What the Pandemic Left

What the Pandemic Left

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Chorus in Agamemnon by Aeschylus

***

My mamá died as he smothered her in a way no abuse or poverty could do to her in this country. I witnessed it on video. My two brothers are beholden to him as well: both have tubes mechanically pumping the air we breathe into their lungs. My oldest brother has a tube coming out from his mouth. My youngest brother has his tube through his neck. Both cannot breathe on their own because of him—the primordial action to breathe. A machine does it for my brothers. Breathe, breathe, breathe, and if not, die. Simply die.

Another motion I witnessed on camera: turn and breathe with your belly on your bed. The nursing staff and aids did it to my mother to no avail. And then another motion: turn and breath with your belly to the air. Turn, and breathe as your life depends on it to survive. An army carries you and flips you to try to keep you alive in those hospital beds, taking care not to disconnect the tube going to your lungs, allowing you to breathe. It is a tightly choreographed dance as the nursing staff and aides take care to move you gently while not disconnecting all the lifelines connected to you: a line to feed you artificially, a line to infuse medications to keep your blood pressure up, and another line to keep your blood thin so as not to clot. Bodily excrements then accumulate on each of my brothers.

The camera shuts off.

***

Papá is now sick. He is coughing up blood-tinged rubies stained with the thick ginger-garlic appearing phlegm onto a napkin. It all accumulates inside his lungs and in a plastic cup near his bed—a disposable red large cup my brothers had used to play beer pong months ago with their friends.

Papá is too frail to walk up to the bathroom to clear his lungs out, so he just spits on the floor. His fever is not resolving with medications. Moistened rags do nothing to cool him down either. Chicken soup, the one my mother used to make, has done nothing at all. I am giving it to him every meal. The two spoons of this concoction of thick gel of ginger, beets, garlic, onions, and honey mixture are not helping him either, although we are giving it to him three times a day. Three times a day and nothing at all. What shall we do? Chicken, vegetables, and ginger are also becoming so hard to get these days.

***

I am alive despite it all. I wonder if he should have killed me off as well. Too tired to think (but not to write in my small black book and admire Dolly), to clean the house (a clean home is the only dignity we can have), prepare meals (is there money, is there food), and prepare the miraculous gel concoction, the holder of all my hopes of maintaining a semblance of my old family.

My doll, Dolly, just sits there on top of my black book in a transparent plastic bin (lest it gets infected). She has become indifferent. She cried too much as people began disappearing because of him. Initially, too many tears have made it flood the small plastic container I kept Dolly in as I don’t want to lose her. I feared everything would be lost, though, as the ink smeared, making some of my writing illegible and the color of my doll’s clothes slowly faded in its brightness.

The tears eventually dried up. All the Andrews, Joses, Davids, Jennifers, and Carols that disappeared. All the Cesars, the Andres, the Pedros, and my mom will not appear again. Again all those people are lost. It is too much for any singular object to bear. The wallops of tears fell as we lost more some months ago. However, now the well has dried, and red pungent mildew is all that remains. Yet Dolly serves as an effervescing reminder that she will continue to cry although we do not see or hear her.

The stock market goes up again, I read today online. The tally of deaths and infections are reported as increasing, decreasing, or stable depending on where you live. It is too hard to keep the numbers straight in my head. I have no more money for groceries today, but the food pantries are now offering free groceries. I will have to line up for hours to get a spot and, if lucky, I can get some chicken and vegetables for more chicken soup.

I am happy as my father is still alive today.

I am sad because I lost both of my brothers today.

My doll and I cried (again, again, and again).

***

“She will need a double-lung transplant to survive,” said the doctor through a camera as he was discussing the ravages the virus has wrecked on her lungs for the last six weeks with her in the backdrop connected to tubes and the large machine.

“Her organs will slowly shut down,” he reiterated. “The inability to both ween her off the breathing machine and oxygenate her body means we must act soon,” he stated.

“This machine is breathing for her, and this other machine is giving her blood oxygen,” as he pointed to the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation circuit, a modern piece of equipment that only existed in fiction decades ago. The enormous machine occupies half the intensive care room. Its presence is overwhelming because you realize it divides people objectively between the living and not living, despite whether they are conscious or not conscious. Its feeds oxygen to our organs that just beg for life.

