I wake early Monday morning to the smell of something burning. Toast? More like plastic. Wire? I run through a mental checklist: backpack, laptop, boots, jacket — I can get out the door in under a minute. It's maybe 2 a.m. The last time I had a “go” bag was in Santa Cruz, the days after the '89 Loma Prieta earthquake. I sniff: no odors. Had I dreamed it? I fall back asleep thinking about stuff I’d miss if it burned.
I dream of finding a small wire peeking from a gap between floor board and my bedroom door jamb. I start to pull; I wrench it free with difficulty along the line between floor and wall. I rip along three walls, realize that if I keep pulling the entire building will collapse; I wake with the thought, sweating.
The Girlfriend wakes later feeling OK — maybe this will be Day 2 of healing after two weeks of persistent, if mild, sickness we assume is Covid-19. She walks to Prospect Park, the longest she’s been out. After lunch, she starts to look glassy-eyed. She takes a nap, wakes with sore and swollen lymph nodes in her neck; she’s listless and achy all afternoon and evening. We re-set her healing clock. (We’re waiting until we've healed for 72 hours before we reconnect with our children.) Damn.
My co-op building captain texts, asks if I can shop for a 9th-floor neighbor. I’ve been eager to help since I signed up; this is my first chance. Sure, I text; can I do it tomorrow morning, when I have to shop for my own family? Perfect, she writes. I tell The Girlfriend; she tells me I’m being idiotic. “We’re minimizing all of our contact because we assume we’ve been sick! You can’t be going out for other people!” I text back the captain, tell her I’ve been hasty. She tells me not to worry, asks if I need help. I tell her I’ll let her know.
I mask up, head east for my afternoon walk. It’s a gorgeous spring day, sun warm, sky blue, air crisp. Almost no traffic, a smattering of pedestrians; joggers, bikers, skateboarders travel in the middle of the street, unmolested. Mask wearing has flipped: when we started quarantine perhaps two in 10 wore them; now it’s eight in 10. Signs from last month seem anachronistic: “Get rid of bed bugs, fast!” (What’s happening with bed bugs? No one these days, come to think of it, seems to be leaving furniture or books on the streets.) “Camel Face Will Fix The Subways.” (Who’s Camel Face? Cuomo? I’d be so happy to ride the subway again.) Everything feels muted.
Seeking normalcy, I turn south on Grand, attracted by a family on their stoop. Two grammar-school kids bounce a handball up and down the stairs; the girl bounces it over the boy’s head, into the street. “You idiot!” he screams. “You’re an idiot!” she screams. Maybe not so much normalcy.
I see two school crossing guards, though it’s 5 p.m. and I think school buildings distributing meals close at 1:30 p.m.: who needs guarding? Then again, the city’s 2,600 crossing guards lose their minimum wage every day they don’t work. As so often in CoronaWorld I think of Indonesia, where in cities young men wearing colored vests often worked as “parkirs” — helping drivers park cars not as valets but as flag men; drivers would usually tip a coin. Big restaurants or department stores might hire parkirs, but in other places men just grabbed a vest, worked for tips. Businesses often worked on a “full-employment” principle, hiring five attendants when one or two would do — someone to help you find the shirt, someone to help you try it on, someone to wrap it, someone to take your money, someone to put it in a bag. Government agencies and non-profits worked like that, too, employing “tea ladies” or janitors or staff with little to do but stand around. Any modest salary was of help. I’ve never lived in the U.S. with an unemployment rate above 11 percent. In the Depression it was 25 percent. Next month?
