In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand. —Robin & Leila

Living temporarily in a tiny cabin adjacent to my home in Iowa, this would not be my first choice of a dwelling if not for my current circumstances. The two-room cabin, less spacious than many motel rooms, is appointed with floor-to-ceiling knotty pine paneling throughout and features a kitchen with no cabinets and a dorm fridge. A flimsy privacy screen provides the only barrier between the kitchen, toilet and bathtub. The cabin belongs to my neighbors who live in a stately Victorian-era home with Tiffany stained glass windows, the house once owned by the son of a 19th-century lumber baron. Now I find myself unable to enter my own home, stuck instead in the cabin that was once home to the carriage driver of the lumber baron’s son.  

For months my wife Margie and I had been successful in keeping Covid at bay in our household, though our efforts were complicated by a change in my employment. At the end of February, I signed a contract for a new position in New York City, where I was born. At any other time, the thought of moving back to New York would have thrilled me, and it did for about two weeks. The plan was for me to move there and for us to make frequent visits back and forth. Margie and our daughters weren’t going to move as our eldest daughter was about to enter her senior year in high school and in normal times we love Iowa City and our home there. As New York became the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., the thought of moving there suddenly seemed like the worst life decision ever. New Yorkers who could afford to flee, fled. When my new dean and I spoke, he told me of the view of the morgue truck parked across the street from his office. He, an avowed Brooklynite, fled the city, too.

Before my move to Brooklyn, I quarantined in an old farmhouse in an upstate town with the quaint name of Cuddebackville. Owned by cousins of mine, the house was hardly ever occupied. The last time I had visited was thirty years earlier, but the house had barely changed, except the evidence of its long-neglect was visible everywhere. Still the house felt familiar and welcoming, to me at least, though Margie, who accompanied me on the drive, hated it. For me, my younger self roamed through the halls and I welcomed seeing him again. For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening. Our one foray to a nearby park was like parting a jeering mob. Every few feet along the mile-long dirt road that led to the park, signs were tacked on nearly every tree, informing us that we were being watched and that we had better not step off the path. The entrance sign to the park was pocked with bullet holes. As in many small towns, outsiders are looked on with suspicion in Cuddebackville, though I was protected by my whiteness and the last name of my cousins. They had owned the house since 1963, and I used their names as my password every time I encountered someone who required such a password, say, walking along the defunct railroad bed near the house. Margie, a woman of color, did not want to stick around such dwellings where passwords were needed, and which might not even work for her. And who could blame her? I, too, would never have spent a minute in the place had I not previously spent five months there in my early twenties.

My new dwelling in Brooklyn was faculty housing, which my dean warned me I shouldn’t get too excited about. Faculty housing and student housing were one and the same, and the three bedrooms of my three-bedroom apartment were labeled “A,” “B” and “C,” replete with 70s modular furniture and bass thumping sophomores across the hall, my closest neighbors. Still, three bedrooms in New York seemed wildly spacious, and by the time I moved in, things were improving in Brooklyn. The streets were lively and the vast majority of people I encountered wore masks, unlike in Iowa, where all summer I had encountered maskless men and women with their game faces on, plowing through the aisles of grocery stores. Nor did I require any passwords to walk freely.

Over the months, the epicenters of the pandemic flipped. During my time in Brooklyn, positivity rates kept declining to the point at which they were at 1%. At the same time, Iowa, which never had a mask order or any coordinated government effort to stop the pandemic, started spiking to the point at which the positivity rate was 50%. I wondered, along with the rest of the country, whether to risk traveling from one dwelling to another over Thanksgiving. It turned out I had little choice.

Margie’s unit in Internal medicine at The University of Iowa Hospital had been converted entirely to a Covid unit, and she had just come on her shift as a nurse when, before she had a chance to fully protect herself, she had to save a patient whose clogged lungs were drowning him. A couple of days later I received a call from her. “Mahal,” she said, which means “Dear” in Tagalog, what we call one another, “I tested positive.”

A utilitarian antique phone, nothing fancy, hangs in my new dwelling: a black box with a simple earpiece dangling from a hook, but no dial. The point of this phone was simply to be summoned. The dead rarely command, as it turns out, though I’m sure that on some occasions, in some figurative way, they do. I admit to once or twice having picked up the receiver, with the tiniest of wild expectations of hearing the drunken voice of the lumber baron’s son, or the voice of my long-dead mother, or the man who killed himself in this cabin a dozen years ago, commanding in the manner of the first words ever spoken on a phone, “Robin, come here; I want you.” Still, it’s the living whose voices we are most often called to heed. It’s why I’m here, for the time being at least.

Robin Hemley
December 15, 2020