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wanderingthedesertalone · 10 months

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Corona Alone a Diary Revisited: An American’s Experience of the Covid Lockdown in Mumbai

Lockdown In Retrospect

Mediocre Graces: In any case, by the end of the Pandemic, I had somewhat been restored to good graces, not that I was ever greeted in Anand Nagar(8) at least with the Atithi Devo Bhava(11) spirit, I got on the good side of the local gang and befriended a Muslim woman who sells fish in a roadside stall, but it was too late, lonesomeness and faithlessness in humanity had grabbed a hold of me. Sadly, I am no longer able to speak to the fish merchant. She married, her husband is conservative and doesn’t allow her to speak to men.

On Lonesomeness: It’s worth noting that many endured the Corona epidemic in complete isolation. According to The Wall Street Journal, 35.7 million Americans, including myself, lived alone (Byron) around the time of writing the first journal entry. However, not just did I live alone, I was an expat, I lived alone in Mumbai, India. Regardless of the negative stigma that goes along with living alone, solitude never bothered me, in fact, ever since I was divorced, in 2012, I’ve preferred to be alone. Besides, I could always grab a cup of coffee and talk to strangers, I have the gift of gab when needed, but the double-whammy of isolation and becoming a pariah had pushed me to the brink of insanity. I’ve come to believe that those things that don’t kill us make us weaker and since the Covid outbreak I’ve become impatient, nervous and have lost faith in humanity, as I’ve already said.

Too Much Fluff: In all, the NPR article is woefully misguided and simply tried to make a buck off of Covid lockdowns, like so many other news outlets were doing at the time. A better story would’ve been on those who live alone before the Pandemic, whether for reason of mental health, a willful solitude or social ineptitude, that chronicled each persons’ descent into madness; I despise fluff journalism, maybe because it reminds me of the way that Bollywood paints India as an endless serene landscape of humorous follies in love that can easily be overcome when it’s something else all together, not easily, or that I would like to, put into words. This isn’t just fluff, there’s comedy for sure, there’s humor in all tragedy but there’s a reason for sharing the gritty details of lockdown in India, I feel it’s important to share these stories lest we live them again! In the past year, I’ve filled 6 volumes with recollections of lockdown, I hoped to get them published by a newspaper, that failed.

Diary Excerpts and Commentary

A Note to the Reader: The following excerpts are from the journal of an expat living in Mumbai (recorded between Feb 2019 and Feb 2021), during Covid lockdown(1). Dates have been replaced with titles because, unless indicated in commentary or prose, they’re irrelevant:

It Begins: There’s a few cases of Covid in China and other places but I’m not too worried, this will have as much effect on me as the 2003 SARS outbreak(6), there’ve been many such scares in my lifetime. Besides, I caught the virus from a wedding party in Sri Lanka, it was like the Flu, high fever, mild delirium and a little trouble breathing. Interesting thing about Sri Lanka, all of the land and wealth seems to be in the hands’ of the Nords, the locals have very little and the price of food is like that of America or Europe. Also, airport authorities took a child’s Queen Conch shell away right before boarding, she was clearly enamored by her seemingly magical wave machine. After they took it from her, she cried all the way back to Mumbai.

The Flasher: A few Covid cases have been confirmed and I’m beginning to feel like an unwelcome guest in a foreign land, an unusual notion in a land where the locals say “Atithi Devo Bhava(11).” Typically, Indians are hospitable, on my travels to the South they were, of course, taxi drivers tried to scam me there, but cabbies the world over are a special breed of scum, you should’ve seen the way they took me to the wringer in Hong Kong, hospitality is a source of national pride here. This afternoon, there was a knock on the door, it was my landlord. I found myself baffled by what he said. I opened the door and he began to speak, timidly and slowly in broken English: “there’s been a complaint,” he said. “What’s wrong?” “A man is walking around outside naked.” “Oh, I see. Thanks for informing me,” I said and shut the door, believing that he was telling me of a dangerous predator lurking among this slum’s numerous tightly knit alleys at night. Later, I came to find that the landlord was attempting to tell me that the neighbors had accused me of going on moonlit strolls in the buff, I was the predator. I was shocked and enraged when I found that I was, according to gossip, a flasher, but consoled myself by telling myself that none of this is the landlord’s fault, he just wants to prevent other tenants from rioting. People are scared and looking to point a finger at an invisible assailant. This will be forgotten quickly and my name restored, I guess it’s not contradictory to be both hospitable and two-faced. Why do I care about my reputation in a slum? I don’t want any trouble.

Last Days of Freedom: Worry has set in, even chain restaurants no longer accept cash, not from me at least, I tried to buy something to eat with good ol’ paper money at McDonald’s and they refused to serve me. Worse luck, as the Chinese say. I’m working on a project here and I’m paid in cash, so credit isn’t something I have access to. This doesn’t just affect me, a large portion of the population is paid, untaxed of course, in cash and most likely doesn’t have a bank account. Also, everywhere I go my temperature is taken.

Days of Optimism: Lockdown began, I went to get groceries for the 2 days that we are told we must shelter in place and plan to go to bed early. There was hoarding and ransacking of shelves at the local grocer, but I’m sure that it’s just hysteria and this whole thing will end soon. Another interesting thing happened at the store today, two women got in a fight over the last box of cookies, the first woman, a pudgy mother with a bad attitude towards everyone that I had had the bad luck of having a few encounters with before, used to admonish me saying “smoking is a bad addiction,” I wagged my finger and said “sugar is a bad addiction,” laughing my way out of the store. It was the first time I’ve laughed in days, I’ve been in a daze, everything is quickly changing and feels so dire. The fowl woman, she lost the battle and the box of cookies. A word about change, I’m often told that nothing changes in this little hamlet and I believe it. It’s hyperbole, things change here, but slowly, there’s digital gadgets for sale, but there are also oxcarts that sell food and other remnants of the past. It’s not that nothing changes, It’s that time seems to go by slower here, like the locals heartbeat at a slower pace. I always feel rushed but they take as much time as the seasons.

Two Days In: The two days passed, but lockdown continues, the food I bought didn’t last. Even worse, I wasn’t informed that lockdown part 2 had begun without the first installment ending, I slept through the grocery shopping time, 6AM. I snuck out for an evening walk despite lockdown, 2 interesting things happened on my covert walk, I saw many others outside as well, they all spoke of the cow that wandered into the open air temple that’s adjacent to my apartment complex, some are feeding here, even the Muslims, having taken up many of the folk traditions of the Hindus they live among, agree that a sickly heifer wandering into the temple is a good omen, the other interesting thing, The Green Eyed Lady (an Indian with green eyes) made me some Khichdi(24). There were also Chinese in Haiden, Beijing, a district home to many Russians, who have green eyes. Isn’t genetic splendid? In any case, the woman asked me if I had eaten, usually more of a salutation than invitation here, I said “no,” so she brought me a bite to eat. The food supposedly heals the sick.

Big Changes in a Little Town: Since implementation of the Janata(5) Curfew, many continue to sit along alleys in large groups or participate in sports, not wearing masks(4). Yet, as I walk enroute to purchase groceries, these intrepid individuals say “here comes Corona” and cover their faces with their dupatta(7) or a handkerchief. This change of attitude towards me is, although slight, I’ve always had my fans and detractors here, is palpable. Maybe it’s just my nerves. Before lockdown, I sometimes played Teen Patti(19) with neighbors at least, never understood the rules though. Anyway, the shelter-in-place decree will be lifted on Passover, this must be a good omen, not that I sincerely believe in such things, I think to myself and reiterate my resolution to weather the storm in Mumbai. One concern about the transmission of Covid, Indians don’t have a sense of proximity, they always crowd.

One Good Deed: The endless bad news has left me exhausted. A few thoughts before bed, having lived in other parts of Asia and meeting many people from Europe, India is like America in one way, heterogeneity. It’s a type of melting pot, not a melting pot of strangers from far off lands but a mixture of old kingdoms, who have their own languages and cultures, forced under one, possibly too small, umbrella. Adding it up, Indian society, due to its long history, caste system and numerous religions is exceedingly complex, for example Muslims created the first free public institutes of higher learning, yet in some regards they’re treated like would-be separatists (Khurshid). Thinking about the day’s event, I sit on the small broken cot that’s my bed, I have to get this fixed soon, it’s interesting, the cost of handwork is very cheap here, in the US, anything that artisan might do is expensive and it’s more cost effective just to throw the old away. I’m reminded of this Chinese woman I met in Beijing, she told me “I’m not Han(23).” “Interesting, which ethnic group do you belong to?” “I’m Miao.” “Is there anything unique about the Miao?” “We don’t eat dogs. All Chinese people are the same, we are one people, the only difference between Han and Miao is that we don’t eat dogs.” I was teaching adult English at the time for extra income. India is more like America than China or Europe, diversity is endless.

