from THE VOICES  

‘The mourning dove and the ambulance siren wail in and out of one another all day.’

• K.D.

Mr. Petrocelli walked nearly every morning to 7:30 Mass. He walked everywhere, in fact, holding his rosary beads of green Connemara marble — that is, when he wasn’t nurturing his garden’s fruits and vegetables, which he would often give away. Sometimes he gave away the entire plant.

He began to feel uncharacteristically fatigued in mid-March, declined over the next two weeks, and died at Staten Island Hospital’s south campus. In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Petrocelli is survived by two granddaughters.

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A week after his death, his wife was continuing to receive messages from the many people her husband had touched.

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I have his strawberry plants, they say. I have his fig trees.

*

When you put something on, it’s called donning, and taking it off is called doffing, and there’s a way to do that to not contaminate your body parts…

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For many New Yorkers, it's officially springtime in NYC when magnolia trees in Central Park are in bloom. This year, star magnolias first bloomed in Central Park during the second week of March. Saucer magnolias were in full bloom by early April.

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hellacious proportions 

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household sex partner (HSP), 

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Passerines start coming through in March with the first push of hardy birds like American Robins, Common Grackles and Red-winged Blackbirds –

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Ear Loop Procedural Mask RS-700

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“This is the great unwinding,”

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‘I always say there’s no hierarchy of pain… pain is not a contest’

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We’re all afraid. I have single mothers working for me, mothers whose husbands are about to be deported, men who are their family’s only support, men who worked during the day in restaurants, and now their only check comes from cleaning. I find my women crying. They’re tired from another job, but they have to keep working. It doesn’t matter how, or whether they’re given gloves or not. I have older people in their 60s who are cleaning bathrooms. Everyone is afraid of getting infected. But even more than being infected — it makes me so sad to say it — they’re afraid of being without work. So they put themselves in the hands of God and hope that he will have pity and that they will not get Covid-19. The thing is to get food on the table.

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*

All trauma is preverbal,”

*

I’m the “float” nurse. 

…It moves me to see her wallet, her planner, her toiletries. Only a week ago she was a person with a future, with plans, with cherry-flavored lip balm

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Dr. Rosenberg welcomed a podiatrist and two of her resident trainees, a neurosurgery physician assistant, surgery residents and a nurse anesthetist. “All people who are good with knives and big needles,” Dr. Rosenberg quipped.

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They were down to eating plain noodles until he visited a food bank and got a bag of potatoes and some carrots.

*

I had a little bird,

Its name was Enza.

I opened the window,

And in flew Enza.

*

There are now so many people dying in private homes that soldiers and members of the National Guard have started to haul the bodies out in rented vans.

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Those currently buried on Hart Island include people who haven't been identified, unclaimed bodies and people whose families could not afford burial costs. 

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In the past, the island has been used as a burial ground for victims of the 1919 Spanish Flu pandemic and the thousands of people who died of AIDS in the 1980s. 

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The first AIDS victims were buried away from other graves on the island in 1985 over fears they would infect the other bodies.

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Tulip season peaks around late April to early May, adding pops of colors along our walkways as spring turns into summer weather. The tulips were early this year -- we spotted them in bloom at Hunter’s Point South Park in mid-April.

*

You know, as a pastor, I live with death. What I struggle with is not that people are going to die. I struggle with the history, in this country, of deaths not counting equally. Of saying it doesn’t really count the same if indigenous people die off. Or poor people. Or black people.

…but if this suffering continues, and people have to see things like they’ve never seen and feel things like they’ve never felt, it may actually push us to the point of recognizing that everybody has a right to live — that if they don’t live, we don’t live.

*

Every hospital has ghostly places, rooms where the dead kids gather to sing from empty beds.

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sometimes, I can’t remember if the gloves on my hands are clean or dirty.

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A typical late spring migrant is the Mourning Warbler, found after many of the other species have mostly passed through.  

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...the search has been fruitless. Many freelancers like her are competing for the same jobs. She said she has savings to pay for two months of rent, groceries and other bills. After that, she does not know what she would do, she said: “That would basically be me going through every dollar I have.”

