Jacques is a good friend. I miss sitting in dive bars with him, laughing at, and with, the world.
The worse it gets here, the more connected to home I feel. I can‘t imagine leaving. It is the source of many arguments.
Linda is worried about the kids. She wants to go stay at her mother’s house out of the city.
I do not know this boy. I did not even get his name. We were standing outside a hospital together, watching the ambulances come and go, dropping off corona patients, and had a silent conversation.
I’ve known David for over thirty years. For all that time he has been working in the restaurant business, first as a busboy, then a waiter, and then a manger, often getting off work at 3, 4, or even 5 in the morning. For the first time, last week, he collected an unemployment check.
The simplest tasks can feel overwhelming. I have to return a borrowed scanner to my friend Samantha in New Jersey. Coming from Brooklyn, it feels as if I was bringing the virus with me.
The scariest part about doing nothing all day is how easy it is to get used to it.
I’ve been complaining a lot. Whenever it gets bad, I think of my friend Mostafa. He is here in Brooklyn alone, unable to go back home, to Egypt, and has been sick with the virus.
I text Yifan to see if he is in New York, and if I can drop by to take a picture. He texts me back “I am in NYC, just back from China, my dad survived after being treated with a ventilator, he was very lucky. I flee half way around the earth to escape one epicenter, to another epicenter, even worse. WTF!”
Andy and Helene and their daughter Maxine are neighbors. They have been very careful, from the beginning, sometime in early March, only leaving their home to go shopping and run essential errands. Still, they all have caught the virus. I see this as evidence of the inevitable. My time will come.
Needing to get out, I go for a walk, past the prison. Prisoners are banging on the windows and screaming. Sometimes still photography is such an inadequate response.
Every time I leave the house, the kids yell at me. You are putting us all at risk, they say. But I feel obligated, I reply, as a journalist, to witness what is happening out there. So your pictures, my son asks, are saving lives? Like a nurse or paramedic?
I’ve really missed Gareth. His landlord owns several funeral homes in Queens, and unloads bodies in the back parking lot. I’ve been urging him to try to get us in to document the overflow of corona deaths. “Its complicated” he said. That is adult speak for no.
Watching the dead be loaded into a makeshift morgue that could just as easily be me on that gurney. But never have I felt a greater disparity between my life and what I know lurks around the corner, unseen.
A neighbor claps for first responders and health care workers at 7pm. It brings out the cynic in me, this nightly expression of gratitude. I want to open the window and scream “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”.
I‘m wrong about that. Seeing the nurses respond to the cheers is a sliver of light in the darkness.
