The Daily - The Sunday Read: 'The Decameron Project'

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, The New York Times Magazine asked 29 authors to write new short stories inspired by the moment — and by Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” which was written as a plague ravaged Florence in the 14th century. We’ve selected two for you to hear today.These stories were written by Tommy Orange and Edwidge Danticat. They were recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

My name is Tommy Orange. I'm a fiction writer from Oakland, California. I wrote a short story called The Team for the Decameron Project for the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project, it's based on a novella written by Giovanni Picaccio during the time of the Black Plague. The Decameron Project mirrors it. It's like a collection of stories put together. Everyone wrote it in the time period of coronavirus happening. I think it's interesting to write fiction that is trying to be relevant to its time period. Often fiction is written, you know, after years having passed, especially when the news is moving as fast as it is. But I think something that stays constant in fiction

when fiction is doing its best is its ability to build our empathic intelligence. By reading about fictional lives, you get inside the characters' heads and their hearts and you understand their context. And I think we need more nuance when it comes to thinking about other people and their lives. It can really help in divisive times

and in times where the divide seems so massive and our fellow Americans seem so far from each other as to be almost a different species. Fiction can help us understand our humanity better in ways that sometimes journalism and the news can't. So here's my story, The Teen, read by me, Tommy Orange, as well as another story written and read

by Edwidge Stantica. You'd been staring at a wall in your office for what amount of time you weren't sure. Time slipped that way lately, as if behind a curtain, then back out again as something else. Here is an internet hole. There is a walk on your street you insisted on calling a hike with your wife and son. Here is a book your eyes look at that you don't comprehend. There is crippling depression. Here is observing circling turkey vultures. There is your ever-imminent anxiety. Here is a failed Zoom call. There is a homeschooling shift with your son. Here is April, May already gone. There is the obsession over the body count,

the nameless numbers rising on endless graphics of animated maps. Time was not on your side or anyone's. It was dreaming its waste with you, as you, hidden and loud as the sun behind a cloud. You were thinking of when you were last in public. This wasn't counting the masked and panicked weekly grocery store runs, or the post office box scramble, you with your precariously stacked boxes of the unessential, keeping as much distance as you could from anyone you saw. Especially after hearing a podcast that introduced you to the disgusting idea of mouth rain. You don't even make eye contact with anyone anymore. So afraid are you of the spread.

The last mass-gathering public-type thing you'd done was running your first half-marathon. There's your medal in your office, hung like a deer head. A half-marathon doesn't sound like a whole lot, it just being the half. But it was a big deal to you, to run and run for 13 miles without stopping. When you first started training, you actually paid money to join a running team that gathered together and pumped you up about how grueling it all was. You did chants and listened to your team leaders rant about their race times and the superior foods and energy sources they carried in plastic sacks

around their waists. You hated the team training, so you quit and started to think of your whole body and health and routine and running songs playlist as the team. You got up early to run, and you went on more than just one run a day sometimes. You kept to the mileage you planned and kept to the diet prescribed by the app you downloaded to

train. The app then was also part of the team. The team kept its promises to itself. The team was your heart keeping healthy and your lungs keeping clear and your determination remaining determined to do this thing you decided you needed to do for reasons you don't even remember. Running is surely as old as legs, and you'd been doing it yourself for quite a while, mostly to stave off the ever-encroaching pounds that come with age.

But running to race was new, running for the distance, for a time, to cross the finish line. This was a strange kind of obligation you'd taken on, a mantle, a goal with a finish line. Running before modern times was serious business. It was running away or toward something with urgency, hunting, being hunted, or delivering a critical message. The first official marathon happened at the 1896 Olympics and was won by a Greek mailman. The race length was a nod to the ancient Greek legend of a runner who'd been running a message about victory just before collapsing and dying right then and there. There could be countless other examples of ancient running. Surely Indians were

running all over American countrysides before Cortez brought Iberian horses to Florida in 1519. And yet you are stuck with the image of the Indian on horseback. And when the image should represent Native people's sheer adaptability stands for the static, dead Indian. You've always known this image to reflect an aspect of you that was both true and not true. Some kind of centurion truth. Because your dad is Native American, a Cheyenne Indian, and your mom is white. And both of them were runners, which is why you ever thought to run in the first place. But regardless of ancient running and family heritage and half-truths, there was no way to really know what kinds of running activities