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Last Friday, the department said that between March 16 and May 5, officers had issued at least 374 summonses for violating the emergency measures and for acts likely to spread the virus. Of those, 300 summonses went to black and Hispanic people.

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Worst practices. Worst case scenario. Worst-in-class 

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the very definition of a “stranded asset” 

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Where do you live? “Bayside, Queens.”

Where do you work? “U.P.S., 26 years.”

Are you nervous doing your job now? “I don’t scare easy. I was working on 9/11 when the two planes flew over my head. But this is different. We’re on the front lines now 

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Everybody is scared. You can see it in people’s eyes. The customers are scared of us delivery boys.

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When I wake up every day, I tell God, “God, please take care of me.”

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these are ruin problems

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This falls under the General Duty Clause 

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The last day Gary Washington reported to work at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in northern Manhattan was March 29. His body was aching, and a colleague saw him lying down in the cafeteria.

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Rosalyn Washington, his wife, thought he was growing too old to keep working as a housekeeping employee there. He cleaned the rooms of virus patients after they were discharged, and his brother thought he should stop going to work, she said.

So many housekeepers called out sick that the hospital began bringing in temporary workers, one of his colleagues said. But Mr. Washington was the family’s primary breadwinner.

“He was not going to quit his job and not take care of his family,” Mrs. Washington said.

“I had 25 years with this man. I’m so empty. Now I’m getting calls about widows’ benefits,” she said, her voice breaking. “He’s trying to take care of me still.”

*

“to grasp the nettle”

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We are the worried unwell 

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Last week, using two vans, Mr. Penepent transported 150. This week they expected to take 300.

As the death toll mounted in March, Mr. Penepent began reaching out to trade organizations and funeral directors, offering to transport the dead to crematories in upstate New York and in neighboring states that were not seeing the same deluge of cases.

Of the 50 crematories across the state, only four are in the city, and they are struggling to keep up with demand. Slots are booked weeks in advance.

At 5:15 p.m. on Thursday, the three had loaded about 30 bodies into one of the vans, which Mr. Halmy, the other student-volunteer, would be driving to Pennsylvania, alone.

*

Around noon four days later, Nick texted Kam that he had left the funeral home with her father’s body and was on his way to Ferncliff Cemetery’s crematory in Hartsdale, N.Y., less than half an hour north. Kam asked him to text her again when he arrived. 

She looked up an image of Ferncliff to imagine where her father’s body was headed and prayed that the crematory workers would be gentle with the casket and with him. She had already texted a link to her sisters and her mom: a Sikh meditative prayer that her father loved. 

As Nick drove on the Bronx River Parkway with Kam’s father in the back of his hearse, in an apartment in the Bronx, in a house in New Jersey and in three different homes on Long Island, the six women who most loved Paramjit Singh Purewal prayed for him.

After 20 minutes, Kam got a text: “He’s here,” Nick wrote.

Kam texted her entire family. “It is done.”

Then, sitting alone at her kitchen table, she wept.

*

Even after her mother died, Minnoli still texted, trying to stay connected. “I miss u,” she wrote before going to bed that night. When she woke the next morning, Minnoli texted, “Thank you for coming to me last night in my dreams.”

*

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I finally weaned a young woman off oxygen. She has a loving husband, who, on the phone, sounds like a jolly, sturdy kind of man. Today, he mentioned something about seeing his wife later today. Huh?

Turns out that every day, he walks the 10 blocks from his apartment to the hospital. He knows where his wife’s second floor room is located, so he stands beneath her window day-in and day-out. There, positioned in front of red tulips, he talks and jokes with his wife, prays with her and tells her how much he loves her.

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*

But what I miss most, with an almost lacerating intensity, are New York City bars.

I miss all the bars where you can feel the subway above or below, the sense of the city chugging along.

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In this precarious moment, the bars I find myself missing most are those that transport me to the past, to the New York City of 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago or more. Bars that endured three or four wars, Prohibition and the Great Depression, and “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Bars that endured the Spanish flu and thus seem to whisper a promise to me that they’ll endure this too

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*

I’m just as likely to die from a cop as I am from Covid,” he said.

