Housebound

This is a short, bleak piece about some of our possible near futures.  SF outlets don't want to hear about COVID right now, for the most part, so I'm putting it here.



"You're insane, Erik."

"I'm insane? Justin, have you thought about what they want us to do?"

"Want us to do?" Justin slumped against the kitchen counter. "It's not like we have a choice. Listen, I don't want to do it, either. It's terrifying."

"And for what?" Erik threw up his hands. "So the economy can 'get moving'? So rich people can get richer? That's why we can't stay safe until there's a cure? Until at least there are hospital beds?"

"Yeah, I guess," Justin said. "And so that all this can finally end. It's awful. All of this is awful." He stepped over to Erik, took his hand. "But at least we'll do it together."

Erik looked down. "No, Justin. We won't. I can't." He pulled his hand away. "I need you to respect my decision."

Justin sighed. So much lost, the last year. The world kept getting smaller. "I guess I don't have a choice."

***

Justin opened the door from the garage and stepped outside. He felt brittle in the cold night air. He shrugged his robe tighter around his shoulders and padded across the yard to the small round stone. To the six-foot by three-foot patch of freshly-dug earth.

He took a deep breath. "You sure don't make this easy, love," he murmured.

***

The doorbell was like a recording from another time. A time with dinner guests, board game nights, New Year's Eve parties. Good times.

If only. Justin heaved himself off the couch and opened the door.

"Hi, Mr.-- uh, hi, Justin." The young woman carrying a small plastic case gave him a chagrined smile. She'd been young enough to call him Mr. Carson when she'd dog-sat for them. Professor Bones had died ten years ago.

"Olivia! You're our Prefect? How are you? Uh..." he wavered. It seemed dangerous. Forbidden. But... "w-won't you come in?"

Olivia stepped casually into the living room. Of course. She must do this all the time. "Thank you! Um, is Erik around?"

"Olivia, uh... Erik...." Justin swallowed. He'd been rehearsing this all morning. "Erik couldn't handle... this. Today. It was too much for him. Here..." Justin walked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. He gestured out toward the stone and upturned earth in the corner of the yard.

Olivia's hand went to her mouth. "Oh, Justin, I'm so sorry." And then she hugged him.

It was the first time anyone but Erik had touched him in a year. Justin's body shuddered, and he started to pull away. And then he realized: it didn't matter. Not today. Not ever again. Slowly, he relaxed and just... hugged someone.

Olivia gave him a tight squeeze and then stepped back. "Sorry, I forget. You're not used to that, yet." She frowned. "Justin, you know you should've reported... this. There's gonna be a lot of paperwork. You could get fined." Her shoulders sagged. "Probably not, though. A lot of people have been making the choice Erik made."

"So," he said, "I guess you came here to... do what Prefects do." Justin still found the term 'Prefect' ridiculous, but it resonated with the Harry Potter crowd. For them -- and the Prefects were all young adults, infected early and now immune -- it seemed orderly. Calming.

"Right. OK." Olivia sat down on the couch and opened her case. Six syringes. In a better world, they'd be full of a vaccine. In this world, they held active virus. "I guess we won't need all these." She pulled out a syringe. "The first one's the important one. That's why I need to do it for you. The other two are just to make sure. One per day." She took the cap off. "Sit down and tilt your head back, please."

It was nothing compared to what the stuff in the syringe was about to do to him. But, for just a second, Justin felt like he was drowning in poison.

***

Justin opened his eyes. He was freezing and damp all over. Couldn't stop shaking. His chest was burning. He stank.

The bedroom was pitch black except for a bright, rectangular light coming from the nightstand. Too bright to look at. Justin squirmed in discomfort.

"Oh, thank God!" The voice came from the same place as the light. Erik's voice? But Erik was in the backyard, now. Wait, no, he wasn't. That had been a lie.

The voice spoke again, and there was movement in the light. "Justin, you're going to be okay. Just hold on, honey."

***

"I go back to the office on Tuesday," said Justin, pushing down the lever on the toaster. "Janet is in Gamma Group, like us-- like me... so it's the first day back for both of us. About half the department's back already."

From the laptop on the kitchen counter, Erik flashed a big grin. "Congratulations, honey!"

Justin opened the fridge and pulled out the peanut butter. "Are you... going to be okay down there?"

"What, me?" Erik's eyes, which had been looking off toward his second monitor, flicked back toward the camera. "Never better! Hey, look." Erik disappeared, and the camera panned around their basement. Erik seemed so far away... hard to believe he was just fourteen feet below Justin. "I got the rowing machine set up. And the new stove! As long as you keep me in food and TP, I'm great!"

Justin had to try. "Hey, uh... I don't suppose you'd reconsi--"

"Justin." Erik was suddenly all serious. "You're 44. You barely made it. I'm a 56-year-old ex-smoker. I'll take my chances down here, thanks." Erik's frown turned deeper. "Besides, you know what would happen if they knew I was alive. What they do to Hiders."

Justin was staring at the toaster.

"What?" Erik asked.

