Day Seven, July 11, 2020, Symptoms

Yesterday I thought I might have a fever. Without a thermometer, which I deliberately forgot to bring, it is impossible to know for sure. Hand to forehead, the time-honored substitute, yielded inconclusive results. Sometimes I was sure I was hot, then decided it was rather that my hand was cold. The back of my neck seemed almost burning to the touch, although that could have been a result of leaving against a pillow. Underarms checked out quite warm -- but of course, they had better. Back, chest, again they varied, one moment hot, the next cold. Did that mean fever? I did and did not want to know. A lifelong hypochondriac, I have been relatively phlegmatic about Covid. I do and don’t think I will get it. But if I get it, with my health and weight, and my newly advantageous O positive blood, I am sure to survive. I think. Besides, the vast majority survive, the papers tell us, before they go on to regale us with the latest horror story of symptomology, like the woman I read about yesterday who had a mild case and was out of the woods after ten days, only to wake up on fire, unable to breathe, and then spent – is still spending – time in the ICU. They can’t seem to make their minds up, the journalists and essayists, whether to reassure or terrify us. So they do both, and accordingly I, too, swing between feeling fine, sound and unshaken, and castigating myself for the stubbornness that led me to come to Europe during a pandemic, and now, damn it, what did I expect -- I am getting sick. 

Getting sick in a foreign country, no less, where I think they’ll give me emergency medical care if I need it, unless they’ve changed that, too, or the beds are full and the Americans get lower priority, as we currently deserve to, or unless the respirators simply don’t work. Or let’s say I live, as I have already ascertained is highly likely, I will still lose some indeterminable number of weeks to feeling miserable and worried, since (as we have also ascertained) apparent improvements are liable to reversal. 

Sunday morning is bright and clear. An occasional bike rider, sometimes two, pass by on the street below, four floors under the narrow patio that lines the flat. Otherwise the streets are deserted. I feel fine, unambiguously fine. I’m drinking coffee and feeling fine. Plus, I am now more than six days out without symptoms, which puts me past the statistical curve. Unless yesterday’s phantom fever was one of the early, mild symptoms they talk about it, in which case by next week I may have a full-blown case. Unless. Maybe. You never really know. 

‘Six days out’ because I date my possible exposure to July 3^rd and 4^th, when I took three flights to get here. The first flight was from Denver to Chicago-O’Hare, where I sat next to a woman who wore her mask below her nose, and I was too cowardly to ask her to pull it up; a second flight from O’Hare to Frankfurt, which was mostly deserted, with as many attendants in my cabin as passengers, no worries here; and the third flight to London, after a seven-hour layover in Frankfurt. 

Frankfurt Airport at 7 am was eerily deserted. Disoriented -- in the way that transatlantic passengers are when they disembark into a morning that should be a night -- I was additionally confounded to find vast, empty corridors, an endless row of gates without a soul, deserted elevators, vacant trains. Terminal Z ends in a roundabout that leads, through a choice of corridors and elevators, or maybe through all of them, to the other terminals, A, B, C, and D.  There is a security check point, visible in its florescent expanse, separating some travelers from others in their mixed destinations. The pathways to those destinations crisscross Frankfurt’s several terminals in a galactic complexity. 

I was walking towards terminal A, for no particular reason, when I passed a security officer talking to a woman, perhaps in her sixties, who was sitting down, holding her stomach. They were noticeable not only because of the contextually alarming behavior but also because they were some of the only people there. It seemed as if the major European hub of international air travel rendered desolate, shocked into quietude, in the way we all have been, by a robust microbe. I must have been primed to this interpretation by my jetlag, enhanced by my recent Covid inculturation, because within a half hour there were more nervous travelers. Among them were travelers with formidable PPE: clear face shields over masks, blue or black plastic gloves, surgical gowns. I circled back to Terminal Z. The woman I had seen before was now on a stretcher next to the line of rugged seats where she had been sitting, surrounded at some distance by three people in hazmat suits. My body tensed from the realization that there was something like radiation in the air, something invisible and inhospitable to man. 

After that there was nothing to do but seek out my gate and retreat as far as I could into a chair at a far end of more rugged seats, next to the window, and wait.

 So that was Frankfurt Airport, or my experience of it, a seven-hour haze of disorientation and low-level dread. Maybe more seasoned travelers, or those not coming from the Covid-infested United States, pass through with thicker skins. Someone had been in touch enough with gallows humor – call it stoical realism -- to adorn the Goethe statue with a face mask.

Photographs by the author.