Anand Nagar Has a New Song: The decree wasn’t lifted. Another day, thousands more Covid cases and locals have begun to shout “go home Corona!” Despite the taunts, I’m staying where I am. I don’t have much of a choice, there aren’t any flights anyway, the airports, in a panic, have shut down, everything, with a mere 2 day warning, has come to a grinding halt. I guess this isn’t merely more sensational media. Besides, the situation is becoming bleaker in the US and airports are havens for communicable diseases, they pack people in, from all over the world, like sardines. Have you ever seen the projected distribution of an epidemic? It all starts with airports. Resolute that this virus will blow over, I buckle down for the Summer of Corona in India.

Foreigners Have it Too: Nothing good has come from lockdowns so far, it has fostered hysteria, mob mentality, greed and anti-foreigner sentiment. This “City of Dreams,” has become a nightmare! The nation has fallen into the clutches of fear of contracting the virus from a foreign national. Hysteria, I tell you! I only hope that this all ends soon. Despite an anti-foreigner hysteria, according to The World Health Organization there are a total of 1637 people infected by Covid-19, a mere 49 of which are aliens(3) (The WHO). Yet, the locals blame it all on Tablighi Jamaat(13)(BBC), why not? Trump is calling this outbreak “The China Virus.” The borders have closed, looks like I’m staying here for a while, I didn’t plan on leaving anyway. Besides, there’s talk of easing restrictions. Back to the human condition, I had always been considered an outsider here, I had always been greeted with mocking and mistrust, to some degree, but there were those who accepted me. The first day I arrived the children called me names and adults mimicked the way I speak with derisive tones and gestures, I guess imitation is the highest form of flattery? I despise epigrams, I really do.

Nostalgia for Slightly Better Days: Before lockdown, there was a woman with a fish tattoo on her arm who often invited me to play cards but I shied away from her after neighbors had told me that she “accuses people of rape to blackmail them for money.” I don’t usually listen to gossip but wanted to play it safe. Other than that, I was at least invited to weddings, funerals and dances during the Graba(22) celebration. Funny story, the first year I refused to dance, a man jokingly told me that if I dance with a girl I have to marry her. I didn’t actually believe him, I’m not that gullible, I’m just not fond of Indian music. Back to the present, it’s not the time for nostalgia, although I can’t think of a better pastime right now, maybe if foreigners in India practice social distancing, unlike the locals, they won’t catch the virus and the stigma will dissolve. The other night I went for a walk just to break the monotony of watching time go by and hoping the world would heal. This morning, I was again accused of perverse behaviors by my landlord. I wasn't walking the alleyways naked, but I am being watched. On the walk, locals barred the alley and told me “no foreigners allowed.” Yet, they daily gather to play Cricket while sentinels watch for cops so that they can quickly disperse.

There’ Gestapos In This Movie Too: I guess I should mention something good too. Lockdown has caused a sort of hush here and now daily I can hear the sound of an infant being bathed through the one tiny window my studio apartment has. Through the 4 foot square aperture I can hear the infant laughing as warm water rushes over it. I now hope that things will return to the way they were before, just subpar not “holy crap the world is on fire and we are all going to die!” A combination of police and concerned citizens, working with the police, now stand along the main road with bamboo canes in hand. They remind me of stories my grandfather told of the Gestapo. Both are poised for violence. The police, they resound the sentiment of the concerned citizens, ridicule the foreigner. Now, I usually get an escort, something that is only afforded to me, to stop “roaming” as I go to get essentials. There are now dots painted on the sidewalk, we are supposed to stand on them to ensure social distancing, the locals don’t obey this. If I do the same, I’m informed, thwack would go the cane. I’ve begun to see in black and white, not metaphorically but literally, I feel as though I’m watching a movie about a distant authoritarian time. The brutalist architecture(24) is reminiscent of Russia and North Korea, it doesn’t take much imagination for the arabesque attributes to obscure. I haven’t slept much.

Building a Wall: This hamlet is bluffed by a river by a river on one side with a small foot bridge for crossing into Neilam Nagar. The police have blockaded the entrance to the crossing and are building a wall to, I believe, keep the several hundred thousand impoverished residence of this hamlet trapped like mice on a sinking ship. I truly fear the wall, perhaps it’s because of my education, having been forced to read the line ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall(20),’ throughout school, it’s almost a national anthem. Walls and golf courses have always seemed as despicable things to me. Neither the rich nor the influential politicians are suffering the same as we are in the slums. They play golf in their gated communities…

The First Stone Tossed: As the situation in India worsens, so do the jeering. Now, a few individuals throw rocks at me, a tactic usually reserved for thwarting the region’s menacing wild dogs, as I venture into the ever more dangerous streets at the permitted time, 6AM, to get essentials, in an attempt to diffuse their frustrations over the region’s spreading epidemic. Yet, returning to the political quagmire that is America keeps me hopeful that sheltering in Mumbai will become easier. Rocks tossed or not, I’m staying in place. Oddly, despite not eating much, I’m gaining weight, it must be stress. Supplies have run thin, some are hoarding and there’s talk of a 2 week prohibition on supply trucks entering Anand Nagar.

Insomnia: Depression has set in and money has mostly ran out. Immediately before lockdown, I was given a promotion but as of yesterday, the company I worked for has permanently shut their doors. I’ve just now realized that I haven’t left my house, let alone gotten out of the broken cot for days. I look at the clock, it’s 5:50 AM, the allotted time for shopping. Getting groceries at dawn isn’t a matter of waking at dawn; I haven’t slept in days either, just sat on this cot watching time go by. Insomnia is starting to take a toll, I’m beginning to hallucinate, time has lost all meaning, at times days go by in minutes yet other times, minutes last for a small eternity. It has been days since I’ve had a face to face conversation with another human.

Home Invaders: Somewhat dazed, I sit on my bed contemplating the meaninglessness of time when there’s nothing to do. Jolted from my daydream-like state, there’s a pounding sound on the door. The sound is getting louder. I hear shouting. The words come into focus, “foreigner, we’re coming in! We’re breaking the door down,” says the unfamiliar voices. I spring to my feet and bolt the door. The pounding becomes more and more rapid and fear takes a hold of me. But then I hear a familiar voice, the voice of my neighbor, she shouts something in Marathi and the marauders leave. I fall into a sleep and don’t wake for 2 days. Food was cut off for 2 weeks, I had to get a bite to eat from the Hanuman Mandir(18). They handed out plates of rice and lentils.

Vigilantes: Days go by and panic worsens among residents of this Mumbai chawl(8). Due to rising fears, vigilantes begin to safeguard the streets from “roaming.” These sentinels attempt to impose restrictions of their own device on me: they inform me that I am not permitted to walk along certain roads because they are afraid that I carry the virus, this happened once before on a late night walk but now it’s the norm, although I’m merely in search of a store to buy necessities and wearing a mask. In the end, these vigilantes won’t cause a reduction in hanging out on the street, this I know, but a few of this slum’s inhabitants get to feel empowered because they are the new sheriff in town. I guess we all need a whipping-post and there’s good among the wicked, a local temple and a few individuals are handing out grains to the needy. We are all needy here. At this point, the lockdown has gone on for months.

The New sheriffs in Town: Currently, there’s two police along Mumbai’s backstreets, those who were given authority by the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MNC) and vigilantes. Feeling harassed and completely rejected by society, loneliness takes hold of me, I begin to search for a way out of this “city of dreams,” maybe returning home while a buffoonish leader (Trump) who makes a mockery of the US isn’t so bad, I think to myself. All things considered, it’s nearly impossible to abide by laws set by both the government and a hysteric mob anyway.

No Payment Until April: At least I have a roof over my head, I think to myself, an article in Aljazeera, Foreign Tourists Face Hostility in India Amid Coronavirus Panic informs that an Israeli woman was evicted from her home in Goa due to locals fear of contracting COVID-19 and others were forced out of their hotel (Purohit), I can go a day without milk, but not without a bed, not to mention, the police had recently found tourists living in a cave because they are trapped in India and have ran out of money (NBC). I haven’t yet been evicted, but am also out of funds and live under constant threat of eviction. Rent payment is suspended until April (Delhi High Court). I lay on my broken cot, I will try to get it fixed on the black market, and continue to doom-scroll taking note of the day’s death tally and searching for any sign of things getting better. Passover has passed but Covid hasn’t.

Nobody Goes Home for That Price: I do some research and come to find that the US Department of State is offering “repatriation flights,” these flights carry a $2000 price tag (a promissory note for the aforementioned amount must be signed before boarding the plane) and a random port of arrival is where I’ll end up if I choose to return home through the ever so benevolent government, how can anyone pay this price during a Pandemic (this thing has been upgraded to a Pandemic, how lovely words are). Upon arriving at this port, the returning expat must find their way home through barricades and the threat of being infected by Corona (Genter). I harden my heart and again resolve to weather the storm in Mumbai. Besides, if the promissory note isn’t paid, I will be banned from international travel. I’m a Digital Nomad. I travel, work at an incredibly low rate and can only afford to survive in developing countries.

