Circling the Americana in Glendale, I witness a sight unworthy for a Tuesday spring afternoon. The bookstore Barnes & Noble is closed, with bundles of the day’s newspapers thrown in front of its locked doors, neglected – as if deliberately ignored for the omens they bear. “Two New Deaths” my glance picks up, words flashing like mute sirens against the cover page soiled from the rain that just stopped. Instead of the usual flood of light that bounces off the books, solitary lamps descend from the high ceilings inside, as if keeping watch over wisdom while its readers read safer at home.
Nordstrom, too, is closed. Shuttered against metal doors, with a barely welcoming “Curbside pick-up only” sign. The chairs of the neighboring eBar are upturned on the tables, the blinders of the Deluca’s across it lowered, as if in slumber. The tracks of the merry trolley, deserted. The conductor is not shouting “Clear!” There is no conductor.
My eyes catch the occasional mother and daughter strolling past the green lawn, mouth and nose seeking refuge behind a white mask. Against the background of lockdown, Frank Sinatra eerily croons a chirpy tune, and the fountains hugging the golden statue continue as if it’s business as usual, water dripping from its oversized feet.
Maintaining well beyond his share of social distance, at the very center of a forgotten La Duree patio, a lone elder man sits in a blue Dodger’s cap. His head lies flat against the metal table, as if asleep, as if… as if… is he ok? My fiancée and I walk toward him in alarm, only to be relieved when he raises his head and makes eye contact with us. It’s Mark, a regular whom Aida and I know from the local coffeeshop. He didn’t have a headphone so he had brought his ear closer to his phone speaker.
He throws me his wizened smile, and the familiar twinkle in his eye brings a smile to mine.
We carry on. I slip into a walking daydream of disbelief.
Is this the same city we lived in a couple weeks ago? It happened so fast, without warning… what hit us? Just two Sundays ago, our families had gotten together to celebrate our engagement, and a couple days after that, on March 10, we made our first preparatory trip to the grocery store, realizing that this is not “just a flu.” Two days later, on March 12, we made the conscious decision to stay home, trusting the panic-proof and politics-agnostic statistics behind “flattening the curve.” And on March 15, halfway across the world, my parents likely became the first business owners in Armenia to temporarily close a public establishment, a restaurant invitingly called “Our Home.”
In the course of a week, we swerved as unexpectedly, as instinctively, and as aggressively as a speeding driver would tear his steering wheel to the side the moment he perceived the cliff he is rushing toward.
Except that the cliff is also rushing toward us.
I hold my breath each time my fingers type in “Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Map” in the Google search bar and I hit enter. The seconds it takes for the page to load and for the graph to appear on the bottom right corner seem an eternity. That is the graph that matters. That is the curve we are trying to flatten. That curve is getting steeper.
It is becoming the cliff.
Chronicles 