Plague Journal, Day 18: What if the war comes?

At my father’s 80th birthday party his four children each prepared a little speech in which we discussed, among other things, his influence on us. My theme: What if the war comes? 

Born in 1925 into a family of (eventually) seven children; being raised in the Depression on his father’s bank-teller salary; spending years eating Miracle Whip-on-Wonder sandwiches and getting big Christmas treats of a single orange; handing over every penny of his magazine route to his mother for the household economy; having grown several inches in both middle school (when he lived in a seminary before declining the priesthood) and his Army years (which ended in 1945 when he was wounded in France) because he was finally consuming a sufficient number of calories: all contributed to my father’s instinct toward parsimony.  

He could master the instinct. He bought himself (and his fortunate children) San Francisco 49ers season tickets from the late ‘40s into the ‘90s. In an apparent moment of midlife crisis he shocked us by trading in the Volkswagen Beetle for a Datsun 260-Z sports car. 

But as a rule Dad never parted with a nickel when he could part with a penny. He despised waste: we cleaned our plates, never used two paper towels when one would do, wrenched every last squeeze from a toothpaste tube. Dining out was a rarity. Our mother, who also worked, spent weeks one year to convince him to let the family take, rather than our usual car-camping vacation, a trip to Europe (where our bible was “Europe on $5 and $10 a day”). Woe to the child leaving a coat or dress heaped on a floor, at whom he’d snap, “You can stop using hangers when you’re buying your own clothes.” 

Despite growing up comparatively fat and middle class and facing nothing like his life of pervasive social peril, his children, to one degree or other, inherited this sensibility, for which my shorthand became: What if the war comes? Why do I keep spices for more than a decade? Why keep a change jar? Why dig the toothpaste tube from the trash for a final three uses? Why cringe when The Girlfriend pulls out a skein of dental floss 6 inches longer than necessary? Why keep a plastic fruit-and-vegetable bag stuffed with other plastic fruit-and-vegetable bags? Well: what if the war comes? 

And now, in the spring of 2020, with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, living in the middle of the nation’s viral epicenter of New York City, at last: The war has come! 

Let me not exaggerate. My market across the street remains open and, if not one day then the next, reasonably well stocked. I live in a lovely apartment, with enough to buy what I need and to eat quite well. The Kid has everything she could want, including a college fund. I try to remember to be grateful for the bounty that pours into my life. 

But having to plot every trip outside; having to plan meals a week in advance to avoid grocery store visits; facing real shortages of items I could use (thermometers, say); unable to buy things even through the plenitude of our online suppliers — all of this has thrust me into a war-time mentality. 

The Girlfriend shares some of this. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, takes for granted no social abundance. I thought I was a reasonable Food-Waste Cop, but she’ll eat things from the fridge I’d have thrown out last week. If she sees me scraping a quarter-helping of food into the trash rather than a Tupperware, she snaps in a tone my father would have admired. 

My best friend upstate says he’s absorbed the mindset. He’s rinsing out and reusing freezer bags. He’s mixing his own milk, which he says isn’t bad if you combine powdered with evaporated. He’s stopped using toilet paper, having purchased a few years ago an attachable bidet, which he swears by. 

Ah, toilet paper: the nation’s most desired item, at least according to my social media feeds. 

I wasn’t worried when physical isolation started, still having two of four large rolls bought a week or so prior. But The Girlfriend and I moved through them much faster than I’d anticipated. On Sunday, as we broke out my single-ply, use-only-under-extreme-conditions emergency roll, she id’d the cause: “I’ve been drinking so much tea, water, juice, I’m peeing like 20 times a day.” 

I put TP on my list when my sister and her boyfriend shopped for me on Sunday, but, as it had been for two weeks, our market was out. The single-ply roll would last for a few days; after that, I surmise, we’ll be using tissues. 

We awake Monday morning early. The Girlfriend feels better than she has in a week. She’s ready to go for a walk, she says, and, as I’m feeling pretty good, too, we head out to see if one of our local bagel shops is open. Twice The Girlfriend has to tell me to slow down; she’s better but hasn’t been out of the apartment in four days, feels fragile. As we pass the market I see a couple of its staff unloading trucks. A thought occurs. 

