Midnight
The novel coronavirus is not the first pandemic of the global age, but it is easily the most relentless. In just a matter of months, from the first appearance of respiratory illnesses in a cluster of people associated with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the virus infected millions of human hosts, killing tens of thousands. The disease it causes, COVID-19, has come to every corner of the earth, except Antarctica. How it first reached New York City, which by late March had become known as the epicenter of the pandemic, is not hard to imagine. John F. Kennedy Airport is the busiest point of arrival for international passengers in North America. Infected people arrived in New York from Italy, from the U.K. and Spain. And, while travel to the city has slowed, the planes keep coming, the travellers disembarking, around the clock.
Soon after midnight on April 15th, the passengers of Delta Flight 1888, from Atlanta, filed into Terminal 4. Hours earlier, Governor Andrew Cuomo had said that the city was at “the apex of the plateau” of the epidemiological curve. The first passenger to reach the baggage claim wore a respirator mask. Three military nurses from Pensacola followed with a quick step. They were heading to work on the U.S.N.S. Comfort, afloat in the Hudson River and operating as a vast supplementary hospital. A man named Henry Vargas paused to catch his breath. He lives in the Little Italy section of the Bronx and has been suffering from lymphoma. When the first COVID-19 case in the United States was confirmed, on January 20th, in the state of Washington, Vargas was in Seattle, undergoing a three-month-long stem-cell treatment, which had laid waste to his immune system. “You have nothing left,” he said. “They have to reintroduce you to all the vaccinations, as if you were a newborn.” He waited for weeks before it was safe for him to travel. When his doctors finally cleared him, the best ticket he could find required two connections—some eleven hours airborne. It was a nerve-racking trip: “The person sitting next to me could sneeze, and that could kill me.” He was relieved to be back in the city. “This is my home,” Vargas said, and shuffled toward the exit.
In Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, Josiah Charles lay in bed, after midnight, watching the movie “Midsommar” and logging in and out of her bank account. She’d worked at a party store called Balloon Saloon, but it had closed. “It might be on pause for a while,” she said recently. “I don’t think that anyone wants to celebrate anything anymore.” Six hundred dollars in unemployment funds had disappeared fast; for more than a week, her account balance had been less than seventy-five cents.
Charles had read online that the federal government was about to send out twelve-hundred-dollar stimulus checks to millions of Americans. Those who were signed up for direct deposit with the I.R.S. would receive them first—presumably, she reasoned, at 1:30 A.M., which is when her biweekly paychecks had once hit her account.
At 1:28 A.M., she logged back in. Nothing. She opened up a new tab and went on Reddit. Hundreds of other people were doing the same thing: waiting for the I.R.S. to send them money on what would have been Tax Day.
“WHERE MY CHASE BROS AT?” a user named brewsnob asked on “THE FINAL COUNTDOWN MEGATHREAD.”
“I got all my notifications turned on,” kburchdmv wrote, “and I’m logged in to Wells Fargo.”
At 1:33, xI-Red-Ix wrote, “CITI bank deposited.”
Sadxtortion: “Wow I checked and mine hasn’t come through. I wonder if maybe I’m just not part of the first round.”
Charles checked her account again. Zilch. Maybe she wasn’t part of the first round, either. She paused the movie—it was the first sacrifice scene—and continued to scroll through Reddit. 1:36 A.M.
“Ugh I can’t sleep,” bossladyfaithdg wrote. “My husband just got into a car accident today. totaled and not covered by insurance. I need this stimulus.”
At 1:37, Charles logged back in to her Advantage SafeBalance Banking account. It showed a total of $1,200.73. Thank God, she thought. She took a screenshot of her balance and posted it, with the one-word caption “Stimulated.”
Around three o’clock in the morning, Bradley Hayward, a critical-care physician at Weill Cornell Medicine, in Manhattan, led a team of doctors to a patient’s room on an upper floor. The patient, a middle-aged man, had come off a ventilator the day before, and was now in cardiac arrest. Hayward, assisted by a critical-care fellow, two residents, and a nurse, stripped the man naked and rolled him onto a backboard. Hayward placed his hands on the patient’s chest—the skin was cold, which suggested that the man did not have a fever when his heart stopped—and pushed until he felt the ribs cracking. In two-minute shifts, pressing faster than once per second, Hayward and the fellow used manual compressions in an attempt to circulate blood throughout the patient’s body. A machine monitored their pressure; if it slackened, a mechanical voice said, “Push harder.”
The cardiac complications of COVID can be a mystery. In Hayward’s experience, running a code, as the process of attempted resuscitation is known, typically doesn’t last much longer than twenty minutes. But, without knowing what caused the patient’s heart to stop, Hayward could not be certain how to start it again, or how long it might take to do so. After eight minutes, an airway team, led by an anesthesiologist, entered the room to perform an intubation. The procedure, which is necessary for the use of a ventilator, releases a spray of particles from a patient’s lungs, and is one of the riskiest for health-care providers treating COVID patients. Hayward kept up compressions until the moment before the ventilator tube slid down the patient’s throat. A few minutes later, a triangular contraption called a LUCAS, which automates the work of compression, was delivered. By then, both Hayward and the fellow were sweating and out of breath.
After half an hour, the door to the patient’s room opened. Someone suggested that it was time to call the code. Hayward called back, “It’s not up to you.” But, when it became clear that the man was not reviving, Hayward went around the room and asked if anyone objected. No one did. Hayward switched off the LUCAS and checked for a pulse. Seventy-five minutes after the code had started, he looked at the clock.
Dawn
The sun rose at 6:16 A.M., but it was hard to tell. Gray clouds that had arrived from the North Atlantic packed the sky. On Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, where the benches on the boardwalk face the sea, almost nobody was out. Circles of light under the boardwalk’s long rows of street lamps, and the lamps themselves, receded to a vanishing point. Set back from the beachfront, Brighton’s high-rise apartment buildings stretched up into the darkness. Now and then on the nearby Belt Parkway, E.M.S. trucks went by, flashing.
If you got close enough to the buildings, you could hear various things attached to them humming. Hundreds of yards away, the waves were coming in quietly. As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room.
At a Holiday Inn Express in Corona, Queens, John Springs left his room and rode the elevator down to the lobby. It was around 6:30 A.M. On a table near the front desk, dozens of white paper bags, filled with a day’s worth of food, sat next to a list of guests. Springs, wearing a sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, Timberland boots, and a face mask, scanned the list for his name, scribbled his signature, and took a bag.
