Our Earthly Dilemma

IT BECOMES REAL when we hear Tom Hanks has the virus. A few weeks later the celebrity patient is Nadia, a four-year-old Malayan tiger suffering from a dry cough at the Bronx Zoo.

Tigers roar but they can’t purr. 

“This is the first instance of a tiger being infected with COVID-19,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports. It is the first week of April. The number of global cases is less than 100,000, with a death toll inching up to 6,000. 

Meanwhile, Tom Hanks loses hand after hand of gin rummy to his wife as they wait out self-isolation on Australia’s Gold Coast. 

Tom learned he was Fred McFeely Rogers’ sixth cousin right before the premier of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the 2019 film where Tom plays Fred, the beloved Presbyterian minister, puppeteer, and host of the children’s television show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. 

"It all just comes together, you see," Tom remarked when informed of their relation.

In the 1960s, a decade teetering on the desegregation of pools and other public spaces, the white Mr. Rogers and Officer Clemmons, a friendly Black police officer in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, dipped their feet into the same plastic wading pool, sharing in the simple human pleasure of cooling one’s feet on a hot day after walking many miles.

“Sometimes just a minute like this will really make a difference,” Mr. Rogers said. 

Officer Clemmons replied by bursting into song: “Well, thank you for your reFRESHments!” François Scarborough Clemmons, the actor portraying the policeman, was a newly minted Metropolitan Opera tenor.

Fred spoke with news anchor Charlie Rose about his book, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from American’s Most Beloved Neighbor, three decades later, in 1994. They discussed our longing to belong. The gravity of love and forgiveness. The blank spaces between paragraphs. The gift of silence.

“I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence,” Fred said. “How do we do that, in our business, yours and mine, how do we encourage reflection?”

Then, “Oh my, this is a noisy world.”

A 2020 STUDY shows that in New England, more than 90 percent of underwater sounds in major rivers, ponds, and streams are produced by humans. The louder the man-made sounds, the quieter and less varied the natural ones. 

Rodney Rountree, a marine ecologist known as “The Fish Listener,” examined 46 hours of recorded underwater soundscapes for the study. Between the rumble and buzz of boats and distant planes, the symphony of sound produced by fish was documented comprehensively for the first time. 

"We are amazed by the widespread occurrence of sounds in different freshwater habitats including unexpectedly abundant fish farts, burps and coughs,” writes Rountree.

The Hoh Rain Forest is one of few remaining places in the United States generally untouched by human sound. The exact location, reachable via a two-hour hike among the colossal trees and ferns of Olympic National Park, is marked with a red stone atop a mossy log. 

“The logic is simple,” reads the One Square Inch manifesto. “if a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can impact many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 100 percent noise-free condition, will also impact many square miles around it.”

IN THE HOH Rain Forest or the ocean or another untouched place, the earth vibrates at a frequency of 7.83 hertz. This is about the same vibration as an alpha wave, the electrical signal our brains emit when approaching a state of deep relaxation and clarity. We are at our most conscious peace when we are in sync with the earth’s pulse, floating in a clear pool upstream of meditation and sleep. We stretch out on the ground and the earth calms us.

On top of the earth’s innate vibration is a racquet of seismic noise generated by humans. Millions of cars moving, trains barreling, airplanes taking off. Football quakes occur when home teams score and stadiums erupt with cheering.

The virus hushes us. A scientist in Brussels is first to notice the phenomenon. The city’s ambient seismic noise drops by half, equivalent to the Earthly quiet only heard on Christmas Day. The quieting comes in a wave, from China to Italy then Europe and everywhere else. Researchers begin to track tiny earthquakes and minute seismic shifts. I find my boyfriend laying on the living room floor, eyes closed.

Our city’s schools, libraries, and senior centers are closed indefinitely on March 12. The mayor declares a State of Emergency on March 15. On March 16 the governor issues an emergency order closing bars, gyms, and eat-in restaurants. Parents scramble for ways to take care of their kids and continue working. They become schoolteachers overnight.

Homeless shelters cut capacity to maintain social distance. 

“How do I find out where I can sleep tonight?” a man asks the mayor at a COVID-19 press briefing. He had been turned away from every shelter.

“I would ask you to reach out to a shelter,” the mayor responds. 

By April our state’s Department of Corrections confirms over 300 coronavirus cases between its prisoners and staff. Mid-month the first inmate dies from COVID-19, a 63-year-old man named Carlos DeLeon nearing the end of his two-year sentence. He had been cleared for release to his family but never made it back home.

