Do I have a nose and mouth?

The emails that have piled up in my absence from my facility form strata.

Shortly after teachers received that call not to report, there was concern for the remaining staff and policy after policy explaining, then amending, the rules of this pandemic response. Faced with a stimulus it had not anticipated ever needing a response, the bureaucracy panicked until soothed with memos.

Then came the placatory gestures--"You can have food in the cafeteria without paying for it!" "You are the best!" "Write in the break room who you are most grateful for!"--both from the state as a whole and my facility in particular. They understood that asking underpaid YDAs to shoulder so great a burden was begging for burnout. This was especially so when coupled with their colleagues testing positive. The YDAs could be grateful for the overtime pay while the world outside the facility fell apart, but it was hard to believe they might not have preferred the world not to fall apart.

Then, a stratum of latency and quiet punctuated by the message that we could pitch in for the funeral of someone from another facility. The authors of these read like they are in a hostage situation, trying to sound normal over the phone. What was going on was not okay, monumentally so, but mentioning it to anyone outside the room was sure to result in a bullet to the temple, metaphorically speaking.

Finally, the state with faint apology rescinded the largesse they had granted. New York has a severe budget shortfall given how nonessential workers were home for months. Axing YDAs ability to eat facility food would have to be on the chopping block. (One of my coworkers asked when she would receive an overdue raise. We would not receive them for the foreseeable future, but we would also continue to have jobs. It's a tradeoff, no doubt.)

The emails returned, in essence, to business as usual.

Nothing can be usual upon our return. The staff is required to be masked, though the children cannot be for security reasons. It is not 100% clear why they should go unmasked. They are few of them, they are in obvious uniforms, they could not conceal anything in a cloth mask. None of these factor into these concerns. The administration assured us that all the students, sequestered as they are, have tested negative. Their effluence should not be any more infectious than usual. Another email gave a chiding reminder that surgical masks should be disposed of in receptacles the students cannot access, as they contain a thin band of metal that residents could use for "inappropriate purposes" (shivs and lockpicks).

Several people refuse to wear masks or wear them around their necks or on their heads as a silent protest against state edicts. My room does not accommodate the mandated six feet between people, though the state insists I should keep social distancing always in force. It would be a wonder of geometry if that could be.

My room was ransacked in my absence, drawers that I had locked searched through, the illicit candy I slipped kids for being studious pilfered. The bulletin boards are untouched. My last journal question ("Would you want to join the military? Why or why not?") remains on my whiteboard.

In my absence from the facility, only one student has attempted the online work I labored to create. I am not surprised by this. I know when I am being asked to do something that will be ignored. I still do it to the best of my ability. There doesn't seem a reason to half-ass it; if I am required to do something, it might as well be good.

The morning is free of students, for the most part. One comes down--chubbier for her time away from us, with better eyeliner--and cleans the house paint on my tables from a project they had been doing. She assures me that she missed us. I remark that she was the only one, which she grants is true.

I am working in a cohort with our math/science teacher (we double up here). Tomorrow, our social studies/special education teacher and our careers/journalism teacher will work. So it will go to the end of the year, ships passing in the night.

Grades seem nebulous at this point. We are likely the only classroom education occurring in the state of New York, which I am certain my students will know, and some may rebel against. For the most part, I can't imagine the state won't graduate my students as with their non-adjudicated peers. Anything I do will be to tide them over until the end of the year, but the grades I give them are likely to be irrelevant. I exist to keep them entertained until the school year ends.

I take my lunch outside the facility, on a picnic table. I do not feel comfortable breathing stale air while eating, air which my students have breathed in unmasked. I read my book and pretend this is something I would usually do. I try to find a normal within this generation-defining abnormality.

When my students do come down for class, they are not interested in schooling. It will take them days to warm up to the idea. Since we are on separate cohorts, they may not warm up to us again until they see us all together for a solid week. So, never this school year.

My classroom no longer feels like mine. It has never been more wholly given over to other purposes since it became mine only. In summer school, it maintains something of the academic air. I trust that the summer school teacher won't ransack my drawers.

Seeing my students so disinterested makes my presence at the facility seem that much more ridiculous. They could refuse to do my work perfectly well without my standing in front of them masked.

There is a new student in my classroom, though I have messaged with him a little online. I tell him that it is my habit to shake the hand of a new student but, given that there is a pandemic, it is unlikely I will ever be doing that again. He does not mind.

There is an edge to everything. Behind my mask, I am less present. Whereas I used to be a physical teacher, the sort who would act out plays and mock-collapse to the floor when a kid could not give the right answer, I now have to keep my distance. My students cannot see their parents, but they are still too inclined to cozy up to the YDAs.

Years ago, a now-former coworker butted heads with the administration over hugging the students. The administration felt that this was a violation of policy, but some of the kids wanted a maternal figure. I have hugged only a few of my students when they were leaving or desperately needed it (like when a video I showed a class triggered a student into frantic sobs). I otherwise keep to the acronym I learned in my initial training, BASH: Back, Arms, Shoulders, and Hands. (They later rearranged this as SHAB. the original acronym is the better one for sheer irony.) I preferred not to come into physical contact with my students because they are germy beasts. Yet, the pathogens I expect from them were never so dire.

I will go in twice a week (and alternate Fridays) for a few weeks and then I will resume being homebound for the future. I do not know how effectively I will be able to educate my students. (Other facilities do not prioritize education as we do. If they can get through the hour without a restraint, that suffices for schooling.) I have one project about juvenile justice. If they complete that, I am going to call it enough for a fourth-quarter grade. I am not, in short, going hard on them. I do not see the point in it. They are aware of the world outside.