August’s Heat: The death toll jets upward and 75 degree angle, it’s updated daily. While bombarded with an endless stream of bad news, jeering has morphed into threats of violence, sleep is still a rare occurrence, heat rash has caused the parts of my body covered by clothing to become as freckled as Little Orphan Annie, I’m as poor to boot, my field of vision is filled sprawling geometric patterns and my temper is quick.

Worse Than the Daughters of Temperance: As the situation thickens, stores begin to deny me service. A shopkeeper refuses to sell me certain items that are in stock and we aren’t barred from sale, I have just been informed that liquor and tobacco have become contraband. The more than nagging need to satiate addictions during lockdown aside, this proprietor allows Indian nationals to purchase products, but denies me the same goods. He’d have me starve to death! I, like all outsiders, have become the face of a faceless virus that has ruined lives, in fact “Muslims were initially blamed for the spread of infection (Siddiqui),” a group that is no less a part of India than Sikhs(10), yet, like Jews anywhere in the world, are perpetual outsiders. All things considered, this is mass hysteria! Nobody I know has died from Covid yet. A sampling error? Perhaps. Nonetheless, I sit in my room without a breeze (I don’t have A/C) and ponder what society has come to, Freud’s mob mentality.

They’re Trying to Starve Me Out: That shopkeeper has changed his mind, I returned to him to buy groceries but he yelled “go away foreigner white face.” He then insisted that a clerk not give me an old box, although I was carrying a heavy load and had no tote. The hypocrisy of people here is an in the face classism, a rule for me and a rule for them. The Covid cases are increasing exponentially! So are my headaches. They’re not headaches as much as a feeling that every nerve ending in my body is being prodded with a needle and the inside of my brain shrinking. Now, I sit at home alone, the rats scurry across the floor, the heat comes in waves, time stands still and there’s nothing to laugh about, Covid cases are in the hundred thousands and the death toll is staggering as well.

Befriending the Gang: August’s heat, insomnia, constant dread and lack of nutrition are getting to me, I don’t know how much longer I can go on. Even local pharmacists have begun to convey a fear of me and insist that I have a cough when I go in to ask for something for heat rash. Unlike the grocers, the pharmacists sell me goods, but with great hesitation and suspicion in regards to my presence in this chawl. Finding tobacco is now the chief task of every day. It’s sold on the black market, along with chocolate, alcohol and meat, at exorbitant prices. So, like a heroin addict, I slink up to a back alley leant-to and buy a pack of smokes. It’s just like buying illicit drugs: there’s an obligatory period of making small-talk, ambiguity over whether or not the man actually has tobacco, razzing, phone calls and scurrying about to find it. In the end, I walk away with cigarettes at European prices and a dirty feeling.

Suicide Among Death: Lockdown continues and most in this chawl have lost morale. The neighbor sent her son over to tinker on my electric piano. She told me of what has been dubbed The Flower House Girl. A young woman hung herself from rafters due to endless confinement to her home and the bleak picture of tomorrow that the daily news paints. What a shame! I had wondered what the fire department was doing on the main street. They took her out of the third story window with the truck’s ladder.

Another Year Another Onion: Did I mention it’s a New Year? I didn’t even notice that the year had changed, the date passed unceremoniously and with festivities. Again, the police have rebuilt the wall that surrounds this chawl, tightening the perimeter, I’m not sure if it’s to keep Covid out or us in. In any case, food has scarcely made it through the makeshift wall and news is that food supplies will be cut off for 2 weeks, again. In any case, that which makes it in is mostly sequestered by the gangs, anyhow. It’s that I’ve got the most onions mentality(12). Despite rarely eating, I continue to gain weight. Speaking of onions, there are now over nine million confirmed Covid cases and farmers are protesting the price gouging of seeds, stating that “We are the ones who have provided food, milk, vegetables when the whole country was in lockdown, we were still toiling in the fields. It is the government” not gathering in New Delhi “that has put us at risk by introducing these laws during Covid (Hollingsworth et al).” My heart is with these brave men and women and if I had the strength I would be beside them. All things considered, despite the news and friends’ proclamations that a new year brings new hope, this may be an onion of a year too.

The Walls Close In: Yet again, the police have reduced the circumference of the wall. I feel claustrophobic or like I’m slowly, very slowly drowning. I go to bed, but sleep doesn’t come. I hear the rats fight over the last morsels of food in this chawl, when I wake, there’s inevitably a rodent corpse on the footpath in the ally that leads to my house. Food has been cut off for 2 weeks. I gave the last of my supplies to a family, in total it amounted to a pound of rice and a pound of lentils. Now, the cot is less of a fishing net with big holes and more of an empty frame. I lay on the floor instead, will I be able to get somebody to fix it, I don’t know. I have to get my family to send money first.

An Altercation: We are now allowed an evening walk, so I venture out to the usual chants, a ragtag team of would-be thugs follow me. A wave of exhaustion washes over me and my pace slows to a crawl in front of the BJP(14) Office. As I cross in front of the office, beneath the flag, a scrawny slum-bastard walk up and says “are you British?” “I’m American,” I reply. “I hear they call you Hari(15).” I can smell the alcohol on his breath as he speaks. “What of it?” “More like Harry Potter.” “I guess that’s funny,” I say and try to walk away, but he grabs me by the collar and takes a swing, he misses. I return the blow, my fist makes contact with his face. My heart is racing. I fear an all out retaliation when, like roaches from beneath rot-wood, members of the local gang emerge from the alleys and come to my aid. I had been buying tobacco from them, at highway robbery prices for weeks, and so it’s in their interest to act as my vigilante guardians, in some regards, the gangs are better than the police, or at least their corruption and self service is laid out on the table for all to see, where the cops are supposed to protect and serve, protecting and serving often isn’t the case here, it comes down to ethnic and caste schisms.

Two Deaths and a Ghost: It’s another day and the death toll has spiked again. Feeling that I escaped death and death being the only thing the news reports on I begin to wonder, had I been killed by a mob, would my death have been reported as a Covid death? Is the death toll real? There’s a little hospital in this chawl, it’s certainly not inundated with the dying and morticians don’t walk the streets singing “bring out your dead,” as they did during the Black Plague of 1665. In fact, of the 3 who purportedly died in Anand Nagar, one was an elderly with Emphysema, the other was a suicide and the last one, I saw him walking down the street the other day, risen from the grave as by some Covid era miracle. Truth be told, he had gone back to his family home and returned. Not an easy task, much like during the Holocaust, traveling papers are required to go anywhere, there’s not even any trains, minus a few for displaced workers. A combination of lack of food, a growing mistrust of the government’s intention with regards to lockdown and dire times brings these lyrics to mind: My wife fixed up a tater stew/ We poured the kids full of it/ Mighty thin stew, though/ You could read a magazine right through it. Always have figured/ That if it’d been just a little bit thinner, Some of these here politicians/ Coulda seen through it(21).

Are the politicians duped or am I? What about herd immunity? I feel like I’m living in the Dust Bowl, except there’s no storm of dust and the sky isn’t black. The enemy is invisible. Or, am I the enemy? So much for relativism.

Police and Indians: On another outing, again attempting to purchase essentials, those things that whether for sustenance or pleasure, an invisible hand has decided that I may indulge in, I find that even local authorities seem misinformed about the number of foreign nationals in India with Covid. Recently, police stopped me for questioning and informed me that “foreigners are the cause of Corona Virus.” After looking for a quarantine stamp on my hands several times and not finding one they insisted that I run back home and followed me on motorcycles. This was witnessed by several locals who cheered the police on. As the police resounded sentiments of this chawl’s inhabitants, it reinforced negative feelings. I didn’t eat that night. The days following the police harassment, locals continued jeering me by saying “the police will come and hit you,” while mimicking the thwack of a cane on their posterior. Not just are they misinformed, they’d like to see me hung.

Read the Sign: In case you feel incredulous in regards to my claims about placing a stamp on the hands of foreigners and the police’s blindingly Orwellian allegiance to the BJP, the party who blamed Covid on Muslims and foreigners, The National Library of Medicine has this to say about it: tourists who arrived in India from affected countries were put in quarantine for 14 days in their port of arrival, their “left hand was stamped with ink” to maintain the date and time of their home quarantine, “a move that could risk assault, due to stigma towards Covid suspects [foreigners].” Individuals violating the quarantine can be penalized via Indian penal code Section 188, 269 and 270 (Siddiqui). The police, like the locals, are looking for a whipping-post and have a draconian view about foreign nationals in India during this crisis, what a hoot it would be to cane them. Bollywood is no “City of Dreams,” in fact, misinformation abounds here, signs, obviously posted by Conservative and nationalistic Hindu Vegans, reads as so: ‘Ways to avoid Covid/ Don’t eat meat/ Don’t smoke/ Don’t talk to foreigners.’ I no longer see the good that I jotted down in an earlier journal entry. Also, tired of the word “misinformation,” not sure who gets to decide what’s misinformation, although I myself used it in this entry, just tired: days crawl by and the feeling of isolation causes a pressure on my cranium and a meaninglessness to all things.

