He has had the cough for several weeks, and now he was only beginning to feel guilty about it.
Marion was driving the car, and he, Clyde, was checking the stats on his blog post. There was nothing so far, though there very rarely was.
After working from home for about a week and a half, he had returned to the office, and now he was feeling guilty about it. At the time, he was sure there was no way that it was the virus, just some strand of the multi-headed beast of corona type viruses that cause colds of all sorts. His having a low-grade fever and cough, after a few days of sore throat, was just a coincidence.
They were headed to the beach, Jacob Riss, specifically, sort of a out-of-the-way place out east of Marine park, where Marion and the kids would go some summers past. It was a good family place, mostly inhabited by locals. It was a nice early spring day, though colder than the previous one, and they had planned to just go for a walk along the surf, take in the air. It was a place to go without much fear of catching or spreading the thing everyone was talking about.
The cough started after that night out with his work buddies, after the five martinis they bought him, which he consumed easily, since they were so soothing on his sore throat he thought nothing of at the time. The next day he could barely talk – his voice was several octaves lower, and a bit of a croak. And he had begun coughing “in anger,” as his colleagues in London might say.
He was told to stay home the next day, which was a Friday, and he coughed all the way through the next Friday, and into the following week, though he showed up again at the office on that Tuesday. He coughed a couple of days, though much less, but everyone was told to work remotely the following days.
Until further notice. The memo said.
He was barely coughing at all now, and they were heading to the beach, he and Marion, and the guy being interviewed on NPR said something about a 20% improvement in air quality due to the virus.
He was only beginning to feel guilty about how he may have unwittingly spread the virus to people on his floor at work, just by going in on those two days. Though it was more likely they would have gotten it before he knew it was anything, when it was on its way up, rather than down. Still, he felt like a contributor, an early ally of this thing causing so much havoc, terrorizing everyone.
With fewer cars on the road, a general slow down of commerce, of all sorts of busy-ness, and who else knows why, there was a 20% improvement in air quality, but where?
Fewer exhaust pipes coughing carbon into the air. Perhaps a slowdown at power plants, and all kinds of production, and the birds now feeling the relief. They were pulling into the parking lot. There were gulls flying in elliptical circuits over the highway, as if in some military or magical rite. A Buddhist ritual of the feathered people, celebrating the change in the atmosphere.
Marion suggested that this was perhaps the way the planet took care of itself, all the other species that are being decimated. Nature does that, you know. It’ll tell us things like that, roll the dice and shuffle the deck. It will say, hey you, you need to create a different fucking economy. Or else I’ll fuck with you like this, stick it in your face.
The gulls seemed to like this nonsensical whirling around. It was time to get out of the car and go for a walk.