The Last Normal Day

The day before the last normal day, I was sitting in a bland, sparsely furnished corporate apartment in Chicago, strategizing the fastest and least physically taxing way to pack up all the unnecessary purchases I'd made in the six weeks I'd lived here and drive them to Michigan while somehow managing to avoid the many deadly germs threatening to implode my lungs between there and here.

I was in Chicago to work on the recently canceled (sigh!), brilliantly funny, and heartfelt television show Work in Progress, which I thought meant that I was going to spend six weeks luxuriating in nice restaurants and getting wasted with all my friends from high school every night, but the job actually required my full un-hungover attention and, oh yeah, it was also WINTER IN CHICAGO and no one wanted to even leave their houses, let alone put on lipstick and pants with a zipper to meet me near where I was staying all the way in freaking River North for an overpriced drink in a pitch-black room in which we'd have to scream ourselves hoarse over thumping beats to catch each other up on our lives.

Oh, the halcyon days of February 2020, when we had no idea just how much our future selves would regret not hauling our asses out in the snow to expectorate in each other's faces while pressed uncomfortably close together in some dark and overly sexy bar.

I like to have the news on in the background when I'm puttering around at home because I find the tone-modulated droning of newscasters oddly soothing, and my preferred way of learning what's happening in the world is to absorb it via osmosis, never directly because that feels too stressful. So in the weeks prior to mandatory lockdown (Is that even what it was called?), I hadn't panicked because, like, when everything is breaking news absolutely nothing is breaking news? How do you know if it's nuclear war or if it's just a celebrity getting divorced when all you hear echoing from an adjacent room every single time anyone does anything is *dun DUN dun!* [the serious news intro theme] "Breaking news at the top of this hour [in an animated yet sober newscaster voice]. Good evening, America, I'm Brick Shetland, reporting live from the newsroom ."

By March, cable news was breathlessly reporting that people in Europe and Asia were coughing to death from some new easily transmissible virus unlike any the world had ever seen and that airports were shutting down, but then with the exact same urgency an anchor would be reading a rundown of the then president's angry tweets, and no one I knew really understood the magnitude of the crisis that was about to be upon us because none of my friends are epidemiologists and we all have access to the same CNN. In Chicago, I would go to work at a studio in Edgewater in the morning then return to my temporary home overlooking the screeching L and cheerfully lit Merchandise Mart at night, and I did all that again and again and again and again, and then suddenly the headlines screamed.

WASH YOUR HANDS

ORDER DELIVERY FOR EVERY MEAL BUT OPEN THE DOOR FOR THE DELIVERY PERSON AT YOUR OWN PERIL

SPRAY YOUR MAIL WITH LYSOL, BLEACH YOUR GROCERIES

CANCEL ALL YOUR RESTAURANT RESERVATIONS

IF YOU SO MUCH AS LOOK AT AN UBER YOU WILL DIE

WASH YOUR HANDS

ORDER EVERYTHING YOU POSSIBLY CAN ONLINE AND BURN YOUR PARCELS UNDER THE SUN BEFORE THEY CROSS YOUR THRESHOLD

IF YOU ARE NOT AT HOME, GO TO YOUR HOME AND DON'T LEAVE, UNLESS YOU NEED TO GO TO WORK AND-FINE, OKAY, SWING BY THAT BIRTHDAY PARTY IF IT LOOKS FUN

GOOD LUCK FINDING SANITIZER!

GLARE AT ANYONE WHO SO MUCH AS CLEARS THEIR THROAT IN YOUR GENERAL VICINITY

STOCKPILE TOILET PAPER FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON

PEOPLE ARE DYING AND WE'RE GONNA LET THEM

SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED THAT YOUR CAT HAS COVID????????

PURCHASE THE DIGITAL VERSION OF CONTAGION ON AN IMPULSE AND TRY NOT TO SCREAM TO DEATH IMAGINING THAT AS OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURE

MAYBE IT'S FINE FOR YOU TO GO TO THAT OUT-OF-TOWN WEDDING?

