What We Do in Quarantine By Zach Jacobs

Work: My wife, Sam, converts her in-person African American literature course at the University of Houston into an online one, making decisions about how to do group presentations when the class will not be in the same room ever again. Making decisions about what participating in class discussion will look like when they will not be in the same room ever again. Making decisions about how to structure assignments and set due dates to accommodate an entirely new, unexpected, unfair situation for her students, some of whom may not have access to a computer or the internet at home, some of whom may now be jobless, some of whom may be sick with COVID-19 or may be caring for family members with COVID-19, some of whom, to put it simply, have more important things to worry about than school right now. And yet, Sam knows that there may never be a better time to read Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. She opens a discussion board online. One of her students posts a question for the class: What are some similarities between Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 pandemic?

Move our bodies: I take a wide stance over my kettlebell, squat down, pick the weight up off the floor, and once standing straight, I lower it, continue back down into a squat, with the tea-kettle-shaped weight dangling between my legs, then rise back up to standing, then lift the bell over my head, whispering the number “one” to myself. I do that nine more times. Then I do an embarrassingly small number of pushups. Then I do some kettlebell swings, squatting just a bit and letting the bell swing back between my legs, while keeping my back straight, and then snapping my body straight up as fast as I can. The bell swings from between my legs out in front of me. I repeat immediately, letting the weight swing backward and forward, each rep a slight squat and then a jerk up. The bell never stops moving.

After one set of each, I am huffing, my heart pounding in my temples. I begin to sweat. After I do two more rounds of that, I also do some ab and hip exercises that a physical therapist once showed me to help with a lower-back injury. Then I stretch, a lot, holding each position for thirty seconds to counteract the fact that being confined not just to a small, one-bedroom apartment most of the time but also being tied to a work laptop forty hours a week or more is slowly turning my body into a balled fist. I leave the workout a little more sane than I went in.

Keep things light: As I am writing this, hunched over my laptop on the coffee table, Sam walks over, bends down to pick up the charging cord for her laptop—which is on the floor next to the love seat on which I am sitting—and pointedly rubs her whole butt on my shoulder as she picks it up, as if to say, “Um, I’m here!”

Contemplate: We are making the planet unlivable for many species we share it with, and most certainly for ourselves—which we have been able to do because we have dominated our surroundings and the macroorganisms that inhabit them—and yet we are dying by the thousands right now due to a microorganism, our societies deteriorating rapidly. In the meantime, as Sandra E. Garcia has reported in The New York Times, a herd of wild Great Orme Kashmiri goats have been spotted roaming a Welsh town at night, and coyote sightings have increased in San Francisco. Closer to home, an unseen bird calls from near our apartment complex, small tufts of cotton rise through the warm spring air outside our windows, yellow pollen coats our barely-used cars, making them look almost fuzzy, and those goddamn wasps are still building a nest on our balcony. As so many have noticed already, the novel coronavirus is knocking humans down a few notches, and if the non-human world is noticing at all, it is because so many of us wise apes are holed up in our caves. Nature doesn’t give a fuck.

Assess our situation: We are not quarantined or self-quarantining as such, at least not yet, because my wife and I do not have any symptoms of the new coronavirus or any of the old, perennial viruses that we humans are so familiar with. We have not been exposed to anyone with COVID-19 as far as we know. So we are sheltering in place, but in a broad sense, since Harris County issued a “Stay Home, Work Safe” order in mid-March, everyone in Houston and the surrounding areas are quarantining themselves to the extent possible. Except for those who are ignoring the order, of course.

So far, Sam and I are lucky.

Move our bodies: Sam’s sister emails her a workout that her CrossFit gym had sent to all its members. Sam does six sets of squats, 220 reps in total, each time swinging her arms out in front of her for balance as she sits back into thin air. She does six sets of pushups as well, 110 reps total, sometimes grunting, sometimes whispering the rep number to herself, always releasing a big sigh as she finishes the set. She sweats, she huffs, she’s spent. She leaves the workout a little more sane than she went in.

Assess our situation: There is no point in writing about toilet paper. We all know what happened.

Contemplate: If we all quarantine ourselves, are any of us actually quarantining ourselves, or is this simply the way we live now, at relative distance, in relative isolation?

Work: I have been working from home for weeks, and I am lucky to be able to do so. I managed to secure a small, thirteen-inch corporate laptop on my last day in the office. My workday usually consists of me researching, writing, and editing in a cubicle. My workday now consists of me researching, writing, and editing with my legs squeezed under our small, antique writing desk. My employer is a mid-size company in a small, surprising niche of healthcare: pharmacy compounding. Some pharmacies do what they used to do before big pharma burst out of the ocean like a leviathan in the mid-twentieth century—they make medicine in the pharmacy. Usually, this medicine is customized for individual patients who need medication that is no longer made commercially, or in a strength that isn’t available, or without an allergen that is in the mass-manufactured version, among other reasons. Right now, though, they are very much needed in other ways as well, especially since the FDA suspended its prohibition of compounding hand sanitizer so that these pharmacies can now make their own from raw materials—alcohol, glycerin, hydrogen peroxide, and purified water—using FDA and WHO guidelines. My employer supports compounding pharmacies through training, education, and various services, and—most importantly—it sells raw materials to them.

