I wake Thursday to the sound of a bird call: three loud trills, a bending, descending note. I hear it a half-dozen times; then it’s drowned out by an ambulance siren. Then another siren. We went to sleep last night to the sound of ambulance sirens.
Up on the 12th floor I’ve started to gauge where the ambulances are traveling: the loudest to The Brooklyn Hospital Center, less than a mile west, in Fort Greene; to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist, a couple of miles south, in Park Slope; to Woodhull Hospital, a couple of miles northeast, in the triangle between Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, and Bushwick; or to Kings County Hospital Center, three miles southeast, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.
Apartment shopping three years ago, I picked as second choice a building a half-block from the Brooklyn Hospital Center’s emergency entrance. The seller’s realtor described the noise as “insignificant”; I remembered my sister’s former apartment near a Harlem hospital, where sirens regularly annoyed. Remind me, I tell The Girlfriend, to add my decision to move farther from the hospital to my gratitude list.
Gov. Cuomo says on Thursday 799 people died in New York City of Covid-19. But that doubtless undercounts; so far this month people dying at home or on the street number 200 a day more than last year’s April average (of about 20-25), uncounted because untested. So Thursday’s number is in fact around 1,000, 42 people an hour, a CoronaDeath every minute and a half. City workers are loading unclaimed bodies into refrigerated trucks, ferrying them to Hart Island in the Bronx, digging mass graves.
John Minchillo/AP/Shutterstock
New York state numbers as of Thursday: 159,937 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 7.1 percent; 7,067 dead, up 12.7 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 16,466, up 13 percent.
Before CoronaWorld, The Girlfriend was looking to buy a house or apartment, focusing east and southeast of Prospect Park. She made an offer on a house a family has owned since 1968. The owner, a retired New York City laborer who bought out his parents in the ‘90s, lives there with his second wife, her mother, and, in the basement, his brother. They plan to move back to his family’s original state, South Carolina. He’s upgraded the place, kept most of the original fixtures. He’s selling the property himself, his daughter acting as informal broker. It's immaculate.
Before The Girlfriend made her offer, the two of us attended about 20 open houses, mostly along a corridor bordered by Flatbush Avenue to the west, Nostrand Avenue to the east. The gentrification wave breaks north to south, the earliest wave-riders craft breweries, boutique bars, fancy coffee shops, yoga studios. On many side streets the attractive two-story row houses (brick, brownstone, limestone, many with bay windows or barrel fronts) remain unsullied. Nearer the avenues have landed a host of 7-, 15-, 25-story apartment buildings of chrome and glass; they bring to mind alien spacecraft, new-fangled pirate ships.
The first question often received on house tours: Buying for yourself or as an investment? Investors buy these houses by the dozen, flip them, knock them down to build chrome-and-glass condos. We saw three or four places used as single-room occupancy (SRO) housing, all terrible: ripped-up floors, sloping stairs, uneven drop-ceilings, smelly kitchens, moldy bathrooms, dank basements with one or two jury-rigged half-baths to cram in another tenant or two. We prospective buyers traipsed through one-family homes with six, seven, eight occupants, all people of color, almost all elderly, in separate rooms watching separate TVs. I walked one afternoon into a tiny bedroom where a wizened, thin-haired woman stood in her nightgown, staring vacantly into space; I apologized, backed out. Soon these houses will be sold, torn down. A month ago my question was: Where will they go?
In CoronaWorld, with such tenants living where physical distancing is impossible and any virus would spread like a grease fire, my question is: how many of the ambulances whizzing around us are carrying these folks?
The Girlfriend’s offer on the Brooklyn house is contingent on selling a house she owns in southern California. Her sister lives there, managing the property and a couple of renters, now on a month-to-month lease. No one knows how CoronaWorld will affect the real estate market. Last month The Girlfriend’s realtor hired a videographer to create a virtual home tour; by Thursday, the realtor reported, multiple offers had come in. Prospective buyers want to tour and inspect the house; everyone wants to act ASAP. The Girlfriend worries the offers are time-contingent, could vanish. No one knows what the markets will look like in a month. The sister asks the renters if they’ll accept a generous buyout to leave before month’s end; the renters consider, then ask for an amount 10 times the offer. That would be “no.” The realtor informs prospective buyers they’ll have to wait til May 1 to see the house. Will that kill the sale? Nothing rides on this except The Girlfriend’s financial future. The stress gnaws. Her lingering illness leaves her drained. She snaps at her sister, at me.
At 6 p.m. we attend a videoconference Passover seder, hosted by The Girlfriend’s college friend, a powerful rabbi in the world of Reform Judaism. The Rabbi has worked for years on a variety of Haggadah to make the ceremony inclusive. Last year we sat at her well-laden table with 30 or so friends; this year the videoconference screen has 30 or 35 windows, 55 or 60 attendees. The Girlfriend and I have prepared a plate: boiled egg, beet, charoset (apple/raisins/honey), celery, saltwater, arugula, orange.
The ceremony is fun — as connective as a virtual thing can be. The technology mostly works. The ritual is spiced with song, poetry, and conversations about cleanliness, purity, brokenness, grieving, renewal, blessings. We all break from the videoconference for 30 minutes to eat. For me and The Girlfriend (whom I call the world’s most agnostic Jew), that means sausage-and-mushroom pizza we’ve had delivered. When we return to complete the seder, one poem especially resonates: Adam Zagajewski’s “Try To Praise The Mutilated World” (translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh):
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
The Girlfriend and I say goodbye to our video friends. We eat chocolate-chip cookies, watch a bad movie, go to sleep to the sound of ambulance sirens.
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