Speaker 1: Pushkin. Here's what we know. A Washington State resident fell
Speaker 1: ill after returning from Huhan, China, in a world gone haywire.
Speaker 1: Sometimes art is the only thing that can make sense
Speaker 1: of it all. You know, it's going to be a
Speaker 1: matter of you know, several weeks to a few months,
Speaker 1: for sure. This is the Chronicles of Now, where we
Speaker 1: ask some of today's greatest authors to write short fiction
Speaker 1: inspired by the news. I'm Ashley Ford. Here in America,
Speaker 1: confirmed infections are now more than double that of any
Speaker 1: other nation. When the coronavirus hit and America hunkered down,
Speaker 1: we had no idea what we were in for or
Speaker 1: how long it would last. There is a hope of
Speaker 1: a scene, and if you get it in a year
Speaker 1: and a half, that would be record time. We still
Speaker 1: don't know what we're in for. From Daytona, where crowds
Speaker 1: shut down traffic and we still don't know what we're doing,
Speaker 1: to the Lake of the Ozarks where people swam on
Speaker 1: top of each other for hours, social distancing nowhere to
Speaker 1: be found. Here's what we do know. Families have been
Speaker 1: stuck inside together for months on end. Yes, things are
Speaker 1: opening up, but how long will that last? Across the nation.
Speaker 1: July fourth celebrations canceled as the virus continues. It's deadly
Speaker 1: served now thirty four states in the country seeing new cases.
Speaker 1: Up to now, coronavirus cases are absolutely skyrocketing. I don't
Speaker 1: even think we've begun to see the extent of what's
Speaker 1: going to happen in this country. That's Roxanne Gay, the
Speaker 1: best selling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger and a
Speaker 1: contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her story
Speaker 1: is about a long, long quarranty. I just thought, what
Speaker 1: would it be like to live with your partner in
Speaker 1: isolation for a year. My wife loves to travel. She
Speaker 1: always has interesting stories about a soup she once tried,
Speaker 1: and hannoi, and what it was like to crawl up
Speaker 1: the steps of a temple into that and so on.
Speaker 1: One time, on the grounds of anger Watt, a Buddhist
Speaker 1: monk gave her a red bracelet, told her it was
Speaker 1: good luck. It was a piece of string, really, but
Speaker 1: she loved that string, and it seemed to love her
Speaker 1: because month after month it stayed wrapped around her slender wrist,
Speaker 1: even as it thinned to nearly nothing. Every night, just
Speaker 1: before bed, she would take off her watch, set it
Speaker 1: on the nightstand, and when she turned to smile at me,
Speaker 1: I stared at her wrist, trying to understand how that
Speaker 1: string could withstand the rigors of being attached to a
Speaker 1: human body. The string was spiting me by hanging on.
Speaker 1: I began to ask her hypotheticals about what she would
Speaker 1: do if I tore the string. I asked her if
Speaker 1: she loved me more than the string. Are you having
Speaker 1: a midlife crisis? She asked, It was a reasonable question.
Speaker 1: I had recently purchased a ridiculous car one evening after
Speaker 1: we drank a bottle of red wine that we got
Speaker 1: from a small vineyard in Tuscany, where the owner cooked
Speaker 1: us the most incredible meal we have ever eaten, and
Speaker 1: got us so drunk that we bought an unfathomable quantity
Speaker 1: of wine. I tugged on the string gently, and my
Speaker 1: wife tensed. This string has brought me so much good luck,
Speaker 1: She said, it brought me you. I don't want to
Speaker 1: think about what might happen when it falls off. I
Speaker 1: turned away, my body a long line of irrational anger,
Speaker 1: and from that day on the string became my nemesis.
Speaker 1: I stared at it and conspired against it and waited.
Speaker 1: But then when the quarantine began, we weren't really worried.
Speaker 1: We have a nice house, we have Netflix, we have books,
Speaker 1: we have each other, and we're quite good at sacks.
Speaker 1: We would amuse ourselves. Every day, soldiers dressed in protective
Speaker 1: gear left a box of rations and four large containers
Speaker 1: of water on our stop. The rations were uninspiring, too
Speaker 1: salty industrial. Once a week we received fresh produce. It
Speaker 1: was never interesting, only things like spinach, cabbage, kale pairs.
Speaker 1: During the first few weeks we pretended we were on
Speaker 1: a cooking competition and tried to make the food palatable.
