Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Coping With Covid
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
In every direction, an empty horizon surrounds me. I’m stranded in an airport next to the Sea of Cortez on the Baja Peninsula waiting for a delayed Cessna Citation to fly me to Mexico City.
As random as contracting Covid or measles, my travels are quarantined. Right now, more than anything I’m pining for a vaccine to inoculate me from errant airplanes and missing pilots.
Heat shimmers off a black tar runway bordered by three-foot-high weeds. A limp windsock is as bored as I am.
A vending machine with a rickety leg and a stingy selection of stale candy bars—I’ve sampled them all—is my only entertainment. In open rebellion, two wall clocks disagree on the time.
Off a cracked plastic seat I snag a yellowing Houston Chronicle. The news is about an American death cult duped by a Rubric’s Cube of interlocking lies and myths about medical science. Trump-voting states have the lowest Covid vaccinations rates in the country, the article says. As I repeatedly rediscover from my high school students, there’s no vaccine for stupidity.
In a corner of the airport’s waiting room, a boatload of sunburnt fishermen compare machismos by measuring fish inches. I can’t avoid overhearing about their sport-fishing exploits, their women, their politics.
Like the bellowing of a male elephants or the crackling of a forest fire, their bravado transmits a threat. I skirt their corner of the airport.
A choleric voice attached to a burly, bloated whale of a man is loudest. To hear him tell it, smartass liberals don’t respect his personal freedoms. “No one is going to force me to stick a needle in my arm,” he proclaims.
He rails against cancel culture, muttering, “They can’t tell me how to talk.” I consider—and reject—asking ask him about the ultimate cancel culture: death-by-Covid.
Right in front of me, the history of contagious plagues is repeating itself. Once, not so very long ago, I might have sought to understand these death-seekers. To dialogue. To educate. To save them from themselves.
Then came the pandemic. Friends fighting to breathe were raced to the hospital. An ambulance took away a respected teacher at my school. Freezer trucks parked outside the local hospital were converted into temporary morgues.
No more feigning a humanity that I no longer feel. No more counterfeit empathy. People who endanger me, my kids, my friends, my neighbors, are domestic terrorists—regardless of how many American flags are stenciled on their fishing boat.
“Let the anti-vaxxers martyr themselves,” I tell my closest friends.
“In evangelical terms,” I smirk, “Covid must be God’s punishment for science-deniers.”
The loudmouth throwing the Trumpy tantrum heads to the men’s room. No doubt, he won’t wash with soap. After all, science only discovered the existence of germs four centuries ago.
My face burns red. My skin is clammy.
I fantasize about following him across the grimy linoleum floor. In the bathroom, I imagine us arguing, shouting, shoving. On the wet floor he slips, falls, cracks open his head on a germy urinal. He bleeds out. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times—in movies.
For the same reason I’d step on a cockroach, I wouldn’t mourn Mr. Anti-Vaxxer. After all, both spread pathogens.
