Growing up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, being a germophobe was normal. I lived on 86th Street, in Yorkville, and it was seedy. At night, prostitutes waited outside German restaurants with heavy, oak doors, twinkling lights and white tablecloths. One restaurant, The Café Geiger, created alpine scenes in their front windows. I marveled at a tiny toy train running through a mountain covered in a facsimile of snow made of dusty cotton balls. Once, a woman in heavy makeup, a pink wig and a Tam O’Shanter, joined me, pointing with a manicured finger in childish wonder. I was never afraid of her or the others, and marveled at their outfits. Once, I saw her wearing jeans with clear plastic pockets. The warmth of her butt cheeks fogged the plastic with condensation.
It was the men who scared me, the pimps in fur coats with impassive, hard faces, the junkies slumped in doorways soaked in piss, the staggering drunks, the flasher who revealed his huge, disgusting penis to me when I was ten, the young man who pinched my chest when I was eleven. The streets were filthy with gum, squashed hot dogs, sticky patches of dried effluvia. There were rats on the subways, and the psychiatric hospitals had dumped their patients into the city. As a child, it all reeled around me, like a malevolent and fascinating snow globe. I often ran the last block home, too scared to endure another moment of exposure.
Into the apartment I would race, kicking my school shoes off at the front door. The kitchen sink was my first stop, and I would scrub my hands and wash my face until I felt cleansed, not just of the city, but of human misery and the terror it evoked in me. I felt empathy and hatred in equal measure for the human beings who populated the streets. My washing routine was a way to delineate the peace and emotional order of home from the chaos of the city outside. Purity was love and home. Dirt was depravity, contagion and violence.
The dichotomy stuck, alas. When the AIDS epidemic subsumed the city, I was terrified. I saw an emaciated man covered in Kaposi’s Sarcoma on the subway, with nobody sitting next to him, a halo of empty air surrounding him on the crowded train. He bowed his head in humiliation. I wanted to be the kind of human being who sits next to him, doesn’t give in to fear, but I packed myself into the crowd, and kept my distance.
Another person revealed their HIV status to me as we ate from a communal plate of Ethiopian food. I was horrified, afraid that I had caught the virus from him. I stopped eating. Another time, some errant spittle from another friend’s mouth hit my eye. I didn’t reveal my panic, but it was there, a tsunami of anxiety and self-preservation that flooded reason and biological fact. It shamed me.
At the height of the AIDS epidemic, I would see indigent, ill human beings living on the streets, cardboard signs propped haphazardly against them asking for help. Once, I saw a man who was unconscious and covered in grime, urine in a moat around him. Commuters marched through it and stepped over him resolutely, annoyed by the obstacle, especially during the morning rush, I felt sick with fear, and empathy. He had once been a baby. He could have had a passport. He was a human being, with a history, a story. How would it feel to be sick and so incredibly alone?
I think his plight, his filth, his inevitable lonely death, reminded me of how prisoners in Hitler’s death camps must have looked and smelled. I couldn’t separate myself from him in some fundamental psychological way that would allow me to step over him. He could have been my Great Grandmother, who died at Auschwitz.
When history lurches violently in your direction and subsumes you or your ancestors, it becomes very hard to feel immune from ramification. I began to read constantly, memoirs of surviving the AIDS epidemic, memoirs by authors who had died. The stories resonated with me. My own Grandmother had been chased from Germany, called a pariah, as had the authors of the AIDS memoirs.
And now we are in another pandemic, and I have been riven with a terror that remained suppressed until my husband returned home. He had been traveling in Asia, but decided to return when every country on his itinerary closed its borders. I carefully planned his homecoming. He could leave his Covid19 infected suitcase in the car. I could wear gloves and a mask, empty the clothes from the suitcase into a plastic bag, race to the laundry and wash the clothes on the sterilization cycle until clean. Similarly, he could strip in the entryway, remove his Covid19 bedecked travel garments, hurry upstairs to shower while I could sprint the pestilential clothing to the laundry as well, then mop the floor where they had touched the tile. All this seemed perfectly logical.
The day before his return, I had purchased food, sweating in a mask and gloves. At home, I hauled the bags of food to the kitchen, filled the sink with hot water and Lysol, and dipped each packaged item into the cleansing solution, sweat from anxiety streaming down my face, a strange, obsessive mantra repeated out loud, rhythmically and crazily as I worked. “Quick dip!” I plunged the can or bottle into the sink, and lifted it streaming onto the counter, “Quick dip! Quick dip! Quick dip!” I was frantic.
And then Eric arrived, an insouciant and irrepressible life-force, filled with opinions, a dark, Thai mask obscuring his pink, sensuous mouth. I told him my plan, shrilly, the urgency in my voice irritating him. “We are not doing that,” he stated. “No.”
And thus, he carried his Bubonic plague bag up our pristine stairs, and plunked it upon the floor of our sacred bedroom and unpacked, while still in his pestilential, malarial plane clothes, allowing me to place his dirty laundry in a plastic bag only after much negotiation, and wandering serenely around the house, touching everything and shedding virus everywhere, until I shrieked in a voice I have almost never heard, as it came from my deepest fear of death and was shattering with its intensity and animal terror. “ERIC! GO SHOWER! PLEASE! PLEASE PLEASE!” My words were brittle, sharp, jagged. As I shouted them, I knew I would scream if I were tortured, knew I would keen and wail if I lost him, knew I could kill him, knew I was the murderer and the victim, the prostitute and the homeless man. I knew that we all are.
It took me two days to unwind, to settle into him being here, being a force of intelligence and beauty, free will and obstinance. I cannot control his reaction to this pandemic, nor can he control mine. But, my howl of fear is a moment I will not forget, now, as I sit in relative tranquility in my beloved, red chair, writing, and looking at two packages that I asked him not to bring inside, but that he brought inside anyway. I will not forget my fear, because for me it is worse than being sick. I will not forget it, because inside the fear, I was utterly alone, afraid and blind with anxiety. The most common phrase repeated throughout the Bible is, “be not afraid.” I think that this is so because fear is what separates us from our highest nature, which is love. I think that it is fear, more than any other feeling, that incites violence.
I don’t think that I can go forward now without fear, but I think that the raw sound of my own terrified shriek is a warning to myself, not to get lost in the terror that will always be there, pandemic or not, the knowledge that we can control very little, least of all death, and certainly not another person, who has different ideas of what is safe and what is reckless. But when I can just be, without crippling alarm, and accept that I am afraid, even of mail, even of air and my dog’s kisses, and that a part of me always was and always will be, I can surrender to the moment, and go upstairs to sleep, one leg warm under the covers and touching Eric’s, the other in the cold air, that is refreshing, and balances the heat.