The father did not say what the hospital administration repeated to him earlier today. It echoed louder in his mind than what that intensivist has said today.

“We will need $135,000 to be able to move forward with the dual lung transplant ”, her father said, repeating what the hospital administrator had quoted from his team in a despairing tone. The doctor did not hear him. However, the doctor figured it involved what he had been struggling with this last week and with no miraculous treatment to assuage the father’s concern: the lack of money.

The doctor responded, “We will find a way.”

The father disapproved as he carried the silent burden of knowing that no one will be there to look out for him and his family. He knew since the day he came from South America with his family two decades ago across the desserts and rivers separating him from the oasis of the American dream the universal truth an immigrant can only know.

“No one comes to help us,” the father solemnly responded.

“$135,000: that is the only number that matters now”, the father reiterated. He scribbled it across his mental notebook in a language that only obsessive illiterate madmen can do. The lack of time was the ice bucket of water thrust upon him at night every day when he realized he might not be able to get the money.

“At least she has some good light,” the father thought as he saw that she was exposed to the large windows that allowed some light to get in and reflected onto the camera creating blurriness.

The crisp orange sun emanating from the Los Angeles skies did nothing but do what it does in moments of despair: shine. The pollution transforms the ordinary yellow and clear rays into a lovely palette of red, orange, pink, purple, and blue hues that play tag with each other as it hits our skin. Those sunsets reminded him of happier days picnicking with his two sons, his daughter, and his wife.

Her father looked afar out of his window at sunset. “I will not lose her,” he proclaimed.

***

The black book with that doll is what she kept as a record of all that went on those fateful months. I recovered it as well as those memories of all we lost. She is succumbing now to the ravages of that villain. That doll with its smeared plaid orange and red blouse and its blue overalls always looked so disturbing to me. Its fluorescent gaudy red hair twisted in neat linear braids would then fan out on her back. The doll is so American with its red hair. My girl loved it. She wanted to be like it. I remember she put a whole bottle of ketchup on her hair to dye it red, just like her doll. If only I can find her again, that same healthy girl that loved her doll and was able to grab it with her hands and hug it with all her might. And to continue writing in her book as she loved to do, the last I gifted her with a special note and tying a plastic debit card into the back of that doll, under her hair right before I got sick.

Given how much she loved that doll and that book, I was hoping to tell her what it contained: my life savings. I had expected to give it to her when I passed, which I thought was imminent some months ago. It was a debit account of a friend who could open it given that he had a social security number, and we did not. I told her there was $20,000 if she needed it. Now, she needs this money.

***

“Sir, tenía $20,000 in that cuenta,” the gentleman pleaded in broken English intermeshed with Spanish through the mask that was obfuscating his words. The bank teller transitioned to Spanish as he realized what was going on.

“It was closed a week ago,” the bank teller told him as silence enveloped the gentleman.

“Ok.” Said the gentleman as it slowly materialized what his friend had done with the savings account. He cannot do anything now, he conceded with an empty gaze. The bank teller asked if there was anything he can do for him. The gentleman left. He carried the tote bag he had once hoped to fill with that thing with feathers, so they say in its cold pragmatic equivalent: money. The little dignity that remained perching from his shoulder onto the tote bag remained empty full of nothing but misplaced notions of optimism and hope. He will have to find another way.

***

The father did “find” $20,000 as he confronted his “friend” with a toy Beretta M92FS. He had given and taken back the toy gun from his two sons decades ago as he realized it looks too authentic, never thinking it would come to use today. He carried it with the conviction and fierce piercing eyes of justice that only a vigilante with nothing to lose can wage. He hid it in the same tote bag he carried to the bank. He went over and retrieved what was rightfully his.

Unfortunately, $20,000 was not enough and came too late. The father’s daughter died one week later after not being able to afford the transplant.

That night the man bought a gun off the streets, which he could now afford: a double-barreled shotgun with its tip sawed off and some bullets. He watched videos on his phone on how to use it. He wanted to carry out his revenge against the world. It was the only dignity he can aspire to have as he failed everyone he loved.

His daughter’s doll looked on from the shelf inside its transparent storage container. Dolly stared at him, indifferent to his pain. She responded in silence, engulfed in a mist of tears slowly drowning her and the home in a burgundy-colored mist. The neighbors and onlookers stared with no one having an adequate response to the imminent disaster.