the tris mccall report

On December 29, I took a long walk up to Journal Square with Hilary. We’d somehow made it through 2019, and I was eyeing the calendar warily. My fear was that something dangerous was coming, but I didn’t know what it was. Hilary felt, reasonably, that I was scaring us for no good reason, and wanted to know why I was so certain that we were headed for trouble. I explained that we were all so tightly tethered to central databases and news sources that it was certain that we’d be exposed to psyops more intense and sophisticated than any we’d encountered before. 2019, I felt, was all phony war. 2020 was an election year; power was up for grabs. The big guns would be out, and the big data that had been meticulously collected would all be used in ways we wouldn’t like.

There are loud voices on the Internet who argue that the coronavirus is a psyop. I won’t indulge those who are determined to minimize what we’re up against. I know better. But I do think that the global crisis is providing excellent cover for those who want to play with our minds. Even before an ill wind blew across this country in March, millions of Americans were already struggling with their own fevered imaginations. Stuck at home, in front of screens all day, listening to messages both broadcasted and narrowcasted, we are sitting ducks for ideological programming. And isolation, I’ve noticed, tends to encourage apophenia.

Apophenia isn’t well known by name, but it’s the dominant psychological state of modern America. An apophenic sees patterns and connections where there aren’t any. For him, nothing is meaningless; everything signifies. Those suffering from acute apophenia are so focused on subtext that they’ve lost any sense of the text. Psychiatrists will tell you that apophenia is often an early stage of schizophrenia. This is where we are as a society: separated, even before social distancing, and chasing down individually-tailored rabbit holes as fast as we can go. I fear there’s nothing at the end but madness, but I can’t seem to stop my own fall.

One of the most dangerous things about apophenia is that those who suffer from believe that as their condition deteriorates, they’re getting smarter. They’re seeing a pattern that others are missing. The harder they look, and the more unrelated components they drag into their grand unification theory, the more convinced they are that they’re right, and that those who disagree are obtuse. In good times, this is troubling; in a global crisis, it’s an unbearable exacerbation of a terrible problem. In late 2015, right on the cusp of disastrous times, I wrote that it was certain that unscrupulous people were going to use our apophenia against us — that conspiracy theories were about to become a tool of the powerful and corrosive. It was one of the few times in my life that I’ve ever been prophetic.

Apophenia affects me as profoundly as it does those who are dead certain that the coronavirus is a plot to bring down the President by political opponents addicted to adrenochrome. My own apophenia often manifests as hypochondria: perceived symptoms, many of which aren’t symptoms at all, drive me straight toward catastrophic fantasies. I appreciate efforts to keep me educated, but I also feel, strongly, that some of what I’m getting from the TV news and the Internet is designed to amplify my anxiety. My challenge is to rise above my paranoia and my fear, beat back the urge to connect dots that shouldn’t be connected, and recover my balance. How, um… how am I doing? Not too well, I admit. I promise to hang in there as best as I can.

It is now abundantly, frighteningly clear that the CCP cooked the books. Many more Chinese have gotten sick from the coronavirus and died than the government is willing to admit. We now know that it took Chinese authorities about three weeks to tell the World Health Organization about what was happening in Wuhan. We will never know the precise reasons for the delay, but it’s probably safe to chalk it up to that toxic combination of greed, ignorance, and denialism that swept across the globe years before the coronavirus did. If China was distorting the numbers in December 2019, it’s virtually certain they’re still misrepresenting — especially since they’ve booted Western journalists out of the country. There is simply no reason to believe anything the CCP is telling us.

This matters, deeply, to the rest of the world. We’re trying to base our projections for the development of this disease on a denominator of cases, and we can’t do that without an accurate count. On January 5, the World Health Organization issued a risk assessment that, in retrospect, is terrifying: a month into the crisis, the government in China was still feeding blatant falsehoods to the international body that was specifically designed to handle this kind of thing. We now also know that the CCP has detained people who were trying to ring the alarm.

We can’t do much about the awful Chinese government. We can, and must, ask questions of our own lousy one. The current administration went out of its way to dismantle the State Department and gut the intelligence services: this was the prime objective of Mr. Bannon, whose desire to prune back the administrative state became the closest thing the White House has ever had to a coherent policy. Competent people at all levels were shown the door and replaced by cronies with no business handling portfolios. After more than three years of this, our own blindness — and our arrogance — made us sitting ducks.