Springs spent much of the nineteen-eighties and nineties in prison, where he wrote and published five pulp-fiction novels. In more recent years, he had been a fixture on Broadway and 110th Street, where he sold used books on the sidewalk. On March 27th, Springs was serving a ninety-day sentence on Rikers Island for failing to report to his parole officer, when Governor Cuomo announced that he was going to release several hundred “parole violators” early; inside the jail, the rate of COVID-19 infection had surged, turning the island into the epicenter of the epicenter. Springs and dozens of other men were placed on a bus, which took them across the Rikers Island bridge to a hotel in Harlem. It had been thirty years since Springs had stayed in a hotel. When he walked into the lobby, he said to himself, “Have we all died and gone to Heaven?” (In the Post, a “disgusted source” said that he was surprised that the men leaving Rikers “weren’t given stretch limos.”)
The men stayed there for two nights, then were told to find their way to the Holiday Inn Express. On Tuesday, April 14th, Springs, who suffers from chronic inflammation of the lungs, visited the Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital to get a new albuterol pump. There, he tested positive for COVID-19. He had no symptoms and returned to the hotel, where he self-quarantined, leaving his room that morning only to pick up his food bag.
He unpacked the food, item by item, into the mini-fridge—a small marble cake, a boiled egg, a peach yogurt—and got back in bed to read. On a desk was a stack of used books, which he had picked up recently from a recycling bin on the Upper West Side: “Living Language: Italian,” “Dating Sucks,” by Joanne Kimes, Voltaire’s “Candide, or Optimism.”
At eight o’clock, when Derrick Palmer arrived at the Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island for his morning shift, there was a new sign at the entrance: “Please walk slowly through the lane and the camera will detect your temperature.” Previously, masked employees wielding thermometer guns had taken co-workers’ temperatures as they entered the four-story building; now an automated system was in place. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Palmer and a small group of his fellow-workers had organized demonstrations for hazard pay, paid sick leave, and more thorough cleaning of the center. In the same period, Palmer, who has worked at Amazon for four and a half years almost without incident, received a disciplinary warning, ostensibly for violating social-distancing measures; another warning and he could be fired. In the lobby, a “Voice of Associates Board” displayed comments from workers. One named Elijah had written, “In all honesty we need to close this warehouse. . . . Some of us have big families to return to when we clock out of work.”
Palmer put his coat in a locker and stepped into the roar of spinning conveyor belts on the fulfillment center’s floor. The work of an Amazon associate is organized by task. That morning, Palmer was assigned to be a “counter,” auditing the inventory in storage units known as “pods.” Walking past workers standing at intervals of twelve feet alongside a fenced-in area where shelving units borne by robots pivoted and zoomed, he noticed that a co-worker who had tested positive for the coronavirus and a manager who had been quarantined for possible exposure were back on the job, apparently cleared for return. He picked up a scanning gun and began counting products that would soon be shipped: Brickell Purifying Charcoal Face Wash for Men, Gogo Squeeze applesauce pouches, Cascade dishwasher pods with OxyClean . . . Shortly after 9 A.M., he was visited at his station by a manager, who was conducting a survey of employees about their ability to maintain social distance while on the job. Worried that what he said might be used against him, he declined to participate.
–
In Times Square at 8:30 A.M., the digital billboard ads blared, beaming their enticements down on nobody. John King, the deputy general manager of the Hudson Theatre, walked into the Millennium Hotel, with which the theatre shares a rear entrance, said hello to a familiar security guard, and took a series of hallways to the management office, where, on a normal day, he would have already been at work. He grabbed his keys and a flashlight, and went into the theatre.
He took an elevator from the basement to the dress circle, then walked up several flights to the highest balcony. A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage. Each Broadway theatre has one: a ghost light, which goes on as soon as the house clears out after a performance. Every theatre, it’s said, is inhabited by a ghost. The light keeps the ghost company, or acts as an offering to keep away curses, or illuminates the stage as the spectral performer plays all night. The upshot of the superstition is that, real bodies be damned, some implicit spiritual theatrical event is always under way, wherever there’s a stage. The ghost lights on Broadway have been shining uninterrupted since March.
Using his flashlight, King inspected the emergency exits on the balcony, making sure they hadn’t been blocked or jimmied open, and then he did the same on the dress-circle level. In the Ambassador Lounge, used for receptions and toasts, King peered through the windows, which face the street, at the unlit marquee outside. The last show to finish its run at the Hudson was David Byrne’s “American Utopia.” In the show, Byrne sings a song whose lyrics now seemed a fantasia:
Imagine driving in a carImagine rolling down the windowImagine opening the doorEverybody’s coming to my houseEverybody’s coming to my house
At 9:15 A.M., Soraya Ribeiro—who was born in Goiânia, a planned city in central Brazil, but who has long been a resident of Astoria—arrived at a town house on the Upper East Side. Waiting on the second floor were two wheaten terriers, Gio Ponti and Pippa, that she takes on walks. Unlike the rest of Ribeiro’s clients, the dogs’ owners, members of the Zabar grocery dynasty, had not left the city. Gio Ponti and Pippa bounded downstairs to meet Ribeiro in the front alcove, and leaped to kiss her through her mask—the “wheaten greetin’.” Ribeiro leashed her charges and set off past the façades of Fifth Avenue, entering Central Park at Ninetieth Street and walking south. The cherry trees were in blossom and the skyscrapers of Billionaires’ Row stood out against a startlingly clear sky.
Usually, Ribeiro walks a bouquet of purebreds, and kids swarm her. Now, she noticed, passersby looked a little scared. She was scared, too. Ribeiro charges by the hour, about thirty dollars per dog. Some of her clients had Venmoed cash gifts after heading to their country houses, but her usual pack—Tinker Bell, Kiki, Chouquie, Teddy, Gilda, and many more—had shrunk to just the two wheatens. Still, she was content to be in the fresh air, which gave her the feeling that everything would return to normal soon. Near the Alexander Hamilton statue, Gio Ponti and Pippa spotted a squirrel. Ribeiro dropped the leashes and the dogs ran off to chase it. They treed the squirrel—a moment of unbridled bliss. Then it was time to go home. “Over here, guys,” she called out to them, across an empty field. “Vem cá! ”
At 9:55 A.M., El pulled up in his 2007 Acura MDX right in front of an apartment building in the East Seventies. Waiting for him was a man in a button-down shirt, a corporate lawyer at a tech company. El, who has a beard and a receding hairline, wore a hoodie and a leather jacket. He handed over the lawyer’s order: some edibles, sativa, and indica for the night. The bill was six hundred dollars. After the lawyer, he was delivering to a finance guy in Tribeca, a nurse in Bushwick, and a film director in Ridgewood. El had been dealing for ten years, but he’d never been on a run like this. Instead of an eighth, people were buying a whole ounce; El’s gross was up almost fifty per cent. “It’s multi-reason,” he said. “Fear of drought and the fact people are consuming more because they’re working from home.”
