I’m back on the east coast either running to catch a train, or on the train, or in an Uber regretting not taking the train—returning to New York for such a short time is like running a marathon at a sprint. On my flight here, two days after the mask mandate was lifted, I started reading Station Eleven. The book follows several characters at the onset and twenty years after an apocalyptic flu-pandemic. Reading it was spooky in the way you would expect, especially the scenes where the illness was just taking hold, the news churning out death toll numbers without any other information. The characters don’t know if it’s coming for them or not. How scared should they be? Should they leave the city? How many bottles of water is paranoid hoarding? In those days of our pandemic, I was at a friend’s apartment in New Haven. I took someone’s room who couldn’t get back from London and my mom and I had semi-serious conversations about where to meet between Connecticut and Michigan if the world ended. Of course the book’s premise was eerily familiar to me (in the post-apocalyptic world we follow a traveling Shakespeare company), but overall I was struck by the hard line between before and after.
In our present situation, society hasn’t collapsed. It has held itself together even as we have all seen the deep fractures exposed. The status quo has continued at the expense of many who don’t have the option to “return to normal.” This is not meant to be a soapbox moment—in the past two weeks I’ve binged on indoor dining and hot yoga—but I do morbidly wonder, what would it take? Though we refer to 2019 as “before,” for many of us the after is starting to look the same, with just a sprinkle of added precaution. There is an at-home covid test in my bag. I’m masked in the grocery store but not in the bar. I must be vaccinated to rehearse, but rehearsal will be indoors without any space or mask restrictions.
In high school, I used to look out the window and imagine something big happening. A truck turns into a transformer on the Walnut Street Bridge. The sky opens and extra-terrestrial assailants come pouring in—the privileged daydreams of someone who was three and safely ensconced in Kentucky during 9/11, of someone who has never had war in their home country. My friends related. We had a weird yearning for something to happen beyond the daily individual struggles, something collective and world-ending but still kind of separate from us. Like being in Brooklyn when the Avengers tear through Manhattan. We never considered the key ingredients of these doomsday fantasies: a singular event, a hero, and everyone in it together.
One of the standout articles of 2020 was about how America was already in collapse, it just didn’t look like the movies, or in this case the book. In Station Eleven we learn that the pandemic was termed the “Georgia Flu,” started in Moscow, and took out 99.9% of the population. In the US, over a million people have died in two years but still no collapse. On the one hand, I guess this is a testament to resiliency, to some measure of community cooperation that stemmed the tide. On the other, how horrifying. We keep being told that in our lifetime we will experience climate crises the likes of which we have never seen, which is amazing because in the past few years we have already seen fires, floods, and freezes well outside the norm. But I wonder which of these catastrophes, if any, would cause a full societal breakdown. If New York City went underwater tomorrow, would the country figure out how to right itself after five years? Ten? Would we trudge along with a new waterfront as the faint reminder of a capital city?
These are all thoughts from reading an entire apocalypse book in one sitting; I was in a dramatic mood. In reality, I am not a doomsday person. I remain an optimist, but we are in strange times indeed. In 2020, George Saunders urged his students to bear witness; he said we’d need a record of the world we were living in. I haven’t written much about the pandemic because it’s hard to pin down what is happening. Reading Station Eleven, I know what this pandemic is not. It’s not one event. It’s not a before and after, but rather a weird slide into “post.” At one point two of the characters discuss a parallel universe in which the pandemic was survivable. I read it and thought well, I guess that’s us. Two years ago, it felt like I woke up each day peeking out from behind my hands and bracing for impact. Now, everyone is like you can put your hands down, and I am grateful for some of that recovered normalcy, but also I keep expecting a catastrophe jump-scare.
In my moments of deep anxiety about the longevity of the human experiment, I am reminded that I find a lot of solace in the idea of nature undisturbed. At our northernmost stop in Utah, the mountains were beyond comprehension. It was slightly claustrophobic, how could anyone get comfortable living in a town that was so hemmed in? They would stand like sentries at the end of every street, and it felt like you would only be able to move forward if you resigned yourself to going straight up. Flying out of Burbank, I thought how different those mountains were compared to the modest outcroppings hovering just beside the airport. In LA, all the mountains have been conquered by whippy Honda Civics and casual hungover hikers. The Utah mountains were indomitable. We may carve little towns in their shadow, but they remain sovereign. I was both awed and anchored by them. Beautiful things have been here longer than us and will far outlast us regardless of whether we are pre, mid, or post-pandemic.
Nature son!
....and I forgot our plan, so if we do wake up to a catastrophe jump-scare, I need a refresher!