Mending a Bed: Despite having become a pariah, I was able to get the cot fixed, for a small fee, a tailor was willing to come over, and work against the law, they despise me, but like money enough to look past it. The work doesn’t look great, it’s rigged. Most everything here is rigged. I’m never sure if this is the ingenuity of a race of impoverished people or the result of an attitude that declares good enough is good. In the end, most everything is a hodgepodge of corrugated steel, broken bits of wood and rope with exposed electrical wires that run through water and the elements in general. I’ve always said, if the manpower here became a collected force and decided to stop pollution, get the rivers clean, enforce something like an ADA, demand fair housing they would be an unstoppable force. Instead, they divide themselves along ethnic schisms.

A Pickpocket: Food has returned to the stores and shopkeepers are serving me, but I was pickpocketed at the register. I took my wallet out to pay, right before my eyes a man reached in my wallet and took a 500 out, it was the last of the money I had. I came home empty handed. For the first time since my divorce, I broke down and cried. Now I sit wiping my eyes. Is all hope for humanity lost? I cannot answer. Besides Covid, there’s so much political turmoil! It looks as though there won’t be a smooth transition of power this time.

What I’ve Learned From the Steppenwolf: I’m concerned for the nation’s migrant workers, other visiting foreign nationals and those who descend from Mizoram and Assam, these individuals may be more prone to the psychological effects of loneliness than myself. Culturally, Indian life centers around an extended family, whereas I’m more akin to Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. All in all, it’s tough to live overseas in the best case scenario and down-right depressing when you’ve become public enemy number one. But, as I said, I have a tough enough skin to survive this, but there are those who’ve been cannibalized by their own society. Anyway, lockdown should end in 3 weeks, the infection rate is on the decline. We are now aloud out in the evenings and I have taken to sitting with friends in front of the Rukhmini(16) Temple. It’s like the opening line of a joke, a Jew, a Muslim and a Hindu… Among us, there’s a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian and a Hindu priest. All in all, I need them not, but it’s nice to have some companionship, even if there’s little communication. I have returned to good graces.

Family Matters: Although I feel alone, I’m not jealous of India’s family structure. Locals often ask me about my family, casual things like “how is your mother?” “I don’t know. I don’t keep in touch with my family very much,” I respond. It’s a matter of privacy and staying out of gossip. Here, grown men never grow up, they are fed and coddled by their mothers. I had recently met a man who can’t cook for himself, nor wash his own clothes and still occasionally sleeps in bed with his mother. Speaking of men, spouse abuse, along with drinking, is on the rise. It’s not uncommon to see and hear it. Too often, after dark, I witness, when I sneak out for a walk to break the munatiny, men hitting women by the open air temple that my house is adjacent to. Speaking of temples, Hanukkah recently passed. I lit a makeshift menorah, but even that gave me little joy. As for now, the best thing is drinking chai by the little Rukmini temple.

Down With the Wall: The wall has come down! Lockdown isn’t over, but the wall has come down. Alas, air travel has returned, the government has announced “air bubbles” and I’m returning to America. After everything, I was never again treated as more than a second-class citizen in that chawl but it matters not, I’m leaving! In the end, the locals’ reaction to me and the psychological impact of the loneliness, their words and actions heave upon me, have caused deep scars. On a more disappointing note, all local newspapers have declined to publish my recollections of lockdown. An earnest question, were we fed false dichotomies, ones that stated wear a mask or everyone dies and get the vaccine or everyone dies, just for some political experiment or agenda? It’s just odd that after the farmers protested the Covid number began to decrease.

Integrity Intact

No Amnesty for the Wicked: One might say, you’ve survived the worst, why bring this up at all? Isn’t it time for amnesty? I feel the answers to this was best put into words in the video Pandemic Amnesty: Do you Forgive and Forget and so I will summarize what the author said, “there were things that happened that there needs to be a recognition of, and there needs to be a public apology. There needs to be a promise that this never happens again. There needs to be people who actually pay for their behavior, potentially criminal behavior. […] Until the people who did harm admit that they did harm this kind of thing will just keep repeating itself. […] Some people were victims, other people were perpetrators, and then there [were] also enablers (Wand).” For instance, The Deccan Herald reports that there have been “attacks on people from India’s northeastern region […], suspecting them of being carriers of the virus.” Assaulting your own people is like cannibalism, that’s all there is to it! As it was written in the newspaper, apart from being called “Corona” or “Chinki(9)” India’s [Asiatic] people were spat on and forcibly quarantined, despite showing no Covid symptoms, all because of their looks and an ignorant fear that anyone who looks different are the root cause of the Pandemic. Also, they were denied entry into their apartment complexes, evicted, merely threatened with eviction or forced out of restaurants to make others comfortable and none wanted to share transport with them (Karmakar). Of all things, it’s not time for amnesty.

Ignorance isn’t an Excuse: There needs to be punishment for these wicked deeds! There’ll be no retribution for foreigners who suffered in India, but locals, those from minority communities, who had just days before lockdown been upstanding citizens, deserve retribution and possibly reparations. There those who died from the virus and those who died at the selfishness and ignorance of mankind, for those who died by the hand of man have this to say: “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time ( Elie Wiesel).” Ignorance, for good reason, has never been, nor shall it be an excuse for breaking laws and committing atrocities. The Atlantic is wrong in their assertion that we should just forgive and forget (Oster). Perhaps, in the name of healing, it’s time to forgive, but should never forget!

A Clear Conscience: During The Covid Outbreak, I may have lost my mind, found myself in complete isolation and on the brink of starvation at times, but at least I kept my dignity. I threw no stones and attempted to obey the laws, even those that actively brought hardship into my life. I defended myself when needed, I live by the adage “walk gently and carry a big stick.” As for the war of the ethnicities in India, I guess it’s none of my business, alone, I can’t defend the minorities. And in regards to retribution for the wicked, my hands are also tied. However, I won’t give amnesty, not in my heart. Forgetting and moving on, as Oster’s article suggests (Oster) is, to reiterate, akin to allowing the cycle to repeat again. In the end, my travels have provided me with armor to protect against cabin fever, I’ve endured hardships and loneliness in remote villages of Nepal and have been “the stranger” in the metropolitans of Hong Kong, Bangladesh… But there are those among the Indians whose identity and self-worth come from a tightly knit family and friend structure, many of which took their own lives due to isolation. Others starved to death because of lack of income and others died due to the rejection of medical services. Luckily, I was not immune to the effects of isolation, but well insulated from the threat of Corona by a chawl that exists off the radar and societies’ fear of foreigners, local inhabitants keep me at arm’s length and so, I didn’t catch the virus during lockdown.

Notes

1: The views herein are not the of WTDA but the author. At WTDA we publish a variety of news, depending on what we deem to be an interesting story at the moment.

2: At the time of writing, Covid hadn’t yet been declared a Pandemic.

3: Citation no longer available at The World Health Organization.

4: The author of this journal wants it to be known that they don’t, nor did they ever, believe that masks are/were an effective way of preventing Covid-19 but were forced to wear a face covering by Indian law. At the time, they obeyed the law.

5: Public.

6: Hyped media, having no real effect on the life of the author.

7: A long scarf worn by Indian women.

8: The Marathi word for neighbourhood which is colloquially used to denote a slum.

9: North Indian slang for India’s Asiatic population.

10: A religion that combines attributes of Islam and Hinduism and originated in India.

11: Guests are G-D.

12: In 2019, due to flooding, there was an onion shortage. An entrepreneur had been hoarding onions. At the time, not only did he declare that “onions are the new gold” he purportedly sold the onions for 3 times the market value. To the author, it serves as a symbol of the selfish psychological state that caused some of the worst aspects of Covid lockdown.

13: A 3 day Islamic spiritual event in India’s capital hosted by a 100 years Islamic Missionary Movement. Due to the cases reaching over 300 after the event, the meme was coined: China is the “producers” of the virus, and Muslims are the “distributors.”

14: A political party, of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the leader of. Every neighborhood has a BJP office.

15: A common male name in India and regional pronunciation of the Anglo name Harry.

16: The primary wife of the Hindu G-D Krishna.

17: The name of the slum in which the writer lived during lockdown.

18: A temple in the slum in which the foreigner lived during lockdown. The temple is dedicated to the monkey G-D, a deity who helped Rama in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana.

19: A poker-like card game in which the players make melds with three cards.

20: Mending Wall by Robert Frost.

21: Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues by Woodie Guthrie.

