Stories for Children, but fourteen years later, it’s still the only installment.
The concept of this particular apocalypse was a pandemic. Images of travel, ominous close-ups of people looking toward horizons, children praying, people walking a far distance from one another on empty city streets, a photo of my mother as a child in a bed, clutching a small white balloon, elderly people holding photographs of loved ones, and illustrations cut from books on plagues—of a skeleton hovering over a baby, the body of an afflicted child being passed down from a window to workers gathering the sick and dead. Blocks of texts, calling on the public to vaccinate.
Spooky prophetic shit.
My mother was a doomsday prepper and I’m a product of that environment. With the threat of Y2K we had a stockpile of Mr. Goudas soup. Hundreds of cans filled a corner of our basement. My mother was not a particularly effective or diverse prepper.
Despite her lack of credibility as seer or strategist, I grew up ingrained with an unspecified end-of-the-world dread. Instead of just worrying— keeping a cupboard full of tuna, and a closet full of toilet paper, I put my fears into physical actions, into artwork.
I created proof.
I admit, this is all pretty weird and convincing, so I’m gonna need you to tell me if you start having dreams about floods.
Too late.
I think we will all be ok, I don’t have a bad feeling about this, and I’m usually a good judge of these situations.
He agrees, he thinks this will pass without much impact, and he’s a highly educated professor, so he should know.
And, as we’ve established, I’m psychic, so we’re good, we can all just stop worrying now.
It’s February 2020, we’re both wrong.
We’re all fucked.
When this began, when the word pandemic became an official status, I knew what would come next. I’m at work when I receive the first of three expected calls:
The nursing home is in lockdown. There will be no visitors.
Have you seen Dawn of the Dead, the zombie movie set in the mall?
In this place, with a virus spreading across the globe, it’s hard not to draw parallels.
The narrative signifiers of this genre play out all around me; people coughing as they move through the halls, a person taken out of the food court on a stretcher, a nearby store closing with rumours of a case on the team.
I gauge areas of weakness and fortification, take stock of the supplies in other stores, their resources, and formulate plans on how I would go about securing them for my own survival.
March 8th
I’m on my neighbours couch having a panic attack, I arrived at his apartment on the way home from mine, coming from work where another memo arrived, changing the hours of the mall
He tells me to breathe through my diaphragm.
Who even has those anymore?!
I can never resist the joke, even when I feel like I may die at any moment, all the more reason to get the punchline in while it’s still timely, I have a legacy to consider.
All of my worries pour out: I’m scared this thing is not under control, that the mall will close, that I will lose my job, that if I don’t lose my job, I will become infected and die, that I might be infected right now, that I have accidentally infected him when he otherwise would have been safe as a successfully employed shut in, that my mom will die alone.
If my fear had physical volume, I would be certain it had replaced the air in my lungs.
the Apple Store closes first.
They are the canary in the coal mine, and two days later and ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
March 10th
On the third floor, a ghost town, the shimmer of tiny Swarovski crystals gives me something to focus on as I tell my boss in Montreal that I’m worried there will be a shutdown. There’s a pause on the line, and then a measured reply:
What makes you think there will be a shutdown?
Because this is a congregate setting in the midst of an active pandemic?
She says we can’t yet know what will happen and there’s no point of panicking
In 2019, I had known for a long time, but specifically the last two years, that I was sick. Am sick. My father chronically ill, disabled, and my mother--paralyzed, dying of MS. I’m afraid of where my own autoimmune disease and the diseases that cluster with it, will lead. I decided then that I should do everything I could to change the course or slow the progress. I gave myself a few rules.
No ubers, no public transit. If I wanted to go anywhere, I had to walk.
If I wanted to get anything, I had to carry it.
In a year I conditioned myself from two thousand steps a day, to walking thirty kilometres without stopping.
I have lost 90lbs, I can carry 50lbs of goods from any store for three hours. I now have one hundred and fifty percent of the average lung capacity,
Without knowing it, I have made myself more resilient to this virus. I have trained myself for the apocalypse.
I also purchased a bidet in 2018, but didn’t install it. Instead, I do this in March 2020 when the stores have been nearly cleared out of toilet paper.
These parameters for living, the cupboard full of tuna, my oddly prescient accessories of doom now don’t seem so eccentric.
I’m out with my neighbour, we’re shopping for ingredients for his favourite pizza, I last made it on New Year’s Eve and he’s been talking about it since. Now it’s his birthday, Sunday March 15th, 2020. We’re walking through a calm neighbourhood, we choose a birthday treat from the fancy bakery. We stop into a cafe for coffee when my phone erupts in texts; questions of what we’re going to do to address the introduction of covid cases in our cities, provinces, and states. This stays on my mind as we buy naan bread, cheese, tomato sauce, sausage, and spinach. The secret is tapenade mixed in with the sauce, and then broiling it at the end for thirty seconds so the cheese gets crispy on top. I will never tell him this. He’ll never ask.
At my place, I make him go home for a while, I want to get things ready and I want to panic quietly in my bathtub.
When he returns, I make the pizza, we watch Robocop, and alerts continue, from Reuters, CBC, Washington Post.
Reports that a state of emergency declaration would be imminent. Borders likely to close. He’s worried, but he’s not as worried, he already works from home most days. He tells me we will be ok, if anything bad happens, he will take care of me.
No one has ever taken care of me, and I am too afraid to trust anyone to try.
I’m softly crying through Robocop.
I am hoping he doesn’t notice, I don’t want to ruin his birthday, but the way he looks at the screen and then back at me tells me that the hives mottling my skin have given me away.
