Outside of Time
CW: COVID-related death
Dear skull-washer,
I’m thinking about the year 1656. Maybe you know it? When a plague brought the population of Naples crashing down by more than half, from 400,000 to 150,000. Like New York City in 2020, they didn’t have room for all the dead. So they piled them in a quarry, which meant condemning their souls to a purgatory reserved for those not buried in their home parish. Also like in New York and the rest of the United States, these were casualties of inaction. Naples’s leaders had ignored early warnings by medical professionals in order to protect their political and economic investments.
Since 1872, local women have been “adopting” the skulls of these dead. The women clean the skulls, make wishes on them, and—my breath catches here—give them names that come to them in dreams. A truly heroic task, to reckon with these materials. To address the ways a soul has been failed.
We’re not there yet, in this timeline. Sometimes friends who live in other parts of the country, that haven’t been hit so hard by COVID, ask me how I deal with friends who refuse to social distance. I know these people exist in New York, but they’re not my friends. “We’ve lived with the refrigerated trucks,” I say. “New Yorkers aren’t going to fuck around.” We all know souls that have been failed.
But how, how, can we ever address them? I think about the 216 years between 1656 and 1872, when the skeletons were left untended in Naples. I imagine those years lining the backs of tractor-trailers. I imagine 216 years compressed into each day that people continue to go without sick leave and health care.
Time compresses and expands wildly in the context of illness. Susan Sontag described tuberculosis as a “disease of time” that “speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it.” Audre Lorde wrote that having cancer meant “there were different questions about time that I would have to start asking myself.” Alison Kafer argues that sick and disabled people without cures in their future are cast “(as) out of time, obstacles to the future of progress.”
In a similar vein, Anne Boyer describes feeling “asynchronous—both hurried and left behind” while undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She writes about how paintings of sickbed scenes are never rendered from the perspective of the sick person, because such a painting would have to “happen outside of time, happen inside of history.” This is the position in which so many of us now find ourselves, in a world ruled by illness. We are so historically specific, with our crumbling gig economy and Zoom sociality—but we can’t even remember what day it is.
The last few days have made me question the certainty I’d felt about the permanence of New Yorkers’ resolve, as the warm weather seems to be drawing people out of the cautious habits they’d developed during the worst emergency days. Before this week, I didn’t worry much while walking down the sidewalk; either the person coming toward me would move into the street to pass, or I would. Walkers and runners had settled into the new choreography of maintaining a six-foot berth. But now, all of a sudden, public space is confusing again. It feels the way it did in mid-March, when the city hadn’t learned how to walk yet, because most people were still making minute-by-minute decisions about what was safe. The period of consensus that followed seems to be coming to an end, even as nothing about the virus has changed. Once again, I walk around with my immunocompromised guard up, feeling like Cassandra.
One of the ways I’ve been trying to reach you, great-grand-wreck, is by lucid dreaming. I’ve only accomplished it a few times, always unintentionally, and so now I’m steeping myself in strange practices to train my brain to know it’s dreaming. One is reality testing, or looking at my hands five times a day to ensure that they’re “normal” and not what—I cannot wait to discover with horror—my hands become in my dreams. Another is waking up early, very early, and scribbling down dream details as I feel them trying to flee my memory. I never thought I had the time for rituals before, and I don’t have any more time than I ever did. But now we are all shocking ourselves into new practices.
The closest I’ve come to lucidity was this:
I was sitting on a pier with my childhood best friend. Very close to us, about 20 feet away in the water, a whale began to crest. It kept cresting and kept cresting, infinitely massive. I realized it was a gargantuan, prehistoric whale, with hard ancient skin like stone reliefs—a whale of myth. When I turned to face my friend, her face was blank. I asked if she had seen it, and she said no. A few minutes passed, and it crested again; again, she didn’t see it. We started walking back across the beach to go home, and one by one, humongous dinosaurs came to walk alongside us. Soon we were surrounded with skyscraper-sized creatures, in bold, dazzling colors. Again, I looked at my friend and saw no recognition. I looked around at the beach crowd and none of them seemed to notice, either. I realized with a startling, but also calming, clarity that I was not occupying the same reality they were.
Or, if not a stone relief, the whale looked like the bark of this very old tree. [Image description: a close-up photo of tree bark with deep fissures in it, honeycomb-like in form.]
A more sinister part of the dream came later, in which a predator from my past reappeared in my social world and no one else recognized him. I woke up and understood immediately that these scenes were two of my brain’s wildly different approaches to processing the panic I’d been feeling while walking outside this week. Yesterday when it was 65 degrees and sunny, and a woman came within three feet of me just to tell me she liked my dog, she and I were occupying different realities. And yet the virus traverses them both. It is a nightmare.
But the dream did something else: it utterly transformed the nightmare of everyday life. The bewildering, life-threatening shifts in my social environment could be integrated into my consciousness through a scene of magic, mysticism, and awe. I talked about this dream in a reading group I’ve been attending, and a poet told me that whales can be “a symbol of the deep subconscious that we are estranged from emerging from the depths.” A sign of growth and paradigm-shifting knowledge. A bit later, when we all took time to write, the whale crested into several people’s poems. What had begun, for me, as body-gripping panic and dread had been transmuted into ecstatic communal creation.
This is a time of surprising, sometimes miraculous, sometimes deadly transmutations. We all know this. But they do not all take place at the scale of global catastrophe. The smaller frequencies are also strange. Boundaries are confused and porous. One of my friends recently awoke in the middle of the night to her bedroom window having shattered spontaneously. Another told me they had woken up to “liquid bouncing ALL OVER my books, into my water glass, on my pillowcase and face.” Their upstairs housemate was watering her plants, as she often does, but only now did it permeate my friend’s window.
[Image description: A photo of my friend Karly’s broken window. A pink lace curtain is draped over the shattered window pane.]
Maybe all the incompatible realities and timelines of this moment are rubbing against each other more closely than they usually do. When that happens, things get weird. The line between the horrifying and the hilarious becomes tremblingly thin. The mundane elements of grief rule like a sedated priestess. The abyss laughs at us; occasionally we can laugh back.
As with many of the things I write here, what the world at large is learning, under the total dominion of illness, is what sick and disabled people have known all along. To quote Carolyn Lazard, the feelings of desperation and being-out-of-time that accompany chronic illness can be “a portal into another dimension.” To look for these portals is not escapism or romanticism—it is survival in the face of great pain.
[Image description: A stone in a small clearing in the forest, covered in moss, with a branch propped diagonally against it. It looks like an altar, or perhaps a portal.]
And so I seek you, again and again. I seek you in the pile of skulls and I seek you in the skull-washers. I seek you in the transmutation of purgatory into wish-granting intimacy. I seek you in the leaking windows.
Do you say your name in women’s dreams? Will you say it in mine?
Yours in the time warp,
Liz