Quarantine diary

In one of my favorite books, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, the police in a drug-addled near future wear “scramble-suits”: full body and face coverings that display constantly varying features at their observer, features from thousands of people a minute, giving the impression of a kind of vaguely human smudge.

This is probably the closest a description has ever gotten to capturing my experience of looking at other people. I am legally blind, and I’ve found that the two most important aspects of seeing that I can hold onto are color and size. Size, roughly-- definitely not shape, and bold color, anything muted gets muddied. I only very recently had my glasses on at night, and saw how many stars there had been, all along. 

The other day I stood for maybe ten minutes with my dog straining against his leash, and watched children play on a jungle gym: There were three little forms, and one slightly bigger one. One wore a red coat, or shirt. Another a green and blue sweater, or jacket. The other two wore probably brown. 

The forms moving up the ladder, down the fireman’s pole, and across the monkey bars, held the balance of some very finite principles of motion in their grubby, stubby hands. They moved like paper cut-outs, being slid around a plane. Like crude early animation. Except only maybe worse, because the arm furthest away from me was not darker, but seemingly the exact same texture, tone and roughly, size as its partner.

What happens when you are confused by the world around you? The hero of A Scanner Darkly is a cop tasked with quelling the widespread drug addiction afflicting his world. He goes undercover in a group of users, eventually becoming addicted to the potent psychedelic himself, to the extent that his self splits into two separate identities; Bob/ Fred. 

When I first got glasses, I kept lifting them up and putting them back down again. Sometimes at rapid speed, giving reality the effect of a very slow, slightly defective projector. The shock and awe wore off eventually. I stopped looking at the furthest point in a plane and taking note of every minute detail I could discern. Every single cellulitic groove in a moving body of water. The leaves on a weeping willow’s highest, gauziest streamer. Things get less important as perspective shifts. In Scanner Darkly this is remarked on: “Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.”

What am I missing? I have forgotten my glasses-- not for the first time, but the first time in a while. I am walking my dog around a small park. There is a road that goes from tar to dirt to tar again, and winds its way around the little league field, the public restrooms, a patch of trees and bushes barely big enough to be deemed a grove. At the end of the loop is the playground, where the children play. The three little two-dimensional amoebas that balletically shift from one play object to another, perfectly smooth for lack of edges, perfectly shaped for lack of shape, perfectly moving for lack of discernible limbs. Boundaryless, impossible, pretty in a strange, cold way-- like a dune, or an Alex Katz painting. 

A bigger shape drags over. If I had my glasses I might feel inclined to put them on right now, and know some things I’d guessed for sure. If the kid in red’s got greasy hair. If the bigger one is skinny but with a potbelly the way little kids get. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I don’t get to find out. How can you ever really know how to feel about something that isn’t real? Time to go, gotten, gone. I don’t need to see clearly to know the kind of looks I’m on the receiving end of from these parents. Mothers, or maybe nannies, give me that scathing look of true unbridled loathing. I look away. Leaves presumably shuffle around, because I see little murmurations of sepia.

In the final pages of the book, it is revealed that Donna, the woman Bob and Fred have loved throughout the book, has been an undercover narcotics officer. Due to the nature of his split personality he is simultaneously caught and capturer. While waiting for the police to arrive he takes in the vista in front of him: the permanent fixture of lurid neon lights constantly beaming from the city, and the police cars, lit up, as they descend on him. 

I feel every moment that passes is so unimportant, and I am too bored to care enough about this for me to be upset by it. It is not a moment in history where this will be a meaningful day, for me, for the mothers, or nannies, for the children. Or maybe. I wonder if they can see something strange is going on around them. I wonder if everything will be alright again before it makes a difference.

I let my dog sniff at what he’s been pulling towards. It’s another dog’s feces, underneath a maple leaf he promptly shoves away. I can see it very clearly, in every aspect. It’s six feet from my eyes right by my shoes, mottled, stepped on definitely more than once, stepped on by someone with other shit on their soles, stepped on so many times it's been embedded into the earth. “But at least he can still see the lights below us.” Dick writes, “Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.”