When Strangers Call
By: Josephine V. Roque
Tags: Covid Diaries, Quarantinelife, Apps, Asia, Quarantine Diaries

On the 48th day of a locked-down country, I signed up for an app called QuarantineChat. The premise was intriguing: receive calls from anywhere in the world. Chat with a stranger also sheltering in place, frightened of an enemy you could not see. For the first time in decades-long forgotten, all of us were in the same predicament. The app was included in an article as part of a list of things to do. There was a photo of a yellow phone and a face mask. This was an old school concept for a new world need. It reminded me of the time before mobile phones in the 1990s when telephone circuits shared with other callers crossed contact like sticks swung in the dark. The party line was the stranger you asked to please hang up or declare a nuisance when they began eavesdropping on calls.

I was living alone in Quezon City stuck in place when the borders closed and movement was forbidden. The family was two hours away in Pampanga but most of them were diabetic seniors and what if I was an asymptomatic carrier? It would only be a month, I reasoned. We all know how that turned out. On that 48th day in the fourth month of the pandemic year, people and conversations online and off began to annoy me even oppress at times not because they were bad. No, I cherished friends and family even more now that nothing is sure. It was because we were all stuck inside four corners looking at the same things unfurl and move too slow or too fast as if life had become an aquarium with the same goldfish, bubbling oxygen tanks, and swaying plastic plants. Baking bread or watching seedlings grow became forms of honest results for honest effort as news in the country grew more despairing by the day. The midnight press conferences were prefaced by frustrating messages in group chats. How to deal with the coherent, lucid statements of our beloved Supreme Leader? The projects and contracts I was looking forward to in the coming months fell apart. What replaced it was insecurity and anxiety because no one knew what would happen next beyond the tentative few steps. It was during one of those late nights, feeling secure and safe by the selfless and exemplary acts of our benevolent elected officials and peace-loving policemen, that I downloaded the app and decided to make the best of it, whatever that meant moving on. I had made it to day 48 confined indoors, alive and healthy. Even when every small itch to the throat or headache meant fear at the possibility should I have COVID-19, I did not.

The first call came from a couple living in British Columbia and homeschooling their daughter. The phone rang in a different tone prompted by the calm, neutral voice of a woman telling you what to expect with a suggestion on what you could talk about. For the session, the topic was breakfast. What did you have for breakfast, the woman said as if welcoming me to take a seat. We ended up not talking about food at all. The husband was curious to know about Manila. They were surprised the call reached Asia. I said I am comfortable at home though a lot of people are far from okay. I imagined them sitting on the dining table while watching the leaves turn golden from the window and seeing people walk on the streets outside, just as they said while I sweated from 44 degree Celsius days. It used to be another place was a dot on the horizon for another possibility of life but the horizon disappears when you fear the same contagion. I was tongue-tied. The English sentences spouted like water from a rusty pipe. Here I was forced to talk in English when I was used to mixing languages and still being understood. It had been more than a month since I talked to a stranger. A stranger. Danger, danger. A stranger meant someone you didn’t know. Now a stranger was the chance a sneeze or cough could send a ventilator down your throat. Yet, I have never seen so many people care as a community. I paused during the conversation when the English words were not enough to express ideas. He introduced me to his wife. Like being on a bad date, I was the boring caller and overthinking it. I told him this was my first call. The man said I sounded afraid when talking about life in Manila. I was, I am. A trip to the supermarket after weeks felt like lining up to attend a wake. The shopping carts full of food were gripped by masked people with grim faces discernible even under coverings. I did not say that I stopped by the five empty shelves where the baking section used to be. He was interested to know what I wrote because he loved to read and missed borrowing books from the library. It would begin here. The callers asked about things I would not be questioned with otherwise had they known me. There was no shared past or future with the possibility to see each other, only the ongoing moment of the conversation. He asked, how do you do manage the days to be different from each other? I was put on the spot and mumbled an answer about routines and planning. Truthfully, I did not know how to make the days stop repeating themselves.

The calls lasted around 30 minutes. It was sufficient to say something interesting or meaningful yet light enough not to burden the rest of the day. A lady living alone in Belgium and surrounded by neighbors sick with COVID-19 and I talked about our imagined future selves. She was tired of drawing pictures in the basement and would like to learn paragliding at 55 years old. I said I did not know the small life I led before was the life I would miss. Sometimes what we didn’t say mattered more than what was said. In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, an Italian caller told me how strange it was to meet a close friend after lockdown. They sat following the prescribed distance apart with face masks and hats on while people looked on strangely as if they were committing a crime. As he told me this, I wondered if they sat nearby Juliet’s house. Where was Romeo? I did not ask him how it was like living in a country with the second-highest number of deaths from the virus. I did not mention the Italian doctors and nurses who wept online for being made to choose the young over the elderly for the right to breathe the same air.

In Mumbai, a man and I spoke longer than usual because conversation shifted from the basic questions to the pertinent ones: how is your government handling the pandemic? Many people are suffering, unequally. I feel like I am not doing enough, I said. He knew what I meant and spoke of going to small communities himself to give meals to the hungry. An engineer from Texas had no choice but to travel in planes once teeming with people now pockmarked with empty seats. Could the virus mutate and survive there too? In the wires and networks he had to install to let more people connect through the internet past the confines of time and space? What was better, apocalypse today or later?

The longest call was with an architect in Jakarta because I made her laugh with my bumbling stories of traveling alone, missed flights, and an almost successful pickpocket. Lately, the calls from the app have become infrequent because of the number of users straining the system. A call would go through then cut after a few minutes or not come through at all. The numbers for the dead keep rising. I hope they make it; I hope we all make it. Some days the sky is the perfect glaze of blue.