Contagion

Human existence has become like a episode of an Netflix series which is stopped in the middle. Many series like Fauda and Babylon, Berlin actually are appealing due to their verisimilitude and their resemblance to life. At a time when most people can’t go anywhere, the viewer is immediately taken away. Contagion was a Steven Soderbergh movie that got a second life during the early stage of the pandemic with its uncanny foretelling of what would eventually transpire. But what series is the world currently in? Pandemic won't grab any viewers. And when the technical problems are worked out and the video again rolls, where will the observer find him or herself? What will be the denouement? It would be nice to think that the printing presses will metaphorically start up again along with the assembly lines across the country. The protagonist of Nicholson Baker'a  The Fermata possesses the ability to stop time. Is this stop/start process what's going to happen when the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are widely available? Will the wheels of progress rev up? Will aspiration be freshly fueled? Will the long-shuttered stores and restaurants in your neighborhood suddenly become filled? Will the darkened hulks of Manhattan’s midtown skyscrapers suddenly light up? Einstein showed that space/time curves. Is it possible that time will be reconfigured in some unseen way with the newest episode ending in a faintly recognizable but fundamentally different dimension than where it began?