Only the Beginning

The pandemic arrives, and the city shudders.

- Photographs by David Wiliams

A City of Bodies

The week we started hoarding beans.

by MOLLY FISCHER

MY PRIVATE principle of subway etiquette has always gone something like this: Pretend you’re not a body, and help others do the same. I try not to touch; I try not to smell. I don’t eat. I don’t groom. I am eyes and ears only, compact and quiet, moving toward the center of the car as best I can.

It’s a pretense required to enjoy what I want to enjoy about living in New York: the simultaneous experience of proximity and privacy, watching and being watched without quite acknowledging either—the ability to indulge in solitude without isolation. It’s a pretense that, suddenly, has grown untenable. The truth, now unignorable: We were all bodies all along, no matter if we’d never clip our fingernails on the train. Whatever thin, invisible barriers I liked to imagine were not the kind to thwart a virus.

Navigating New York City in March of 2020 meant growing increasingly alert to gestures and sensations that once passed beneath notice. In the beginning, this all felt stagy, artificial. Your eye itches: Go to rub it, and pull your hand away. Your phone fidgets in your pocket: Do you pull it out? Someone coughs Lookup, wondering if they made it to their elbow. Quickly rearrange your face into the nonjudgmental expression of a person who’s definitely not a hygiene-vigilante panic monger. Stand on the rush-hour subway, holding the pole, your bag brushing the passenger behind you as the train stops. Imagine an oily phantom print of subway pole on your left palm until you reach a sink. What started out as stagy soon became routine.