Coming Home in the Time of Coronavirus

March 23, 2020, 8 p.m., and opposite me in the hotel shuttle bus to LAX is an airline pilot in full uniform. The bus lurches and I almost fall on him as, like everyone else on the shuttle, I am trying to avoid clinging to the nearby pole with my bare hands. I take my seat in the half-empty bus next to my husband and smile across the aisle apologetically murmuring “Sorry” under my N95 surgical mask to the seated pilot, who I can see smiles back as he is not encumbered by a lower face full of damp cloth.

“Heading home?” he asks, and we start to talk about that: “We’re answering the instruction from our Prime Minister to get back to Australia before he locks us out on the thirty-first of March. We’re lucky to get a flight as most are cancelled,” I reply to this pleasant pilot, a man I’d judge as in his late forties. He asks conversationally where we’d been, and I tell him: “We flew in yesterday from New Orleans to ensure we’d be here to catch our flight…