Is This What Disaster Looks Like?

Blooming flowers, and face masks? The fear of humans in aisle 2?

As a child of 9/11, I grew up with much different images in mind of collective disaster and destruction — like skyscrapers collapsing amid clouds of smoke.

He stood slowly, staring down at his bright two-stem bouquet, and wandered to the doorway. There he stopped, positioned so that the trapezoid between my computer screen and the edge of the window perfectly framed the top of his head and his hands. He reached into the turquoise backpack slung over one slightly hunched shoulder and pulled out a palm-sized bottle with a baby-blue translucent cap.

By the time his date emerged from the entryway, he was fully prepared with the only two items befitting a romantic walk on a splendorous afternoon in April, 2020: flowers and hand sanitizer.

This young man had stopped below my window before. He’s just one of the faces and gaits I’ve added to my growing internal portrait gallery. There’s also the man in his late 40s who walks by with a son no older than 5 wearing a billowing blue down jacket that makes him appear as if he might start bouncing laterally off of invisible clouds. There are the couples pushing strollers whose faces are always hidden behind blue surgical masks and scarves. There’s my friend’s ex, who lopes by in athletic shorts and a cotton T‑shirt many afternoons at around 2, appearing as though he has set out for a run but lost the urge partway up Prospect Street and resigned to walk the rest of the way.

These are not the images I had expected would form the backdrop of life in a disaster. The flowers are blooming (too early this year because of the mild winter), the skies are sunny (sometimes; it is still New England), and buds are beginning to appear on the tips of twigs.

No crumbling buildings and flooded streets. Just daily life accented with surgical masks and household cleaning products.

That is what I find so unsettling about the daily barrage of springtime snapshots that have come to pepper the monotony of life in a disaster. A crisis that, if projections hold, could kill more Americans in a matter of months than died in all of our armed struggles since World War II, should not look like this.

Born in 1996, I am of a generation that was inculcated to America’s culture of national paranoia by images of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. I learned to place New Orleans on a map because of photographs in which rooftops had become islands. I learned what ​“frontline” means from textbooks that display flattened cities and mushroom clouds.

There is a rich history of disaster imagery, and it does more than simply document events or satisfy our guilty infatuation with images of destruction. Images form the foundations of our collective understanding of an event because they approximate the experience of having been there. Collective memory is represented, and driven, by images and soundbites because it is not the knowledge of what happened but the impression of what it felt like that constitutes memory.

I was too young to understand what it meant when two planes destroyed the World Trade Center in 2001. My most vivid memory of the day that is authentically my own is of the confusion about why my Jewish parents took me to a church that night. (In a small Vermont town, a Jewish family will settle for a church service when that’s all there is.) But I have constructed a memory of how that day felt that has nothing to do with my own experience. It is assembled from photographs of deep, black smoke and a man with a tie diving head-first from a burning office building.

Last week, I stopped by P & M Market to grab milk, bananas, and a few other necessities. It was a warm, sunny Friday afternoon. I swerved around two neighbors chatting as they walked their dogs so that I could maintain six feet while I locked my bike to a street sign. The store was warm and shoppers moved slowly. I picked up a half-gallon carton of milk from the lower shelf of a refrigerator case, something I’ve done thousands of times, and it almost felt normal.

Yet every alarm in my three-week-old internal disaster prevention system was screaming ​“ALERT.” The woman and her daughter in the refrigerator aisle where I was trying to go and the man coming toward me from the other direction had tripped my sonar system and triggered red flashing lights and fire-alarm beeps in my command-room brain.

The captain scanned the surroundings. Shelf in sensor one. Danger (human) in sensor two. Human in sensor three.

Sensor four: empty aisle! I backed up into the safe zone behind me until the coast was clear.

The daily reminders of danger — like the fact that the checkout clerk was wearing gloves — are unsettling. They make me oscillate between blissful ignorance and terror every time I see a doorknob, but they never quite let me understand, viscerally, what is happening.

That is precisely what gives the pandemic its unique brand of fear. The images of everyday life accented with surgical masks and cleaning products to which we have become accustomed are so incongruous with what we know could await us if we touch a doorknob or an unsanitized grocery cart. Lurking at every ​“high-touch surface” is something invisible that could reduce our daily lives from a paranoid ritual of disinfecting to a battle for air. But what could lie waiting for us is incomprehensible because it is unseen, and we are left imagining demons on every uncleaned surface so we can pretend to understand the threat and know how to avoid it. 

Of course, horrifying images of this disaster are not hidden from everyone. I might not write this if I were living in Brooklyn or Bergamo. This would be a very different piece if I worked, or had been admitted to, a hospital. Medical personnel face death every day. Laid-off workers who used to live paycheck to paycheck have grown used to long lines at food pantries. Those who used to be able to escape domestic violence are now trapped with their abusers.

But when a photographer captures a scene from this pandemic, it doesn’t show the nature and scope of the crisis. Doctors in Tyvek suits and N95 respirators crowded around a tumble of sheets and ventilator wires out of which a tuft of hair pokes show a personal tragedy, but they do not show scale. Lines of cars waiting at a food pantry might show scale, but they do not capture the sense of tragedy. When our response to disaster is to stay inside and avoid other people, it’s difficult to conceive of the deaths as a collective phenomenon, and not as personal tragedies, since everything happens in physical isolation.

Can we ever understand a disaster as aesthetically subtle as this one in the same way we understand one that can be captured in a single photograph? Or are the images of a disaster always incongruous with actual experience, and I was simply too naïve to know that?

I thought that I would be able to match visual with intellectual understanding by simply looking outside. Clearly I was naïve. But the lack of comprehension of this radically different world hasn’t stopped me from learning how to live in it. I have started backing into empty grocery aisles when staying put would mean coming within six feet of another shopper. I trample people’s lawns now to avoid passing too close to another jogger on the sidewalk. It doesn’t yet feel like habit, but still, I never forget to do it.

Perhaps the new routines and the constant paranoia are the foundation of what will become our collective understanding of the 2020 pandemic. Once backing into empty grocery aisles to escape other shoppers becomes habit, and opening doors with a sleeve is simply proper etiquette, maybe then we will be able to reconcile subtle gestures with death statistics. We will no longer need to see scope and tragedy in the same image. Disaster will have left its impression in the way we navigate stores and the way we sanitize our dates’ hands before presenting them the flowers we picked from their lawn. Perhaps in 20 years, the three year olds of today will look at photographs of masked shoppers in line for groceries, and they won’t be able to separate their knowledge of how many died in the pandemic from the paranoia they see in the expressions on those masked faces.