I wasn’t sure whether or not to take the free masks.

A black and white sign asks anyone who has a fever or cold symptoms to put one on. I am here for an STI checkup.

But a tanned white woman tucked away in the far corner, next to the magazine was staring. Her pouting lips are ready to devour. And a Chinese-looking guy just sneezed ferociously on the left row of seats and he sat slouching like a blob. But there’s another masked east Asian girl with puffy, tired eyes.

Too many variables! I scream internally. Precautions and over protection. Political representation. Fear, of not just the virus but also being exposed as naïve, wrong, to have felt safe. What my mom said the doctor said when she went to the hospital for her back pain, at the onset of SARS: “Are you an idiot?”

As in all other situations requiring stressful decisions, I stopped thinking about it. I focused on staring at the culprit. They have a customized stand for dispensing masks! Capitalism works wonders. Why are these masks yellow? They’re usually blue. Aren’t they usually blue? Does this mean they ran out of blue ones already? Are they actually hiding something?

There’s an unopened box laying casually on a side table. It’s sold out everywhere, even at Target.

Finally, it’s my turn to check-in. She asked if I have fevers or have coughed recently, I said no. Then she had to repeat Wuhan twice before I caught what she was saying. No, I have not been at all, I answered.

Wuhan is a very masculine name; she softened its edges with slurpy American sounds—I thought as I waited again, anxiously monitoring my fellow patients. Every string of cough detonated like a round of grenades in my heart. But as a proud commander, I put up nonchalant faces and continuously convince myself of safety by scrolling through Facebook. See! They’re making memes about this.

A nurse came, casually called out a Chinese name that wasn’t mine. And then another.

There are moments you realize something extraordinary you’ve thought about and drilled for is actually happening, like that time when our apartment caught on fire from a cabbage. It feels like the beginning of a snowstorm. You detect little things of white falling down, but as you put a finger on it, it dissolves into nothing: you can never quite tell if this is reality flooding in, or another practice of imagining. Only when your limbs are frozen and it’s too late to run, can you know for sure.

I told myself it was just the flu, but bemasked myself either way. A while later someone called me. I followed her past a plastic construct protruding from the wall, some pipes circulating the air. This must be the quarantine space. Next to it on a chair sits a girl dozed off, a thin mask covering half of a slightly reddened face, draped over with sleek black hair. She woke up, lazily shook her shoulders with knotted brows. She coughed, ah, like drums beating on my fragile aorta.

Survival in the time of authoritarian rule sometimes means tweeting Epstein was murdered, and hoping horoscopes possess subversive powers. But always it means weighing one’s own eyes above lips fat from conceit. I know there were many more dead because I have seen the dead uncounted. But how do you know if this is one of the ghosts?

Surely not in America, I kept saying—there can be no shadows in the land shinning from coast to coast—but surely that’s what America would like you to think. Have I become an advertisement-infused buffalo, or do I stink of “third-world” superstition?

Two tubes of blood and half a bottle of pee later, I quickened my steps and fled from this narrow corridor of questions—with a box of masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer in my bag, just in case.

Note: I’m not sure how much of this writing contrasts the scientific and the humanistic perspective, or relates to my quarter-long endeavor. I had difficulty recalling a specific scientific diagnosis, or otherwise lacked solid memory that I dared to write about the diagnosis. But I particularly wanted to write about this because, first of all, the experience still worries me; it is slightly funny in a somewhat sad way; and it reveals the vulnerability in of my (our) belief in science when it is entwined with politics and our own life and death.