Nonfiction by Susan Bloch

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There is a loud tapping at the window above my desk. The one that looks out onto the third-floor deck. I jump up, knocking over a mug of coffee, and whisk my laptop into the air. Brown liquid snakes its way across the Formica top. The scrape of my chair’s metal feet on slate hangs in the silence. I smell fear on my skin.

Too scared to lift my eyes to face my assassins, I grip the desk to stop the room from swaying. No one could get up this high off the ground without a ladder. My mouth feels dry. I can’t swallow. I can’t blink. The wall clock ticks louder.

Another knock. My chin quivers. I want to lean over and grab my phone, but I’m locked into a state of suspension. A chickadee’s monotonous chirping breaks the silence. A dog barks. Blood beats in my ears. My hands won’t stop shaking, even though I’m holding onto my laptop. I squeeze my eyes shut to wish bad things away—a childhood habit.

It’s March 2021, a year since the official declaration of the pandemic. We no longer hug, chat, or stand within six feet of anyone. We don’t touch anything that anyone else has touched. Amazon boxes lie unopened for at least a few hours so I won’t be infected. No one knocks on a neighbor’s door anymore, so why would they knock on my window?

 I wrestle for breath. The room is silent. The clock seems to stop ticking.

Then I remember. The hummingbird feeder stuck onto the outside of the window at eye level. I turn to face it. Two angry black eyes stare at me through the early morning fog. My once silent companion, the hummingbird I’ve named Pedro, knocks at the glass again with the tip of his beak—an ornithological hammer. He stares at me, the unkind parent. Hummingbirds are known to recognize people and fly around their heads to tell them when their feeders are empty. This is the first time he has let me know that he has no sugar water.

My shoulders drop as I swallow and take in a deep breath. My laptop now safe on a dry shelf, I mop up the coffee on the desk and floor with the last of the paper towels.

“Everybody is out of everything these days,” I say to Pedro, tearing the last sheet off the cardboard roll. I stare back at my confessor. “No toilet paper. No hand sanitizer. No baking flour or yeast. And no disinfecting wipes.”

Pedro interrupts my ranting and taps the window. Harder. Louder. This time I move closer to the glass and whisper, “Not enough vaccinations. Not enough vaccination centers. I’ve been obsessed with trying to get an appointment online, on the hour, every hour, for two days. So don’t complain that you don’t have enough homemade nectar in your feeder.”

I’m ashamed of how callous I’ve become. All I can think about is getting the magic shot that will defy the evil virus and keep me alive. Determined to be around to celebrate my grandson’s bar mitzvah next year and throw confetti over my granddaughter next summer, I press dig my thumbs into my temples. “Be patient. I’m frustrated too.”

I turn around to take a bag of sugar out of the closet, measure a quarter cup into a mug, switch the kettle on to boil, and listen for the bubbling.

“You’ll have your breakfast soon.” I spill boiling water on my hand as I pick up the kettle. The heat singes my palm. Just in time I grab the handle to stop the cup from crashing into the sink.

“Can you believe it? On CNN this morning the cameras focused on bodies lying in trucks outside hospitals in Los Angeles and New York because there is no space at the morgue,” I say to Pedro, stirring the mixture to dissolve the sugar. The teaspoon tinkles against the sides of the mug. “Those images of dead bodies are glued to my eyelids and terrorize me at night. That’s not how I want to end up.”

I lick the teaspoon clean, enjoying the sweet warmth on my tongue before placing it in the sink.

“As soon as this is done, I’ll try the websites again. I was thinking I might just show up at one of the locations, even though they’d probably turn me away, and all I’d do is expose myself to other sick people.”

I turn to face Pedro. “I have to keep trying.”

He looks straight at me and cocks his head as if he understands my dilemma. He hovers. I’ve read that his wings flutter at four thousand beats a minute, yet they don’t seem to move. Nor does he. At least he listens and is someone to talk to. I long to reach out and stroke his tiny back.

