Transcript
A (0:02)
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
B (0:10)
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In this time of pandemic, the streets of New York City now are so desolate, you half expect tumbleweed to blow along the pavement where cars and cabs once clustered. You hear the wheeze of an empty bus rounding the corner, the flutter of pigeons on the fire escape, the wail of an ambulance, unnervingly frequent for weeks as the pandemic took hold. A sax player who stakes his corner outside a dress shop on Broadway was still there, playing My Favorite things and all the things you are. Now he's gone too. The spectacle of New York without New Yorkers is the result of a social pact. We've absented ourselves from the schools and the playgrounds, the ballparks and the bars, the places where we work, because life now depends on our withdrawal from life. The vacancy of our public spaces is antithetical to the very purpose of the city, which is defined by its encounters, their constancy and their poetry. But the vacancy of the city is what's needed to preserve it. And so you stick your head out the window of an apartment that you have not left in days, you see a single scurrying soul. Her arms full of groceries, she's wearing a mask and walking with the urgency of a thief. She quickens her step as she crosses Broadway, past magnolias blooming on the traffic divider. And like all of us, she's trying to outrun a thing that she cannot see. E.B. white wrote in the summer of 1948, on any person who desires such queer prizes. New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. But these prizes are now a public health requirement. We chafe at the solitude. We try to overcome it with technology. We text, we zoom. We send links about virology. We are all immunologists now. We watch televised briefings. As long as arthouse movies, they're not descending on us from heaven. But then something happens. Joy comes at seven. Or is it sheer catharsis? At seven o', clock, in neighborhoods across the city, cheering breaks out as though the Yankees had clinched the World Series. It spills from the stoops and the sidewalks, from apartment windows and rooftops. We take out our smartphones and start recording the roar, the clapping, the whooping, the tambourines and the wind chimes, the vuvuzelas. The guy across the street is a master of the cowbell. And we don't mind. Before it all dies down, we've sent the recording to a loved one who works in an er, and we send it to others who are sick, in bed or out of range of our dense and canyon city, the city described on the news as the epicenter. The cheering is for all the nurses, orderlies, doctors, EMTs. It's for the courage of professionals who may work without the protective gear that they need. Some of them have seen their salaries cut. Some have fallen ill, and others soon will. We're applauding Anthony Fauci, who must spend nearly as much mental energy trying to finesse the ignorance and ego of his commander in chief as he does in assessing the course of the virus. We're cheering researchers in labs all over the world who are at work on treatments or vaccines. We're cheering people who make the city work at their peril. Grocery clerks and ambulance drivers, sanitation workers, pharmacists and mail carriers, truckers, cops, firemen. The delivery man who shrugs off the straps of his knapsack and jabs at the intercom buzzer with a gloved finger. We cheer those who provide straight information and look out for the most vulnerable among us, the poor, the aged, the incarcerated. And we cheer the artists who have lost their gigs but are posting paintings on Instagram, Facetiming their soliloquies, singing into iPhones. We know the limits of this release, this cheering. There's a feeling of helplessness reflected in it, too. But it's what we have. In a dark time, even the president has appeared to bow before the reality that as many as 1 or 200,000 of us could die in this pandemic. These coming weeks are and will be demanding in ways that few of us could have anticipated. If New Yorkers are in hiding, the virus has shown a knack for seeking. But with time, time and discipline, life will return to the city, our city and your city. The doors will open, and we'll leave our homes. We'll greet our friends face to face at long delayed Easter services and Passover seders. Children will go to class with their teachers. Sidewalks and stores and theaters will fill. One day, remnants of the crisis will be tucked away, out of sight and out of mind. A box of gloves, a bag of makeshift masks, containers of drying Clorox wipes. We'll forget a lot about our city's suspended life, but we'll remember who we lost. We will remember the terrible cost of time squandered. And we'll remember the sound of seven o'.