Guest Editorial
C D A J O U R N A L , V O L 4 9 , Nº 12
Corona Creative Eric K. Curtis, DDS, MA
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fter what seemed like a lifetime, we crept back to the office and cracked the door open, checking supplies, flushing lines and tentatively inviting our patients back into an environment more fully than ever wrapped, masked, wiped, suctioned and distanced. My employees were nervous about the prospect of facing the public, terrified of a menace that, the avalanche of media reportage notwithstanding, was next to impossible to assess. As novelist Arundhati Roy wrote, “Who can look at anything anymore — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?”1 The virus made me uneasy too, but I still found myself craving the rhythms and clarity of work. Being sidelined for seven weeks might have been a rehearsal for retirement, but only if retiring consisted of retreating to a cave. I woke at odd hours. I lost track of days. From inside my little grotto, the Arizona governor’s executive order to resume “nonessential” surgeries beckoned like sunshine, and I was ready to stagger out into its warmth, even if fresh air would have to be muzzled by filtration-efficient masks and the light refracted through a face shield. (Sunburn and heat stroke and skin cancer? Life demands that we weigh risks.) My staff was brave: The employees voted to reopen the office, and they made light of their fears by taking “socially distancing” photos wearing inflatable body balls. My colleagues were resourceful, helping me find masks and offering me tips on managing patient flow. My patients
Reading pandemic fiction during a pandemic feels even more edgy and piquant than I would have imagined — and much more empowering.
were supportive — one, a nurse, supplied us with scarce hand sanitizer that she found at a feed store. My mother even sewed a stack of cloth gowns that we could change for laundering between patients. Yet of all the preparations for engaging with the realities of my new world, none gave me better psychological cover than reading fiction. I’ve always been a reader. I developed the habit early in life, pulling books out of my parents’ bookshelves — inevitably with a sense of mystery, as if unsheathing broadswords of mythical promise — and riding my bike down to the local library on Saturdays, intrigued that linear marks on a page could readily open my brain to other people’s consciousness, their realities, ideas and lively conversations. Reading invited an introverted kid to live boldly, imagine the world’s vastness and fly to its far corners, even to blast off the planet, G-forces tearing at my mind, to touch the stars. So, of course, when I found myself pressed under the thumb of the COVID-19 pandemic, I naturally fell back on that well-worn impulse to read my way out. If you like books about mass calamity, you’ll need more than seven weeks. Disaster threats, both real and imagined, are as old as history, and their symbolic trappings often loom as important as the event. The “Epic of Gilgamesh” describes
a civilization-ending flood so dramatically pegged to notions of religious obedience and sacrifice that the story was retold in the Bible, the Quran and the Hindu Dharmasastra, from which it rippled into Buddhist and Jainist texts. Moses’s Egyptian plagues, what with all those frogs and the pharaoh’s disdain and the lamb’s blood daubed on Israelite doors, famously celebrated in Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, are more circumspectly remembered each year at Passover. Latter-day cataclysms sparked by the struggle of good versus evil, as promised in the book of Revelation, continue to resonate in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s novel “Good Omens” (1990). The earliest tales of apocalypse invariably warn against human hubris. “You are the plague,” a blind man tells Oedipus in that classical Greek tragedy, as Jill Lepore reports in “Don’t Come Any Closer: What’s at stake in our fables of contagion?”2 Ancient lessons are rebirthed in modern yarns of technology-triggered disaster, including H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” (1895), Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” (1950), Walter M. Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” (1959) and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” (1998). But the most expansive, the most profound and perhaps the most gripping annihilation stories arise from the unpredictability of disease. D ECEMBER 2 0 2 1
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