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“I do not think anybody is going to be observing this curfew,” said George Daratany, 34. “It doesn’t compute for New York City to have a closing time.”

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“I had an experience where I asked a group of officers why they weren’t wearing masks,” Ms. Heckard said. “And they told me it was because they couldn’t breathe. And I thought that was the most ironic thing.”

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Today, the mourning dove holds the distinction of being the only native North American bird to breed in every state, including Hawaii. Their U.S. population is estimated at more than 400 million. Despite their numbers, their lives tend to be short and difficult

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He was old enough to remember when there were ‘No Spitting’ signs in the subways

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Load the sled, check the traces, feed Balto,

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I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping.

When I was at my sickest, I could barely talk on the phone. I’d like to say that I caught up on some reading, but I didn’t.  

Instead, I closed my eyes and saw myself running along the New York waterfront, healthy and whole, all 8.5 million of my neighbors by my side. I pictured myself doing the things I haven’t gotten to do yet, like getting married, buying a house, becoming a mother, owning a dog.

*

My kids. I miss their touch, their smell, their drool, their runny noses. We will miss Easter, my birthday and, in all likelihood, the baby’s first birthday. I am angry at a force I cannot see, but more than anything, I am sad and aching to squeeze them again, feel their soft skin next to mine. When this nightmare is over, I will hold them so long my arms will ache and the kids will fall to my feet and hug my ankles like they used to before we were all felled by the monster in our midst.

*

Hvalat

Mahalo

kop Kuhn

Salamat

Arigato

Gracias

Hey you. We really appreciate you

Thank you

Thanks

*

Sounds of children yelling. Applause. Car horns. Rattles. Cacophony. 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time. Pots banging. Trumpets. Crescendo.

. . . . . . . .

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an excerpt from the novel

WHAT IS TO

BE DONE

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Chapter 1: Just like Clay leaning over Liston

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“A sort of Wife of Bathsheba’s Tale?” she said. The old lady shook her head, then shook her head again. “What does that even mean?”

This wasn’t going well. This really wasn’t going well at all.

“I still don’t get it. Again, please,” she said, impatiently. “Exactly why did you get thrown out?”

Jonathan Head took a breath and stole another glance at her. “Like I was saying, this was for my senior thesis, in April, just a few months ago. God, it seems like years ago. I got the word: they were going to give me the big space. Well, maybe it did go to my head a bit. But I got to work right away. And when it came time for the opening, I have to say, the installation looked great. I had projected a street map of the city onto three walls of the gallery. Each artifact was mounted, along with a wall label, at the location on the map where it was… collected. On the fourth we showed a loop of the video.”

The two of them were sitting at a table at the end of a long room overlooking the Bowery. The young man took in Sarah Her’s famous white hair, with the straight-cut bangs, swaying back and forth as she moved her head. This was her Drawing room, he’d been informed.

“That’s it?” she said, shaking her head again. “That’s all? The insurance companies were coming after you. So what? You were on the hook for thirty thousand for all those BMW hood ornaments. Big deal. Lots of people have gotten away with worse. I mean, we’re talking about the Rhode Island School of Design. I would have expected you to end up with a fellowship, so you could make a project out of your pre-trial hearings. I’ve never heard of anyone getting expelled from RISD for something like this.”

“Well,” Jonathan looked away, “a lot of it has to do with my video. It shows me leaning over each BMW –”

“Oh, now it’s your video? Yours?” the old lady said sharply, “I thought it was your girlfriend who produced it.”

This Jonathan was taking up space and time, especially time, in her world – this Jonathan Head, this skinny white kid. His hair looked like he’d been sleeping in it for the last week or so, and his face looked like it was months and months, perhaps years and years, away from deciding what it wanted to be when it finished growing up. In his tired-looking jeans and his wrinkled oxford shirt that was a little past the point of looking like it was supposed to be as wrinkled as it was, and his entirely dolorous-looking sneakers,

downright downtrodden, very close to utterly defeated as any athletic shoes could be. What was he even  doing here? She’d clean forgotten. Oh right… it came back to her.

