New York, US
By Craig Wilson
New York, I love you, but you might get me killed.
If you’re going to move somewhere new just before a pandemic hits you should aim for somewhere affordable. Who knows how low the economy is going to sink, how high unemployment is going to climb, or how long it’s all going to drag on for. Low population density is good, too. Aim for somewhere with a garden, and pick a city temperate enough for you to enjoy it. In other words, don’t choose New York.
No reasonable person sells everything they own and moves to New York to stay inside. Until they do. Until I did. Just when New Yorkers (and I) thought the worst thing that could happen to the city — or to the rest of the US — was Donald Trump, Covid-19 turned up and made one of the global epicentres of art, commerce, culture, cuisine, and other things you need to leave home to enjoy, the epicentre of the US’s share of a global pandemic.
Sure, it’s poetic that the self-described Greatest City on Earth in the self-anointed Greatest Country on Earth is now home to the Greatest Number of Infections on Earth. It’s this sort of irony-drenched tidiness that only fact, not fiction, can deliver. The cracks of a system that tethers health insurance to employment and couches systemic inequality in meritocratic rhetoric are showing. Hell, they’re glowing and pulsing, like the vein on the temple of the latest White House press secretary tasked with spinning suggestions made by their boss that the nation considers mainlining cleaning products.
The scale of the pandemic is, like New York, unfathomable. So we don’t try to fathom. We try to control what little we can. We’ve created new routines. We take days off from the news cycle. Practice the new rituals of cleansing, protecting, and being unified in our efforts to stay apart to expedite the day we can come together again … and complain about it. But social distancing is hard. Not just because there are so many of us in so little space, but because New Yorkers hate being told what to do.
The changing seasons don’t help. Here spring and summer are celebrated and savoured through socialising on the city’s sidewalks, stairs, and streets.
Summer looks set to offer misplaced relief. New infections are likely going to dwindle without disappearing, and as the days get colder they’ll escalate all over again. Meanwhile, despite his chronic ineptitude at crisis management, Trump will likely win again in November, because his opponent — aside from having lost the same race twice before in 1988 and 2008 — is a septuagenarian sex pest without the benefit of also being the incumbent.
But all is not lost. There are people selling handmade masks in the doorways of their now-shuttered stores in my neighbourhood. Restaurants all over the city are doing assemble-it-yourself meal kits. And every evening at 7pm my neighbours come out on their balconies and whoop and clap and whistle for the city’s scrubs-clad heroines and heroes. It doesn’t matter if any medical professional witnesses the outpouring of support or is buoyed by the sentiment. Because in doing it we lift ourselves.
We remind one another that we live here because we can’t imagine being anywhere else. We live here because nothing is static and that means anything is possible. The effects of the coronavirus will be felt here for a generation. But New Yorkers will speak in reverential terms about how they endured. Because endurance is the price of admission. It’s the cost of getting to say “I live in
New York”.
Every day you wash the city off you so you can bathe in its muck anew the next day. These days, we’re all far too clean. But there’s going to come a time when we can get dirty again. We’re all going to get so dirty.