I've gone back to reading Emily St. John Mandel's book Station 11, objectively a terrible idea. There, a much worse pandemic sweeps the world and kills almost everyone within 24 hours of being infected. Society degenerates to pockets of violent isolated groups, cults, abuse, no infrastructure, no power, no running water or shops. The book switches between a telling of the story before the collapse, the collapse itself, and the story of a Shakespearean theatre group and orchestra that travel around the wary but sometimes more peaceful towns of 20 years post-collapse. Chapter 6 of the book is a heart aching lament of all that has been lost. it's the kind of apocalyptic book that makes you feel generous and very fond of our type of civilisation, which have a definite grace despite all its flaws.
"No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with the generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer but it was difficult to come by." And later: "No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light, no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position..." When I have nightmares, it's often not that a horrible thing is happening, but I am filled with a horrible knowledge of what is coming. It's not a Station 11 level virus, but I am waking some mornings, bewildered. Because I expect to wake from being in a world with a pandemic. The Director of WHO expects the known cases globally will reach a million in the next few days. I talk to my friend M, one of the best people I've met. She works with homeless adults and unaccompanied migrant minors in Washington State, some of the foster parents are getting sick now, the homeless shelters are more frightening and stressful. The publisher of the NZ Listener, North and South, Women's Weekly and a bunch of other biggish NZ magazines announced they were closing today. All the staff have lost their jobs. Lots of the printing industry in Auckland are based around those publications. There will be some sad and stressed people around this country tonight as well. People frightened about security. The overseas company Bauer is laying the blame at the feet of the virus but they accepted no offer of support from the government and some believe it was opportunistic, in their plans all along. We're probably small fry to their international markets. There were the most new cases in a day today. Over 700 cases now. My numbers seem to be 1 or 2 out but I think it must be as probable cases become confirmed or possible. I added a new graph for the new cases as my eye is on this now too. Even though loads of others are doing this kind of line graph now, that I couldn't find in the early early days, it satisfies a part of me, to enter the numbers and build the graphs myself. Today, mist was all around us. I heard reports from the beach that people could not see each other until quite close when they would emerge suddenly rearing out of the haziness. I walked in the hills and looked out across a different sort of place.
Today was my friend A's 50th birthday. There is no time in my life when I have not known A, our parents were friends, our big sisters were friends, we grew up on other sides of the same hill, we went to the same schools. We had decades of our lives when we didn't see each other, though he visited me and another school friend in London once, that was, when I think about it, literally half a life time ago. He took photos of us, I think with small plastic dinosaurs. Now he lives four blocks from me, down the same road. I painted a happy birthday banner on an old flowery sheet tacked the sheet to two poles., and did a cheesy kind of installation of the number "50" in battery fairy lights and surrounded by a wreath of plastic flowers. My friend KT has bought a 2nd hand piano accordion and is learning to play it so I enlisted her help. Our family and KT, a good 5 metres distant from us, serenaded locked down A. He was video chatting to other friends at the time and so they were part of it too. KT did an impressive version of happy birthday and we left a bunch of autumn flowers, the jar acting as a vase carefully disinfected if they choose to take it inside, then we walked briskly away, KT on the footpath opposite us waving a distant gooodbye. Effficient, covid-safe.
New Zealand's total of Coronavirus (including those recovered) is of today 647. It climbs but not exponentially. Ashley Bloomfield, the Director General of Health gives daily updates which are streamed live on RNZ. I watch them each day. He says he expects the numbers to rise for 10-14 days, and, if everyone sticks to the lockdown to start going down after that. I like the story that we are an island state and acted earlier than other countries and we could actually eliminate it here, and hunker down, hold out until there is a vaccine. I like that story better than the others. New Zealand has been under a state of emergency for seven days. It gives the government unprecedented powers, or perhaps it gives the special COVID committee unprecedented powers as Parliament is suspended. The state of emergency is I guess essentially undemocratic and is therefore reviewed every 7 days to ensure its still necessary. It was reviewed and extended today but that was misinterpreted by some, including some media, to mean our lockdown period (currently at 4 weeks) was extended by 7 days. Rumour spreads like fire on the internet. In New Zealand rumour spreads faster than Coronavirus. Someone asked on social media today about whether it was true you should wash your fruit in methylated spirits. I'm loving the re-visioning by some Māori of the lockdown as the rāhui. It's all over social media now. From maoridictionary.co.nz rāhui is "to put in place a temporary ritual prohibition, closed season, ban, reserve". I had only heard it before in relation to fishing or shellfish harvesting, stopping the harvest to give time for the babies to get bigger. People are talking about the layers of protection wrapped in the word's meaning. A collective decision to take time out to get things back in balance. The things we pause to allow us to pick up and continue later. 76 new cases in New Zealand today, our total has moved to 589.