We learn that COVID is not affecting people equally. Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Native American citizens are experiencing greater infection, hospitalization, and death than their white neighbors. 

“Pandemics reveal the cracks in our society,” says a Spanish flu expert on the radio.

We are told to stay home, to save lives. To keep six feet apart, to wipe things down, to wash our hands, to stop touching our faces. We must socially distance because we are inseparable.

We can’t get clean of each other.

ANTS, BEES, WASPS, and other colony-dwelling insects implement a variety of defense mechanisms against infection. Leaf-cutter ants guard their colonies, checking others for fungus before allowing re-entry. Several species of ants and bees are able to disinfect the surface of fellow contaminated bugs with antifungal secretions. Some sick insects willingly exclude themselves from their colony in order to stem infection. 

The cafe where my boyfriend works shuts down. The music venues he would ordinarily play in shutter. My copywriting work dries up, too.

We spend lockdown at my apartment. He composes a new album and records the demos in my bedroom while I write about a makerspace in our city building a “Last Resort Ventilator” with a bag mask valve, a motorized lever, and guidance from Israeli Air Force electronics experts. There are not enough ventilators in the world for all the COVID patients in need of breathing assistance, and communities across the globe are teaming up to build DIY ventilators and intubation shields as backup medical equipment.

There are other shortages. Toilet paper. Soap. Flour. Bucatini. Bicycles. Elastic, for masks. Plexiglass, for barriers at banks and grocery stores and bars that everyone will have trouble speaking through. The Tokyo Olympics are postponed. People are dreaming wildly. 

The courtyard of my apartment complex becomes a tiny town square. We share news, worry about paying rent, fail in setting up a mutual aid email network. I serve as second witness to my neighbor as she stands next to her daughter and signs a revised will. My cat is a free and wild animal, darting from shrub to shrub, chasing after birds and turning her belly up to the sun.

My boyfriend and I walk the neighborhood. We watch spring unfold. Point out houses we like. There are stuffed bears placed in countless windows. A picture of a teddy bear inside a Ziploc bag fastened to a tree. We come across a sign on a telephone pole: Turn around. 

We turn and see a giant bear silhouette affixed to a home’s picture window. Weeks later a real black bear wanders the streets and the park before disappearing back into the woods. A flock of turkeys is seen walking downtown, past Shake Shack and Ann Taylor and the bubble tea shop. People post pictures of dolphins returning to the miraculously clean canals of Venice, but it’s fake news.

SARS-CoV-2 could be the name of a nebula or galaxy or some other extraterrestrial body but it is a virus, another Earthling, doing its best to survive the vast interiors of humans and animals. Waiting patiently within respiratory droplets and aerosols. 

It takes 242,565 of us by the end of April. 

CATS PURR NOT only out of pleasure but to heal their bones.

“Cats purr during both inhalation and exhalation with a consistent pattern and frequency between 25 and 150 hertz,” writes veterinarian Leslie A. Lyons in Scientific American. “Various investigators have shown that sound frequencies in this range can improve bone density and promote healing.”

The benefits of purring extend to other beings as well. Those who spend time with purring cats can experience eased breathing, decreased blood pressure, and enhanced joint, bone, and soft tissue repair. 

Doctors begin applying ultrasound therapy to COVID patients. A small device emitting sound waves of 20,000 hertz is placed on the ribs for several minutes a day, calming the hyper-inflamed lungs beneath. Elsewhere researchers find those experiencing respiratory distress are able to avoid intubation and ventilation simply by lying face down, the full breadth of their lungs expanding behind them to take in more oxygen.

News of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder breaks in May, 72 days after he was tracked and hunted by three white men. He was jogging. They killed him on a Sunday, two weeks before a Black woman was shot to death by police 730 miles away. Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old emergency room technician. The victim of a drugless drug raid. Her boyfriend cried out for God as she lay on the floor dying in her own home.

On Memorial Day a woman tries to sic the cops on a man in Central Park when he asks her to leash her dog. Later we’ll find out they share the same last name: Cooper.

“I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life!” she warns before calling 911 in theatrical hysterics. She is dragging her dog along the ground by its collar. Its feet are lifting off the ground.

This Black man, in the park that morning to wonder at birds, is able to walk away physically unharmed. But not Ahmaud Arbery. Not Tony McDade, or Philando Castile. Not Elijah McClain, not Eric Garner. Not countless Black people of all genders and ages. Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin. Atatiana Jefferson. Tamir Rice. Michelle Cusseaux.