“Have any toilet paper?”

“One box,” the staffer says, wiping his brow with a gloved wrist. “It’s in Aisle Two.” 

I tell The Girlfriend to wait. As I run in she says, “Can you get soda water?” 

The sister/boyfriend shopping expedition was a godsend, but they bought four bottles of watermelon-flavored soda water, which proves to be unpotable. (Not that that will stop The Girlfriend from drinking it if she must.)

I dash in, see only two other customers. I head to Aisle Two, whose shelves are empty of not only toilet paper but paper towels, tissues, napkins — any pulpable item you can name, save a few stacks of plates. Then I see it, at the end the aisle at the bottom of a stack of boxes: a box stamped with a brand I recognize. I unstack the pile, find the box open, one of its three containers of 12 rolls already removed. I take the second one, grab four lemon-flavored soda waters, head for the cashier. No line. My bill is almost $15. TP is expensive. I walk out. No Girlfriend. 

Did she go back to the apartment? I run to the courtyard — no sign of her. I run around to the front, go upstairs — no sign. I deposit my TP and soda, run to the 12th-floor windows — no sign. It reminds me of The Kid’s younger years, in a couple of horrible moments when I lost track of her. Not that The Girlfriend can’t take care of herself, of course. But she’s so weak. I check: her phone sits on the counter. What if she falls? These aren’t normal days. I run downstairs, start running to the bagel shop. A couple of blocks away, here she comes, moving slower than my 89-year-old mother. The bagel shop is closed, she says. 

“Why did you leave?”

“You asked me to! You said, ‘Walk.’ Like you were going to catch up with me.” 

“I didn’t say ‘Walk.’ I said ‘Wait!’” 

“Well, I thought it was weird. But I thought you wanted me to prove I could do it. Like a dose of tough love.” 

“I like tough love more than most, but I wouldn't do that to you while you're sick!” 

“I'm not that sick.” 

We go upstairs, slowly. In the bathroom I break open the package; the room immediately fills with a horrible chemical-floral scent. 

“What is that?”

“I think it’s the toilet paper.” 

“My God! Who wants to use that? That’s just awful.” 

I’ve already ripped open the package to stack the rolls in my utility closet. I find a garbage bag to enclose the scent. 

Under normal conditions I’d throw it away, but now I dismiss the thought. After all, the war has come. 

(New York state numbers as of Monday: 66,497 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 12 percent; 1,218 dead, up 26 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,968.) 

Plague Journal, Day 17: Authoritarianism 101 (Suharto style)

Authoritarianism takes getting used to. When I lived in Indonesia, during the pre-digital 1990s, no one trusted the Suharto government. News organizations, knowing their licenses could be pulled any time, doled out data cagily. 

Early in my stay The Jakarta Post, an English-language daily, wrote about marijuana arrests in Aceh, a province of northern Sumatra. Late in the story, apropos of nothing, the story cited an unnamed government official denying the arrests were tied to Acehnese independence. What was that paragraph doing in the story? I realized: That was the story. The government, which routinely denied an Acehnese independence movement existed, was arresting rebels under the guise of drug busts. The story was told as a negative image: the foreground was the denial depicted in the background. 

Such routine obfuscations led Indonesians, while paying obeisance to authority, to profound levels of distrust. Superstitions were common. Societal support systems — cops and hospitals, courts and post offices — failed as often as they worked, despite the good will of most. If you wanted something you called a powerful friend, or, if you could, paid a bribe. People visited doctors only after a half-dozen home remedies failed, and they’d try a half-dozen more with their prescriptions. When anything unusual happened — a rise in cooking oil prices; a policy to rid Jakarta of bicycle pedicabs; a minister’s illness — conspiracy theories were as common as rice. The theories might be valid, might be bullshit. The powerful benefited by planting doubt among the powerless: the absence of certainty, the impossibility of explanation, gave enormous space for malfeasance. 