They watch CNN Student News, which we originally showed as a fluffy time-filler during homeroom. It then became increasingly strained as Carl Azuz had to give middle-of-the-ground reporting about a global pandemic. If it happened once or twice, my students could have shrugged it off, but soon broadcasts were nothing else. The stories about the rebellion in Hong Kong vanished, their previous fixation. My students needed more than any point in their lives to hear adults tell them that it was going to be okay. No one had the authority to tell them it would be. (This is not to say that the more conspiratorial didn't try to fill their heads with pet theories to give them the illusion that anyone is in control.)

My students are confined, which is a sort of blessing right now. In the coming couple of months, a few of them are set to be released. Should this pandemic keep hold, I do not know that the state will let them.

One of my students, understanding that bodily fluids have increased in infectiousness, has added spitting to his dysregulated repertoire, expecting this will be enough to keep the YDAs away while he rages. (It will not, but it will piss them off more as they use the spit shield.)

The YDAs are not happy that the teachers have, to their way of thinking, taken a paid vacation. I make clear that I would rather have worked and been able to lead a normal life for the last few months. They don't believe me. A few don't believe COVID-19 is real, thus their thumbing their noses by making sure said noses are never covered.

Anyone around my pay grade is surprised we are back at all. They know that we have been doing work from home. They know that we tend toward professionalism and were not having fun in seclusion.

The following day, I drive an hour both ways to have my finger pricked to see if I have antibodies. I told people at my facility that I was invited to do this, as were they. Most give a shrug that tells me they won't do this. Some say that this is part of a government conspiracy to inject something into me, though they are not clear what that might be.

The whole process from walking in the door to leaving takes around two minutes. Soldiers and assorted volunteers lounge around the building. They check me in and point me toward five nurses, all looking bored. One waves, so I tell her she will be the lucky winner. They have seen few people, and she encourages me to tell all my friends. She pricks my middle finger, dabs it five times onto a card (the nurse says that I bleed well, and I tell her than I practice), and ushers me out a different door.

Amber hopes that I test negative for the antibodies. I hope it is positive because there is the potential that I have already had a mild case that could confer immunity going forward. Also, if I have the antibodies, Amber would likely have had the same illness and had the antibodies, too.

The antibodies are not a promise that we are immune, but they are better than nothing. COVID-19, even for those who survive it, can cause permanent damage. To have the confidence that we are safe would reassure me.

(The nurse told me that I should have my results, officially, in seven to ten days. Practically, since no one is taking the tests, two to five. I have it in twelve hours. I am negative.)

As I am only across the river from my parents, I stop by to see them, keeping distant. I feel guilty even being ten feet from my mother, but this is almost as safe as it can get. They ask if their yard looks the same and, no, it doesn't. They've changed enough. We discuss how long it will take before it is appropriate to gather together. They think it will be the Fourth of July. I think, but do not say, that this may be optimistic. It will not be Memorial Day, though the state is opening to gatherings of no more than ten.

Amber worries about my going back to work. Until this point, the only people likely to infect me were at the grocery store. I saw them only twice a month and always at a safe remove, guarded by Plexiglas. The people at the grocery store are more concerned with observing masking. They are not contemptuous of and fatigued by the mandates.

The next day, a student asks for something. I open one of my otherwise unused desk drawers (they do not lock, so I do not trust them). Instead of the paper she wants, there are Ziploc bags of pastel goo.

"We made cloud slime," she says.

"I see that."

"It's made of shaving cream and toothpaste."

I nod, certain that it isn't, but giving one a good squeeze. I am only back for about a month, so I do not even feel the incentive to get rid of these. They will be someone else's problem. If they are here in September, the students to whom they belong will either be gone or will have forgotten about them. They will not notice these being cast into the trash bin.

One of the YDAs, whom I call a teddy bear, but with the addendum that even teddy bears can growl, mentions that he has lost money with his side hustle of catered barbecue.

"Do you think anyone else will pick up the slack?" he asks, meaning if he is going to get other gigs this summer. I tell him that it does not seem likely to me.

"People aren't even having their weddings," he says.

The only engaged could I know has posted that they intend to abscond for a destination wedding. "Destination" because the bride suspects that the coronavirus is a political ploy. She does not know what destination would welcome skeptical American tourists fleeing this petri dish, but surely some tropical country shares her doubts long enough to stamp their passports.

Next summer, I would love to believe it will be normal. It won't be, not normal as it was last summer or dozens before it, but there will not be this inherent reservation about being in public.

My family is still planning our vacation in Lake George, having rented a house months ago. The town expects to be open, though Great Escape, one of the gems of the experience, is on a reservation system when they do open. They are down several hundred workers since the imported international students are not getting visas to become plague rats for an internship. I have felt the unreality of these last few months, but I expect the cautions and alterations I see in Lake George will hit me hard.

It does not feel that COVID is going to loosen its grip much for a while. Should we open up and see a sharp uptick in cases because people are not being mindful of social distancing and masking, the reaction is only going to be more severe.

Come September, I want my job to be as it was. I want to have my classroom every day of the week. I do not want to have to spend more time separated from my friends and family. I do not want to see Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas sacrificed because the new anti-masking league has been astroturfed into believing that a bit of cloth and common courtesy is literal fascism (particularly as this opinion flows from the mouths of people who otherwise regard fascism favorably).

A chasm I cannot bridge alone separates my wanting these things and their coming to pass.

Soon in Xenology: Probably more about COVID-19, since, you know, the world is ending and everything.

last watched: FLCL: Alternative
reading: Discount Armageddon