“I should be happy that I’m one of the lucky ones with a roof over my head, and shelves stocked with rice, lentils, and Chianti, but I feel so alone.” I wrap my arms around myself, hugging my loneliness into my chest.

A slate-grey female with a green feathery collar joins Pedro. He stares at her, scans his surroundings, and then pecks at her neck. She shifts sideways but stays close. Behind her the heavy fog hides Lake Washington under a magician’s cloth, like the caliginous fog that’s clouding my brain.

“Now on NPR they tell us the ‘good’ news. Only two thousand, six hundred people died in the US today. That’s one person every twenty-eight seconds.” My voice is flat and dull. “Well, fewer than yesterday,” and then I cackle a witch’s laugh. My palm covers my lips as I realize who made the high-pitched sound.

 My tongue feels as if it’s too big for my mouth, so I take my temperature to check if I have a fever. Even though my neck feels coiled tight as if choking in a hangman’s noose my temperature is normal. I roll my head from side to side, hoping to oil and grease the stiff muscles, and take in a deep long breath mumbling, “be positive…be positive…be positive.”

“After all,” I mutter, “there are a few good things about house arrest. No hour-long commutes. Zoom makes dressing for work easy—a silk blouse, jacket, and leggings. And I can turn off my video to hide the bags under my eyes and pull my greasy hair into a scrunchy. No makeup needed. Not even mascara or lip gloss.”

I lift the French press and pour another cup of coffee. Steam furrows into the air. Eyes closed I take a long sip, slurping like a wave lapping on a sunny beach. The earthy aroma restores some of my emotional balance, and I relish the bitterish flavor. Even my neck feels looser.

“Thank goodness I still have my sense of smell and taste,” I say to Pedro.

Panic fills my belly with a loud snort. Forsaken by everyone, except for Pedro, I’m stuck on a desert island of my own making. I unlock the door to the deck, at a loss as to how I can possibly schedule an appointment for that shot.

A blast of icy air knocks me back. When I recover my balance, I stare at the horizon for a few moments watching the sun struggle to paint a pale pinkish glow above Mount Rainier as if this beauty will save the world from itself. In the distance a siren whines. Then closer. Vociferous.

As I lift the bird feeder tray off its suction holder to wash it, a buzzing sound like that of a blender mixing a smoothie jolts me. My hair blows into my eyes. Pedro is inches away from my face, and I try not to blink. The whirring intensifies, and his wings touch my cheek as if he is kissing me. My lips curl up at the sides for the first time in weeks. A statue, I hold my breath. It’s the closest I’ve been to any living soul for months. My skin tingles. A live being is touching me, and my heart thumps as if I were kissing a lover for the first time. A frozen statue, I stare ahead.

“Come back in five minutes,” I whisper, “Breakfast will be served then.” Pedro stays with me. When he flies away, my eyes shift from left to right before I slowly glide back inside.

I walk back into the kitchen and close the door. My voice is croaky, but I keep on talking.

“Will all these months of solitary confinement—an effective method of torture—atrophy my social muscles?”

No one replies. The silence reeks of contempt. Only then I notice how my tongue is clamped between my teeth. Knocked over by a savage loneliness, I’d been slow to realize how my isolation was taking a toll. One evening I brushed my teeth twice and couldn’t even remember if or what I’d eaten that day. The next, I pressed the button on the microwave for five minutes but forgot to put my dinner inside. Befuddled.

At night I can’t read or fall asleep, even though my body is sapped. The bedroom air is silent with dread. When I finally stop tossing and turning, I dream of losing myself in empty grey streets. I often sleep through the alarm and wake to find myself wrapped in the top sheet as if I were an Egyptian mummy.

On my daily walks, the damp rising from the ground echoes my dark and heavy moods. I don’t remember which route I’ve taken, who I waved at on the other side of the street, or whether it’s drizzly or sunny. Even though I’ve been walking up Seattle’s walkways for weeks, my legs feel as if they have one-pound weights on each ankle. My breathing is shallow, and I’m still out of breath after sprinting up a thirty-step stairway.

