To write a novel that acknowledges the pandemic? Or to write a novel pre-pandemic? has been the key point of debate in my classes this year as some embark on the daunting task. The World Health Organisation has said we will not be returning to the normal we once knew, that there is only a COVID and post-COVID world from here on out. I consider the possibility of a novel that chooses to disregard the pandemic and this novel being stuck in an impenetrable past. I also consider it is this location which may lend the novel it’s readability, in that the market may crave any recount of the world that was. T disagrees. Just you watch, he says, once a vaccine emerges we will struggle to remember it at all.
I am watching.
I read Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation; a lecture on ‘presentness’. She uses the term ‘composition’ to describe the very act of writing and favours proximity over what will or might happen because ‘naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening’. Stein suggests that an acute ‘presentness’ is necessary for authentic life-writing. Where attention to writing in the present creates a prolonged present, thus a natural composition of the world. She writes ‘the time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps everyone can be certain’.
I practice presentness all week, a body attuned to all it encounters.
I run into a friend of a friend. I hold my skirt against my knee with one hand and with the other do my best to control my hair, which is whipping around in a small tornado above us. Spring winds, they’re here, the friend of a friend says. In the evening, I spend time compiling my winter clothes to retire to my parents home. A month ago the feeling of sandal wearing weather was intangible to this body. Now, it’s twenty-four and sunny and I’ve all but forgotten about those dormant winter months of baked gnocchis, heavy reds and too-early sunsets. The seasons roll and will continue to roll and I wonder and will continue to wonder what the present even is; it’s always gone before I can grasp it.
It is your job to bear witness to this dystopia, my teacher says triumphantly.
I witness by way of pressing letters into words into sentences at the front sun grabbing window. The driver of the mini-van angle parked in front of the deli has returned from the supermarket. Her trolly is so full it topples as she crosses the gutter so bread rolls, tinned tomatoes and mandarins scatter everywhere. Flustered and all alone, I watch as she rips the mask from her face. I watch her haul bags of bread rolls and enormous cellophane bags of corn chips into two baby seats, which sit side-by-side.
The dystopia is often very un-glamorous, I say.
I witness, when sipping my mango avocado goo in the front window, my sister’s partner burst though the door, an oh my god look plastered on his face. That was quick, my sister says. Apparently, he wanted to walk here from my nephew’s creche. But I had to run, he says. He had noticed people giving him strange looks at the start but it wasn’t until one elderly man snarled at him, that he realised he didn’t have a mask with him. He is speaking with as much adrenaline as a pedestrian who has only just been spared fatal collision with a car.
But it is still the dystopia, my teacher says.
I witness at Almost French, when I stop to buy T a treat. Something illicit I would probably never have myself. What’s in that one, I ask the lady, pointing to a folded doughnut dusted in sugar. Custard, she says. It looks marvellous. I buy it. There is confusion about how much it costs. FOUR-TEN. FOUR-TEN. I think she is asking me for fourteen dollars. We apologise too many times to one another even though no wrong has been done. It’s these, I can’t do anything anymore, she says gesturing to her mask. She leans on the register, still holding the paper-bagged doughnut, to look out the window. I study her polished hands, then the bag, which is already turning translucent. If there is one thing I’ve learnt this year, the lady says, so swiftly does one adapt to the unimaginable.
I witness when the sound of a horn, long and irritated, fills my living space. I hurry to find her mood when I get in the car, the four coffee kind of jittery. She is pregnant and so I probe. We’re technically breaking the law, she says. I consider this. It’s true, I hadn’t actually realised. We pass a checkpoint, dodging it by way of a left turn down a residential side street. We start coming up with reasons as to why we might be out together. When I get out of the car at the other end, I have counted nine police cars in just 2.6 kilometers. People send looks toward our group of socially distanced three; looks of confusion, concern and judgment. It’s only one third above the law, I think. Her baby has grown untold since I first met him three months ago. There is a buzzing sound in the atmosphere, like an electronic march fly it comes and goes. The sound belongs to a drone, which moves around the park to then hover above the three of us. My sister, now restless beyond sitting, suggests we leave before we get fined.
I witness when I walk around the Botanical Garden track and the pack of police and army uniforms on patrol do not do anything to this body anymore. They are customary to morning time and as token to the Botanical Garden Track as the pirouetting ficus’ that line the perimeter. There is the man who tells off young women taking a break from their masks; we pass him in the same place we see him every other morning and he greets me with his same foul tongue. I now take pride in being one of his victims, as if I am a token of all that he fears. I volley him back a thumbs up now, which works not only to disgruntle his power trip but also sate me.
In the deli’s courtyard, I witness when my sister yells for us to HIDE QUICK, I grab my gin and tonic and leap into the bamboo. There is the sound of a large vehicle above us; wind rearranges the foliage. I study it and notice what looks to be disease all over its pale green skin, then remember watching Daisy dump black mop water here once. It’s just an aeroplane, T says. I emerge, re-take my seat. I didn’t even know we were on a flight path.
I pay fifty-nine dollars for an alternative word processing program to Microsoft Word because my now thousands of vignettes / novel in progress is a fragmented palaver. Reading through I am made to see that to write anything in this time is to inadvertently write about the pandemic. That the dystopia is embedded in my bedroom walls or in the mundanity of driving to the market on my own. I keep writing into the prolonged present; toward a natural composition of the small patch of concrete T and I take up.
In the morning I think about how many hours have to happen until I can say it is evening. I blend a bunch of things to a cold brown goo, swallow it and leave the dregs on the bench to bear witness downstairs. It’s a non-deli day. I close my eyes to the dull artificial hum the fridges. I am reminded that we are on a flight path when the sound of movie-like wartime fills the deli.
Time will pass and you must freeze it with language, my teacher implores us today. Where does she get this stuff?
When I retire upstairs, T is hanging out our bedroom window smoking his five pm cigarette, drinking his five pm beer. What time is it, I ask. Four thirty, he says. My smoothie is over there, the smoothie I made in the morning as I longed for evening. I think about standing in the COVID-free summer I have longed for all winter. I think about how nobody really knows. How present-ness is arduous when the future is as ambiguous as it is. I go to bed and sleep well anyway, humbled by the fact that the ice still melts; the smoothie still separates; that summer will arrive; that eleven becomes twelve, then two.
Yellow Days 