The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  Pause.

  Command: “Take him,” the baby’s father says, quietly. “Take him.”

  Aftermath: The baby’s mother takes the baby. Cleans him. The baby’s father cleans his shirt, the sofa, the rug, his hair. Reclaims the baby.

  Question: “What time is it?” the baby’s father says.

  Answer: It is 3:02 a.m.

  Question: “Where the hell is this call?” the baby’s father asks.

  Decision: The mother, the milk-giver, will take the baby to the hospital. The father holds the baby, freshly changed, asleep, still smelling of bile. The mother packs a bag.

  List: Into the bag go six diapers, one pack of wipes, two changes of clothes, two burp cloths—“take more,” the father says, thinking of vomit—a manual breast pump, two bottles of pumped milk—in case of separation—an ice pack, one small soft cooler, water for the mother, trail mix for the mother, a phone charger for the mother’s phone. The mother’s phone. Her wallet. Her keys, which first drop to the ground with a clatter.

  Interruption: The baby laughs.

  Question: “Did he just laugh?” the mother asks.

  Answer: He did. The baby has lifted his head. He gestures, open-palmed, toward the keys on the floor. I want. The baby smiles.

  Observation: The baby’s eyes are alert. The baby’s color is better. The baby is looking around the room, making sounds with his mouth. “Ohwow, ohwow, ohwow,” chants the baby, an expression of awe. His first words, which he recently learned.

  Deduction: “He’s better,” the mother says. “Let’s take his temperature again,” the father says.

  Result: 101.2.

  Suggestion: “Maybe,” the father says, “we can—”

  Interruption: The phone rings. The doctor.

  Advice: “She says we can wait until morning,” the mother says.

  Observation: The baby is rubbing his eyes. The baby looks tired.

  Decision: The parents of the baby strip him to his diaper. Put him into a sleep sack, pink-trimmed, passed down from his sister. His housecoat, the mother calls it, remembering her grandmother’s, remembering the candies her grandmother kept in its pockets, remembering the long tender feet of her grandmother, and the way she had of placing a hand on the back of the mother when she was ill, and the time she came and stayed with the mother when she had chicken pox as a child, watching The Sound of Music with her over and over again, never complaining or acting bored. And the thought of it moves her. All of those ancestors, all of that tenderness given to child after child, the last being this one—the baby she holds in her arms. As the mother remembers, she nurses the baby to sleep, tensing at every pause in his efforts, waiting for him to be sick again.

  He isn’t. For now, the mother will lay him down in his crib, in his pink housecoat, will watch as he sleeps, will lean down and place one hand to his forehead, testing again and again. Warm but not hot, she tells herself—though without the thermometer she cannot be certain. She lies down on the floor, next to the baby. Watches the baby. The baby is breathing. The baby is breathing. Dim light and shadow on the face of the baby. Through the slats of the crib, she touches one finger to the skin of the baby. Warm but not hot. Warm but not hot, she thinks—a chant, a prayer—though she cannot be certain.

  ou’d been staring at a wall in your office for what amount of time you weren’t sure. Time slipped that way lately, as if behind a curtain, then back out again as something else, here as an internet hole, there as a walk on your street you insisted on calling a hike with your wife and son, here as a book your eyes look at, that you don’t comprehend, there as crippling depression, here as observing circling turkey vultures, there as your ever-imminent anxiety, here as a failed Zoom call, there as a homeschooling shift with your son, here as April, May already gone, there as the obsession over the body count, the nameless numbers rising on endless graphics of animated maps. Time was not on your side or anyone’s, it was dreaming its waste with you, as you, hidden and loud as the sun behind a cloud.

  You were thinking of when you were last in public. This wasn’t counting the masked and panicked weekly grocery-store runs, or the post-office-box scramble, you with your precariously stacked boxes of the unessential, keeping as much distance as you could from anyone you saw, especially after hearing a podcast that introduced you to the disgusting idea of mouth rain. You don’t even make eye contact with anyone anymore, so afraid are you of the spread.

  The last mass-gathering public-type thing you’d done was running your first half marathon. There’s your medal in your office, hung like a deer head. A half marathon doesn’t sound like a whole lot, it just being the half, but it was a big deal to you, to run and run for 13 miles without stopping. When you first started training, you actually paid money to join a running team that gathered together and pumped you up about how grueling it all was. You did chants and listened to your team leaders rant about their race times and the superior foods and energy sources they carried in plastic sacks around their waists. You hated the team training, so you quit and started to think of your whole body, and health, and routine, and running-songs playlist as the Team. You got up early to run, and you went on more than just one run a day sometimes. You kept to the mileage you planned, and kept to the diet prescribed by the app you downloaded to train—the app then was also part of the Team. The Team kept its promises to itself. The Team was your heart keeping healthy and your lungs keeping clear and your determination remaining determined to do this thing you decided you needed to do for reasons you don’t even remember.

