Herd Immunity (Chapter 14)

Stillman Hawking Wonders What A Pair of Seemingly Romantic Phone Calls Mean

All his life Stillman Hawking had been plagued by two things: bashfulness and sudden plunges in mood. Long hair had helped with the reticence he felt in meeting people. Women were now approaching him. That was doubly true when he performed.

The lows were trickier.

He never knew when they might appear. They were like the thunderstorms that drew in from the Gulf. One minute there was a bright yellow sun, and the next sheets of rain were descending, and a curtain of water covered everything. He was not affected by it so much in the mornings. More often, the feeling arrived, suddenly, in the afternoon. When it did, it was enveloping. In high school, he would return home after school, enter his room and stare at the ceiling or the floor, hiding and trying to wait it out, asking himself the cosmic questions. When he saw movies set in space, the ones where the astronauts got in their suits, leaving their ship to go out into the void to fix something, he understood. Nothing seemed to be. You were alone in a void that stretched for thousands of miles with only occasional points of light above you. While you were tethered to the rocketship, your line could break at any moment, and then you would find yourself drifting in a vacuum. Around you was a field of infinite emptiness and darkness.

Then you felt better. But you didn’t know why or when the relief would come. And you dreaded the next bout. Music was the great solace. It was the bomb and a balm. It had always been that.

The fear of losing his grandmother and the return to his home had forced him to be watchful. But it had not yet set off the worst of the spells. He retreated to his room – the one he had occupied as a boy – and played his instruments. Or he was at the hospital. There he put the headphones on, or he brought sheet music or a book to read. Were he in New York he would have been set off by the way that Janie and Marie were behaving, not returning his calls when they knew that his grandmother’s life lay in the balance. Somehow, back home, this was tolerable. And there was good news: everyone in the family other than his grandmother appeared to be free of the virus, even his grandpa.  

But he did not know what to think about what had happened that morning. He had been planning to do what he did most every day: head to the clinic and sit in the admitting area by the nurses’ station, awaiting word. Was the Dexamethasone working? Was there cause for hope? Yet before he had borrowed one of his father’s cars to drive there – or simply walk over – he had received two calls. Both Janie and Marie had phoned. There was subtext to each. That he knew. Lying in bed, he tried to parse them out.

Janie’s call was more transparent. She had started out by asking about Luann – grandma – of course, inquiring about her condition. And how was he doing in response? Then she had started chatting about Washington and how great it was. From there, she had proceeded to talking about how it had a much better music scene than you might suppose, and, while that was shut down now with the virus outbreak, it was definitely worth checking out. This was not hard to translate. The quarantine was affecting her. She was lonely, and she was backtracking, at least partially, on her decision to dump him.

Marie’s call was more curious. Indeed, it was among the strangest that he had ever gotten, and it required a fair amount of thought to process and interpret. In speaking with her, he had felt as though he were watching a movie in Farsi or Korean but without the subtitles.

During the periods when he and Janie had been split up, he had gone home with cougars a few times after his shows. They never expected much. They had lives, and they knew that nothing meaningful was ever going to come of a one-night stand. Marie appeared to be more complicated. That things were not so simple had been apparent in their initial encounter. He had not grasped the extent of the gap in their ages until he had woken up in the morning at her place, but then he had been struck by the numbers of radical books on her shelves. Obviously, she was unconventional. This did not appear to be a woman who was just looking to get married to her rich boyfriend and start a family. She was the real deal: a true fighter against the patriarchy and the transphobes and homophobes and Islamophobes. She was committed to her causes, and that was her life, it seemed.

But that something had happened to her was evident. The first indicator was her altered tone. Previously she had spoken to him very much as a school principal – with that combination of haughtiness and fake empathy. But now she was talking with an odd, somewhat manic intimacy. It was as though he were on the line with a different person. The only thing that was the same was her husky voice and her lack of pronounced femininity. It had taken him a while to figure it out. But his familiarity with black moods gave him a hint. Something had thrown her into a state of panic and doubt. But what was it? And what did she want from him?