PENANG, MALAYSIA — Our train pulled into Butterworth at dusk, two hours behind schedule. We walked with the other passengers (half without masks, at least one or two coughing lustily) to the ferry launch across the water from George Town. Although there couldn’t have been more than twenty people waiting to board, there was somehow a crush at the gate. Once on deck, however, social distance was restored. The strait was calm and sunset pink. On our port side was Jerejak Island, where they tore down the old leprosarium to build a beachside resort.
C and I had spent February in Malaysia’s rainforests, visiting outposts of hunter-gatherers and autonomous Temiar villages. When we left for Penang, on March 10, we had just finished three days of research in Ipoh, an old tin mining boomtown. With its covered arcades and concubine alleyways, Ipoh was picturesque but eerie, like the photos going around of the Great Mosque of Mecca’s empty white floor, or the clarified, unsedimented canals of Venice. We assumed the restriction on flights from China was the reason shops were quiet. Wheelbarrows of durian had no buyers. But reality had not really set in. We were sharing our hostel with a suntanned family of five from Perth, halfway through a vacation they seemed grimly determined to enjoy. On the ferry, I remembered the young mother coughing into the kaya jam one breakfast, and instinctively felt my lymph nodes. Nothing.
Some writers are already shut-ins. At the moment, I envy them. Last December, I signed a contract to write a book about communities in extremis—refugees, nomads, smugglers, separatists—people living literally at the furthest reaches and in the shadow of the state. It would involve six months of travel across Southeast, South, and Central Asia. We sublet our apartment in Berlin and flew to the Philippines on January 10, eleven days after the World Health Organization announced the discovery of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan.
Two days later, Taal Volcano erupted outside of Manila, coating the parked cars in Poblacion with a gossamer of white ash. Thousands living around the caldera were evacuated and N95 face masks were sold out for weeks in pharmacies as far south as Zamboanga, 500 miles away. What a disaster, we thought at the time. On January 15, as we met with a veteran political prisoner in the Cordillera, the crater was still smoldering and the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention was declaring to the world that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.”
Disembarking the ferry in George Town, we hailed a taxi using an app called Grab. Our driver was wearing a blue surgical mask and listening to “Memories” from the Original Broadway Recording of Cats. Later, C made the observation that this was the last piece of music we would hear ambiently, in public. The cab dropped us at our home stay: a studio apartment on the twenty-ninth floor overlooking other mostly vacant high-rises and mazes of stilted homes by the shoreline. Rich atop poor. It’s a view we have come to know well.
The next day, we went to see the Chinese clan jetties, built a century ago to house migrant dockworkers along Weld Quay. Men in gas masks walked along Chew Jetty with disinfecting guns that looked like leafblowers, blasting hot air and chemicals into open living rooms. We got back to the apartment and begged our host to extend our stay through the end of March, self-quarantining that very night. A few days later, lockdown began. Security guards ushered stragglers off the beach. The army was deployed to enforce road blocks; just today, C received a text message in Malay: “Photographs showing ATM / armored vehicles on the road are fake news that is intended to cause public anxiety.” The local news channel ran a video of a cardiologist in George Town arguing with a cop over the right to jog.
Still, we took a walk by ourselves to the fisherman’s wharf two days ago. No one stopped us. There was no one to stop us. As we walked, I found all the usual travelers’ exotica transformed into apocalypse porn: packs of wild dogs, crumbling piers, weatherworn temples. Normal wildness and rot was suddenly portentous. The world had retreated to the furthest reaches. Everywhere is in extremis. Malaysia’s Movement Control Order is set to end on April 1. Friends in George Town warn us it will probably be extended. Either way, we don’t know where to go.
Ben Mauk has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The Believer, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. He was a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award for feature writing. He is working on his first book for FSG. (March 2020)
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SOUTHAMPTON, NEW YORK—In the back of my mind I’ve always considered the small Shingle Style house my wife Rosemarie and I bought twenty-five years ago in the village of Southampton on Long Island’s South Fork to be our safe haven if anything catastrophic ever happened to New York City. Such a disaster occurred on October 29, 2012, when Superstorm Sandy caused the East River to flood and rendered our Upper East Side apartment building uninhabitable for six weeks, during which we decamped to Southampton, grateful to have that refuge, unlike the many far unluckier victims whose sole dwellings were destroyed.
