Last week, as I waited in the social-distance line outside a medical pot store on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I overheard two men in front of me talking. Both, like me, were white and in their mid-thirties. One, a former Marine wearing well-worn issue boots, said his rifle magazines were topped off and he had plenty of food; he hoped it was time for “the boogaloo.” The other man nodded; he hoped the civil war was going down soon, too, otherwise he’d need to get back to work.

There’s a virus in our midst, but something else hangs in the air.

In a parallel dimension with no Covid-19 fatalities, I’m just back from a honeymoon with my new wife, Toni. We were supposed to get married and have a party with 100 friends and relatives on March 21 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Toni’s smarter than me. She figured out first that we needed to postpone the whole thing; I wanted to sleep on it. It sunk in for me with a March 12 text message from a sister of my groomsman, Monty, who calls to shoot the shit a couple times a day but refuses to send or receive text messages. “Daanzho,” she wrote, a Jicarilla Apache greeting meaning “It is good”—but her message wasn’t. “Bad news. Can’t travel.” Guidance had come down from the Jicarilla Apache Nation president, Darrell Paiz. “I’m sorry. Can’t attend your wedding.”



In the early 1900s, a tuberculosis epidemic spread through the Apache community in Dulce, New Mexico. By 1918, when the flu epidemic hit, only 596 members of the Jicarilla Nation remained. Monty’s grandfather had been a soldier during World War I, living through the Spanish flu, telling the stories to his grandson. Memories of contagion’s ravages—and the knowledge that the American government will lie and break promises—remain with the Nation’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. To ensure no chances of bringing the coronavirus back to the reservation in Dulce, my Apache friends were staying put.

Our planned officiant, Tim, was an old friend of mine I’d bonded with years ago in California, when he was involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, my postwar traumatic stress was peaking, and the world seemed especially hostile. Before we decided to postpone, he’d developed his own contingency plans. Rather than buy him a plane ticket, I would rent him a car, and he would drive in from his home in the Bay Area, with an overnight stay in Kingman, Arizona. Going over these plans, I voiced concerns about his physical safety: Given the White House’s “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu” rhetoric and increased attacks on Chinese Americans in the Bay, this might not be the best time to be a Chinese American lawyer and activist seeking a room for the night in Kingman, the town that incubated Tim McVeigh.