We’re experiencing something similar in locked-down New York City in the data-rich Covid-19 spring of 2020, as our health care system buckles and doctors lack ventilators and nurses lack masks and The Mount Sinai Hospital erects triage tents in Central Park like a Civil War reenactment. 

The scenes play out at the macro-level: the president in his press conference reality show floats distractions that reporters and Twitterati chase like soap bubbles (New York doctors are selling stolen medical equipment on the black market! The governor of Washington is evil! That reporter was mean to me! Have you checked my ratings?), obscuring the profound, continuing governmental failures that will kill, his top doc now estimates, 200,000 or more Americans. Politicizing science has worked so far for U.S. climate deniers; if it kills a few hundred thousand Covid-19 patients, well, we’ve got presidential poll numbers to boost. 

(New York state numbers as of Sunday: 59,513 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 14 percent; 965 dead, up 33 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,462.) 

The scenes play out at the micro-level. The Girlfriend still feels punky; it’s Day 7 of her illness, most of which she’s spent in bed, longer than she’s ever been sick. Part of her exhaustion comes from fielding texts and phone calls from well-meaning loved ones with theories, explanations, prescriptions, proscriptions: You don’t have Covid-19. For sure you have Covid-19. Why aren’t you getting tested? For God’s sake, don’t get tested. You need to stay in bed. You need exercise. You’re contagious four days after symptoms subside. You’re contagious 28 days after symptoms subside. We scan websites, study videos, scour citations. Whom to trust? 

I feel better than Saturday morning but far less than 100 percent. We decide to spend the day in isolation. I cancel plans to see The Kid, who’s seriously bummed. I ask my sister, visiting Brooklyn to see her boyfriend after each has gone 14 days symptom-free, to do our weekly shopping; they drive from Crown Heights to Clinton Hill, use my credit card to buy $150 in groceries at the market across the street. I’m deeply grateful. Still, the psychological toll of missing activities I’d anticipated drags my mood to the Slough Of Despond. 

After dinner The Girlfriend, brows knit, eyes like slits, says, “I feel different.” Her chest is tighter. Tighter than any time this week? Remember Thursday afternoon? “I think so.” She feels phlegm in her chest, in her throat: a new symptom. She retreats to bed, assures me I can go on a post-prandial walk without worry. I walk, but I’m worried. 

It’s 8 p.m. I head into Bed-Stuy, call my college friend upstate, who for two weeks has been battling bronchial illness. He gives the best news I’ve heard in weeks: He feels great. My friend has spent his adult life braiding complicated strains of practicality and New Age-tinged spirituality, common sense and mystic woo-woo. How’d he get better? He decided Saturday to go into a 24-hour news blackout. He decided to move, to stop lying around, to stir up the shit in his lungs. He used a netty pot laced with tinctures. He huddled under a humidifier spiced with, among other things, eucalyptus drops. He did yogic breathing exercises (50 deep, intense breaths through the nose). He ate a special soup. I can’t track the remedies. The short version: 24 hours later, he feels better than in weeks, thinks he’s pretty much cured. 

I come home, energized by my friend’s news as well as my walk. The Girlfriend looks a tiny bit perkier. Maybe tomorrow, I say, you could call him, ask about his cures. At the least, I say, we should try to walk. “I think you need to leave this apartment,” I say to the woman who on an average weeknight attends two cultural events, has to be talked out of a third. 

“I think you’re right,” she says. 

We pay $12 to stream from a local independent movie theatre website Vivarium (2020): a terrible choice. It’s a slow-burning, non-violent horror story of a couple trapped in Yonder, a dystopic suburban community; it's a mediocre Twilight Zone episode stretched to 90 minutes. The Girlfriend calls the ending in the movie’s first third. I protest, refuse to believe the filmmakers would be that stupid. She’s right.

After the movie, as seems to keep happening, our moods have flipped. The Girlfriend feels better. Though she has nary a drop of spiritual woo-woo in her veins and I doubt she’ll try any of my friend’s cures beyond exercise, the story of his recovery buoys her spirits. She says she feels optimistic, falls promptly asleep. 

