David Davis 22
The pandemic was a few months deep before I really, truly internalized that there wasn’t going to be an “end” to it in the way I hoped. Shaggy-haired and running on fumes, I had heretofore resisted the notion that COVID wasn’t going to go out with a bang like the Axis powers, marked with a ticker-tape parade and spontaneous kissing in the streets, a jubilant, en masse return to a fairytale normalcy. It was a fantasy within a fantasy, a nesting manufactured by imperialist propaganda and denial and Spielberg-helmed epics anchored by the likes of America’s great dullard, Tom Hanks. There would be no return to normal, I realized, because there had never been a normal to return to.
After the Trump election, I read a bunch of Primo Levi’s autobiographical writing, including If This Is A Man, and discovered that the Jewish-Italian writer’s journey home after the war was almost as dangerous as his imprisonment in Auschwitz. Arrested at the end of 1943, Levi was first interned in Modena before being sent to Monowitz, one of Auschwitz’s three main camps, where he spent less than a year until it was liberated by the Soviets in 1945. It took him almost as long to get home to Turin, in which time he starved, scrounged, and struggled his way through Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany, one of the millions of exiled, escaped, conscripted, and displaced by camps, armies, and the post-war re-drawing of Europe’s maps. The myth of a neat and tidy ending of one of history’s great brutalizing events seamlessly dovetails with the lie’s complement: that the war’s five or so years of unimaginable violence had been preceded with a similarly neat and tidy peace.
There will be no day of victory for COVID. Even if the virus and its terrors could be disappeared overnight, in the States, people have been in bars and restaurants and movie theaters (many of them not by choice) for the duration of the pandemic. Certainly, there will soon come a time when my friends and I go out together unmasked to drink and do drugs and fuck strangers with something approaching the freedom of before, but it will never be the same, and not just because COVID will be joining the other plague that never went away, or because the gay bars, along with so many other businesses and institutions, have disappeared forever.
Amidst the internecine Twitter bickering about who is doing what and when and where—and who is being naive, either by jumping the epidemiological gun or by squarely waiting for permission to get out there and take what’s theirs—I’m going slow. By necessity, but there’s more to it than that. I want to have group sex with my girlfriend and make dirty movies with Dahlia and Bambi and act on flirtatious DMs and organize the crucifixion scene I had been saving for my 33rd birthday (just two months away now!), but my, I think, plausible health concerns are attended by new anxieties and fears. Though the vaccine feels like a miracle, it is not a finish line.
I rewatched Casablanca (1942) with Jade recently, appreciating more than ever the moral and geographical dead zone of Rick’s Café Américain. I do not dare to compare my experience of the last year to any war, let alone the one that clove stoic Bogey from sexy woodland creature Bergman, but I will say that it’s been a lesson in the shape of capitalism’s crisis: protean and perpetual.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.