Not George Floyd.

Twelve-hundred miles from Central Park that same Memorial Day, 46-year-old George Floyd calls for his mother and begs for breath as a police officer kneels on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. George is unconscious for nearly four of those minutes. 

On a still and silent man’s neck, the officer continues to kneel. He does not remove his knee until the paramedics arrive and make him.

THE COUNTRY EXPLODES. 

The Minneapolis police Third Precinct building is burned to a shell. Protests in Minneapolis spill to Saint Paul. New York. Chicago. Kyoto. Budapest. Tunisia. Vienna. Bermuda. New Zealand. 

It’s a late Sunday morning, six days after George’s murder. My boyfriend and I are still in bed. Our friend calls into one of the open windows:

“Want to go to a protest?”

She and I drive downtown. A huge crowd of people is spilling out of the city green and into the streets. There are a thousand of us. We chant:

“No justice, no peace!”

We are moving as one in the wrong direction up a four-lane one-way street. At a halted intersection a man is blasting music and dancing on top of his car in jubilation. 

Left, onto an unfinished on-ramp until we reach the highway. We stop southbound traffic on one of the longest interstates in the U.S., then hop the divider and form a wall holding back northbound traffic. In Miami and Philadelphia and Richmond and Wilmington others are taking to the same highway.

The police greet us in riot gear when we arrive at the station. The mayor is barricaded inside. Protestors are pepper sprayed. My friend and I leave before sundown but others stay well after dark.

Near midnight a man named Harvey Fair comes to the front of the crowd, facing shields and helmets and gloves and body armor and guns. He got out of bed and drove across town to address the police.

“I’m 65 years old,” he tells them. “I’ve never seen a police department assemble like this here and the mayor come out like he got a hit squad. Well guess what? This ain’t the mob, man! And this ain’t going away! You know why? Because people are tired. Ain’t nobody want to fight. We’re standing up for our rights, man.”

“We just wanna breathe!” another protestor calls.

“You gonna see us again!” Harvey continues. “You know why? Because America for 400 years — 400! — been practicing oppression, alright?”

The energy in the crowd swells. The police retreat into the station. The people repeat over and over:

“We’ll be back! We’ll be back! We’ll be back!”

THERE ARE 5,000 of us five days later. This time the mayor is walking with us. The protest is led by one of the city’s youth organizations. They demand school police officers be removed and replaced with counselors. That steep cuts be made to the police budget in order to fund education and affordable housing. That officers involved in a killing or beating be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

My brother and I fight. He is a sheriff’s deputy in the Deep South and I am marching to defund the police in New England.

“Stop playing in traffic,” he says.

“Quit your racist job,” I say.

On Facebook I call people I have never met white supremacists. I argue with my boyfriend. I make my mother cry. I speak about racial injustice with other white people imperfectly, harshly, messily. I am pushing them away in my quest to be right and just and absolute. I think I can be a bridge but I am a door.

“When we learn about historical events, particularly life-changing ones such as the American Revolution, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, we see the finished product,” my friend Scott Mason writes on Facebook. He is a Black man of Jamaican ancestry working as a middle school teacher in an affluent, mostly white town.

“We see a polished presentation, neat and safe to digest. But there’s another side to it. There are different ideas, mistakes made, disagreements had, and at the worst death and destruction along the way. This can all be summed up in one sentence:

The process is messy.”

THE SUMMER COOLS and so does some of the unrest. Our state passes a police accountability bill. The new law makes officers culpable if they fail to intervene when a fellow officer uses excessive force. A newly appointed inspector general will be able to subpoena police records as well as testimony from individual officers when investigating deadly force. Our city reallocates $100,000 to planning a cop-less mobile crisis team that would send social and healthcare workers to mental health, substance use, and homelessness calls.

The world feels tender and fragile. Everything is right up against the surface, fluttering, a valve opening and closing. I apologize to my family for my harshness. My brother is already on to the next upheaval. In August the strongest hurricane since 1856 rips through his parish. He is in the National Guard and preparing for his first foreign deployment. 

My cat greets people in the courtyard the way a dog does. She turns 11. My boyfriend and I make plans to move to Memphis or some other Southern city, where he can make it as a working musician. We get roller skates and rollerblades and glide through the neighborhood at night, like kids. We visit graveyards. We watch space movies. We are two entwined galaxies, two worlds with different atmospheres, natures, gravities, limits and languages, drawn to each other by unknowable forces.

