The World is Still Sick (Tasker)

It's July 2020 and the world is still sick. Masked and sanitized, Elle and I drive to Kentucky. Plans for her 30th birthday have had to become smaller, the Grand Canyon no longer within reach. Due to NPR reports of new infections across the country, we’re ever-vigilant. To prepare for this excursion, haven’t seen anyone in weeks.

As Cleveland disappears behind us, I let the outer world take hold of me. Non-televised America is still here, just the way it was before we started quarantining. I’m stunned by the dun fields, by the unruly overgrowth bracketing the rutted Ohio highway. It feels like I’m seeing it for the first time.

We’ve spent the last three months putzing about our untidy house—working, eating, trying not to hollow out. It’s hard to order those grey days now, to apply narrative sense to weeks of privileged purgatory. Zoom calls with West Coast friends, distracting ourselves with movies set in other eras. Call Me By Your Name. Brazil. In the Realms of the Unreal. Bouts of half-hearted yoga. Seeking solace in plague literature. The Road. Zone One. Station Eleven. Books depicting world enders more immediate than this one. Alternating nightly between indulgence and asceticism. Crock pot carnitas and champagne followed by runs through our eerily empty neighborhood. Insomnia-fueled Amazon sprees bleeding into hours of meditation. It took us a month to find our balance.

At a rest stop, we join other Midwesterners refueling on vending machine sundries and coffee in paper cups. We dart from the car to the bathroom, giving a wide berth to anyone unmasked. It feels rude to move six feet out of someone’s way preemptively, even if you’re trying to appear nonchalant, but we do it to keep our loved ones safe. Soon, we’ll find ourselves lost in a state park an hour north of Louisville, swatting ping-pong-ball sized mosquitoes and squeezing sweat from our t-shirts. We’ll take guilty comfort in the fact that we’re walking the forest alone.

Tomorrow in Louisville, we’ll amble past dreamcatchers twirling on empty porches. We’ll stand outside of a silent church watching Elle’s nephew slurp milk in the sunshine. A beautiful scene. The sort you want to last forever. In the afternoon haze, we’ll laugh and gab in the family’s backyard, sipping IPAs and munching homemade macaroni. Though we’re all apparently healthy, though we’re pleased to treat ourselves to this perfect day of togetherness, we’ll wonder at times if we’re doing the New Normal correctly.

This is our world now. The slow bleed of the Curve. No sense of coming to the end of anything. Just more weird weeks of fear and waiting punctuated by moments of bliss that smooth out the edges of panic. We rest in them when we can. We watch right now as the baby splashes in his small blue pool while two sun-warmed cats observe through the open window.

 Kevin Tasker writes about food for McSweeney's and Edible Cleveland. His fiction has appeared in Hobart, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. He lives in Cleveland with his girlfriend and their three cats.