How do we sense danger when we can see nothing?
We listen, eyes closed, head turning this way and that to bring the ears into their best position for taking in sound waves. We go still. We trust something we use less often — call it intuition, instinct, picking up a vibe, feeling watched, feeling set upon. The ‘reptile brain’ calls upon its automatic, unconscious awareness of danger and reacts accordingly. Should we flee or fight?
But no human or animal is coming for us now. We are beset by a virus and humans are its host. They are much smaller than bacteria. In a pandemic, during this version of a plague, we imagine them everywhere — on doorknobs, bar tops, the lids of jars, on steering wheels, on a box of Cheerios, on the money I carry and receive, in droplets suspended in the air in a store. on the skin of the humans I pass in the market, on their breath, on my own hands. We must worry about others. We must worry about how our own bodies might turn on us.
Unlike the Black Death, no one has spoken of this as God’s Punishment other than a idiot Kardashian and a handful of odious preachers. Even though it does not feel like it at times, we are products of the Enlightenment. Enough of us believe in science and facts to understand what the coronavirus means, how it arrived, and to a point, how to combat it. Eventually, we have faith that a vaccine will be invented and all will go back to normal, whatever normal will mean at that point. Meanwhile, it can kill us.
So, we take our own measures to guard against whatever is on the air or has settled upon the material world we must inhabit. We scrub, step back, wear gloves, perhaps believe in masks (even though a virus can sail through most masks as if they were made of giants’ nets sewn for giants’ fish in spaces dozens of feet square). Do you calculate distances between yourself and others in the grocery store. This is safe and No too close. Have you held your breath when they pass you? Do you feel a pinch of relief when you walk back into sun and wind? In your secret mind, do you have to argue against a fear of the old, a fear of the person who coughs once, the one in line ahead of you who blows his nose, against the young who might believe they are invulnerable? Do you find yourself wishing upon your immune system, telling yourself, “I am strong. My lungs are clear. I will live.”
How will we react over time to a threat that arrives from an invisible realm and that is both everywhere and nowhere?