This February, we visited our son and his wife in Honolulu and comprehended the gravity of Asia’s Covid-19 pandemic because travel from Japan—which accounts for nearly 20 percent of Hawaii’s tourism industry—had plummeted. We reckoned that globalization would make it only a matter of time before the contagion hit the mainland US, and, upon our return, began making plans to ride out the danger in Southampton, since both our age and my fraught medical history put us at increased risk. I can write anywhere and Rosemarie can happily garden for hours on end as Spring commences, so what could be bad about a protracted Long Island hiatus? Though what if this turns out to be a much longer siege than the aftermath of Sandy?
Once we arrived in Southampton on Friday, March 13, we could see that we were hardly the only second-home-owning New Yorkers who’d decided to outlast the plague in these less confined surroundings. It initially feels like a premature, unusually chilly summer season, and local real estate offices report a sudden spike in house rentals for immediate occupancy rather than beginning as usual on Memorial Day weekend.
Although we’ve always preferred to think of the Hamptons as being inhabited not just by gazillionaires but also people like us—writers, academics, artists, and curators—the ugly truth is that this is Trump country. The fact that our Republican US congressman, Lee Zeldin, is a fervent Trumpist reflects the unlikely coalition between the region’s disgruntled white working-class residents, whose pickup trucks and utility vans are often plastered with Trump bumper stickers, and plutocratic New York businessmen who use their part-time Hamptons domiciles as legal residences and vote via absentee ballot.
The latter contingent includes several protagonists of the Trump administration, among them Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. His third wife is a third-generation Southampton socialite, and their house is a three-minute drive—but a universe away—from ours. Last summer, a multimillion-dollar fundraising event that Trump attended at the Southampton estate of the New York real estate developer Stephen Ross (the prime mover behind the dreadful Hudson Yards) spurred a social media-driven rash of membership cancellations at Soul Cycle and Equinox, two fitness chains that he owns.
The other side of this high/low equation is the shocking depth of race hatred among working-class whites in Suffolk County, many of whom descend from families who fled the increasingly multicultural outer boroughs of New York City from the 1950s through the 1970s. And the pandemic seems to have exacerbated class conflicts that have long simmered just beneath the surface in the Hamptons.
At the start of every summer, it seems, The New York Times runs a laughably inaccurate Hamptons-envy article—a rote rehearsal of the same dated celebrity names (Calvin Klein, Stephen Spielberg, Christie Brinkley) with cartoonish memes of Lamborghinis and Maseratis clogging the roadways and yachts three-deep in the marinas. But last week the Murdoch-owned New York Post published a prime specimen of socially divisive invective: an opinion piece by Maureen Callahan headlined, ‘“We should blow up the bridges’—Coronavirus leads to class warfare in the Hamptons.” Callahan alleges that the city’s Covid-19 refugees were bringing the virus with us and polluting the year-round community, as if there hadn’t likely been enough pre-symptomatic exposure to ensure the spread of the disease out here already.
Nonetheless, we continue to witness the expected grotesqueries that exemplify life in the Hamptons of the so-called 1 percent. The Chase Bank branch in Southampton lately caused a stir by refusing to cash a check for $30,000 because they feared they’d run out of ready money at the start of a weekend and so limited withdrawals to $10,000 per customer. What one could possibly want with that much paper money beggars the imagination, unless it was meant for very high-stakes poker games or to pay a big staff of off-the-books servants at one of the colossal oceanfront mansions on Dune Road.
For years I’d fantasized an updated Decameron scenario like the one we’re now living though, with ourselves in the role of the Florentine aristocrats who fled from their city palazzi to their villas in Fiesole to escape the Black Death. However, I doubt that any present-day Hamptons literati—now that so many of the best ones, including our reliably mordant and cheerily fatalistic friend William Gaddis, are dead—will produce anything approaching Boccaccio’s plague-time classic.
