We had a zoom conversation with an old friend last night. David lives alone, one of two tenants in a building with about twelve units, most of which have been unoccupied for years. Why this prime piece of San Francisco property has been kept empty for over a decade is a mystery to me. David has said it’s because the building’s two owners are in a long-running dispute. All I know is, when we have visited, it’s been creepy to walk down the upstairs halls to his place, past the numbered doors of rooms that have been dark and uninhabited for almost two decades. It must feel especially hollow and lonely to be quarantined there.

David, who’s in his late fifties, looked well enough on zoom, backed by the crammed book-cases of his tiny apartment. “I think I might have it,” he said. “I’ve had a dry cough I can’t shake for two weeks now.”

“Do you have a fever?”

“No, just the cough.”

We asked if he needed anything, if Michael could, on his next grocery run, pick up some things and leave them at his door, but he waved that off, said he was fully stocked.

David survived the era when skeletal young men walked slowly through the Castro with canes. He volunteered to care for AIDS patients at a time when many people would not even be in the same room with them. Like most gay men of his generation, he’s a tough guy. But I worry about him being so alone in that place. We’re going to need to keep in touch with him, call him every other day, to make sure he’s all right.

Has he already contracted COVID and passed the danger period of eight days? Who knows?

There’s a rumor that the virus arrived here, not two months ago, but in the autumn. That occurred to me as far back as January, when the library’s building manager had to beg off an event because of “this bug I just can’t shake. I’ll think I’m over it and then the damned thing comes back.” She’s fine now, fully recovered.

This is likely wishful thinking. We all want to imagine whatever last sickness we contracted was CV-19 and therefore conferred immunity.