48 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
BELGRADE, SERBIA, BY JASU HUcitron tea by the register and was weigh-
ing whether it was worth five bucks when
the woman behind me asked if I wanted
to trade it for ginger-lemon. I looked
hesitant, but the dude behind the counter
wiped both bottles down and handed
them back between gloved fingers.
These grocers had—right along with
their counterparts in emergency ser-
vices—helped keep their cities running.
But once I got outside, walking to my
car, a white guy behind me yelled a loud
“Hey!” I turned, thinking he was talking
to me. But the target of his anger was
an Asian woman halfway across the
parking lot. He yelled “Hey!” again, fum-
ing, pointing to an abandoned shop-
ping cart. He seemed, for some reason,
to think she had left it there. He asked
the woman what the fuck she thought
she was doing.
The woman and I exchanged looks.
I walked over and moved the cart, wav-
ing her away. The guy gave me a long
stare and climbed into his truck. Two
kids sat in the back seat, blinking through
the windows.
Last month, the mayor issued a stay-
at-home order, signalling that we’d be
navigating this situation, together, for
some time. But the burden is not dis-
tributed equally: besides nurses and
doctors, caregivers and delivery people,
grocers are on the front lines. They don’t
get to work from home. God forbid
that we’re anything but grateful.
I ventured into a decimated Whole
Foods the other day and managed to
snag the last pecan pie. At the register,
I asked the cashier, a Latinx dude, how
it was going. He looked sleepy. But he
smiled, and said that the day had been
chaos. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ve
got this. But it’s gonna fucking suck.”
—Bryan Washington
1
MUSICWILLBEIMPORTANTW
e’re all going to be spending some
time alone now. I once spent the
better part of a year by myself in my
apartment. It was 2016. I was not under
house arrest. I was not in quarantine. I
was sick with what we and our doctors
call major depression. I would rather
call it suicide, which I see not as an event
or a deed, not a consequence of anguish
or deliberations over the meaning oflife, but as the natural ongoing outcome
of trauma and isolation. And though at
times I functioned, I nonetheless could
not bring myself to write, or read much,
or cook for myself, or exercise, or open
the mailbox. I let the mail sit, until the
mailman, unable to fit all the flyers and
bills and tax notices, emptied the box,
wrapped everything with a rubber band,
and left the bundle on the entryway
floor. Those were bad days, when I made
it outside and into the neighborhood—
the days when, on my way out the build-
ing’s front door, I found that mail. The
problem was terror. The problem was
that I was not safe. There was danger.
I’d lost my sense of belonging, and lived
in abjection, lonely, cut off, trying not
to die but working just to stay alive. Fear
and loneliness can both seem to last an
eternity. Maybe at some time in your
life you’ve hidden yourself away, scur-
ried past the mailbox, let the phone ring,
if it rings at all. Maybe you’ve distanced
yourself from friends, or lost them for
good. What will happen to you if you
go outside? I put the mail in the back
of the closet, and then took an Ativan.
And yet I needed people’s voices. I