If worst comes to absolute worst and all our precautions have been for naught, our designated burial plot is contiguous to Gaddis’s in Sag Harbor’s historic Oakland Cemetery, a few miles northeast of Southampton. Not far from his tombstone, which is inscribed with an excerpt from his masterwork, The Recognitions, lies the grave of the incomparable George Balanchine. Further away are those of two more of our favorite artists, Gordon Matta-Clark and Stephen Antonakos. I consolingly consider them our cosmic cocktail party, though I’m not eager to join in anytime son.
Martin Filler
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EVANSTON, ILLINOIS—There aren’t many cars on the road, but the proportion of Amazon delivery vehicles feels ominous, my husband says. “If there’s going to be a junta,” he jokes, “it will probably be led by Amazon.” This is our first week under the Stay at Home order, and our second week staying at home with our son. I take him outside for mandatory exercise every morning. Today we jog a couple blocks to the high school to run sprints on the track, but the chain-link fence around the track is locked with a padlock, so we run sprints on the empty parking lot. My son was born in 2009, a month before the first novel H1N1 influenza infections were reported to the CDC. The possibility of hospitals becoming overwhelmed and essential medical supplies becoming scarce—the possibility that has now become a reality—is what made those early reports of a novel H1N1 virus, the subtype that caused the 1918 pandemic, so alarming to experts in infectious disease.
“This is not unprecedented,” I said to a friend last night on the phone. Maybe the scale of the worldwide response to Covid-19 is, but the global spread of a devastating disease is not. And neither are the strategies we’re employing to slow that spread. Quarantine is an old word, and Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, a fictional account of the 1665 epidemic of bubonic plague in London, reads like a prologue to this pandemic. The numbers reported in the weekly Bills of Death were low at first, Defoe writes, but then grew exponentially. The rich fled the city, and the sick were forced to stay in their houses.
“Pest houses,” I thought when I read the first reports of the temporary facilities in China where people with symptoms of Covid-19 were being held. In nineteenth-century America, a pest house was where people with smallpox were forcibly isolated. The historian Michael Willrich writes in Pox: An American History of children who were dragged away from their mothers to be taken to pest houses, where they most often died.
The playground two blocks from our house is almost always full of children, even on a cold March day like today. I’ve seen children on that playground in freezing rain, in polar vortexes, and in searing heatwaves. But today it’s empty. My stepmother tells me about a summer during her childhood in the Bronx when she wasn’t allowed to play in the sprinklers in the public parks. There was a polio epidemic that summer. What polio has in common with Covid-19 is that people can carry and transmit it without showing symptoms. About 70 percent of people infected with polio show no symptoms and another 25 percent have mild symptoms such as a fever and a sore throat. One in two hundred infections leads to paralysis. My stepmother knew a boy across the street who was in a wheelchair and a girl at school who walked with a limp.
The forbidden sprinklers stood at the center of large concave circles of concrete where they sprayed showers of cooling water. “Was that summer hot?” I ask my stepmother now. “Summers were always hot,” she says. Eventually, she stood in line in the gymnasium of her school, where something that looked like a gun was used to give every child a shot in the arm. That was the Salk vaccine. Later, she would line up again to receive a sugar cube on her tongue. That was the Sabin vaccine. We now use only the Salk vaccine in the US, but the Sabin vaccine, which is less expensive and easier to administer, is used in other countries. “You got both?” I ask her. “Oh yes,” she says, “I got both.”
Eula Biss is the author of On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Her new book, Having and Being Had, will be published in September. (March 2020)
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EAST BOOTHBAY, MAINE—I think these times feel stranger elsewhere than here in small-town Maine, where I live. Life here feels familiar—perversely, almost easy, if admittedly factitious. Just not bad on an hourly basis.
My wife does her best to curry a useful sense of danger and threat. (I don’t mean this as I see it reads: I’m not complaining, I need reminding.) But I don’t feel threat strongly—even as I wash my hands, steer clear of others (not her), disinfect my car-door handles and grocery items, and avoid the president’s daily rants.
In the way in which there’s no such thing as a false sense of optimism, that trees falling in the forest haven’t fallen, that the worst sex is still good, there may be no danger to one’s self if one doesn’t feel it. This is, admittedly, an old-person’s existentialism (although it may be a young person’s, too). Still, danger, all by itself, seems inert; it’s the consequence of danger that causes trouble. It’s like falling: the fall’s nothing, it’s the sudden stop at the end that’s to be feared.
