On December 28th, 2021, I self-tested positive for Covid-19.
Aside from the possibility (or probability?) of bad news, the experience itself is frankly nauseating, a claim which elicited a reprimand from a friend that I should act more like the seventy-three-year-old grandfather I am rather than his four-year-old grandson.
Even opening the pouch containing the test card makes me scowl, as it's sealed tighter than cereal wrap and requires me to deploy the 9" forged steel Italian scissors bequeathed to me by my father thirty years ago.
At this point, step four, I'm suddenly fearful of failure (these tests are in short supply and not be wasted), having overlooked one, two, and three: read the instructions prior to starting; wear gloves; wash and dry your hands. Now I'm warned in bright pink letters: do not touch any parts of the card on the inside; handle only by the edges.
I've got the card open flat on the table. I detach the dropper bottle from its plastic frame, remove the cap, and holding it straight up (not at an angle), squeeze six drops into the top hole, careful not to touch the card with the tip. That's the easy part.
Just so I don't contemplate any cowardly short cuts, there are three depictions of how far the soft tip of the swab is to be thrust up my nose (3/4 of an inch) and, once there, how it is to be manipulated: rubbed against the inside walls of the nostril in five big circles for about fifteen seconds. And then repeated in the other one.
At least the next insertion is only into the card: through the bottom hole until the swab is visible in the top hole, where it is turned (three times to the right) so the nostril and test fluids are mixed. I close the card, seal it with adhesive, start the timer on my trusty ten-year-old Timex runner's watch, and wait with bated breath.
After twenty minutes (and safely within the fifteen to thirty minute window), I swivel my chair around, bend over the credenza behind my desk, and peer at the card. Staring back at me are two horizontal pink parallels: the sample line matches the control line, which indicates "positive." Oh no! Oh yes!
Thus the scratchy throat, cough, and congestion that have been worsening for the past twelve hours are not just a recurrence of the cold I had off and on for three weeks after Thanksgiving. When it first came on, of course I tested for Covid, exhaling a sigh of relief at the sight of a single line, as I was scheduled to attend a dinner party with seven other persons that night. I knew its origin: five hours in the car with my sniffling son, his wife, and children en route to a family gathering at the Omni Hotel in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, where, incidentally, more germs were rampant.
Covid is stalking me, however. I visit my internist for my annual check-up. After verifying a normal temperature, the gatekeeper at the entrance directs me toward the waiting area, whence, after registration, I am ushered to an examination room. During our interview the nurse asks me if I would like a flu shot. "Sure," I say, inhaling gravelly through my nasal passage, "but I don't know if I should take it while I have this cold."
"Let me check with the doctor," she says. Five minutes later she rushes back with a panic-stricken look on her face, exclaims "You can't be in here," and shoos me out like a pesky fly. The doctor calls me while I'm sitting in my car, and tells me that, in order for him to examine me, I need to take a Covid test. "Fine," I say, until he informs me that I won't get the result for two hours. "I don't have Covid and I can't wait two hours," I retort. "I'll come back when my cold is better."
My doctor, whom I adore (everyone does), then attempts to persuade me to take the test, questioning the reliability of the at-home antigen version and suggesting I could be putting others at risk -- specifically, my ninety-six-year-old mother -- by my refusal. It's a guilt trip I'm not buying, although the conversation comes back to haunt me a scant two weeks later.
Like millions of other Americans in the same moment, I am now the embodiment of all the absurdities, ironies, frustrations, and contradictions that have defined the pandemic since the virus emerged two years ago.
I distanced, physically, socially, emotionally, at first begrudgingly, then with the restrained eagerness of a long-suffering introvert realizing the fulfillment of his most repressed desire. Because my business qualified as an essential one, I didn't have to lock it down, which was fortuitous, as demand for home furnishings soared while the restaurant and travel industries imploded. I remember when masks were a novelty, then a nuisance, finally a requirement, accumulating drawer fulls, at home, at my office, in my car, yet never having one at hand when I needed it. I watched endless hours of cable news, read a thousand articles, weighed the words of hundreds of politicians, pundits, and professors, and concluded that the more they talked, the less they knew. Given my general good health, my commitment to fitness, and my observance of most safety measures, I categorized myself as low-risk, while cases and deaths mounted, including among the latter two employees, a close childhood friend, and a college roommate. With the swift advent of the vaccine -- nothing short of miraculous, considering the biology of coronavirus -- after three inoculations I assumed a certain invulnerability and the imminent demise of the plague.
If sadly mistaken, I was in good company.
I couldn't suppress a smidgen of sympathy for poor, pitiful Joe, whose July 4th celebration of the country's "independence from the pandemic" recalled another president's ill-timed declaration of victory. Just as George W. Bush proudly proclaimed on May 1, 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and its allies have prevailed," so too did Mr. Biden prematurely announce to 1000 supporters on the White House lawn, "We are emerging from the darkness . . . [ending] a year of . . . isolation . . . fear and heartbreaking loss."
His grounds for confidence were certainly reasonable. With hardly a nod to his predecessor for warp speeding the vaccine into existence, he heralded his own administration's adherence to science and the competence with which it would govern, thereby implying that not only would it facilitate the availability of vaccine, any and all resistance would be expeditiously overcome by the presumed facts and the power of persuasion.
