THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 11COMMENT
LIFEATTHEEPICENTER
T
he streets of New York City are so
desolate now that you half expect
tumbleweed to blow along the pave-
ment where cars and cabs once clus-
tered. There is barely a plane in the sky.
You hear the wheeze of an empty bus
rounding a corner, the flutter of pigeons
on a fire escape, the wail of an ambu-
lance. The sirens are unnervingly fre-
quent. But even on these sunny, early-
spring days there are few people in sight.
For weeks, as the distancing rules of the
pandemic took hold, a gifted saxophone
player who stakes his corner outside a
dress shop on Broadway every morn-
ing was still there, playing “My Favor-
ite Things” and “All the Things You
Are.” Now he is gone, too.
The spectacle of New York without
New Yorkers is the result of a commu-
nal pact. We have absented ourselves
from the schools and the playgrounds,
the ballparks and the bars, the places
where we work, because we know that
life now depends on our withdrawal
from life. The vacancy of our public
spaces, though antithetical to the pur-
pose of a great city, which is defined by
the constancy and the poetry of its en-
counters, is needed for its preservation.
And so you stick your head out the
window of an apartment that you haven’t
left in days and look down and around.
You wait awhile before you see a sin-
gle scurrying soul, her arms full of gro-
ceries. She’s wearing a mask and walk-
ing with the urgency of a thief. She
crosses Broadway, past blooming mag-nolias on the traffic divider. She quick-
ens her step and heads toward Amster-
dam Avenue. Like all of us, she is
trying to outrun the thing she cannot
see. You close the window and wash
your hands for the fourteenth time that
day. “Happy birthday to you .. .” Twenty
seconds of it. Never less.
“On any person who desires such
queer prizes, New York will bestow the
gift of loneliness and the gift of pri-
v a c y, ” E. B. White wrote, in the summer
of 1948. But these queer prizes are now
a public-health requirement. Because
New Yorkers are not medieval monks,
we mostly chafe at the imposed solitude.
We do our best to overcome it through
technologies that White would have
had a hard time imagining: We text. We
Zoom. We send one another links about
virology. (We are all immunologists now.)
We watch televised briefings that areILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
as long as art-house movies. The poli-
ticians review the bullet points of the
day, nearly all of them ominous. The
reporters sit at least six feet apart, when
they do not phone in their plaintive
questions, asking, in sum: Do we have
the medicine, the equipment, the food
we need to keep going? When can we
go out again? And then you ask your-
self if you need more liquid soap. The
hours are as long as evening shadows.
But then something happens. Joy
comes at seven. (Or is it sheer cathar-
sis?) Every evening, in many neighbor-
hoods across the city, cheering breaks
out, the way it would when the Yan-
kees clinched another World Series title.
It spills from the stoops and the side-
walks, from apartment windows and
rooftops, for all the nurses, orderlies,
doctors, E.M.T.s––everyone who can-
not shelter in place and continues to go
about healing the people of the city.
We take out our smartphones and
record the roar outside: the clapping
and the whooping, the tambourines and
wind chimes, the vuvuzelas. The guy
across the street is a master of the cow-
bell. Before it all dies down, we’ve sent
off the recording to a loved one who
works as an E.R. doc—and to others
who are sick in bed or out of range of
our anxious, canyoned city—the city
described every minute on cable news
as “the epicenter.”
What’s being applauded at seven is
the courage of professionals, many of
them working without the protective
gear they need. Some have seen their
salaries cut; some have fallen ill, others
soon will. We’re applauding the likes of