The nicer the work conditions, the happier El is. By these terms, these were halcyon days. “I haven’t remembered a time like this in ever,” he said. His travel time was cut in half and the parking was “seamless.” For social-distancing reasons, he usually dropped the weed in his clients’ mailboxes; when he met the lawyer, though, he stopped to chat—about friends they knew who were sick and others whose trips had been cancelled. The lawyer was leaving town for two months. His wife called from a window, telling the men to keep their masks on. El complied, to keep the peace, but the coronavirus doesn’t particularly frighten him. He worked in health care before getting into the marijuana business. “I’ve been exposed to everything over the years,” he said. The men kicked feet goodbye.
At ten-thirty, outside the PATH Family Center, on 151st Street in the Bronx, there was a smell of disinfectant and marijuana. A bearded employee was sweeping litter from the sidewalk. The center, run by the Department of Homeless Services, admits families with children into the shelter system. It also tries to help them find alternatives; PATH stands for Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing. In ordinary times, the ramp outside is crowded with strollers, bumper to bumper. Not now. The hotels are empty, so some of them have contracted with the city to provide sixteen thousand rooms for temporary shelter. Just as after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, attention and federal funds, provided by FEMA, are focussed on the city. As happened after those disasters, one day the money and the attention will end. “It’s quiet now,” the employee said, as he used his broom to flip a cigarette butt out of a tree pit and into his dustpan. “But I will tell you one thing—when this coronavirus is over, and the people start coming back, it will get crazy around here.”
–
At 11:02 A.M., Seth Meyers logged on to a Zoom call with a half-dozen staffers from “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” to discuss a segment for that evening’s show. In the absence of a studio audience at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Meyers has had to get used to doing comedy in a void, recording on an iPad and using a teleprompter app. He was sitting in his attic crawl space, a familiar scene by now to his viewers: a green desk, a sliver of chimney, a copy of “The Thorn Birds.” He’s been filming his show there since the beginning of April, after experimenting in an upstairs hallway (too echoey) and a neighbor’s garage (too cold).
“All right, let’s go,” Meyers said. As he read through a script, the staffers took notes. The show’s producer, Mike Shoemaker, calling in from Westchester, sat in a chair in front of a circular painting of a cloudy sky. The script under discussion was for “A Closer Look,” a segment in which Meyers reviews the news. The day before, President Trump had announced from the Rose Garden that he was pulling funding from the World Health Organization, and a Harvard study warned that some social-distancing measures might be necessary through 2022. “So, yeah,” Meyers read, “we’re going to need, like, six thousand more episodes of ‘Tiger King,’ stat. And you know what? Fine. I’m gonna watch every episode of ‘Fuck Island,’ too.”
He stopped and said, “Maybe go with ‘Fine, I’m going to re-watch’?”
Sal Gentile, who had written the script, was calling in from Park Slope. “Yeah,” he said, making a note.
Meyers sped through the rest of the monologue, which ended without comedy. “When the time for a political accounting comes,” he said, “we must remember that this was not inevitable, that it could have been prevented, and that a long sequence of failures led to this moment.”
Gentile said that he would make some trims. “ ‘Fuck Island’ will stay,” he said with a smile.
“Throw it in a couple more times,” Meyers said. “I feel like it’ll get real traction.”
At 11:30 A.M., at Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx, Joselyn Baez, a thirty-one-year-old emergency-room nurse, was working in the E.R.’s greeting station: a tent made from blue plastic tarp and furnished with computer carts, which had been set up in the hospital’s ambulance bay. It was cold, and Baez wore a hospital sheet wrapped around her neck as a scarf, an accessory to her layers of personal protective gear.
Patients drifted in, usually accompanied by friends or family members. Baez assessed how sick they looked and asked a round of COVID-specific questions: “Any fever, chills, or cough?” (Or, if they spoke Spanish, “Tiene fiebre? Escalofríos? Tos?”) Then she gave them a wristband—orange for suspected COVID, green for non-COVID—and directed them to another station, for triage. People sometimes arrived in such bad shape that Baez had to drop what she was doing and rush them into the E.R. to be intubated.
On the worst days, patients had died by the dozen—in the I.C.U., which had tripled its capacity; in the hospital beds outside the emergency department; and on stretchers in the E.R. Baez once counted five white morgue trucks parked by the hospital’s loading dock. Urgent codes rang out on the P.A. system: “Rapid response,” for when a patient can’t breathe; “C.A.C.,” for cardiac arrest. One day, there were four or five codes by 10 A.M. She had turned to her best friend, also a nurse, and said, “They’re dropping like flies.”
Recently, though, a new tradition had begun. Whenever a COVID patient was taken off a ventilator or was discharged, hospital staff played a snippet of “Empire State of Mind,” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. This was known as the “happy code.” Shortly after Baez arrived at work, she heard the song. “Well, maybe some people are making it out of here,” she thought. “Maybe COVID’s loosening its grip a little bit.”
It’s not unusual for Carolyn Riccardelli, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to see the building’s vast limestone entrance hall devoid of visitors; witnessing the museum’s private life is one of the privileges of being on staff. What’s strange is to see it without flowers. Lila Acheson Wallace, the co-founder of the Reader’s Digest, permanently endowed the hall’s stone urns in 1967; since then, the Met has received a delivery of flowers every Tuesday, which the Dutch master florist Remco van Vliet shapes into towering arrangements up to twelve feet tall. But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed and cherry trees shed pink petals onto sidewalks all over the city, the urns stood empty.
Riccardelli wore a face mask decorated with cartoon owls, and round-framed glasses that made her look a little like an owl herself. For the past month, she has come in every few days as a member of the collections monitoring team, a volunteer unit of curators, conservators, and collections managers who take turns checking on the dormant galleries and storerooms. From a human point of view, the pandemic has been disastrous beyond measure, but, from the perspective of the paintings and sculptures and pottery and tapestry and all manner of other precious objects that make their home at the Met, it’s had a weirdly salutary effect. No people means no lights and no dust.
The Astor Chinese Garden Court features a pond full of koi, which Riccardelli fed with a scooper of orange pellets. Next, she stopped by the Venetian Sculpture Gallery to visit Tullio Lombardo’s lissome Adam, the first life-size marble nude in the classical style made during the Renaissance. In 2002, the pedestal supporting it collapsed, and the sculpture shattered on the ground. Riccardelli spent the better part of a decade leading the team that put it—“him,” she’d say—back together, so seamlessly that you’d never be able to tell there had been significant damage. His manhood modestly covered with a fig leaf, he stands as he once did in Venice, in a niche, unbitten apple in hand, as if he had never fallen.