"I just made breakfast."

"Yeah?"

"Out of habit. I've made toast every day for the last year." Justin blinked. "I'm going out for breakfast today. I'm meeting Jarred at Julie's Brunch in ten minutes."

"Oh. Uh... don't say hi for me."

"Yeah. Yeah." Justin was trying to hide a smile and not doing very well at it. "Hey, I'll check back in with you in an hour."

"Nah, it's OK," Erik said. "I was just about to put on a movie."

***

"Ooh, what's for dinner tonight?"

"Eggplant parmesan," Justin said, looking up from the stove. "It's on the calendar."

"Oh, yeah," said Erik. "Forgot to check. Hey, uh," he paused. "Remember to wipe down the plate before you put it on the stairs."

"Are you kidding?" Justin turned back to the stove. "Gotta keep you healthy!"

***

"Where were you?" Erik's voice sounded a bit choked, from the laptop, but it might have been the connection.

"Hey, Erik! Sorry, Janet and Lewis invited me out for dinner.... It got a little late." Justin looked guilty. "I'll throw something together for you."

"Nah, don't bother," Erik said. "I made spaghetti. I'll put the dishes on the stairs."

"Hey, how about we watch Die Hard and get plastered, later?"

"Um," Erik was looking at his other monitor. "No thanks. Got stuff to do."

***

"Justin!"

"Mmmph."

"Justin, wake up!"

Justin rolled toward the screen. "Erik? What's wrong?"

"You won't believe this! The virus... they've proved it was a bioweapon!"

Justin sighed. "Who, this time? End Times News? The Halon Report?"

Silence.

"It was Halon, wasn't it? Erik, those people are filth."

A window popped up on Justin's screen. Call ended.

***

"Erik, what do you want for dinner?"

...

"Honey, you have to eat. You haven't touched anything in three days."

...

"All right, I'll call when I get back. Love you."

***

"Erik, what did you do?"

"N-nuffin'."

"Erik, what is--. Did you... smash the TV... with the microwave?"

"Made myshelf a drink. Somethin' speshul."

"Oh, great. That's just--"

"Put somethin' in it I've been holdin' onto. Somefin I brought wif me... how long I bin down here, Jus?"

"Four months, Erik. You know that."

"Four mumfs I been holdin' onto these li'l suckers." Erik waved an orange bottle with a white cap in front of the camera.

"Oh, God. Oh, God! Erik, I-- I--". Justin jumped up and ran to the sink, started furiously washing his hands. "Hold on!"

***

Justin opened the door from the garage and stepped outside. He felt brittle in the cold night air. He shrugged his robe tighter around his shoulders and padded across the yard to the small round stone. To the six-foot by three-foot patch of freshly-dug earth.

He took a deep breath. "You sure don't make this easy, love," he murmured.

How numbers behave

We have a water cooler at work, with those big water jug things. When you go to get some water and the jug is empty, you have to replace it; this probably happens 2-3 times/week.

I encountered an end of a jug (and therefore replaced it) three times in my first two weeks in the lab, and then I didn't encounter one again until this morning, nearly a year later. My brain immediately started trying to read meaning into this. Why then? Why now? Why not all the time in between?

The reason, of course, is "just because". If I ever create a course called "Psychology and Statistics" (spoiler: I won't) you can be sure there will be a segment on water coolers.

Running downhill

I'm going back to grad school this year. It's been a long time coming -- holy hell, I'm 36; I have articles of clothing that are almost as old as most of my classmates will be. I've been working in computational biology for 8 years, now, since I left the software industry. Over that time I slowly came to the realization that this is really what I want to do with my whole career, and that I really needed to invest the years to get a PhD in order to do it at the level I want to. So far, without a PhD, I've pieced together a couple of really great jobs doing some really fun work, but that's all been a matter of luck; to make this into a lasting career, I need to do what everyone else around me did in their 20s.

I need to go back to school, both to get the credential I need to be taken seriously and to get the knowledge I need to do those jobs as well as I can. Even when I come out on the other side, I'll be the low man on the totem pole; it'll be a big step back in many ways. I may never make as much money again as I do now; if I do, it'll be a long while. But that's OK, because I'll be much better at what I'm doing with my life than I am now. Different doors will be open to me.

Yeah.

That's the story I tell most people about why I'm going back to school. It's pretty true, actually, and if it weren't pretty true I wouldn't be doing it. There's another part, though. The other part has repeated itself dozens of times during the last 8 years, and it goes something like this:

We all went to the bar this afternoon, in my lab. We call this "running downhill". That's hilarious, because my boss always talks about how we take the quickest path to getting drugs into the clinic, and he calls that "running downhill", but there's also literally a bar downhill from us. We don't actually run there; that would be too much effort.

Anyway, we all went to this bar, and while we were there, a colleague of mine who had a couple drinks in him made a comment about how, when they replace me after I go to grad school, maybe my replacement can "do some science, too".

