Defiance in the City of Death

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was at a gym downtown when the first plane flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. We watched with horror, not knowing if it was an accident or intentional. Forty-five minutes later, we knew: A second plane hit the South Tower. We ran outside to join others running up Sixth Avenue. Within 24 hours, we knew more: Our city — our country — had been attacked.

Although the heavy smoke and endless swirl of helicopters continued for weeks, most New Yorkers soon went back to work and more important, onto the streets — defiant, determined to reclaim our city.

This year on the morning of March 29, my son, Alexander, and I entered Central Park as we always do, at 97th Street, in front of our building. Schools had closed two weeks before, but the full scope of what we were dealing with had not yet set in. The scene in front of us was like the second plane hitting the tower. Volunteers from the Christian humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse were erecting huge white tents, covering 50,000 feet of the swath of land called East Meadow, where Alexander had played soccer just the day before. Now New York Police Department (NYPD) and metal barriers prevented anything except stunned spectators from doing anything but taking photos.

To Alexander, it was just another bizarre scene in New York City. To the adults, it was incomprehensible, surreal.

Two days later, the field hospital — 68 beds, including 10 ICU beds — was ready. After 9/11, the hospitals had been ready, but the ambulances never came. Now, ambulances and helicopters swirl around Mount Sinai Hospital day and night.

The rare person you see isn’t defiant, but filled with fear, an existential foreboding. People are afraid to look into each other’s eyes.

As I write this, New York City nears 12,000 deaths; four times as many as on 9/11. Some outside of the city have called New Yorkers irresponsible; I can only think that they’ve never been here. Essentially, we live on top of one another. Crowded apartment buildings, crowded sidewalks, crowded shops, crowded theaters. “I suspect NYC as both a transit hub and target for international travel plays as big or even bigger role than density,” Dr. David Isaacson, an internist and hospitalist in Wisconsin, told me. Indeed, an April 9 study by researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Icahn School of Medicine states that most of the early cases came directly from European as well as United States sources.

By the end of March, the city was on lockdown, which closed not just non-essential businesses but essential ones, too, such as the pharmacy around the corner. Up and down the main avenues, businesses are boarded up, streets are vacant, sidewalks clear. The rare person you see isn’t defiant, but filled with fear, an existential foreboding. People are afraid to look into each other’s eyes.

Typically, there is an energy that runs through New York City that, no matter how much you may be sick of the winters or enjoy a vacation, you find yourself missing. That energy is gone. The city of the hyper-creative and the hyper-competitive — the city of constant motion — has been forced to stop.

Stillness often connotes beauty. But in this case, it tells an ominous truth: The city has lost its soul.

Changing the nature of New York

“This is a bad time to be living in an apartment building,” said my doctor, who lives in a house with a yard in Bergen County, N.J.

After the schools closed mid-March, anyone who had a home in the Hamptons (on Long Island) or Connecticut fled. That left many parts of the city, including the Upper East Side where we live, empty. At first, it just felt like a typical summer in New York City. But as “shelter in place” became the new normal, crowdlessness quickly lost its appeal. When most restaurants also closed — they couldn’t survive on take-out alone — it began to feel as if the walls were closing in.

Although it’s been only a month, the anxious monotony makes it feel far longer. Our apartment doesn’t get much light, so we try to get out every day. But on rainy days, it can feel as if we’re sinking into a black hole.

“NYC’s finger-waggers and toilet-paper hoarders are far outweighed by the random acts of kindness.”

Some of us questioned the logic of the lockdown. If you force 8.4 million residents into their often-cramped apartments, isn’t that going to make a highly contagious problem worse? Why not quarantine just the most vulnerable? Gov. Andrew Cuomo also initially questioned the lockdown: “I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy,” he told the New York Post on March 26. “Young people then quarantined with older people, [it] was probably not the best public health strategy. The younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection.”

Nonetheless, as the numbers of sick and dying continued to climb, Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio went on a closing spree. Closing the basketball courts was particularly painful. Basketball is New York’s great equalizer. The day the park rangers took down the hoops in Central Park, one man shouted at them, “Do you know what this is called? Oppression.”

“I hear you,” responded one of rangers. “Both my kids play here. Now they’re playing video games.”

To stay on trend, The New York Times published a total of five pro-video game pieces. You could almost hear the eyerolls from some parents.

“We are a city of congregators,” wrote Glynnis MacNicol in Medium’s vertical GEN on April 15. “We are so used to being jammed up against one another, so thrilled and challenged and comforted by it that maintaining social distancing requires the mental vigilance of giving up an addiction. … In a city of people used to rallying in an emergency, be it large or small, we have been forbidden from using our greatest strength. This virus is perverting everything: It’s Gotham’s kryptonite.

“The abrupt closures of the last month have mimicked the sudden loss of a loved one: the immediate disorienting grief when everything is upside down and your brain, stretched between what was and what is now, does acrobatic maneuvers trying to exist in both places at once. In Alzheimer communities, it’s known as anticipatory grief: The confusing and extraordinarily painful process of understanding that what you see before you is not actually there. And may never be there again.”

A toll on the community

Bereavement notices from our synagogue, Park Avenue, typically come once a month, maybe once every two months. I started to get six or seven a day. One friend lost her father. My 90-year-old father is on such tight security in his Palm Beach, Fla., nursing home that often, I can’t even call him.

The homeless are gone, too, presumably to shelters. The lines outside the various food pantries stretch around the block.