But there was also a basis for skepticism. Unlike traditional vaccines, which release a weakened or inactivated germ into the body, the Moderna and Pfizer products are messenger (m)RNA vaccines. Entering the arm muscle, the mRNA instructs the cells there to manufacture the spike protein found on the surface of the virus that causes Covid-19. Recognizing the protein as alien, the body's immune system creates antibodies which remain active to combat future infection.
Not only were these mRNA vaccines the first ever of their kind developed for widespread human usage, the three phases of the clinical trial process -- in which the number of persons inoculated is gradually expanded from small groups to thousands -- were conducted simultaneously rather than consecutively, thereby significantly reducing the time necessary for approval.
Couple these factors with the ongoing politicization of the pandemic, the ranting of conspiracy theorists, the failure of past mitigation efforts to moderate much less subdue the disease, and the eruption of breakthrough infections immediately on the heels of the Moderna/Pfizer (and J&J) rollout, is it any wonder that the vaccination's purported efficacy might be suspect?
Confronted by a portion of the population stubbornly obtuse to cajolery, pleading, shaming, intimidation, and death warnings, the administration raised its heavy hand, and laid yet another onerous ordinance on small (and large) businesses: all employees must either be vaccinated, submit to a weekly testing regimen, or be terminated, with non-compliance punishable by five-figure fines per incident.
Aside from the matter of legality, the mandate raises issues of fairness, practicality, and utility, some of which were invoked in the Supreme Court's recent decision preventing OSHA from implementing the regulations.
While I strongly encourage everyone to take the Covid vaccination to protect himself from the severity of the disease, I resent being ordered by the government to serve as its policing agent, especially when the so-called policy experts drafting the rules have no conception of how my business operates. They take it for granted that, since my company is above the one hundred head count threshold that would exempt it from the mandate, it has the resources at hand to monitor both vaccination and testing compliance, not realizing that its five-hundred-seventy-five employees are dispersed among fifty-two locations, with some having as few as eight at the site.
Further, in the current climate, recruiting and retaining employees is difficult at best, and the competition is fierce. Not only am I reluctant to accede to a directive that, regardless of the health benefits, might compel me to fire some of them, I am disturbed by the thought that another small furniture store a mile up the road might be looking for a really good salesperson who does not have to be vaccinated.
Even if one accepts a personal statement or document as valid, the question arises: what satisfies the definition of "fully vaccinated"? One, two, or three shots? And at one point does a fourth become necessary?
I will concede that, given a choice between those shots and sticking a swab up the nose every week, a vaccination holdout might surrender to the lesser of two evils (in my opinion). As an employer, I would certainly hope so because, as I understand it, I'm required to have every test witnessed by a supervisor or co-worker and entered into a log just in case an OSHA representative drops by for an inspection. And remember, these tests take fifteen minutes, cost twelve dollars each, and, incidentally, during this ongoing distraction we've got to wait on customers, finalize sales in our credit office, and deliver merchandise.
The Supreme Court hung its 6-3 ruling on the contention that, because Covid is a hazard that exists outside the workplace, it does not meet the standard of "grave danger" that OSHA is permitted by federal law to act upon to protect workers; the dissenters countered that no such limitation is found in the statute, nor has it bound OSHA in the past. Regardless of whom is correct, it's clearly evident that the vaccination neither prevents one from contracting Covid nor from spreading it to others, that the "grave danger" presented by the disease applies solely to the person who chooses to spurn the vaccination, and that any obligation I have to an employee who foolishly refuses to act in his own self-interest collapses under the weight of the burden imposed on my business in fulfilling it.
According to Holman Jenkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal (January 12, 2022), the workplace mandate would have had "a negligible, almost invisible, impact on either vaccination rates or the unfolding of the pandemic . . . A large majority of the U.S. population has already been vaccinated. The mandate targets only . . . the private workforce, most of whom have already received the shot . . . At least half have also likely been infected and acquired natural immunity."
Nevertheless, the authorities persevere, moving after social distancing, lock downs, deep cleaning, masking, targeted closures, and vaccinations to Act Seven of this protracted melodrama: universal testing, another surefire remedy in their futile quest to tame the capriciousness of nature. Predictably, it's a gesture that just fuels the frenzy, as thousands in perfect health rush from drug stores to walk-in clinics and line up for hours to find out if perhaps they've been victimized by a stealth attack. And to what end? So they can come back the next day for another swab, and the day after that, ad nauseam, just to make sure nothing's changed?
Five hundred million tests promised in December to arrive in two weeks (paid by insurers, no less) have yet to materialize, just another $5 billion (among trillions) wasted on the pandemic, as by that time, either the panic will have subsided or the Omicron variant will have run its course.
I tested myself because I had symptoms; otherwise I wouldn't bother. Am I surprised at the result? I shouldn't be; after all, to quote an interviewee on cable news, the virus is now "ubiquitous," although when I would idly comment to friends and acquaintances that "We're all going to get it," I was only half-serious. Now I'm a believer.
One's first thought is "Have I exposed anyone else?" followed by "Where did I get it?"
