Thursday, August 6, 2020

My landlady calls me late in the day. She can hear my air conditioning running. She’s worried that I might have left it on when I went to work. I tell her that I’m in isolation and working from home. She doesn’t quite understand. We had been speaking in English, but her English is even weaker than my Hebrew. We switch. I tell her what’s happening. I emphasize that I don’t have any symptoms. We’re just being cautious, as instructed by the government. She’s relieved. She asks if I need anything from the supermarket. I tell her that I’m OK, and that I had plenty of things saved up. Looking around later, I see that I’m out of fruit. Digging into my quarantine stash, I find that I actually have plenty of dried fruit, as well as a fresh pack of frozen grapes in the freezer. They’re one of my favorite snacks, like bite-sized all-fruit popsicles without the stick. I work through the day, sending email and WhatsApp messages to coworkers, and working remotely on my office desktop. My boss tells me that he can see things moving on my screens. It’s like there’s a ghost in my cube. I think, but don’t say, that if there were to be a ghost in a cube, he would probably be across the aisle. Someone I know who also went into isolation yesterday sends me an eerie picture. He is in his living room. A person in a hazmat suit is testing him for the virus. He doesn’t have symptoms either, but apparently his doctor thought getting tested was a good idea anyway. His test has come back negative, after only one day. When work ends, I shut down the remote desktop for the weekend and put my sandals on. Isolation or not, the trash still has to go out.