Me? Though inept, the horror movie works on me. I’m up for hours. We’re trapped for a third week in our apartment, cocooned in a five-mile radius in an urban landscape a shell of itself, its hospitals filled with the sick and dying, the most common sound an ambulance siren, the outside world a cacophony of contrasting dicta. What’s real?  

I curl against The Girlfriend’s back, thinking of President Suharto. 

Plague Journal, Day 16: The Girlfriend and I swap symptoms

I wake on Saturday leaden. We keep breakfast simple, but preparing it exhausts me. I’m achy, tingly, my lungs feel tight. “Welcome to my week,” says The Girlfriend, who’s feeling more energetic. I go back to bed, able to do little more than read. No fever, though, and no coughing. I text The Co-Parent, say it makes little sense for me to see The Kid today. The Girlfriend makes sandwiches for lunch; I haul myself out of bed, eat, haul myself back. 

AT 1:30 p.m. she’s tired again; she prepares to take a work call in bed beside me. “I’m going to try to write,” I say. Somehow, typing out the blog energizes me, and afterward I’m ready for a walk. She’s ready for a nap. It’s like we’re passing a sickness baton. 

I take a week’s worth of clothes to the laundromat across the street. They’re open but not taking new loads; as of tomorrow, they’re closed for two weeks. This is a blow. At $1.10 a pound, having my clothes washed, dried, and folded is the best 20-odd dollars I spend every week. My co-op complex has washers and dryers, but I’ve never used them; laundry is my least favorite chore. 

I haul my dirty clothes back to the 12th floor, head back out. Coming into the building is a woman about my age and her 20-something son, who has a significant cognitive disability. They live on the first floor, his care her full-time job. 

“I’ve been thinking about you,” I say. “Where are you coming from?” 

“A loooong walk,” she says. It’s chilly; she looks exhausted. 

“I guess you have to go somewhere now the library’s closed,” I say. Every time I visit our local library branch I see them, usually using the computers and wi-fi. I imagine they have no devices at home. 

He perks up, looks into my eyes. He doesn’t always do this. 

“We still walk by the library every day so I can show him the sign that says it’s closed,” she says, giving me a look over her glasses. 

“Library open,” he says. I can’t always understand his diction, but this is clear.

“I hope so soon,” I say. “But it’s hard to say. It could be closed a long time.” I hold my hands a distance apart. 

“They closed the tennis courts, too,” she says. “At Fort Greene Park. We like to sit on our bench, keeping our distance from everybody, and watch. But they padlocked the gate.” 

“That’s a drag,” I say. “You can stay six feet apart and play tennis.” 

“I know,” she says. “But what are we going to do?” 

I wish I had an answer. 

Walking east on Greene Street I pass a fancy bakery with a new sign: “Only 3 customers at a time. No cash.” This last element strikes me as poor policy. Money is dirty, certainly, but it’ll pass nothing that gloves or a good hand-washing can’t kill. Then again, folks without a bank or credit card may be unwilling to fork over $5 for a cinnamon roll or $11 for a breakfast burrito. 

Pedestrian traffic is thin. Car traffic moves in swift currents on a couple of major thoroughfares (Lafayette, Nostrand), with little spillover on the side streets. A pair of happy teens take turns posing for pictures in the middle of otherwise empty Greene Street. Theirs is the only joy on display. Most people are masked. I’m far enough from the Brooklyn Hospital Center to hear ambulance sirens only faintly. I walk west on Myrtle Street, with only supermarkets, pharmacies, and liquor stores doing business. 

Daily Covid-19 stats: 52,318 cases in New York state, up 17 percent from Friday. The 7,377 new cases are more than any day this month, but they also represent March’s lowest percentage increase — a sign that physical distancing may be starting to take effect? 