  Running is surely as old as legs, and you’d been doing it yourself for quite a while, mostly to stave off the ever-encroaching pounds that come with age, but running to race was new, running for the distance, for a time, to cross the finish line, this was a strange kind of obligation you’d taken on, a mantle, a goal with a finish line. Running before modern times was serious business; it was running away or toward something with urgency, hunting, being hunted, or delivering a critical message. The first official marathon happened at the 1896 Olympics and was won by a Greek mailman. The race length was a nod to the ancient Greek legend of a runner who’d been running a message about victory just before collapsing and dying right then and there. There could be countless other examples of ancient running—surely Indians were running all over American countrysides before Cortés brought Iberian horses to Florida in 1519—and yet you are stuck with the image of the Indian on horseback, and when the image should represent Native people’s sheer adaptability, it stands for the static, dead Indian. You’ve always known this image to reflect an aspect of you that was both true and not true, some kind of centaurian truth, because your dad is Native American, a Cheyenne Indian, and your mom is white, and both of them were runners, which is why you ever even thought to run in the first place, but regardless of ancient running and family heritage, and half-truths, there was no way to really know what kinds of running activities humans were up to since the beginning of legs.

  After the race you went back up the mountain to where you moved when Oakland became a cost you couldn’t afford five years ago. You went back up to isolation, and you were mostly safe from what others had to risk being together so closely in cities. But after the race, you were done running. The world came to a screeching halt, and so did your good feelings about it being a worthy endeavor, something worth working for. When the old white monsters at the top threw crumbs and ate heartily from the ridiculous plate that was the stimulus package, you felt the sick need to stop everything and watch it all burn, watch it lose its breath. With all the talking heads talking their talk, saying almost nothing, all you could do was watch, and it’s all you did, all you felt you could do, which felt like doing something even though it was doing nothing, to watch, to listen, to read the news like something new might come of it more than new death, even while you thought the deaths could mean the old white monsters would suffer, but they didn’t, and it turned out to be the same people who’d always suffered at the exp
ense of the pigs having more than their fair share of the crop, slop to them because they didn’t need it, a level of greed so beyond need you couldn’t even conceptualize it. It was all in the name of freedom. You were taught that in school, and it was written in textbooks, the sanctimony of the free market, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which referred and still refers to Indians as merciless savages.

  The new Team was your family, the one you’re at home with now. This was your wife, and your son, your sister-in-law and her two teenage girls. It was isolation itself, what you did with it, against it. The new Team was not running; it was planning meals together and sharing news of the outside world as read about and listened to from the inside of your insular lives, from the inside of your Bluetooth bass-heavy headphones. The new Team was the new future, which was yet to be determined, which seemed to be decided by individual communities and whether they believed in the number of lives lost and how it related to them. Your new Team was made up of frontline workers scanning your groceries and delivering your deliveries. It was made up of your old family, the one that had been broken up for so long it seemed absurd to even think of picking up the pieces, not to mention putting them back together. You were learning Cheyenne together, from your dad. It was his first language, and your sister had become fluent, and understanding a new language felt like something everyone needed to be thinking about, given that you’d lost the thread of truth, somewhere back when you thought you believed anymore in anything close to hope. Was it before Obama, or during Obama, or after Obama, this all was an important point in time to understand where you stood, what you understood to mean the future of the country, which flag you stood under, and what did it mean that white people were moving toward the minority—never mind hope, never mind prosperity, would you survive? No, you didn’t run anymore, and it showed, and you showered maybe once a week, and forgot about your teeth. You drank too much, and smoked more cigarettes than ever. You would improve once things seemed to improve, once you got a glimmer of hope from the news; you’re watching, something will come, a cure, a drop in numbers, a miracle drug, antibodies, something, anything else.

  You’re back at the wall, staring at it, unable to do anything but watch. It was the Teamwork being done by the whole new world, all those not directly affected, to watch and wait, to stay put, it would be a marathon, all this isolation, but it was the only way the Team could make it, humans, the whole damn race.

  Translated by Sam Taylor from the French

  ne September evening, as the author Robert Broussard was giving a speech about his latest novel, someone threw a rock at his face. At the moment when the rock left the assailant’s hand and began to fly through the air, the novelist was reaching the end of an anecdote that he had told many times before—about Tolstoy’s being described as a “disgusting pig.” To the author’s disappointment, the audience reaction that night was no more than a smattering of polite laughter. He then leaned toward the glass of water on the table next to him, and so it was his left profile that the rock hit. The journalist who was interviewing him cried out in alarm, and soon the audience was yelling, too. In a panic, everyone ran from the room. Broussard was left alone, lying unconscious on the stage, blood pouring from his forehead.

  When he came to, Robert Broussard was in a hospital bed, half his face covered with bandages. He wasn’t in pain. He felt as if he were floating, and he would have liked that sensation of lightness to continue forever. He was a highly successful novelist, but his literary reputation was in inverse proportion to his sales figures. Ignored by the press, he was viewed contemptuously by his peers, who considered it laughable that Broussard should even call himself a writer. And yet he had a long backlist of bestsellers and a devoted fan base, made up mostly of women. Broussard’s books never touched on religion or politics. He had no clear-cut opinions on anything. He did not confront issues such as gender or race, and he kept his distance from the controversies of the day. It came as a surprise that anyone would want to assault him.

