The Pandemic
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
The Pandemic
27
An eerie stillness blanketed Asheville, another booming tourist town brought to its knees by Covid-19. Nothing moved; utter silence—even the birds held their tongue. Petra, a recluse for almost a year before stay-at-home orders and mandatory lockdowns, had more coping skills than most. Aside from her now non-existent server job at a restaurant who shuttered its doors forever, she lived and breathed isolation. Refusing to re-engage in social media, a secondary addiction that had caused so much suffering, her mind became an introspective cloister, and she, its solitary nun, echoed fervent prayers night and day searching the massive stone hallways of a haunted convent for clarity.
“Wonder what YouTube has to say about unconscious patterns?”
In a random search for answers, a video popped up called Qigong for Beginners. Bored with her yoga practice, she gave it a whirl. To her surprise, she moved energy. It was as if her open palms were touching God. The sensation mimicked the electricity she had felt crouching in the doorway of her bedroom as Sister McKinney, next door in her prayer chamber, summoned the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit.
Soon after, another video popped up entitled Heart and Brain Coherence. Petra, in search of balance, watched the entire episode, even though it was about meditation, something she knew was impossible, at least for her.
“Close your eyes. Breathe in and out in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Now, touch your heart and concentrate on things you are grateful for.”
The man, who appeared to be a doppelgänger for Hugh Jackman in The Wolverine, promised that after three minutes, her heart and mind would become coherent. Intrigued, she tested his theory.
One cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous is gratitude. Any recovering person actively involved in a 12-step program learns how to counter negative feelings by writing a gratitude list. Whether they persist in the practice is another matter.
The easy to follow meditation focused her concentration and kept her mind occupied. A few minutes into it, she felt a tangible energy source collect in and around her. It was one of her favorite feelings, but, until that day, only happened by accident. Sometimes, when she ran into a friend, they would get to talking and this same feeling would fall on them. They would look at each other in wonder, as the hair on their arms stood up on end.
She thought, “Could it be this simple? Why didn’t Auntie Pat say that meditation was about feeling God?”
She redirected her attention back to things she was grateful for. About halfway through her list, she called it quits and opened her eyes. Thirty minutes had passed.
“Holy shit! I can do this.”
Meditation became her new morning ritual. In it, she lost all sense of self. Her inadequacies and her lack disappeared into an enormous inner world of possibility and palpable love.
—
A few weeks later, humiliated and terrified, she approached her apartment manager.
“I can only pay maybe a third of my rent.”
“Don’t worry about it. More than half the residents are in the same boat. We’re not allowed to evict anybody. Go ahead and hang on to the money you’ve got. Buncombe County has a program that will pay six months’ rent. Here’s the number. It’s going to be okay.”
Petra had never missed a rent payment. The sorry condition of the world, broken and forlorn, bursting at its seams with the dead and dying, felt surreal.
On a roll, she persisted through every technical difficulty known to modern man and applied online for unemployment. While waiting on that, she sold a good portion of her furniture and household items on Craigslist. She sorted through her clothes and sold them on eBay. In her mind, they were at war and stuff did not matter.
The decluttering process secured some much needed financial traction, and combined with a daily meditation practice, her emotions leveled out for the first time in years.
The newfound, semi-solid footing was obliterated in a nanosecond by dreadful news.
Vincent was dead, presumably from Covid. She hadn’t spoken to him for a couple of months. It was May 2020. She telephoned Fred and Charlotte. Utter disbelief. A slew of emails followed, connecting Petra to all his friends in New York and San Francisco.
Peter, one of his poet comrades from their early days at Naropa and the last to see him alive, recounted a tragic story. A year earlier, Vincent had retired from his position as a High School AP English teacher. Since then, void of responsibility and purpose, his drinking spun out-of-control as did the usual self-destructive behavior patterns associated with advanced alcoholism. His wife and son, for obvious reasons, left him to his own devices. When Peter visited, right before the lockdown, the house was in shambles. A perfect reflection of Vinny’s condition. In long-term recovery, Peter did his best to convince his best friend to get help, to no avail.
Like the countless other Covid-19 fatalities, his body was stuck in limbo awaiting autopsy. The morgue at the Suffolk County Medical Examiner had reached its 70 person capacity and two refrigerated trailers, each able to house 45 bodies, had to be brought in to accommodate the overflow. There was also talk of utilizing a nearby meat packing plant. The coroner expected processing to take several months, which eliminated any possibility of a normal funeral. The lockdown prohibited travel and communal gatherings, so no in-person memorial of any kind.
Following his death, Peter contacted the local police station to find out who had discovered the body. According to the desk sergeant, Vincent had stopped off at a liquor store a few blocks from his house. He was so drunk that the owner demanded his car keys before selling him any more booze. Two days passed. He failed to retrieve his vehicle. The liquor store owner called the police, who found him lying dead on his bed. Many months later, the verdict would be death by a heart attack, with no extenuating circumstances.
Everything concerning Vincent and the life they shared felt unresolved.
How could a relationship so powerful, with such deep meaning and complex emotions, dissolve into nothingness like this? Where was the happy ending?
In her morning meditations, she called out to him and while she found peace; she did not find him.
One night, in a vivid dream, she met up with him. It had been forty days since his passing. In the dream, she was sitting on a bench, on one of those triangular-shaped concrete islands, in the middle of Sixth Avenue. A cab pulled up. It wasn’t a yellow cab common to New York City. Instead, it was a black London cab. Vincent stepped out, handed the cabbie some cash, and motioned for him to wait. He sat down next to Petra and placed his arm around her shoulders, as he had countless times before. He stared out onto the busy street and sucked in the air, a habit of his when he had something on his mind.
Turning to face her, he said, “I need you to let me go.”
“I can’t. I won’t.”
