OUI\ LOCAL COl\l\E.SPONDENTJABUNDANCE OF CAUTION
Entering a time of containment, New Yor.k is at ii! hest and its worst.
8Y ADAM GOPNIK
Pl-IOTOGl\APHS BY PHIL.JP MONR:iOMER.YP
lagues happen only to people.An-
imals can suffer from mass info:-
ti.ons, of course, but they experi-
ence them as one more bad blow from
an unpredictable and predatory nanaral
environment. Only people put mental
brackets around a phenomenon like the
coronavirus pandemic and attempt to
give it a name and some historical. per-
spectm; some sense of pn:cedencc and
possibility. The coronavirus, indifferent
to individuals, has no creed or moral pur-
pose; but it becomes human when it hiu
UB----ncither microscopic nor historic,just
the si7.e we are as we cxperieru:e its dfects.
AB Albert Camus wrote in "The Plague,"
the 1947 novel that's becoming to this
disruption what W. H. Auden's "Sep-
tember 1, 1939" was to the aftermath of
9/11, the microbe has no meaning; we
seek to create one in the chaos it brings.
The final weekend of semi-ordinary
life in New Yorluu:rived on Friday the 13th.
In the week that followed, New York be-
came a ghost town in a ghost nation on
a ghost planet. The gravity and scale of
what is happening can overwhelm the
details of daily life, in which human be-
ings seek a plateau of normalcy in ab-
normal times, just as they always have
in blitzes and battles. Nobody has any
confidence at all about whether we are
seeing the first phases of a new normal,
the brief cll1m before a worse stonn, or
a wise reaction that may allow, not so
horribly long from now, for a renewal of
common life. Here are some notes on
things seen by one walker in the city, and
some voices heard among New Yorkers
bearing witness, on and off the streets.
I
t happened slowly and then sud-
denly. On Monday, March 9th, the
spectre of a pandemic in New York was
still off on the puzzling horizon. By
Friday, it wa.s the dominant fact oflife.38 THE NEY~ MARCH 30, 2020New Yorkers began to adopt a grim
new dance of "social distancing." On a
sparsely peopled 5 train, heading down
to Grand Central Terminal on Satur-
day morning, passengers warily tried
to achieve an even, strategic spacing,
like chess pieces during an endgame:
the rook all the way down here, but
tlucatening the king from the back.row.
Then, when the doors opened, they got
off the train one by one, in single, hes-
itant file, unlearning in a minute New
York habits ingrained over lifetimes,
the dbowed rush fur the door.
In the relatively empty subway cars,
one can focus on the human details of
the riders.A}. Liebling,in a piece pub-
lished in these pages some sixty years
ago, recounted the tale of a once fa-
mous New York murder, in which the
headless torso of a man was found
wrapped in oilcloth, :B.oating in the East
River. The hero of the tale, as Liebling
chose to tell it, was a young reporter
for the great New York World, who
identified the body by type before any-
one else did: he saw that the corpse's
fingertips were wrinkled in a way that
characterized "rubbers" -masseurs--
in Turkish baths. Only someone whose
hands were wet that often would have
those fingertips. On the subway, in
the street, nearly everyone has rubbers'
hands now, with skin shrivelled from
excessive washing.
At the other end of the day, in Cen-
tral Park late at night, the only people
out were the ones W21ki.ng their dogs.
Dogs are still allowed to have proxim-
ity, if only to other dogs. They can't be
kept from it. The negotiations of prox-
iinity-the dogs demanding it, the CJWil-
ers trying to resist it without being ac-
tively rude-are newly arrived in the
city. Walking home down the almost
empty avenues, you could see the samesi1houette, repeated: dogs straining to-
ward dogs on long-stretched leashes,
held by watchful owners keeping their
distance, a nightly choreography of an-
imal need and human caution.A
t J.F.K., in Queens, during that
strange weekend, people huddled
and waited anxiously for the home-
coming of family members who had
been stranded abroad, with the under-
standing that homecoming now comes
at a cost arriving passengers have been
asked to self-quarantine fur two weeks.
J .F.K. had been spared some of the
nightmarish lines and confusion seen
at Dulles, in Washington, and O'Hare,
in Chicago, following Donald Trump's
abrupt decision the previous Wednes-
day (re1ayed in a garbled announcement)
to suspend most travel from Europe.
But no one is spared the emotional
ambivalence of the moment every feel-
ing pulled out hard, like an attenuated
nerve. Parents are keenly aware that,
in bringing their children home to what
is meant to be safety, they are bring-
ing them to an increasingly unsafe place.
"Barren" was the word that Lisa
Cleve1and, who lives in New Jersey; used
for the normally bustling airport. She
spent part of Saturday morning wait-
ing for her teen-age children Zoe and
Xander, who had been staying in the
Netherlands. Their father is a Dutch
citizen. "I'm still trying to understand
the risks, but he's been tracking this for
more than two months," Cleveland said.
"He's that guy." Getting the kids back
to the U.S. before further barriers went
up wasn't easy. "Xander and Zoe-she
likes the double dot over her name, oth-
erwise it becomes a Dutch word that
rhymes with 'cow'--were in Amsterdam.
We struggled and struggled to find them
tickets home. Someone told us that one