  A policeman interrogated him. He wanted to know if Broussard had any enemies. Did he owe anyone money? Was he sleeping with another man’s wife? He asked lots of questions about women. Did Broussard have many affairs? With what kind of women? Could a jealous or rejected lover have slipped unnoticed into the audience? To all these questions, Robert Broussard responded with a shake of the head. Despite his dry mouth and the awful pain he had suddenly begun to feel in his eyeball, he described the nature of his existence to the policeman. He led a tranquil life, without any troubles or complications. Broussard had never been married and spent most of his time at his desk. He would sometimes eat dinner with friends from college, whom he’d known for 30 years, and on Sundays he went to his mother’s house for lunch. “Nothing very exciting, I’m afraid,” he concluded. The detective shut his notebook and left.

  Broussard was now all over the news. Journalists fought for an exclusive interview with him. Broussard was a hero. For some, he was a victim of a far-right vigilante; for others, a target of Islamic extremists. Some people believed that a bitter incel must have sneaked into the room that night, intent on punishing this man who had built his success on the mendacious myth of love. The famous literary critic Anton Ramowich published a five-page article on Broussard’s work, which he had previously disdained. Ramowich claimed to have deciphered, between the lines of the author’s light romantic novels, an acerbic critique of consumer society and a pointed analysis of social divisions. He labeled Broussard “the secret subversive.”

  After being discharged from the hospital, Broussard was invited to the Élysée Palace, where the French president, a busy, thin-faced man, acclaimed him as a war hero. “France is in your debt,” he told the author. “France is proud of you.” A bodyguard was sent to protect him: He visited Broussard’s apartment and decided to cover the windows with paper and to move the entry phone to a different spot. The bodyguard was a stocky man with a shaved, shiny head, who told the novelist that he’d spent two months protecting a neo-Nazi pamphleteer who treated him like a servant and sent him to pick up his clothes from the dry cleaner’s.

  In the weeks that followed, Broussard was invited onto dozens of television shows, where the makeup artists took care to highlight the scar on his forehead. When he was asked if he regarded the attack on him as an assault on freedom of expression, his limp replies were taken as proof of modesty. For the first time in his life, Robert Broussard felt loved—and, even better, respected—by everyone around him. When he entered a room, with his black eye, his face like a wounded soldier’s, an awed hush would fall in his wake. And his editor would put a hand on his shoulder, as proud as a horse breeder showing off his prize thoroughbred.

  After a few months, the case was closed. No culprit was ever found: There was no camera in the bookstore where the speech was given, and the spectators had given conflicting accounts. On social media, the anonymous criminal became the object of excited speculation. An anarchist journalist, whose reputation was founded on the leaking of politicians’ sex tapes, hailed the assailant as an icon of the invisible, forgotten masses. The nameless rock-thrower was the herald of a revolution. In daring to attack Broussard, he had fired the first shot against easy money, undeserved success, the capitalist media, and the tyranny of middle-aged white men.

  The novelist’s star waned. There were no more invitations to appear on television. His editor advised him to lie low and decided to delay the publication of his new novel. Broussard no longer dared Google himself. The things he read about himself were so full of hate that he found it hard to breathe. He felt his guts twist and drops of sweat trickle down his forehead. He returned to his tranquil, solitary life. One Sunday, after eating lunch with his mother, he decided to walk home. On the way, he thought about the book he wanted to write, the book that would solve everything. A book that would put the chaos of the age into words, that would show the world the true Robert Broussard. He was thinking about all this when the first rock
hit him. He didn’t see where it came from, nor the ones that followed. He didn’t even have time to cover his face with his hands. He just collapsed in the middle of the street, under a rain of stones.

  o you all have your comfort blankets? We tried to provide the right sizes. I am sorry some of them are washcloths—we ran out.

  And your snacks? I regret that we could not arrange to have them cooked, as you call it, but the nourishment is more complete without this cooking that you do. If you put all of the snack into your ingestion apparatus—your, as you call it, mouth—the blood will not drip on the floor. That is what we do at home.

  I regret that we do not have any snacks that are what you call vegan. We could not interpret this word.

  You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to.

  Please stop whispering, at the back there. And stop whimpering, and take your thumb out of your mouth, Sir-Madam. You must set a good example to the children.

  No, you are not the children, Madam-Sir. You are 42. Among us you would be the children, but you are not from our planet or even our galaxy. Thank you, Sir or Madam.

  I use both because quite frankly I can’t tell the difference. We do not have such limited arrangements on our planet.

  Yes, I know I look like what you call an octopus, little young entity. I have seen pictures of these amicable beings. If the way I appear truly disturbs you, you may close your eyes. It would allow you to pay better attention to the story, in any case.

  No, you may not leave the quarantine room. The plague is out there. It would be too dangerous for you, though not for me. We do not have that type of microbe on our planet.