“She just shot the footage. I did all the editing and the sound –”

“– Fine, fine,” the old lady interrupted again. “No doubt this work was compelling and persuasive, a devastating critique of late-stage capital, but, as long as you were willing to pay the fines and return the badges, I should have thought you would have ended up the darling of the department.”

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“Well,” he said again, “actually, it did have something to do with the department. With Bathsheba. You’re probably acquainted with –”

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“– Of course, I know her.”

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The old lady spoke in clipped peremptory sentences. Why was he still here, in this white room, at this long, bare Nakashima refectory table? She was going to throw him out soon, he could just tell. “And her wife, Astrid. I know them both.”

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So he began the story again. This was the third time. “When we went out at night we’d ride around town, near campus, between RISD and Brown, until we came across a BMW. They’re not that hard to find. Penny would start recording. I’d pry the badge off the car, wave at her with it, and off we’d go. Later, we’d use the GPS to mark the spot – where I – where we – collected it. Then, when it came time to install the piece, I fixed the hundred forty-four badges to those three walls of the gallery on which the map of the city was projected, right at the locations where I’d found them, along the labels noting the date and time…”

Jonathan paused.

“You already told me this.” She turned her head and looked out the window. Across the street, on the east side of the Bowery, along a block lined with restaurants, each bar’s busboy was setting up his sidewalk tables for lunch. She was getting bored, he could tell.

“We only ever came across one M5 badge” he resumed, hesitantly. “You don’t see a lot of them. I found it at the corner of Benefit and Meeting Street. Turns out it belonged to Bathsheba herself. Bright and early the morning after I took their badge, it turns out, Bathsheba got on the phone and filed a claim with her carrier. Actually, Astrid took care of it. In their marriage she did that stuff, insurance, bills, things like that.

Bathsheba told her that the car had been hit the night before, when she was in Boston, at a fundraising dinner for the Friends of one of the museums. The funny thing is, I wondered if it might be hers when I came across it that night. At the time, I thought she’d find it all amusing. That should have been the end of it… except for what happened the night of the opening.”

“The opening?”

Did the old lady seem a little more interested now? She turned back to him.

“Well, Bathsheba was there of course. She was being lovely to me. And no one was looking at the work; it was an opening after all. Then, towards the end, but when there were still lots of faculty and administration hanging out, working their way to the bottom of the buckets of Stella, Astrid showed up. Somehow Astrid was drawn to that M5 badge.”

Jonathan looked out the window again. Honking Suburbans clogged the Bowery, waiting for the light to change at Houston Street.

He went on, “No one had really leaned in and looked at the piece. I was watching her. I felt kind of flattered by the attention. Then she walked past the video being projected against the fourth wall. It was a kind of montage of the different jobs. You could hear us talking, see me jumping off the bike, running around, pulling the screwdriver from my pocket, laughing as we rode away, car alarms going off now and then. Astrid happened to look up at the projection just when it was running the actual footage of me taking their very own badge. What were the odds of that? She noticed and stopped. She recognized her car. She also recognized the building it was parked in front of. It wasn’t their house.

“I’d never seen anyone do a spit-take before. Astrid did one, right in front of me. I watched her quickly walk back to the M5 badge and read the label next to it. She was doing the math. She realized that their BMW had been parked in front of Bathsheba’s old flame’s house the night Bathsheba claimed she’d been at that benefit in Boston. The car hadn’t been vandalized in Boston, but right there in Providence. Of course, it was

being vandalized by me. And while it was being vandalized Bathsheba must have been in bed with her ex, that bitch. After swearing up and down that she was never going to see her again.”

Jonathan looked back from the window, glanced at Sarah Her, then continued.

“What happened next was almost too… too perfect, if that’s the right word. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Astrid catch sight of us and grab one of the Stellas by the neck. Bathsheba had just finished introducing me to a Chinese high school junior and her parents. ‘Yes, this Jonathan is special. We don’t just give every senior a one-man show upon graduation. Actually, only one every year. And this year it’s him. I know you two have been building a collection. My advice: keep your eye on him.’ She then launched into a disquisition on Korean-style barbecue food trucks in Back Bay Boston. They were touring the New England art schools. Astrid walked right up to Bathsheba. The Stella was still capped. It was pretty heavy with all that beer inside. And she clocked her a good one.

