Thursday, March 12th; A cleaning-company employee sanitizes a handrailing at Port Authority.of the airlines was going to go bankrupt."
When she saw Zoe and Xander at
last, Cleveland said, "it was just such an
enormous relie£ And more emotion
than you can easily imagin.c.1bis is the
first day I've bc:cn able to smile in weeks.
But now they have to do a mandatory
self-quarantine for two weeks."
Zoe said, "Not that I'm not glad to
be home, but I'll miss school The mood
on the plane was weird-half the plane
was wearing masks."Because safety masks
were sold out in Amsterdam, she and
her brother decided to wear masks that
their parents had bought them out of an
abundance of caution. They were JM
respirators, the kind an industrial worker
!Dlghtwear in the presence of toxic aero-
sols. "I fcl.t people were judging us," Zoe
said. "It's a crazy mask. No one else on
the plane had on such a serious mask."
C
rises take an X-ray of a citf s da.ss
structure. After 9/11, it was the
Middle Eastern and South.Asian taxi.-
drivers who suddenly became visi-
ble, lining their cabs with American4! THE NEY~ MAl\CH 30, 2020flags for fear of being taken for ji-
hadis. Now particular visibility falls
on bicycle deliverymen, Mexicans and
Indians, the emissaries of Seamless,
who modestly shoulder the burden of
fcc:ding the middle cl.ass. On the East
Side, outside a Thai restaurant at
7 P.M. on Saturday, a single delivery-
man balanced five bags of food hang-
ing from his handlebars. His liveli-
hood hinges on his getting meals to
people who are self-isolating, a lux-
ury he doesn't have. Although he was
grateful for the work, he said, he was
a little frightened about his own ex-
posure. Asked how many more sacks
he ferries during his shift these days,
he shrugged and said at least ten times
the usual load.
Just as the medical system depends
on the lowest paid of the health work-
ers-the orderlies and custodians-
the food system, now that restaurants
have been limited to takeout and de-
livery, depends on a whole cadre of
men pedalling bicycles. They are lit-
enilly overburdened, and, that night,this one got off to an unsteady start,
like a plane in wartime trying to take
off with too large a load of refugees.
He glanced up at a high-rise condo-
minium being built on Madison Av-
enue and Eighty-ninth Street. Con-
struction work continues right through
the closures-no letup in the noise
and activity. even on the weekend. The
workmen, in their puffy vests and hard
hats, were side by side, though they
didn't seem particularly worried, or
constrained. The exigencies of Man-
hattan real estate and development are
evidently undeterred by the crisis.
What's strange about this ener-
getic construction of more luxury
housing is that, in the existing apart-
ment buildings nearby, on the impos-
sibly wealthy blocks of Fifth Avenue,
scarcely a light can be seen. Nobody's
home. Most of the truly wealthy have
gone, by helicopter or private jet, to
the Hamptons or to an island some-
where. There can be something vex-
ing about the thought that those
whose wealth relies on the intense,