While my mother was at work, I would climb into her bed and lie alone beneath the sheets and blankets, feeling their weight on my face and my breath—its sticky heat—ricocheting into my eyes. In that muted light under thick layers, it was hard to breathe.
“I’m here,” I’d whisper, and imagine the slope of a loved one’s ankle arching before me, the only sliver of human contact I was permitted in the parameters of that make-believe. I can’t remember how or why that childhood fantasy began. But in the dystopian civilization I’d concocted, humans lived horizontally, oppressed by a thick air and evil autocrat, and because of it, love was a fragmented thing. Though your beloveds could live near you, beside you even, nothing more than a foot, or calf, or hand was ever yours to touch. Deprived, we whispered to each other from feet away, never seeing the other’s face.
I forgot about this game. Then last week, thirty years later, it came rushing back. Washing dishes, 30 days into quarantine, mulling over the 90-year-old Belgian woman who relinquished her ventilator to a younger patient and died soon after, I gasped for air. The blue sheets flashed before me.
The first time I heard about quarantine, it was almost exciting. The part of the movie that forces its characters to band together: fraying marriages would repair, estranged fathers would atone, greed-mongers would be humbled in the face of a force they could not buy off. Surely, the pastels of romance would glow brighter against the shadowy backdrop of a global pandemic.
But not long after news spread of the virus’s entrance to the U.S., stories of triage began pouring in from Italian hospitals; the reality of their fatality rate painted a dire picture. Hysteria surged, spreading across state lines, and in that tumult my plans were suddenly upturned: I couldn’t go home. After a quick turn of events, I found myself alone in a desert casita tucked into hills along the outskirts of Tucson, where I knew no one.
It was charming at first, even poetic. Day after day, as the sun set over distant mountains, I’d wander empty streets lined with towering saguaros and pink prickly pear cacti. In the mornings, I’d wake to sip lavender iced tea behind the screen door, watching birds circle grapefruit trees. The nights were quiet; a spray of streetlights glittered silently across the valley below.
A week turned into two, two into three, and all the while my friends FaceTimed beside their husbands, my sister beside her children, my father beside his dogs. The weight of empty space grew gradually, each day a little heavier than the last. I started filling my calendar with online dance classes, art lessons, a course on Omens and Oracles—wedges to fill every gap in time, voices to override each silence. An obsession, tinged with desperation I kept at arm’s length, began to creep in. “Water the plants,” I penciled into one 15-minute time slot; “Take out the trash,” I added to another. Each opening was a hole I might fall into; I promptly closed it.
Even public spaces drove my loneliness. The grocery store became an infinity mirror of isolation. In the course of two weeks, people went from passing strangers mindlessly, if not pleasantly, to regarding them as walking death chambers, their noxious vapors hardly containable behind a paper mask. Anxious to keep a six-foot distance, they weaved warily through the produce section, the cracker aisle, which had, all too often, been emptied by mass rapaciousness, or else, panic.
I watched it through a fog, a buzzing television. Shoppers peppered the aisles like a chain of Alfred Hitchcocks dryly narrating the end times. Just as surreal, my breathing was hot and belabored inside the N95 mask I wore to dispel airborne toxic droplets, or else the fear of airborne toxic droplets.
That fear was omnipresent, and it warped everything—the carton of cream (how many people had touched it?), the tomato I reached for (smudged by an infected patron?)—into an otherworldly version of its former self. But when a clerk at the checkout counter reminded me that I was a threat, I snapped back to reality. “Would you mind bagging your own groceries?” she asked as I lifted my totes to the conveyor belt, “To be on the safe side.” I looked down at my hands and saw what everyone else was seeing: two plots where COVID-19 might well have planted its seed.
At home, quiet leapt from every corner, announced itself when I opened my eyes in the morning, waited for me ominously in the living room. I moved the wind chimes from the front porch to the back patio, to break up the night’s silence while I made dinner in the kitchen. I hadn’t seen anyone I knew in person—much less come within two feet of another human—in nearly a month, and in that time firsthand reports began emerging, revealing the nefarious way the new virus operated. It hurts to breathe, I read in one account, like a thousand tiny daggers when you inhale. A woman on the news cried from her living room via Zoom: “It takes your breath away,” she said, “It takes your breath.” I watched, horrified.
And with guilt; alone in the desert, I was safe. As the death toll from New York began to rocket, I looked around at the luxury of emptiness I’d been afforded and felt ashamed. And yet that space, the very thing keeping me healthy, was also like fingers at my throat. The isolation felt suffocating. Every day was worse than the last, and they stacked up, one onto the other, no end in sight.
When the memories of my childhood game resurfaced, I was nearly six weeks into quarantine. The loneliness I’d recreated then, the love I conjured for a person whose face I’d never be allowed to hold, the struggle to inhale, suddenly it was all alarmingly familiar.
But there was something different about it now, a nuance I couldn’t have seen at nine years old. Just days before, I’d read about the research of French physicist Alain Aspect. In his work studying quantum entanglement, he split a photon in two, creating a pair of “daughter” photons. Though they were allowed to travel far in opposite directions, any time the spin of one was measured, its twin simultaneously showed the exact complementary spin. No amount of distance, no length of time, could impede their bond.
It wasn’t unlike breath and touch, whose inalienable relationship I’d somehow understood as a child lost in strange imaginings. Two pieces, lock and key, that together generate life force, the fullness of vitality: our world on either side of pandemic. Under the reign of their union, bodies of a concert crowd press together, belting lyrics; congregation members hug the person to their right, then left, introducing themselves; two drunk strangers fold into each other, their breath heavy and hopeful as dahlia blossoms.
But forced apart, breath and touch are like two wandering daughters calling back to each other through dense ether, air thick with the noise of death and quarantine. As disease works to steal one, her sister also diminishes. In their cleaving, and in their struggle to survive, our collective life force weakens. The menacing shadows of empty chairs stretch over bare floors across the country, the world.
But maybe it’s in the silence of vacant rooms that we can best hear the voices of those sisters, their longing arching beyond solitude, their longing reaching toward the memory of what was, what will be again.
