Isolating at the Edge of the World
Quarantine life in Covid-free New Zealand
I leave my room and take the lift down to the lobby. Walking past a nurse-occupied business suite, and rows of plexiglass-covered desks in reception, I reach the hotel entrance and give my room number to the security guard on duty.
“Enjoy the fresh air if you can,” she says before pressing a button on the wall. The doors slide open and I step outside.
As a guest in self-isolation, I don’t go outside very often. In fact, over the last week I’ve been mostly confined to my room. After testing negative, though, I was given a blue bracelet that allows me to come down to this outdoor lobby area. The space is surrounded by two rows of metal fences, and while you could probably leap your way to freedom, just like how Satan in Paradise Lost leaps a wall to enter the Garden of Eden, the threat of criminal prosecution would stop you in your tracks.
Like all the hotels hosting all arrivals to New Zealand, one of the few countries in the world with no known Covid cases in the community, my hotel has converted this lobby area and a skydeck on level 4 into fitness spaces. But since ‘vigorous exercise’ remains strictly forbidden, we’re left with walking as our sole form of movement. The result is a bizarre spectacle of people circling the porte cochère in an anti-clockwise direction like two-legged fish in a fishbowl, while bored-looking defence force personnel watch on. It’s like the world’s worst fashion show, where jet-lagged night owls in various states of fitness parade the latest gym gear from five years ago.
Despite sharing a physical space and a shared experience of managed isolation, however, none of us ever seem to exchange words with our fellow sojourners. We may acknowledge each other’s existence, but we keep to our bubbles and a safe distance apart. We’re alone together, present yet incorrigibly absent.
Since everyone walks at their own pace, though, from time to time we all end up congested on one side of the track, while the other side is bare. This is soon resolved when someone hits the accelerator on their sneakers and cheekily overtakes the slowcoach holding us all up. Nietzsche might have propounded the idea of eternal recurrence, yet never in his wildest dreams…
