Seven AM. The alarm next to my bed goes off as usual, and as usual, I slam my fist on the snooze button. Seven ten AM. There’s the alarm again. It’s a Tuesday, I remember, as I lay there with the shrill beating of the alarm blowing through my skull like a sword. It pisses me off, so I reach over and turn it off, then back on again for tomorrow. I didn’t sleep well. I drifted off watching CNN, and lousy news as my last thoughts of the day never seems to do me any favors in the peaceful sleep department. Tuesday. Not a fan of Tuesdays; meeting after meeting after meeting, and meetings, or at least the attention span required to successfully participate in said meetings, is not within my grasp. So I take my time in the shower, take my time getting dressed and take my time going downstairs. Amanda is making cinnamon toast for Rachel, who is sitting at the kitchen island listening to her iPod and working on a project for school. Pictures of Anne Frank litter the island and she’s sketching a life-sized mask of Anne’s face.
“I can’t get the nose right”, she tells me. “Morning, dad.” She’s right – the nose looks like an upside down old style Coca Cola bottle. I tell her to stop worrying about the shape of the nose and look at the shadows the nose makes, and to try to use shading rather than hard lines. I kiss her on her forehead; as she gets older, kisses on the lips are farther and fewer between. Her hair smells like coconut and it reminds me of the beach.
Amanda kisses me good morning; her lips are closed as they always are when she kisses me before she’s brushed her teeth. I’ve never worried about her morning breath, I just like a nice kiss before I head out the door to fight the good fight. We talk a little about the day ahead – work for me (“You hate Tuesdays”, she reminds me), Market Day at the school for her and then gymnastics with Rachel after class lets out. I kiss them both goodbye and toss the newspaper through the door. The cat always chases the paper and she scampers after it with a little mew.
The drive to work is about three miles and can take anywhere from five minutes to a half hour, depending on the weather and the traffic. The weather depends on what kind of mood the weather gods are in, and the traffic depends on whether or not the asshole drivers are capable of effectively merging from two lanes into one on Wickham Road. Today, the weather is decent for April, sunny and warmish. The gauge in the car says the outside temp is sixty six degrees. The traffic, on the other hand, is a piece of shit. I always wonder why people who drive this route daily still can’t seem to get their fucking cars into the left lane in time to avoid the complete shutdown of forward motion that results from power-obsessed assholes trying to be the winner of the battle for lane space. The road is a parking lot and it takes me ten minutes to move about a hundred feet. There’s a douchebag driving an Expedition to my right, edging farther and farther left as he uses the shoulder to pass me and the four cars in front of me, finally using the size of his vehicle to force a Saab to allow him in. The bottleneck cleans up and I’m finally able to use more than idle speed. I make it a half mile to the next light and there’s the dick with the Expedition, waiting for the green. Fucker.
The fucking coffee machine is down again. It’s down more than it’s not and I remind myself that I need to get my own coffee maker so I’m not held hostage to the temperamental R2D2-like vending machine that spits out my shitty coffee every morning. It’s ten minutes after eight, and my first meeting is at nine. I drive to the Starbucks about a quarter mile from my office – the one that sits a quarter mile to the south, not the one that’s a quarter mile to the north, or the one that’s a quarter mile to the east, or the one that’s a quarter mile to the west. My office, as well as every other office in every city in every state of the Union, has about a hundred Starbucks inside of a mile radius.
I order a French vanilla latte. “Biggest you’ve got,” I tell the milfy forty-something with the green apron. She sighs and glances up intentionally at the size chart above her head.
“Venti?”
“If that’s the biggest, then yes.” I can’t bring myself to use Italian or whatever language Starbucks has chosen to name what should be small, medium or large. Changing the language doesn’t seem to make the coffee taste any better. She asks me if I want an extra shot of whatever they put in a big cup of frothy coffee. I ask if it will keep me jacked up longer and she gives me the sigh again. Apparently it will, so I get it. It’s a dollar extra. At this point, I don’t care if it’s a month’s salary. My head is starting to ache from caffeine withdrawal. Ms. Milfy doesn’t seem too impressed with me, or with her job, or with the world. I guess being a barista is harder than it looks.
I move down the counter to wait for my coffee, and scan the Starbucks crowd. It’s typical, the usual suited dickhead with his laptop, working on a brief or a proposal, the mom’s morning out group, the college kid working on a paper. It’s any other day. Except for the moms; they’re not talking about Suzi’s new boyfriend or Dustin’s driver’s education teacher. They’re talking about the news this morning and a new flu that’s making people in Los Angeles sick. I remember a few snippets from CNN that I heard before I fell asleep the night before. It’s another H1N1, I’m thinking. A lot of hype and another reason for the government to take over more of the private sector.