A memory stirs. My favorite fifty-year-old yoga teacher insisted that Kundalini yoga exercises built strong lymphatic and immune systems that would shield us from the virus. But yesterday I read his obituary on our Facebook group. He died all alone, connected to a ventilator. My eyes moisten and my throat feels as if a pebble has lodged where my tonsils used to be.

Scrubbing the hummingbird feeder with warm soapy water, I stare out the window above the kitchen sink. Lumpy cumulous clouds with pregnant charcoal underbellies gallop across the sky. Then I remember I’ve not heard from a client who canceled a Zoom meeting a few days earlier.

“Laying low today,” he emailed. “I need to cancel our meeting. Bad stomach. Brutal headache.”

It’s impossible not to worry and fear the worst, but I’m reluctant to email or text in case he’s seriously unwell, or worse still, hospitalized. I stare at my soapy hands, willing all germs to go away. The lemony soapy fragrance fills the air but does little to change my mood.

At the end of my yard a Steller’s blue jay, a trapeze artist balancing on a tightrope, grips a flimsy branch at the very top of a bare poplar tree. For a moment I forget about the sugar feast I’m preparing for Pedro. As the tree sweeps from left to right, I stretch up my arms, clasp my palms together, and, following the movement of the swaying tree, breathe in and out Kundalini-style. The jay’s gray silhouette against a background of bloating rainclouds holds my gaze. Deep breath in. Long, slow breath out. I lower my arms, place my elbows at the edge of the sink, and drop my head onto the back of my hands. I hang there for maybe a few seconds, or minutes, and then lengthen my back into a horizontal position, stretching into a cat-cow roll while I listen to the news. Again.

Post Trump, Dr. Fauci is back giving interviews. Ninety thousand more COVID deaths are expected in the next four weeks.

“Alexa, stop!” I yell, and the device goes to sleep in the middle of a sentence. When I hear these statistics I choke on my own breath, convinced that I don’t have enough oxygen to even call for an ambulance. Anxiety, as well as the virus, is highly contagious.

“Who will feed you if I get sick and die?” I ask Pedro as I rinse the plastic feeder. Back outside, I slip it onto the suction holder and slowly pour in the now cool sugar water. My steady jailbird companion should be treated better.

I lean down to inspect the vegetables growing in pots on my deck. Drizzle dribbles down a kale leaf. The mint is mangy, the oregano moldy, and the marjoram bedraggled. In another pot the fuchsia bush is a skeleton of dry twigs.

Back inside, I turn the key in the kitchen door. Caged, I’m my own jailor.

Alexa comes back to life. The growth rate of new cases is leveling out. “This is good news,” repeats the newscaster. Treatment is improving. I hope it’s not too late to help my neighbor Terri’s mother, hospitalized a few days ago.

Pedro flutters back to the window. His claws grip the feeder’s rim as he pokes his beak, long and thin like a darning needle, into the sweet water. He throws back his head and swallows the liquid as if he were downing a double shot of tequila. Given the calories he burns, it’s no wonder he has to feed so often.

The female with the green collar tries to join Pedro again. He jabs her wing, and this time she darts away. A royal guard at the palace gate, he attacks any competitors while he’s feeding. Just like the two women in Target who fought in a tug of war over the last remaining pack of toilet paper.

It’s only ten o’clock and I can do with a cocktail, but it’s far too early for my own quarantini, which I make with a tot of gin, a dash of bitters, grenadine, and orange juice.

“To life and health,” I say, toasting Pedro with another mug of coffee. He cocks his head and I wonder how much he understands. I wasn’t prepared for quarantine. Who was? And who knew how long it would last?

Flipping open my laptop I check the Walgreens website for the third time that morning. I click on the vaccination tab again. A message pops up, Try later.