Today, I am thinking about how lightly my friends and I have moved through this world. How global we have been, dancing and sweating and sleeping and hugging, marching and walking with whoever we like. Going where we want. Nights and days, open and unworried. Where travellers are, beyond anything, interesting, strangeness a welcome frisson. Will the cautions of these last weeks ever be absolved completely? Are we watching an era slip into history? Nothing gradual, no withering away, no antiquated world collapsing while modernity is already being built in the weedy sections, but a sudden grinding shift we hear as we fall into our troubled sleep. There's a large park at the end of our road with many intersecting curved and straight paths. You can walk up hills and feel the wind, and walk in regenerating bush alongside a creek filled with tuna (the eel kind). You can walk to the sea, along paths of bracken, flax and pale grasses. You can bike to the next village north.
When I went walking there yesterday, I was thinking hard, took a wrong turn, and managed to get completely disoriented. Even though I was only a few hundred metres from the sea, I had no view of it, nor of the stream, the river nor the bike path that winds through the park. I listened for the sea but it sounded like it was all around me. I came to several junctures of sealed and unsealed paths and had no idea which way to turn. I just walked in a random direction and it took a few moments to orientate myself again. This used to happen to me sometimes cycling home from Hagley High School where I went in my last year, I would semi-deliberately get lost in the endless grid of Somerfield streets with their identical houses and tidy lawns, and other times cycling through the gigantic roundabouts of London and thinking I had found a shortcut. I think I find physical bewilderment thrilling. Even for a few moments, the utter loss of knowing where I sit in relation to my environment. Groundless, a weird euphoria, I don't know if it's the being lost or the finding myself again that is euphoric. I have, you see, never stayed lost. I am still thinking about the cruise ships, out at sea, unwanted by any country, how frightening it must be to be aboard a ship where you know there are infections. I started thinking about Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines and the other books in that series. In that universe, cities have become predatory and mobile. They range or hunt above the now toxic earth. They are strategic, devouring other cities to access their resources. I imagine some dystopia where ships of sick people are never able to dock, drifting interminably. Perhaps it would work the other way as well, ships setting sail where only healthy people have been allowed to board, leaving those on land to the fate of mass infection. Ships biding their time on the waves until it's safe to go home. I absorb from Reeve the idea that cities could be transient, roaming and self-interested. I think of the last scene of When worlds collide when the Earth's people escape via spaceship moments before another planet hits us. I think of the Utopia episode of Doctor Who, which we just watched with our kids (who have somehow developed fandom behind our backs). It's the end of the universe and a frustrated genius is trying to launch a rocket to rescue a population of humans from pointed teeth Futurekind and send them to a distant planet called Utopia. The people have been waiting for years and the Doctor fixes it all, the final engineering problem, the people board but nothing is at seems. 108 New Zealanders who were at sea for two weeks after a cruise was aborted did get to fly home today. A woman died in Greymouth Hospital, our first Coronavirus related death. We have 63 new cases, so we're sitting at 514 now. It's gone up ten times in the last eight days. But 63 new cases is fewer new cases than yesterday, and fewer than the day before. Which may be meaningless but is comforting none-the-less. The UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has coronavirus. British Health Minister, Matt Hancock, has coronavirus. Prince Charles has coronavirus. Greta Thunberg has coronavirus. Another 83 new and probable cases NZ. in the last day More than 100,000 cases now in the US and New York Times ran a story that almost 3 million people across the country lost their jobs in the last week. Almost a 1000 people died in Italy in the last 24 hours. Almost 30,000 cases and almost 3000 deaths in Iran. There's an article about an Iranian boy who is now blind because of a rumour that drinking methanol will kill the virus. Iran now has a methanol death and sickness toll. 900 cases and 20 deaths in India. Many thousands locked down in New Delhi with no food or income. South Africa is locked down. Myanmar shares borders with China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Laos. After officials claimed a healthy lifestyle and not using credit cards meant Myanmar citizens were immune to the disease, the country is now reporting cases and has shut its borders.
At least 10 cruise ships are still at sea, each with thousands of passengers. Some of the ships have no reported sickness, some have known cases, some have no testing kits but have passengers finding it hard to breathe. No port will let them in. Today, I think, it's a bit like a Friday. It's not very different from my normal life. It's a bit like working from home during the school holidays. Actually, it's just like that. Joe's home, cooking. Lily made a sponge cake. The kids are home being a bit bored but mostly content. I'm less focused than usual but as usual perched on a chair at the end of the house trying to bring order to the chaos of online information. As usual getting bogged down by anomalies and arrangement and things that don't quite fit, until I hold the shape up to the light and things slip into place and are calmer. As usual trying to make things make sense. I don't go out all that much anyway My quiet village is a bit quieter. I am walking more. I am showering more. I am sleeping less. I am still chatting to my friends online. Today I know there's a storm out there, but it's not mine, not yet.
