Illness Also Gives You Time to Write

I drink chamomile tea to calm a raging red throat. I listen to Bebel Gilberto to calm a transitioning soul.

Two men were trapped this morning in a construction site not five blocks from my house. I heard the helicopters, but saw the close-ups on the news. I believe they are both free from their pit—an enclosure seemingly caused by the collapse of a large canary-yellow machine.

I am merely trapped in my apartment, awaiting the subsidence of a virus that has invaded every cell in my body and invited its friends along to party.

So I will tell you about my favorite plant.

I have a plant that has lived with me for 14 years. It happily stares over a view of Manhattan, and has for nearly six years now. (It regrets, however, that its view of the skyline is now disrupted by a high-rise construction in Brooklyn.) It has spindly arms and broad, flat leaves, like the palms of hands. Sometimes I choose to count how many shoots are growing from its base, and I get to as many as 21 or 22. But I can never understand why I so rarely need to pull off a dead stalk over the years, how they disappear when I feel like I have been paying attention. This plant is a good companion. A mystery though. Like so many others I keep nearby in my life. Comforting, but mysterious. Mysteriously comforting. So I don’t ask (too often) why or how it molts so clandestinely.

The water was out for 13 hours yesterday. I went out into the street around 9 p.m. to watch the block’s children run back and forth on the sidewalk. Men covered in light brown dust trained their eyes on the trench they had run through the middle of the road. Stage lights illuminated their work.

I can’t think of a more interesting piece of New York than the part that runs beneath it. Miles and miles of pipes and wiring running past shards of Dutch pottery or African tools. Who knows what is beneath the streets, truly. Every so often, archaeologists declare a major find here, and I wonder back to the people who made this very spot their homes before we did. And one day archaeologists will discuss us, these early millennials, and hopefully, we won’t look too destructive to their land, although I have serious doubts that will be possible after what we’ve done here.

But I’m not in the mood to preach, as I so rarely am (am I ever? Fuck, I hope not). So I will tell you about the article I am about to read in The Atlantic Monthly.

It is called “The Monster of Florence” and it is by Douglas Preston. It concerns this: “Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples—fourteen people in all—were murdered while making love in parked cars in the hills of Florence. The case was never solved…”

Have a great day.