“She caught Bathsheba right across the temple. Knocked her clean out. As she stood over her,” Jonathan balled his hands into fists and essayed a pose, “She looked just like Clay leaning over Liston in Lewiston. And everyone there, every single tenured member of the department and all of the post-grads, as well as all the graduating seniors and most of their parents, was then treated, courtesy of Astrid, to a detailed

précis of each instance of Bathsheba’s infidelity during their marriage, the volume of which was kind of impressive – a marriage which, Astrid made a point of reiterating repeatedly – was to be considered terminated as of that moment.”

Sarah Her seemed to be smiling now. Was that a smile?

“And how is it that you know about Clay and Liston?” she asked.

“Oh,” Jonathan colored slightly, “one of my old roommates. He freelanced for some sports nostalgia site.”

She was clearly smiling now.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember now. I did hear about them breaking up, but not Why.”

A thin, not entirely kind smile.

“Well, that could indeed get you thrown out of RISD. That would do it,” Sarah Her said.

“And so, here we are,” he said.

She didn’t appear to hear him.

“What about the police? And the girlfriend? Penny?”

“There was money for a decent lawyer,” Jonathan looked down – as if there was something about the mention of money. Did he look embarrassed? As if pained to admit that there was money? Family money, presumably. She was looking at him again. He was pained about something.

“It was agreed that all charges would be dropped if I just gave back the badges, paid the damages and left town. And didn’t come back for ten years. As for Penny, she didn’t get expelled. She’s in a different department. That department’s chair hates Bathsheba. Something to do with budgets. There was some dirty pool when it came to refurbishing the seminar rooms a few years ago. He hasn’t forgiven her. I’m not

sure exactly what’s going on now, though. I think Penny might be sleeping with him. I haven’t heard from her since I got on the bus.”

“Oh, I am sorry.” Another smile. This one entirely unkind, not hostile or angry, just scrubbed of feeling, at least any that he could recognize. “And just a week before you were going to graduate.”

The old lady pushed back her chair abruptly, rose to her feet and briskly rubbed her hands together. She pulled her cashmere shawl across her shoulders. She seemed to be entirely in cashmere: turtleneck, long narrow skirt, wide, fringeless, double-folded shawl, all variations of gray. She drew it tighter even though it was a warm early summer afternoon.

“I wish,” she said, “I could help you… you…”

It was clear to him that she had no seen reason to commit his name to memory. Sarah Her had found it increasingly convenient of late to feign that she was losing her memory. What easier way to let someone know where he stands than to give him the impression that he’d made such a little impression that she couldn’t be bothered to remember his name.

“It’s Jonathan Head, but –”

“’Ah, ‘Head’ would have worked. I never give three syllables to an assistant.Dogs get two, assistants one. But you’re not going to be my assistant.”

“– But this is my last –”

“I’m sorry, young man,” Sarah Her said, briskly. “It is true that I have what some would call an unlovely weakness for young ‘uns like you. I readily admit it. Why not? I’m an old lady. Who’s going to criticize me now? When it comes to assistants, I have a predilection for cosseted and clueless white kids. And you do have the stink of the trust fund upon you. I can always tell. There’s been a long parade of ones just like you

through here. And despite the fact that you can spin a decent yarn – and everyone knows that I like a picaresque tale – despite all of that: no. No, no, no. I could never have someone like you in this studio.”

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She shook her head. He was standing now too. She had taken him by the arm, guiding him out of the room.

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“No.”

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This was really it.

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They were on the landing now. The elevator was there but she led him down the stairs. She kept shaking her head as they reached the ground floor. She opened the double doors to the street and extended a thin arm across the lintel.

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“No.”

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Still, it was ending so fast.

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She shook her head once more and then slammed the doors shut, delivering her last words in a decidedly energetic, almost jaunty tone. As if just being able to utter them gave her a certain, discrete joy. As if this was the name of a certain dessert she didn’t treat herself to all that often, but which always occasioned no small measure of pleasure when it happened to be served to her. He stared at the gleaming black doors.

“Heads up, Head! I’m sure you’re heading for something heady!”