22: A dance form native to the west Indian state of Gujarat, performed in October to honour the Hindu Goddess Durga. It is also celebrated in Maharashtra. People gather on the streets, dancing in pairs of men and women where they rhythmically click sticks together.

23: The largest ethnic group in mainland China, about 91% of the population.

24: A South Indian dish made of rice and lentils. It’s a comfort food that’s supposed to aid in healing.

25: Brutalist architecture emerged during the 1950s in the United Kingdom, among the reconstruction projects of the post-war era.These buildings characterised by minimalism and bare building materials. They are commonly seen today in old Soviet Union countries and Central Asia, reminding many of totalitarianism.

#lockdown #travelogue #Covid-19 #memoir #India #autobiography #travel #online diary #memories of Covid #Pande #coronavirus #pandemic #mumbai #maharashtra #expatliving #overseas #police #mob mentality

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samanthasgone · 1 year

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#zak bagans #zak bagans drama #ghost adventures #zak vs nick vs dakota #nick groff #dakota laden #paranormal lockdown #destination fear #paranormal community #travel channel #travel channel plus #jeffree star #paranormal #twitter post #my twitter post #my tweets

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ophiliaclement · 1 year

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octopath will really have some of the most haunting music imaginable. and then have it completely drown out the voice acting and the peaking mics.

#octopath traveler #octopath traveler ii #ori i love you but....ough #no hate or anything this was obviously made during lockdown / home working #but still .......

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tracle0 · 8 months

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Previous - here First - here

Thanks for reading!

#crow comic #art #artist #artist on tumblr #original comic #original art #well hey folks that's it well done you got to the end!#it's corny and cheesy and I had no idea where it was going but it sure did end #fun fact this. Was not actually graded #it was meant to be and I busted my ass to get it done on time #working during lockdown and routinely where my class mates just did No Work At All #and then JUST as I finished this page. My teacher was like btw the exam board isn't marking anything past the lockdown starting :)#so. that was cool. But I still like the comic #sorry it took so long to post I went travelling halfway through the release times so things got wonkly #but it's all here now!

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pepprs · 1 year

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#to translate this post: someone liked this post i made (on the upper left) on AUGUST 28 having a moment of self awareness that i was running #away from my whole life and not moving or learni ng to drive or anything. it is now march 8. it has been almost 7 months. and i have made #basically zero progress. and there is nothing stopping me but me. i could read the drivers manual and whatever whenever i want. but i am not #doing anything. and i don’t know how to get myself to start.#purrs #i know it’s a cop out excuse but i truly do think it’s covid. i think being in lockdown for a year and a half made me just let go of any #sense of progress. made me scared to take steps forward. and i mean i did bc i lived on campus for a while after that but it’s like.. EVERY #part of my life is stagnant rn it seems. and it’s not just me it’s my siblings too. we’re all getting older but none of us is trying to move #out or gain our independence in any way and my brother isn’t even looking for jobs even though he needs one. we’re all just getting older #but we’ve lost (or maybe had knocked out of us by covid and our mom being so strict) any sense of moving ipward and spreading our wings.#forgotten we have wings at all. and ive done important things like going on a house tour or traveling with my besties (<3). but i have only #made it to page 8 of the drivers manual and i truly do not want to read the rest of it. i have only been on one house tour and im longing to #move out but how much am i really because i can’t bring myself to schedule another tour and start searching for a new home in earnest.#i just come home every day UTTERLY exhausted and spend all my free time trying to process or rest. and im not making room for myself to use #my wings. and it’s truly terrible. why are we all okay with living like this. my younger self would be HORRIFIED if she saw how much i had a #atrophied since graduating and moving back home. my brighton self would be HORRIFIED. i told myself i wouldn’t and then it’s exactly what i #did. and ik im being harsh and ive spread my wings in some important ways during this time but… these are so obvious. such low hanging #fruit in some ways. bc any 16 year old can take this test and pass it so why can’t i at 24? why won’t i let myself? dont i want a nice cozy #home i make my own where i can eat what i want and sleep when i want and have control over sounds? then why am i not running for it?#delete later #i am wasting my youth i am wasting my youth i am wasting my youth 🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑 my one precious life 😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃#also LMFAOOOOO the next tag on that aug 28 post was that i need to get a new campus id card… guess who hasn’t done that either ♥️

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ravenpuffheadcanons · 1 year

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and the darkness comprehended it not

Here we are - bits and pieces of my story for @inklings-challenge (both late and incomplete, I’m sorry!). If this story had stayed at the length it was intended to be, I might have finished it, but it grew until it became the first glimpse of a universe I think I might want to explore in something much longer. I at least want to finish the story, given that I have mostly written the sad parts at the start and not got to the excitement/vulnerability/hopefulness of making new friends when you’ve been lonely for so long that you think you’ve forgotten how!

I really enjoyed the challenge, even though I didn’t finish, and am looking forward to reading the other stories. My intention was to explore the perils of being self-reliant and cutting oneself off from others, contrasted with being in a community - I ended up using both light and bread as imagery, though to very different extents.

I think the simulated sunrises are the worst part of being in space, myself. Before I left I suppose I worried about the cramped quarters or the terrible algorithmic telly or the microgravity. It’s true that all those things grate. The ship makes a strange noise, as well, and that sometimes stops me from dropping off at night. I hadn’t anticipated that. But it’s the sunrises that do it for me. Oh, I know all the reasons they have to have them. In fact, assuming my memories are accurate - Earth memories feel unreliable somehow, though really it was only a few weeks ago that we left - I think it’s partly my work they’re using. Circadian rhythms, regular sleep-wake cycles, routine, melatonin and blood pressure and homeostasis. I know all the reasons they have to have them.

And they’ve done a beautiful job with them, too, the techs. Big windows in all the rooms, a fractionally different sunrise every day, times and views shifting subtly as the days slip past. They’re working from Earth data, data from all over the planet: simulated sunrises and sunsets are the closest thing to a replica Earth experience you can get anywhere on the ship. It’s certainly closer than the food. I believe they went with the times from central Peru in the end, after they reviewed upwards of a hundred options. Close enough to the equator that nobody has to endure the short, bleak days we used to experience closer to the poles; not so close that there’s no seasonal change. The best possible outcome for everybody. They’ve even adjusted climate controls so that the temperature increases slowly as the “sun” comes up. That used to be my favourite part of the day, walking to work across the park as the ground slowly warmed, and they’ve got it spot on. The perfect sunrise, statistically speaking - better than any you’d get on Earth. And I hate it. I watch them every morning and I hate every one. I couldn’t tell you why.

II.

Having a routine is important in circumstances like this. (Technically, that’s more of my research, though I don’t think anyone on this ship needs to read a paper to find out that bedtime matters. Brightest minds in a generation, etc). Anyway, I get up at 0600. I exercise until 0645, I shower, I eat breakfast, I head to work. I get to work at 0730 every day, and return at 1930. The work is interesting - more interesting than I had anticipated, actually. It works like this: everyone has regular check-ups with a physician - one of the requirements, since nobody has ever been in deep space for this long before - and I get fed all the data even vaguely connected to my field. I sit in my little lab watching MRIs, running blood samples, reading clinical reviews; a jack of all neurosciences. They would have liked a team, I think, but there were so few people who were willing to sign up to over a year in interstellar space. Until the ship docks on Kepler-452b, I’m really only doing data entry. Sophisticated data entry, for sure, but my dataset won’t be complete for at least a year. Eventually I’ll have the tools to sit down and analyse it, but for now I’m compiling data and developing theories about what this trip is doing to the inhabitants of this vessel.

Making everyone weird, mostly. Not really the kind of thing I can write in a paper. No patterns, not yet, not really: things are definitely changing, but I can’t tell if it’s the FTL travel or the microgravity or the sheer strangeness of everything. There are fractional changes in all the MRIs I’m sent. Nothing that I’m alarmed by. The physicians haven’t reported an increased incidence of mental health issues - not any more than would have been expected in a population of academics, nothing that hasn’t been reported in biospheres or the ISS - and there doesn’t seem to be anything dangerous going on.

(The good thing about this ship full of academic weirdos is that everyone wants to participate in my research. I would have killed for this kind of dataset on Earth. I think that’s hyperbole. I hope it’s hyperbole. Either way, I never dreamt of this: having an army of willing lab rats, people who actually want to be part of my little observational experiments, happily consenting to whatever data I want to get my hands on).

Anyway. All of this means that I know routines are important. My usual morning exercise is a walk - or a jog, if I’m feeling penned in - around the ship’s hydroponics bay. When we left the earth, it was still looking sketchy, and it’s true that I’ve been surviving mostly on rations since take-off. I had my first ship-grown radishes the other day, which was a relief after weeks of packet food - but it’s still getting off the ground. Still, though. It’s the closest to an outside space on this whole vessel, so every morning I walk through it and watch the simulated sunrise from its window. They leave a sort of psychological aftertaste - not an aftertaste, of course, but that’s the closest I can get to the sensation. The chemical sort of feeling I used to get after eating a cheap burger on Earth. I can’t seem to stop watching those sunrises anyway, though, no matter how hard I try.

