The day after receiving my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, I lay in bed, body weight pressed against the white sheets, finishing up an ethnography set in Egypt and India. Even with all the shades drawn, the heat still manages to enter; it muscles in, hungrily sharing the bed with me.
The cicadas, thumb-sized green gems that hang in the trees like ornaments, buzz unceasingly. At this point in the summer, their cries are not an unwelcome distraction, but part of the background noise of a season I proclaim to hate every year, but that I always come to earnestly love. A three-month period of cloudless blue skies and bright red moods. As I read, the flourescent bars that illuminate the neighborhood school grounds begin to flicker intermittently. Their amber-yellow light bleeds in through the folds where my blue curtains nearly converge, but fail to touch.
On the last page, the story takes a dark turn; the author narrates how a friend is lost, presumably forever, in a country at war. I can’t help but feel that this conclusion is left somewhat ambiguous. Not open to interpretation, necessarily, but unresolved. After contemplating for a few moments, silent in my room filled with warmth, light, and insect sounds, a greenhouse of sensation, I roll over, slip off the bed, and flip open my laptop. I navigate to Google and plug in the friend’s name repeatedly, in combination with a grab bag of search terms, on my way to discovering his true fate. “Author,” “friend,” “death,” “what happened” “?”
The search turns up nothing. Another search yields nothing. My immediate confusion at this is derived, not from the lack of obtainable information, but from the search engine’s inability to find what I assume must exist. A daughter of the World Wide Web, my first impulse is to trust that anything can be found by carefully selecting search terms, rearranging their order in the sequence, and clicking through web pages diligently, like a pilgrim organizing relics, in wait of a miracle.
I retreat from the keyboard. I open the curtains and find that the sun has set; the evening sky splashes onto my eyes like a gentle wave. I spot the bicycle belonging to the child next door: seafoam green wheels, a white basket. Its wheel is positioned in the direction of my window, inclining the frame towards me as though in greeting.
There’s mountains of information inaccessible to me. There’s kingdoms of knowledge locked away. Maybe it’s better like that. Not all information benefits from availability. A young man died suddenly, and it’s not possible to learn how, or when, or where, or why. A stranger, I think of him on his last day, threading the needle of his final hours. Walking forward until the path twisted, and then closed off before him.
Congrats on vaccine day! I do think we as a species do not really have the wherewithal yet to deal with the amount of information we currently receive. It’s a curious point of history we’re at. I wonder how long the adaptation will take (and if we’ll even last that long, of course).
Em edit: I often wonder the exact same thing.