The ultra-Orthodox communities in Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park have been especially hard hit. Estimates put the number of deaths in these communities at roughly 300. The early resistance by many to social distancing was part of the problem but so was the fact that “community” is precisely what this community rests on. “Twenty-five people in the Hasidic communities died over the course of one Shabbat,” a Satmar adviser told The Jerusalem Post on April 17. “We didn’t want to get up in the morning because we didn’t want to hear any more bad news.”

I feel so blessed to have Alexander. We deal with isolation issues — now, I am often the unwilling recipient of his tackles — but friends who live alone face an aching loneliness on top of the relentless anxiety.

I urge my friends to take walks in the park. But sometimes, even that can be dangerous. I’ve been scolded for laughing; walking too close to Alexander; and told that I was “setting a bad example” by running after his soccer ball. Yes, New Yorkers are on edge. But not as much as non-New Yorkers observing this. Whenever I post photos from the park, there’s always a group of finger-waggers attempting to virus-shame (HBO TV show host Bill Maher’s term) me. Oh yeah, they all live in big houses with yards.

‘I just don’t see an end of this in sight’

Short of losing a loved one, I simply can’t process what it must be like for the health care workers who go in each day to face a humanitarian crisis not seen in this country for a century. Each time they go to work, they are risking their lives and those of their loved ones. On April 17 the New York Post reported that at least 26 health care workers in NYC had died from complications of the virus; 900 staffers had tested positive; 3,000 had called in sick.

I see Mount Sinai staffers take a break on benches in Central Park. Their eyes bloodshot or closed from 12-hour shifts, they look as though life, let alone bravery, has been beaten out of them. But soon, they pick themselves up and go back into battle.

The New York Times Magazine ran a particularly wrenching description by Dr. Helen Ouyang as the headline: “I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same,” on April 14. She is part of a WhatsApp group chat with other emergency room doctors to share facts and feelings. By the end of March, she learned that 13 COVID-19 patients died in one hospital in 24 hours: “A refrigerated truck is sheltering dead bodies there because the morgue is already full .… Paramedics say they are seeing 300 ‘dead on arrival’ cases in one day, citywide, instead of the usual 50 or so.

“It seems impossible to avoid getting infected,” Ouyang continues. “You would have to be perfect, and in the mayhem of the E.R., it’s nearly impossible to be even good. I make mental calculations to keep all protective equipment on for my eight-hour shifts; during my 12-hour shifts, I’ll remove it only twice, to eat or drink.

Typically, there is an energy that runs through New York City that, no matter how much you may be sick of the winters or enjoy a vacation, you find yourself missing.

“When I walk through the hospital doors, the E.R. is a place I no longer recognize. Intubated patients, of every age, are on ventilators everywhere. It feels simultaneously electrifying and oppressive. But it’s also eerily quiet. Family members and friends haven’t been allowed in the E.R. for more than a week; most of the patients are too sick to talk. … Oxygen hisses in the background.

“The virus is impulsive, attacking one person more ferociously than another …. I just don’t see an end of this in sight,” she continues. “When I think about that, I feel submerged, and my instinct is to rip off my mask and leave the hospital.”

But she doesn’t. Ouyang continues to weather the storm with a strength and resilience that feels biblical.

Random acts of kindness 

NYC’s finger-waggers and toilet-paper hoarders are far outweighed by the random acts of kindness. Food shopping can be onerous in NYC, but cabs typically are a short step away. What happens when the cabs disappear? Alexander and I were walking up Madison Avenue, laden with grocery bags, when a guy with a helmet and mask approached on his electric scooter. “Hey neighbor, let me take a few of these for you.” Alexander was dumbfounded that I gave our grocery bags to a complete stranger. But his heavy Israeli accent signaled he was our neighbor across the street, the guy who owns the dog spa.

The tents in front of our building soon became part of the Central Park landscape, as solid and as unwavering as the trees, despite the 24-hour presence of the NYPD, media and groups trying to steal the media spotlight. One day, we saw a bunch of violets tied to the fence. A sign read “Take Heart,” but it faced the spectators, not the tents. Whoever put it there knew we needed that message almost as much as the patients in the tents.

There also have been moments of humor: the guy in the park with the full-head goat mask; the guy wearing a mask and smoking (actually not funny); the scantily clad sunbather who took over the basketball courts.

The defiance of nature

The lifesaver for all New Yorkers has no doubt been the most glorious blossoming of spring throughout the city. Are the cherry blossoms and tulips and daffodils even more beautiful this year? Why do the squirrels and baby birds seem more eager to connect? “Without all of the people, you notice everything more,” my son said.

My hope that a sense of defiance would emerge quickly was quashed by a new set of rules and regulations from the governor, rules that further confiscate the three things we need to get us through this: sun, air and human contact.

I asked Isaacson where this is all going. “We don’t know,” he said. “If initial predictions pan out, so far, we’ve seen just the tip of the iceberg. The rapid progression of the disease, that it can so swiftly derail multiple organs in the body, offers significant treatment challenges still.”

On the morning of April 19, Cuomo was slightly optimistic. “If the data holds, we are past the high point, and all indications at this point are that we are on a descent,” he said during his daily press conference. “We are on the other side of the plateau and the numbers are coming down.”

The governor asked that we remain vigilant, stressing that 1,300 people had been hospitalized for the virus the previous day.

“Don’t get cocky,” he said. “Don’t get arrogant. This virus has been ahead of us every step of the way. This is only halftime in this entire situation.”

Spring continues to defy all forms of oppression. For humans, defiance rests on hope, on the glimpse of an end to this horror. Sadly, we don’t quite have that yet.

Karen Lehrman Bloch is an author and cultural critic.