In the absence of national leadership, fact-finding, like so much else, has devolved to state and local governments. Jersey City is not a place known for transparency, but the Mayor and other municipal spokespeople have been quick to communicate what they’ve learned about the virus. Some of the news out of City Hall has been encouraging — not ecstatically so, but reason to entertain some measured hope. The City set up a testing center a few days ago, and officials have been applying swabs to residents worried about their health. This has, as you’d imagine, led to a spike in reported cases, and it’s reddened the color of Hudson County on those online crisis maps that we’ve all been compulsively following.

But it’s also led to a corresponding spike in negative results. The Mayor reports that negatives have increased with each day of testing. Only 31% of people who showed up for a swab yesterday actually had the coronavirus. What they did have were symptoms — ones serious enough to demand a scan. More than two-thirds of those who brought their fevers, muscle aches, coughs, and shortness of breath to the testing center on Marin were, according to the test, suffering from something other than the coronavirus as we’ve come to know it. This suggests to me that the containment strategies that we’ve put in place in Jersey City are having two meaningful effects. They’re keeping a deadly communicative disease from spreading. They’re also intensifying the psychosomatic symptoms of people losing their minds indoors.

I don’t trust our municipal government all that much more than I trust the Chinese Communist Party. Like many 21st century administrations, ours has a ravenous and judgment-clouding desire for positive publicity. But our local leaders have never tried to soft-pedal this crisis, or make outsiders believe that Jersey City is safer than it is. They’ve recognized the seriousness of what we’re facing. Until they’re caught in a fib, I’m going to believe that City Hall is working with other municipal governments to provide the clear view of the parameters of the crisis that federal complacency has denied us. For all our faults, we are not a place where science is unwelcome. Two of our City Councilpeople — Rolando Lavarro and Michael Yun — have been down with virus symptoms. I have to imagine they’re possessed with a burning desire to cut the crap and get some answers.

Friends, we made it to the last day of March. We can turn the corner in April. I love New Jersey, I love New York, and I love you. Bless you all.

Brett writes that confidence is half of immunity. I know he’s right. Shortly after her diagnosis — when we had limited knowledge of what we were facing — Hilary came into this room and announced that we were going to have to try to have fun. Every morning since then, I’ve woke with a plan to make her happy. That became the priority. Even on the most desperate day we faced, a little more than ten months ago, I was determined to stay cheerful, play games, give her the best minute-to-minute experience a person could have.

So what explains my meltdown yesterday? Over an eight hour period, I became convinced that she had the virus and there was nothing I could do to save her. We wouldn’t even get to be together: she’d be taken to the hospital without me, and I’d be here with a partially operational cellphone, going out of whatever is left of my mind (not much). Despair, Catholics are taught, is a grievous sin because it rules out the possibility of saving grace and divine mercy. Father, I confess that on March 29, the Devil dragged me under, and I don’t even have sharp lapels or a checkered coat.

I’d like to say I’m back — I’m no longer physically shaking — but I don’t think I can. I’m still dealing with the irrational fear that the rainier it gets, the more likely it is that critical symptoms of the disease will suddenly manifest. I can’t figure out what the connection is: normally I love the rain. I even like to ride my bicycle in it. Today’s rain is supposed to start at 3 p.m., and I admit I’m desperately hoping it’s just a quick shower. My imagination continues to outpace all containment efforts.

It’s been seven days since the pharmacy visit. Since then, we’ve mostly stayed inside — weather hasn’t been wonderful, and there’s nothing much to see in the neighborhood. We’d never ordered groceries from a delivery service before, but last week we broke down and got vegetables from Amazon Prime. After dinner, paranoia kicked in. What if the paper bags weren’t properly sanitized? What if the robe I was in when I carried the groceries upstairs came into contact with virus particles? Why trust Amazon? Everything became suspect. I found myself washing my hands in the middle of the night. I found myself sleeping on my back in case I transferred any viral dust to my pillow.

This sort of crazed behavior is harmful to Hilary, who needs a healthier habitat. The determination that came so naturally to me during chemotherapy and radiation has deserted me. I do realize that I am mapping my fear for my cousins on to our own unrelated circumstances, and I need to hold it together and react to things that I can control, because the news isn’t going to improve any time soon. One of Hilary’s friends, who lives in the Heights, has been sick: she spent her fiftieth birthday in the ER after her blood oxygen level dropped. She got it from her daughter, who has been struggling with various symptoms for three weeks. Last night, through our walls, which are not thin, I could hear our pregnant neighbor bawling. I wish I could make her happy, too. Someday I’ll make it up to everyone.