I walk east on Gates, see two women leaning against each other on a top step chatting with a mom and two kids on the sidewalk. The 6-year-old prattles about the unfairness of playground closings; the 3-year-old clings to her thigh like a carbuncle. “That’s probably right, sweetie,” the mom says to quiet the boy. One of the stoop women asks, “And how are you?” The mom — Chinese-American, late 30s, fit, expensive haircut, sharp-looking boots — inhales, readies a sigh, pauses, cuts short the exhale. “Fine,” she says. Her affect is neither anger or sarcasm; she means it. Big picture, she is fine. No one’s going to the hospital, the family’s healthy, together, they’re walking around on a gorgeous afternoon. On a more granular level? She’s probably working from home; so is her husband. Kids in their hair all day; they have to help the older one through his digitized school lessons, the younger through whatever replacement for pre-K they’ve conjured. Screen limits are out the window; the kids are still cranky, stir crazed. Work demands are wonky for both parents. Is anyone doing good work these days? What does “good” in this context even mean? Their relationship stress is unprecedented, each confronting situations they’ve structured their lives to avoid. Neither adult can get to the gym; they’re making do with confabulated workouts. They’re worrying about elderly parents. She’s exhausted. How long is this going to last? Weeks? Months? “Fine” is accurate, doesn’t begin to describe it.
The Girlfriend and I decide to eat out — that is, order food to pick up. A taqueria on Fulton Street sells a “taco box”: four tortillas, rice and beans, chicken or beef, sauces, guac, sour cream, two 12-ounce margaritas, $29.95. It’s our first meal in two weeks not prepared at home. I like to cook, but the break is nice. The margaritas are weak, the food mediocre. “I don’t want to brag, but I could make this better,” I say. “That’s not bragging — that’s accurate,” The Girlfriend says.
My L.A. Friend sends a podcast, a journalist interviewing Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, economist, author of Thinking Fast And Slow. She’s told me to read the book; last year I checked it out of the library, checked it back unread. Listen, she says: “He changed the way I take in the world, including my own mind.”
Kahneman discusses his difficulty in deciding in early Covid-19 days whether to take a scheduled trip to Paris. He understands how pandemics work, knows the threat of a disease spreading exponentially. On the other hand, only 100 people in France have tested positive; how worrisome is that? He’s put a lot of preparatory work into the trip.
He decides not to go, but "even when I made the decision I wasn’t thinking straight. I had tools I didn’t use, tools to think about what it means that a pandemic is spreading. And I completely failed to see that.” He’s surprised by his inability to “worry at the appropriate level.”
I’ve been feeling like an idiot for three weeks, my instincts all messed up. I offered to make dinner for my child and The Co-Parent’s family knowing I’ve been sick. I’ve dashed in the afternoon into a pharmacy to buy soap and toothpaste after determining the same morning to restrict all contact. Just today I offered to shop for a neighbor.
“Individuals should make the smallest possible number of choices because they’re not equipped to do it,” Kahneman says. “There should be clear guidelines and clear instructions. We all ought to know if we should open Amazon packages outside the door or bring them in. It’s not a decision that individuals should consider making on the basis of what they know, because they don’t know enough to make it.”
Living on top of each other, New York City residents take a kind of pride in our bonds of connection. In normal days we feel the bonds weakly but steadily. Part of the city’s famed “rudeness” is in fact instructional: we teach each other where to stand on escalators, not to pause at the top of crowded stairways, how to hold umbrellas on a crowded sidewalk. A lot of us help each other; when The Kid used a stroller I never waited more than 30 seconds before someone helped me lift it up a flight of subway stairs. We feel the bonds in moments of stress — exchanging glances when, say, a crazy person enters a subway car.
In CoronaWorld our connecting bonds might as well be flashing neon pink. People step off the curb to let others pass on the sidewalk, stay six feet apart in bodega lines, look askance at those without masks. I see you, and I see your spit. It’s bizarrely intimate. It makes me love New Yorkers more even as I fear them.
“We’re adopting a pattern of behaviors that on the whole for many people will be safer,” Kahneman says. “Here, the main cues we’re getting are the behavior of other people. I’m very struck by change of behavior of other people in the supermarket over the last few days. That signal that other people are aware of what is happening — that’s the main way that risks get communicated.”
I head to my windows for the city’s 7 p.m. ritual cheer for the health care workers, first responders, laborers making the city function, saving our lives. It's a modest gesture, but the bonds radiate, neon pink.
(New York state numbers as of Monday: 130,689 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 7.1 percent; 4,758 dead, up 14 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 10,748, up 13 percent.)
No comments:
Post a Comment