Shelter from the Storm

I never saw the guy coming, out of the darkness of an alley in New Orleans

By the beginning of 2020, I had been a lot of places. Kathmandu. St. Petersburg. Mumbai. Zagreb. But somehow I had never made it to New Orleans, a situation we decided to rectify last February.

I know. Cue the ominous, viral music. In my ears, it was then merely an annoying background whine, like yet another Zika or West-Nile bearing mosquito, buzzing near our ears but not yet alighted. We were aware that contagion was out there, but decided to go to the biggest party in North America, anyway.

On our first night in the Crescent City, we were headed to the Sylvain restaurant for dinner, which entailed a stroll along Chartres Street, a block in from the Mississippi River. Just past Jackson Square, I was looking up at a street sign to determine how close we were to the restaurant, when I became aware of an onrushing presence to my left. It was like everything else in 2020: an imminent threat that I managed to ignore until it was right on top of me.

“There is so much about my fate that I …