I work in marketing. My team, along with our corporate communications department, has been very busy in the last few weeks, hurriedly sending out press releases and mass emails, building webpages and publishing blog articles and social media posts so that our customers know what resources are available to them and how we can help. We are also simultaneously trying to spread the word about the crucial role that these pharmacies play in healthcare—highlighting that some of them around the country are donating compounded hand sanitizer to local first responders during the pandemic, for instance—and, let’s face it, promoting our company while we’re at it. This also means that I am lucky to have a secure job for the time being.

Assess our situation: Sam has a bottle of champagne in the fridge that she will open after she defends her PhD dissertation this spring. She could use a celebration, especially since it is taking on more significance given the circumstances: She will not be able to have a traditional dissertation defense, in a room with her committee asking her questions about the book she has written. Instead, they will ask her questions through a Zoom video meeting. She also will not have a ceremony to mark her graduation. Several of her family members had planned to fly to Houston from around the U.S. to attend her spring commencement and celebrate Sam earning her PhD in American literature, but it has been postponed to the end of summer, and they have all canceled their flights from Nebraska and Massachusetts and South Carolina. Sam has worked very hard for five years to earn the highest academic degree awarded in the world, and she is now being denied all the symbols of that achievement.

Sam and I are both fortunate in many ways, to be sure. We have enough money to survive and a little extra, we have health insurance, we have some feeble retirement savings, we’re able to slowly pay down my crushing student loans (though when hers come out of deferment after her graduation, who knows), we both have jobs for the time being, we are young and physically healthy for the most part, are not at high risk for contracting COVID-19, and currently don’t have it as far as we know. This is in addition to, and probably at least partially because of, our privileges of race (we are white), sexuality (we are straight), and gender identity and expression (we are cisgender).

Maybe it’s in poor taste to bring up dissertation defenses and commencements when so many are going through so much worse. Some are losing loved ones or even their own lives. Some are currently jobless, including my younger brother up in Denver. Sam knows this, too. While she often thinks of these things that are being taken away from her, as I suppose we all are, she also frequently acknowledges that hers are relatively insignificant, that she is “being a brat,” in her words, when she complains about her dissertation defense or graduation.

But that doesn’t mean that Sam isn’t faced daily with the fact that the life she has worked so hard for over the last decade seems to be slipping away from her, leaving our future uncertain and precarious. She has been on the academic job market for about six months, applying for around fifty teaching positions at universities and colleges all over the United States. The application and interviewing process for aspiring professors and instructors is notoriously grueling, and there are always far more job applicants than jobs. She had received some positive responses and had interviewed for a handful of positions before the new coronavirus made its way to America, but many universities and colleges are now entirely closed, and many are freezing all hiring. One of the positions she had interviewed for has already been terminated. She has received rejections for others. She hasn’t heard anything back about some. One of the temporary jobs she had lined up over the summer has already fallen through. We are expecting the other to disappear as well. After that, we just don’t know.

Keep things light: Sam and I dance to Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club while cooking and doing dishes. We don’t fight it; we just feel it.

Contemplate: Are we doing enough? Sam and I have effectively been sheltering in place since Saturday, March 14, over a week before our county issued its version of a shelter-in-place order, but what is reasonable and required as part of our collective social contract is changing alarmingly quickly. What seemed drastic mere weeks ago now seems inadequate. What seems drastic now, we may later regret not doing sooner. With only a few exceptions, Sam and I have stayed in our apartment other than to go to the grocery store, to walk outside (while maintaining distance from others), to get the mail, and to pick up take-out from local restaurants that we want to support. This seemed reasonable and responsible until I read a Facebook post from my distant cousin who lives in Spain. Since most of her immediate family and our extended family live in the U.S., she posts updates on Facebook daily, with new figures for documented COVID-19 cases and related deaths. On March 31, when deaths were over 8,000 in Spain, she implored her family and friends in the U.S. to take the new coronavirus seriously, to go beyond social distancing and to isolate at home, to not go to the grocery store more than once per week, and to wear a bandana over your mouth (saving masks for healthcare workers) and gloves when we do.

Sam and I hadn’t done all of that, though we have since taken more precautions. We have not purchased gloves because we want to do our part to ensure that the people who need gloves can get them. Still, we are following the general guidelines local and national health officials have proposed or mandated as far as we know, and we have been doing that since the virus has been spreading in the United States, but we also want to support local restaurants and their employees, so we go for take-out once or twice a week and we tip more than we usually do.

But are we doing enough? By the time you read this, you may think us barbaric, accuse us of not taking this seriously. One of the many frightening aspects of the pandemic for us on the ground level is that we may not know what “enough” is or was until after it’s past.

