What Just Happened, page 1
Also by Charles Finch
The Last Passenger
The Inheritance
Home by Nightfall
The Last Enchantments
this is a borzoi book
published by alfred a. knopf
Copyright © 2021 by Charles Finch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Penguin Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from “A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country” from Hidden Stuff by Barbara Ras, copyright © 2006 by Barbara Ras. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Finch, Charles (Charles B.), author.
Title: What just happened / Charles Finch.
Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. | “This is a Borzoi book”
Identifiers: LCCN 2021014661 (print) | LCCN 2021014662 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593319079 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593319086 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Finch, Charles (Charles B.)—Diaries. | Two thousand twenty, A.D.—Social aspects—United States. | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC PS3606.I526 W47 2021 (print) | LCC PS3606.I526 (ebook) | DDC 814/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014661
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014662
Ebook ISBN 9780593319086
Cover photograph by Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
Cover design by Janet Hansen
ep_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Charles Finch
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
2020
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
2021
January
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
For Alexander, Annabel, and Emily,
with my endless love
2020
MARCH
March 11
There’s an emotional chill in the streets today for the first time. People are suddenly thinking and planning, which are not always part of the normal duties of life. You can see it in their expressions. Coronavirus has been a story for a month or so, but only in the last ten days has it seemed like an immediate problem, and not until today did it seem much more alarming than the various deadly flus that have been arriving here by bird and swine (is swine just pigs?) since my childhood.
It now seems inevitable that in certain places where the virus is spreading, people will have to quarantine for a week or two. I tell my mom I think it will be okay. That doesn’t completely reflect what my friend Nathan, a doctor in New York, has been saying, but it at least sort of does. The best news of the past few days was his confirmation that the virus doesn’t seem to affect children, really the first thing you would wish for in a pandemic. But nearly everything else is an educated guess. We still don’t know how you get it. According to Rush Limbaugh, it’s “like the common cold” and “all of this panic is just not warranted,” so presumably we’re fucked.
However serious it ends up, the virus is already politicized. A reporter asks GOP senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who’s a sprightly 85, what precautions he’s taking about this illness, which is reportedly particularly deadly for the old, and he replies “Want to shake hands?”
March 12
I drove just to take a drive today. No traffic anywhere. In Los Angeles.
A consensus is firming up hour by hour, and it seems more likely that we will all have to lock in for a few weeks to slow the spread of this new virus, not just people with symptoms. On the first of the month it would have been an unthinkable suggestion. But the directives to work remotely are cascading down—people guiltily excited for a week or two at home—and in big cities, stores and restaurants are closed, with cheerful signs in their windows that they’ll reopen as soon as it’s safe. For better or worse, retail gives our world its texture. When it’s gone you feel it.
Most museums around the world closed today too, and this evening, in the actual midst of games I think, the NBA suspended its season, which was maybe the biggest jolt yet. It came after the 7′1″ Rudy Gobert (who made the not especially well-received covid joke of touching every microphone at a press conference a couple days ago) tested positive. Tom Hanks has also tested positive, and there’s an online feeling of dread on his behalf.
Since Trump won, we’ve congratulated ourselves on our luck that he hasn’t had to face a crisis. This is how bad he is with things going okay! people would say and chuckle. Well, here we go. So far he’s lurching around in search of an alibi, his focus mostly on minimizing the threat of the virus, for what seems like a strange emotional tangle of personal and political reasons. Almost every day he says some variation of the phrase “It will go away,” which is how children think about bad stuff, down to refusing to say the bad word out loud. But it’s worked on us, to some degree—we were asleep. In part that’s probably because even in the most liberal mind, if you could strip every veneer of politeness away, there was a sense that the virus was happening in China, where stuff sort of always seems to be happening. Their economy is expanding so quickly that we’ve learned it fires off these kinds of externalities at random, besides which they have egregiously limited freedom of the press, so news about the virus has often seemed uncertain.
But now “the whole of Italy is closed,” as a headline making its way around Twitter from the Corriere della Sera says, and no one sensible thinks coronavirus is a regional problem anymore. The Italian lockdowns are the most severe restriction on movement in a western democracy since World War II, apparently. (Anyway, as Nathan said, if we’re comparing countries, by the time China was at this stage of their outbreak—20 deaths—they had already built two new hospitals. We can’t even test people yet.) On the news from Italy, the number has suddenly shot up: as many as 20,000 people may die in America, a number so big it’s laced with a certain grim comedy for those of us who can reach deep into the mists of autocrat time, six days ago, and remember when Trump refused to let a few hundred people get off the cruise ship Grand Princess. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” as he said.
