On hotel quarantine

Joe the pigeon was found emaciated and immobile in the backyard of a man named Kevin Celli-Bird in Melbourne the day after Christmas last year. Joe had a tag on his leg that identified him as having come from the US state of Oregon. Authorities supposed that it had somehow made the journey to Australia across thousands of kilometers of Pacific Ocean, perhaps hitching a ride on a cargo ship. Given its foreign status, Joe was considered it a disease risk. And, just they threatened Johnny Depp’s dogs, the government was going to kill it. I read about Joe’s plight about halfway through my two week stay in hotel quarantine. The story had become a major news item in Australia. Many called for clemency. The Prime Minister weighed in on the matter and said that it was unlikely Joe would be spared. Having recently done the trip across the Pacific myself—being, like Joe, detained as a "disease risk"—I felt for the pigeon.

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We left New York after the first of a barrage of snowstorms that have since continued unabated, which I've been following with relief and envy on Instagram. The first leg of our flight, New York to Hong Kong, was so empty and quiet that we could hear dogs traveling in the pet area under the cabin yelping throughout the flight. Except when there was turbulence. Then they would go quiet. The second flight was just as empty, but no dogs. When we landed, sitting on the tarmac, everyone got up to collect their luggage. The doors opened and a woman in a hazmat suit boarded the plane. She raised her voice. "Can everyone please sit down again," she said, and proceeded to explain the conditions of our entry into Australia. We were to be "detained" for 14 days in a hotel of the government’s choosing. We would have to pay for the stay. We would be given food and drink. At no point were we allowed to film or take photos of any government workers. "We greatly appreciate your cooperation in these challenging times," she said. "Welcome to Melbourne."

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After passing through three temperature check stations, being given new masks, hands disinfected, we were assigned the Mercure Welcome Hotel. We were ushered into busses and driven along the Tullamarine Freeway into the center of the city. We were assigned room number 937. The official closed the door behind us, and we looked at the room we wouldn't leave for two weeks. The walls were greyish white. The piping was exposed. There was a wooden unit with a fridge and some cups. Grey and black herring bone carpet. A bed with white starchy sheets. A desk with a tiny TV on it. A cupboard. And a small bathroom with a shower that ran hot and with good pressure. We set to work making some adjustments to make the room more livable. We made a small kitchen table out of a picture of sail boats that was hanging on the wall and a luggage tray. We pulled the fridge out of its wooden unit and turned it on its side—a dining table. We ordered Uber eats and a bottle of wine from room service.

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The whole experience of traveling and arriving during a plague felt sci-fi-like. But certainly the most unearthly aspect, once in the hotel, was awaiting meal deliveries. Each morning, afternoon, and evening we'd hear a knock on the door indicating that our food was ready. I started watching the process through the peep hole. The hazmat suited official would walk through the corridor, dropping off little brown paper bags on the floor outside each room. Once all the bags were laid out, they'd walk back through the corridor, knocking on every door as they went, and then quickly scurrying back to their post outside the elevator, where I could see them sitting on shifts 24 hours 7 days a week. I'd open the door and shout, "thank you". Some would wave. Others just looked straight ahead. Comraderies and antagonism. On day three, we got a knock on the door at an irregular time. Two nameless nurses stood outside ready to test us for the virus. We had been getting almost weekly tests in New York. To have someone close enough to put the little swab up my nose felt comforting and made me strangely emotional.

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From there, we developed a pretty rigid daily routine. Stretching in the morning. Breakfast (fortunately, we brought a French press with us in our luggage so could make our own coffee.) And then I'd get to work on some writing assignments I had left over from New York. Shortly after lunch, I usually found that my mind was no longer capable of active concentration, so I'd play Mario Odyssey on the coral pink Nintendo Switch I bought just before we left New York, which I thought would offer hours of distraction, but having not played games regularly since I was around 16, was strangely taxing. At 5.30pm Jess and I would do the original Jane Fonda workout via YouTube. Then a shower, drink wine, dinner, movie. At the end of the day that I was shocked to find that I was tired and ready for sleep despite not having moved. The routine made time pass steadily and with limited introspection. In the second week, the meals started to repeat themselves. Quinoa salad. Mushroom gnocchi. Occasionally, though, something would interrupt the rhythm. For instance, when the water stopped running in our room and we had the thrilling thought that we might have to move hotels. Or when our next door neighbor, who played the acoustic guitar, stopped relentlessly practicing Blackbird by The Beatles, and instead turned his attention to I'm on Fire (Springsteen).

