The New Troy
Photographs by Jesse Lee Kercheval 1.
From my living room window in Montevideo, Uruguay, at sunset, I see a young couple on the roof of the tall apartment building across the street. Now that we are under quarantine, there have been people out all day on their azoteas, the flat roofs used to hang laundry, or sitting on their balconies. But this building is the tallest one on the block, twelve stories, with no railing at all on the roof. I have never seen anyone on it.
At first it is just the young man, exercising. Every time he goes close to the edge I hold my breath. Then the woman joins him and they start dancing, slowly, close together. Maybe a tango, which would be fitting here in Uruguay where the tango was born, but if there is music, I am too far away to hear.
I take a very distant photo of them with my iPhone. And because this is what I am doing instead of seeing people face to face, I post it on Facebook.
Just looking at the photo of them twelve stories up gives me acrophobia. But the Facebook reaction I get is not fear of falling. “They are standing too close!” a friend posts nearly instantly. “Tell them they should stand six feet apart! Social distancing, please!”
2.
I tried to start this essay in February. I wrote:
Four weeks ago, I was in China. Today, as I write this, nearly all the world’s airlines have cancelled their flights to China. Planeloads of Americans have been evacuated from Wuhan, the city infamous as the home of the shuttered Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and birthplace of 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease. The evacuees have been placed in quarantine on various US military bases.
I didn’t get further—life and the crisis were moving too fast. So today, as I try to start again, I have to revise:
Ten weeks ago, I was in China. I left just as the government shut Wuhan, then Shanghai where we had just been, and Bejing where we had been before that. The Chinese government sealed in its people and the world closed its doors to keep the danger out. Or so they hoped. Now I am in Montevideo, Uruguay and its two borders—with Argentina and Brazil—are closed. The airport is closed. My home state of Wisconsin is under a “Safer at Home” order, the very midwesternly polite name for quarantine. The President of the United States is talking about a cordon sanitaire around New York, shades of Wuhan. No one in, no one out.
By the time I look at the previous paragraph tonight or tomorrow morning, maybe even in an hour, most of it will need to be rewritten.
The world has changed so many times I feel like I am, as they used to say on Star Trek, caught in a tear in the