As for the latter, I initially lay the blame on a gathering at Jacquie's house on December 26th which included her three children plus another family of five, all of whom have come from out of town. When neither symptoms nor a positive test surfaces from this group, I shift the culprit to a party we attended on the 23rd; there were about one hundred guests, many of whom I would, at my age, classify as "youngsters," that is, in their late twenties to mid-thirties, and also non-residents. I'm told later that at least two other persons tested positive for Covid, which is not a large number considering the crowd and makes my case that much more mysterious.
The day before my diagnosis I played duplicate bridge at the Templeton Senior Center with about thirty other folks, most over seventy and certainly when at a table for four sitting closer together than six feet. I could sense a cough and congestion coming on, so I took the precaution of wearing a mask, which put me in a definite minority. I'm supposed to play the next evening, Wednesday, but I'm somewhat apprehensive about breaking the news to my partner, much less the entire club. If I call him today, Tuesday, might he not think I was already sick yesterday and by coming to the club knowingly put the other players at risk? As much as I denied its legitimacy a few weeks ago in my encounter with my doctor, guilt has crept into my consciousness.
I procrastinate twenty-four hours, and text Phil early Wednesday morning. He expresses his sympathy, and I'm relieved to have that behind me until my phone blows up. Well, not really: there are only two calls, one from a woman who has a dental appointment the next day and wants to know what she should tell her dentist, the other from my Monday partner, who's not concerned about Covid and just wants to know if I'll be able to play with him again Friday as scheduled. It's a moot point, as Phil has done what I should have done: called the club president. By 1:00 PM the decision has been made and transmitted by email that the games Wednesday evening and Friday morning are cancelled due to a member (me obviously) testing positive for Covid.
My level of distress edges up a notch. I draft an email explaining that I thought my early symptoms were the resurgence of a lingering cold, that I had worn a mask on Monday, that I am experiencing only mild discomfort, that I do not recommend a test unless symptoms are present, and that I am sorry this happened and hopeful the illness will be confined to only one person. I forward it to the club president, and ask him to distribute it to the membership. Either he doesn't receive it or ignores my request, as it never appears on my phone, for which in retrospect I am most grateful.
While no one wants to be responsible for infecting another person, we've reached a point in the pandemic where apologies are irrelevant and guilt is baseless. They may have had some credibility in the early days when social distancing and masks were society's most effective mitigation tools and mortality loomed as a genuine threat to segments of the population, but in today's environment, where the virus is uncontrollable and protection is easily accessible, they serve no purpose.
Most people accept that they can fall prey to this disease at any time and any place and that it's no more than a random unfortunate occurrence -- or perhaps fortunate if one aspires to greater immunity. Several of my fellow bridge players inquire about my health during my illness; they all welcome me back enthusiastically when I return to the club on January 10th, where I learn much to my surprise that another member tested positive around the same time I did. He hadn't played the Monday two weeks ago when I thought I might be a spreader, but we had both played the Wednesday night prior. After all my anxiety, is it possible that he's patient zero, not I? Such are the vagaries of Covid-19.
And the hits keep coming. My daughter calls from St. Maarten, where she, her husband, her two children, and her mother-in-law are vacationing for the holidays. All but her husband have tested positive, and they're frantically navigating the island and airline regulations to determine when they will be able to fly home.
I'm now under quarantine, at least for only five days rather than ten, according to the just-released CDC guidelines, which of course are subject to revision or reinterpretation at any moment. While there's never a good time to be shut-in, this week seems as suitable as any. It's winter, although the weather has been unseasonably warm. While I'll miss the New Year in Paris Celebration at Oakwood Country Club (it's rung in at 6:00 PM -- midnight Paris time -- so all the old folks can make a speedy getaway and be safely in bed before the real festivities begin), I didn't think that would deter Jacquie and the two other couples who were joining us from carrying on without me, but they decide to bail; I never knew I was the life of the party.
Some other friends have exhibited extraordinary foresight and already cancelled their wonderful New Year's Day Traditional Dinner (barbecued ribs, stewed tomatoes, collard greens, and black-eyed peas). When I received the notification, I suggested some alternatives: February 6th, Chinese New Year; March 20th, Iranian New Year; April 14th, Tamil New Year; and of course October 2nd, Jewish New Year.
On her last visit to Lynchburg, my eight-year-old granddaughter Lia (not seeing anyone else around) asked me if I lived by myself. "I do," I answered. "And do you know what that means? I can do whatever I want whenever I want."
So, being home alone shouldn't bother me, provided I don't get too sick. Tuesday, the day I test, isn't too bad, but Wednesday and Thursday, I'm pretty miserable, coughing and sniffling constantly. I escape the other common symptoms -- loss of taste and smell, fever, fatigue, headache -- but develop an abnormality, mouth ulcers, which I haven't had for years since my periodontist recommended a supplement that I take daily, L-Lysine. A little googling reveals that, yes, other patients have reported a similar condition.
I'm able to sleep five or six hours the first two nights, which is not much less than what's now normal for me. Jacquie brings me some chicken soup which is as good for the soul as advertised. A piddling annoyance is dehydration, which makes me abandon coffee for a couple of days and substitute tea, which I drink as a last resort. Other than that, I'm in good shape by Friday, except for throat congestion, which lingers for almost two weeks.
