From the archive
Year of the Plague: Jake Gardner and the Ghosts of 2020
Returning to a night in Omaha that rattled the nation, Matthew Chabin presents another side of an old friend in the middle of the tragedy. An intimate meditation on the fragility of friendship in a black-and-white age, Chabin calls for understanding over condemning one's enemies, including his own.
“I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.” — Frantz Fanon
2020—Year of the Rat. What Nimrod hurled his spear at Heaven? What Pandora cracked the lid for a peek in the box? What rogue planet wandered into our solar backcountry like a rabid bear, bit the leg of Nandi, and put the Pandavas to rout? Did we deserve it? Did we engender it? Did we call it down? Or did it simply happen? And is that distinction also an illusion, a construct of vanity and anxiety, and the childish desire to be both innocent and in control?
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread over the globe, it seemed to many only the outward sign of something more fundamentally rotten and astray in the spiritual life of the planet. The dual-origin stories of the virus (was it a wet market? a lab?) merged on the symbolic level to tell the tale of our original sin, our need to probe, screw, and eat every dirty and sacred thing under the sun. A nightmare year. President Trump hunkered in the White House like some great poisonous toad, infected himself, but seemingly immune, as fires consumed the hills, and riots raged in the cities. Theaters and parks stood empty, and fountains ran dry, their stonework graffiti-tagged and scorched, their statues disfigured or torn out. Enmity soared. Men killed each other in the streets.
It was the year of George Floyd and Kyle Rittenhouse—names you may have heard. It was also the year of Jake Gardner and James Scurlock—names you may have missed. In May of that wretched year, Jake Gardner killed James Scurlock on a street in Omaha and, shortly thereafter, killed himself. Competing narratives sprang up around their deaths. Gardner—a guilty man who had cheated justice; Scurlock—a second George Floyd. Gardner—victim of a corrupt system hounded into suicide; Scurlock—a thug who courted his own death. The civil authorities seemed more than usually confused on the matter, and Gardner’s death foreclosed the possibility of an official ruling.
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