III.

Do you remember what you were doing the day before we left the Earth? I don’t. Lots of people don’t. That’s one of the things I’ve seen notes in clinical reviews, over and over. It seems strange. We knew we were leaving our homes behind, probably forever. We knew this journey would be long and cold and dark; we knew - we still know - that the light at the end of the tunnel is not guaranteed. Why wasn’t that the prompt to make some final memories, to say goodbye? Perhaps it was and I have just forgotten - but I don’t think so. I don’t think this is a case of collective amnesia. Partly, of course, that’s because no cases have ever actually been verified and documented in the medical literature. (I suppose I do things every day now that were never verified or documented in the medical literature). Mostly, though, the people who do seem to have memories from that day aren’t claiming anything outrageous. There was a man recently - a few weeks ago, I think - who told me he spent that last morning defrosting his freezer. If untrue, it lacks imagination. If delusion - well, I’ve never heard of an hallucination so boring.

You know, there are nearly 300 people on this ship. Why do so few of us have fond memories of those last few days? It makes me sad when I think about it. All of us just floating in the middle of nowhere. Surely there are people on this ship who had families? People who miss their friends? Surely some of us had goodbye parties or walks in the woods or something before this grey floating existence. Maybe we self-selected for this mission because we were lonely.

IV.

The strangest thing just happened to me. I was in the kitchen making some tea when Tony came in. He nodded at me when he came in, so I nodded back, and he went over to his cubby.

He pulled out a lurid package of those individually wrapped honey buns. Awful stuff. I’ve never understood the appeal. If it can survive being shot across space, I don’t think it can possibly count as cake. Anyway, he took out a bun and unwrapped it, looked at it for a minute, looked at me, and then looked back at his hand. After a moment, he broke the cake in two in two and offered me half. No comment, just a little smile. Completely pointless, of course, for I have perfectly satisfactory rations, ones designed with my own tastes and nutritional needs in mind. Somehow, though, I found myself thanking him and accepting it. I sat down to eat it right there in the kitchen. He sat down and ate his half with me before getting up in silence and going about his day. I’d only gone in for a cuppa. And yet I feel better now. Palm oil and sugar and probably some sort of stabiliser; my mango jerky sits untouched in my cubby, though it would have done me much more good I am sure. Why do I feel so much better now?

My hands tighten around my mug. It’s freezing in the Hab - at least my brain tells me it is, although I don’t think it’s actually any colder than my bunk, and I’ve got a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. But I know that the planet is cold, much colder than Earth, so I shiver despite myself and take a grateful sip of tea. A noise at the door startles me, and I look up to see Tony and Esther coming in, hand-in-hand. I had expected to have the place to myself this morning, but somehow I don’t mind as they come to stand silently beside me, one each side. Tony, who seems to be literally incapable of seeing a person without feeding them, untucks one hand from my mug and pushes a buttered roll into it. He frowns at me until he sees me bite into it.

None of us are meant to be here, though I probably have the best excuse. My work doesn’t need to be prepared for transfer, after all - nothing particularly physical about it. Tony should be selecting the plants that he thinks have the best chance of survival in the planet-side hydroponics bay. Esther should probably be boxing up medication and taking inventory, though perhaps one of the other physicians is doing it. The ship docked behind us is a veritable hive of activity. I’m not quite sure why they’re here - I’ve never heard either of them complaining about the sunrises on board the ship. They can’t feel the same magnetic draw to this view that I do - this first sunrise in our new home.

Perhaps, I realise suddenly, they knew I would be here.

There isn’t time for me to ask, and I don’t know how I would do so anyway. Instead I hold my breath as Esther reaches behind me to flick off the lights in the Hab. Dawn is breaking.

It’s a pale imitation of the simulated sunrises. The sun itself - or the star, I suppose I should say - is tiny, slipping up over the horizon. There’s not much discernable change in temperature, and the light is blue-grey, not yellow. We’re at the edge of the habitable zone, and the plastic wall of the Hab is thick and slightly grainy. It is a much less impressive than the pink and red and gold that has been splashed across the window in hydroponics. And yet, as the dawn breaks, I feel my shoulders drop, my jaw relax. I haven’t realised until now how tense I have been holding myself.

“Well,” says Tony, and his voice sounds different to any time I have ever heard it. His usual joviality is gone entirely, replaced with something no less happy but somehow more serious. “How about that. Seems impossible, don’t it, after all those months in the dark?”

We haven’t really been in the dark for months. The ship is flooded with warm yellow light during the day, dimmed but not extinguished during the sleep shift. Esther usually corrects Tony when he makes trite statements like this, her voice sometimes edged with irritation, so I’m surprised to see her smile at him instead. Yet, before I can open my mouth to be the voice of reason, I am smiling too.

#inklings challenge #team lewis #imagery: light #imagery: bread #genre: space travel #i didn't mean to write a story about how horrible lockdown was but i guess that's what happened somehow #incomplete #lou writes #inklingschallenge #inklings challenge 2022 #team-lewis

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apparitionism · 2 years

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Run 9b

This story is nominally about how advances in running-shoe technology affect athletic competition. (It’s of course really about a Bering and a Wells.) Anyway, near the beginning—which was written in early 2020—I had a character speculate that the shoe companies putting all this new distance-running technology in place would eventually get to developing “skinny little cheat spikes” for shorter distances... and what a surprise, they did. Springy plates. Fancy foam. Super spikes. Et cetera. There’s been a spate of sub-four miles in the past year, and while a causal connection between such times and these new spikes hasn’t been definitively established, the correlation’s pretty strong. But who cares, right? Particularly since things might start happening on the Myka-and-Helena-begin-to-mend-fences front... that is, if Myka can nimbly navigate a minefield of a conversation with Dan Badger... and truly make up her mind about a few things... anyway none of this makes sense without the context of part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7a, part 7b, part 8, and part 9a.

Run 9b

“I’m grateful to you,” Badger said to Myka as she stood once again in his office.

“I’m glad I was able to help,” Myka said. “Glad to have had the opportunity. To have been in a position to do it. To...” She felt herself begin to slide into babbling, and she stopped. Stopped—surprised and pleased that she was able to do so—and waited. If gratitude was the extent of it, he could have sent an email. So what was this really about?

He obliged. “Additionally, I have a question for you, if you don’t find it an intrusion.”

She gave her best noncommittal nod, but she thought, Is it about who’s important to me? Because I have had it with that for today.

He shook his gray mane away from his face, rearranging its waves every so slightly. It made him seem more committed to perfection but also, paradoxically, more... a person. Someone whose hair could displease him, if only in the smallest of ways. Fixing his gaze again upon Myka, he said, “Why don’t you run?”

“I do run.”

“I know you exercise,” he said. That word. Hearing it from him was infinitely worse than it had ever been, coming from anyone else. From everyone else. But then he surprised her: “My question is, why don’t you—why didn’t you—run. Your height-to-leg ratio is ideal; you’d have had an enviable stride. Everyone knows how you can work. Why didn’t you run?”

All she could think was, Because my father didn’t. Had he done that—rather than exercise—she might have thought to do it too. But running (exercising) alongside him, she’d had no way to think it. Apples don’t fall far from trees.

She said that out loud to Badger, who responded with a quizzical lift of eyebrow. “All I know is the Deceits made it clear,” she added.

Yet another quizzical lift.

“Did you run in them?” she asked, feeling the question a real risk.

The eyebrow lowered. His entire forehead lowered. “Yes...” he said. He obviously did not enjoy being unable to immediately discern her intent.

“How did they make you feel?” A further risk.

That got her a turn of head. Had she asked the right question at last? “Like myself,” he said.

“That’s the difference.”

“They made you feel...” he prompted.

“Like an athlete. Like one of you.”

“Oh I see. That’s why you don’t want the public to have them? Because you find this club so offensive?”

“Your club is exclusive,” Myka said. “Rightfully so.”

“And yet you could have been a member,” Badger said.

He seemed to want to wound, at least a pinprick’s worth, and that want gave Myka a slight upper hand. For once. It enabled her to say a placid, “But I’m not.” She was proud of that. She was proud also of being able to follow it with a similarly calm, “So here we are.” Had she been a member of his club, she would have appended a casual “Badge.”

“Indeed, here we are.” As if he wondered why they were still there. Given that he had expressed his gratitude and received an answer—although perhaps not the one he would have preferred—to his question.

But Myka knew she had a task before her; she heard Giselle in her head, saying She lost her job, followed by What are you going to do about that?

Badger would soon lose his patience with her presence. What was she going to do about that? Myka determined to... bring it up.

“Zelus fired Helena Wells,” Myka said, tossing it into what might have been a void.

