Of course, the global catastrophe unfolding is nothing but real. Stock-market convulsions have destroyed, in a matter of days, nest eggs built over decades. More than 16 million people in the United States applied for unemployment over just three weeks. The case count and death toll grow with each refresh of the page.
And yet some part of me still doesn’t want to accept that these calamities are really happening. Not really. What does it mean to say that this doesn’t feel real? The feeling seems to derive from the assumption that life before the pandemic, “normal” life, was real. That we have departed from it into strange territory.
But what if it’s exactly the other way around?
Neutrinos are nature’s escape artists. Did they help us slip out of the Big Bang? Perhaps. Recent experiments in Japan have discovered a telltale anomaly in the behavior of neutrinos, and the results suggest that, amid the throes of creation and annihilation in the first moments of the universe, these particles could have tipped the balance between matter and its evil-twin opposite, antimatter.
As a result, a universe that started out with a clean balance sheet — equal amounts of matter and antimatter — wound up with an excess of matter: stars, black holes, oceans and us.
Finally, they reached a decision. They would stay open for delivery and curbside pickup. The next day, they’d make that decision again. Deciding their fate daily would become their new normal. On the day this story is published, Café Rakka remains operational. Tomorrow, it may well be closed. All across the country, restaurants are shutting down. Some may never reopen. And what’s at stake, for our economy and our culture and for the lives of those who own and staff them, is far greater than just a matter of a few businesses closing their doors.
“No one has ever done this before and written a guidebook saying, ‘Look, here’s how you do it,’” Riyad says.
“It’s absolutely impossible to know what to do.”
When I first punched in to work at Papa J’s Ristorante at 16 years old, how could I have known I’d still be working in the service industry 32 years later? Though college was on the horizon, I was aimless. But what stuck with me from my time as a dishwasher was the cold soaked jeans, the fistfuls of shredded provolone, and the smell of roasted garlic simmering in a chunky tomato marinara. Those late 1980s high school nights, at a hip Italian-joint in a company town outside of Pittsburgh, taught me to appreciate a bite of mousse cake that cost more a piece than what I made in an hour. Soon, I’d be promoted to busboy, and with it, I would come to learn about people.
Something about the rhythm of how we breathe while we’re in the water changes us. Deep breathing research is in its infancy, but we know that this pace of breath is soothing—there’s a feedback loop between our breathing patterns and the nerve centers that fire our anxiety responses. When we’re stressed, we tend to take short, rapid breaths; if we breathe deeply and slowly, that counteracts the stress and dampens our alarm system. In this way, our arousal and breathing centers are reciprocally linked. Swimming is particular in its activation of deep breathing. It’s the nature of the exercise: you take a big breath, hold it, and then release it slowly.
Midway through Dima Wannous’s novel, the narrator recalls a neighbour who fell sick during a dire shortage of doctors and medicine. The woman’s daughter had to take time off work to hunt for a hospital bed. “So, silently, I begged my own mother not to fall ill,” she says, to “not contract a virus or other disease.”
As well as having a chilling resonance today, the anecdote offers a glimpse of daily life for millions of Syrians since the 2011 revolution. Almost five years after the uprising began, many doctors have left a country mired in civil war, where the price of medicines has sky-rocketed. Yet in Wannous’s ambitious, multilayered second novel – which was shortlisted for the 2018 International prize for Arabic fiction – the threat of disease is just one of many reasons to live in fear.
Set in an alternate Tudor England, Megan Campisi’s wonderful debut novel “Sin Eater” is a riveting depiction of hard-won female empowerment that weaves together meticulous research, unsolved murder — and an unforgettable young heroine.
If only my bag had been large enough,
I would have brought the lonely men in parked cars
by the river. I would have brought the woman
dabbing kohl tears with the heel
Now it is night again, child on my chest.
I croon & my song drifts you towards rest.