THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 47
izations since the pandemic began,
but Kolbe and Dill worried that it
was just a plateau, not a true de-
scent.“There’s a lot of weather meta-
phors,” Dill said. “People are saying,
‘This is just a breather before the sec-
ond wave comes,’ or ‘Maybe we are in
the eye of the hurricane, and that’s
why it’s calm.’”
While relief felt premature, end-
less hyperarousal no longer felt sus-
tainable. In the past few weeks, Kolbe
had been reading the poetry of Zbig-
niew Herbert. “He had this alter ego,
Mr. Cogito, who was this sort of hap-
less Everyman trying to navigate the
bureaucracy of mid-century Poland,”
she said. “I’ve found odd comfort in
poetry about various kinds of laby-
rinths and roadblocks. How can you
continue to play the game when the
rules keep changing?”
The internists were looking over
a list of “watchers”—patients at risk
of imminent death. All of them had
Covid-19. One of the patients was
homeless and had already been hos-
pitalized; he had improved enough to
be discharged to a hotel converted into
a makeshift shelter, but he returned
to the hospital when hotel staff found
him passed out on the floor. Another
watcher had been working on Wall
Street on 9/11, and his lungs were fail-
ing. After arriving at the hospital, he
had expressed so much anxiety that
he was given an iPad to keep in his
room, so that he could have virtual
sessions with a psychologist. Kolbe
imagined that he was thinking, “What
are the chances that, for a second time,
the worst will have happened and I
will still pull through and walk out of
this situation?”
The watcher who concerned her
the most was a woman who spoke Can-
tonese. Every time the woman moved
even slightly, her oxygen levels dipped.
When Kolbe needed to communicate
with her, she would walk to a part of
the hospital corridor marked with green
tape, indicating that it was free of bio-
hazards, dial an interpreter phone-bank
service from her cell phone, place the
phone in the pocket of her scrubs, put
on her protective gown, and cross to
the part of the hallway demarcated by
red tape, the “dirty” zone. Kolbe would
try to get her pocket as close as pos-
sible to the woman’s face, to allow a
conversation with the interpreter, on
speakerphone. Sometimes all the in-
terpreter could hear was the sound of
rustling fabric.
The woman had managed to grasp
the thrust of the interpreter’s message:
she should not lie on her back all the
time. When a person is supine for too
long, lung tissue may start to collapse,
and blood may pool. Every few hours,
nurses turned her from her left side to
her stomach, then to her right side,
then to her back. When Kolbe walked
into the woman’s room, she said, she
was touched to see her in an “odalisque
position,” as if she were sunbathing. A
few hours later, just before midnight,
she peeked into the woman’s room.
The woman had been rotated again.
Now she was on her back, her legscrossed at the ankle. Her chest was ris-
ing and falling at an easy pace. Doc-
tors love epithets: Murphy’s sign, Bat-
tle’s sign, Homans’ sign. Kolbe thought
about coining a new one: the Ankle
sign. “Anyone with their legs crossed
so neatly at the ankles must be faring
reasonably well,” she observed. She
shut the door. Written by Rachel Aviv, Robert P. Baird,
Burkhard Bilger, Jonathan Blitzer, Vinson
Cunningham, William Finnegan, Tyler
Foggatt, Ian Frazier, Jennifer Gonner-
man, Adam Gopnik, Zach Helfand, Dhruv
Khullar, Carolyn Kormann, Eric Lach,
Sarah Larson, D. T. Max, Alexis Okeowo,
Helen Rosner, Kelefa Sanneh, Michael
Schulman, Alexandra Schwartz, Jia To-
lentino, Lizzie Widdicombe, Paige Wil-
liams, and Emily Witt.“Could we talk about something else?”