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Tomorrow is Leah’s immuniday. It’s what we’re calling the two-week mark after the second vaccine. It one of the new words in the small personal language we inevitably created after months of being each other’s sole companion. The cat became “Beeb” soon after her recovery. All meals are “One food, please.” All cooking involves multiple ten-second dances: Stirring Soup is probably the most fun; Chopping Stuff is mildly dangerous. Answers to “How’s it going?” have an emotional range limited to “Eh,” “Meh,” “Okay?” with a sighing surprise, and various grunts and growls.
My immuniday was last Wednesday, and I’ve been using the gap to try to undo some of the damage I’ve inflicted on my psyche. I can go outside without hyperventilating the whole time, although I still hold my breath when passing unmasked people. The thought of going into the hallway of our building isn’t quite as fraught. I spent ten minutes indoors to mail some packages, and only shook a little. I can pet the Beeb without wondering what she rubbed against when I wasn’t looking.
Fear of my own hands is the biggest problem. I’ve scrubbed them to the point of bleeding on some days, and dug up a bunch of old electronics to make hands-free sensor that would play a 30-second music track so I would know when to stop. I almost cried the first time it finished because I didn’t have to rely on my own broken brain to measure time. Because a pile of wires and bad code told me I was okay.
I couldn’t get past the hand-washing. I washed my hands more than most even before this, because I have cats and am futilely trying to avoid toxoplasmosis twenty years in. When it turned out fomite transmission wasn’t much of an issue, I was relieved but didn’t stop scrubbing every raw crevice in my ever-drier skin, because it was something I could do. I couldn’t stop breathing. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t protect my brother, stuck selling wine to the public and telling people they had to stay outside the store 50 times a day. I could stay inside and wash my hands.
Tomorrow, Leah and I will be as immune as we’re going to get, and I will have no more excuses to indulge the OCD I’ve spent much of my life trying to keep under control. I subsumed as much as I could into numbers and averages, however depressing. Some interesting numbers that are neither almost 600,000 nor 65 percent: The amount of money we spent saving the Beeb. It’s a number so large I won’t say it here, but people making four times our household income probably wouldn’t have spent it. My relationship with money was opposite that of most people in the pandemic: I didn’t make any less but had no luxury to spend it on. Without restaurants or bars or anything else to do, it just piled up over a blocked hedonism drain. I gave some away in increments I hoped would patch the dissonance between having the savings I should have had ten years ago, and knowing so many people needed it so much more, and needed it now. But they were anonymous; Beeb’s spilling guts were not. We’d already lost one cat in 2020. The Beeb is our last uncompromised joy. One money, please.
The number of stupid iPhone games on my phone is a rough barometer for my state of mind. In the past, I would go through a couple of rounds every winter where I would download five or six, try them out, and settle on one to pass the time I had to spend hiding in the bathroom. At time of writing, I have 52 on my phone. Some free advertising: I downloaded June’s Journey because Chris Gethard’s voice did some paid advertising in the middle of a Beautiful/Anonymous episode. It’s the kind of game I usually hate: There’s a primary mode, in this case finding hidden objects in scenes, wrapped up in a dozen ways to get you to spend money or watch ads. A single mutation away from the Candy Crush family. The story is pedestrian, the animations take too long, the grifting is aggressive and monotonous. I play it an hour a day.
The games I feel less empty playing are the simple puzzle games, but they become rote too quickly. Nonograms had a good run, but gave way to Water Sort Puzzle, which gave way to an empty numbness, briefly filled by Water Connect Puzzle, then simply accepted into my soul. Creepy story games that cost a few bucks and don’t drown me in advertising fare a little better, but they tend to be too short or too long. Fez is too long. Reach is way too short. Very Little Nightmares was about right, but I still finished it in two hours. Limbo is the gold standard, but there’s only one and its almost-as-good sequel.
Naturally as the number of games and corresponding screentime skyrockets, steps per day has fallen to the point where the chart no longer displays meaningful trends. The steady curve with the slight dip over the weekend is gone, replaced by a spiky mess with occasional highs indicating I pumped myself up enough to leave the house for an hour to walk around industrial areas, trying not to touch anything. Nowadays I don’t take my phone outside because I don’t want to wipe it down when I get home, so it doesn’t even know about that.
I used to drink ginger ale to the point where we stocked it each week like it was wine or flour, but a preexisting fear of cans, brought about by an untrue story about contracting legionnaire’s disease from an unwashed can, made it too difficult to go through the ritual of washing one. Small numbers of untrue things add up in my brain, even when I know they’re wrong. They hang out together and build their own stories, out of my control, and I have to go in and erase them one by one, with far more effort to overcome the fear than the fear took to set up shop.
I began to fear people as disease vectors last April; by July I feared my own anger at them for aggressively vectoring away. Part of that anger was rooted in my impotence in efforts to do anything for anyone. I find that anger draining away as small futures emerge.
It turns out not only can you live your life in fear, that’s what most of us do. Thinking it through doesn’t work very often, since all fear is in some sense irrational. Action overcomes fear, and the action depends on the object of fear. I fear real things in an arguably unhealthy way, so tomorrow my action will be to split the difference: I’m going to put on my watch, my rings, and everything else that could interfere with washing my hands and has thus been gathering dust for a year. I’m going to go to a bar, get cash out of a public ATM, spend it on booze, and get drunk with my friends. I am not going to engage with obnoxious strangers, even if I silently hate them. And that’s about as normal as it gets.
