The Cover Age, Chapter 12

It felt like the very next day, or in his worst moments, only a minute earlier, the lockdowns began. Clive gave up custody of his daughter and then plunged into the uncertainty of not seeing her for a long, long time.

He began to let it get to him. Suddenly, as it was for everyone else, even though it was something that had been talked about for months prior, the pandemic became a reality only when it proved how much Clive could lose because of it, not his health (he never became sick, although he could of course never prove he hadn’t been a carrier, without being tested), but, yes, his daughter.

It was the old adage, writ large: You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.

The ex was not someone who would even consider violating the restrictions, or if she was, certainly not so Clive could still see his daughter, whether because of the split and therefore out of callous vengeance, or because she’d always been that way and was thus another thing Clive had previously failed to notice.

He still tried calling, daily, pestering his ex, he understood, further aggravating the divide, but...it was his daughter. He cared about his daughter. He needed his daughter, now more than ever. He vowed what every petitioner vowed, that he would never make the same mistake again, that he would never take her for granted again, that she would never be given a reason to doubt his love again, much less fear him. None of this spoken in the pointless messages left on his ex’s phone. The words he did leave, equally pointless to dwell on.

So, the despair mounted every day, made them longer, beyond the sudden emptiness, not merely for the loss of his daughter, but of course the fact of the lockdown, no place to go anyway, regardless of how often Clive had left his home before. A prison.

He didn’t spend his days in misery, paradoxically. They were filled with the things he had always loved doing. He did end up working on his anthologies (wondering if there was a point to rush them into publication though he did). He read books, he watched movies. He went for walks.  No one he encountered on his travels made a point of the fact that he never put on a mask, never questioned if he should be outside at all. He felt he missed what so many others complained about. He never lost his job, he was never lacking for funds, for food.

But he missed his daughter. It wasn’t that he feared that she would get sick, or his ex. He supposed if the ex became ill, that would pose a problem. He wondered if she would relent then, but then he weighed her spite again, and found himself on the low scale again.

By the time he saw Fox’s blog post, about the so-called monster hunter claiming to know for a fact that all this was caused by some kind of conspiracy hiding an uglier truth...Clive didn’t care. It sounded like nonsense, like everything else. It was mildly alarming, to learn suddenly that he and Fox lived in the same city. You don’t spend time on the internet interacting with people you could meet in the real world, not if you were doing it right, anyway. Then again, how would Clive know? He didn’t seem to have done anything at all right.

He never told Fox, but Clive knew who she was all along. She was his daughter’s caregiver. Of course he knew. He chose to pursue a fiction. Probably as he had with everything else. Out of self-pity, he agreed to play along one last time.

And died because of it.