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We developed little techniques to make up for the lack of utilities in the room. We made ice trays out of discarded juice boxes. And toasted breakfast rolls on the iron. I posted short videos of this on Instagram and people responded with claps and heart eye emojis. We also zoomed with people back in New York and spoke about how we missed each other and the weather and the supposed coup at the Capitol. At times, it felt difficult to distinguish entirely between what I was seeing on my phone screen and what I was seeing through the one window in our room, which looked directly into a popular dumpling restaurant in a shopping center around 30 meters across the laneway from our hotel. Family and friends came to the dumpling restaurant and had a meal while we spoke via our phones. My sister came with her three kids. As a joke, I started shouting “let us out” and banging the window. My sister’s youngest son, likely confused at why he was watching us eat through a window across a laneway, looked up at his mom in a moment of fear and saw she was laughing and started laughing, too. 

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A strange effect of the sensory deprivation was intense flashbacks to somewhat troubling memories from early childhood. One afternoon, while playing Mario, I had a vision of a boy who, in grade 1, would drink his own pee at the urinals to impress other kids. Someone told on him and he was shamed in front of the class by the teacher. The general sense of foreboding created by these memories were intensified due to the fact that I was working on a story, while inside, about how psychiatrists are using mobile phone data to predict mental illness. Part of the background research I was doing was about B.F. Skinner, the psychiatrist who in the 1950s developed the operant conditioning box, those enclosed compartments filled with levers and buttons that, when triggered, would release small amounts of food for the hungry rats inside, who slowly adapted to their environment. (Apparently Skinner wanted to expand the use of his box to include children.) We were also watching the fourth season of Search Party: the main character is kidnapped by a crazed fan and imprisoned in a perfect replica of her Brooklyn apartment that he sets up in his basement. He delivers her food three times a day through a slot in the door.

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One evening we watched Safe, a 1995 movie set in the 1980s about a wealthy housewife named Carol, played by Julianne Moore, who for no apparent reason is beset by unexplained headaches, a dry cough, nosebleeds. Her doctors are baffled and helpless. She finds no relief until she comes across Wrenwood, a community of the similarly afflicted who explain that she is allergic to unseen and unknown elements in her environment—toxins, fumes, chemicals. She leaves her husband and stepson to live on a remote commune in the desert under the supervision of a self-assured, proto-wellness guru named Peter. During one of Peter's lectures he tells the group that he has stopped reading the papers, stopped watching the news on television. Reports from the outside world are in themselves a type of pollutant. "If I really believe that life is that devastating, that destructive, I'm afraid that my immune system will believe it, too," he says. "And I can't afford to take that risk. Neither can you." The film ends with Carol retreating into a fully sealed porcelain igloo at the retreat reserved for the most vulnerable community members. She stares into the mirror, repeating the words "I love you" to her own reflection, as if trying to trick herself into believing it.

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The night before we were due to be released I woke up at 4am from a dream about being interned at a concentration camp with Ross from friends. There was, clearly, no chance of falling back asleep after that and time passed extremely slowly until we were eventually set free by the officials at around 9.30. We had breakfast with family and sat outside on a perfect blue sky day in a maskless summer. I got badly sunburnt on my face and felt the strongest dissociation I've ever felt. The disconnect between body and mind was so intense that I couldn't perform some basic physical tasks in the first days out. I cut myself shaving quite badly. And I found myself at an ATM trying to key in my pin code but constantly hitting the wrong digits.

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It's more than a month back in Melbourne, now, and I'm no longer so strongly dissociated. But I am struck by how profoundly different my body feels in the new environment, which is home but also feels alienating and foreign. My hair feels dryer. I am hungrier. My skin seems to be reacting to the air, giving me low-intensity hives. I first noticed this the other morning, while waiting in a line outside a bakery to get some bread—some raised red dots on my forearm. I also noticed pigeons cooing at a volume that was far more intense than New York pigeons, but maybe that was just because Melbourne is so much quieter. It made me think about Joe. I looked on my phone to see what ever happened to him. After further investigation, the authorities discovered that the identification tag on his leg was actually a counterfeit. It was highly unlikely that he was born or had ever lived in America or travelled across the ocean to a new home. Given this new information, the authorities deemed that his life would be spared. "The department has concluded that Joe the Pigeon is highly likely to be Australian," the press release said, "and does not present a biosecurity risk."