Essays

The mood in the Jeep quieted when we turned down a dirt road running through a trailer park. Every trailer had at least two, sometimes three dogs lounging by their porch steps. I guessed that none were spayed or neutered.

That first edition of The Random House Unabridged contains about 300,000 entries. In all, 2,091 thumb-indexed pages. All of this seemed like most of the world’s knowledge to a young me, and flipping through it while lying on the short-napped, striped carpet was, if not my favorite pastime, at least a worthwhile one.

On New Year’s Day 2020, 24 hours after an initial cluster of COVID-19 cases had been diagnosed in Wuhan, China, I was nose-deep in The Mirror & the Light, the magnificent doorstop conclusion to Dame Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, soaking up the pageantry and intrigue of Henry VIII’s court. Mantel cast a spell, and I was blissfully unaware of reports radiating outward from East Asia and then from Italy. Doomscrolling was future tense.

Maybe it was the truth in that blue, bedazzling ocean that caused me to trip upon my own comfortable musings. Come on, now, the sea seemed to whisper. Don’t be putting on airs.

Perhaps the trauma of that evening a few months later, when Clarksville became a footnote in the grisly story, is when it began to set in. An obsession that would become full-blown OCD started to grow as I struggled to understand what happened.