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APRIL 13, 2020
4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
David Remnick on New York’s empty streets;
a view from the E.R.; the Navy’s ship comes in;
the death of a father; the front line of the grocery. Not all our
Matthew Hutson 16
DEPT. OF SCIENCE
Attack Mode
award-winning
The search for the solution to the next virus.
writing can
SHOWCASE
Moises Saman 19 Curfew begins in Amman, Jordan. be found
Geoff Dyer 23
LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES
Home Alone Together
in these pages.
Solidarity in the new domesticity.
ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY
Bill Buford 26 Good Bread
Mastering the art of French baking.
34 DISPATCHES FROM A PANDEMIC
Twelve writers on life in the time of COVID-19.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Ariel Levy 50 The Mission
Was a “white savior” in Uganda falsely accused?
FICTION
Tessa Hadley 62 “The Other One”
THE CRITICS
The New Yorker Today app
THE ART WORLD
is the best way to stay on top of
Peter Schjeldahl 70 The Old Masters and our transience.
news and culture every day, as
BOOKS well as the magazine each week.
Casey Cep 73 The radical faith of Dorothy Day. Get a daily blend of reporting,
77 Briefly Noted commentary, humor, and cartoons
Dan Chiasson 78 Joyelle McSweeney’s “Toxicon and Arachne.” from the Web site, and browse
ON TELEVISION
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Doreen St. Félix 80 “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.” newyorker.com/go/today
POEMS
Deborah Garrison 20 “After Sex, Checking for Instagram Posts
by My Kids, and Other Avoidance Strategies”
Arthur Sze 67 “Transpirations”
COVER
Pascal Campion “Lifeline”
DRAWINGS Barbara Smaller, Roz Chast, Mike Twohy, Available on iPad and iPhone
Bruce Eric Kaplan, Tom Toro, P. C. Vey, Liana Finck, Ellis Rosen, Zachary Kanin,
Frank Cotham, Brooke Bourgeois SPOTS Anthony Russo
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 1

jixiansheng
The Sunday Archive Newsletter
CONTRIBUTORS
Ariel Levy (“The Mission,” p. 90) is a staff Matthew Hutson (“Attack Mode,” p. 16),
writer. Her most recent book is the mem- a science writer living in New York
oir “The Rules Do Not Apply.” City, is the author of “The 7 Laws of
Magical Thinking.”
Dig into Bill Buford (“Good Bread,” p. 26), a for-
mer fiction editor at The New Yorker, Karen Russell (“Dispatches from a Pan-
stories from is the author of “Among the Thugs”

and “Heat.” His latest book, “Dirt,” will
be published in May.
demic,” p. 34) has written four books, in-
cluding the short-story collection “Orange
World” and the novel “Swamplandia!”
our 95-year Edwidge Danticat (“Dispatches from a Pascal Campion (Cover), an illustrator,
Pandemic,” p. 41) is the author of, most is an art director for animation studios
archive. recently, “Everything Inside.” in Southern California.
Moises Saman (Showcase, p. 19), a doc- Maggie Nelson (“Dispatches from a Pan-
umentary photographer, won a Gug- demic,” p. 38) was named a MacArthur
genheim Fellowship in 2015. His book Fellow in 2016. Her book “The Argo-
“Discordia” is a visual account of the nauts” won the 2016 National Book
Arab Spring. Critics Circle Award.
Tessa Hadley (Fiction, p. 62) has con- Arthur Sze (Poem, p. 67) is the author
tributed short stories to the magazine of, most recently, the collection “Sight
since 2002. Her most recent novel is Lines,” which won the 2019 National
“Late in the Day.” Book Award for Poetry.
Gary Shteyngart (“Dispatches from a Lorrie Moore (“Dispatches from a Pan-

Pandemic,” p. 37) is the author of five demic,” p. 39) has published ten books,
books, including “Little Failure” and including “Bark” and “See What Can
“Lake Success.” Be Done.”
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PERSONAL HISTORY POSTSCRIPT

C Pam Zhang reflects on her Jonathan Blitzer on the life of Juan
father’s death and her immigrant Sanabria, one of New York City’s first
parents’ psychological legacy. coronavirus victims.
Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
2 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
On the Trail Newsletter
THE MAIL
A SWIM IN THE SEA “deaths of despair,” as the economists
Anne Case and Angus Deaton call
Jill Lepore, in her chronicle of plague lit- them—overlooks a historical develop-
erature, reads Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, ment that supports his thesis (Books,
“The Plague,” as a parable (“Don’t Come March 23rd). Gawande points out that
Any Closer,” March 30th). The virus is death rates across the world have been
Fascism, and the inevitable return of falling for decades. This is generally Sign up for
the disease is evidence of the failure of true, but, after the collapse of Com-
human sympathy. “Men will always be-
come, again, rats,” Lepore writes. But
munism, in 1989, death rates in Russia
and much of the former Soviet Union
The New Yorker’s
when I read “The Plague” with my ninth-
and tenth-grade students in the fall of
increased dramatically. While alcohol
consumption played a key role in this
2020 election
2017, we found that Camus’s text offered surge, the underlying cause, as Case
not just the darkness that Lepore cites but and Deaton suggest, was social disin- newsletter
also a complex vision of resistance to it. tegration. Throughout Russia, indus-
My students, in their essays, all wanted trial employment collapsed, just as it
to analyze the same scene: a moment in has in the American Rust Belt. Income
which Bernard Rieux, a doctor and the inequality soared, with vulture capi-
book’s narrator, escapes from the plague- talists snatching state resources and
ridden town with his partner in resis- becoming billionaires. Without the
tance, Jean Tarrou. They go for a swim centralized command economy, many
in the sea. Their strokes synch up, and social and health services could no lon-
they find themselves in physical and ger run. Non-state organizations that
mental sympathy with each other, “per- might have offered some social stabil-
fectly at one.” Afterward, they must re- ity had been barred by the Soviet Union,
turn to their plague-stricken patients. and religion provided solace for only a
My students were attracted to this scene portion of the population. For many
not only because it is a lyrical respite Russian workers, the future was bleak,
from the horrors of the text but because and deaths from violence, alcohol, and Subscribe to On the Trail
it offers the possibility of respite as a heart disease escalated. to receive weekly insights,
form of resistance. In short, we saw in Russia twenty analysis, and observations
The physical leap that Rieux and Tar- years ago what we see in America
rou take into the sea is made possible by today—deteriorating economic condi-
from our writers
an imaginative one: they free their minds, tions, ineffective social supports, and a covering the campaign.
if only for a moment, from the grip of health-care system that cannot effec-
the plague. Lepore cites Rieux’s asser- tively address self-destructive behavior Sign up at
tion that “no one will ever be free so long or chronic disease. We know what has newyorker.com/onthetrail
as there are pestilences.” But he and Tar- happened to Russian politics since the
rou do not naïvely assume themselves to nineteen-nineties. The conditions in
be free; they carve a form of freedom out the U.S. that Gawande describes have
of a landscape inimical to it. To resist the led to our own flirtation with a leader
psychological effects of COVID-19, we who ignores the truth and manipulates
need to find a form of imaginative free- the media. I hope that our country will
dom that, like Rieux and Tarrou’s, does not follow the path trod by Russia after
not ignore the pestilence. Camus calls its decade of deaths from despair.
this “a happiness that forgot nothing.” Frank Feeley
Kyra G. Morris Concord, Mass.