Speaker 1: But there is only so much you can do with
Speaker 1: rice and beans and dry graham crackers. The soldiers were brusque, efficient,
Speaker 1: and ignored us when we tried to talk to them
Speaker 1: glean some information about life beyond. As far as we
Speaker 1: could see, the street was empty and quiet save for
Speaker 1: the military. The helicopters going in and out of the
Speaker 1: nearby heliport were gone. There were no sirens wailing. That
Speaker 1: was the worst part, the sound of nothing. To keep
Speaker 1: ourselves reasonably sane, we developed a routine. In the morning,
Speaker 1: we trudged up and down the stairs for forty five
Speaker 1: minutes and lifted hand weights. It was important to stay fit,
Speaker 1: we decided, just in case we eventually had to fight
Speaker 1: for our survival. We'd shower separately most of the time,
Speaker 1: and then catch up on email do some work because
Speaker 1: it seemed like work still mattered, or we needed it
Speaker 1: to matter, so we could believe that eventually the quarantine
Speaker 1: would end and our lives would be waiting for us.
Speaker 1: Quarantines in other countries had already ended, so we weren't
Speaker 1: deluding ourselves. When we got bored with work, we watched
Speaker 1: a TV show or movie. We played a lot of
Speaker 1: board games, and sometimes got testy with each other. We
Speaker 1: had to stop playing uno entirely. Neither of us were
Speaker 1: particularly fond of our own nudity, but some days we
Speaker 1: didn't even bother putting on clothes, or we wore outlandish outfits.
Speaker 1: When we got stir crazy, we ran around our small backyard,
Speaker 1: really just a patch of concrete with some nice outdoor furniture,
Speaker 1: a fire pit and a grille. We burned things and
Speaker 1: it felt good to commit small acts of destruction. We
Speaker 1: ordered things we didn't need from Amazon because they contracted
Speaker 1: with the military to handle their deliveries during the quarantine,
Speaker 1: and the military gladly took their money, and we knew
Speaker 1: we were complicit in something, but couldn't say quite what.
Speaker 1: We took to spying on our neighbors in the huge
Speaker 1: apartment building across the way, and they took to spying
Speaker 1: on us. We saw some things about the ways other
Speaker 1: people lived their lives, and many of those things were terrible.
Speaker 1: Some days we ventured up to the roof, looked around
Speaker 1: and saw people for blocks in every direction, also standing
Speaker 1: on their roofs. No one tried communicating. We just smiled
Speaker 1: at each other wandly shrugged like pandemic. What can you do?
Speaker 1: My wife and I had a lot of sex that
Speaker 1: never got boring. Every freaky or weird thing we had
Speaker 1: been too shy to try was suddenly part of our repertoire.
Speaker 1: I put my tongue in places I still thrilled to
Speaker 1: think about. She was suddenly more demanding, less demure like.
Speaker 1: She was determined to draw as much pleasure as she
Speaker 1: could out of me. I was more than happy to oblige.
Speaker 1: We did not fight much at all, because we're in
Speaker 1: our fifties and understand the importance of not wasting time.
Speaker 1: There was only one news channel in those days, and
Speaker 1: the journalists broadcast from their homes, so they didn't have
Speaker 1: much to say. Once in a while, a small child
Speaker 1: would toddle in the background, having escaped the watchful eye
Speaker 1: of another parent or a sibling. That was nice, a
Speaker 1: reminder of why we were doing this thing at all. Mostly,
Speaker 1: the journalists parroted whatever talking points they were given by
Speaker 1: the government, how the quarantine would last for a year
Speaker 1: too at the most, while the vaccine was developed and
Speaker 1: tested and manufactured in mass quantities. The rest of the
Speaker 1: world had a vaccine, but the American president had angered
Speaker 1: so many world leaders that they left us to our
Speaker 1: own devices and helped each other instead. Whenever he gave
Speaker 1: the nation an update, the president looked unwell, like his
Speaker 1: genetics were revolting all over his face and extremities, so
Speaker 1: that gave us some hope and cheer. Fifteen months into
Speaker 1: the quarantine, the red string remained around my wife's wrist.
Speaker 1: It drove me to distraction. The vaccine was ready. One
Speaker 1: morning we received a note with our daily rations. A
Speaker 1: medical team would be bringing us the vaccine at the
Speaker 1: end of the week. See my wife said one evening
Speaker 1: as we watched a Spanish television show about angry teenagers
Speaker 1: who seemingly didn't have parents. We're alive because of this string.
Speaker 1: She raised a fist triumphantly. The string desperately frayed, taunted me.
Speaker 1: I clenched my jaw and inhaled deeply. I willed myself
Speaker 1: not to pluck it from her wrist. It would take
Speaker 1: no effort at all, as it was barely hanging on.
Speaker 1: I wanted to say we were alive because of our isolation,
Speaker 1: general good health, and daily calisthenics in and out of bed.
Speaker 1: But she looked so calm and assured I could not
Speaker 1: take that from her or even myself. That was string
Speaker 1: theory by Roxanne Gang. The reader was Bonnie Turpin. Roxanne,
Speaker 1: it's now June, and I happened to know that you
Speaker 1: wrote that story back in early March. What made you
Speaker 1: into it? This was going to be a long, long ordeal.
