Ashbery’s poem “Laughing Gravy” from Wakefulness makes a nice cameo appearance in this piece by Geoff Dyer on the how the corona virus is affecting our lives.
The False Positives, False Negatives, and Positive Negatives of the Coronavirus
By Geoff Dyer
April 30, 2020
As the coronavirus began to creep into our lives—but before it came to define them entirely—e-mails from across the world included the cheery phrase “Crazy times!” Messages from friends here in Los Angeles tended to favor something locally sourced, courtesy of Jim Morrison and the Doors: “Strange Days.”
Those of us who come through these times without serious illness, loss, or ruinous debt will look back on this period as an extraordinary one to have been alive.Photograph by Vincent Poillet / Redux
Strange days, indeed, as we waited for the result of my wife’s test, hoping that it would be positive. Can you think of any other illness for which a positive result might be eagerly anticipated? Unable to do anything but lie in bed, she experienced symptoms that were severe by any usual standard but most welcome by the newly enhanced metrics of affliction ushered in by the virus. We had gone for the test a week after she became ill. Some of that week had been spent conducting our own speculative and highly ineffective form of contact tracing, trying to work out how and from whom she might have contracted the virus. As time passed and her condition did not get significantly worse, we became more and more optimistic about a positive result. Until she fell ill—quite suddenly, late on a Friday night—we had slept snuggled up together as usual, so I had presumably been exposed. In a classic plot twist, there was also the possibility of an inside job. Had she caught the virus from the very person who was helping with the investigation, namely, me? On the Monday before she got sick, we had cancelled a dinner with neighbors because I had a weird headache and felt sure I was going to wake up in the morning with full-blown corona-itis. I was actually fine the next day, but now we wondered if this faint throb, while nothing in itself, might have been the virus getting its foot in our door.
All this, of course, is the hand everyone dreams of being dealt: an asymptomatic case (his) or a “mild” one (hers). Come out the other side. Get the antibody test and rejoin what’s left of the world with a clean bill of health. So it sucked when the test result was negative. We were back to square one—or, if such a thing is possible, to pre-square one. My wife was still sick, so we maintained a policy of mutual quarantining in an apartment that makes any kind of separation almost impossible. And whereas I’d thought I was beyond the point at which I could get sick, now I was back, full time, in the realm of daily dread. Not for the first time during the outbreak—and almost certainly not for the last—it seemed like we were living out those John Ashbery lines: “The crisis has just passed. / Uh oh, here it comes again, / looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I . . . ”
No wonder we didn’t believe the result. We’d heard of false negatives—had read that oral tests of the sort that she had self-administered were less reliable than the ones for which someone else shoves a swab up your nose, halfway to the brain. So we persuaded ourselves that she did have the bug. Part of the reason for this, after about nineteen days, was that it was preferable to the possibility that she was ill with something else. We’d had a laugh at the expense of a friend who’d been stupid enough to slice his finger while pruning bushes in his garden in Oakland and had to have the wound stitched. Of all the times to wind up at urgent care! My wife spoke with a doctor who confirmed the possible inconclusiveness of the test. Then I spoke with a friend whose symptoms had matched hers exactly—in the sense of roughly—but who had tested positive. That clinched it. We now had corroborating proof that the result was wrong. And then, very slowly, she began to get better.
Meanwhile, the false negative was in the process of being balanced out by false positives. The lockdown, for example, meant there was more time to read. Except that there is actually less time to read than ever before, partly because so much of the day is spent monitoring the news (in spite of repeated resolutions to prune back the habit) and dealing with the increasingly tiresome flow of fun YouTube clips, many of them featuring dogs, most of which I now delete sight unseen. Still, at least I am of an age when my deepest desire is not to be out every night socializing, partying, carousing, boozing. I’ve not had a drink since March 18th, the longest period I’ve been off the sauce since I turned seventeen, forty-five years ago, when I pretty much decided to dedicate the rest of my life to swilling beer. Staying in, back then, in my late teens and twenties and thirties—and, if we’re honest, in my forties and much of my fifties—was nothing short of torture, partly because of what I might have been missing out on. Young people can at least take succor from the fact that there’s nothing to miss. Considered as a whole, this bundle of contradictory data adds up to what might be called a positive negative.
Right now, I’m content just to venture out on my bike for an afternoon: take a look around, as the Lizard King put it, see which way the wind blow. In the retail sense, it’s not blowing at all. “A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time,” D. H. Lawrence declared, in “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through.” Time has been called, as they still say in English pubs, on the overpriced clothes and sunglasses shops of Abbot Kinney. Even MedMen does not have its usual line of punters queuing outside as if it were a daytime night club. But it is open! How Californian: a store selling marijuana deemed an essential service, though I’m not surprised business seems slow. Given the well-documented tendency of the drug to induce paranoia, you’d need nerves of steel to get stoned now.
Jeez, but it feels so lovely to be out and even slightly about that I’m convinced that those of us who manage, like Lawrence, to come through this without serious illness, the loss of loved ones, or ruinous debt will look back on these “dark times”—as those “crazy times” inevitably became—as a most extraordinary period to have been alive. This is especially true of the health-care workers who will remember it as their finest hour, when their work was most profoundly appreciated. That “finest hour” phrase was a non-accidental accident since I often find myself thinking, lovingly, of England and its National Health Service. Now, of course, I am brimful of admiration for the health-care workers here in the U.S. who dedicate themselves to saving lives and nursing the sick, but I am conscious that they are operating within a system in which the patient, as Martin Amis succinctly phrased it, is “getting charged for every Kleenex.” The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, was right to denounce the bidding wars that have been taking place between states for ventilators and personal protective equipment, but, within the moral confines of a for-profit health-care system, it’s hardly surprising that related parts of the economy will continue to operate in accordance with the hallowed principles of the market. That’s why we British invest so much pride and emotion in our ailing health system—more emotion than money, it might be added. Our outpouring of thanks is the flip side of a tacit acceptance that the N.H.S. is in critical condition, on borrowed time and life support. We hope that its patients pull through and we hope it pulls through, too. The question is whether our present gratitude might be converted into a willingness to insure recovery and robust future health through greater investment, even as the depleted U.K. tax reservoir shrinks to the size of a Serengeti watering hole in the midst of a record-setting drought. This was Britain’s Easter message of hope: that the Eton-educated Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson would emerge from his I.C. tomb, reincarnated as a convert to Corbynism.