WASH YOUR HANDS

But no one really knew anything. At least not definitively, from what I could tell through my passive consumption of broadcast news. Everyone in the writers' room kept going to work because our employer, Showtime, was expecting a season of television from us in exchange for all the Thai food and LaCroix they'd paid for, and also because the papers were casually like "Maybe Steam Clean the Shit You Bought at Walgreens When You Get It Home, If You Feel Like It" and not "WARNING WARNING DO NOT BREATHE COMMUNAL AIR."

Remember how reporters-cum- preschool teachers taught us to sing the words to "Happy Birthday" while washing our hands as we coughed into our friends' mouths??? Nobody knew shit! When we switched to working remotely (OH GOD, the early days of Zoom!!!!!!), I figured it was pretty serious, this Corona-whateveryoucallit. At the same time, we were led to believe it would blow through like a foul wind if we just hunkered down and laid low for a few weeks. Then things would go back to normal. But also, what the fuck is "normal" anyway, and is it actually a thing we wanted to get back to?

A few days after we'd gotten used to where to focus our dumb eyes on a multi-person video call (I participated then as I continue to do now: stare intently at my own visage, horrified by its many flaws and hoping no one has the kind of crystal clear resolution that amplifies my upper lip hairs), our boss emailed us something to the effect of "Fuck this job, pack up your tiny dorm rooms and flee the city before it's too late!" Sure, I'd been trying to open doors with my elbow for a week at that point, but that's when it really hit me that it wasn't just a bad flu other reckless people who just couldn't resist a St. Patrick's Day bar crawl were catching; Covid was in this country and rapidly spreading across the city I was in, and I needed to hurry up and get back to my hermetically sealed bunker in Michigan before I caught it from a grocery cart or a high five.

I read the email from the building manager telling us where to leave our keys and reminding us that we would be heftily fined if we had done visible damage to any of the three forks we'd each been allotted (one day I would like a job as the person who decides what amenities should come standard in short-term corporate housing; imagine being the dude who's like, "Nine hand towels, no corkscrews." What power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and I had less than a day to pack my shit and hit the road so I could ride out the lockdown with all of my books and shirts and cats-and my wife, I guess. AND YET: rather than immediately throw everything in a suitcase and haul ass home as fast as I could, I instead sat on the side of the bed and googled "coronavirus symptoms" while hoping the tickle in my throat was just allergies (IT WAS) and wondering how in the world I was gonna get all the stuff I'd bought out of my temporary home and into the car without a single box to carry it all in.

The thought of multiple trips up and down in a high-rise elevator crawling with other people's potentially deadly spores filled me with doom while also forcing me to examine how one person could contain so many different types of emotional wreckage. My contract said I was supposed to work for six or maybe seven (unlikely, though!) weeks. A month and a half, at most. Why on earth had I purchased:

• an Anthropologie fruit bowl made from surprisingly heavy wood that I got off the sale rack during a late-night spiral at Nordstrom, which was beautiful but honestly the six pears I let rot inside it could have turned to mold just as easily on the fucking counter;
• several different varieties of scented luxury candle, for an apartment with only two distinct rooms and a bathroom;
• the biggest pack of paper towels they sell at the store;
• a bunch of Trader Joe's snack foods that always sound good theoretically but once I get them home it's always like: "But who actually wants these brussels sprout-flavored tortilla chips, and who was I buying this for?";
• a modest stack, but a stack nonetheless, of books that I bought at the Women & Children First bookstore because books are my friends, but also because I thought they could warm up the soullessness of a place I mostly used for sleeping;
• a tub of collagen powder????? (My knees hurt.);
• a set of washcloths and towels because the apartment came equipped with an all-white set, and I didn't want anyone to get mad at me when I inevitably ruined them;
• some sweaters I panic-ordered in the middle of the night after opening my suitcase to discover that everything I own is gross and ugly, but joke's on me because if you get a package delivered to one of these high-tech buildings that offer things I don't care about like communal work spaces and indoor dog parks, you have to ask the twenty-four-hour doorman to interrupt whatever he's looking at on...