Covid: Four years ago / Still with us

Pert 1

I’m temporarity leaving the “Opposable” format to look back to the beginning of the pandemic that changed us all in ways we are only beginning to undestand. It started for me in New York City.

March 2020

The virus is quickly proliferating, and it is now evident that its transmission route is breath itself. In a New York minute, masks sell out in drug and hardware stores. But in storefronts that previously specialized in drug paraphernalia and sex toys, shamelessly overpriced, probably faux N95s and sky blue “surgical” masks appear as if by magic, like umbrella hawkers at the first drops of rain.

As mobile morgues and hospitals fill, and the body count explodes, masks become facial billboards advertising political affiliation, adherence to science over delusion, and social responsibility over a grotesque Trump-led interpretation of freedom.

New York City vibrates with misinformation. One rumor holds that Chinese people are Covid-19 carriers to be feared and shunned. So, in those early, ignorant weeks before the pandemic really hits, I seek out Chinese restaurants. With few customers, they are sad places where financial disaster sits on the tables alongside bottles of soy sauce and hand sanitizer. The food, however, is especially good, seasoned as it is with the self-righteousness of taking a tiny stand against ignorance and racism.

March 17, 2020

Around 9 pm, with the uncanny quiet of shelter-in-place pressing down, I venture out to see what the shut-down city has become. My downtown neighborhood is, creepy, sad, a little frightening, and beautiful in a stage-lit zombie- apocalypse way. Cars are scarce; people more so as a bare few tread wary and isolated.

Delivery bicyclists now rule. They swoop through wide avenues and swirl down narrow cross streets, claiming the middle of the road and swinging round corners in luxurious arcs. Unimpeded by pedestrians or traffic, these messengers-of-something-remains have become the city’s lifeblood. Carrying take-out, groceries, Amazon packages, hand sanitizer and, if you are lucky, toilet paper, the bikers pump through artery avenues and surge along thousands of capillary streets that wind to individual doors.

Restaurants and stores are deserted except for an occasional worker awaiting a to-go order, or cleaning and cleaning again, or sitting solitary and frozen in solemn Hopper light.

Shop windows display handwritten signs declaring that they are closed until further notice to protect staff and customers, or that they are open only for take-out and delivery. They promise to return, but we already know so many won’t.

The haze of danger that overhangs the streets resembles the apprehension that was normal in the wild old New York of the ’60s and ’70s, when a nighttime walk alone risked muggers and junkies. Now, the rational fear is of all fellow humans, any one of whom might be harboring a deadly virus.

Occasionally though, I stop to talk to people and find quick, companionable rapport. What are you doing? I ask a guy with an electric bike hauling a wagon filled with black and yellow plastic crates. Delivering for Amazon, he says. And he likes the work. It pays $15 an hour, no one is looking over his shoulder, and he loves to be on the bike. “It’s a good way to kill time, and now the streets are empty and people are really grateful and glad to see me.” He is young and sweet and seems in no rush.

I meet another lone woman on my block, who says she’s lived in New York all her life and this is the strangest time yet—stranger even than after 9/11. We talk about how, then, you could smell death in the air. Yes, she says, it even coated the windows. But this is stranger yet, we agree.

I want to walk more, but start to feel increasingly lonely and creeped out. So I climb to my 5th floor studio walk-up—where the cat waits to be fed and the world is safe—unless, of course, the virus is already inside me. And indeed my throat feels scratchy, my chest a little tight. It is so like all the apocalypse films you’ve ever seen, and yet, here it is.

Next part: reassessing “essential.”