At 11:46 A.M., a call came over the radio. “O.K.,” Maddy Wetterhall, a twenty-four-year-old emergency medical technician, told the dispatcher. “We’re clear and we’re en route.” A few weeks earlier, Wetterhall, who works for a private ambulance company based in Atlanta, had driven to New York City in her ambulance, with a caravan of out-of-state E.M.S. workers sent by FEMA to help with the crisis there. She’d been responding to 911 calls, “running Brooklyn,” working ten-to-ten shifts every day since she arrived. It was her first time in the city. “It’s crazy,” she said. “There’s no traffic here.”
An elderly woman met Wetterhall and her partner at the door, and explained that her husband, who has severe memory problems, had been acting strangely for several days, not eating, not responding when spoken to. The woman led the E.M.T.s into a back bedroom. The shades were drawn. When Wetterhall’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see that the man was lying in bed, fully dressed, with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed. A framed, black-and-white picture of the couple at their wedding was hanging above the bed. “We’ve been married for over sixty years,” the woman said.
The team brought the man downstairs and guided him toward the ambulance. Wetterhall noticed that the woman called her husband Buddy: “She goes, ‘O.K., Buddy, they’re going to help you.’ ” Because of the risks associated with the coronavirus, the man’s wife couldn’t accompany him to the hospital. Before handing him off to the E.M.T.s, she gave Wetterhall a note with her phone number and a list of his medications and dosages. “That’s a super important piece of paper,” the woman said. Her husband was anxious and disoriented, rocking back and forth in the stair chair. Wetterhall used a go-to calming strategy. “You explain everything to the patient as you’re doing it,” she said. “It’s a way you can get a better connection with them.” She used his nickname: “This is an ambulance, Buddy. We’re going to see the doctors, so you can feel better. Buddy, we’re going to get you help.”
–
In Flatbush, at around midday, the rapper known as 22Gz, who had recently rolled out of bed, was shooting his latest music video. 22Gz is twenty-two, although he looks younger: skinny, with a bright smile and strikingly big eyes. Raised in the neighborhood, he grew up playing basketball in the parks and sometimes dancing on subway trains for tips. He is a big name in his home town and far beyond, but his videos tend not to require extravagant budgets. A few months earlier, to promote a track called “Suburban, Pt. 2,” he had invited some friends to the BP gas station across from the Kings County Hospital Center. A few dozen people showed up, dancing and mean-mugging for the camera; the resulting video accrued about ten million views on YouTube.
For years, one of the harshest insults in the hip-hop lexicon was “Internet gangsta”—to describe someone who acted tough online but was never seen on the streets. Now most rappers were staying inside, like everybody else. 22Gz recently had to return twenty thousand dollars in deposits for cancelled concerts.
The music for his new video came from a track called “308,” which begins in the first-person plural: “When we spin through, it’s a D.O.A.” The video, like many in this era, was first-person singular. 22Gz, wearing a turquoise “Paid in Full” sweatshirt, used his iPhone to record himself, first doing a little arm-waving dance in the shower, then walking down the hall, then pouring syrup on a Styrofoam plate stacked with waffles. At one point, he pointed a can of Lysol at the lens, as if to dissolve viral membranes through the phone. There is an art to projecting this much hip-hop swagger while stuck at home, he reflected: “It’s kinda boring, but you’ve got to vibe yourself up.”
Lunchtime
Just before 2 P.M., a man in a BMW pulled into an empty parking space in front of Russ & Daughters, the venerated smoked-fish purveyor on East Houston Street. Josh Russ Tupper, the fourth-generation co-owner of the business, playing an ad-hoc bouncer, unlocked the door and opened it. “Did you call in an order?” he said. The man hadn’t, and drove away. The store has been around since 1914; in the past three decades, it has not been closed for more than a day or two. “During Sandy, we were open—a friend of mine brought a generator,” Tupper said from his post at the glass-fronted door. “And the blackout—we were open as well.” In the days after September 11, 2001, when downtown Manhattan was closed to traffic, Tupper’s co-owner and cousin, Niki Russ Federman, walked hand trucks up to Fourteenth Street with store staff to meet their delivery drivers, keeping their counter open and stocked.
In March, the cousins began to worry about how to adapt the cramped, tenement-style store to the demands of social distancing. On the thirtieth, they decided to close, shifting orders to their Brooklyn production facility. The shop was shuttered for two weeks. It didn’t feel right. On Tuesday, April 14th, the store reopened, though no customers were allowed inside—phone orders only. The next day, the air was perfumed with a familiar smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—tinged with a jagged note of surface cleaner. The wire baskets lining the walls were bare; the bagels were in the back, ready to be packed up for deliveries. The usually bustling store felt almost spacious: three employees worked at set-apart stations, and a private courier stood waiting to get an order into a backpack.
A man in orange safety gloves appeared at the door, pleading his case. “It’s not a big order,” he said. Call-in orders only, Tupper said. Next, a couple, masked, arms linked: no luck. An older woman appeared, thin and gray-haired, swaddled in a brown shearling coat. “I’m picking up an order,” she said. One of the employees put together her bag: a bit of smoked fish, a bit of cream cheese, some babka, a bagel or two. Tupper regarded the assemblage as it came together on the counter. “This is a small little order,” he said. “But you know, right now, if someone wants a quarter pound of whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever we can.”
On the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, Cheryl Hayashi unlocked her laboratory door. In individual containers on a sunny windowsill, a dozen large garden spiders sat in their webs. Four Western black widows hunched, nearby, in small plastic boxes. Everyone but Hayashi had abandoned the lab on March 13th, when the museum shut down. Hayashi, who studies the tensile properties of spider silks, now leaves her apartment only to feed her animals.
She carried one of the containers to a lab table. The occupant, a Pacific garden spider, a type of orb weaver with spindly legs and a neon-yellow back, didn’t move. Near at hand, scores of tiny brown crickets were crawling around inside a clear plastic box with a slotted lid. Hayashi lifted the lid and reached inside with long tweezers. She plucked out a cricket, placed it in a lab dish, and cut off its legs with a straight razor. When she offered the cricket to the spider, the spider crawled off, ignoring its food. Hayashi placed the cricket at the center of its web and said, “She’ll find it.”
Spiders are natural self-isolators, except when they mate. In the wild, they occupy separate bushes, separate trees. Hayashi was about to prepare another cricket when the yellow-backed spider suddenly lunged for its lunch. “There we go! ” Hayashi said. Orb weavers are the type of predator whose survival depends on strategic patience: “They have to remain motionless and just wait.”
Shortly after two o’clock, Germaine Jackson, a group station manager for the subway system, was wrangling station cleaners. “Mr. Williams, are you able to do four hours?” She was talking on the phone, a company-issued beast of a cell. “O.K., do Spring Street on the Charlie, then Canal Street on the C.” She wore a high-visibility vest, and her eyes danced brightly above a blue mask.