He might have been kidding. He kind of acted like he was kidding. If he was, he was kidding because there's some truth there, too, at least in the collective mind of my chosen field. It doesn't matter how important my work is or how many publications I have. I don't have a PhD, so what I'm doing isn't science. It's just a matter of definitions. It probably doesn't help that I'm currently a computational researcher surrounded by wet lab folks, but I got the same kind of comments when my colleagues were computational.

I used to hate this phenomenon; it cut me deeply, over and over, and frankly it's the thing that got into my bones and made me decide to go back to school.

But now that I'm headed back to school, I love stuff like that. It shores up my resolve to go back, which is something that weakens whenever I actually stop to think about the craziness I'm about to embark on. That comment right there, by my coworker at the bar, was me passing my qualifying exam. Or maybe it was a dozen pages of my dissertation. Or maybe it was me powering through a week of late nights in the lab. Because every time a coworker with a PhD makes a comment like that, I store it up. It's like a giant fucking battery, and it's been charging up for most of a decade now. I'm going to need a lot of damn energy from that battery to get through the next five or so years, so I'm especially grateful when someone just hands me a great big jolt of it.

The state of science in America

A dog door-opening solution

I've always meant to document this properly:

We have room-by-room heating, and we have a dog. I've set up pulleys in the rooms we keep warm to close doors behind our dog, and handles he can use to open them. That way, he can go wherever he wants in the house and doesn't leave an open door behind him, letting heat out.

The pulley and handle were dead simple to put together. The handle is just a metal hook like you can find at any hardware store, screwed into the door at nose height with some rope and soft fabric wrapped around it. The pulley consists of two screw eyes, a string, and some socket wrench attachments I had lying around for weights. The string ties to the screw eye on the door, goes through the screw eye in the doorway, and drops down beside the door.

Toby had no trouble learning how to push open the door. It took him maybe a couple days to learn how to pull it open from the other side. He settled on a two-part motion, first swiping the handle with his paw (or with his nose) to open the door a bit and then nosing it open the rest of the way. The only tricky part was getting the amount of resistance just right (by varying the number of weights) without putting him off the concept entirely. Lots of treats.

I used pulleys instead of spring hinges because spring hinges always seem to end up squeaking, and because the pulley seems to give a more consistent amount of resistance.

To Whom It May Concern:

[This letter I sent to a hospital is about a situation in Seattle, but this is very much a national issue. If it worries you, check it out and get involved.]

I'm a Swedish Hospital NICU parent, and I just received a fundraising letter regarding the Lytle Center for Pregnancy and Newborns. I have great respect for everyone I've dealt with at Swedish and feel that we received excellent care there. However, I will not be supporting this Center, and I would like to tell you why.

The recent merger with Providence Health & Services, a Catholic health care organization, and removal of "elective" abortion services from the hospital leave me skeptical that the Lytle Center will truly provide "convenient access to a full spectrum of prenatal and postpartum care" as described in your letter.

"A full spectrum of prenatal and postpartum care" may necessarily include abortion. It may, yes, include so-called "elective" abortion in a time of extreme duress for parents facing one of the toughest decisions of their lives. This is particularly likely in the case of high-risk pregnancies such as ours was.

It may include end-of-life care, as indeed it did in our case: we lost one of our twin daughters in the Swedish NICU and, at that time, felt well-supported in all of our our decision-making by Swedish staff.

It most certainly, in all cases, includes the availability of contraceptive advice.

I am no longer confident that Swedish can provide these things in a convenient manner, nor that it will continue to provide them at all in the future. I will redirect the contribution that I would very much like to send to the Lytle Center to March of Dimes, instead.

Regards,
[Upwind Both Ways]

Pretend Daddy

(My two-year-old started talking to "Pretend Daddy" while I was out yesterday evening, sort of an imaginary friend version of me. I think this is pretty much how that came about)

They found a way in, last night, when I didn't come home until after my two-year-old daughter went to bed. The Clever Ones that usually linger just out of sight around her saw their chance and took it. They fashioned a doppelgänger from her bright, carefree thoughts of me and started to whisper to her. She began to speak of Pretend Daddy.

She says that Pretend Daddy -- "Ysh-Hothur" in the Unspoken Tongue -- sings better than I do. I can only imagine what perversions he croaks to our daughter in that broken language while she sleeps. He's taller than me, too, she says: she can sense the raw force that's there, hidden for now, just barely invisible to adult eyes.

As he binds more and more of her small being to his will, he will be able to gather more of the Clever Ones to him. We've seen this beginning already: her stuffed Burt the Bee now has... friends... with him, in his plush, yellow hive; to call those twisted souls "other bees", as our child does, is to make a mockery of all that is sane.

We ignore this Pretend Daddy at our hazard; he must be dealt with. And, so, we have an uneasy truce, perhaps even a diabolical bargain. 

On the one hand, Ysh-Hothur clearly means to use our daughter as an entry point into this world.  He puts our daughter, our family, perhaps the whole of the mortal realm in deadly peril.

On the other hand, he's really useful at mealtimes. "Look, Pretend Daddy's saying you should eat your oatmeal, too!"