Sworn to full disclosure, I admit that I breach my quarantine seven times: one trip each to the library and the grocery store to collect a few provisions and five six-mile walks to the Blackwater Creek Bike Trail and back. Needless to say I don't wear a mask during my exercise excursions, and thus am embarrassed to encounter a close friend on an outing with his son and grandson. Whereas he wants to stop and chat, my priority is avoiding close contact. I nod, smile, put my head down, and pick up my pace as if I'm on a mission, which I'm sure he shrugs off as just another instance of my habitual rudeness.
Among those who know me, it's no secret that I like to read books; I've got fifteen sitting on a shelf just waiting for an opportunity like this one. But even I can't read for six or seven hours a day for a solid week. So in between naps, snacks, and wandering aimlessly through my house, sooner or later I plant myself in my well-worn maroon La-Z-Boy recliner in what I call the tv room, and pick up my remote. I rarely watch television, and when I do, it's mostly news, so my 21" screen is really sufficient for viewing talking heads that are swollen enough without magnification.
A few years ago my step son-in-law set me up as a signer on his Netflix account; it's the only app available to me other than MLB, for which I purchase a subscription every season to follow my beloved Oakland A's. I've watched The Queen's Gambit and a three episodes of Bridgerton, but other than those, the menu of shows is as foreign to me as a Chinese newspaper. I consult the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and decide that Money Heist, The Kominsky Method (also recommended by a friend), The Crown, and Ozark look inviting. I click on the last one but nothing happens. I click on the other three one by one; again nothing. I try a few movies -- I can't remember what they were -- but have no luck with them either. I disconnect and reattach the HD converter box to no avail. It appears that, if I'm going to watch television, it's going to be the old-fashioned way: scrolling through a hundred or so cable channels.
It's the time of the year for bowl games, and there are at least three every day until New Year's. That doesn't do me much good, since I detest football. Nevertheless, I check out the schedule, and conclude that some slick salesmen are convincing some big companies to write fat checks to paste their brands on football games between mediocre teams which I can't imagine very many people are watching, namely, Quick Lane, ServPro, Autozone, Guaranteed Rate, Valero, Cheez-It, Duke's Mayo, Taxslayer, Chick-fil-A, and Tony the Tiger. Looking back, if I'd had any interest, I could have suffered through (or rejoiced at, depending on my affiliation, which I'm not revealing) Maryland's shellacking of Virginia Tech, a fate which that other Virginia college adroitly avoided when its contest was cancelled.
The one channel that might have appealed to me, Turner Classic Movies, was stricken from my Comcast line-up about a year ago, and now demands a premium. As much as I try, I just can't generate an appetite for any of films, reality shows, documentaries, serials, and reruns that pop up at the flick of a finger. I'm snagged for a bit by TV Land, whose afternoon fare alternates between two classics of my generation, Gunsmoke (more violent than I remembered) and The Andy Griffith Show (Opie steals every scene), but thirty minutes each of James Arness's booming baritone and Don Knotts's squeaky soprano is about all I can take.
Sooner or later anyone randomly surfing during the late afternoon or early evening will hit on the two of the highest-rated game shows in America: Jeopardy! and Family Feud. I just happen to tune in to the former two days before Amy Schneider sets the record for the most consecutive wins by a woman, twenty-one. (By Friday, January 21st, she has extended her winning streak to thirty-eight, tied for the second longest, and upped her earnings to $1,307,200, good for fourth place.) I actually recollect her Final Jeopardy answer (at least the gist of it before I looked up the exact language on the J! Archive web site) -- "In 1955 Peter Hall directed the first production of this play in English 'without having the foggiest idea of what some of it means'" -- and the question, which I guessed because it was the only contemporary play I could think of: Waiting for Godot.
Jeopardy! has been on the air since 1984. I submit that its longevity is attributable to two factors: first, the contestants come from all backgrounds and look to be no different from and no smarter than ourselves or people we know; second, the questions (or answers) are challenging but not extremely difficult, and for viewers the solutions are always on the tip of the tongue, just out of reach, but, alas, most of the time, unable to be retrieved in the few seconds allotted. It's a game we can all play but not nearly as well as someone like Amy Schneider, or the current host and all-time champion Ken Jennings. Whether Jennings will continue in the position is of course up to the producers, but in my opinion he lacks the personality to engage the audience at the level of his long-time predecessor, Alex Trebek.
As for Family Feud, which pits two families of five against each other in a contest to win cash by answering survey questions, all the show's energy flows from the host, Steve Harvey. The fourth to fill the role since 1976, he increased Nielsen ratings significantly when he took over in 2010, and has now surpassed the other three in tenure. Harvey struggled for a number of years making ends meet, but broke through as a stand-up comedian in 1990. He has hosted a weekday morning radio program since 2000, had major parts in at least five films, and in 2009 published a New York Times best selling book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.
With his athletic height and physique, shiny silk suits, resonant voice, quick wit, infectious charm, and broad, beaming smile, Harvey dominates the stage. Many survey questions prompt the most outlandish responses, which present Harvey with numerous opportunities to crack jokes, stare at the audience with looks of disbelief, and then announce with the certainty that the contestant is about to be hilariously humiliated: "Survey says!" It's all in fun, and he revels in it when Lucifer is selected as "a character Steve might play in the Bible" and a penis is offered as "something of her husband's an estranged wife might give to her brother."