The Guardian takes a step back to look at the U.S. response, contrasting it to South Korea, which saw its first Covid-19 patient on the same day (Jan. 20). South Korea rallied private industry to get thousands of rapid diagnostic tests. They quickly identified and quarantined patients. The U.S. dithered, downplayed the problem, tried to “keep the numbers down” to pacify the stock market. Now the wave is beginning to break. The president still plays to his base and downplays the problem, as U.S. deaths top 2,000. New York City (675 dead so far) will be only the first city to suffer to this degree.  

Two sample quotes: Ron Klain, the U.S. czar against ebola in 2014: “The U.S. response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort. What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.” 

Jeremy Konyndyk, who led USAid from 2013-17: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.” 

President Trump has never been more popular.

I continue to feel energized, The Girlfriend enervated. Before sleep, we skirmish over a series of questions: Should I meet my sister and her boyfriend (now spending time together after each was isolated for two weeks) in the park tomorrow for a six-feet-apart walk? Should we be wearing masks? Should The Kid come over to our house after two-plus weeks at The Co-Parent’s? 

In each case, we realize that we have no real information. With the federal government an active disinformation agent, the authority vacuum is taking its toll. We’ve been sort of sick, as has The Kid. Has it been Covid-19? Are we still contagious to The Kid? To outsiders? Should we be isolating? Should I go shopping tomorrow? Do we believe the WHO and CDC on masks (no need for most people), or should we believe the research scientist who says they’re making a scientifically unsound mistake? Smart decisions feel impossible; we’re pounding pitons into sand. 

Our doubt as much as our physical symptoms sends us to bed shortly after 9 p.m., depleted. 

Plague Journal, Day 15: Rank competence

Friday. Covid-19 cases in New York State: 44,635, up 20 percent from Thursday. Deaths: 519 total, up 134 (35 percent) from Thursday. 

I lack energy to relate the horribleness of President Trump, whose approval ratings have never been higher. Assured by hordes of social media friends how good Gov. Cuomo and Joe Biden look by comparison, I watch clips and am taken by how many of us, our standards immeasurably lowered, are wowed by rank competence. 

Biden (maybe sixth in my ranking of Democratic presidential candidates) issues reasonable statements about how we’re all in this together. He’s credible when discussing other people’s pain. I believe that he wants the best for all Americans. His statements about the nation’s can-do spirit strike me as hackneyed but sincere. 

Cuomo (whom I’ve twice voted against in state primaries) deftly moves through data-rich power-point presentations. He’s reasonable when discussing New York City as an epicenter: we live on top of each other, which makes us vulnerable to a virus but overall is a strength. He’s careful to distinguish facts from his opinions. When he wishes to beckon our better angels he relies on words from his father, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, blessed with political poetry his prosaic son lacks. 

Both seem able to anticipate timeframes longer than a news cycle. Both seem willing to trust experts, acknowledge limitations. Both seem able to account for realities unshown by Twitter feeds or TV screens. Both seem able to use personal experience as ground to build empathy, to imagine an existence beyond themselves. In short, neither strikes me as a conspiracy theorist burdened with narcissistic personality disorder. 

God bless America. 

The Girlfriend remains on the mend but, still sore and fatigued, spends most of the day in bed. The Kid is almost entirely recovered. It’s a fine spring day, the city budding and bursting, and after a lunch of leftovers I ride my bike to see her. I probably shouldn’t. I’m starting to feel more achy and tired. For days I’ve told myself my symptoms are psychosomatic; today’s the first day I think they’re probably not. I ride my co-op elevator (now allowing only one person or family at a time) to the lobby, realize I’ve grabbed The Girlfriend’s sunglasses. I return to the 12th floor, swap glasses, head down to my complex’s bicycle room, realize I gave my key fob yesterday to The Girlfriend. I return to the 12th floor, grab the fob, return to the bike room, tired before I’ve put foot to pedal. 

I feel better on a bike. Car traffic remains minimal; sirens remain ubiquitous. Prospect Park is awash in exercisers. The Kid is eager to be outside for 45 minutes before her weekly after-school writing seminar (seamlessly moved online). We walk around Ditmas Park, where lawns and grass-covered islands on the wide streets are filled with parents, babies, dogs, sun-worshippers. We can pretend it’s a normal spring afternoon until we reach Cortelyou Avenue and the local food co-op, where customers line the sidewalk around the corner, down the block, six feet apart; apparently they’re letting in 10 folks at a time. Most businesses are shuttered, save pharmacies and restaurants serving take out. The Kid’s in good enough spirits to carp, notably about the fact that she can’t come to my place for a few more days.