Move our bodies: Sam and I go for a long walk about every other day, which is allowed by our county’s stay-at-home order. We live just over 1.5 miles from NRG Park, a 350-acre complex containing NRG Center, NRG Arena, NRG Stadium, and the Astrodome. The Houston Texans play at NRG stadium every fall, and it was host to the Super Bowl in 2017. The Astrodome was the first completely enclosed sports stadium when it opened in 1965, according to the NRG Park website, but it has been collecting dust for years. The entire complex floods with millions of people through the month of March every year for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which, in addition to its eponymous events, brings together an absurdly large carnival with nightly music concerts, over the years featuring everyone from Gene Autry to Beyoncé, Johnny and June Carter Cash to Melissa Etheridge, Gladys Knight to Pitbull, Selena to ZZ Top. On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, at the order of the City of Houston and its health department, the rodeo closed, canceling about halfway through.

Fortunately, Harris County has recently approved $60 million for a medical shelter to be pre-emptively built in NRG Park should the hospitals in the Houston area become overwhelmed. For the time being, though, as Sam and I walk down there after work a few nights a week, it sits empty, hundreds of acres of concrete fenced off, looking like a ruin more and more every day, the kind of open space that you would have to avoid in a zombie-apocalypse scenario. Luckily, the sidewalk stretching down Holly Hall Street from NRG almost all the way to our apartment complex is about eight feet wide, making it easy to physically distance ourselves from other walkers and bike riders. As we pass others or they pass us, we simply walk single file along the right edge of the sidewalk, which puts us about six feet from the others when they walk or ride on the opposite edge of the sidewalk. The problem is that, as of early April, many of the people we encounter still do not do this.

Contemplate: I wonder if the only thing that is new about this pandemic is the speed with which it became a pandemic. The tragedy of it, the horror that it shares with all other outbreaks, is that it exploits our social nature, our need to be with one another, and especially our ability to connect over long distances. Epidemic disease contributed to the decline and fall of both the Roman Empire and the Han Empire in late antiquity. According to Jerry H. Bentley and Herb F. Ziegler in Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, by about 600 CE, the populations of both the Mediterranean basin and China had been reduced by one quarter to one third from their high points in the Roman and Han societies—all due to epidemic disease, two likely candidates being smallpox and measles. The societies in Persia and the Indian subcontinent may have been greatly affected as well, though the evidence isn’t as strong. What allowed this epidemic spread was trade over the silk roads, which comprised land and sea routes and connected much of Eurasia and Africa.

Bentley and Ziegler also explain that the Mongol empires facilitated the spread of the bubonic plague in the 1300s from China all the way to Europe. “Bubonic plague sometimes killed half or more of an exposed population,” they write, “particularly during the furious initial years of the epidemic, and it seriously disrupted economies and societies throughout much of Eurasia.” In certain areas, it could kill seventy percent of the people. Some towns and villages were completely wiped out.

Centuries later, there was the epidemic devastation that European traders, missionaries, settlers and conquerors brought with them, ravaging native peoples in the Caribbean islands, the Americas, and the Pacific islands, decimating populations over and over again. And then there was the influenza pandemic in 1918, one of the deadliest in recorded history. It killed more Americans than all of the wars of the twentieth century. And yet, as an interviewee recalled in an American Experience documentary on PBS, we forgot about it quickly. It was as if we wanted to forget it, he said.

Yet at least in the case of our current pandemic, connection has not just facilitated viral spread, it has also allowed the WHO and researchers around the world to share information quickly. They have shared the virus’s genome, methods to detect it, even its phylogenetic tree, which surely has helped the global effort to combat outbreaks—though what we have done with that information is questionable. As the Associated Press and others have reported, the U.S. CDC rejected a test for the novel coronavirus that the WHO had already developed, delaying the American response by weeks—and many of the early CDC tests turned out to be ineffective—to say nothing of the Trump Administration’s ignore-deny-delay-deflect approach. The sharing of important information does little in the way of helping if we do nothing with it. And our ability to connect virtually, while certainly better than complete isolation, is no substitute for the physical connection that sustains us and that, of course, is now one of our greatest risks.

Keep things light: Because Sam and I read about tragedy daily, we increasingly watch comedy on TV: Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, A Serious Man, Groundhog Day, Community, Dave Chappelle: The Kennedy Center Mark Twin Prize for American Humor, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, Big Mouth. There is nothing funny about our need to laugh. Soon, we start seeking humor in our reading as well: She picks up Catch-22 again; I pick up a new book, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences.

Zach Jacobs is originally from Bennington, Nebraska, but now lives in Houston, Texas. He earned his MA in English from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His writing has also appeared in Fourth Genre, Sonora Review, Hobart, Sport Literate, The Fourth River, and The Examined Life Journal. He is currently working on a collection of personal essays and an archaeological memoir.