in the endgame.

When I was younger, I made my living volunteering as a human lab rat for clinical pharmaceutical research trials. These were long-term, inpatient trials that paid more than I was capable of earning based on the skills or experience I possessed at the time. I would check in to some large facility in Austin or Waukegan or Madison or London, stay for several weeks, swallow whatever pills or get whatever injections of whatever drugs they were looking to test, report any side effects, hand a lab tech a plastic jug that collected all of my urine every day, live with a bunch of other people who were all doing the exact same thing for money, not be allowed to go outside, and leave with a check for several thousand dollars. It beat having a day job, I reckoned.

The process of settling in during these studies tended to look more or less the same, regardless of the facility I was in. The first part always involved trying to carve out some pockets of what would feel like normalcy in these conditions: set up my laptop, find a TV show to watch, figure out when I would write, see if there were anyone else in the study I liked being around, etc. Those elements of normalcy were really important, because everything else was weird. (You’d have to pause that TV show in order to get your blood drawn every fifteen minutes on dosing days, for example.) Most of the volunteers in these studies were dudes, because many of them required that volunteer subjects not be able to get pregnant, and there would always be the dudes who took over a TV room to hook up video games in their own search for normalcy. Food, which was strictly controlled to test for interactions with the drugs, was extremely important as a touchstone of feeling like a human being. (Some facilities served cheap, high school cafeteria-style food; others were catered and had fresh baked goods; in London, the food was bad but they served tea, with two shortbread biscuits, every evening.) The goal was to make the strangeness of the environment match up to some semblance of what you could recognize as normal.

After a few days, you’d settle in, figure out what your habits and routines were in this place. I usually found that time, which I constantly feared was slipping away from me even when I was in my twenties, was not something I valued highly inside one of these studies. (That was, in hindsight, part of the appeal to me, I think.) For bioethical reasons having to do with not inducing people to put themselves at risk for money, my time was legally the only resource for which I was being paid, and I got paid the same amount whether I wrote or slept or re-watched season three of Angel. Privacy, meanwhile, was at a premium, since many of the facilities slept eight or more people to a room. The combination of “developing new routines,” “not caring much about time,” and “desperately seeking privacy” led me to habits like taking hour-long showers every day, sometimes twice a day. I’d spend an hour or two every day pacing around the facility, or I’d practice memorizing the names of every U.S. senator, stuff I would never do in normal times. But normal things weren’t available to me, and I was still there, and I needed to find something to do with myself, some way to create novel experiences.

Eventually, the time remaining in the study would get short. After a few weeks of hour-long showers and counting down to Zucchini Bread Wednesdays (PPD heads know), I’d find myself a week or so away from getting out. This was always the most interminable part. I’d lose my good habits, because I knew they wouldn’t be coming with me. I’d stop calling Kat every day, because what was there to say anymore? The final stretch of any study would go from something I was experiencing, in whatever small and fucked-up way that I had created for myself, and became something I was trying to endure. Even the nonsense goals I’d set out for myself (finish that season of Angel! Figure out who John Thune is!) became a chore. Mostly I would spend my time dicking around on the Internet, reading a few pages of whatever without focusing on it, watching whatever came on the common area TVs, just waiting to get out of there and go back to life.

That’s roughly the point I’m at in this goddamn pandemic right now, too, which I connected when I read this story about “third quarter syndrome” this morning. Turns out this is a normal thing! People who work in Antarctic substations, or on submarines, or who simulate long-haul space travel experience it, too. When the end gets near, it’s harder, not easier, to continue living the way you had when your unusual circumstances developed. We are, hopefully, not far from something that looks like normal life returning—4th of July cookouts with friends and neighbors, with no masks, seem likely to be safe—and that makes the current period feel endless and also pointless. I am so fucking bored I could fart blood, and my attention span for all of this is shot to hell. When it might be a year before you can go back to a restaurant, sure, settle in and read the Wolf Hall trilogy! When you’ve gotten dose two of the vaccine, and are figuring out what you’ll be comfortable doing in two weeks, finding the space to read a whole goddamn book seems impossible. You’ll have options soon! (For the record: Dog park—yes; hanging out with vaccinated friends—yes; swimming pools—please, god, yes; restaurants—not yet; going to play in a Magic: The Gathering tournament—maybe this fall? Movie theaters—no, damn it, and it’ll probably be the last thing.)

There’s no right way to experience a year like the one we’ve had (or, for that matter, to live on a submarine), because there’s not a right way to experience life. Even people who’ve trained for these exact kind of circumstances tend to fall apart when they actually arrive. In the end, all you can really ask of yourself is to get through it as well as possible, whatever that looks like. There’ll be no right way to do that, either.