“I’m aware,” Badger said. And then a void did loom: he made her wait, and she counted the seconds, reaching ten before he said, “She was, alas, shown to be not quite so ‘good at what she does’ as I recall you postulating.” His eyes narrowed again, and Myka felt the pressure of predation. “I witnessed your exchange at the elevators the other night, you know.”

“You know”... what a strange thing to say. Myka didn’t know. How could she have known? The puzzlement of it distracted her, such that it took a beat for her to feel the jolt of the much more disturbing—yet not in the end surprising—fact of his witnessing.

How to respond to that fact? Was this her opportunity to introduce the idea that Helena had made the deal possible? Could she say that Helena had been giving her Ingenumedix? Myka wished she’d come into this with a better plan... with any plan. But Badger interrupted her futile wishing with, “Was she indeed entreating you as she seemed? Rather desperately, and for information, I thought. In light of recent developments, that seems correct. Is it?”

“Entreating?” Myka echoed. That made no sense as a description of any part of what had happened. She could have recounted their conversation word for word, but she would never have thought to read any sort of pleading as a component of anything Helena had said.

What had Badger seen, to attribute to Helena that penitent role? He had to be wrong... as proof, he clearly hadn’t perceived Myka’s own desperate want. Because she would have entreated. If she could have found a way to let herself, oh, how she would have entreated. “I can’t speak to that. But. But.” Don’t spin your wheels, she told herself. Tell the truth. As much of it as won’t do undue damage. To anyone. “You said, before, that you suspected I wasn’t telling you the story in full.”

“I did.”

He didn’t follow that with a question. She gathered herself and went on, “You were right. Some information found its way to me. I think it came from Helena.”

“You ‘think.’” Languid disbelief.

Myka doubled down, with as much force as she could muster: “And I think Zelus fired her for that. Not because she didn’t make the deal they wanted.”

“And precisely why would she want such information—the Ingenumedix wrinkle, I presume—to find its way to you?”

“I think she’s interested in competition being fair,” Myka said, telling the truth. Sideways, but the truth. Was that a precise enough why?

To Myka’s surprise, Badger snorted. “Doesn’t take after Wells, then. Thank god that young man competed before the era of performance-enhancing drugs.”

“I’m not saying she’s a saint,” Myka said, in... well, what was it? Clarification? Or was she trying to push aside the possibility that, in this instance, such a label could apply?

Badger snorted again. “Thank you for that.”

Myka castigated herself for not immediately recalling “Saint Dan,” and she hurried to add, “But I think she wanted to bring about an equitable outcome.”

“Interesting motivation. Given her position.”

“Which she doesn’t have anymore,” Myka said. “Because of that motivation. I think.”

“You ‘think,’” Badger said again, again conveying his clear doubt that Myka’s thoughts could be taken as in any way definitive.

It was true that she’d qualified everything she’d said about Helena as being what she thought. As opposed to what she knew.

What are you going to do about that? she heard again in her head. “Bring it up” was by every measure not enough. What was she really going to do about that? Giselle had been implying pretty heavily what she should do... but Myka couldn’t yet manage to go all the way there under her own power. Thinking, knowing. She said, “I think also that Giselle thinks you could use Helena here.”

“Well, Giselle.” His tossed-off tell me something I don’t know aspect, the sense that he was so very familiar with Giselle’s proclivities and what they prompted, annoyed Myka. She barely quelled an impulse to counter with Giselle says she’s out of that side of this game as Badger went on, “Her, I can understand, and yet Pete Lattimer, of all people, made a similar case to me not half an hour ago. Wells’s daughter has a strikingly diverse array of champions.” He stopped—not long enough to provoke a count—then sprang. “You sound as if you might be among them. Are you?”

“If she really helped make this deal happen? Yes.” Easy to say, for it followed, logically. She wasn’t going to think, not just yet, about what else might follow, logically or otherwise.

Now he contemplated—or feigned contemplation. For fifteen seconds. “Do you have any reason to believe she won’t betray us similarly, given an attractive opportunity?”

Was hope a reason? “I think this situation was singular.” There she went with “think” again... but she was trying to be truthful, and all she had were her thoughts. And hope.

Badger contemplated her for twenty seconds this time. These lengthening pauses, these turnings of pressure-screws... they were exhausting. Clearly, the reason the athletes were able to deal so well with Badger was that they had stamina. When he relented, all he said was, “Singular.” This time he waited just long enough to make her question her choice of word. Then: “Why was she in fact entreating you?” As if he knew exactly how “singular” and “entreating” were related.

“I honestly can’t say.” She understood, now, that she was formulating hopes about reasons. But she could not say with any honesty that she knew anything about Helena’s part of that exchange, other than the words she had said.

“I won’t guess,” he said, as if he were doing her a favor, as if his guess would be so revealingly accurate that she’d be unable to bear its articulation. “I’ll observe, however, that when I asked her that question, she wouldn’t answer. At the time, I thought I knew why. In light of recent developments, I’m revising my opinion.”

His guess might have been accurate in just that terrifying way. Myka determined to create some distance—to suggest, however misleadingly, that any connection he might be inferring would be off the mark. “I’ve been reading up on her father,” she said, in defensive deflection: I had to read; I have no personal knowledge. Differentiating herself from Giselle, at least. “Took him more than one try to get it right.”

“As I understand her professional reputation, prior to now, she’s been very like him. Once he did get it right, that is. Enjoying the challenge. That ruthless glint.”

Are you talking only about the Wells family? About yourself as well? About all athletes? This, too, is why I didn’t run. I don��t want to be ruthless.

Not like Helena.

And yet... she had been ruthless. Not like Helena, but with Helena. “Please, Myka” had never ceased to echo in her head. She thought again of what her father did not bequeath her.

“Don’t you want someone like that?” she asked. “Someone who enjoys a challenge? Particularly as set by you.”

“Well.” His pause now returned to the ten-count, an unreadable changeup. “She was a fussy infant, however. Have you seen the photograph?

Helena was a fussy infant, and... there was a photograph of that? But no, not a photograph, the photograph. “The photograph?” she echoed, weak with ignorance.

Badger breathed out audibly through his nose, the impatient exhale suggesting that her lack of knowledge was an insult. “Wells, myself, the infant. Taken for the papers, prior to his initial disaster. It’s quite well known.”

Well known? Myka added “the photograph” to her increasingly long list of what she hadn’t known at all. What she never would have known, had Helena not come to AAI. All she wanted to do now was find “the photograph”... but Badger kept talking: “Quieting that child required what seemed hours of cossetting. I won’t deny it’s colored how I think of her—for good and ill. There’s residual annoyance in the memory of her incessant wailing, yet a real relief in not needing to introduce over and over a silver rattle into her small chub of a fist in order to achieve an outcome.”

That made Myka laugh. “That’s what the past does?” He made as if to answer, with no pause this time, but Myka preempted him, saying, “No, I know.” The saying of it, and the way she’d said it—both were far too familiar for her to have used with him. And yet it didn’t seem inappropriate, because she was again telling the truth: she did know. She saw her own similar culpability. What the past does... what it should do... what it should not do.

How could her attitude have shifted so fast? So fast and so sure? For she was sure. Like a time-lapse video of a bloom opening: she’d gone from not knowing what would happen to knowing exactly what had to happen, here in this office, in this conversation. And beyond.

As the force of had to took over, it kicked a memory of her first instinctive response to Helena’s reappearance in her life: You belong right here.

And then another kick, back to the very beginning, reminding her of her own self-possession. Her power. Her knowledge of what she could have, if she wanted it. What she could have because she wanted it.

Her lizard brain had retained that knowledge, but she had buried it, along with her hunger for excuses, her craving for reasons. She hadn’t expected Helena—via Giselle, and in unknowing collusion with her father—to provide what she needed.

Now Helena was someone to thank. And more, and greater: someone to persuade. You belong right here. Frightening, but... true?

Badger interrupted her lizard-thinking with, “Fortunately, that former infant has no commensurate memory of me.” He quirked a smile. “As far as I’m aware.” It was true, native charm, without any undertone of need, of attempt. His “Saint Dan” sobriquet in that moment made perfect sense: the charm, married to his basic decency, did confer a saintly aspect, certainly as compared to the vast majority of mortals.

Myka felt sure now that Helena, similarly charming in that unforced way, had that bedrock of decency as well. She had disallowed herself any knowledge of it in the past, and she’d let the past stand in the way of her knowing it now... up until perhaps this very minute.

“I’ll ring her in the morning,” Badger said, again followed by a pause, and Myka predicted ten seconds. He averted her count at five, with a wry and impossibly knowing, “I suppose you might do the same. If we’re to obtain the outcome Pete, and Giselle, and you, and a no doubt infinite number of additional champions desire.”

He thought a call from Myka could affect the outcome. His inferences had to be closing in on the contours of the situation—Myka shared a past with Helena, one that was extraordinarily personal—if not how it had affected, or would affect, the present.