My coffee’s ready and I’m out the door.
Meeting, then another meeting, then another meeting. Strategy, synergy and Doing Business 2.0. All the buzz words are used appropriately, all the right things are said and all the right plans are laid. For lunch, the executive editor and I go to a restaurant slash sports bar where the burgers are amazing, and we order artery cloggers. On any other day, the eight TVs would be showing ESPN, Speed Channel and Fox Sports, but not today. The TV’s are tuned to all the news networks. It’s FluTV. I don’t really like this show. Cases are being reported in all the major cities, including Chicago. Schools are closing. The TV shows people wearing surgical masks at O’Hare. This doesn’t surprise me, because it’s almost a fashion statement, especially for the Asians who travel through the airport. One out of every three Asians always seems to have a mask on, and it always makes me wonder if they’re sick or if they’re afraid of becoming sick. My buddy the editor is on his iPhone, texting his people to see if they’re getting anything good off the wire. His wife is a doctor. He’ll have a line on what’s up, I’m thinking. The news says the flu has a nasty bite, attacking the respiratory system and causing cardiac arrest in the very old, the very young and those with compromised immune systems. Wash your hands often, cover your sneezes and avoid direct contact with the infected. Hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed with the sick and, of course, the government is pressing the pharmaceutical giants to speed up production of flu vaccine. And of course, the government is also considering taking over the distribution of vaccine. This, to me, is fucked up. During the H1N1 debacle, every welfare recipient in the country got the shot first, leaving the working public to struggle through chills, fever and a rotten cough. Perfect. I’m a little freaked out, because Rachel has asthma and I always worry about respiratory problems that stem from colds and the flu.
Chris, the editor, has a stricken look on his face. I ask him what’s up, thinking the cook probably didn’t prepare his bacon burger rare enough. Chris loves to eat. He tells me his wife sent him a text telling him to come home. Pick up the kids and come home. This is scary. Apparently the flu is sweeping over the population really, really fucking fast and it’s bad. The news isn’t talking about a mortality rate but there is one, and it’s off the charts high. He tells me we need to go. I’m not hungry anymore.
Amanda isn’t answering her cell phone, but she rarely does. I don’t know why she has one.
At the office, things are weird. The phones aren’t ringing and as you’d expect, there’s a lot of activity in the news room. My boss has left the office and human resources is suggesting sending all non-essential staff home. I notice a jug of hand sanitizer, left over from the H1N1 hype, on the front counter. I pump some into my hands.
I’m non-essential staff. This would have jabbed my ego a bit if I wasn’t scared shitless, so I tell all my managers to wrap it up and head home. We activate the phone tree for tomorrow; each of us has a list of people we’ll call in the morning to pass on what’s going on with the business, who needs to pick up who, whatever.
Amanda calls my cell phone. She has Rachel and they’re on the way home. School is closing for the day and will be closed tomorrow. Rachel is upset because her Anne Frank presentation was supposed to be tomorrow. Her mom and I are upset because this flu thing is pretty fucked up and scary.
At home, we shut the garage door and close the windows. I don’t really know what this does to help, but it makes me feel better, so I do a room-to-room policing of the place, drawing the windows up tight. Rachel immediately heads upstairs to the loft and I hear the sounds of the Wii. She’s unaffected by what’s going on and she’s apparently not worried about her Anne Frank project at the moment. The sun has slipped behind a wall of grey and it’s springtime in Chicago again. It looks like rain. The TV is on in the family room, Fox News is showing footage of a hospital in New York City. The emergency waiting room is jammed with people, all wearing masks. Some are lying on the floor. Some are on gurneys. Some are sitting in chairs, holding small children. It’s unsettling at best. Scary and depressing. I head up to the bedroom, get out of my work stuff and put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. Amanda is staring at the TV. It’s like 9/11 all over again, wall to wall bad news. CNN is showing what could be the exact same hospital footage, except it’s from Atlanta.
We spend the rest of the afternoon watching the news. After dinner, we put in a movie, Uncle Buck, to try to change the mood. Amanda and I have heard enough flu news. Rachel just likes Uncle Buck. While we watch the movie, I check out Facebook. The posts are all about the flu. I have Facebook friends from all over the world. They’re not people I know, just people I added for games. Their posts look a lot like the posts from the United States. Wherever this flu came from, it spanned the globe in a goddamned nanosecond.
When it’s time to go to sleep, we all pile into our bed. Rachel talks nonstop for about a half hour before she drops off between us. Amanda reaches across her for my hand. It’s already there, waiting for her to take it. I fall asleep without the TV on.
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