The undead

“STRANGE fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees/ … is a strange and bitter crop,” sang the great Billie Holiday in the timeless blues anthem to prejudice and hate.

Mixed fruits the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) brings me although these are no less strange, rediscovered in their unfamiliarity in the jaundiced light of strange times, borne by a virus that feeds on people’s need for contact and intimacy and offering redemption through denial of the same.

“Can one take a bath after getting the vaccine?” According to the doctor debriefing our cordoned group, this question is the “most asked” by just vaccinated individuals. 

The bath as a social ritual was long altered by the pandemic. Navigating the crosscurrents of Zoom meetings and Facebook Live webinars, we increasingly eschew a necessity that used to be essential for keeping face in the Asian context: the morning bath.

In a twinkling, we transform into mermen and -maids, donning an office shirt over last night’s pajamas or splashing water on a stale face to appear fresh and bright from the neck up for virtual encounters.

Stay-at-home and work-from-home are realities that transform us into cross-platform denizens, situated in the domestic while pivoting the new borderless social.

The new social, though, is an illusion camouflaging the anti-social. Leaving the vaccination hub located within a city’s financial and commercial district, the husband and I walk a few blocks to return to the carpark when I hear two women walking behind us.

I feel the tautening of my neck, back, and arms as their voices, in loud, animated conversation, draw closer and closer. 

My strides stumble as I debate whether to slow down or work faster. If we let them pass us, will they get close enough to release in that fatal second or two some of the super viral load of those infected with the Delta variant? Or will I?

As if in rebuke, the voices behind us abruptly de-escalate. The women swerved for another direction.

The husband and I are back to being the solitary humans walking on the vacant sidewalks beside the wide, empty streets. In this apocalyptic landscape, I breathe better behind the layers of my personal protective equipment (PPE). 

Remembering the debriefing, I reflect that, especially for the unvaccinated or the partially vaccinated, the bath is the prerequisite for purification, a sloughing off from possible contagion from other people so one can continue to function as a human counting out its days and nights in fear of playing host to an infection that breeds in living cells.

The vaccine came too late. I had become a shirker of flesh, a seeker of bubbles, another Covid mutant: the zombie.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the August 22, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column in SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”

Waiting for vax

 

I AM in the pale. In numbers, I belong to the 87 percent of the country’s population that have not been vaccinated against coronavirus disease (Covid-19), by choice or not.

It is the latter in our case. The husband and I have registered when the local government units in Luzon where we live and work made the call for A3 and A4 groups, prioritized due to underlying health conditions and working in the public, private, and informal sectors.

Our latest registration was in the Parañaque website, open also to non-residents. The government launched a “mega vaccination site” at the Nayong Pilipino, with eight “ambulatory vaccination centers and 30 drive-thru booths” and the capacity to inoculate “at least 15,000 persons a day”.

Currently, the husband and I still belong to the 96,731,254 Filipinos that have not received even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

As of Aug. 9, the country’s population is 111,185,350, according to the United Nations. Only 11 percent of Filipinos are fully vaccinated while 1.9 percent have at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, based on the ourworldindata.org.

Vaccine equity has to leap out from public health jargon into reality because the supply of vaccines is insufficient to meet the demand.

In our part of Cavite, the administration of the second dose of Covid-19 vaccines was delayed for weeks and has just been resumed. Prioritized are the A2 and A3 groups, who are elderly, have comorbidities, or are both.

Yet, the A4 (frontline economic workers) and A5 (indigent) groups are also vulnerable. Many Calabarzon residents commute to and fro Metro Manila for work, putting them daily at risk.

When the poor get sick, they rarely rush to hospitals. “Coronavirus inequality,” to borrow the phrase used in a “Washington Post” article, is the reality that those with less in life fear more a lockdown than disease.

The former means hunger, a protracted dying. Covid-19 works quickly on people with poor nutrition and health and little or no resources for work from home, physical distancing, isolation, and hospitalization.

I will accept any vaccine but first, it must be available.

I will wait for a vax appointment, which every government website I have registered in promises to send but has yet to fulfill.

Walking into a congested vaccination center without an appointment is a sure ticket to the Delta class.  

As part of the walking unvaccinated, I pose a potential threat to others, including the vaccinated. A nearby vax center has closed for “disinfection”.  Vaccinators are getting exhausted, infected, or both.

Yet, the deafening call to “get vaccinated” lacks this antecedent message: “make vaccines available”.  Please.

Dead reckoning

ANXIETY is the siren wail that pounces in the middle of the day, with another spiraling in the void opened by the emptied highway, followed by another and another.

It is a photograph of a shop posted by an entrepreneur that is moving out and returning to where he started: home. 

Anxiety is writing a tribute for someone loved and writing another for a different beloved before the week is over. It is waking at the dead of the night and listening:  who is next?

We clutch at the no small comfort that no loved one has died from the virus. Until we realize that grief is dredging up memories of a certain vintage. 

We have not seen last year/lost year all those who took departure. We thought love was best measured out by the restraint of physical presence and the chance of contagion. 

What is this remorse then for emotions unconfessed, stories hoarded and never to be unspooled? Regret is colder than the touch of fear accompanying the solitary flipping through a scrapbook labeled “The Last Time They Met”.

After the re-imposition of modified enhanced community quarantine, I wake just before midnight, intending to bring inside our ten-month-old calico for a meal before she begins the 12-hour fast and quarantine before spaying.

Wiggy is not with her four kittens, powerful engines idling in those tiny abdomens falling and rising in dreamless sleep. Her orbs are not among the marbles reflecting the moonlight in the faces of her three younger half-sisters from the same mother.

When I hear the mewling of kittens that announces her return, I had time to ponder how inventions like curfew and quarantine are redefined by a creature that makes no sense of these. 

The risk of aspirating—vomit during surgery entering the lungs—requires the caging of a cat to ensure her stomach is empty when anesthesia relaxes the epiglottis that prevents regurgitation.

Wiggy, who since birth comes and goes like the wind, enters the carrier not because she comprehends this long-winded explanation. She trusts me. 

We look at each other across the mesh barrier. I find it difficult to breathe and take her out. I watch her curl up and sleep outside the fetters of my anxiety. Still sleepless hours later, I put her in when there is no more excuse to put off what must be done.

Before modern navigation, a person out at sea estimated distance from the nearest land by dead reckoning. Adrift from the known and familiar, fishermen and sailors read celestial objects or based their estimates on an object known as a Dutchman’s log. To enable one to guess the speed of the vessel, the object had to stay afloat. 

Buoyancy is the trust of a creature that belongs to me and I, to her.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 8, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”