In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Andrew, the assistant director of a funeral home one mile from Elmhurst Hospital, the “epicenter of the epicenter,” meets a legendary Coney Island witch doctor (Lelya Dorche), who makes him an offer that could better his chances of keeping his COVID-positive elderly parents and his severely asthmatic 13-year-old son, Miro, off the ever-expanding list of virus mortalities. To keep up his end of the bargain, Andrew will have to find his way to Bulgaria (no small task considering that there’s a ban on passenger flights to Europe) to secure 10 liters of a rare Macedonian pine sap, a key ingredient of Lelya Dorche’s proven remedy.
In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Andrew, the assistant director of a funeral home one mile from Elmhurst Hospital, the “epicenter of the epicenter,” meets a legendary Coney Island witch doctor (Lelya Dorche), who makes him an offer that could better his chances of keeping his COVID-positive elderly parents and his severely asthmatic 13-year-old son, Miro, off the ever-expanding list of virus mortalities. To keep up his end of the bargain, Andrew will have to find his way to Bulgaria (no small task considering that there’s a ban on passenger flights to Europe) to secure 10 liters of a rare Macedonian pine sap, a key ingredient of Lelya Dorche’s proven remedy.
April 2020
Coney Island
Mermaid Avenue.
Two blocks from where my father grew up, five from where my sister had been run down so many years back. And this Bulgarian witch doctor, her ancient hair covered in an old-world black kerchief, her wrinkled face half-hidden behind a glass shield, stands in a mailroom closet of an abandoned post office, now some kind of makeshift healing facility, and offers me a deal that could keep my COVID-positive elderly parents, and my severely asthmatic thirteen-year-old son off the ever-expanding list of virus mortalities.
No doubt, it’s a savage deal that would make the devil cringe on a good day, and this is about as bad of a day as they come, but what choice do I have? I can stand idly watching as the burning virus creeps deeper into my child’s lungs. I can sit passively as our pediatrician shares a detailed explanation of how the disease may well critically destabilize our son’s already compromised respiratory system.
I’m not going to do that.
I have the deepest respect for science and Dr. Fauci, but the scientific community has no great news to share. No exit. No hope. No cure. Just ventilators to die under and daily statistics of new hospitalizations and deaths.
Mermaid Avenue is eerie. Silent. The check cashing store with the fully barred windows next door is closed, as is the triple-locked Our Lady of Solace church across the way. But there is plenty of action going on here behind the curtains of the postal counter windows. Through the curtains, one can make out the large barrels 1 filled with fiery concoctions being mixed in the distance. There’s an urgency in the rising steam, and in the silhouettes of workers rushing this way and that; a dissonant melody of voices calling and responding.
Lelya Dorche and I maintain a good social distance and seal the deal with a mutual nodding, both understanding that if my wife Ivana were not Bulgarian (with lots of contacts back home), I would not have been given the time of day. Not here. “We’re a local operation,” she’d explained earlier in rhyme. “If your zip code’s not 11224, you’re not getting in the door.”
We don’t even live in Brooklyn.
As for my part of the bargain, I’ll need to find a way to breach the unheard of. Lelya Dorche’s demand seems impossible, at least on the surface.
We stand a good ten feet apart, she staring at me skeptically through her face shield, and I giving her my affirmation in the form of a full-on nod. This is life versus death. I will deliver.
It's a question many writers must have pondered in the past three years - how to deal with the seismic events that have been the universally-shared experience of the Covid-19 Pandemic. In tackling the subject head-on, making it the key driver of his narrative, Rothman has at least sidestepped the question over whether to have masks and social distancing as background features of their fictional world. What's left then, is the matter of using something so huge and, for so many, tragic for the basis of a work of fiction.
Rothman's take, however, doesn't overstep in terms of taste. In fact, one strength his novel possesses is a particular blessing in this instance. There are a number of times during the novel where Rothman makes the less dramatic choice and, in doing so, creates something more authentic. It sounds damning with faint praise, to speak of less dramatic choices, but so often, in choosing to ramp things up, authors end up drowning in absurdities of their own making. Rothman's tale is as much, if not more, about the emotional journeys of his characters as it is about the events he describes. Protagonist Andrew's feelings of ineffectiveness in the face of this huge event are made all the more authentic for the limited reach of his own actions. Not that he doesn't end up doing far more than you or I might in his place (or did, in our own experience of the pandemic), but the feel of Rothman's hands on the reins gives his readers the ability to trust where his story is taking us.
There are moments of high drama, of course. Rothman doesn't fall short of giving us a compelling story. He also paints a realistic picture of everyday life in the pandemic - the signs on tables outside restaurants stressing take-out only; the suspicion of other people, especially when they cough; the empty streets; the illicit meet-ups and the endless zoom calls.
Rothman's central characters are believable, their atypical backgrounds intriguing (I don't recall ever reading a book about Bulgarian immigrants in the US before), their relationships tangible and relatable - there's a remarkable piece just pages before the end where a conversation that has been loving turns for a moment towards irritation and, that close to the end, with most writers that would be portentous, but here it's just realistic. The end of the story doesn't mean these characters are all suddenly in some fixed, complete state. They're still wonderfully human.
Compelling then, well-written and authentic. If not explosively gripping or genre-redefiningly brilliant, still very enjoyable and worthy of praise.