I have lived a long time. I would like to live longer, but I don’t want to be greedy about it. If a meteor was approaching the planet, zeroing in on New Jersey from some precinct of space, and there was no way to avoid it, I don’t think I’d panic. I’d have Hilary with me. Because of her, my life has been a rich and beautiful thing. We’d face the catastrophe together.

No, what I fear is separation: being unable to help her when she needs me, or comfort her when she’s frightened. When I’m shook up, my anxiety drives a wedge between us. Neither of us wants to worry the other.

My cousin has been taken to the hospital. She is 70 years old. She had run a fever for many days — she was up to 102 degrees on Friday. She didn’t want to go. Her children, one of whom is in recovery from the virus and another who hasn’t yet been tested, had been taking good care of her. Once she experienced chest pains and difficulty breathing, they sent for the ambulance. No one was allowed to go with her. She’s on her own in a battlezone.

Reports have been sketchy. We know she spent the night in the ER. An x-ray of her chest suggested pneumonia. The hospital is looking for a bed for her. They’ve treated her with plaquenil, which is one of the two quinoline drugs given to malaria patients. Her daughter, who caught the virus on a business trip, told me she feels helpless. I’m sure it goes well beyond that. We’ve been checking our phones for updates. But for those on the other side of the glass doors, the world of the hospital is a silent one. We hope to hear something more clarifying than a howl. We hope for a sunnier day.

In January, which feels like oh so long ago, our plane home from Miami was delayed for four hours. Surface winds in Newark, we were told. The literature at the airport gift shops concerned true crime or fake crime or in between crime, Girl Chopped Up or Girl Flung From The Train, or Pieces Of Her by Karen Slaughter (this last one is an actual title that I won’t forget soon). None of that was for me. Instead, I bought us a baseball season preview. Then I spent the balance of the wait time, and most of the flight, circling desirable players. After the mess that was 2019, I knew I needed to find some good Cauliflowers for Hilary.

The Cauliflowers are Hilary’s ballplayers. They constitute the roster of her beloved rotisserie league baseball team. The fate of The Cauliflowers is not of small significance to her. A few years ago, her squad took the top prize, and I made her a poster of her sixteen best point-producers — Francisco Lindor was on there, as was Jose Altuve. It still hangs on the wall of her office at the University, alongside the history books and the 18th C. British literature.

There’s not going to be any rotisserie league season in 2020. We’ll be lucky if there’s any season at all. Until there’s a vaccine, it’s hard to imagine MLB encouraging thirty-five thousand sweaty customers to jam themselves into stadiums. Because baseball is as synonymous with spring for us as Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura, it feels like the calendar has failed to turn. Our team, as you surely know, is the San Francisco Giants, and we’ve had meaningful times in the house by McCovey Cove, singing along to “Lights” by Journey and cheering on Buster Posey. No high-fives for us, for awhile — in San Francisco, or anywhere else.

And while I am the notorious baseball fanatic around here, this has hit Hilary harder than it has hit me. She likes to watch the game every night. Part of that is her Ruthian emotional investment in her favorites, and her Cauliflowers, and the rhythm and regularity of the baseball season as it unfolds. But she’s also comforted by the sound of the crowd, and the feel of the blanket of summer as it hangs over the stadium, and the talented Mets and Giants broadcasters. She’ll watch spring training games from beginning to end; she’ll even cultivate a rooting interest in the outcome of exhibitions. We don’t follow any other sports — baseball is it, and our sudden deprivation has unnerved us both. During the worst days of chemotherapy, we always had baseball games to distract us from what was happening, even if they were just buzzing and cracking in the background.

As a salve in desperate times, MLB now allows fans to watch old games over their network. All fans were offered a guaranteed opening-day win: a famous victory drawn from the archive. Giants fans have been spoiled ever since Hilary took up the cause in 2009: she’s watched the team win three World Championships, each one more improbable than the last. That gave MLB a few famous options, and they offered us a rerun of the final game of the 2014 World Series — the game, as you may know, where Madison Bumgarner came out of the bullpen on short rest and carried the Giants across the wire. I don’t have the same recall for baseball that I do for popular music, but I remember everything that transpired that night. Hilary surely does, too. A game like that held no mystery for us.

