THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 35
“But what will we name the baby after it becomes an adult?”• •
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.
T
he 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 build-
ings stretched up into the darkness.
Now and then on the nearby Belt Park-
way, E.M.S. trucks went by, flashing.
If you got close enough to the build-
ings, you could hear various things at-
tached 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 differ-
ent 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 gray-
ish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jer-
sey. 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 for-
get 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-fic-
tion 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 sen-
tence on Rikers Island for failing to
report to his parole officer, when Gov-
ernor Cuomo announced that he was
going to release several hundred “pa-
role 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 Is-
land 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 leavingRikers “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 hos-
pital 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 recy-
cling bin on the Upper West Side: “Liv-
ing Language: Italian,” “Dating Sucks,”
by Joanne Kimes, Voltaire’s “Candide,
or Optimism.”At eight o’clock, when Derrick Palmer
arrived at the Amazon fulfillment cen-
ter on Staten Island for his morning
shift, there was a new sign at the en-
trance: “Please walk slowly through the