There are long sections of shelving at the grocery store that are empty; enough sauerkraut and maraschino cherries left to feed an army on the march, but no milk, no bread, no meat, and only the most homely non-perishable items (I pass a lone can that says Unsalted Asparagus Spears, in glum resignation to its contents). If you’ve spent your life wandering like a docile cow through supermarket aisles stocked with an array of food that would humble an ancient emperor, it’s not a good feeling. “Will we see canned peas again?” That’s a terrifying question to ask your friends even 80% in jest. And people are terrified. That’s the main thing. Everyone seems so scared.
* * *
—
I think I was naively sure that something would judder into motion in our creaky old government—some lifelong bureaucrat on the fifth floor of an overflow office in Alexandria would get an unusual fax from a colleague at the CDC about the numbers in Wuhan, the city in China where this new, fifth strain of coronavirus seems to have originated, and at that moment a long chain of rote superpower stuff would develop, labs unmothballed, production lines whipping into life. America is such an enormous enterprise that up until this moment it’s still seemed that even if our government has been starved down to its bones by Republicans and big business (except the military, of course, grotesquely fattened up by profiteers) it would have some reflexive memory of capability lurking in it, which would be triggered and creak meaningfully forward while the meaningless theater of Trump played out overhead. Maybe it will still happen.
March 13
Locked in. The shelf-stable foods I ordered last week have started to arrive, today lentils and oats. I contemplate them and feel like a farmer in the Baltics receiving state rations.
Sarah Palin has been revealed as Bear Mask on The Masked Singer.
March 15
A day of rain among days of rain, eaves dripping hard, adding to the sense of strangeness and interiority these numb hours already have. I love the rain, and having grown up on the east coast I miss it. You can be inside and rain makes you more inside. At around six I put on a soft sweatshirt and go out into our tiny high-hedged yard, which is just big enough for a few chairs and tables and a single small tree. I sit in a wooden armchair with a green cushion and carefully roll and light a joint, an indulgence on a Sunday, but to hell with it, there’s a virus. I listen to Fleetwood Mac on my headphones and sip iced coffee and feel my body soften away from its anxieties. Beneath the gray sky, the stout California trees, swaying in the wind, look suddenly both greener and less sure of themselves. Everything feels sad and witchy and possible.
I debate making spaghetti for dinner, my favorite food, but it’s one of the things that’s scarcest on the shelves. (Only lasagna noodles last time I went to Albertson’s.) Finally, with a reckless feeling, I go inside and make it anyway, adding butter, pepper, salt, and cheap parmesan cheese, and eat it extremely hot, with unbecoming intensity and great happiness.
I text woozily with my friend Ben, who’s been ordering cans of beans since mid-February. I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t doing it, he says.
Ordering beans? I write back, and realize that I’m pretty stoned.
No, getting ready!
I tell him, ah, of course, no, he’d been right (one of the most depressing things you can tell a best friend) and we talk over what’s unavailable and what we have on hand. Both here and in New York there are no household cleaners, bottled water, granola bars, pasta, canned goods, rice, soap, lighters, or rubbing alcohol, and above all no hand sanitizer, soap, or toilet paper, or really any paper goods now, though you might occasionally still see a pack of fancy party napkins, whereas the last hand sanitizer went off the shelves two days ago. We’ve both still found a picked-over but normal selection of fruits and vegetables. (A lot of food for religious festivals is HIGHLY available. If you’ve been looking to stock up on matzoh and want to filigree it with a spicy Cinco de Mayo dip, your moment has come.) Both Ben and I—we were roommates for four years in college, after all—have been reading in depth about the supply chain. We agree that it sounds as if it’s wobbling but safe, this might be the worst moment. But having the conversation, an alarm that had been going off in a distant part of my mind falls quiet. Unbidden, Ben says I’ll probably be able to find pasta in a week or two. It just might not be my favorite kind.
I admit to him I wasn’t worried enough about the virus until we were asking Nathan questions a few days ago in our group chat (the same five of us have been on it since 2005, including Ben and Nathan, and we write back and forth intermittently throughout the day, previously on e-mail, now mostly on Slack). What’s the first date on the calendar that we’ll wake up and not think about corona for an entire day? May 12th? I asked Nathan.