humans were up to since the beginning of lakes. After the race, you went back up the mountain to where you moved when Oakland became a cost you couldn't afford five years ago. You went back up to isolation, and you were mostly safe from what others had to risk being together so closely in cities. But after the race, you were done running. The world came to a screeching halt and so did your good feelings about it being a worthy endeavor,

something worth working for. When the old white monsters at the top threw crumbs and ate heartily from the ridiculous plate that was the stimulus package, you felt the sick need to stop everything and watch it all burn, watch it lose its breath. With all the talking heads talking their talk, saying almost nothing, all you could do was watch. And that's all you did. All you felt you could do, which felt like doing something even though it was doing nothing, to watch, to listen, to read the news like something new might come of it more than new death. Even while you thought the deaths could mean the old white monsters would suffer, but they didn't. And it turned out to be the same people who had always suffered at the expense of the pigs having more than their fair share of the crop, slopped to them because they

didn't need it. A level of greed so beyond need you couldn't even conceptualize it. It was all in the name of freedom. We were taught that in school, and it was written in textbooks, the sanctimony of the free market, the constitution, and the declaration of independence, which referred and still refers to Indians as merciless savages. The new team was your family, the one you're at home with now. This was your wife and your son, your sister-in-law and her two teenage girls. It was isolation itself. What you did with it. Against it. The new team was not running.

It was planning meals together and sharing news of the outside world as read about and listened to from the inside of your insular lives. From the inside of your Bluetooth bass-heavy headphones. The new team was the new future, which was yet to be determined, which seemed to be decided by individual communities and whether they believed in the number of lives lost and how it related to them. Your new team was made up of frontline workers scanning your groceries and delivering your deliveries. It was made up of your old family, the one that had been broken up for so long it seemed absurd to even think of picking up the pieces, not to mention putting them back together. You were learning Cheyenne together from your dad. It was his first language, and your sister

had become fluent, and understanding a new language felt like something everyone needed to be thinking about, given that you'd lost the thread of truth, somewhere back when you thought you believed anymore in anything close to hope? Was it before Obama, or during Obama, or after Obama? This all was an important point in time to understand where you stood, what you understood to mean the future of the country, which flag you stood under, and what it did mean that white people were moving toward the minority, lag you stood under? And what did it mean that white people were moving toward the minority? Never mind hope, never mind prosperity. Would you survive? No, you didn't run anymore, and it showed, and you showered maybe once a week and forgot about your teeth. You drank too much and smoked more cigarettes than ever. You would improve once things seemed to improve,

once you got a glimmer of hope from the news. You're watching. Something will come. A cure. A drop in numbers. A miracle drug. Antibodies. Something. Anything else. You're back at the wall, staring at it, unable to do anything but watch it was the teamwork being done by the whole new world all those not directly affected to watch and wait to stay put

it would be a marathon all this isolation but it was the only way the team could make it humans the whole damn race. One Thing, written by Edwige Dantzika. She's dreaming of caves and the rocks and minerals with which he's obsessed. In the dream, he tells her that touching one of the columns rising from the cave floor could cause the stalagmite to die. She laughs and tells him

that this might be one reason people no longer live in caves. He corrects her and says, maybe not in Brooklyn, but some people elsewhere do. Forced by weather, maybe, during or after hurricanes, or during a war, hiding, or for protection. He reminds her that they are breathtaking, though he'd no longer use that particular word. Enviably beautiful, he might say, million-year-old caves he would love to see. Caves with mile-long pits, canyons and shafts, even waterfalls, and with explosions of colors from marble arches, selenite crystals, ice pearls, or glowworms. C caves that are so striking they could burn your pupils with their beauty. He can no longer speak this way, his body vibrating with each word, his fist raised in