With the recent premiere of Judge Steve Harvey on ABC, Harvey has vaulted into the courtroom, where he'll be employing his brash humor to adjudicate real-life conflicts in unscripted one-hour weekly sessions.
Another host with similar star power is Guy Fieri, who's been cruising across America in his red Camaro visiting Diner, Drive-Ins, and Dives since 2007. For someone who doesn't cook, I'm drawn to this food orgy like a homeless man to Golden Corral, and I'm not alone; according to YouGovAmerica, it's the second most popular contemporary reality show after MythBusters. I thought I'd gone to a World Series game when my stepdaughter took me to the crowded Cast Iron Kitchen in Wilmington, NC one Sunday morning several months ago and I saw Guy's picture on the wall. Most of the eight hundred restaurants that have been highlighted on the show have reported dramatic increases in sales as a result. One of those, Donatelli's, in White Bear Lake, MN said its appearance saved it from going out of business.
The afternoon I tune in, Guy hopscotches from Chehalis, WA to Houston, TX to Nashville, TN where he observes the preparation of and savors in turn a meatloaf panini sandwich (at Once Upon a Thyme), a pair of brisket tacos (at The Pit Room), and Spicy Pork Bulgogi (at Soy Bistro). They're all mouthwatering to look at, a sensation reinforced by the customer testimonials Guy evokes as he saunters through the seating areas.
As I watch though, from a critical perspective, the shine may be wearing off the apple. Like Steve, Guy is the engine that drives his show. He's a superb performer; in repartee with the chefs, the contrast between himself and his two guests -- his son and Lee Majors -- is striking. His curiosity about the recipes and enthusiasm for the process never wane; his delight in the final products is always genuine. After a while, however, the repetitiveness is too blatant to ignore. How many ways are there to express just how good something tastes? In spite of the variety emerging from their boilers, fryers, grills, and ovens, all the kitchens are mirror images of each other, especially in their impressive immaculateness. For each fabulous concoction the same ingredients -- onions, ginger, sugar, sea salt, chili powder, garlic, cilantro, ground pepper -- are sliced, diced, pureed, and then thrown together with numbing monotony.
Guy's not slowing down. Besides franchising his own chain of fast food chicken restaurants, he recently completed a four-part series for the Discovery Channel (part of a three-year $80 million deal) which follows him, his wife, his two sons, and a nephew on a twenty day journey exploring Hawaii and enjoying its food, culture, and sporting activities.
On New Year's Eve I stumble upon the SYFY channel's Twilight Zone marathon -- 104 out of 156 episodes in forty-eight hours -- an annual event, I understand. Is this the piece de resistance that might actually command my attention longer than a brief sampling? If the two entrees served up are any indication, I may be in for the long haul.
I'm five minutes into the third scariest show in the series, "Living Doll." A svelte young (but already bald) Telly Savalas plays Erich Streator, who, unable to bear children with her mother Annabelle, transfers his frustration to his stepdaughter Christie. Annabelle buys Christie a wind-up doll named Talky Tina, who mouths such niceties as "I love you very much" -- until Erich gives the key a twist and Tina starts spewing vitriol, like "I don't like you . . . I hate you" and ultimately "I'm going to kill you." Erich stuffs the doll in a trash can under a weighted lid; when she escapes he tries to destroy her using a vise, a blowtorch, and a saw, all for naught.
Accused by Erich of playing tricks on him, Annabelle threatens to leave, but reconsiders when he returns the doll to Christie. Later that night Erich hears strange noises. As he takes his first step down the stairs to have a look, he trips and falls to his death. When Annabelle finds his body, lying beside it is Tina, who opens her eyes and says, "My name is Talky Tina, and you better be nice to me!"
"Dolls can't really talk, and they certainly can't commit murder," intones producer Rod Serling, except "in the misty region of the Twilight Zone."
If that isn't spooky enough, next up is the famous "Time Enough at Last," which stars a barely recognizable Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a bespectacled bank clerk who loves books. In the opening scene he shortchanges a customer because he's so engrossed in the novel David Copperfield. Duly chastised by his boss, Henry returns home that night to a nagging wife who berates him for wasting so much time reading and shoves a book in his face in which she has blacked out the text.
The next day while taking his lunch break in the bank vault where he can read undisturbed, Henry is knocked unconscious by an enormous explosion. After retrieving his glasses, Henry emerges from the vault to find the city razed, indeed the planet devastated, by a nuclear war. In despair at being the sole survivor, Henry raises a revolver and is about to shoot himself when he spies a public library in the distance. Venturing closer, he sees all the books he could ever hope for still intact, and comprehends he has time enough at last to read without interruption.
But as he leans over to pick up the first gem, his glasses fall from his face and shatter, leaving him virtually blind, surrounded by books he can now never read. "Just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself, Henry Bemis in the Twilight Zone" bursts into tears.
Cited by Rod Serling as one of his top two favorites (the other was "The Invaders"), "Time Enough at Last" polled as the most remembered episode in the series by readers of Twilight Zone Magazine. It ranked twenty-fifth in TV Land's presentation of TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in Television."