He wrote back, That’s when it’ll be peak corona, dude.
What? This is not the peak?
To that, Nathan, who’s generally unflappable—an emergency room doctor in New York—wrote back, Charlie, it hasn’t started yet.
Before going, I tell Ben to stay safe—not perfunctorily. New York is the center of the virus in America right now and Nathan’s stories about the ER at his hospital there are getting worse.
* * *
—
One thing he says: every day he sees new ER patients who should technically be dead. A normal blood oxygen level is about 99%, he explained to us, it’s not great to see anything below a level of 95%, and you admit a patient automatically when they’re at 91% or lower. At 85% there’s usually imminent danger, and if they’re not already there that’s when he pages the lung specialists.
Or that’s the standard he’s worked by. Now he goes to the hospital and sees patients, many of them day laborers passed on to him from the flooded hospitals in Queens, who say, sitting up and to all appearances okay, though taking off oxygen masks to speak, “Hey, doc, finally, can I get out of here yet?”
Nathan says he checks the chart again to confirm what he’d read a moment before—that the blood oxygen level of the person in front of him is at something like, say, 70%, maybe 72%, either way a number that’s usually, in his words, incompatible with life. It’s a symptom he’s never seen in another virus. No, he tells them, you can’t leave quite yet.
* * *
—
In other circumstances I would welcome some time at home. I was traveling for most of February. I had a book come out and went to thirteen cities on tour, which means I went on at least 26 flights, though there were some connections in there. The last place I stopped was Seattle, which was the country’s hot spot at the time—there had been two deaths in a nursing home in Washington in February, following the hospitalization of a man who had come directly from Wuhan. Aside from more masks in airports, even then life didn’t seem much different than usual. I did the event there with my friend Mary Ann and then she and her husband and I had dinner at a pub. The turnout was good, too, we agreed.
It was the longest book tour I’ve ever done. The first three days were fine, but after that it started to take on a horrible eerie quality, and for a week in the middle it turned into a single long dream in which I did nothing but listen to Radiohead and walk through a single infinite airport, like the looping train at the end of The Unconsoled. It’s only been a few weeks, but I’m not sure I could say which store was in which city from that time. I missed Emily and our dog Lucy and having time to write and being at home, but it was more than that. In retrospect the dysphoria may have come partly from the instinctive sense around me (I was in denial, as my question to Nathan showed) that everything was on the verge of getting bad.
There were always four good hours a day, which was the exact amount of time it took me to arrive at a new hotel from the airport, go for a long walk, shower, change, get to the signing (and I loved those without reservation, the readers and the bookstores alike, particularly the booksellers, the heroes of my world) and then go back to my hotel, eat whatever was free on the table in my room, and watch an episode of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. (Pretty good show.) Then I would sleep for six hours and get into another car going to another airport and try to listen to something besides Radiohead before giving up and listening to Radiohead—the music of not knowing how to feel on this earth.
Of course, I was lucky to be on tour. Every so often someone tells me how many writers make a living in America, and the number constantly gets smaller. At first it was a few thousand. Then it was a thousand, then four hundred, then, not long ago, in a Weimar-like bit of deflation, seventy-one, according to a poet I know from Chicago.
People love to ask what it’s like to be a writer. I’m still not sure myself. In the midst of writing, when I forget what I’m doing, I love it. But those are infrequent times. As for praise, I never believe a word of it, not deep down. The only good compliment I ever got was at a reception after a lecture I gave at a small college in Missouri. The provost’s wife, who was handing out prizes to the students who had written the best essays about my book, was sitting next to me, and after we had talked about her life, she said, in reference to absolutely nothing, “You know, I didn’t like the book.”
“No?” I said.
“No.” She thought for a moment. “But you could tell all the words were in the right place.” Then she nodded firmly once, as if that sealed the subject of my attributes forever, which no doubt for her it did. But I treasure the memory of her impartiality, which held a rare vindication—because she was right, I put every word in the right place. It took for fucking ever, and I hated it, but I put every word in the right place, and it was fine with me if she didn’t like the novel itself. I was just so grateful that she noticed.
At any rate, I have nothing to write for a few weeks. I can just worry about politics, dying, and tweeting. Huge relief.
* * *
—
One of my favorite announcements comes from Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, a Republican, via Twitter:
Missouri specific:
• ZERO confirmed cases
• Nearly 17 people have been tested
• Testing CAN be done in Missouri
• Prisons, nursing homes & mental health facilities are a concern
