She approached the desk eyes wide in from outside and I didn’t want to even look at her because the last three check-ins had been lunatics wanting to get drunk disappointed that the big breweries were shut down.
That’s what I’m learning fast here: people are animals with no regard for others if it means they’ll have to change their PLAN, their idealized FUTURE, be UNCOMFORTABLE, fuck whoever is getting in their way. People wander into the hotel grinning and I get to touch their IDs and credit cards, learning as I process them that I’m grabbing objects out of unwashed hands all-too-recently in fucking Portland or New York or Washington D.C. or whatever other plague zones. I restrain myself from leaping over the desk and strangling them because it would be a personal sanitation issue, and when they make faces about how upset they are about The Biltmore Estate’s closing I smile and tell them “Yes. Everything is closed.” My “What brings you to Asheville?” now feels more pointed, even if I ask warmly as ever. “What are you doing here?”
“Why are you travelling?”
“Don’t you feel even a little shame?”
“GO HOME. GO FUCKING HOME.”
So this lady walked into the hotel with wide eyes and her daughter, a little frantic. She wore athleisure, solidly middle class, black hair pulled back tight but a little frizzed. A tight grin with an unsmiling stare. She had a room here, yes. She wondered what was open, I told her most things still, but I can’t tell her what will be open tomorrow, it keeps changing, restaurants and shops are closing in quick succession. She asked how I’ve been making sure my hands are clean between interactions and I gestured to my pump of hand sanitizer on my desk.
“You have hand sanitizer?”
I blink, “Yes. I use a lot.”
“Are you selling it?”
“…No.”
A bitter frown.
We then get onto the topic of how wherever she’s from, I’ve no recollection where, is completely out of everything, every grocery store totally emptied. I told her to check out ours, as of 5 days ago things were still alright.
“5 DAYS AGO?” (Terse Laugh)
“…Yes.”
“Everything’s changed since then.”
And she was right. It was a stupid suggestion with my qualifier, though I still urged her to check out the grocery stores if she intended to stock up.
Eventually I managed to calm this woman, but the whole night had been like this. I had a woman call in stating she stayed last week. She told me she’d heard a person who’d been through Asheville, a New Yorker according to NPR, was today confirmed as a COVID-19 case, and demanded to know if that person had stayed at our hotel. I could only answer honestly: “I have absolutely no idea.” She rephrased her question a few times, asking me if we’d call her if we found out, what the protocol is for this situation, but there is no protocol. I don’t know if the federal government would even contact us to let us know if that person had been through our hotel. “We know as much as you ma’am.”
A terribly dissatisfying answer: I don’t know. The world is in utter chaos, and nowhere has good information on how to organize. People are lashing out, confused. People are ignoring good suggestions of how to save others, selfish. People are scared, and angry, and stupid, and human in a state of nature without any real guidance. I don’t entirely know what to make of it.
The few people who have good information are online, often remote niche wonks, and there are no practical solutions for the working poor. Many people are barely holding on. Barely. How are they supposed to quarantine? There is no plan. I love these conflicting moral pressures: don’t hoard, don’t go to work, but don’t panic, and don’t travel. What is the option? “Cease to be for a time, and apparate when the economy balances out so you can resume wage slavery without any structural improvements to society.”
Ahh, okay.
It is in these moments of stress one sees the thin veneers sealing people into the image of a society peel, every structural weakness is bared in odious cracks shrieking “I’VE BEEN WAITING, CHILDREN”. The naked horrors of the State of Nature peek through these cracks, gripping brains, pressing people to buy 20 packs of toilet paper, 1,000 bottles of hand sanitizer for resale, enough ammunition to kill 50 hungry men. Every little man becomes a sovereign. He sits on his pile and waits for things to cease crumbling, to saunter out into the cleared day and assert: I will take what I need, and all others be damned.
That the world is kill or be killed, live and let die, zero sum.
At least in America. This is what we have cultivated. This is our ethic. 327,000,000 petit tyrants, kings of our own back yards, or our rented space, or please just leave me alone in the forest, or TITANS OF INDUSTRY, gods and subjugators. Glory.
It’s strange: I’m already picking out people I know in my head who will definitely need hospital. I see them in the streets. I wonder at the thinning of the herd. I see them come into my hotel smiling about some time off. The weddings are already cancelled. Why are you still coming? Why are we letting you in?
Why are you still coming?