“When do I get to move? Everyone is driving me crazy.” 

“Well, you’ve been there for two weeks. If you were with me for two weeks, don’t you think I’d be driving you crazy?” 

“Not as much.” 

“I can guarantee you: that is untrue. I’m grateful we haven’t had to put it to the test.” 

“Maybe we should. Maybe I should stay with you for two weeks.” 

“Maybe. We’ll see.” 

I’m about to ask her to list gripes about her housemates, think better of it. Instead, she gripes about a horrible show she’s watched: a 1980s anime version of “Little Women” (the Greta Gerwig version of which she’s seen at least four times). Among the problems: terrible animation; the characters’ impossibly high-pitched voices; and info-dumping. 

“What’s info-dumping?”

“That’s when you start a story in a new world and the characters say things to explain the world that they’d never say in real life. Like, a girl might say, ‘Mom, I really want to celebrate my 15th birthday in a manner non-traditional for our Flabghastian society, not with a religious observance but instead by inviting both male and female friends over, which has been taboo in Flabghastia since the wars of the 2120s.’” 

“I get it. So for this show, does that mean characters say things like, ‘I wish Pa were not away fighting the War Between The States, which we have been fighting since 1861 over southerners’ desire to maintain the institution of enslavement of African peoples, which they think is essential to their way of life, while those of us in the north wish to save the union, and some of us, called abolitionists, consider the practice of slavery cruel and inhumane’?”

“Pretty much. Plus what they do to poor Beth. I mean, in the book and the movie Beth of course is almost sickeningly good. But she’s a real person, with real emotions: sadness, fear, joy. In this version, they turn her into a robot who only seeks good. She’s almost like Janet.” 

“Janet?”

“From ‘The Good Place.’ You know, the robot woman with all the information in the universe?” 

“Oh, right.” 

 “But this is a Janet who only wants good for others, with no other reactions.” 

“You mean she says things like, ‘Yes, it is sad that our mother is dead. But I can mourn for no longer than 35 seconds, for I must continue to sew buttons onto the uniforms we are sending to the brave soldiers fighting to save our Union.’” 

“Yeah, pretty much.” 

She starts to explain the horribleness of an animated movie called “Food Fight,” but we’ve reached home and her writing class is starting. 

I ride back through a park filled with more bicyclists than I’ve ever seen there, many unfamiliar with its rules of the road (pedestrians to the left, slow bikes in the middle, pass on the right). The ride requires extreme diligence; I arrive home wiped out, sleep for 90 minutes.

I have a hard time getting out of bed. Fortunately, dinner is quick to fix: asparagus pasta. For the first time in days The Girlfriend is perkier than I. 

At 7 p.m., she reminds me: New Yorkers are going to their windows and stoops and roof decks to cheer for the nurses and doctors and hospital workers and first responders risking their lives for us all. We spend two minutes at separate windows, hooting, clapping, reveling in the gratitude, the noise, the resilience, the solidarity. I tear up. Until this moment, I didn’t know I felt so raw. 

Plague Journal, Day 14: Grieving ambiguously

Thursday. The Girlfriend wakes with an onset migraine, from which she occasionally suffers. She takes one over-the-counter migraine pill: acetaminophen, aspirin, lots of caffeine. (It shrinks inflamed blood vessels and thus reduces migraine pain.) Within 30 minutes she feels better than she has since Sunday, and, after her usual two espressos, she’s ready to take on the day. By lunchtime she’s completed three work tasks and done a fair bit of a jigsaw puzzle. 