exhilaration, his head bouncing from side to side, as though he's always trying to generate a room's worth of enthusiasm for the high school juniors and seniors to whom he teaches earth and environmental science. At home, his sentences had grown short and clipped even before he became visibly ill. He was beginning to sound like some of her newly arrived cousins, curtly speaking a bowered tongue, while the language they've been hearing since birth slowly slipped away. This summer, they were planning to visit the grottos and caves of their parents' birthplace near the town where her mother was born in the south of Haiti. One of the caves is your namesake, he said, when they decided to solicit honeymoon funds for the trip on their wedding registry. The cave had, like her, been

named for a nurse and soldier, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, who dressed as a man to fight alongside her husband against the French colonial army during the Haitian Revolution. Who would I have to dress as to be able to see you and fight for you, with you? She asks him now. Would I have to be a doctor or a chaplain? Are you, the atheist, even allowed a chaplain, just in case you wake up and demand conversion? A recollection of his racing breath jolts her awake. What scares her most now, in this recent hierarchy of terrors,

is not his silence or the gasping beats of the ventilator, which is hours old, but when the shift changes and someone speaks into the phone that had been placed next to his ear, the exhausted female voice on the other end, a voice she imagines as a mezzo-soprano in an a cappella group from the way her intonation rises and falls so quickly and dramatically. That voice purposely perks up and says, good morning, am I speaking to the love of Ray's life? How did you know, she wants to ask. Of course, they take notes on iPads or notepads for one another to read, small details to differentiate and to visualize. The night nurse might have been able to make out her words after all. He might have written down exactly what Marijan had bawled and blubbered through. His name is Raymond, but we call him Ray.

He is the love of my life. What did you two spend the night talking about? The morning nurse asks, and before reminding her to recharge the phone so she can speak in his ear again, later that morning and maybe in the afternoon, and perhaps again tonight, Marijan sleepily answers in her scratchy, mostly bass voice,

caves, we were talking about caves. They didn't always talk about caves. During their four-month courtship between the new science teacher's orientation and their New Year's Eve wedding in the Flatbush Avenue restaurant owned by his parents, they talked more generally of travel. This was one advantage of their profession after all, their great fortune in having the summers to check off bucket list items. He liked to describe their planned trips as though they'd already happened. He wanted them to ride a steam train between the river gorges of Zambia's lower Zambezi National Park and Victoria Falls Bridge,

and hoped that before they had children, they would climb Machu Picchu, swim with penguins in the Galapagos, gaze at the northern lights from inside a glass igloo. But first, they had to go on the delayed honeymoon to her namesake cave. As soon as she hangs up with the nurse, she imagines driving to the hospital and circling the main building. She'd park under the sweet gum tree by the front gate. In ordinary times, this tree would be a conduit to a lobby where visitors sign in before finding their way inside the hospital maze. The day before, she dropped him off on the other side of that building at the emergency admission section. Two people in what looked like spacesuits had wheeled him inside.

He could still breathe on his own then and was even able to turn his head and wave in her direction. It was not a goodbye wave. Go on now, he seemed to be saying under the face mask, his nightshade eyes obscured by fogging aviator glasses. There is a long line of people behind you. She wonders now where in the hospital he might be, what floor, what room. The night nurse won't say, perhaps so she and others don't storm the building and rush to those floors to hold their loved ones' hands. The nurse simply says that they were taking good care of him. I know, she said, much in the way he might have. I know you're doing the best you can.

She thinks that tonight, on the phone, she will play some of his favorite Nina Simone again. Last night she played Wild is the Wind 16 times for the 16 weeks they've been married. At their wedding, everyone was expecting some kind of gag, a hip-hop interlude in the middle of their first dance and his abysmal breakdancing interrupting the mournful jazz. But they danced the entire seven minutes of the live recording,

cheek to cheek. Kiss me. You kiss me. of the live recording, cheek to cheek. You kiss me. With your kiss, my life begins. You're spring to me. All things to me. Don't you know your life itself? She could call back and ask the nurses to play the song for him right now,

but the ward might be too busy during the day. Both words and melody might be muffled by the stream of hurried movements and rushed to beeping machines. In any case, the night is when relief might be most needed from both his and her nightmares. She doesn't realize that she's nodded off until the phone rings, and in one swift movement she grabs it from the folds of the yellow duvet on their bed while wiping the sleep from her eyes. She can hear the Creole news broadcast blasting from the radio that's always on in her parents' apartment as they thank her for the groceries

