It was not Covid, it was not flu. Two tests, an X-ray of the lungs, and the paucity of symptoms proved it. So what gave my wife congestion, a cough, and the energy level of a grease stain on the floor of an auto-repair-shop garage was a virus. The young physician’s assistant who saw us at the neighborhood urgent-care facility thought both to encourage and inform her by saying that she had had it too, and by giving the ailment its technical medical description: “absolutely horrible.”

We welcomed, not for the first time, the amenities of city life. In the country everything from food to M.D.s means a hop in the car. In the city the furthest we had to go, on a visit to a pulmonologist, was 20 blocks (= one mile). Everything else — urgent care, pharmacy, supermarket, the dark elixir of life — was the briefest of walks. What we did not fetch ourselves was fetched for us by the rangers of takeout. Counsel — my wife, a doctor’s daughter who began carrying her anesthesiologist father’s bag on his pre-op rounds when she was five and was introduced to all as his assistant, has managed to make each of her doctors since an honorary blood relative — was available by phone.

The consequence of everything being available in a small compass is that life shrinks to that compass. The peak and the downward slope of autumn were visible only in the leaves on our block, turning color then littering the street like spilled coins; in pumpkins displayed, then not displayed in stores; in the slow downward bump of temperature at night or in the shade of tall buildings. Upstate, where it happened in glory, was a foreign country.

Time shrank along with space. You got up late because sleep was good, doubly late because coughing at night had stolen it. Then breakfast, lunch, dinner, varied by mail, email, and (happily we are old enough to know what books are) reading aloud. The tilt of the pole and the end of DST made night fall fast, then faster. Next day, as with the repeat signs of my piano-playing youth, you did it all again. To add variety to this life-drone the medications kept changing slightly. That nice young physician’s assistant had prescribed one thing, the trusty medical retainer consulted by telephone prescribed another, the pulmonologist he finally referred us to suggested a third and a fourth. The third remedy was simple pills, to be taken one a day (except on the first day, when two were to be taken). The fourth remedy was an inhaler — a plastic contraption the size of a hockey puck. To clear the spout, you had to slide aside a casing, then push back a lever (when my wife first used it, explained the pulmonologist, she wasn’t pushing back the lever, so she didn’t get any inhalant). After these manipulations were accomplished, you exhaled, inhaled from the spout, held your breath for a count of five or more, exhaled slowly, and rinsed, gargled, and spat without swallowing. I liked that last direction: What would happen if you swallowed? In a lab somewhere a scientist and a marketer are conferring. If you rinse, gargle, and spit you’ll be 100 percent, but if you rinse, gargle, and swallow your head will explode! Can we get this by the FDA? No wonder with all this to do, and not do in order to do the next thing, the patient becomes confused.

Thank God for the routines of others, the externalities that stir the inner life. The adult Halloween parade succumbed long ago to booze and exhibitionism, but the preschool on our block threw an outdoor party that filled the street with dinosaurs, princesses, and bumblebees, while parents wearing the dull garb of adulthood even so sported antlers and tails. My trainer, raised in a British colony a stone’s throw from Florida, recalled that he double-dipped, celebrating both Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day. There was an election, perhaps you heard. (Ballot-gathering is not new: John Roche’s father, in Tammany-era Brooklyn, was going out to vote one morning when his doorman cheerily told him not to worry, he had already done it for him.) This magazine, asking me to explain it all in paragraphs every two weeks, in laments once a month. The full moon that came up, way to the north, like God’s eye: bright, unexpected, looking right at you.

What did I shop for, day after day? Seltzer (drink fluids). Ice cream (comfort food). Throat lozenges, doctor’s helpers. Kleenexes. It was amazing how fast the wastebaskets overflowed, how many nooks a little wadded-up, discarded rag-ball could come to rest in. Trees gave their lives to dispose of the sufferer’s phlegm.

When Anne Elliot gives a paean to illness as an arena of heroism, fortitude, patience, and resignation, Mrs. Smith gives her a dose of reality. “Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of.” This is aimed as much at caregivers as the cared for. You can sleep on the sofa when the sufferer is restless, but the cushions are not made for overnight proneness, you always rise misshapen. Coughs sound like woodpeckers, only demanding: Pay-at-ten-tion, pay-at-ten-tion. Ventures outside go no faster than space-normal speed (we will be able to manage only that soon enough, why hasten the day?). The caregiver must be a secretary, keeping track of doses and teleconferences. “I hope you get better,” without watching, slides into “Why don’t you get better?” into “Why won’t you get better?” There are no inhalers for patience. On the other hand, you don’t need to get it from a doctor.

My wife asked about the project she was working on before the virus hit. It must be lifting.