THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 37
bounded downstairs to meet Ribeiro
in the front alcove, and leaped to kiss
her through her mask—the “wheaten
greetin’.” Ribeiro leashed her charges
and set off past the façades of Fifth Av-
enue, entering Central Park at Nine-
tieth Street and walking south. The
cherry trees were in blossom and the
skyscrapers of Billionaires’ Row stood
out against a startlingly clear sky.
Usually, Ribeiro walks a bouquet of
purebreds, and kids swarm her. Now,
she noticed, passersby looked a little
scared. She was scared, too. Ribeiro
charges by the hour, about thirty dol-
lars per dog. Some of her clients had
Venmoed cash gifts after heading to
their country houses, but her usual
pack—Tinker Bell, Kiki, Chouquie,
Teddy, Gilda, and many more—had
shrunk to just the two wheatens. Still,
she was content to be in the fresh air,
which gave her the feeling that every-
thing would return to normal soon.
Near the Alexander Hamilton statue,
Gio Ponti and Pippa spotted a squir-
rel. Ribeiro dropped the leashes and
the dogs ran off to chase it. They treed
the squirrel—a moment of unbridled
bliss. Then it was time to go home.
“Over here, guys,” she called out to
them, across an empty field. “Vem cá!”
At 9:55 a.m., El pulled up in his 2007
Acura MDX right in front of an apart-
ment building in the East Seventies.
Waiting for him was a man in a but-
ton-down shirt, a corporate lawyer at
a tech company. El, who has a beard
and a receding hairline, wore a hoodie
and a leather jacket. He handed over
the lawyer’s order: some edibles, sativa,
and indica for the night. The bill was
six hundred dollars. After the lawyer,
he was delivering to a finance guy in
Tribeca, a nurse in Bushwick, and a
film director in Ridgewood. El had
been dealing for ten years, but he’d
never been on a run like this. Instead
of an eighth, people were buying a
whole ounce; El’s gross was up almost
fifty per cent. “It’s multi-reason,” he
said. “Fear of drought and the fact peo-
ple are consuming more because they’re
working from home.”
The nicer the work conditions, the
happier El is. By these terms, these
were halcyon days. “I haven’t remem-
bered a time like this in ever,” he said.
His travel time was cut in half and the
parking was “seamless.” For social-dis-
tancing reasons, he usually dropped
the weed in his clients’ mailboxes; when
he met the lawyer, though, he stopped
to chat—about friends they knew who
were sick and others whose trips had
been cancelled. The lawyer was leav-
ing town for two months. His wife
called from a window, telling the men
to keep their masks on. El complied,
to keep the peace, but the coronavirus
doesn’t particularly frighten him. He
worked in health care before getting
into the marijuana business. “I’ve been
exposed to everything over the years,”
he said. The men kicked feet goodbye.- At ten-thirty, outside the PATH Fam-
ily Center, on 151st Street in the Bronx,
there was a smell of disinfectant and
marijuana. A bearded employee was
sweeping litter from the sidewalk. The
center, run by the Department of Home-
less Services, admits families with chil-
dren into the shelter system. It also tries
to help them find alternatives; PATH
stands for Prevention Assistance and
Temporary Housing. In ordinary times,
the ramp outside is crowded with stroll-
ers, bumper to bumper. Not now. The
hotels are empty, so some of them have
contracted with the city to provide six-
teen thousand rooms for temporary
shelter. Just as after 9/11 and
Hurricane Sandy, attention
and federal funds, provided
by FEMA, are focussed on the
city. As happened after those
disasters, one day the money
and the attention will end.
“It’s quiet now,” the employee
said, as he used his broom
to flip a cigarette butt out of
a tree pit and into his dust-
pan. “But I will tell you one
thing—when this coronavirus is over,
and the people start coming back, it will
get crazy around here.”
At 11:02 A.M., Seth Meyers logged on
to a Zoom call with a half-dozen
staffers from “Late Night with Seth
Meyers,” to discuss a segment for that
evening’s show. In the absence of a stu-
dio audience at 30 Rockefeller Plaza,
Meyers has had to get used to doing
comedy in a void, recording on an iPad
and using a teleprompter app. He was
sitting in his attic crawl space, a famil-
iar scene by now to his viewers: a green
desk, a sliver of chimney, a copy of “The
Thorn Birds.” He’s been filming his
show there since the beginning of April,
after experimenting in an upstairs hall-
way (too echoey) and a neighbor’s ga-
rage (too cold).
“All right, let’s go,” Meyers said. As
he read through a script, the staffers
took notes. The show’s producer, Mike
Shoemaker, calling in from Westches-
ter, sat in a chair in front of a circular
painting of a cloudy sky. The script under
discussion was for “A Closer Look,” a
segment in which Meyers reviews the
news. The day before, President Trump
had announced from the Rose Garden
that he was pulling funding from the
World Health Organization, and a Har-
vard study warned that some social-dis-
tancing measures might be necessary
through 2022. “So, yeah,” Meyers read,
“we’re going to need, like, six thousand
more episodes of ‘Tiger King,’ stat. And
you know what? Fine. I’m gonna watch
every episode of ‘Fuck Island,’ too.”
He stopped and said, “Maybe go
with ‘Fine, I’m going to re-watch’?”
Sal Gentile, who had written the
script, was calling in from Park Slope.
“Yeah,” he said, making a note.
Meyers sped through the rest of the
monologue, which ended
without comedy. “When the
time for a political account-
ing comes,” he said, “we
must remember that this
was not inevitable, that it
could have been prevented,
and that a long sequence of
failures led to this moment.”
Gentile said that he
would make some trims.
“‘Fuck Island’ will stay,” he
said with a smile.
“Throw it in a couple more times,”
Meyers said. “I feel like it’ll get real
traction.”At 11:30 a.m., at Montefiore Medical
Center, in the Bronx, Joselyn Baez, a
thirty-one-year-old emergency-room
nurse, was working in the E.R.’s greeting
station: a tent made from blue plastic