Speaker 1: I think I started to get a sense of how
Speaker 1: much of an ordeal the pandemic was going to be
Speaker 1: because we have incoherent and incompetent federal leadership, and so
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that, like, literally, what is the
Speaker 1: worst case scenario when an idiot is president and a
Speaker 1: pandemic is ravaging the country. The story actually started in
Speaker 1: a really weird way. My partner, she went to Cambodia
Speaker 1: about a year and a half ago, and a monk
Speaker 1: gave her this piece of red string that he tied
Speaker 1: around her wrist, and it's a good luck type blessing.
Speaker 1: Then we would joke about it because it drove me crazy.
Speaker 1: I was like, why won't it fucking break? What is
Speaker 1: happening here? And she got very protective of this little
Speaker 1: red string, and so then I decided to write a
Speaker 1: story about it. And then the pandemic was happening, and
Speaker 1: that's where I took it. I was telling someone recently,
Speaker 1: this felt like, as much as a pandemic story, a
Speaker 1: love story about loving a person enough to allow them
Speaker 1: their faith even if you feel like I don't know. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you could talk to me about what
Speaker 1: that string means to these two different characters, even though
Speaker 1: they're stuck together. So to one of them, it means
Speaker 1: that there is life beyond quarantine, that there is something
Speaker 1: to believe in beyond the moment to moment, the day
Speaker 1: to day. For the other partner. It represents this infuriating
Speaker 1: thing that should not be sustained, that should not be intact,
Speaker 1: but is intact, And so then it becomes this sort
Speaker 1: of mildly antagonistic thing like, oh, now I want to
Speaker 1: break it. I want to prove that that faith is misplaced.
Speaker 1: But the longer the quarantine progresses for these women, the
Speaker 1: more the antagonist realizes, Oh, maybe it is time to
Speaker 1: have a little faith, because we're stuck with each other
Speaker 1: and we love each other, and if this matters to her,
Speaker 1: then it's got a matter to me. And so there's
Speaker 1: this evolution of that. Back in March, we also didn't
Speaker 1: know George Floyd would be killed by Minneapolis police. This
Speaker 1: is all started and uprising the likes of which this
Speaker 1: country hasn't seen in fifty years. To be close, do
Speaker 1: you see a relationship between the pandemic and these uprisings. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: the uprisings were going to happen no matter what because
Speaker 1: black people have truly had enough. We are done, this
Speaker 1: is it. But people have had a lot of time
Speaker 1: to sit at home. There's no sports, there's no new TV,
Speaker 1: there are no new movies, there's no new nothing. And
Speaker 1: that frankly, there won't be until next year, and so
Speaker 1: we have a lot of fucking time to sit around
Speaker 1: thinking about what we think and feel. And I think
Speaker 1: that absolutely contributed. Besides which people are scared, they're angry,
Speaker 1: they are broke because we have again an incompetent federal government,
Speaker 1: and that is a lethal combination. Plus summer is starting,
Speaker 1: so people are getting out of school, like there's literally
Speaker 1: nothing to distract us without work, without play, without school, Yes,
Speaker 1: people are going to have the time. And in many ways,
Speaker 1: the pandemic, I mean, it is a curse, but it
Speaker 1: really laid bare just how divided this country is and
Speaker 1: just how imperiled black life is. And I'm not grateful
Speaker 1: for it. But sometimes something necessary rises out of something painful. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: if you were writing this story today, not back in March,
Speaker 1: how would this story end. The story would end with
Speaker 1: more action, It wouldn't just be like and then life
Speaker 1: got back to normal. I think it would end on
Speaker 1: a note of we don't know what's next, but we
Speaker 1: know that whatever's next will inevitably be better than what
Speaker 1: we left behind, because we're going to leave behind racism
Speaker 1: and law enforcement unchecked and all of these systemic biases
Speaker 1: that allow law enforcement to brutalize black people. So I
Speaker 1: think it would be more active at the end instead
Speaker 1: of this sort of passive. Let's get back to normal, Roxanne,
Speaker 1: thanks so much, Thank you so much, Ashley Forward. You
Speaker 1: can read my full interview with Roxanne Gay on our
Speaker 1: website Chronicles dot fm, where you can also read Drink
Speaker 1: Theory and other short fiction torn from today's headlines. Our
Speaker 1: sound designer and composer is Bart Warshaw. Our producer is
Speaker 1: Curtis Fox. Tyler Cabot is the ex ecutive producer and
Speaker 1: founder of Chronicles of Now for Pushkin Industries. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Leta Mulaud and Jacob Weisberg for the Chronicles of
Speaker 1: Now podcast. I'm Ashley for thanks for listening.