All subway passengers these days are supposed to be essential workers, as defined by the statewide stay-at-home order. A sign you see on platforms makes it simple. “ESSENTIAL WORKER,” it says across the top, with one arrow pointing left, to “YES,” and then down, to “OKAY TO RIDE.” A second arrow points right, to “NO,” and then “WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE READING THIS?,” and then “GO HOME.” In the Herald Square station, which has eight subway lines running through it, plus a PATH-train terminal, every concession was closed. An elderly woman dozed behind a phone-charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shopping cart, her head nodding. Jackson’s office is a windowless box on the lower mezzanine level. There was a map of the subway system taped on her wall, a tall black metal bookcase with stacks of forms on the shelves, and, in the corner, a large orange heavy-duty flashlight.
The headway was a little extended—subway language for fewer trains running than usual. The system had been plagued by staff shortages. To date, sixty-seven transit workers had died from the coronavirus. Twenty-five hundred had tested positive, and more than four thousand were in quarantine. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a workforce of around seventy thousand. It had been accused of neglecting the safety of its workers, a charge the M.T.A. leadership denies. “We have a lot of fallen soldiers, but we’re hanging in there,” Jackson said, into the phone. “You stay blessed.” She hung up. She was giving overtime to the cleaners.
She manages thirteen stations, from midtown to SoHo and the Lower East Side, and disinfecting them had become a high priority: the handrails, the garbage cans, the MetroCard vending machines, the turnstiles, the elevator buttons—“everywhere a customer touches.” That morning, she had carried bags of personal protective equipment with her as she rode the train to Delancey Street‐Essex Street, handing out supplies to employees who needed them. Although passenger traffic has plummeted, the subway still carries four hundred thousand people a day, and, Jackson had noticed, customers were very appreciative, saying, “Thank you so much for running,” and “I don’t know how I’d get to work without the train.”
Back on the phone: “Did Delancey call for comfort?” (Sotto voce: “That means leaving the booth to go to the bathroom.”) Above her mask, her brows knitted. She listened, and nodded. “Whenever you leave the booth, you need to call,” she said. “We’ll never tell you no.” As she spoke, she typed data into a spreadsheet on a computer monitor. Her energy seemed unlimited. But maybe she was exhausted. It was hard to tell with the mask.
Around three o’clock, Megan Liu stared at her screen as Lee Goldman, the head of the Columbia University Medical Center, addressed her graduating class from his office desk: “I just want to say how proud we are of all of you . . .” A pixelated audience looked on as a few other speakers made their remarks. Goldman cut back in. “I apologize,” he said. “I’m going to have to get off for another call.” More than six hundred COVID patients had been admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian, where Goldman is a cardiologist—he was in the process of “doing some redeployment,” he said, and left the Zoom meeting.
Liu sat in her apartment on a small couch next to a mini-fridge, drinking a glass of white wine. She and her classmates were graduating a month early in order to provide a wave of reinforcements for New York City’s hospitals. The ceremony lasted an hour. At the end, the faculty invited each student to offer a five-word salutation. One by one, the faces of the city’s newest doctors popped up on Liu’s screen, along with their messages: “Please don and doff carefully.” “Healthcare is a human right.” And “We’re coming for you, coronavirus!”
Seven people on the line. “Do we have Ginnie or Robert yet?” Robert York, the editor-in-chief of the Daily News, asked.
“I’ll Slack ’em,” Ginger Adams Otis, the metro editor, said. A few minutes later, at 3:03 P.M., Ginnie Teo, the national editor, and Robert Dominguez, a senior editor, joined the call. Nine people on the line.
“I’ll get the party started,” Otis said. She came to the Daily News in 2012, from the Post. “If we wanted to do only a tangentially corona story, the best one we’ve got going today is ‘BK SHOT,’ ” she said, using the story’s slug. Shamar Davis, a twenty-one-year-old who lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, had been taking care of his quarantined aunt when he noticed a fight going on outside her apartment building. Davis tried to break up the fight, which led to his getting shot and killed. “We don’t have a picture of the shooter,” Otis said. “But we’ve got an interview with the aunt. And it’s a very strong, emotional story.
“On the political side, you’ve got the big mask order from Governor Cuomo. The enforcement of this is a little bit up in the air.” She went on, “It’s leading the Web site. And it’s the big talker.”
“Have we talked to the police about what they’re going to do to avoid arbitrary enforcement?” York asked. “It has the risk of being a little stop-and-frisk-ish.”
“We have questions in to them,” Otis replied. “I’ll make sure that’s on the list.”
“I want to make sure that we understand what it means whenever Cuomo comes forward with an order like this,” York said. “It starts to put some teeth behind it—even if they’re little teeth.”
“So,” Eddie Glazarev, the director of print operations, said. “Do we want to do something like a ‘NO SHOES, NO MASK, NO SERVICE’ kind of front page tomorrow?” After the call, it would be up to Glazarev’s team to create a mockup of a front page—“the wood,” in tabloid-speak.
“I think that’s the place to start,” York said. “Or you can do something with Cuomo, some masked-man Lone Ranger thing.”
“Who would be Tonto?” Otis asked.
“De Blasio,” Glazarev said. “Actually, de Blasio could be Tonto’s horse.” Laughter. “That horse was the worst.”
Sam Youkilis for The New Yorker
The temperature was dropping when, in the late afternoon, N.Y.P.D. officers approached a man on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. He was sitting on the sidewalk, in a patch of waning sun. The officers knew the man as Michael, and his story was always the same: he was waiting there for a car, which would take him home, to California. “I have it on order,” Michael told the officers, Joseph Musquez and Erik Bunze, who are members of the Citywide Mobile Crisis Outreach Team.
The officers were accompanied by Courtney Cruise, a big guy with a faint Jamaican accent, wearing cargo pants, an N95 mask, and purple nitrile gloves. Cruise is one of twelve nurses that the N.Y.P.D. recently brought in to help officers connect the thirty-five hundred or so people who live on the city’s streets to hospital care, shelter, and other services. COVID-19 was complicating these efforts. Homeless people are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus: many have unaddressed health problems, and self-isolating is difficult to maintain on the streets. The officers were handing out masks, but the recipients usually refused to wear them, saying that they were uncomfortable or looked weird. Cruise tried hard to overcome this resistance. “The homeless, they’re not stupid,” he said. “They can talk.”
