It feels like a slow-motion summer. There’s an uneasiness about, as if some great, big crisis had been averted. By the way, you are allowed to perceive others as being antsy. As ants, more like it.
Covid-19 has the power to reduce people to ants. There I said it.
The series of conflagrations that have shaken our capitals, to their core, really, have settled down. In their place, ant hills, cities, under siege, people, milling. We human ants are obsessive, the future got closer, the present is already slipping by us and the just-past is already a function of some glorious collective history, full of socializing, warehouse parties, undeterred boinking, sound-system-laden boats, on deck people with a glass in their hand, swaying to loud-bassy-music, hip kids with Telfar bags dancing on runways, transatlantic flights during which the flight crew turns the safety regulations into a comedy bit and people laugh and take pictures, family expeditions to the top of Pão de Açúcar with mouths and noses on full display and where the little guy breaks into a song at the back of the tram car because he’s gotten anxious from the steep climb up the mountain and everyone smiles.
Is he coming home? Did she really have to travel now? Did I leave the mask home? Why can’t they let me in? She looks ill. But I am an ant. We are. All. Ants. Extemporaneously.
Jonathan’s reaction was strange. How does he apprehend all this sudden, unprovoked misery? I perceive him like an ant, even though he probably sees himself as prince. The book award-winning prince-in-a-hurry-meeting-with-so-and-so-and-unfortunately-I-am-leaving-town-tonight. Ant. Prince.
Ant.
People-humanoids are no longer on the take in this new decade. Supermarkets shelves tonight will groan under the weight of toilet paper value packs, baby wipes and bean twelvers. Netflix, HBO, BFMTV, MSNBC, YOUTUBE, they are the Prussian Guard of this “Covid 19” : at attention and ready to serve. I can’t watch “The Walking Dead” a third time. About one hundred thirty hours of watching persons attacking zombies, shouting at the TV screen, “take that, virus, take that covid, eat it, novel, covid, covid, novona, savonid, conora, RHONDA COVNORONONA!!!!”
No.
Dear Century, what is the genesis of our here covid19 set piece? Where did our little problem (you know, the one that we need to really talk about), originate? On a cluster of mica? The inside cover of a Torah? An old shoe string left on the side of a snaky trail cutting through a desert in Zambia? Said shoe lace belonged to a Lusaka City Council Member who had been on that trailer earlier this year with a delegation from the Shenzhen Industrial Demolition Association.
Maybe yes? Nod if you can fear me.
Or, this. A mole, in the SouthWestern Asian steppes, back in 1998, licked a piece of poisonous tree bark and got infected. Asymptomatic Mole. Huzzah! I have a band name for when I learn to play the guitar—for real, now—and become a rock god with long, white hair and change my own name. To Koresh’s Soul.
Back to our Mole. She lived for a few more years until she was no more. Inside her, the coronavirus (at the time, covid was known, simply, as Shmooey), which only had half a crown, then, was doughy and green behind the ear. Shmooey found a receptive organism inside the Mole and became a little stronger every year, developing the rest of its crown, hand-eye coordination and testing out various toolkits for how to better impinge on blood cells.
Around 2:38 a.m. on Wednesday, December 19th, 2019 a carnivorous bat picked up the mole’s decaying carcass and flew back to its lair to consume it with two children and one batty sister bat. Shmooey, still inside, by then was hulking and prone to aggressivity. At times. It had a fully-functioning crown and the cellular machinery was strong. Shmooey had been working tirelessly on the self-correcting duplication process and, in the last weeks of the mole’s life, Shmooey had had time to work its way through all of the mammal’s organs, setting traps here, mounting road blocks there, unleashing chaos on life’s precise calculus of fluids and gazes exchanges. Shmooey had emerged an attaquant.
And we are ants, and it’s the slow-motion summer. And it’s a new decade.
Nod if you can fear me.