Sometimes the mold defeated her productivity, made her feel done with the outside world, done with the basement, done with others. On those nights, Dune poured a glass of rosé, rolled a spliff and ran a bath. This was a new ritual, concurrently numbing from the inside out and outside in, until feeling wasn’t an option.

Technically there had been a suggested quarantine since the curfew was imposed, but now that every body of law enforcement was overwhelmed with their own sick and dying, people had been finding ways to leave, occasionally with sick family members in their trunks.

Overnight, the National Guard made the border official with M16s. They set up a Quarantine Station at the airport as the Guard headquarters, someone official determining that that was far enough from the epicenter of the crisis. Concrete barriers were trucked across the Ambassador Bridge and set up with armed checkpoints along 75, 96, 94, Michigan Ave. The tunnel and the Ambassador were already impossible to cross due to customs, the last few years of US paranoia and deportation frenzy having caused Canada (and Mexico) to heighten their security reflexively. Now, every major road that left the city was blocked off, with patrolling guards who would check them on a randomized schedule. A quick fence, more suggestive than prohibitive, was thrown up in a semi-circle that started and ended on the Detroit River.

Detroit had a sprawling, strangely constructed population. While the city was mostly Black, the suburb of Dearborn had the largest Middle Eastern population in the US, there was a long-standing Hmong community, mostly in Hamtramck—one of the small cities inside of Detroit’s city limits—and a growing immigrant body in Southwest with families from Mexico, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Chili, Colombia, Guatemala. All throughout this global community were pockets of Anishnaabe, the first peoples of the region, who still knew it as home.

The white business class came and went as locusts; when times were flush they came to the city and ate everything, then left again to the suburbs during lean years. A lot of them had become obstinate in their suburban living and in the face of the syndrome they went on the defensive, setting up their own police and militia patrols around their stores and gas stations. It was, after all, Michigan, and past that, Ohio, where rural folks generally preferred Black people to stick to the cities, even when they weren’t sick.

There were moments of chaos at these new borders. Without much in the way of emergency communication infrastructure in place, a lot of people found out about the boundaries when they tried to cross them. Even with H-8, winter approaching, and no city services functional, there were people left in the city lines, within and beyond the 8 Mile marker.

Detroiters are persistent when it comes to surviving the impossible.