Michael sat beneath a blanket, with an empty McDonald’s coffee cup and a box of Goya crackers. Cruise reminded him that the coronavirus is highly contagious and damages the lungs, adding, “Everybody’s wearing a mask now—you see?” Michael, who has alert blue eyes and a full beard, thought that it was 2005, and said that he was fifty-two (he’s sixty-two), but he wasn’t coughing. His breathing seemed fine. Cruise checked his pulse. Michael amiably followed Cruise’s instructions to remove his Nikes, exposing his bare feet. Cruise, feeling the skin, detected no sign of fever. Officer Musquez handed him a ziplock bag containing hand sanitizer and masks. Michael tucked it away and said, “Thanks for dropping by.”
In Union Square, the team met Kelvin and Eleanor, who had become friends only the previous night. Eleanor was bare-legged; she wore a long black skirt and a furry coat. When she began singing a Rita Marley song, Cruise joined her: “I wanna get high, so high.” Eleanor and Kelvin finally agreed to sleep inside—the team found them beds, in separate locations. Eleanor refused a mask. “I don’t have the AIDS virus,” she told them.
As Eleanor and Kelvin left, in N.Y.P.D. vans, team members suddenly sprinted across the street—a man’s coat was on fire. He had stuck a lit pipe into the pocket of his parka and now stood in a swirl of feathers.
At around 5 P.M., two doctors, a nurse, and a respiratory therapist met in a corridor of an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell Medicine, then opened a door and walked into a room. Bright fluorescent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man with paper-white hair, age seventy-five. Intubated. His skin was nearly translucent. He’d been improving, and was breathing almost entirely on his own through a ventilator’s tube, which snaked between his lips and down his throat.
The group gathered silently at the bedside. The man lay still and watched. He seemed to understand what was about to happen. The respiratory therapist reached with a gloved hand to open the man’s lips. Using a narrow suction wand, he slowly drew mucus and saliva into a cannister mounted on the wall, already half full of brownish-green debris. The man looked into the therapist’s eyes; the therapist covered the man’s face with a blue absorbent pad, to prevent aerosolized virus from spraying into the room.
“One, two, three,” the therapist said. He pulled the tube out in a quick, sinuous motion. The man coughed and gasped. His eyes bulged. He took a deep breath, loud in the quiet room. A nurse stepped forward, placing an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. The man’s breathing eased. Everyone looked at one another, and exhaled.
Evening
As the workday ended, Max Rose, an Afghanistan-war veteran who represents Staten Island and southern Brooklyn in Congress, was tying up loose ends. For a few weeks, he had deployed with the National Guard and led a contingent of troops from the 69th Infantry Regiment. Their mission was to help turn a psychiatric facility on Staten Island’s southeast shore into a two-hundred-and-sixty-two-bed emergency COVID-19 hospital. The hospital, designed for patients who don’t require intensive care, had been put together in six days, its five floors filled with equipment and staffed with doctors, nurses, soldiers, contractors, and cleaners. Every bed needed an I.V. pole. Every room needed a surge protector. Every pod of rooms needed five shower chairs. There were access cards, computers, and Internet to set up, operating procedures to establish. A new hundred-car parking lot had been paved outside.
Rose is short, with a shaved head, square shoulders, and a drill sergeant’s voice. From the windows of the new facility, he could see Staten Island University Hospital, which had been overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. Staten Island is a borough of essential workers: nurses, bus drivers, cops, firemen, sanitation workers. Rose lives nearby, but had been spending his nights in a hotel, to protect his wife from exposure. National Guard soldiers were on duty at the ambulance station, coördinating food deliveries and distributing equipment. It was Rose’s last day of deployment before returning to politics. He still had to do a clothes drop in the parking garage of his apartment building. His work with the “Fighting 69th,” as Robert E. Lee supposedly dubbed the unit during the Civil War, had been “strictly operational.” At one point, he had driven to Pennsylvania to pick up a supply of garbage cans. “That’s not normally the way a member of Congress thinks,” he said. “It’d be nice if Congress were thinking a little more like that. Operational intensity.”
–
Between five and six-thirty in the evening, parents arrived to pick up their kids at Bronx Collaborative High School, on the southern edge of Van Cortlandt Park. Brett Schneider, the founding principal, had been there since seven that morning. Although his school is closed, the Department of Education had chosen the building to be one of its fifty-seven Regional Enrichment Centers. The sites, which serve three meals and function as a kind of quarantine day camp, are for students whose parents are essential workers. Schneider had volunteered immediately to supervise his school’s program. He knew how to get the classrooms ready for social distancing: “It’s a natural extension of prepping for the SATs.” At both ends of the day, a nurse takes every kid’s temperature. One of the site’s volunteers had been teaching step dance, emphasizing the distance between each child. They had six-feet-apart rock-paper-scissors competitions that morning, and six-feet-apart speed-walking relay races (no baton passing) that afternoon.
Schneider, who has shoulder-length black hair, was standing in a marble rotunda, just inside the school’s main entrance, holding a walkie-talkie. Two of the borough’s major hospitals—North Central and Montefiore—are within walking distance. One mother had just got off a ten-hour shift administering non-stop dialysis in an acute-care unit. “Lots of young people that had no previous kidney issues are needing dialysis now,” she told Schneider. “The problem is these folks, if they survive, are going to have kidney damage for the rest of their lives.” A woman arrived who was working a night shift in the emergency room in two hours. She had used the day to get some sleep—“so I can go to my shift energized,” she said. Her son handed her a gift from his crafts class—a paper rose.
Jerome Strauss for The New Yorker
Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The New Yorker
In Central Park, the runners along the cinder track on the perimeter of what is officially called the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir—Mrs. Onassis lived not far from it, on Fifth Avenue, and jogged around it, too—formed a single file of dread-in-motion, appropriately watchful and spaced. Early on in the pandemic, they had moved with an almost infuriating disregard for the new reality, running, most of them maskless, in that eternal clockwork way of city runners, seeming to believe that, once started, they were on an unbreakable internal drive, like so many windup mechanical bunnies, unable to slow down, much less stop. Some small effort at social distancing had gone on, but, when a runner ahead had been going too slowly, the others, rather than adjust their pace to maintain the spacing, still tended to come zooming along, as though their legs were self-governing. This, runners will tell you, is essential to sustaining the aerobic benefits, and, generally, to being a runner.
Over time, the pace slowed. They began self-organizing, finding an entirely new way to run. The runners still wore their usual garb—the tight-fitting lower half and the loose-fitting upper half, the ugly, expensive sneakers—but masks and bandannas appeared. Now, from a distance, they looked less like racers and more like a frieze, a procession moving in a stately way across the beautiful screen of the West Side towers beyond. They were moping more than moving, just like the rest of us.
