Lockdown isn’t a happy memory for most of us, and navigating the topic of COVID-19 somehow hasn’t become easier in the months and years since. We don’t talk about the tolls the pandemic has taken on each of us. In Ben Miller‘s new book Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020-2022 (Rutgers University Press, November 2024), the Davenport native says the quiet part aloud.
Reading this book was sort of a scary healing experience. In it, Miller transcribes and builds narrative from his work notes — taken as an employee of a hospital system in a state that managed to bungle any meaningful public safety precautions.
Miller’s story is different from most people’s, because he was working with medicine, but nearly every entry rings with universality. Regarding vaccines and masking, “It’s been the same story for months. Tellers are inevitably bewildered and/or anguished. To be incapable of uniting to deal with an epidemic points to a painful, dizzying phenomenon: concepts of family, and of country, are so widely varied from individual to individual that often the outcome is indecipherability on all levels of the social unit.”
There just isn’t a better way to say it: everything about our conversations and the ways we engage with public life became more complicated, more fraught. Throughout Miller’s logs (a short, heady book at only 189 pages) he returns the reader to a near past, during which we all struggled to navigate our daily lives. The exception for Miller, though, is that he had a real-time view (if somewhat removed) of the lives lost. In a telehealth ICU, he was responsible for discharging patients when they died. “Trying to make the process feel more humane, I had that habit of looking up the patient’s age and full name during the wait, but it did not much help alter the vibe of callousness. Bright sophisticated screens were very good at taking the uniqueness out of a life, reducing it to fields of data that all looked the same.”
The beginning of Pandemonium Logs was the hardest to read because it starts in early March 2020 and slides us slowly into the chaos that month would be — and it felt very much like living in that moment, gradually and then suddenly existing in a different reality. I didn’t want to go back there. It was a dark period and it lasted a long time. We all worried, whatever our background or views, and we were all isolated. Somehow, while not ever breaking the fourth wall or pausing to reflect (to say something like “this was four years ago”), Miller also doesn’t punish the reader for coming to this text. Maybe because the text is so honest, so forthcoming, it becomes a bit of a salve for the wounds we’ve assumed are gone because we’ve ignored them as we’ve “returned to normal.”
Pandemonium Logs is a frank and gentle reminder that we have all been changed by COVID-19 that allows and encourages readers to care for ourselves, however we are today. “To me the core of being a writer is the willingness to start over. It’s never a negative thing. It’s an occasion for renewal.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
