In the summer of 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was finally slowing down, my teenage son and I took a trip to Italy. Travel restrictions had been lifted only a few days before, and Rome was almost entirely empty of tourists. It was glorious.
We wandered around the city. We stood on the Spanish Steps in the mild evening air, then continued down to the Trevi Fountain and dipped our hands in the water. We ate pasta at little tables on the sidewalks of ancient streets. At the colosseum, on a hot, bright day, we walked right in. We went to the Vatican and peered obediently up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
I’d been to the Vatican before, but as we wandered through it, almost alone, I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time. It was dripping with riches, the cup of salvation overflowing with material luxury. No ermine robe was too soft, and no dish too delicious, for the cardinals of the past. In that moment, walking through room after room of marble and silk and silver, all of it extracted from illiterate workers in the fields and fishing boats on the horizon, the reasons for the Protestant Reformation became fully clear to me. My son had taken social studies that year, and so we talked about these things a bit—the French Revolution, Karl Marx, the essential conflict between power and powerlessness, and how it continues.
There, behind the casino in the harbor, were the superyachts.
We rented a tiny car—a Fiat 500, in deep, luscious green. There were two normal seats in front, and two perches in the back where we put our bags. We drove out of Rome, down to the Amalfi Coast, and then up to Venice and the Dolomites. After a few days in the mountains, we descended to Milan, where we drove a Ferrari for fifteen minutes. We stayed in Airbnbs in the countryside, and one old woman, seeing that we were a father and son on a trip together, insisted on putting us up in her lovely farmhouse for free.
Near the end of our trip, we headed to Monaco. In front of a casino by the water, we watched a gray-haired man in his seventies, wearing a track suit, stiffly emerge from a glistening Lamborghini with an astonishing blond porcelain doll of a woman, so young she could have been his granddaughter.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. He tossed his car keys to the uniformed valet, she took his arm possessively, and they walked together up the steps into the casino.
Tall and thin, but with a distinct paunch visible beneath his track suit, the man did not look like a captain of industry. He didn’t look like much of anything, and the impression he gave was one of carelessness and boredom, as if he didn’t know what else to do, on another identical day.
There, behind the casino in the harbor, were the superyachts. Some of them were at berths in the locked marina, but others were at anchor. Most were gleaming white and conventionally extravagant, with black privacy glass and chrome railings and layers of decks. A few, however, were tributes to an imaginary future, incongruous and strange, like props from a film. Almost all of them seemed empty, like houses closed for the season, but a handful had signs of life—crewmen at the railings, polishing the brightwork, as if getting ready to leave. I watched them for a while, and wondered who they were, and what they thought of their work, and this was the genesis of my novel The Red Dress.
Many books start this way, I suspect, with a single moment, and for me, this time, it was the image of a middle-aged man, in an officer’s uniform, casually spraying the deck of a superyacht with a hose. He became my narrator, an imaginary captain, a well-paid professional servant of empty extravagance. I named him Nick, after Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
Like the rest of the world, I was trying to put the Covid-19 pandemic behind me that summer. I was a frontline healthcare worker throughout the pandemic, and those weeks in Italy were a blessed relief. Along with everyone else in healthcare, I was exposed to the virus every day, all day, with unforgivably inadequate personal protective equipment. An N95 mask costs less than a latte from Starbucks, but the US government failed to provide them to us, and did not force US corporations to produce them domestically since that would have cost them too much money. Instead, we wore individual N95 masks for weeks at a time, masks that had been designed for single use, and stored them in brown paper bags like lunch until their rubber bands broke.
Patients were justifiably afraid to come to the hospital during that period, and many shifts were strikingly still and quiet. A physician’s assistant I worked with, a veteran of the Iraq War, told me that the atmosphere in the ER reminded him of being on patrol in Baghdad, when the streets were empty and the hair on the back of his neck stood at attention. His words have stayed with me.
Never in my life have I felt more disposable, or more like a name on a schedule.