I paint over the inside of my front door, the same dark colour of the walls, now the only signs of the exit are the tarnished brass knob and bolt chain.
PLEASE STAY WHERE YOU ARE
Instructs one of my 2015 text pieces, framed and hung, inches away from the door, reflecting my figure when I move to leave, restating public health messaging, stay inside, essential workers only.
I have to work.
I am essential.
For now.
He only wants me when times are terrible and there has never been a more terrible time. I’m sitting on the kitchen counter, he’s not listening to the virtual departmental meeting he’s attending, and the voices over speakerphone become meaningless background.
He's inside of me, eyes fixed on mine, intensely focused on distraction from the agenda:
Immediate next steps, and the path forward in these uncertain times.
Overwhelmed with the scope of that uncertainty, we turn to the familiarity of our bodies pressed together, a predictable outcome.
The day furlough takes effect we have a small, virtual wine and cheese gathering, I buy myself wine, and so much fancy cheese, neither of which I have had in months. I expect maybe we’ll talk, get to know each other, and commiserate. I had only just been promoted into this position in February, and I am, in this moment, embarrassingly naive about this dynamic and the company culture.
Their eagerness to be elsewhere with other people leaves us with a few sips of wine before the call ends. I have no elsewhere and no other people.
I have been left with a dangerous amount of cheese.
Closed in and alone in my space, letting myself out only for walks where I see no one, I’m squirrelly and constantly irritated.
From the apartment next to mine, I hear music, yelling, cheering—gathering.
idiocy. When I go to the hall, I hear shouts, reveling in sticking it to the man. The man in this instance is Public Health.
I begin snitching on my neighbours; anger, and righteousness find perfect harmony with petty bureaucracy.
The scientist is turned on by the end of the world.
He won’t be told he has to stay home, he won’t be cut off from his… whatever I am.
Already careful before the start of lockdown, seeing one another becomes even more secretive.
His entrances are quiet, and he washes his hands before touching me.
I see the anger in him, rage over the world on fire, idiots denying the reality of this, like a macro abstraction of his wife’s infidelity and gaslighting.
I often feel insignificant to him, more like an accessory to an act of revenge he holds close. He has affection for me, but we’re very different people. I appreciate his bafflement over our chemistry—it’s not his field.
At the time I felt our shared hurt connected us, but I understand my own rage now. Only seeing the surface of it then, the way it manifested in self-hatred and guilt, twenty years ago I carved this suppressed fury into my thighs. They’re pressed beside him now, I’m sitting on top of him, my couch just a few feet from my front door. I’m trying to keep quiet so that my neighbours don’t hear.
Now is the time when we have our own ways of coping, each justifying what we need to do, while righteously incensed by others, the lines we’ve drawn crossed by one thing or another.
I hate my next door neighbours and their parties, but I tell myself that I am being safe, I need this, I need him. I should have this, I have earned this. I’m so alone.
I’m a hypocrite.
I’M A BRICK HOUSE
I text her
GET IT? BECAUSE I HAVE SHINGLES!
yeah, I get it
this happens sometimes, well, two other times, but this time the sensations of electricity moving under my skin lingers far longer,
and the rash is more pronounced. When I last had shingles, I was an indoor person, and I was just tired all the time. Now, I am an adventurer, and shingles won’t keep me down. Because I can’t see the doctor, the doctor can’t tell me that I need to stay out of the sun, and
so I do the exact opposite.
A lot.
Magical thinking is an easy trap to fall into when a life of distress has made you convinced that there is some reason for the bad things, and that the universe will, if you’re good, make it better.
It makes me think of my uncle, when he died I cleared out his apartment and found eerie similarities in our personalities—he was a man who loved beautiful things, and often lived beyond his means, and had dozens of crumpled lottery tickets littering his home.
A han-drawn pie chart on a large flip paper chart detailing how he would spend his winnings, who he would share his fortune with.
Did he have a system, or did he just believe so strongly that the universe owed him this?
After the Great Shut Down furlough, I apply for EI. Not wanting to make staying at home the thing I become used to, or make my cats any more neurotic than they already are, I make it my new job to walk eight hours a day.
In the morning, I leave my home and head in some direction that will lead me approximately four hours away, and then I will turn around, and walk another four home.
During this time I move far beyond the parameters I set for myself in the before time, I’m not running far away errands. There are few errands to run, I would kill for an errand.
I love coincidences, they further prove that some force is working to make things happen, and I make as much meaning of these coincidences as possible. When we first start talking in 2016, we learn we live on the same street.
Fated.
This is how we came to be in each other’s lives, my neighbour and I. We met only when he admitted he needed help. His life had spiralled out of control,
With my family and friends far away in other cities, provinces and countries, he is all I have close by. I’m all he has.
He sends me on errands; guitar strings, a kettle, spices.
In him, I find purpose, in helping him, my life has meaning again.
There are lottery tickets on my fridge.
I’m crossing the portage bridge into Quebec at sunset. I walk a lot at night now, it’s the time I feel the expanse of loneliness stretch far in front of me and it is terrifying to stay at home, lost in it. So I focus on moving, and the diet of pop music I have myself on to manipulate myself into a state of energized pep.
I’m on the bridge when I get the second call:
There are residents infected, the virus has reached her ward.
The best chocolate chip cookies need three kinds of chocolate—milk, semi-sweet and dark, with varying textures, brown sugar and white sugar for ultimate chewiness and time to rest. Cookie dough should be left for at least 24 hours to let the flavours infuse, and the flour to hydrate with butter and egg. Even if the world is ending you are not allowed to eat the cookie dough.