Any normal compulsive reader ought to be intimidated by the fate of Henry Bemis. I hang around for a few snippets of a quiet suburban neighborhood disrupted by the sighting of a spaceship and a businessman whose sense of reality is ruptured when he discovers that he's on a tv set rather than in his office. But the sweetness of the printed word is too tempting to resist, and I've got three delicacies waiting to be plucked.
The late Philip Kerr was a British author who achieved a modicum of fame for three mysteries published in 1989-1991 (later collated as the trilogy Berlin Noir) featuring Bernie Gunther, a hard-boiled police detective plying his trade during the Nazi regime. Fifteen years and nine standalone novels later he resurrected Bernie, crafted eleven more clever cliffhangers that leapfrog his protagonist from wartime Germany to postwar South America, and left as a legacy an antihero unique in the annals of crime fiction.
Bernie's perpetual dilemma is that he despises the Nazis yet must obey his masters in order to survive. Trapped in a world where horror abounds, morality is inverted, and the truth illusory, he maintains his sanity through brutal self-examination, trenchant cynicism, sardonic humor, and irreverent outbursts of sarcasm and ridicule that border on insubordination yet are indulged by his superiors because his sleuthing talents are undeniable and useful.
Bernie's exploits are grounded in actual events and peopled with historical figures, most of whom are placeholders in the Nazi hierarchy. Kerr's research is impeccable, and readers learn as much if not more about the period from his fabrications as they would from an authoritative work. In Prague Fatale, Bernie is summoned to a palatial estate in Bohemia-Moravia where the diabolical Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Police and architect of the "Final Solution," is perplexed by the locked room murder of an adjutant. In A Man Without Breath, Propaganda Minister and Hitler henchman Joseph Goebbels dispatches Bernie to Smolensk, charging him with exhuming evidence that the 4000 dead Polish officers found in a mass grave were massacred by Russian soldiers.
Next in sequence, the one I'm reading, is The Lady from Zagreb; she's Dalia Dresner, a beautiful actress, Yugoslavian by birth, who's refusing Goebbels's entreaties to star in his new film unless he can recruit a detective capable of tracking down and delivering a letter to her father, a former Roman Catholic priest missing somewhere in war-torn Croatia.
Goebbels volunteers Bernie for the task, which lands him in a ravaged country where communist partisans and royalists battle the Ustase, the ruling fascist militia whose barbarism and cruelty may have exceeded that of the SS. Dalia's father is no longer a priest; he's a Commandant at the notorious Jasenovic concentration camp, where one hundred thousand Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies have been brutally murdered. On the walls of his villa Bernie grimaces at the "framed photographs of decapitations -- men and women . . . having their heads cut off with knives, axes, and . . . a crosscut saw."
Returning to Berlin, Bernie is informed by Goebbels that he now must follow Dalia to Zurich, where she has fled to rejoin her husband, and that, incidentally he must marry the woman with whom he has a passing acquaintance in order to be allowed back into Germany.
In Zurich the plot becomes labyrinthine. Bernie has a torrid love affair with Dalia. Mistaken for Walter Schellenberg, head of the SS foreign intelligence, he's kidnapped by American agents and interrogated by Allen Dulles. Apprehended by the Gestapo, he's accused of smuggling when gold is discovered in the undercarriage of the Mercedes he was ordered to drive to Switzerland; he escapes by spewing alcohol at one of the officer's cigarette lighter. He solves the murder of a physician who was threatening to divulge a business deal whereby Swiss industrialists were supplying the Germans concentration camp barracks. He makes common cause with Schellenberg, who arranges for a bogus Swiss defense report to be conveyed to Hitler to thwart his plan to violate that country's neutrality. Two shocking revelations dictate the permanent banishment of Dalia to Switzerland and prohibit Bernie from ever seeing her again, except years later on the screen of a darkened theater in Marseilles.
Amidst all these escapades and reversals of fortune, Bernie shares some philosophical musings with Swiss author Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach. "I just don't think life has very much meaning," he says. "Good people are never as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren't as bad. Not half as bad. On different days we're all good. On other days, we're evil. That's the story of my life. That's the story of everyone's life."
A person who might subscribe to the ambiguity of human nature but would surely hold a more sanguine view of life's meaning is Guido Brunetti, the thoughtful, compassionate, and persistent police commissioner who's been patrolling the canals and alleys of Venice since 1992. Two years prior to that Donna Leon, an English literature teacher living in the city, was joking with a friend about how a reputable but very much unloved and recently deceased opera conductor might have been murdered in his dressing room. She composed a manuscript, Death at La Fenice, but left it in a drawer until her friend convinced her to submit it to a writing contest. It won, got published, and thirty more followed in annual progression.
There's always a crime, and Brunetti never fails to get his man (or woman). But the plots are mere skeletons; what makes these slender volumes (under three hundred pages) full-bodied are the author's familiarity with the setting, her appreciation for the native culture, and her long-term investment in her ensemble of characters.
Guido is a "surprisingly neat man" who relaxes by reading Greek and Roman history; he always comes home for a delightful lunch with his wife and two teenagers, but may step out occasionally to enjoy a prosecco, brioche, or caffe at a nearby bar. He's happily married to Paola, herself an English professor, an excellent cook, and a confidant for her husband as he strives to unravel the twisted threads of his current case.