So instead, we watched Game 7 of the 1952 World Series: Yanks vs. Dodgers, Mickey against the Duke. While I knew all of the names, I’d never seen any of those players in action. At one point in an early inning, I realized that everybody hugging a base was a Hall of Famer: Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Gil Hodges, who’d go on to win the Series as the manager of the Miracle Mets, in the batter’s box, facing down the great Allie Reynolds. (He was limited to a sacrifice fly, alas.) I’d never seen Ebbets Field, or Casey Stengel pacing the dugout, and I’d never heard Mel Allen or Red Barber call a game from beginning to end. The experience felt like something out of a dream: a step back in time at a moment when we’re all held in stasis. Baseball, for me, has always been a reason to live — if only to satisfy my ferocious curiosity about how Kluber will fare in Texas, how the Mets will cope with the absence of Thor, whether Bregman’s great year was a can-battering illusion, which version of Johnny Cueto we’re going to get on any given night, who’s on first. Whenever and wherever they say “play ball” again, we’re going to do our damnedest to be there.

By executive order, the governor of Mississippi overrides decisions made by Mississippi municipalities and orders people back to work. Later he amends this decision, and then amends his amendment. Rhode Island announces its intention to enforce the mandatory quarantine of New York visitors by going door to door and screening for Empire State license plates. Closer to home, a friend of a friend complains that New Yorkers have spread viral pollution on the otherwise pristine beaches of Cape Cod. The beleaguered governor of Michigan demands assistance from the federal government. The President belittles her; denunciations and reinforcement come from the usual quarters, signifying nothing but show.

Friends, we’re falling apart. Less than two weeks after the first municipal shutdowns and enforced isolation, the bonds that hold together the states, regions, and cities are fraying. Maybe they were never really there, and it’s taken a global crisis and an ineffectual federal government to make us realize that the union is, in 2020, anthem performances and guesswork, and that’s about it. The network executives who once happily aired every red-hat rally Trump held, squeezing every rating point they could out of the outrage and controversy that ensued, now weigh whether the daily Presidential press conferences are worth coverage. A little too little, and far too late, if you ask me, but nobody’s asking me, and that’s probably because they know what I’d say.

As has been the case since the beginning of this regime, it’s impossible for outsiders to tell who is in charge of what — and that’s likely because nobody is in charge of anything much. The Vice President is supposed to be handling pandemic response, unless the President contradicts him while he’s standing there red-faced, unless Dr. Fauci is on hand to throw cold water on the rosy projections and self-congratulation, unless Dr. Fauci has been sent to the cornfield for displeasing Anthony Fremont. There’s a suggestion that Jared Kushner is doing something, which will surely come to the same sorry end as it generally does whenever Jared Kushner is given a portfolio. Is it any wonder that people are prescribing themselves fish-tank cleaner and crossing their fingers?

Yesterday, Politico ran a story that referred to the President as an “authoritarian weakman.” That’s cute, and I get it, and I think we’ve all become painfully familiar with the vacillation they’re talking about. But a funny thing I’ve noticed about authoritarians is that when push comes to shove, they’re all weak men. They’re always happy to boss you around and consolidate power on a sunny day, but the moment they have to make a real, consequential decision, they never know what to do. Authoritarianism is an expression of deep insecurity; it’s the jealous, desperate accrual of power for its own sake, and an absence of true leadership and selfless action in the face of real challenges. There are still leaders in America — people who might actually be able to salvage a union that’s falling to pieces before our eyes — but they’ve been marginalized and made unwelcome by people in power who recoil at any sign of moral legitimacy. That citizens cannot, or will not, elevate these people to positions of consequence suggests to me that America no longer means all that much to Americans.

In The Beginning Of Desire, a close reading of the Book of Genesis, Rabbi Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg interprets the Flood story as a metaphor for pregnancy and birth. Noah floats, silent and surrounded by symbols of generative potential, in an amniotic sea inside the womb of the ark. After a period of labor — forty days and forty nights, which is scriptural code for a very long time — he emerges through the breach into a world wiped clean as a dish. Rabbi Zornberg, who is a wonderful teacher, hears the psychological resonances in every verse. She points out (as many scholars have) that Noah is effectively mute; God talks to him, but he doesn’t talk back, choosing instead to carry out his duties. Genesis never gives us the name of his wife. During his time on the page, which isn’t long, he remains embryonic.