There she was, sitting with the Vincent of her youth. He was the very best of himself. She could feel the weight of his arm on her back.
“It’s time for me to leave, but I won’t go until you release me.”
“Just a few more minutes, okay?”
Of course, she intended to let him go. After all, she wasn’t a selfish pig of a monster, was she? They sat in silence. Resting her hand on his knee, she nodded. He kissed her cheek, walked over to the cab, turned and smiled. Petra offered a sad, weak wave.
When she woke, an open wound filled with everything that might have been and never would be, settled on her chest.
“He’s gone. He’s fucking gone!”
—
The following night, she couldn’t sleep. As a child, drifting off into an unconscious slumber was a means of escape, her one true refuge. Out of necessity, she trained her mind to go solid black, allowing her to shut down the voices in her head. It was the equivalent of a chalk eraser sliding across a blackboard. The skill followed her into adulthood and as long as she wasn’t detoxing from drugs; she continued to drift into sleep with ease.
On this night, her brain would not cooperate. It wasn’t clear what thoughts were interfering with her normal ability to wind down. There appeared to be a multitude. All of them were vying for her attention and none of them were succeeding at capturing the spotlight.
With closed eyes, lying on her side, she began slow rhythmic breathing. She asked her thoughts to form a single-file line and present themselves one at a time. A nasty accusation catapulted to the top.
“You’re a piece of shit.”
It was running on a loop like a hamster on a wheel. Petra did not dwell on it. She allowed it to pass by and drift upwards. She imagined it was a balloon. As it rose, she popped it with an imaginary pin. The thought dissipated with the air from the balloon.
All the various thoughts ran on never ending loops. Each hamster wheel stacked on top of the next. Layers upon layers, all talking at the same time until they merged into a continuous, imperceptible white background noise. Petra had no previous awareness that she had a constant flow of abusive, self-abasing thoughts altering her perceptions of reality and creating havoc. She continued the process with each thought that rose into her conscious awareness.
“You’re no good.”
“You’ll never amount to anything.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I wish you were dead.”
“You fat little pig.”
That thought startled her. She recognized it as her mother’s voice.
What if these self-condemning thoughts were not her thoughts? Was it possible that they came from the outside in, rather than from the inside out, as she had always believed? Maybe her parents, in moments of disappointment or distress, had planted these ideas. What if she had accepted them as truth and adopted them as core beliefs? Was it possible that everything she believed about herself was a lie?
“I can’t stand to look at you. Get out of my face.”
“You killed my baby!”
“Loser!”
“Why are you alive and she’s dead?”
“I wish you were never born!”
“Stupid, stupid girl. Can’t you do anything right?”
She deflated each thought balloon. Pop, pop, pop until they had all disappeared into the blackness.
Finding herself conscious and awake in the black for the first time was like entering another dimension beyond time and space. It was uncharted territory, an expansive nothingness, empty, void of thought or feeling and yet somehow perfect and serene. She was nothing and awareness at the same time.
“What is this? Where am I?” she asked.
A booming voice that seemed to come from every direction at once answered.
“I Am.”
Petra knew, without a hint of skepticism, that she had found God’s presence inside herself, hidden under all the lies, the bullshit and some seriously destructive programming.
“This is cool. I can work with this. Here’s a foundation I can build something on.”
At peace, she drifted into a deep sleep.
In her morning meditation, she discovered she could assess the “I Am” space and linger as long as she liked. Sometimes, she could perceive it visually on the inner screen of her forehead. It appeared as the vast blackness of space filled with stars that fell in a constant stream, like rain. Sometimes, the stars formed patterns and flew in various formations, twisting and turning like a flock of birds. Observing the heavens in flight brought up a powerful emotion, a longing for home.
Meditation provided a newfound refuge for her. The problems arose when she opened her eyes and jumped back into the “shit” as she liked to call life. She realized that all these insidious hamster wheels needed to be dealt with.
“Maybe it’s time for EMDR therapy.”
Relaxing on the front porch, she asked herself if she was happy living in the mountains. Yes, it was beautiful, but was it the best environment for her? She remembered how amazing she felt living at the beach in Maui. Thanks to the pandemic and a slew of government programs, Petra had collected a small reserve of cash.
At that moment, her twelve-year-old adolescent self appeared, not as some ghostly apparition, but flesh and bone solid, surrounded by an air of haughty defiance. She held a cocktail, Jameson’s on the rocks, in one hand and a lighted cigarette in the other.
“You know Vincent stole the art, right?”
Petra smiled.
“Of course he did. Why couldn’t I see that?”
Taking a long drag and filling her lungs, the middle-schooler said, “There’s a lot you don’t see.”
Frustrated, the arrogant tween shook her head, flipped her cigarette butt onto the driveway, and evaporated in a thick cloud of exhaled smoke. Petra contemplated this part of her, a part she often heard somewhere deep inside her gut. An arrogant ruffian with an uncanny ability to see the world clearly for what it was. Brutal and uncompromising, emboldened by the warm glow of that first drink and a numbing rush of nicotine that distanced her from the pain just enough to look reality in its beady little eyes.
“Hey, Daniel, I’m thinking about selling the rest of my shit and moving to the beach. Want to come with?”
“Sure. Why not? I’ve had enough of this mountain bullshit.”
They tallied up their resources and decided on the Gulf of Mexico. White sand beaches, emerald green water.
“Redneck Riviera, here we come!”
She found an apartment in a complex under construction. It would be ready in five months, which corresponded with the end of their current lease.
—
While waiting, Petra looked into therapy. Mental health had become a top priority during the lockdown. As a result, she could attend twenty sessions for five dollars a pop.
“What a deal!”
She found a woman with over thirty years of experience and an excellent reputation.
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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography meets fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.