The ICUs were quiet also, because rows of patients slowly dying on ventilators don’t make noise. There is just the slow hiss and sigh of the machines, tucked safely out of sight, as social media filled with resistance to mask mandates, to empathy and authority, to the power of the state, and the chorus of anti-vaxxers grew. Meanwhile, the administration couldn’t distance itself far enough. It soon corrupted the CDC with propaganda, and abandoned the states, along with the hospitals within them, to make their plans alone. These years later, the origin of Covid-19 remains unclear, yet more Americans died of Covid-19 than in all of our wars combined.
The gloves of structural and institutional power came off fully during the pandemic, and one of its central lessons was that we were not, in fact, in it together. Under pressure, society did not unify before a collective threat. It fractured and divided. Non-essential workers—executives, administrators, management of all kinds—disappeared into Zoom en masse across the country.
But essential workers—in meatpacking plants, in hospitals, in nursing homes, in bus stations, in grocery stores, in Amazon sorting facilities, in restaurants cooking meals-to-go, on farms, and on fishing boats—kept right on working essentially unprotected. The many deaths among them and their families passed unrecognized, but if they spoke out in resistance, they were fired, and the message spread fast. If you want to keep food on the table, keep your mouth shut, go to work, and hope for the best.
Never in my life have I felt more disposable, or more like a name on a schedule. I, too, was an essential worker trapped in the amber of the machine, unable to truly speak my mind, and knowing it would change nothing if I did. I’ve understood this all along, but Covid-19 was a flashbulb anyway, illuminating our hierarchies and divisions in stark relief.
Medicine, of course, serves the sick and the injured. But it also increasingly serves corporate power, and the balance sheet, and at the height of the worst pandemic in a hundred years, when hospital beds in the state of New Mexico were in critically short supply, Lovelace Health System, part of a national for-profit corporation, closed an entire wing of their hospital and laid off dozens of nurses at the direction of faceless executives working from home. The State of New Mexico protested to no avail. The executives, for their part, were serving still more distant masters—shareholders, owners, and the CEO in his private jet.
John Updike once wrote: The essence of the superrich is absence. They like to demonstrate they can afford to be elsewhere. It’s a resonant line, and an accurate one. But it also occurred to me, contemplating the arthritic passage of what I presumed to be an oligarch up the brown stone steps of the casino with his temporary child bride, that the individuals themselves, whether polishing the rails or reclining in the master suite, are in an important sense similarly interchangeable and replaceable, serving larger forces that none of them fully understand.
We got on the plane and flew home. My name was on the schedule again, and school was about to begin.
Fiction at its best asks us to look closely, and to ask both ourselves and others real questions. If there is lightness and humor along the way, so much the better, but the purpose of literary fiction is ultimately serious. It asks us to consider our own lives and complicities, and to step beyond ourselves into other shoes. It seeks to explore the grey as much as the black and white, and the middle as much as the extremes of life. It reminds us that no amount of detachment, ironic or otherwise, will protect us in the end. Perhaps above all it asks us to see clearly, and challenges us to lead more examined lives.
These days, the headlines all point to difficult times ahead. The cacophony is loud, the opinions many, the forces great, and the collective threat real. Rarely has examination been more important. But so far, for most of us, the effects are insidious. They are atmospheric and implied, like storms in the distance, and the sense that rain is about to fall. Meanwhile, everyone keeps going to work with their heads down, and the ordinary days continue.
After leaving Monaco, we returned our elegant little car at the Rome airport very early in the morning and took the shuttlebus to the terminal. The terminal was crowded as overnight flights arrived: tourists were coming back. What first had been a trickle was now a flood, as the lines at the colosseum quickly formed again.
We had been gone for three weeks, privileged travelers on vacation, exactly like the others in the morning crowd. But then it was over, and the real world asserted itself once more. We got on the plane and flew home. My name was on the schedule again, and school was about to begin.
A few weeks after arriving home, I began The Red Dress—a gesture, I suppose, an imperfect attempt, however small, to examine this time, when history is about to change. It’s the story of a flawed and solitary father’s love for his child, his desire to protect the promise of her future, and to gather what small forces of resistance he can against the faceless, inhuman, profoundly distorting powers of the coming world, where so little will be known with certainty, and nobody understands where we’re going.
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The Red Dress by Frank Huyler is available from Bellevue Literary Press.