I think the Book of Exodus is the most powerful work of literature ever composed. But these days, it isn’t the Passover story that is resonating with me. Instead, I’ve been feeling like Noah adrift on the sea; a sea that was once the world he knew, but which was now inaccessible to him. We’ve retreated to our arks, sealed the doors with pitch, and we’re waiting out our forty days and forty nights. The air outside, we’ve been warned, may be flooded with vaporized pathogens — we imagine the virus hanging in droplets, sneezed out by a jogger, or just blown in on an ill wind. A hard and violent rain keeps falling.

We’re encouraged to be productive during this period of gestation. I keep on working. Hilary keeps improving her online teaching skills. I am always comforted to hear my next door neighbor making beats. Today, for the first day in weeks, I barely read or listened to any news. I checked Twitter for personal messages, but refused to scroll. In the unlikely event that good tidings come, I’ll be told about them. The break from news inundation helped me balance myself. I feel powerfully for all those who can’t unplug, and must face this head on — the grocers and pharmacists, the people running the power grid, the sanitation workers, the doctors who treated Hilary, everybody out there in the storm tonight.

In Genesis, Noah does nothing but put his head down and listen to God, and God, in Genesis, is a talkative character. He makes it clear that the flood is a punishment: a hard reset on a planet that had become, in his view, misaligned with divine provenance. Only through sacrifice can the anger be eased. Once the rains stop, God swears not to do it again, but I’m sure Rabbi Zornberg would agree that there’s a strong implication in Genesis that he’s got his fingers crossed behind his back. Reality, the Old Testament teaches us, is capricious. God is mercurial, prone to tantrums, easily put off, and always tempted to chuck the whole creation into the furnace and begin again. Like Noah, we do what we’re told, eyes on the horizon, waiting for the olive leaf and a sign that we might be reborn.

Hand sanitizer reminds me of the worst days of chemotherapy. We’d never used it before. But we were taking the train back and forth to Sloan Kettering, and standing in crowds, trying our best to stay upright. We didn’t want to pick up any opportunistic infections. At the hospital, dispensers of Purell foam were everywhere. I got in the habit of slathering it on my hands whenever we entered or exited any room, anywhere in the building. The smell of sanitizer is a powerful trigger: instantly I am back on that train, hoping there’d be no delays, hoping no one was sick, hoping that the fearsome after-effects of a chemotherapy session wouldn’t begin until Hilary was home in bed.

Damn it, I swore I’d never write about those months. I never wanted anybody else to read about them and get upset. But I’m back to the constant worry that at any moment, something terrible might begin. Symptoms would begin; a trap door would open, and she’d drop, and I’d never be able to recover her. For twenty-eight years, all I have ever wanted to be was the one who would catch her if she fell. So my fear that I could get her sick — that I could be the one who pulls that lever, however inadvertently, and let the trap doors swing — has been overwhelming. I’ll touch my face and I’ll feel like I’ve condemned us both. An act as innocuous as an eye scratch has begun to feel as threatening as a live mine. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, I was told when I was a child. I never stepped on a crack, because unlikely as it seemed, what if it was true?

I was ten years old when I first heard about AIDS. It was then called GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. A year later we learned that it could be spread through heterosexual contact, too. Great, I remember thinking, that’s everything out. As a young teenager I thought about sex constantly — how to get it, how many different ways I wanted to try it, what sort of adventures I might have while pursuing it, the ups and downs, the seeker and the sought, the whole shebang. The hunger never eased. At the same time, I read the public-service announcements and Village Voice articles that testified to the awful reality: a single errant contact could spell doom. Nothing was foolproof but abstinence, and abstinence seemed quite out of the question for me. Once I became sexually active, I was terrified that I had it — that I’d made a mistake that would not only be my undoing, but the undoing of the people I found exciting and lovely. My deepest fear was not that I would die horribly, but that I would be a transmitter, a vector, a ruiner of the lives of others.

I’ve spent the last few days having intense flashbacks to the ’80s and early ’90s. I’ve been remembering the mood on the street in Manhattan — the OutWeek and Enjoy AZT posters, the elegiac Pet Shop Boys songs, the looming dread and suspicion in the clubs, the feeling that a playground we’d been promised was falling apart. Our ungovernable desires, we were told, were the corrosive forces that made that collapse inevitable. In the midst of this catastrophe, not only is casual sex an affront to the public health, but so is a handshake. We’re not even supposed to touch ourselves: we’ve got to keep all surfaces scrubbed and squeaky clean. By government order, we are alienated from our experiences and exiled from our senses. And because the alternative is unspeakable, I’m going along with it.