We imagine how aliens might say “I love you.” It involves standing rigidly at attention, widening our eyes, and making a sound like the Looney Tunes Road Runner. We decide that it happens automatically and unconsciously, whenever two aliens who love each other are within close enough distance for their frequencies to touch. 

I LEARN I am pregnant in September. The night before I take the test we join friends for dinner on the sidewalk outside a fancy restaurant. A homeless man gets in a neighboring diner’s face. The cops come but the man is long gone. We continue eating our expensive meal on the street. 

I am 35. I wonder if it’s time. He doesn’t wonder. 

We decide it is not time. We have only been together nine months. We don’t live together. There is a pandemic.

The ultrasound looks like a telescope image of an asteroid. The nurse asks if I want a copy. I say yes, thinking I will show my boyfriend. They forget to give it to me. I don't remind them.

It happens in the middle of the night. He is asleep and I am alone in the bathroom. The nurse told me most women know when they pass their pregnancies. I did not understand what she meant then but now I do. I vomit and become feverish. The night goes underwater. 

In the morning he holds me on the couch. He presses his forehead against mine and we breathe together. I am crying but he is holding me and the grief and with him everything is bearable, everything is in its right time, even this.

Days later I am in the kitchen fixing lunch. The window is open and I hear the youngest boy at the neighboring house talking to himself in the garden. The sun catches his hair and he is singing. 

IT’S BEEN A year since my boyfriend and I first kissed on a beach. We rent an apartment on an old farm in the mountains to celebrate. 

It rains all weekend but we explore the grounds when the weather breaks. We stomp through a cornfield. Walk the farm trail at night and scare a bunch of kids getting drunk around the fire pit. It’s December and we find ladybugs in the bathroom, in the loft. We are lucky.

“My Love, My Sweet, My All-Around Angel,” he writes in a card. “What a year it’s been, and quick it went. But my love for you? It has only grown.”

We get back home and there is something wrong with my cat. She hasn’t eaten much over the weekend. She is tired and uncomfortable. COVID protocols prevent me from going into the vet's office with her, but when the tech takes her from my car I am unworried. She hasn't been sick since she was a kitten. She came home from her summer checkup in perfect health. Kitty virus, I think. 

But it’s not a virus, it’s anemia. A healthy cat’s blood is made up of 25 to 45 percent red blood cells. Hers has 15 percent. She is taking in plenty of oxygen but there is not enough hemoglobin in her blood for it to anchor to. She is suffocating.

“Unless you’re prepared to spend thousands of dollars, this is the time to consider putting her down,” the vet tells me over the phone.

There is a credit card for trying to save your pet’s life. My boyfriend and I bring her to an emergency hospital, where she gets a blood transfusion and fluids and steroids. She comes home the next day, still anemic but less so, with a regimen of medicines. It could be an infection. An autoimmune disease. Bone cancer. 

She is in the hospital for another blood transfusion three days later. A new test shows that she is no longer producing new red blood cells. I am trying to wrap my head around the end of her life. My boyfriend tells me not to give up while I cry in his arms.

“You haven’t tried everything yet,” he says.

MY BROTHER GOES to war. It is almost Christmas when he lands at a base within a 34-square-mile deconfliction zone in Syria, in the desert on the border of Iraq and Jordan. The bullets in his rifle rip from the gun at a frequency of 1,200 hertz. The energy of 153 Earths in one machine.

Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees live in a camp within the zone, coexisting an hour's drive from Russian, Irani, and U.S. military outposts. The mailman will not go to my brother’s base. He receives his packages from the sky. 

I am trying to heal my cat with algae and enzymes and plant root tinctures. Homeopathic remedies called ferrum met and kali carb. I give her steroids twice a day and liquid chlorophyll four times a day. Chlorophyll is said to behave like hemoglobin and oxygenate the blood. It stains the fur around her mouth bright green. I buy cow liver from a Halal market, for the iron. It is smooth and glossy and dense, with perfect round tunnels for veins and ducts and artery branches. I leave to run errands and wrap a speaker playing a purring soundtrack with her in the blankets.

She is back in the hospital on Christmas Eve for a third blood transfusion. The vet uses the term “palliative care.” 

“You and your family will be the best to judge when it is time to euthanize your companion,” reads the Q&A from Final Journey, the in-home service recommended by my vet. “Everyone has a different thought on quality of life. For some, it will be when their companion stops eating, wagging their tail or purring.”