Princeton, N.J.
1 •
LESSONS FROM RUSSIA Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
Atul Gawande, in his excellent article [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
about the rise in death rates among any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
less educated working-class whites— of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres,
music venues, cinemas, and restaurants have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming.
APRIL 8 – 14, 2020
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Like millions of people around the world, New Yorkers are staying at home. When they must go out—say,
to walk the dog in Prospect Park (pictured)—the rule is social distancing. Fondly known as “Brooklyn’s
back yard,” the park, which opened in 1867, was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the
duo behind Central Park. To enjoy Prospect Park from afar, watch Brooklyn’s own Danny Kaye on location
there in the Academy Award-winning 1945 musical “Wonder Man” (streaming on the Criterion Channel).
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER FISHER
1
ART
pastel, sun-dappled puzzle becomes a Tro-
jan horse for drama.—J.F. (chapter-ny.com)
ing photos from Wuhan in early February, of an
intensive-care unit and the empty city center.
In Rosana Paulino’s watercolors of mythic en-
tities, the Brazilian artist draws connections
Romare Bearden “Art at a Time Like This” between her country’s history of slavery and
From 1958 to 1962, this revered Afri- How can we think of art at a time like this? the consequences of Bolsonaro’s far-right
can-American painter put his vibrant rep- That question, posed by the New York curators rule, exacerbated by the disease’s spread. The
resentations of black culture and community Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen in this New York artist Hunter Reynolds reflects on
on hold in order to experiment with geo- online-only exhibition, is answered in poignant the devastation of another virus, H.I.V., in
metric and geological surfaces. Among the and provocative ways by an eclectic group of stitched photo collages that incorporate scans
magnetic highlights of the DC Moore gal- international artists. Each of the posts (there of newspaper clippings. Although art may be
lery’s online selection of these abstractions are new entries daily) features images and a deemed nonessential in the current crisis, it
are “River Mist,” made from torn pieces of short reflection on the COVID-19 crisis. Ai is some consolation that artists are respond-
canvas as variegated as slabs of labradorite Weiwei captures a pivotal moment with haunting nonetheless.—J.F. (artatatimelikethis.com)
and punctuated with flashes of orange, and
“With Blue,” in which a glacial shape of
pale, drippy pigment rests on a saturated
azure background. There are also examples
ART ONLINE
of Bearden’s later work, made after he re-
turned, energized by the civil-rights move-
ment, to his previous subject matter. The
mixed-media painting “Feast,” from 1969, is
a lyrically deconstructed Last Supper that
incorporates photographs of African masks;
its striated structure resembles weathered
bands of sediment. The piece indicates
that the artist’s abstract period was not a de-
tour but a bridge to a new era of improvisa-
tion.—Johanna Fateman (dcmooregallery.com)
Jutta Koether
For her first show at the Lévy Gorvy gallery,
now online only, this influential German
painter, who splits her time between New
York and Berlin, paired new work with deep
cuts from the nineteen-eighties and nineties.
The result is an abbreviated survey of sorts,
full of art-historical echoes (from Max Ernst
to Florine Stettheimer) and punk insouci-
ance (YouTube has many videos of Koether’s
frequent collaborations with Kim Gordon).
Neo-expressionist bluster is tempered with
sardonic femininity—unfurling ribbons are
a recurring motif. The most recent paintings
are tightly focussed, attuned to the present
moment; fluidly sketched pieces in fiery
pinks and citrus are accompanied by more
ambitious scenes, including the towering
canvas “Neue Frau” (“New Woman”), in
which a portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cor-
tez against a cityscape is attended by a blue
streamer rising up from the bottom of the
composition, as if rooting for the young con-
gresswoman’s ascent.—J.F. (levygorvy.com)
Willa Nasatir The equestrians riding into the angsty, orange sky in “Holiday” (pictured),
This young American artist is best known by the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson, share the same DNA as
© MAMMA ANDERSSON / ARS, NEW YORK / BILDUPPHOVSRÄTT,
for her painterly photographs, for which she

shoots (and re-shoots) found-object assem- Edvard Munch’s screamer and the Romantic loners of Caspar David Frie-
SWEDEN / COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER
blages, rendered otherworldly in her studio drich, but if they had a soundtrack it might be “In My Room,” by Brian
with mirrors and in-camera effects. The Wilson. Most of the fourteen poetic pictures in Andersson’s show “The
four paintings in her new show at Chapter
(viewable online) are compositional cousins Lost Paradise,” at the Zwirner gallery (online at davidzwirner.com), are
to those pictures, but they’re also appeal- landscapes, at once specifically Nordic and timelessly placeless. But they
ingly airier, with a springtime palette and feel interior, too—the rewards of an artist battling uncertainty alone in
swirly patterns that invite thoughts of Lilly
Pulitzer gone experimental. The outlines her studio, inventing a world. Especially striking are the portraits of trees,
of recognizable objects emerge from lay- whose bark springs to life through Andersson’s use of a new technique:
ered, abstract tangles. Zippers, a cougar’s oil stick, rubbed into the painted surfaces, leaves a trace so nubby that
face, a bootprint, and a bird in flight are
easy to spot; more ambiguous forms are you can practically feel it, even onscreen. Andersson is married to the
lurking, too, if you look long enough at the artist Jockum Nordström, a fellow-Swede who also exhibits at Zwirner;
jumbled shapes. A piece titled “Alligator” listen to the couple discuss the pleasures and the struggles of shared
edges close to narrative: the reptile’s snout
overlaps with a figure in silhouette, dragging isolation on a new episode of “Dialogues,” the gallery’s terrific podcast
itself out of harm’s way. Here, Nasatir’s series on the creative process, now in its third season.—Andrea K. Scott
nineteen-thirties. “Dark Elegies” is an exposi-
STREAMING BALLET tion of communal grief—a timely theme—set
to Mahler’s song cycle “Kindertotenlieder.” In
“Jardin aux Lilas,” four people are caught in a
quadrangle of impossible love during a rather
gloomy afternoon garden party. The dancers
of this New York-based chamber company
perform the works—which can be viewed on
Vimeo—with bracing sincerity.—Marina Harss
1
PODCASTS
“Dead Eyes”
Delight can come from unexpected places,
including this series from the character actor
and U.C.B. stalwart Connor Ratliff, known for
his mind-bending Twitter mega-threads (on
the œuvre of Elvis Costello, say, or of Porky
Pig) and for such roles as Chester, the creepy
Catskills grifter on “The Marvelous Mrs. Mai-
sel.” In the podcast, Ratliff delves into, as he
puts it, “a deeply unimportant question that has
haunted me for nearly twenty years”: Why did
Tom Hanks fire Ratliff from a small speaking
role in the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers”?
(Hint: see podcast title.) In probing themes
of opportunity, rejection, and turning failure
There may be no greater balm for the spirit than the ballets of the nine- into art, Ratliff and his guests (including Jon
teenth-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville. As Bournonville Hamm, Rian Johnson, and Aimee Mann) man-
wrote of his philosophy in his “Choreographic Credo,” “Dance is essentially age a level of entertainment and tonal nuance
that is, frankly, surprising, while fondly con-
an expression of joy.” His 1842 ballet, “Napoli,” inspired by his travels to the necting those themes to Hanksian touchstones
southern Italian city the year before, is a perfect example: a loving portrait such as “That Thing You Do!” and David S.
of a place teeming with life, in which fishermen ply their wares on the town Pumpkins.—Sarah Larson
square, a street singer belts out a tune, and, in the end, everyone dances. The
music includes snatches of Neapolitan songs and “The Barber of Seville.” “Floodlines”
The ballet is a jewel in the repertoire of the Royal Danish Ballet, which is Hosted and reported by Vann R. Newkirk II,
this masterly new series from The Atlantic,
currently streaming a recording of the piece on its Web site. The staging, from released just as our full-on national pan-
the 2013-14 season, is an update by the company’s director, Nikolaj Hübbe, demic panic began, chronicles another story
who moved the action to the nineteen-fifties and added neorealist touches. of American catastrophe and mismanage-
ment—post-Katrina New Orleans, after the
Despite some over-the-top moments—particularly in the second act—it still levees broke. We hear the voices of people
has much to offer, principally the crisp, detailed mime and dancing, and the who lived through it, such as Alice Craft-
dashing presence of the young Danish star Alban Lendorf.—Marina Harss Kerney, a nurse at Charity Hospital, and Fred
Johnson, who took refuge in the Hyatt Hotel
and got deputized to protect it. (“The level
1 of fear that was in that room, I was trying
They’ve been filming themselves dancing, not to visualize it,” he says.) The series yields
DANCE separate and isolated wherever they might fresh insights about institutional racism, con-
be, and then combining the footage in short temporary media, and upended norms while
videos on Instagram. The company has also avoiding the stylistic clichés of both investi-
Abrons Arts Center started streaming full-length performances, gative podcasts and New Orleans narratives,
This Lower East Side theatre has postponed for limited periods, on its Web site. The of- and Newkirk, a warm and wise presence,
its spring season, but it has made work from ferings—which started, naturally, with “Rev- deftly balances the personable (Johnson, he
previous seasons available on Vimeo. Footage of elations”—continue, on April 9, with Judith says, “has no fear of the patterned shirt”) and
“Let ‘im Move You: This Is a Formation,” from Jamison’s “Divining.” In the coming weeks, the serious.—S.L.
2019, is a glimpse, for anybody who needs one, look for Camille A. Brown’s grief-defying
of what isn’t possible under social isolation. The “City of Rain” and, especially, Rennie Harris’s 1
production—part of a series by jumatatu m. “Lazarus,” whose mix of painful searching and
poe and Jermone Donte Beacham that explores pleasure in the groove should feel even more MUSIC
J-Sette, a dance form developed by majorettes potent now.—B.S.
in historically black colleges and adopted by
DJ Harvey: “Live at Rumors”
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
queer black men—is loose and convivial, as

much party as performance. Via a mingling NYTB / Chamberworks HOUSE One of the d.j.s whose career path was set
camera, viewers can soak in the atmosphere or The company formerly known as New York during the London acid-house explosion of the
skip to the call-and-response moves and dance Theatre Ballet is one of the few places you late eighties, DJ Harvey is a master at moving
at home.—Brian Seibert can see the work of the twentieth-century between tracks in such a logical manner that
British choreographer Antony Tudor these his sets can feel like long exhalations. “Live at
days. Rigorous and taut, these ballets are all Rumors”—a two-and-a-half-hour mix recorded
Alvin Ailey the more intense for the contained manner in this past May, at a Los Angeles block party—
Unable to perform in public, the amazing which they are performed. The company has was recently made available on Bandcamp for
dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance The- put several of them online, including “Dark a dollar (the proceeds will be donated to coro-
atre haven’t stopped inspiring audiences. Elegies” and “Jardin aux Lilas,” both from the navirus relief). His selections are heavy on dub

effects; there’s a sleek sense of displacement, crackles preface a plainspoken, hymnlike cho- drums and guitars imbuing the track with rock
with synthesizer lines glowing like neon tubing rale, complete this album of near-supernatural drama even as his vocals remain pillowy-pop
over loose drums. The set builds almost imper- potency.—Steve Smith soft. Despite its mishmash of sounds, “BRAT”
ceptibly until, near the end, the late Hi-NRG is remarkably cohesive—its quirkiest moments
pioneer Patrick Cowley’s romping “Get a Little” don’t sacrifice accessibility, and its more famil-
explodes the tension.—Michaelangelo Matos Harold Mabern: iar gestures still feel unique. The record works
as both a new chapter in NNAMDÏ’s colorful
“Mabern Plays Mabern” portfolio and a worthwhile introduction for those
Empress Of: JAZZ New Orleans may have spawned jazz, but who may be unfamiliar; bask in its pleasures,
by the mid-fifties Memphis was turning out but don’t get too comfortable.—Briana Younger
“I’m Your Empress Of ” significant musicians in the genre by the bushel.
ELECTRO-POP As Empress Of, Lorely Rodriguez Among the city’s titans was the pianist and com-
creates shimmery electro-pop with a subtle poser Harold Mabern, who died last September, PARTYNEXTDOOR:
dance pulse. On her new album, “I’m Your at the age of eighty-three, still gigging until the
Empress Of,” that kinetic energy completely end. Mabern established himself in New York “PARTYMOBILE”
spills over: songs such as “Love Is a Drug” and and, thanks to his experience as a supporting R. & B. When Jahron Brathwaite started making
“Give Me Another Chance” are charged with player, became an indispensable component music under the alias PARTYNEXTDOOR,
a tinselly menagerie of upbeat club and house of the scene—an individual stylist who could the Canadian singer and producer cut a figure
influences. Her approach is decisive and full of dependably enhance the work of others. His own that was mysterious and somewhat hard to
adrenaline, but she brings sensitivity to the vol- fine recordings spotlighted his earthy, blues- pin down. He had an added boost to his pro-
canic production; Rodriguez’s mother’s voice drenched take on bop and modern styles in file as the first artist Drake signed to his OVO
appears in recordings throughout the album, his engaging and direct compositions. A newly Sound imprint, but his style made wider rec-
sharing stories of her experiences and resil- released live album, “Mabern Plays Mabern,” ognition elusive; his beats were moody and full
ience as an immigrant and offering words of recorded in 2018, finds him playing alongside of shadows that felt like hideaways. However,
encouragement to her daughter.—Julyssa Lopez the younger acolytes who worked with him as on “PARTYMOBILE,” his latest album, his
trusted compatriots during the last thirty years production is confident, and his song choices—
of his life, including the tenor saxophonist Eric including a collaboration with Rihanna that
Daniel Hope: “Belle Epoque” Alexander, the bassist John Webber, and the marks her first musical appearance in three
CHAMBER MUSIC The British violinist Dan- drummer Joe Farnsworth. A blend of sharp years—are bold power moves, transforming
iel Hope released his double album “Belle originals and standards, the music swings hard— an anonymous sound into a signature.—J.L.
Epoque” in February, before the coronavirus when Mabern took any bandstand, you expected
outbreak had been declared a pandemic and nothing less.—Steve Futterman 1
nations began their unprecedented lockdown
efforts. Originally, Hope intended the set to MOVIES
be a lavish tribute to an era remembered with NNAMDÏ: “BRAT”
optimism, when the arts flourished and late ART POP The only constant in NNAMDÏ’s world
Romanticism hadn’t yet surrendered to mod- is change; the restless Chicago multi-instrumen- I Am Not a Witch
ernism in the wake of the First World War. talist has performed in outfits as disparate as In the Zambian writer and director Rungano
Listening to Hope’s album now, its pangs of screamo and hip-hop. His new album, “BRAT,” Nyoni’s first feature, from 2017, a quiet eight-
nostalgia for a vibrant period before a shared journeys through a maze of genres, revealing year-old girl (Maggie Mulubwa) is accused by
global trauma feel especially acute. He deliv- with each turn a broad appetite and staggering her fellow-villagers of being a witch, and is sent
ers shimmery melodies by Debussy, Massenet, musical proficiency. The silvery track “Wasted” to an encampment of witches, all of whom are
and a young Schoenberg with softness and care collapses breezy rap and quirky R. & B. into the adult women who are kept tethered to straps,
in an acoustic environment that favors gauzy gossamer haze of a hymn; elsewhere, on “Perfect to prevent them from fleeing. Their compound
warmth, and the Zürcher Kammerorchester in My Mind,” contrast is the rule, with dynamic serves as a tourist attraction; during off-hours,
offers sumptuous support. It’s a balm in hard
times, which Hope understands; for the past
two weeks, he’s live-streamed a daily series EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
called “Hope at Home” for cloistered audi-
ences around the world.—Oussama Zahr
There remains something powerful
Clarice Jensen: “The experience about black musicians creating outside
the bounds of genre, and Yves Tumor’s
of repetition as death”
artistic impulses are as sonically defiant
CHAMBER MUSIC Lately, the cellist Clarice Jen-
sen, a co-founder of the versatile new-music as they are destructive. “Heaven to a Tor-
group American Contemporary Music En- tured Mind” is a passionate world unto
semble, has turned her attention to fashioning itself, an album that converts enigma into
solo works that use electronic effects. The
idiom might seem ideal for our present state star power and strikes a potent balance
of isolation, but the music on her album “The between the cerebral and the visceral.
experience of repetition as death” rejects med- The mind can identify the compositional
itative navel-gazing. Jensen deploys loops and
layers to evoke the experience of attending to brilliance of “Gospel for a New Century,”
her terminally ill mother in her final weeks, the lush musicality of “Kerosene!,” or the
adopting concepts from Freud and the fem- sumptuous vocal textures of “A Greater
inist poet Adrienne Rich as structural ideas.
Simple repetitions in “Daily” call to mind a Love,” but even when those qualities blur
ILLUSTRATION BY QIEER WANG
caretaker’s elementary chores—their toll is into an unidentifiable oblivion—as on

implied as the music’s edges gradually soften the phenomenally unhinged “Medicine
and blur. Jensen’s electronically enhanced
vocabulary can astonish: a guttural drone in Burn”—it’s the goosebumps on the arms,
“Day Tonight” resembles Tibetan chant, and, the tightening of the chest, the butterflies
in “Metastable,” the incessant beep of hospital in the stomach that imprint Yves Tu-
monitors morphs into a stately pipe-organ
étude. “Holy Mother,” a mountainous, wind- mor’s music on the soul. To try to define
swept threnody, and “Final,” where nostalgic it is to miss the point.—Briana Younger

they’re forced to do farm work. The girl, whom unwarranted police violence, continues with J.P. (Bruno Ganz), to the attentions of her sister,
the women name Shula (“uprooted,” in Nyanja), a woman’s domestic-violence complaint, and Vicki (Kerry Fox); meanwhile, Beth’s daughter,
plays her role to the hilt: she’s employed as a highlights an immigrant’s resentment of his Annie (Miranda Otto), is falling quietly for Tim
diviner who, taking the place of judge and jury, own bigoted mistreatment. The film’s writer and (Kiri Paramore), their lodger with a crewcut
identifies criminals on sight, and is summoned director, Robert Rossen, sets up a multidimen- and a sense of humor. Jokes at the dinner table
to end a drought, with tragic consequences. sional chess game, for mortal stakes, between can turn nasty and upsetting, but people also
Nyoni depicts a wide range of misogynistic Johnny, his glad-handing boss (Thomas Gomez), recover quickly, and sometimes dance without
abuses of power, as when Mr. Banda (Henry B.J. his boss’s wife (Ellen Drew), a cagey police in- warning. This fluent, hopeful comedy (and it is
Phiri), Shula’s “state guardian” with the Minis- spector (Lee J. Cobb), and a scuffling actress a comedy, for all the encroachments of sadness)
try of Tourism and Traditional Beliefs, protects (Evelyn Keyes) whose sister (Nina Foch) worked charts every shift in the emotional climate. It’s a
her as “government property.” Nyoni’s frank, at the casino and dated a corrupt detective (Jim true ensemble movie: none of the performances
confrontational style is both derisive and em- Bannon). The caustically epigrammatic script, are vain or showy—Harrow in particular braves
pathetic; she extracts powerful symbolic images the cast’s suavely controlled gestures of love and all manner of self-exposure, and we can see the
from the oppressive environment. In English menace, and Rossen’s thrillingly restrained and fear beneath her strength. Beth longs to keep
and Nyanja.—Richard Brody (Streaming on the stylishly assertive images (as well as his political the house in order, but everyone else is itching
Criterion Channel, Amazon, and other services.) conscience) make this pugnacious yet intricate to relax or break free—you can see it in the look
spectacle a hidden classic of the genre.—R.B. of the film, the way that figures mess around
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel.) within careful compositions.—Anthony Lane
Johnny O’Clock (Streaming on Netflix and other services.)
This terse and taut film noir, from 1947, is cen-
tered on the romantic and professional conflicts The Last Days of Chez Nous
of the title character, the criminal mastermind Gillian Armstrong’s 1993 movie is set in a ram- Never Rarely Sometimes Always
(played by Dick Powell) behind a posh illegal shackle Sydney household, where an Australian Eliza Hittman’s third feature tells a spare story
casino. Yet the action is rooted in the woes of family gets on with its life, but only just. Beth in compelling detail: Autumn Callahan (Sidney
the wider world—it begins with accusations of (Lisa Harrow) starts to lose her French husband, Flanigan), a seventeen-year-old high-school
student in a small Pennsylvania town, learns
that she’s pregnant. Unable to get an abortion
in that state without parental consent, she
WHAT TO STREAM travels to New York, with her cousin Skylar
(Talia Ryder), for the procedure. Hittman,
who also wrote the script, stays intimately close
to Autumn, spotlighting her cramped life at
home and in school, her independent-minded
ferocity, and her physical sufferings (including
attempts at ending the pregnancy herself). But,
above all, this is a drama of social fabric—of
the impact of policy and prejudice on the daily
thicket of administrative details, the nerve-jan-
gling tension that women endure from ambi-
ent sexual aggression, and the oppressive air
of surveillance and terror sparked by the war
against abortion. The young women’s journey
to New York—and their encounter with a Phila-
delphia hipster (Théodore Pellerin)—offers an
anguished apprenticeship in the wider world’s
network of money and power.—R.B. (Streaming
on Amazon, iTunes, and other services.)
Pain and Gain

Michael Bay directed this rowdy, raunchy,
gleefully swaggering true-crime tale, set in
the mid-nineties, about a vain and ambitious
Miami bodybuilder, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahl-
berg), who is stuck working as a trainer at a
gym. He decides to kidnap a rich client, Victor
The title of the series “Space Is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, the Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), with the help of a
Sequel,” which was to have run at BAB through April 9, comes from a mild-mannered colleague (Anthony Mackie),
1972 movie featuring Sun Ra, whose combination of music and the- and a mighty, penitent ex-con (Dwayne John-
son). The three stooges amplify one another’s
atrics, metaphysical poetics and communal living, opened a new and mistakes in an echo chamber of increasingly
visionary dimension in jazz and in culture at large. Robert Mugge’s bloody and brutal idiocy that attracts the at-
1980 documentary, “Sun Ra—A Joyful Noise” (streaming on Amazon tention of a principled private eye (Ed Harris).
The frantic script gives the characters snappy
and iTunes), provides a revelatory showcase for Sun Ra’s art, which was foot-in-mouth arias; with slow-motion shots and
anchored by a nucleus of musicians living and rehearsing in a house slam-cuts, kinetic thrills and cocked angles, Bay
COURTESY MUG-SHOT PRODUCTIONS
in Philadelphia, joined by others on a temporary basis to make a big captures sensational delusions of grandeur as
well as panicked energy whirling out of control.
band. Its repertoire ranged from amped-up versions of swing and bop The tangy flotilla of side characters—including
to cosmic storms of fury issuing from Sun Ra’s electronic keyboards. a motivational huckster (Ken Jeong) and a sex
Vigorously roving long takes of ecstatic concert performances—some therapist (Rebel Wilson)—seems to be having
a rollicking good time selling the tall tale. Re-
involving the collective frenzies of free jazz, others bringing audiences leased in 2013.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon,
to their feet with jaunty percussion, chant, and dance—display the YouTube, and other services.)
bandleader’s self-described practice of discipline and precision even as 1
he discusses, in interviews with Mugge, the political protest reflected For more reviews, visit
in his transcendental philosophy.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

tractors. “If you are a great Chef-Cook, oil, garlic, onion, and chili flakes. Then he
a purist and have access to . . . abundant boiled orecchiette, adding “old broccoli
diverse ingredients, great equipment etc,” rabe” and turnip and radish tops to the
he wrote, “I am very happy for you and if water at the last minute, and mixed every-
my cooking methods are not interesting thing together with MSG and fish sauce,
enough for you . . . don’t bother following because he didn’t have Parmesan cheese.
1 and posting negative comments.” “This is not how you cook in a restaurant,”
TABLES FOR TWO In the wake of their restaurants clos- he wrote. “Who cares . . . tasted great.”
ing, many of New York’s most prominent Christina Tosi, the force behind Milk
Chefs Take to Instagram chefs are agitating on behalf of their des- Bar, has launched a baking club on Insta-
perately strapped industry by organizing gram Live; prior to each meeting, she
The other day, the chef Tom Colicchio, employee-relief funds, writing op-eds, and posts photos of piles of various ingredi-
whose four restaurants in New York are urging constituents to call their represen- ents, informing her followers that they
currently closed, posted a short video on tatives to demand government aid. In the need only one item from each array, Mad
Instagram, demonstrating how he was moments in between, many are taking to Libs style. If you don’t have all-purpose
using leftover roasted Brussels sprouts the Internet to share tutorials, tips, and flour for cutout cookies, you can grind oats
and carrots to make lunch. (Or was it glimpses of what they’re up to in isolation. in a blender, or even use Bisquick pancake
breakfast? A fried egg was involved. The Their posts are, on some level, meant mix. If you don’t have a rolling pin, you can
hours, and the meals, have begun to blur.) to inspire. But what I like best about them use a wine bottle or a foam muscle roller.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
He started by drizzling some oil into a is how forgiving they are, how they let the Rita Sodi, the chef behind I Sodi and
pan. “Does it matter what oil?” whispered home cook off the hook. If you want help Via Carota, offered a recipe for humble
the person behind the camera. “No. Right making sourdough bread—a finicky and potatoes, fried with sage. Natasha Pick-
now, nothing matters!” Colicchio re- time-consuming project, just the sort that owicz, of Café Altro Paradiso and Flora
sponded, chuckling. many are seeking right now—you can find Bar, posted dreamy doodles of cakes and
Emma Bengtsson, the executive chef it in spades. If you only have the time and galettes. For months, Frederico Ribeiro,
of Aquavit, in east midtown, filmed herself energy to focus on feeding yourself (and who co-owns Té Company, a West Vil-
preparing an easy meat sauce for pasta. not a needy levain starter) with limited lage tea shop and restaurant, with his
She had ordered a tripod online, she said, resources, look to restaurant chefs, who wife, Elena Liao, has been using Insta-
but it would take two weeks to arrive; in are usually so busy cooking elaborately gram Stories to document how they eat
the meantime, she was using a head of for other people that they’ve developed a at home, in a charmingly deadpan se-
broccoli to prop up her phone. She would special shorthand for cooking for them- ries he calls “Chez Fred.” Recently, while
normally add green olives to her sauce, but selves. You can learn it, too. making breakfast sandwiches, he noted
her grocery store had been cleaned out. “The microwave,” declared David that he’d forgotten to rub garlic on the
Eric Ripert showcased a smoked- Chang, of Momofuku, in a recent post, “is bread before he spread it with mustard,
salmon grilled cheese and an incredibly a machine from the future here in present “so I’m just gonna rub the garlic around
simple butternut-squash soup, the likes day. If you think a microwave is bad for the bread.” “Seriously?” said Liao, off
of which you would never find at his you . . . throw away your smartphone.” camera. Later, she sighed deeply. “Oh,
restaurant Le Bernardin. In one caption, He used his to “hammer” (kitchen slang what a stressful time.”
he included a warning to would-be de- for “overcook”) some sausage with olive —Hannah Goldfield
Help feed NYC’s children
and families now.
With the COVID-19 crisis forcing schools and many

businesses to close, NYC’s children and their families
urgently need help getting food now. You can help keep
City Harvest’s trucks on the road and full of food for
our city’s youngest New Yorkers and their families.
Donate at
cityharvest.org/feednyckids
#WeAreCityHarvest
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT nolias on the traffic divider. She quick- as long as art-house movies. The poli-
LIFE AT THE EPICENTER ens her step and heads toward Amster- ticians review the bullet points of the
dam Avenue. Like all of us, she is day, nearly all of them ominous. The
he streets of New York City are so trying to outrun the thing she cannot reporters sit at least six feet apart, when
T desolate now that you half expect
tumbleweed to blow along the pave-
see. You close the window and wash
your hands for the fourteenth time that
they do not phone in their plaintive
questions, asking, in sum: Do we have
ment where cars and cabs once clus- day. “Happy birthday to you . . .”Twenty the medicine, the equipment, the food
tered. There is barely a plane in the sky. seconds of it. Never less. we need to keep going? When can we
You hear the wheeze of an empty bus “On any person who desires such go out again? And then you ask your-
rounding a corner, the flutter of pigeons queer prizes, New York will bestow the self if you need more liquid soap. The
on a fire escape, the wail of an ambu- gift of loneliness and the gift of pri- hours are as long as evening shadows.
lance. The sirens are unnervingly fre- vacy,” E. B. White wrote, in the summer But then something happens. Joy
quent. But even on these sunny, early- of 1948. But these queer prizes are now comes at seven. (Or is it sheer cathar-
spring days there are few people in sight. a public-health requirement. Because sis?) Every evening, in many neighbor-
For weeks, as the distancing rules of the New Yorkers are not medieval monks, hoods across the city, cheering breaks
pandemic took hold, a gifted saxophone we mostly chafe at the imposed solitude. out, the way it would when the Yan-
player who stakes his corner outside a We do our best to overcome it through kees clinched another World Series title.
dress shop on Broadway every morn- technologies that White would have It spills from the stoops and the side-
ing was still there, playing “My Favor- had a hard time imagining: We text. We walks, from apartment windows and
ite Things” and “All the Things You Zoom. We send one another links about rooftops, for all the nurses, orderlies,
Are.” Now he is gone, too. virology. (We are all immunologists now.) doctors, E.M.T.s––everyone who can-
The spectacle of New York without We watch televised briefings that are not shelter in place and continues to go
New Yorkers is the result of a commu- about healing the people of the city.
nal pact. We have absented ourselves We take out our smartphones and
from the schools and the playgrounds, record the roar outside: the clapping
the ballparks and the bars, the places and the whooping, the tambourines and
where we work, because we know that wind chimes, the vuvuzelas. The guy
life now depends on our withdrawal across the street is a master of the cow-
from life. The vacancy of our public bell. Before it all dies down, we’ve sent
spaces, though antithetical to the pur- off the recording to a loved one who
pose of a great city, which is defined by works as an E.R. doc—and to others
the constancy and the poetry of its en- who are sick in bed or out of range of
counters, is needed for its preservation. our anxious, canyoned city—the city
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
And so you stick your head out the described every minute on cable news
window of an apartment that you haven’t as “the epicenter.”
left in days and look down and around. What’s being applauded at seven is
You wait awhile before you see a sin- the courage of professionals, many of
gle scurrying soul, her arms full of gro- them working without the protective
ceries. She’s wearing a mask and walk- gear they need. Some have seen their
ing with the urgency of a thief. She salaries cut; some have fallen ill, others
crosses Broadway, past blooming mag- soon will. We’re applauding the likes of
Anthony Fauci, who must spend nearly straight information, lobbying Wash- These next weeks and months will
as much mental energy trying to finesse ington for medical supplies, looking out be demanding in ways that are hard to
the ignorance and the ego of his Com- for the most vulnerable among us, and fathom. If New Yorkers are in hiding,
mander-in-Chief as he does in assess- making critical decisions based on the the virus has shown a knack for seek-
ing the course of the novel coronavirus. scientific evidence, no matter how un- ing. But, with time, life will return to
We’re cheering researchers in labs all forgiving. We know the limits of this the city. Our city and your city. The
over the world who are at work on an- release—there is a feeling of helpless- doors will open and we will leave our
tivirals and potential vaccines. We’re ness reflected in it, too––but it’s what homes. We will meet again. We will
cheering everyone who makes it possi- we have in a dark time. greet our friends, face to face, at long-
ble for the city to avoid the myriad con- And there is no question of the dark- delayed Easter services and Passover
ceivable shortfalls and collapses: gro- ness. Last Tuesday, President Trump Seders. Children will attend class with
cery clerks and ambulance drivers; presided over a two-hour news confer- their teachers. Sidewalks and stores and
sanitation workers; pharmacists and ence at which he fleetingly appeared to theatres will fill. Remnants of the cri-
mail carriers; truckers, cops, and fire- bow before realities that he had airily sis—a box of nitrile gloves, a bag of
men; the deliveryman who shrugs off dismissed for so long and at our collec- makeshift masks; containers of drying
the straps of his knapsack and jabs the tive peril––the most chilling fact being Clorox wipes—will be tucked away, out
intercom buzzer with a gloved finger; that, even with effective strategies of so- of sight and out of mind. We’ll forget
the community of artists, dancers, d.j.s, cial distancing, perhaps one or two hun- a lot about our city’s suspended life. But
musicians, and actors who have lost pay- dred thousand Americans could die in we will remember what, and who, we
checks and jobs but are posting paint- this pandemic. “As sobering a number lost. We’ll remember the cost of time
ings on Instagram, FaceTiming solilo- as that is, we should be prepared for it,” squandered. And we will remember the
quies, singing into iPhones. And we’re Fauci said, as the President stood nearby, sound of seven o’clock.
thanking those who are providing seeming, for once in his life, humbled. —David Remnick
IN THE E.R. lost. I don’t feel that way yet. But we’re protected. While examining the patient,
RAMPING UP getting there. you become coated with viral particles.
As the pandemic ramps up, I’m work- So, when you remove your P.P.E., you
ing twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. have to be careful not to contaminate
I’ve picked up extra shifts to cover for yourself. It’s not easy. Now there is a na-
doctors who are already sick. During a tional shortage of P.P.E.—but no short-
typical shift, you might intubate one pa- age of infected patients—and some doc-
tient who is critically ill. Three would tors and nurses are wearing a disposable
or ten years, I’ve been an attending be a lot. On my last shift, we intubated mask and gown for an entire shift.
F emergency-medicine physician at
Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, in Park
ten. Each day now, we’re turning away
hundreds of patients who definitely have
If our intensive-care units get over-
whelmed, we’re going to be faced with
Slope. As E.R. doctors, we pride our- the symptoms of COVID-19. Even when some difficult choices. And we aren’t used
selves on being cool in a crisis. After patients come in with an unrelated to that in this country. Traditionally, the
years of practice and training, I have trauma that requires a chest X-ray, you American medical system is focussed on
become desensitized to the blood, the incidentally find they’ve got it. The ex- aggressive healing at all costs, sometimes
urine, the feces, the vomit, and the tent of community spread is unreal. You in the face of medical futility to the det-
screaming. It’s rare that I ever feel stress, begin to realize that, without compre- riment of the patient’s comfort. When I
despite all the crazy things I’ve seen. hensive testing, we are radically under- rotated through the I.C.U. as a resident, I
Things can get loud and out of control. estimating the spread of this virus. had a patient with an overwhelming bac-
If you demand silence, it completely Planning for disasters is part of emer- terial infection. She had been bed-bound,
changes the energy in the room. But gency medicine. We run drills for events nonverbal, and ventilator-dependent for
this cool, it’s a learned behavior. There’s like a bomb in the subway or, yes, a pan- a decade. I tried to have a discussion with
an adage from Samuel Shem’s novel of demic respiratory illness. When they’re her daughter about end-of-life care. The
hospital life, “The House of God,” that over, all the participants invariably pat daughter simply said, “My mother sur-
your first procedure at a cardiac arrest themselves on the back for how well they vived Auschwitz. Who am I to put an
is to check your own pulse. But now, in did. But, no matter how much you plan, end to her life?” In this brave new world
the time of pandemic, we may be find- reality is different. You think you’re ready. of COVID-19 infections, a nursing-home
ing ourselves tachycardic. Then reality comes. And you’re not. patient like this is at particular risk. Will
There are sixty-odd hospitals in the During the Ebola outbreak, we prac- we be forced to shift the emphasis of our
city, and all of us who work in them are ticed “donning and doffing”––the art of bioethical values away from our “do ev-
approaching the point of being over- putting on and taking off your P.P.E., erything” approach?
whelmed. Somehow, my biggest fear personal protective equipment. You have Emergency rooms are the country’s
now, with Covid-19, is that this learned to apply your gown, gloves, and mask safety net. We work around the clock,
ability to be cool and collected will get in such a way that you are completely and we’re proud to take care of people
no one else is taking care of. And yet, and she insisted on buying my coffee. ship’s bridge, he and the captain and
for the first time in my career, I feel truly After years of being abused in the E.R., others on hand kept a safe and cordial
appreciated by society. The mood at it’s amazing the appreciation people have distance. The sea was calm, with three-
work has changed. Before this, it was shown. The E.R. is flooded with food foot swells, and the tide almost slack.
not uncommon to be cursed out by— that people are sending us: Thai, Turk- As the ship made her way slowly by,
understandably—angry, stressed people ish, regular pizza, fancy pizza. And, this the watchers at Von Briesen Park moved
who are in pain and tired of waiting. I being Park Slope, a nice kale salad, too. along the fence to follow her, each at a
always joke that you want to be ignored There’s so much food around now that distance from the next, like football de-
in an emergency room. If everyone’s ig- one of the residents said we’re all going fensemen staying in their lanes. Farther
noring you, then you’re probably not to gain “the Covid-15.” along the bluff, it was hard to see the
sick enough to warrant immediate at- —Jessica van Voorhees ship through the trees, one of which, a
tention. If, instead, you see a lot of E.R. 1 beech, had the names of Rob, Chris, and
doctors getting really excited and pay- DEPT. OF NAVIGATION Eileen carved onto it. Soon, wakes from
ing a lot of attention to your case, then BRINGING IN THE COMFORT the boat traffic began splashing onto the
you should probably be a little nervous. rocks at the base of the bluff with sigh-
The patients who now need me most ing noises. In Manhattan and along the
can’t speak. They’re gasping for breath. shoreline in New Jersey, the people who
Or they’re “altered”—they’re out of it came out to see the ship were not so
mentally, either from lack of oxygen or careful, as news photos showed. The
from direct viral infection of the brain. crowds bunched together in heedless
There is something psychologically he Navy hospital ship Comfort camaraderie, no doubt encouraged by
taxing about working a day shift at the
E.R. No matter how hard you work, the
T went under the Verrazzano-Nar-
rows Bridge at about nine-twenty last
the arrival of the floating thousand-bed
hospital with the red crosses on her side;
day just keeps getting more and more Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge watching a ship come in can lift the
intense—more patients, more illness— blew long blasts of welcome on their spirits enormously. (Later, the hope
until you reach a crescendo of misery, horns. The ship appeared suddenly in would seem to be misplaced. The Com-
and you walk out the door completely the overcast day as if out of nowhere; fort was not intended for COVID-19 cases,
spent. On a night shift, you come into the medical-clinic white of her hull and and the small number of other patients
the E.R. at its busiest and most chaotic. superstructure blended in with the sea that the ship accepted in the days after
People are screaming, someone is run- and the sky. In Von Briesen Park, on docking has been little help to the city’s
ning naked through the department, all Staten Island, ship-watchers had set up hard-pressed hospital system so far.)
hell is breaking loose. But you take this cameras on tripods six feet or more apart Just north of Chelsea Piers, the dock-
chaotic landscape and transform it. on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. The ing pilot, Captain Robert Ellis, from one
Things begin to taper off at midnight. MarineTraffic mobile app told them of the McAllister tugs, climbed aboard
Patients get admitted. Most have gone what time the ship would arrive. Four and took over from Captain Ferrie. He
home. And, when the shift’s over, you McAllister tugboats awaited the Com- brought the ship upstream and, mostly
walk out into the morning light. fort just north of the bridge, their bows by means of his tugboats’ nudging, turned
This morning, on my way home, I pointing toward her. As she passed, they her ninety degrees, into the slip at Pier 90,
went into someplace to get a cup of swung around and escorted her in. An- which had been dredged out in a high-pri-
coffee. A woman saw me in my scrubs other tug, carrying film crews, veered ority dredging marathon to accommo-
among a wider entourage of police and date her. The last watcher in Von Briesen
Coast Guard boats, and private craft Park stayed until the ship and the distant
practicing police-enforced nautical dis- haze of downtown Manhattan could
tancing, all under a small, hovering flock barely be distinguished from each other.
