Since the arrival of the new coronavirus, each month, each week, each day has manifested a new city in place of the old one.
At eye level, from the sidewalk, the first new city was more easily felt than seen. There were just a few masks bobbing among the same number of faces and heads. Were people walking faster, or slower? Were they talking less, or more? Did they know something the rest of us didn’t?
Next came the uncanny city, full of nervous life and incongruity: subways full of people, more than usual carrying full shopping bags. Were people looking at — and touching — their phones less, or more? Every cough seemed louder. People started to seem closer.
The bars were full of people watching TVs showing games with empty stands. They didn’t know, didn’t believe or didn’t care. This city still had an opinion about the virus. It agreed to disagree.
The next city understood that the last city’s residents had betrayed it, and started making plans. As in each of the cities before, this one was full of people on different mental timelines, some with thoughts of family and friends in China or Italy or Iran, others addled by the accelerating news cycles, and yet others, busy with their lives, interrupted by friends and loved ones with a prophecy to share.
The next city, the current city, looks like what it is: a place between states. It’s a movie set at lunchtime, everyone milling about and practicing expository lines about “the virus.” A video game level you already beat, full of avatars wandering around with no more sophisticated objective than to not run into one another.
This city is, on the sidewalk, quiet: all awkward avoidance and pedestrian choreography, sideways glances and conflicting feelings, people unsure if they should still be outside at all, and wondering the same about all the others, at least six feet away.
This city is panicked, but the panic is all inside: matters of money and care and health and fear are boiling over mostly out of sight, in our heads and behind closed doors.
Tomorrow’s city will feel as empty as its homes feel full. There will be no question about where those fewer and fewer people are going: to help each other, and themselves, by heading inside.