Myka herself didn’t in all honesty know anything about how that past would affect the present. She didn’t feel she knew much about the present at all... except, all right, for a couple of very distinct things: one, that Helena was leaving tonight. Two, that she did not want Helena to do that.

So what hope did Myka, motivated by thing two, have of averting thing one?

She was sure that no phone call from Badger, even one placed this very minute, would be enough. For Myka did know some things about the past, or knew some things based on the past, and one of those things—very salient here—was that Helena believed, with near religious conviction, in the persuasive value of presence.

A small conversation from one of their nights together had led Myka to this knowledge.

“But I don’t see why you couldn’t do what you do from elsewhere,” Myka had said. “From anywhere. It’s just meetings.”

“‘Just’ meetings?” Helena had disputed. “No meeting is merely itself. So many observations to be made... you yourself brought up peacocking. Such displays require proximity.” She’d turned a bit pedantic then, saying, “Never underestimate the importance of what takes place when parties to any negotiation are face-to-face.” Helena twisted her mouth into a little cringe then, clearly regretting her unsolicited advice, and Myka had to resist mightily the urge to tell her that even her didactic streak was irresistible. She felt herself starting to say it anyway, but Helena preempted her with the shrug of a naked shoulder, saying, “All that aside, I’ll note that you and I wouldn’t be here now if not for that importance.”

At the time, Myka had worshipped that importance. In the aftermath, she had taken it as punishment.

Now, she was sure it was a lesson.

Maybe Badger’s call would work if AAI were the only entity with an interest in the negotiation, but Myka was—needed to be—a party to it as well. Let me go, she began pleading silently. Let me go. She had time, but not forever; the details Giselle had texted her had included Helena’s flight time. She needed to get to the airport, needed to stop Helena there, needed enough time to plead a case... enough time to show Helena that her own conversion, however rapid, was genuine. She knew that would never work if they were not face-to-face.

“I will,” Myka said. “Absolutely.” Trying to overassure so he would let her go.

“Then you might have a new colleague soon.”

“Sounds great.” Let. Me. Go.

“Not competitive?” Badger asked. He was the picture of innocence.

“That is not part of my motivation or mindset or philosophy,” Myka overemphasized, “at this point. Really not.” She bounced a bit, just a bit, on her toes, a muted version of what she would have done prior to a run. No, an exercise. Whatever—it felt like four in the morning, like the dark early start of a day, that every-morning If I don’t get moving now, I won’t move at all fear of failure.

“You seem anxious,” he observed, in a way that made Myka want to jump out of her skin.

Which would prove him right. “Not at all. I am calm. Placid, even. Not to mention, ready to move forward. In productive ways.” He didn’t need to know what kind of productive—

“Involving portable MRIs?” This he said with a completely annoying—completely charming—twinkle.

“Yes. That is exactly what I’m talking about.” Helena had managed to get her way with Badger when she was an infant, so Myka surely could now. As an adult. Though Badger was making it difficult for her to remember that she was one. Nevertheless: If you don’t let me go I will lose my mind.

The release did come at last, with a still-twinkling “Then I suppose we’re in accord.”

He gave a final nod, as if to express satisfaction both with how he’d toyed with her—batting her this way and that, befitting his apex-predator status—and with how she’d responded. She would have resented that satisfaction, yet all of his questioning and probing and inferring had revealed her to herself, crystallizing her purposes, her aims. Her wants. Their justifications.

She had, she realized, experienced an epiphany. Was he in fact a saint?

****

As she was trying to squeeze into a down elevator so she could finally get on her way, Pete grabbed her; all she could think was Why. Will. Nobody. Let. Me. Leave.

He said, “Hey, I had a really brilliant idea here at the elevators a while ago, and it was—”

“That Helena should work here. And you told it to Dan Badger,” she finished for him.

He gave her the cartoon bug-eyes. “Are you psychic?”

“Yes. Also, my side hustle is running the world.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know. Anyway you have to help get your ex to work here, because it would be awesome, because she seems so totally nuts. Also, is she really that nuts?”

“No,” Myka said, because there were a lot of words that could reasonably be applied to Helena, but “nuts” wasn’t—

“She thinks we’re together.”

“Right. I forgot about that, so I’ll rephrase: yes.”

Pete giggled. “I can’t wait.”

“Look. If you want this to happen, you need to shut up and let me get on the elevator so I can get to the airport and try to talk her into it.”

Now he gasped. “Can I go with you?”

“Oh my actual god no. Also someone has to be here to at least pretend we’re a department that does real work.”

“I think that means I should go to the airport, not you.”

“Which one of us do you think can talk her into even considering staying?”

“Depends. Are you really as good in bed as that nostalgia eyesex made it seem like?”

“I’m leaving for the airport now,” Myka said, and she was, miraculously, able to step into an elevator as she did so.

“That means yes!” Pete called after her, as Myka thought, I am so glad we did this at the elevators. I am so glad approximately the entirety of AAI will have heard some version of this before I even get to the airport. She fully expected Giselle to text her about it while she was still in the elevator. Probably somewhere near the inauspicious thirteenth floor, given everything.

****

En route, in a cab, Myka called Helena: no answer. She didn’t leave a message.

Once at the airport, she tried a text. I’m outside security. Where are you?

To her outsize relief, she got dots in response, and then Helena responded, with one blessed word: Why.

Because I want to talk to you.

Dots, dots dots dots, for an absurd length of time. Myka might as well have been back in Badger’s office, counting Mississippis.

Then: I’m in the bar at the airport Hilton.

Myka launched herself into action, pushing through throng after throng of people—she had never said “excuse me” so many times, worming and threading and carving her way along, panic beating in her head, which way is the Hilton which way which way where are the signs an airport should have signs—holding her phone before her as she hurtled, the device and her hands forming the knife with which she cut her way through.

Breaking free from crowds for a moment, she stopped and texted, Don’t move.

She received dots in response, so she resumed her sprint, wishing—traitorously, but wishing all the same—that she were wearing Deceits.

The minute Myka entered the bar, her eyes were drawn to Helena, and her body served up a similar surge of desire and pull—the first she’d been able to let herself experience without immediately having to feel guilty and despise herself for it.

Helena’s expression at her approach was noncommittal, but not aggressively so. It beat three blinking dots. Or maybe it was intended to be the equivalent of three blinking dots...

Myka took the barstool next to Helena—for thank god she had no company—and calmly ordered a scotch, on the theory that Giselle wasn’t the only one who could drink amber alcohols. She congratulated herself on her self-possession. She congratulated herself also on her lung capacity; she’d managed to say “scotch” without showing any effects of her mad dash. Hopefully.

Her additional justification for her drink: Even though I’ve just run a series of time trials through an airport for you, Helena, I’m not ready to drink wine in your presence. Not yet. She heard the “yet” in her head. Hearing that, feeling its implications—letting herself feel its implications—mattered far more than the ridiculous airport steeplechase.

She began. “I heard you had a talk with Pete.”

Helena’s dry response: “News travels rapidly at AAI.”

Myka waited to say more until she received her drink. Was she trying to make Helena anticipate, raise the stakes as to what was coming next? Yes... and trying to keep Helena’s interest piqued: that felt like before. But should now be like before? Myka had no idea. She could prolong the anticipation by lifting her glass, by sipping and savoring... but now wasn’t then. Instead, she stared at her scotch while saying, “I heard you said I deserve to be treated well.”

Helena then made Myka wait, but not long; she responded, even more dry, “Extremely detailed news travels rapidly at AAI.”

“No... news travels at AAI like carrier pigeons chirping through tin cans.” Myka raised her eyes. She needed to see Helena’s reaction to what she intended to say next. “For example, I also heard that you heard that Pete and I are together.”

Helena deflected. She looked deep into her own drink, a voluminous glass of a leggy red. “In the interest of accuracy, that is not what I heard. I heard—or rather, I was told—that you have a boyfriend. I inferred for myself that that boyfriend is Pete.”

In that instant, Myka saw herself putting a stop to everything, regardless of new wishes and old wants. She could say “It is,” and that would truly be that.

Instead, after a breathing decision, she said, “It isn’t.”

“I need you to tell me it isn’t anyone else either,” Helena said.

Myka was pretty sure that was about Giselle, and again, she could put a stop to everything...

“It isn’t,” she repeated, for all the truth.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Run #part 9b #AU week #while some other versions of Helena might have been fine with pandemic lockdowns #this Helena wold have hated them with a purple passion #(unless perhaps she got to spend that time with this Myka)#I haven't really addressed our years-long disease-ridden environment in a Bering and Wells context #and I honestly don't know if I will #I was going to do a thing with the Travel versions of them #but that was very early in the pandemic #and I was (correctly) advised that it would be too depressing #to put them through even minimal strife #(nobody was going to get sick)#(but still)

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