How we manage our sense of consequence is the task at hand—and it’s not an unwriterly task. On the one hand, of course, it’s what we do (wash, avoid, ignore) that matters; but it’s also what we say and think and write and notice and make ourselves willing to hear that—assuming we don’t croak—will matter surprisingly much to us when this is all over and done with.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short-story writer. His latest story collection, Sorry for Your Trouble, was published last year. He is to receive, in 2020, The Paris Review’s Hadada lifetime achievement award. (March 2020)
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BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—On Friday, March 13, at least one owner on a restaurant-industry message board was still making jokes: “The mayor says to keep the restaurant half empty? I’d be happy to see it half full!” All week business had been abysmal. For us at Egg in Williamsburg, it had been the worst five days in at least twelve years. Our servers were on edge from making no money; the cooks were bored. We’d tried to drum up business by Instagramming the details of our cleaning protocols. We gathered excitedly around our new sanitizer dispensers and marveled at being rich in toilet paper. We were all aware that there was a disaster brewing, or already afoot, but I hoped it would ask no more of the restaurant than any disaster does: simply that we stay open, tough it out, feed people, and let them feel normal for at least the duration of a meal.
On Saturday, the restaurant was buzzing with life. Aside from the 50 percent capacity rule, it was almost business as usual: hangovers to soothe, reunions to host, babies to feed. Customers seemed unconcerned. Our staff was happy to be back in action. If there was darkness creeping around outside the restaurant, inside it was—mostly—normalcy and joy.
But on Sunday morning, the sight of crowds no longer cheered me up. Something had changed overnight. It’s hard to say what was different: a little more news of contagion and death, a little more evidence of governmental incompetence, a few more warnings against contact with others.
Now the busy dining room was making me anxious. I kept counting seats, sure that we were over the 50 percent limit, then alarmed when I realized we weren’t, that we could still—legally—squeeze a few more people in. And people were there to be seated, too. They were clustered by the door, reluctant as ever to heed the host’s request that they not congregate in the entrance. I stepped outside more and more frequently as the day went on, almost as if gasping for air, hoping that I wouldn’t see any more customers coming in. But here came the last member of a party of four, stepping out of an Uber with a little dance move, her girlfriends calling her into their embrace. Here was a little knot of tourists, determined to make it to every spot on their list before the city shut down. Here was a couple, fresh from the gym, pausing to read the note in our window explaining the 50 percent rule. “Oh,” one said, after a moment’s confusion. “It’s because of the virus, I guess.” They strolled down the block toward a food hall instead.
By the end of the day, I didn’t want to help make things feel normal anymore. I wanted people to feel how strange things had become. Feigning normal felt dangerous.
As the last of our crew finished cleaning up and resetting the restaurant, my partner and I sat at a table near the door, painstakingly writing and revising a difficult message to our staff: we were switching to takeout and delivery only. They would lose shifts. They would lose tips. But, we hoped, they’d keep their health and we’d be able to keep the business limping along until it was possible to open the doors wide again. I sent it with my stomach in my throat, worried that I was being rash, worried that they’d feel like I’d sold them out to my fear. Two hours later, the city shut down all restaurants to anything but takeout and delivery.
But even closing the dining room did little to allay our fear that we were risking something more important than business. We could only hope that the next people through the door weren’t going to bring infection with them. We could only hope that none of us was, either. So thirty-six hours after my last note to staff, I wrote another message. Of the several I’d sent that week, this was the shortest and most devastating: we were closing. They were all losing their jobs—“for now,” I wrote, and believed it (I still do), but with no sense of how long “for now” would last. We wrote checks to our staff for as much money as we thought we could spare without jeopardizing our ability to reopen, whenever that day might come. We told them to come in for as much food as they could carry. They loaded up on eggs, bacon, flour, onions, cheese: food for a long haul. We waved goodbye from a distance.
George Weld is the founder of Egg Restaurant in Brooklyn and Tokyo, and the coauthor (with Egg Chef Evan Hanczor) of Breakfast: Recipes to Wake Up For. (March 2020)