I bring her home on Christmas Day. She has 10 good days before declining again. I bring water to her and take her to the litter box. I listen for purring but she is quiet. 

When it’s time my boyfriend comes over, then the vet performs the euthanasia. The vet explains what will happen. First an injection to sedate her, followed by another to stop her heart. My cat is curled up on my bed inside my winter coat. We’re able to take our masks off for the final moments of her life.

I pet her as she falls asleep. His hand is on my thigh. The vet whispers to her, shepherding her out of this world and into the next. 

Her last breath is a tiny gust of wind. 

MID-FEBRUARY. TWO and a half million people are dead. Nineteen of our state's inmates have died from COVID.

Emergency vaccines are slowly distributed across the globe. My grandma gets her first shot, then friends who work in healthcare and schools. There is talk of easing lockdown restrictions in the spring.

I clean my apartment and find tufts of cat hair. On the ceiling fan. Caught in the leaves of my plants. 

I no longer walk into a room to find my boyfriend laying on the floor, eyes closed. Now it is me holding him as we drift off to sleep. I hardly notice. I have read books and listened to talks about the ebb and flow that is love, the cycle of turning towards and away and towards again that is a relationship. I am nothing but grateful to wrap my arms around him as our brains quiet. Eight hertz. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Two. One-half.

“Love means opening again and again to your beloved, yourself, and your world, and seeing what happens next,” writes Susan Piver in her book The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships. “You can’t know what it will be. Waves of connection are followed by waves of distance. Sunny conditions give way to more sun — or to storms. Storms give way to clear skies. Or not. One simply never knows, and a great deal of presence and bravery is required to face the shifting patterns. The ride cannot be fully evened out; it can only be experienced.”

On Valentine’s Day I get a bouquet of roses and another beautiful card. He tells me everything we’ve been through makes him feel closer to me.

“I like to think we got through it together,” he says.

Months from now it will be full summer. I will read about the singing meditations François Clemmons is offering at a newly reopened studio in his Vermont hometown. Participants are invited to gather around while he sings, full-bodied, whatever song enters his heart. It's a practice he's relied on to withstand the isolation of the pandemic. 

“Something special happens when I sing,” François tells the newspaper reporter. “There’s a vibration...” 

Overcome, he moves into a hymn: 

“Precious memories, how they linger...How they ever flood my soul, Lord...”

WE LAND ON Mars on February 18. The Perseverance rover journeyed 293 million miles to enter the Red Planet’s atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour. There it will explore a dry lake that was the size of Lake Tahoe billions of years ago.

We bomb Syria. Iranian-backed militia groups on the Iraq border are the target. We are told the reason is retaliation for a rocket attack on a U.S.-led military base in northern Iraq. My brother is safe but he and his comrades prepare for counter-retaliation. 

It is less than one month before the first day of spring. My boyfriend and I are discussing the state of the world. Discussion becomes debate. We are pushing each other away in our quest to be right and just and absolute. Then we are talking about our relationship. He doesn’t know if he wants to be in one. 

He asks for time to think. I dream he is driving my car on a dusty road surrounded by open plains and gray sky. He loses control of the car and we are spinning out. We are headed towards a tree and I brace for impact.

After four days I beg him to talk with me. 

“I would really like to reconnect,” I text. “This feels like a big freakout for us both and we love each other. Will you please come over and figure this out with me?”

“I love you and you mean very much to me,” he writes back. “I’d like to come by tomorrow and we can move past this. I believe in us.”

He does not come by the next day. I do not hear from him at all. Night falls and the wind picks up. When he answers the phone he says our disagreements about the world feel unresolved, foreboding. That we lived in a bubble. 

“You’re breaking up with me,” I say.

“I think I have to,” he says. 

His reasons for leaving don’t make sense to me. I can count our arguments on the fingers of one hand. Our differences are nothing compared to all the goodness between us, like just enough salt. Everyone's been living in a damn bubble.

But the reasons make sense to him. Something within his universe, his orientation in space and time, is pulling away from mine. There’s been a reaction, a deep space event. A mystery, like dark matter. Light disappears into a black hole. We break apart and there is nothing to hold onto.

The wind howls and howls and howls.

On Mars the wind blows, too. The Perseverance is equipped with a microphone. A gust of wind blowing at five meters per second is the first recorded sound from Mars. The rover’s 10-trillion-hertz laser zaps at the planet’s surface to determine what it's made of.

We are there searching for signs of past life, past mistakes. 

To bring pieces of another place back to Earth.