“I’ve been trying for days,” I yell at no one, “This is a full-time job.”

He dips his beak into the feeder again. Pedro ignores me now that he has his nectar.

I yank the scrunchie off my hair and run my fingers through the lank strands. Then I check to see if there are any appointments at five Seattle drugstores and hospitals, but their websites keep crashing. Even though the room is chilly, the skin on my back goes moist.

Staring at my tidy closet, I pull out a pile of clothes and begin to refold all my T-shirts for the second time this week. Then I shake out my jeans and leggings and press creases neatly into the folds before checking the websites again. Finally, I’m able to log into Walgreens. This time when I click on the tab that says, ‘schedule your COVID shot’, it takes me to a calendar. I stare at dates with appointment times and try not to blink. I’m not told to check back later. There is a pulsating just above my right ear. My right index finger hovers above the keyboard. Now I’m worried I’ll miss the opportunity by doing something stupid like clicking the wrong box or spelling my name wrong. Then, without pausing any longer, I tick the first available slot even though I have to drive for twenty miles to a location near the airport. Only when the appointment is confirmed by email do I realize how long I’d been holding my breath.

“Yay,” I shout to no one, and clap my hands together. “I got my appointment.” I stand up, wave my arms, and raise my eyes up to the grey heavens as if looking for a god to pray to and thank. I turn around and around, dancing a pirouette, only stopping when the floor sways and my head spins. It’s not too early for a midday quarantini after all, with a double shot of gin to celebrate.

At the first sip there is a mellow burning in my mouth. The dull winter sun shreds the mist, and the fog begins to disperse. In the afternoon light, Lake Washington sparkles as if rubbed with Windolene. Now I can see the persimmon tree at the bottom of my yard. Tall as a basketball post, I can make out its orange-brownish fruit rotting on the tree. I unlock the front door and stroll towards it when I feel something touch my hair. Pedro has followed me. I try not to blink as he hovers and flies past me toward the herb box in the front yard. He looks back at me as if to egg me on. Suddenly and without warning, in the space of only a few minutes, one mood replaces another. How quickly my world is changing. What I want is to get something back. Something intangible but real. Something that is more in me than on the outside.

I dispel all thoughts as I lean over to touch the sage leaves soft as lambs’ ears. I breathe in the fragrance of fresh parsley as if it were expensive perfume. The hyssop plant has grown inches in just a few days, and celery roots are sprouting. Pedro flies ahead as if he knows where I’m heading. Near the persimmon tree I see daffodils, foot-tall green stems blooms bursting with yellow heads held high, and magenta petals budding on crocus plants. Strange, I’m sure they weren’t there earlier when my world was a sticky grey. The tree’s branches reach toward me as a mother welcomes a child. I walk toward it, lean in, and smell the sour, damp bark. The decaying fruit is squishy and smells like a brewery.

My world is slowing, and I can see the lake through the mist. Pedro turns to face me as if willing me to see not only the oppressive greys in our world, but to embrace the yellows, oranges, and purples. I twist a firmish persimmon off the tree and sink my teeth into the juicy flesh. It’s slightly tart. I hear my own loud chewing and swallow softly.

Pedro flies at me and then, as if his job as a teacher is done, he flits away. I catch a faint hint of laughter in myself. Part of me wants to beg him not to leave. Part of me knows that I feel more comforted than I have for a long time.

I know he’ll be back for another chat tomorrow.

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Susan Bloch is the author of the award-winning memoir Travels with My Grief. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in a variety of publications including Glint, The Hooghly Review, Jelly Bucket, Hearth and Coffin Literary Journal, The Summerset Review, The Antigonish Review, Eclectica Magazine, and The Bombay Review, as well as receiving a notable mention in Best American Essays 2017. A lifelong traveler, she lived in South Africa, New York, Tel Aviv, London, and Mumbai before alighting in Seattle. http://www.susanblochwriter.com

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash