"April 18, 2020"
by Gaia Squarci from New York, USA
I browse through photos of the 1918 Spanish flu, the ones I can search online a century later, imagining the multitude of others that got lost in time. I see the filthy streets of the Manhattan described by Luc Sante. Through the noise of wheels on cobblestones and the clanking of the elevated train I overhear conversations that sound archaic and incredibly familiar at once. I enter stuffy rooms and follow nurses as they go from roof to roof to travel between tenement homes. I smell people, and places.
While our worlds are so different, under the clothes of culture our bodies are just the same. They feel, sweat, suffer alike, and the pain and pleasure my body feels is the same a woman once felt 100, 1000 years ago.
A body I always thought of as “he” somehow, like a companion who needs to be on my side, making sure I’m ok. For years I got upset whenever he fell short. This crisis made me realize he’s on me, I’m the one who needs to take care of him. Doctors endlessly told me there was nothing wrong with my immune system. He was powered by stress and sleep-deprived, that’s why I kept falling sick.
Yesterday I walked in front of the refrigerated truck that was turned into a morgue at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center. A brave, big graffiti on its side warned “Dead Inside”. It reminded me of what society is largely made of, how unable we are to connect to the pain of others unless directly touched, and that our elected representatives are a reflection of who we are, collectively.
Whenever I get out to photograph and talk to people in Brooklyn I walk into the surreal. People are out in the streets and sometimes willingly oblivious. Some ask me to shoot their music video and try to hand me their phone so I can “type in my Instagram”. Others get too close and go: “They’re not telling us the whole story”. And the whole story brings in an army led by Bill Gates and “the Chinese” followed by 5G towers, Alexas and sects of global elites who jump out of a magician’s hat to populate a conversation where science is treated like an inconvenience, because it doesn’t claim to have answers before time, and even when answers come they aren’t framed into a catchphrase. We need complex things to be easy, and we need someone to blame.
I wake up in the morning without an alarm. Time is liquid. My coffee cup with a chipped border and a falling man painted at the bottom never gets cleaned before I refill it. I never begin or finish anything. I go from an audio recording to a photo series to a zoom interview to taxes, to the meditation my mother sent me which I listen to while eating cookies, to running out on a whim when it gets too much. At the little sports field close to home the daylight is fading. Drizzle falls silently. I walk by the only other person in the field. A man in a hoodie, wearing a mask, kneeling on a yoga mat on the fake green grass. He looks at me too. Then, he bends over to pray.
And I did again on February 14, when a high fever and a cough unlike any I’ve ever had chained me to the bed for a week. I would wake up soaked in sweat every morning and I got scared. This felt different. For another week I could feel a faint hiss in my breath and I kept falling asleep wherever I was, exhausted even by a couple of hours outside. I couldn’t smell or taste the food I ate, and found no explanation for this. At the time mainstream media hadn’t pointed out these specific symptoms, and Covid-19 wasn’t considered a real threat to the U.S. A month later Coronavirus was everywhere.
This crisis has shown us that no matter how steady our lives looked, how successful anyone’s business might have been, anything can be snatched away from anyone in no time. What do we make of this. The questions about how society will learn from this experience and the mistakes that could have been avoided are on countless headlines and on the minds of the thinking. Most of the times my hopes don’t go far. The only quality I deeply trust in human beings is our ductility, our capability to adapt to whatever new circumstances are presented to us, and hopefully survive.
I meet Tree at the corner of Troutman and Central, while an old woman is loaded into an ambulance during a windstorm. Are you related to her? Yes. Are you a relative? No, she sits every day in front of the building and drinks. Does she have symptoms of Covid-19? No, I don’t know how but she fell and her head is bleeding.
Tree greets everyone in the street. Cars stop by to say hi. He also knows many of the guys who sleep in the park nearby. He tries to show me a couple of Covid videos he received in Whatsapp but they won’t work. He urges me to drink lemon and warm water, and disappears like street people do.
Manhattan feels different. Largely white collar, less people around, but what strikes me is not the emptiness. It’s the silence. I can hear the sound of a car and a couple of bikers go by, in the same place where road works, food cart generators, shouting preachers, and hundreds of engines and thousands of steps would drill my ears every day. That’s why we all wear headphones in New York. I don’t need them today.
When I take the train back to Brooklyn it’s late. The subway is as dirty as I’ve ever seen it, yet almost completely deserted. Only the homeless drag themselves in an out, or sleep stretched on the benches, lonelier than ever, on a ghost train.
These nights I like to analyze how sleep gets hold of me, spooning me as I turn on my left side, melting with the warmth of the blanket. It starts from the nape, spreads into the back of the head, it touches my shoulders, and then the rest of my body goes. I let myself be taken without resisting, somehow blindly confident that I will wake up again.