I remember when I was playing Prospero in a small production of the Tempest, and writing about it, I realised that everything the audience and Ariel knows is reported. Prospero could have made the whole thing up. Him being powerful back home in Milan, him being betrayed, him releasing Ariel. He gets to tell the story and so we experience that truth. I wonder if that's why some of the Coronacranks are so skeptical. I see their mutterings online as well. use your brains they say, think about it. Who's telling us? Why? What are they protecting? Where's the proof? It's caused by 5G, it's just the common cold, it'll disappear in spring. It's hysteria. You can't see a virus, you see. It's just a story told to us, a nefarious government's fairy tale. I can imagine it though, the spiky virus we see pictures of everywhere now, tumbling, yes like tumbleweed, down the empty streets. So we've started. I mean we were kind of in lockdown since Monday afternoon anyway. We saw Jane and Sam for an outdoor-sitting-a-long-way-apart-morning-tea, to plan things and since that just the four of us. But we've started full enforceable by law lockdown. We're in it.
I feel tired and a bit jittery. Two nights ago I got something in my eye just as I was falling asleep and thought sleep will wash it out. So I slept and woke with one tiny eye and a lot of puffiness around it. Sleep did wash whatever it was out. The puffiness has gone down and my eye has got bigger, but it has added to a feeling of general dis-ease, of being not sick but not quite well either. Louise Hay would ask, what am I not wanting to see. I feel a bit worried or perhaps I feel very worried but distant from it. As if I am under water. I am having to deal with some stressful voluntary work, and my attempts to de-stress the situation backfired, and some pressured paid work, and those things feel like distractions, like distancing mechanisms. I feel like my job now should be The Lockdown. Every morning I should get up and report to duty for The Lockdown and every week the government should send us our Lockdown cheque sufficient to support our basic needs. This is so huge. There is the lockdown, and already people are talking about it being extended, that four weeks won't be long enough and that worries me. I want to see my Mum. I want my kids to see my Mum. My kids need air and variety and friends and learning. People being lonely. People dying alone. People being in lockdowns which are safe from the virus but not safe from the people they're locked down with. The way social connection is what makes us human. What is going to change over this four weeks? What will we be like at the end? I worry. And then there's the infection itself, another 78 new or probable infections in NZ today. It is hitting New York "like a bullet train" and it is "exploding" in Tokyo, and there are 470,000 global infections now and more than 21,000 deaths. And nowhere including New Zealand enough ventilators or ICU beds and nurses saying they are being told not to wear masks and they feel unsafe. And our public health system so underfunded for so long. There were crises before a crisis hit. All that worries me. And then there's the poverty. There's already homelessness and poverty in New Zealand, and people being hungry, and people working three jobs just to stay afloat, and we're not in depression or recession. We've been growing. It's been normal. But a depression is thundering towards us, galloping full pace, like a rhinoceros or a demogorgon. And the way things are arranged the people who it will hurt most are the people already hurting. Economic resilience is directly related to the amount of change you have had in your pocket after you paid your weekly bills. Some people will be okay though this thing. Some won't. Desperation will become more common. Our country will change. Like any event, it's a justice issue as much as anything, The benefits of supposed economic growth have fallen unevenly, so too will the burdens of a depression. And that, that worries me most of all. Lockdown happens at 11.59 pm tonight, two hours and 24 minutes away. Everyone I know has already started really. Many people's parents haven't started but instead are popping out to the dairy or angling for a cappuccino in the cafe. Just a few of us, dear. One friend's mother went to the Casino last weekend, well I've had a good run, she said, when my friend complained.
The police have said, don't even think about going for a drive to the beach. Walk in your local neighbourhood, keep two metres away from anyone else, only go with people you are in a household cluster with. The idea is a closed circle of members of your household. The police say act like you have the virus. 40 new confirmed or probable cases yesterday, 50 new confirmed or probable cases announced today. and because the numbers in my graph don't add up, I have been recording new infections each day, it must be because they have started absorbing the probable cases into their numbers as well as the confirmed. I made up the difference in yesterday's numbers so it shows a greater leap than the 40 new infections we were told about. The Director of Health says it will keep going up for another 10 days, because the people being tested now are those who have arrived before the borders were closed, and before the lock down. I keep thinking about Dustin in Stranger Things (series 2 spoiler alert) who finds a cute specimen of a seemingly undiscovered species and names him D'Artagnan (Dart for short) after a chocolate bar he feeds him. His friends are suspicious, but Dustin hides Dart from them, and lies to them in order to protect his new obsession. He keeps Dart in his turtle's tank, and overnight Dart grows at astronomical rates, escapes, eats the family's cat, leaving a bloody pool of fur and flesh and is revealed to be a baby demogorgon, a creature responsible for the worst kinds of hell that Dustin and his friends have already lived through. Dustin, usually sensible, is brilliantly deceptive, his face flickering between calm affection in company, and sick terror in private as he understands exactly what he has been nurturing. It's Wednesday night. We now have 205 confirmed or probable cases in New Zealand. Four community infections, possibly more. Last Wednesday we had 20 cases, the Wednesday before that we had five. |
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