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Mei says, The start of Week Two, while stretching her arms above her head and I think, yes, it is isn't it. It's been one week or two weeks, or two months, or two years — it doesn't seem to matter. Someone said on the TV that we might be like this for six months and I thought, what is six months. September? Who even knows what a month is, time is just a construct.
The apocalypse was never far off when I was young — I lived in constant fear of the rapture, that Jesus would appear in the clouds and take my family and hopefully me, on to paradise. I've been told a story about when I was young, sometime before I can remember, of coming into the house and telling everyone excitedly that Jesus was coming back. My parents ran out with me into the garden, the American backyard, and there over the trees, a Mickey Mouse hot air balloon had appeared. This story is supposed to be funny, but it's not funny to me anymore, because now all I can think is how, in this time that I don't remember, had I known a story of Jesus coming back. How primed had I been from two or three or four to think that in a moment, everything would stop, that a trumpet, an actual physical trumpet, would be blown and Jesus would come back to either take me away or not, depending on some set of rules that I could not, of course, understand. How fundamentally unstable does that make a person.
That end never came. I wonder now about the people that were the most whipped up. There was this kid called Lance and his parents were prophesy junkies who thought the rapture was even more imminent than my family did. I wonder if this crisis has them back into it, reading Revelation like they can figure out who the beast is now, and what each of the seven heads and ten horns, and the crowns on the horns, represent. I'm sure, somewhere in my family's basement there is a three-ring binder from a course his parents taught at the church, explaining what each of these things represented in the early-mid-nineties, when it must have been Madeline Albright or Bill Clinton. But who is the antichrist now. What things can you count as multiples of ten or seven or what could be added up to be six-sixty-six. It was credit cards then for a while, wasn't it — the beast was everywhere.
Marking time in a lockdown is not simple. The weekend came and went and as I think about what we did, I can't remember. I suspect this will be the whole experience. We were in lockdown for three or four or six months. We fought sometimes and cried sometimes and laughed sometimes. We did a lot of drawing and school worksheets. We didn't think about the future for a while. We tried to stay out of each other's way as much as we could. Or some concrete things: I finally cleaned a stain on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I finally fixed my bike brakes. Naomi and I made dinner. We ate together and put aside some of the frustrations. There's no point in making any decisions anyway if we are here for now in suspended animation. I will get paid this month, yes? And next month too? Then we will be okay.
Things feel okay now, but it's hard to tell. They say deaths are a lagging indicator in a pandemic, so more people can be dying even when things get better. And any number can mean anything you want it to mean. There is always something that will have killed more people than this virus. And Jesus could still be coming back, we can't rule that out. This is just another chance to be right, another series of three-ring binders to fill with cloze test nonsense answers. It turns out you can count anything by ten or seven or six. It's Monday now, the thirtieth. Make of that what you will.