Business

The virus brings with it a new time.  A time of anxiety.  A time of prayer.  My work now is the same as it was in the time before, before the novel virus, when the office building was a safe place to take a phone call or hang out at the ice machine.  My office now is one desk at a window in the bedroom.  Quite a down-size.  But once the phone rings, it's business as usual.

This day, I get a call from Bryan Vasquez in Los Angeles.  Nice guy.

As I pull up his account, I take note of the two triangular ears extending over the top of the monitor.  Someone is always listening.

I ask Bryan for some basic personal information to confirm I am speaking with the real Bryan Vasquez.  He answers by telling me he doesn’t have a mask.  Real quick, I scan the account to confirm this.

“I’m sorry, I don’t see that.  How about a home address?”

“What are you talking about?”  His tone rises sharply.

More gently, I say, “I just need something that is uniquely yours to confirm you on the account.”

“I’m an x-ray technician at a hospital.  I was on my way to work, circling on Tremont Terrace, telling myself that nothing can touch me, that I can dodge gurneys and microscopic germs with equal ease.”  His laugh is a bark.  “I was on my third lap when I rear-ended a freaking garbage truck.  It was just sitting there.  No red light or stop sign.  No garbage at the curb.  No reason to just be sitting there, unless it was to show me there are some things you just can’t dodge.  And now my car won’t start.  Of course, there was no damage to the garbage truck.  It just pulled away and I’m stuck in the middle of the road.”

“With no mask.”

“Right.”

A hospital technician with a car involved in an accident.  While it does narrow the field, it’s not an uncommon collection of traits.  Even without a mask, the caller is just one of many with this same broad description.

“So where do you get your mail?”

“Every day, the hallways are filled with people coughing and sneezing, adding to this invisible floating virus wetland.  And I’m just breathing that stuff in.  It’s my job to put people in the right position before I take their x-ray.  That means I have to touch.  Do you know how close you have to be to someone to do that?”

I mumble something, keeping it incoherent.

“I mean, I am going to keep doing my job.  That’s what I signed on for.  But what if I get the virus?”  He is still circling around the information I need from him to move forward.  “What if all the doctors and nurses get sick?  Who is going to help us?”

Although twenty-four hundred miles removed from Mr. Vasquez’s little breakdown, I can feel his anxiety seeping into me.   “You are describing a worst-case scenario,” I say, trying to rationalize the two of us through this.  “I don’t think that’s likely to happen.”

“That’s what they say in a Godzilla movie before somebody starts shooting radioactive beams of light.”

I don’t have a good comeback for that.  And Toby’s no help.  He is preoccupied turning around in the curtains like a quantum of fur caught in a revolving door.

“It’s all I can think about,” Bryan says.  “What if I get sick?  All because there are no masks.”

“If that happens, they would probably send you home,” I say with an agenda.  “And where would that be?”

Caught off his guard, Mr. Vasquez finally gives me one thing I can confirm on his account.  

“Okay.  And would that be Street?  Or Boulevard?”

I push too hard and the broken-down technician starts to cry. 

“Man…I’m sorry,” he says.  “You don’t need to hear this.”

Nor do I know what to say.  Again, I look to Toby who, after several revolutions, steps out of the curtains, the long material draping from his coat like a majestic cape. 

“If it’s something you need to tell me, then I need to hear it.  Maybe we all need to hear it.  Maybe then we would take better care of the heroes taking care of us.”

“I’m not a hero.  I’m just an imaging tech.”

“You were driving to ground zero of a viral contagion so that you could peer inside the bodies of sick people and see how they are broken.  You were going there of your own volition,” I say.  “Without a mask.”

We are quiet for a long time. 

“I still need to get to work.”  He brings us back to the reason for his call.  A uniquely selfless healer who lives on an avenue, stranded on a distant terrace, in need of a way to get to work.

“Let me make some calls.  We’ll get your car towed to a local shop and set you up with a rental car so you can go to work and perform your heroics.” 

Mr. Vasquez laughs. 

Toby and I do a quick fist/paw bump. 

And I make those calls.

Slipping into something more heroic.