Guido gets no support from his boss, Vice-Questor Patta, who's vain, lazy, pompous, and an expert at shifting blame or claiming credit depending on circumstances. More helpful are Patta's glamorous secretary, Signorina Elettra, whose vast network of contacts and exceptional computer dexterity enable her to unearth the deepest secrets; the reliable Sergeant Vianello, honest, clever, and adept at earning the trust of witnesses and suspects; and Commissario Griffoni, a willowy blonde Neopolitan, whose integrity, insight, and willingness to challenge Brunetti's assumptions make her an invaluable partner.
The latest entry in the series, Transient Desires, starts slowly, but illustrates Brunetti's insistence that any mishap, no matter the purported explanation, deserves a full airing. Two injured American women are deposited at the hospital dock by two men, Berto and Marcello, who are filmed speeding away, intent on remaining anonymous. Identified and ordered to the Questura for questioning, they admit to a collision aboard a boat borrowed from Marcello's uncle, Pietro Borgato, the owner of a transport business. Brunetti learns from a sanitation worker that Borgato has equipped two of his boats with oversized motors.
Signorina Elettra's sources ferret out Borgato's checkered past; as a youth he ran afoul of the police and lost his job, then left the city for ten years, inexplicably returning with enough money to buy a warehouse and two boats. A contact in the Carabinieri tells Brunetti a horrid story about a group of young girls from Nigeria who were thrown overboard when the boat smuggling them was spotted by the authorities; only one survived. Brunetti collars Berto again and obtains one more confession: Marcello was a member of the crew when the mass drowning occurred. The human trafficking scheme is exposed, the centuries-old systematic exploitation by the strong and wealthy of the weak and poor, who become, Brunetti laments, "field hands, sex toys, even organ donors, each step stripping successive layers of humanity from their persons and from the souls . . . of their owners." At least Borgato's run is over, as Brunetti and the Guardia Costiera corner him in the midst of another transfer.
In Brunetti's Italy, corruption and bribery abound. "Torn between his ideals and the insults to mind, body, and spirit that he witnesses everyday," he perseveres, drawing "constant balm from his family, his friends, a perfect risotto, a glass of fine wine, and always, outside his door, the breathtaking city." (Neil Nyren, "Donna Leon," Crime Reads, June 25, 2021)
To finish out the week, I'm switching to nonfiction: Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II, by Daniel James Brown. He's the author of the highly acclaimed The Boys in the Boat, which chronicles the University of Washington rowing team's improbable capture of the Olympic Gold Medal in 1936. Seven years have intervened between the publication of the two books, a testament to the monumental research involved in the newer one, which included scouring voluminous oral histories, letters, and battle accounts and conducting hundreds of interviews with surviving soldiers and family members.
Brown ingeniously juxtaposes the more familiar (at least to me) war tragedy in which 120,000 Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) were summarily stripped of their possessions and confined to "relocation centers" and the lesser known history of the US 442nd Infantry Regiment, in which 18,000 Nisei (American-born Japanese Americans) served and received a higher proportionate number of Medals of Honor than any other unit.
For the evacuees, the facilities at the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona were typical. "Row upon row of black tar-paper-clad barracks stretched for three miles end to end on a vast expanse of raw, sun baked sand . . . A fine gray dust settled over everything . . . From time to time a gust of hot, dry wind stirred the dust up, but the wind was searing and offered no relief." New arrivals stuffed empty sacks with straw so they would have something to sleep on. They built shelving, tables, and chairs out of scrap lumber. They whittled chopsticks out of desert ironwood and mesquite. Only fifty cents' worth of rations per day per person was provided, and most of it was army surplus: cheap canned meat, soggy vegetables, old potatoes, and evaporated milk.
But like the inhabitants of their adopted country, these Japanese Americans were resilient. "They undertook an ambitious program to build a complete infrastructure to meet their needs." Using adobe bricks they made from mud and and straw, they erected schools. "They turned spare barracks into Christian and Buddhist churches." They set up poultry and hog farms to supply fresh meat and eggs. They irrigated the surrounding desert, planted crops, and harvested fresh produce. They cleared the ground of sagebrush, marked off baseball diamonds and football fields, and formed teams. They organized police and fire departments, ran health clinics, beauty shops, and newspapers, and initiated a wide variety of clubs and social activities.
While the Issei endured the travails of incarceration, their sons went to war, but not until 1943 after President Roosevelt signed a memo rich in unintended irony. It read, in part, "Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to his country and our creed of liberty and democracy. Every loyal American should be given the opportunity to serve this country." What was omitted from those noble words was any acknowledgement of the military's racial segregation policy.
Brown recounts the tortuous journey of three Nisei determined to assert their patriotism and the ordeal of one who chose to protest the unjust treatment of the Japanese Americans and their being denied due process of law.