“Look at you,” I say. “It’s like watching the last act of ‘Logan.’” I explain [spoiler alert for those who, like The Girlfriend, haven't seen “Logan,” the decade’s only superhero movie I’ve thought about outside the cineplex for more than 15 minutes]: In crisis, an aged Wolverine takes a serum that temporarily restores his youthful vigor, and for several minutes he lays waste to bad guys. Then the serum wears off, and a bad guy kills him. 

After lunch The Girlfriend feels tired. I suggest a walk and she agrees, but as we hit the sidewalk she says she’ll just go to the park bench where she sat in the sun a couple of days ago. If anything, she’s moving more slowly. When I return to the park 40 minutes later she’s gone back inside, where she passes the evening spent as a weak kitten. Still: No fever, no coughing, less achiness. Much better. 

The Kid, though still bedridden, is better, too. She jumps metaphorically when I suggest bringing some of the St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake I made yesterday. I drive to bring to The Girlfriend’s children some cake and a package of yeast (they want to make bread), swapping for soup they made the previous night. At The Co-Parent’s house The Kid still can’t travel much past the stair landing, but she wolfs down a piece of cake. My worry abates. 

With fewer cars on the road, drivers get aggressive. Two pull U-turns that force me to jam on the brakes. A jacked-up flatbed truck roars ahead of me, then floors it to pass one car at a time across Ocean Boulevard’s double-yellow line; with little oncoming traffic and cops busy elsewhere, driving is a video game. 

All week from the 12th-floor apartment The Girlfriend and I have been hearing sirens, mostly ambulances, from all over north Brooklyn. Today they seem more ubiquitous, often two or three at once. I walk west on DeKalb to pass the Brooklyn Hospital Center (where, as it happens, a Times reporter has been embedded this week). 

A dozen or so people — all of color — line up six feet apart outside a tent erected in the hospital parking lot; a staffer clad head to booties in blue antiviral gear distributes clipboards. The emergency room entrance is on the hospital’s other side, but I see two masked and gloved drivers scrubbing down ambulances with squirt bottles and paper towels. A young man wanders toward the tent; two onlookers direct him to the back of the line. Everyone wears masks; everyone’s mood is somber.

I cross Flatbush Avenue to the ghost-town blocks of Fulton Mall: a few walkers, a couple of street people. Suddenly, a stream of young men emerges around a corner: construction workers, ending a shift on one of the ubiquitous glass-and-chrome, 30-odd-floor apartment towers of downtown Brooklyn, where their “essential work” continues apace. 

I walk home through Fort Greene Park. The long triple-flight of steps on the west side of the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument is jammed, with apparently every denizen of north Brooklyn’s closed gyms and spas running, stretching, stair hopping, rope jumping, squat lunging, sit- and push-upping. From atop the hill I hear at least five separate sirens. 

Back at my apartment compound, a middle-aged man ends a loud conversation with an elderly woman: “Oh, I know you can’t trust them. But I believe people are dying. And if people are dying, I’m going to trust them enough to do what they say. I’m staying six feet away from people. I’m wearing my mask. I’m staying inside.” 

The United States on Thursday passes China as the nation with the most Covid-19 cases. New York State sees cases up another 21 percent, to 37,258. Deaths in the state jump by 100 (35 percent), to 385. 

At home, The Girlfriend says she’s read about a concept that’s helping her process what’s been waking her up at night: ambiguous grief. She’s worried about, among other things, her children’s health; their futures, as both near the end of college with careers in flux; her aging parents; her work projects that have been put in limbo; and her house sale (in Southern California) and purchase (in Brooklyn), both of which are postponed for who knows how long. 

The article says a classic example of ambiguous grief is having a loved one with dementia: they’re physically present, mentally and spiritually absent. Having lost my father and my mom’s two sisters to dementia within the past decade, my family grew accustomed to that particular twilight zone.

“Ambiguous grief can leave us in a state of ongoing mourning, so it’s important for us to stay grounded in the present,” the article says. “Instead of futurizing or catastrophizing — ruminating about losses that haven’t actually happened yet (and may never happen) — we can focus on the present.”

That’s the best thing about the blog, I tell her. At least I have something to focus on. 

We fall asleep to the sound of sirens dopplering in the distance.