Richard Renaldi for The New Yorker
At 6:55 P.M., on the top floor of an East Village walkup, John Fredericks, a restaurant beverage director, was setting up cables and an amp on the fire escape of the apartment he shares with his wife, Karly, a designer, and their rat terrier, Mudd. Their building is near St. Stanislaus, a Polish church, and Trash and Vaudeville, the punk-rock leather-pants-and-studded-jacket emporium, whose legendary longtime manager, Jimmy Webb, had died the day before, of cancer. Near the window, Fredericks tuned his electric guitar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stratocaster neck. For the past three weeks, during the city’s nightly cheer for health-care workers, he had been playing a Jimi Hendrix-style “Star-Spangled Banner,” good and loud, for the neighborhood. He’d wanted to celebrate medical professionals; Fredericks’s two brothers and his father are E.R. doctors, and Karly is pregnant.
When he began the new tradition, Fredericks said, the claps were just starting in the East Village. “The first night, somebody yelled, ‘Do it again tomorrow!’ ” So he did, and then he kept doing it. When he skipped a night, “people were looking up at our fire escape, and they were, like, pissed.” As the hour approached, he climbed out the window. Golden light from the west illuminated his hair and his teal guitar. He clapped, and others cheered from windows, fire escapes, balconies, the sidewalk. Two cars had stopped on the street below, the passengers looking up. At 7:01, Fredericks began to play.
As the sun set, Kim Zambito, a funeral director at Sherman’s Flatbush Memorial Chapel, in Midwood, Brooklyn, entered through the mortuary’s back door, wearing jeans and a baseball cap. “I’m back,” she said. “Where are we going to put this one?” Bodies kept coming in—a dozen by the early evening, and counting—half of them from house calls at apartments across the borough and the rest from the hospital morgues. In the parking lot, next to Zambito’s van, which held the body of an eighty-three-year-old man, two hearses already contained caskets for the following day.
In the main lobby, Chris Kasler, who is fifty-four, the son and grandson of funeral directors, sat at a plastic folding table covered in death certificates. He checked the master calendar, with his mask pulled down below his nostrils. Dozens of burials were scheduled in the coming days, each annotated in a dense, inky hand listing the name of the deceased and the cemetery: twenty-two interments on Thursday, twenty on Friday. But no bodies had gone out for funerals that day—it was the end of Passover, and most of the cemeteries were closed. “It causes a backup, because the remains are still coming in,” he said.
Kasler and Zambito walked down the hallway to a door with a sign that read “No Admittance.” Usually, the room was reserved for embalming; they were looking for someone with an upcoming funeral to put into a casket and move to a different room, freeing up space for the latest arrival. Inside, four tables held eight bodies, some of them in scuffed orange pouches from the hospital, others in clear sleeves no thicker than garbage bags.
“Nothing here,” Kasler said, checking the schedule. In the storage room next door, Sherman’s refrigeration unit, which held nine more bodies, was also full. They had better luck in the chapel, a large carpeted space with wooden pews, where one of the bodies was swaddled in a white sheet. Kasler and Zambito brought in a casket on an aluminum dolly, and bent over the corpse, lifting it delicately at both ends. Kasler rolled the casket to another room, while Zambito returned to the van for the stretcher.
At 8:30 P.M., Dr. Heather Jones and her patient Lisa Cintron decided to go ahead with a C-section. Cintron had been at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, in Park Slope, for two days after visiting her ob-gyn on Monday morning, wondering if her amniotic sac was leaking. It was not, but her blood pressure had been high. Since she was close to her due date, and there was an open slot at the hospital, her doctor scheduled an induction for Monday night. The process was slow. Cintron spent hours dilating, sucking on ice chips and trying to nap. She had tested negative for COVID, which was a relief: she was an operating-room I.T. specialist for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and she knew how common it was to be asymptomatic. She’d been working from home, taking breaks to wash and fold baby clothes and set up the nursery—dove gray, with darker gray trim, and a baseball decal with the baby’s name, Christopher, on the wall. But for the first day and a half at the hospital she’d hardly slept, and she hadn’t eaten anything. It was hard to relax with a mask on.
“Just think about the big picture,” her husband kept telling her. “We’re going to have so many stories to tell this kid.” Cintron’s mother walked to the hospital and stood outside, waving to her through the window. Her sister, who’d had five children at the same hospital, told her, on the phone, that she was in good hands. The nurses were attentive and cheerful. Dr. Jones, too, her dark eyes peeking out behind a face shield, was kind as she explained that Cintron was still not sufficiently dilated.
Cintron was wheeled into an operating room and hooked up to monitors—she heard how fast her heart was racing in the skitter of beeps. She was given an epidural. Her husband was allowed in, wearing a mask and gloves and a hairnet. Cintron was shaking uncontrollably, and numb from the neck down. Then she felt a hard tug, and heard crying. She still couldn’t open her eyes. Her teeth were chattering. Shortly after 9:18, she heard her husband taking the baby, saying that he was a miracle.
Sam Youkilis for The New Yorker
As the evening shoved on, and all the surfaces were Lysoled, all the dishes washed, dried, and stowed, and it became too hard to watch another cycle of cable news or binge-watch the latest streaming phenomenon, an apartment-bound man on the back end of middle age confronted a stack of books that were being mentioned all the time these days: Defoe, Boccaccio, Camus, the whole syllabus of plague literature. He couldn’t. Instead, he picked up “The Zoo of the New,” a grab-bag anthology of poems (“from Sappho to Paul Muldoon”) edited by Nick Laird and Don Paterson. He opened it and, uncannily, within a few pages, landed on these lines of Auden:
. . . Unendowed with wealth or pity,Little birds with scarlet legs,Sitting on their speckled eggs,Eye each flu-infected city.
He snapped the book shut and set it aside. He sent a few texts to family. He checked the refrigerator and closed it. He washed his hands.
Finally, wanting a moment that was not flu-infected, he thought about watching ESPN, which in the absence of actual sports had contrived a very exciting event: pro ballplayers, some young and bored, others retired and thickening, playing games of H-O-R-S-E in their respective back yards, often thousands of miles apart. That would be more like it.
After ten, in an apartment in Greenpoint, Rae Haas, a twenty-four-year-old sex worker, set up a camera on a tripod, pressed Record, and stepped naked into the shower. Rae, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” massaged purple dye into the roots of their already violet hair and let the dye run down their body. After several minutes, they got out of the shower and took some nude selfies, and washed the dye off their hands in the sink. Later, on OnlyFans, a platform where sex workers and artists can publish content to paid subscribers, Rae would release the video. In March, the Web site saw a seventy-five-per-cent increase in new accounts.