Expelled from the Territorial Guard because of his ethnicity, Hawaiian Kats Miho goes to work building naval air barracks after Pearl Harbor until he becomes eligible for the U.S. armed forces. Sent to the Poston Relocation Center with his parents, Rudi Tokiwa of Salinas, California, exhorts his fellow Nisei to join the ranks with him in order to be able "to stand up afterwards and say, 'I did my share.'" Fred Shiosaki of Spokane, Washington, walks into the Selective Service office where six months prior he was called an enemy alien, and enlists, provoking an outburst of anger from his father unlike any he has ever seen. On June 1st, after refusing three times to sign the proper registration form, Gordon Hirabayashi, the last Japanese American living in Spokane, is arraigned on violating Civilian Exclusion Order No. 57 and the 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew and consigned to the King County Jail to await trial.
The recruits are sent to Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for basic training that goes beyond the purely military. At the Union Station train depot, encountering men's rooms and drinking fountains marked "white" and "colored," Kats asks a white officer which he should use. The officer scratches his head, equally baffled, before grumbling, "Aw hell. You ain't either, exactly. Use the white one."
As the summer progresses, the new soldiers acquire a host of uncommon skills: how to repair tanks; how to fire heavy machine guns; how to lay and conceal land mines; how to blow up bridges and rebuild them in hours; how to winch 37-millimeter antitank guns across rivers; how to traverse the wet lowlands of southern Mississippi, evading alligators and snakes, thrashing brush thickets and tangled kudzu, and tolerating the painful attacks of ticks and chiggers. Most important, in spite of differences in language and culture that early on led to arguments, insults, and fisticuffs, the Hawaiian Buddaheads and the mainland kotunks learn to live and labor together and to wage war as a team.
They will need all the strength and unity they can muster. They are about to be sent to one of the deadliest places on earth.
In gripping and realistic prose, Brown describes the murderous combat between the 442nd Regiment and the Germans during the summer of 1944 as the Americans claw their way mile by mile up the Ligurian Coast from the Anzio beachhead into the hilly terrain of Northern Italy. Kats's Artillery Battalion toils in two shifts firing its guns around the clock; running a gauntlet of "exploding mortars, hissing bullets, and shrieking shells," Rudy's K Company conquers Hill 140; the same force wrests towns like Luciana from the enemy building by building, blasting through doors and windows with machine guns, bazookas, and grenades.
The young men of the 442nd emerge from the crucible transformed, bound together by the certain knowledge that, before this is over, many will die and that it's "up to each of them now to watch out for the others, to take any risk, to bear any burden for one another."
The 442nd's stellar performance earns it another assignment: to anchor the southern tip of the American Seventh Army in its attack on the German Siegfried Line in the fall of 1944. For seven days and nights the soldiers battle their way though dense forests, continuous rain, impenetrable mud, and barricades laced with mines and booby traps, and drive the Germans from the French towns of Bruyeres, Belmont, and Biffontaine. Their reward: an order to rescue the Lost Battalion of the Texas Division's 141st Regiment, whose arrogant and incompetent commander, John E. Dahlquist, has foolishly allowed it to be surrounded and entrapped in the Vosges Mountains.
It's a suicidal mission. After two days advancing through more woods, rain, fog, mud, and intense firepower, K and I Companies are at an impasse. To reach the stranded battalion, they must cross a ridge and scale a steep slope through heavily fortified emplacements under a constant enemy barrage. "I want you guys to charge!" yells Dahlquist to Regimental Lt. Col. Alfred Pursall. Compelled to obey, "the men one by one, then en masse, rise and storm up the hill . . . shooting blind through the tangle of trees looming above . . . A torrent of steel and lead descends upon them. Mortar shells plunge down among them with terrifying randomness. Machine-gun fire rips them apart."
Amazingly the assault is a success; the Germans retreat from their positions. The next day the remnants of the two companies break through the encirclement and link up with the besieged Texans. Once again the 442nd regiment has triumphed against overwhelming odds, but this time the cost is horrific. "Of the roughly 360 men who marched into the Vosges three days before, fewer than two dozen in K Company are still alive and able to walk out of the woods; in I Company there are even fewer" -- all of them sacrificed to rescue 200 comrades.
Back home, rather than congratulatory, the reception accorded the surviving Japanese Americans is insensitive, insolent, and demeaning. "Millions of employers refuse to hire them. What jobs are available are mostly low paying and menial." They are greeted with slurs and slights wherever they go. The dissident Gordon Hirabayashi loses his case, appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, which rules against him, and spends most of the war in prison. In 1987 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will overturn his conviction.
Nothing summarizes the remarkable story of the soldiers of 442nd Regiment better than the inscription on the "Go For Broke" memorial monument that rises in middle of Los Angeles's Little Tokyo neighborhood: "Looked upon with suspicion, set apart and deprived of their constitutional rights, they nevertheless remained steadfast and served with indomitable spirit and uncommon valor, for theirs was a fight to prove loyalty."
And so too is the book a fitting coda to my illness and quarantine. One's minor ailments pale in comparison to such courage and heroism, particular when significant benefits may ensue. The medical consensus is that, having recovered from Covid and been thrice vaccinated, I'm now the possessor of super immunity -- at least until the next variant crawls out of a cave. And once I obtain a confirming document from my physician, I'm free to travel internationally without fear of consequences should I test positive. As I'm leaving soon for ten days in Patagonia, I may find myself in a situation where both those propositions become problematic.
Let's hope not. Otherwise I will be obliged to subject my faithful readers to an exhaustive sequel.
