46 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
washed, dried, and stowed, and it became
too hard to watch another cycle of cable
news or binge-watch the latest stream-
ing phenomenon, an apartment-bound
man on the back end of middle age con-
fronted a stack of books that were being
mentioned all the time these days: Defoe,
Boccaccio, Camus, the whole syllabus
of plague literature. He couldn’t. Instead,
he picked up “The Zoo of the New,” a
grab-bag anthology of poems (“from
Sappho to Paul Muldoon”) edited by
Nick Laird and Don Paterson. He
opened it and, uncannily, within a few
pages, landed on these lines of Auden:
... Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.He snapped the book shut and set
it aside. He sent a few texts to family.
He checked the refrigerator and closed
it. He washed his hands.
Finally, wanting a moment that
was not flu-infected, he thought about
watching ESPN, which in the absence
of actual sports had contrived a very ex-
citing event: pro ballplayers, some young
and bored, others retired and thicken-
ing, playing games of H-O-R-S-E in
their respective back yards, often thou-
sands of miles apart. That would be
more like it.
After ten, in an apartment in Green-
point, Rae Haas, a twenty-four-year-
old sex worker, set up a cam-
era on a tripod, pressed
Record, and stepped naked
into the shower. Rae, who
uses the pronouns “they” and
“them,” massaged purple dye
into the roots of their al-
ready violet hair and let the
dye run down their body.
After several minutes, they
got out of the shower and
took some nude selfies, and
washed the dye off their hands in the
sink. Later, on OnlyFans, a platform
where sex workers and artists can pub-
lish content to paid subscribers, Rae
would release the video. In March, the
Web site saw a seventy-five-per-cent
increase in new accounts.
Rae’s partner was watching “The
Return of Godzilla” and eating sushi
in bed. Rae got in, and started texting.
A man whom Rae had met at the strip
club Pumps, in Williamsburg, where
Rae had worked as a dancer until
March, now wanted a constant stream
of nude photographs. Another client
wanted Rae to verbally humiliate and
then coddle him. Since self-quaran-
tine had begun in the city, Rae had no-
ticed clients becoming more “emotion-
ally hungry.” “They’re saying things
like ‘Hey, you didn’t text me all day,’
and ‘Why don’t you want to talk to
me?’” Rae said. “Everyone’s on their
phones right now, but they might not
realize you’re texting thirty other peo-
ple.” Clients were also “ten times thirst-
ier,” asking more directly for the ex-
plicit sex acts they wanted to watch.
Others had ghosted Rae. “A lot of
people I was talking with before the
virus—a lot of them are quarantined
with their wives,” they said. “I’ve mes-
saged them, and they’d be, like, ‘I can’t
talk for quarantine. It’s too danger-
ous.’” Some of Rae’s clients just wanted
to commiserate about their financial
woes. “But I’m, like, ‘Listen, if you’re
gonna gripe and moan about the state
of the world to me, please pay me—
because, same.’”Captain Jackie Benton was back where
he’d started at dawn: in a tugboat on
the north shore of Staten Island. It
was nearly eleven o’clock and a half-
moon hung over Newark Bay. Its light
skimmed over the empty
waters of the Kill Van Kull,
past the shores of Coney Is-
land and Sandy Hook to
the vast and unquarantined
Atlantic. Benton had spent
the day escorting container
ships bearing supplies for
New York—from the Nar-
rows between Brooklyn and
Staten Island, around Ber-
gen Point to Port Elizabeth
and back. Now he was docked at the
McAllister yard with five other tugs.
Through the windows of the wheel-
house, Benton could see them rocking
in their private berths, their cabins
aglow. At least two crew members
would be awake on each one—check-
ing engines, listening for dispatches,
doing paperwork. Even in better times,Benton rarely left his boat. Tugs were
social-distancing before it was cool, he
liked to say.
A month had passed since he’d been
home with his family, on the Gulf
Coast of Mississippi, and the only
people he’d seen in that time were his
first mate, his engineer, and his deck-
hand. Benton, who is forty-four years
old, with a mop of brown hair and a
swampy drawl, has worked on boats
since he was eighteen. His grandfa-
ther was a tugboat captain, his father
a tugboat engineer. He has spent al-
most a third of his life confined to
less than two thousand square feet:
wheelhouse, galley, and cabin. If all
those years on tugs have taught him
anything, it’s the blessing of a well-
adjusted crew. Misery spreads faster
than happiness.
Benton’s tug, the Captain Brian A.
McAllister, is one of the most powerful
ships in the McAllister fleet, and also
the nimblest. With its nearly seven-
thousand-horsepower engines and
azimuth propeller, it can go forward,
backward, and sideways, or spin like a
top on the water. On the morning of
March 30th, Benton had used it to help
escort the U.S.N.S. Comfort to Man-
hattan. Almost nine hundred feet long,
the Comfort could barely squeeze into
its berth, at Pier 90. The Brian pulled
the stern one way while another tug
pushed the bow in the other, pivoting
the ship ninety degrees. Then the tugs
nudged the Comfort forward, pulling
back on their tethers as it eased into
place. It was, Benton thought, a defi-
ning moment in the country’s history.
Bringing a hospital ship in for a pan-
demic—he didn’t believe anybody had
ever seen that before.- Laura Kolbe, an internist, was work-
ing the night shift at Lower Manhat-
tan Hospital with Anna Dill, a doc-
tor who had come to the city the week
before. Dill and some fifty colleagues
from Cayuga Medical Center, in
Ithaca, had taken school buses to Man-
hattan, to help. Kolbe and Dill bonded
over the discomforts of the N95 mask,
which seemed, they concluded, to have
been designed for the face of a man.
The day before, New York State had
reported its first decline in hospital-