Rae’s partner was watching “The Return of Godzilla” and eating sushi in bed. Rae got in, and started texting. A man whom Rae had met at the strip club Pumps, in Williamsburg, where Rae had worked as a dancer until March, now wanted a constant stream of nude photographs. Another client wanted Rae to verbally humiliate and then coddle him. Since self-quarantine had begun in the city, Rae had noticed clients becoming more “emotionally hungry.” “They’re saying things like ‘Hey, you didn’t text me all day,’ and ‘Why don’t you want to talk to me?’ ” Rae said. “Everyone’s on their phones right now, but they might not realize you’re texting thirty other people.” Clients were also “ten times thirstier,” asking more directly for the explicit sex acts they wanted to watch.
Others had ghosted Rae. “A lot of people I was talking with before the virus—a lot of them are quarantined with their wives,” they said. “I’ve messaged them, and they’d be, like, ‘I can’t talk for quarantine. It’s too dangerous.’ ” Some of Rae’s clients just wanted to commiserate about their financial woes. “But I’m, like, ‘Listen, if you’re gonna gripe and moan about the state of the world to me, please pay me—because, same.’ ”
Caroline Tompkins for The New Yorker
Caroline Tompkins for The New Yorker
Captain Jackie Benton was back where he’d started at dawn: in a tugboat on the north shore of Staten Island. It was nearly eleven o’clock and a half-moon hung over Newark Bay. Its light skimmed over the empty waters of the Kill Van Kull, past the shores of Coney Island and Sandy Hook to the vast and unquarantined Atlantic. Benton had spent the day escorting container ships bearing supplies for New York—from the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, around Bergen Point to Port Elizabeth and back. Now he was docked at the McAllister yard with five other tugs. Through the windows of the wheelhouse, Benton could see them rocking in their private berths, their cabins aglow. At least two crew members would be awake on each one—checking engines, listening for dispatches, doing paperwork. Even in better times, Benton rarely left his boat. Tugs were social-distancing before it was cool, he liked to say.
A month had passed since he’d been home with his family, on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, and the only people he’d seen in that time were his first mate, his engineer, and his deckhand. Benton, who is forty-four years old, with a mop of brown hair and a swampy drawl, has worked on boats since he was eighteen. His grandfather was a tugboat captain, his father a tugboat engineer. He has spent almost a third of his life confined to less than two thousand square feet: wheelhouse, galley, and cabin. If all those years on tugs have taught him anything, it’s the blessing of a well-adjusted crew. Misery spreads faster than happiness.
Benton’s tug, the Captain Brian A. McAllister, is one of the most powerful ships in the McAllister fleet, and also the nimblest. With its nearly seven-thousand-horsepower engines and azimuth propeller, it can go forward, backward, and sideways, or spin like a top on the water. On the morning of March 30th, Benton had used it to help escort the U.S.N.S. Comfort to Manhattan. Almost nine hundred feet long, the Comfort could barely squeeze into its berth, at Pier 90. The Brian pulled the stern one way while another tug pushed the bow in the other, pivoting the ship ninety degrees. Then the tugs nudged the Comfort forward, pulling back on their tethers as it eased into place. It was, Benton thought, a defining moment in the country’s history. Bringing a hospital ship in for a pandemic—he didn’t believe anybody had ever seen that before.
Laura Kolbe, an internist, was working the night shift at Lower Manhattan Hospital with Anna Dill, a doctor who had come to the city the week before. Dill and some fifty colleagues from Cayuga Medical Center, in Ithaca, had taken school buses to Manhattan, to help. Kolbe and Dill bonded over the discomforts of the N95 mask, which seemed, they concluded, to have been designed for the face of a man. The day before, New York State had reported its first decline in hospitalizations since the pandemic began, but Kolbe and Dill worried that it was just a plateau, not a true descent.“There’s a lot of weather metaphors,” Dill said. “People are saying, ‘This is just a breather before the second wave comes,’ or ‘Maybe we are in the eye of the hurricane, and that’s why it’s calm.’ ”
While relief felt premature, endless hyperarousal no longer felt sustainable. In the past few weeks, Kolbe had been reading the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. “He had this alter ego, Mr. Cogito, who was this sort of hapless Everyman trying to navigate the bureaucracy of mid-century Poland,” she said. “I’ve found odd comfort in poetry about various kinds of labyrinths and roadblocks. How can you continue to play the game when the rules keep changing?”
The internists were looking over a list of “watchers”—patients at risk of imminent death. All of them had COVID-19. One of the patients was homeless and had already been hospitalized; he had improved enough to be discharged to a hotel converted into a makeshift shelter, but he returned to the hospital when hotel staff found him passed out on the floor. Another watcher had been working on Wall Street on 9/11, and his lungs were failing. After arriving at the hospital, he had expressed so much anxiety that he was given an iPad to keep in his room, so that he could have virtual sessions with a psychologist. Kolbe imagined that he was thinking, “What are the chances that, for a second time, the worst will have happened and I will still pull through and walk out of this situation?”
The watcher who concerned her the most was a woman who spoke Cantonese. Every time the woman moved even slightly, her oxygen levels dipped. When Kolbe needed to communicate with her, she would walk to a part of the hospital corridor marked with green tape, indicating that it was free of biohazards, dial an interpreter phone-bank service from her cell phone, place the phone in the pocket of her scrubs, put on her protective gown, and cross to the part of the hallway demarcated by red tape, the “dirty” zone. Kolbe would try to get her pocket as close as possible to the woman’s face, to allow a conversation with the interpreter, on speakerphone. Sometimes all the interpreter could hear was the sound of rustling fabric.
The woman had managed to grasp the thrust of the interpreter’s message: she should not lie on her back all the time. When a person is supine for too long, lung tissue may start to collapse, and blood may pool. Every few hours, nurses turned her from her left side to her stomach, then to her right side, then to her back. When Kolbe walked into the woman’s room, she said, she was touched to see her in an “odalisque position,” as if she were sunbathing. A few hours later, just before midnight, she peeked into the woman’s room. The woman had been rotated again. Now she was on her back, her legs crossed at the ankle. Her chest was rising and falling at an easy pace. Doctors love epithets: Murphy’s sign, Battle’s sign, Homans’ sign. Kolbe thought about coining a new one: the Ankle sign. “Anyone with their legs crossed so neatly at the ankles must be faring reasonably well,” she observed. She shut the door. ♦
Written by Rachel Aviv, Robert P. Baird, Burkhard Bilger, Jonathan Blitzer, Vinson Cunningham, William Finnegan, Tyler Foggatt, Ian Frazier, Jennifer Gonnerman, Adam Gopnik, Zach Helfand, Dhruv Khullar, Carolyn Kormann, Eric Lach, Sarah Larson, D. T. Max, Alexis Okeowo, Helen Rosner, Kelefa Sanneh, Michael Schulman, Alexandra Schwartz, Jia Tolentino, Lizzie Widdicombe, Paige Williams, and Emily Witt.
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