"Double Take" by Mia Chung
Act 1
March 12, 2020.
An email informs me that next week’s photo shoot is cancelled.
- (sigh of relief)
Out of an abundance of caution, I have my class meet on this thing called Zoom. At the end of class:
- Um, Cuomo just shut down Broadway.
The next day I buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of shelf-stable groceries and look forward to a one-week retreat: I will finally have time to finish the revision. While I’m unpacking groceries, my sister who has a house with a furnished attic calls:
- You can come today, tomorrow, or in two months.
Before she is done talking, I purchase a train ticket. As I pack for a two-week visit, I find myself putting everything I can fit into every bag I own (including the groceries) because some part of me realizes I am moving out of New York City.
Act 2
His watch tracks him getting an average of two hours of REM sleep each night. He consults a doctor:
- Why are the CDC and the WHO saying that masks won’t stop infection, and yet masks are in such dire need at the hospitals?
- Because people touch their faces so much with unwashed hands and don’t wear masks correctly anyways, so masks are useless, and the burn rate of masks and gloves at hospitals is so high that hospitals are running out.
He doesn’t understand and now he also feels stupid, like a guitar string in his brain has snapped, so he takes another nap. Food is delivered; the only thing his wife doesn’t wash is the cheese, which she wipes with disinfectant. He gets a sleep score above 90 for the first time ever and then writes to their landlord about uncertainty. They feel drowsy, so they take a walk:
- (smile, brief wave) Hello
But the couple strides past them silently, frowning, with tunnel vision, which makes him believe they associate him with China. At home he puts on headphones and she takes a nap. She wakes up and reads four histories of the Chosun Era and finally understands that due to the stability of this period of Confucian orthodoxy, Korea let its foot fall asleep and then couldn’t keep up when Change barged in with guns. His work is not considered essential, and if she could just stop worrying about toilet paper, he would not have slammed the door in her face. She wants them to get a dog, but the shelter is empty.
A white police officer presses his knee into a Black man’s neck; a white woman with a dog files two false reports against a Black man watching birds — and cities across the country and around the world begin to wake up.
Act 3
So much is finally so clear to so many for a moment. With the next exhale, they send statements and she hosts conversations and he fills out surveys and we send money and dispatch reading lists and form focus groups and list demands and yet the only thing Bella really wants to do is go outside.
Wesley logs in on Monday and re-schedules the webinar with London, but now that it’s Friday, he’ll send the email after the weekend and take the rest of the day off even though it’s Monday because forgetting to mute and forgetting to unmute for five hours straight is his limit, and on Friday he steps outside for the first time all week and vows to make virtual cardio a daily commitment starting on Monday when — but after three solitary months in Brooklyn, Wesley routinely talks to himself out loud and eats cereal for dinner and overreacts when there’s a slow connection (but will we ever go back now that there’s no commute?) and the public has thickened the streets with airborne anger and neutrality has been outed as supremacy, and now, now he no longer feels safe. So he takes a test, confirms he is negative, breaks his lease, puts on a mask, flies across country to his parents’ home, and prepares to sit this one out in peace and quiet in Portland, Oregon.
Bella goes outside because she prefers dying by virus over the death of staying safe. She is tired of educating friends and sick of policing allies, but then she realizes that what is set in stone can be taken down and removed from public view, even if it has been polished for decades and has a loose resemblance to a former president. She can gather and rally and march and be a living, breathing monument. Could it be that exposure to tear gas, rubber bullets, and accusations of looting can lead to a lasting health?
Act 4
The earth gets hotter and vegetation dries up, a gender is revealed, lightning strikes, and then unquenchable flames paint the sky orange and smoke blots out the sun, summoning a nuclear winter or a scene from Mars. Mars squares the stationing Saturn on Tuesday. On Wednesday, John receives his mail-in ballot; two days later, he receives a second, identical ballot. In a neighboring state, Pearl’s mother considers each option, configuration, philosophy, and question (including “what is kindergarten actually?”) in balance with sundry risks, expenses, and drawbacks — on an hourly basis; after all, what really hangs in the balance is not the acquisition of friends and skills, but the future personhood of Pearl.
- Pearl, do you want to pod with Aliya? You’d be going to her house and / you’d—
- I promise I’ll wear a mask all the time, Mama! Yes, I want to go, please, I promise!
Instead of fighting fires for $1 an hour, the people in prison are fighting a virus instead, and so houses burn. A wedding is held outside a nursing home so her grandmother can attend through a window. Another Justice dies, then Decency follows in mere hours — and no one is surprised. His Hippocratic Oath now also means he must keep patients from their families and stay away from his own. Natives could swing Arizona if they can secure rights to a street address. Halloween has come early and will stay late. Nothing smells true. Whales have taken to flying through the air. Given such circumstances, John asks himself if he should vote twice. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma because Juan with that lawn sign down the block might have received three. Nothing can be heard because the birds are making a big racket due to the flying whales. After they click “Leave Meeting,” Pearl and Aliya go to the park and get stung by bees.
Act 5
Summer 2021 or in three years — depending on who you trust.
You open the window to hear the resilient hum of the city.
You think about washing your hands, but this moment might pass, so you reach out and hold the side of their face. Later:
- I touched the window, but I washed my hands just before.
They laugh and the future and the past are breathing in this present, this only-connect moment for which nothing could prepare us and that we will each remember differently and the same.