she's had delivered to them. When they ask how her husband is doing, she says, same. When his parents call, she asks if they want her to add them to her call to him later on that night. They could tell him stories, folktales, or family anecdotes remind him of things he'd loved and treasured when he was a boy. Give him a reason to come back to us, his mother summarizes what Marijan is struggling to say. It's not fully up to him, is it? His father interrupts. He sounds distant, as though speaking from another extension in another room, rather than on speaker on his wife's cell phone. I know he wants to come back to us, her mother-in-law says. We're praying all the time. I know he will.

There's a funeral that maybe she can help them watch online, the father says. A service for good friends who have fallen. the father says, a service for good friends who have fallen. He says fallen in such a literal way that Marijan at first thinks his friends have slipped in the tub or on the stairs. We were sent a link and a password, her mother-in-law says. She sends the link and password to Marijan via text along with the instructions and somehow Marijan manages to talk them through joining the private funeral group on their laptop. Before she hangs up, Marijan hears her mother-in-law ask her husband, Are you sure you can watch? Marijan uses the link to connect to the service.

The camera seems to be recording from a corner of the funeral home chapel's ceiling. It's a double funeral. A couple married 45 years who died three days apart. They'd been at her wedding. They contributed $200 to the honeymoon funds. They are among the oldest friends of her in-laws. The couple's three daughters, their husbands, and four of their oldest grandchildren are sitting on chairs arranged on what looks like every other square of a giant chessboard.

The two coffins are draped with identical velvet-purple paws. Marijan swipes the screen before hearing a word. Marie-Jeanne swipes the screen before hearing a word. Her namesake cave is three miles long and more than a million years old. The first chamber, with the acru-colored floor, is two stories high, he'd said. Further in, there are chambers with stalactites shaped like the Virgin Mary and wedding cakes. Inside one of the cave's deepest and darkest chambers, with explorers have named the abyss, you can hear echoes of your own beating heart.

Tonight, she might retell him everything he'd told her about the caves. She would remind him, too, of how, when she seemed hesitant to plunge in so soon after they'd met, he asked her to pick one thing about him to focus on at a time, one thing that could make her forget everything else. Today, that thing is the caves. Tomorrow, it might be Nina Simone. Again, the next day, it might be the bobbing of his head when he was talking about something he loved or how she would predict his next move by looking past the nerdy glasses and into his eyes.

and into his eyes. The phone rings once more, and her arm instinctively reaches for it before she realizes what she's doing. The same nurse who was trying to sound so upbeat a little while ago is now carefully parsing her words. I intended to mention this earlier, the nurse says, there are a few words meant for you on your husband's admission file. I don't know if they were shared with you. Waiting for some graver pronouncement to follow, Marijan answers, no, in such a low voice that she has to repeat the word. Would you like me to read them to you, the nurse asks. the word. Would you like me to read them to you, the nurse asks. Marijan pauses, purposely stretching the time, so if there was some other news, she might delay it for a while. Whatever the words

are, she does not want to hear them in a stranger's voice. That much she knows. She wants to hear herself reading them, or better yet, she wants to hear him saying them. I can email you a screenshot, the nurse says. Somebody's already taken a picture. Please, Marijan answers. When the email alert pops up on her cell phone, she knows even before she reads the words what they will be. Ray had written on a plain white piece of paper, MJ, wild is the wind. The words look as though they'd been scribbled in a hurried cursive with a trembling hand. MJ is written in a straight line, but the rest of the words glide down the paper, degenerating in shape and size to the point that she's not a hundred percent sure

that the last word is not wing. She remembers him once telling her that inside the Marijan cave, him once telling her that inside the Marijan cave, sounds carry weight and travel in waves strong enough to possibly crack some of the most fragile karst. She imagines herself standing at the lowest depths of this cave in the abyss and hearing again what he whispered in her ear during their wedding dance. One thing, MJ, this is our one thing. This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as the New York Times.