of helicopters. Later, by way of a network of New York
At the helm, Captain Timothy Fer- pilots, he reached both Captain Ferrie
rie, a Sandy Hook pilot, licensed and and Captain Ellis on their phones. “My
skilled in local waters, had control of the family have been Sandy Hook pilots since
ship—the “conn,” as pilots and ships’ 1882,” Captain Ferrie said, while on his
crews call it. Captain Ferrie had piloted way home to Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
a tanker out of the harbor and into the “And it’s kind of ironical, because my
open ocean the day before, spent the older brother William Ferrie was the li-
night on the pilots’ station boat, twelve aison between the pilots and the Com-
miles out, and received the assignment fort when George Bush sent her to New
to bring the Comfort in in the morn- York Harbor after September 11th. Wil-
ing. He dressed in a coat and tie (cus- liam is now retired, and his son, Thomas,
tomary attire for pilots meeting a ship), also became a pilot, so that’s the fifth gen-
put on a respirator mask, and climbed eration of pilots in our family.”
up the ship’s twenty-foot ladder. On the Captain Ellis said, “Docking this ship
was not much different than docking grated to the United States from Peru. you and mom are in charge,” he wrote.
any tanker, although it’s easier to pull To hasten the citizenship process, he I finally reached a doctor. She told
up parallel to a dock than to make a enlisted in the Army Reserves. He even- me that several attempts to help his
ninety-degree turn. The Hudson River tually served in South Korea, Bosnia, breathing—with antibiotics, hydroxy-
had a little current, fed by freshets from Kuwait, and, for four tours, Iraq. At a chloroquine, and water pills—had not
upstream with local rains, and melting club in Seoul, he met my mother, an as- worked. His oxygen levels were drop-
snow farther up, in the Adirondacks. I piring accountant, and they moved to ping, and it was getting to the point
talked our tug captains through it—I’ve New York. I am their only child. Dad where he might need to be intubated
known all of them for many years. Ev- started at the M.T.A. as a token clerk, and put on a ventilator. The doctors were
erything went well. I saw there was a doing back-to-back shifts at the West moving him to a specialized floor for
crowd waiting on the pier, with politi- Fourth Street station so that Mom could the more serious COVID-19 cases.
cians and publicity, and I wanted as lit- stay home and raise me. Later, he worked A text wasn’t the right way to give
tle contact as possible, so I boarded a overtime as a supervisor cleaning sub- Dad this news. I called him. At first,
tug near the stern and it took me back way stations. all I could hear was him coughing and
to our dock in Staten Island.” After getting my father’s text, I took wheezing. I told him about his declin-
Captain Ferrie: “It was an honor to a car to Elmhurst to bring him a char- ing oxygen levels and the possibility of
cede the conn to Captain Ellis, one of ger for his phone. Families were shut a ventilator. All I could say at the end
the best docking pilots ever. I’ve been out of the hospital, to prevent further was “I love you, we love you, I love
piloting for forty years, and I’ve brought infection; we could communicate only you.” All he could muster was “I love
thousands of ships in and out of the via his cell phone. I persuaded a medi- you” back.
harbor, including Navy ships. One year cal worker to bring the charger to him For the next thirty-two hours, Dad
during Fleet Week I piloted the John F. in the E.R. My father responded: I want was silent. His lungs were a battlefield.
Kennedy, a thousand-foot-long aircraft some mango juice. He was too busy fighting to respond to
carrier that has since been decommis- Dad refused to talk on the phone or my texts. I called the hospital repeat-
sioned. But piloting the Comfort, and try videoconferencing calls. It was too edly, but I got no updates. Once, I was
being part of her work here, has been hard for him to speak. My mother, quar- put on hold for twenty-five minutes,
the proudest day of my life.” antined at home in Astoria, was recov- and then was disconnected.
—Ian Frazier ering from relatively mild symptoms and At 10:16 P.M. on March 26th, Dad
1 living on the groceries that she and Dad wrote, “I’m to put to sleep. I love you
A SON’S STORY had bought before either of them fell and mom.” He continued, “I’m sorry I
LIFELINE ill. Texting was our lifeline. wasn’t the father. Will always love u re-
On March 20th, the medical team member that.”
admitted Dad to a regular floor of the Then the texts stopped. I called the
hospital. “I’m staying overnight looking hospital, asking for information. I called
for a room,” he texted. several times the next day. A nurse or
“No room service?” I replied. “Lame.” a clerk working in Dad’s unit sounded
He LOL’ed. Later, he wrote, “I need testy: “They have thirty-five critical pa-
“ Ineed help,” my father texted me
from the hospital. Papá was not
some ceviche diablo.” Ceviche is his fa-
vorite dish; he always made it for my
tients, and they just can’t talk to every-
one. They will call if there is a change
someone who liked asking for help. Vic- birthday. in your dad’s care. It is a significant
tor Alejandro Zapana, Sr., was a war The texts from Elmhurst were fre- change to put someone on ventilation.
veteran and worked as a night-shift su- quent, but increasingly strained and, They would need to call the family.” I
pervisor for the Metropolitan Transpor- sometimes, garbled: asked whether he was confirming that,
tation Authority. In mid-March, he “I just wanna get better and spend since no doctor had called, Dad was
started having flu-like symptoms—and whatever I ha left with u guys not here.” not on a ventilator. He said, “I can’t
then his fever spiked. He began to have “I cann’t sleep.” confirm that.”
trouble breathing. He was tested for “I will wall out here.” (I will walk out I called several more times. I got noth-
COVID-19 at the Brooklyn Veterans Hos- of here.) ing until 3:26 A.M. on Sunday, March
pital, and, three days later, the results “Scared working as hard as a I can 29th. A doctor called and told me that
came back positive. to get rid of this nightmare.” Dad had passed away at 3:18. In a re-
On March 19th, an ambulance brought On March 24th, he texted to say strained yet exhausted voice, he explained
him to Elmhurst Hospital Center, in that he’d been given a diagnosis of that the doctors had “tried everything
Queens. (Less than a week later, thir- pneumonia. Except for short calls ask- they possibly could.” He said that Dad
teen patients there died in a single day; ing for my father’s cell-phone number, had been put on a ventilator a few days
a refrigerated truck was parked outside the hospital staff had not communi- before, and that we had been briefed on
to handle the bodies.) My father texted cated with us. The next day, Dad tex- the risks of putting him on it. When I
me. He was sixty-one. Until he caught ted that he’d elected to participate in told him that no doctor had called, he
the virus, he was healthy. a randomized experimental trial for the said it was a “very difficult time” at the
In the nineteen-eighties, Dad immi- drug sarilumab. “Anything goes wrong hospital. The doctors were doing their
“absolute best.” By then, my heartbeat wagons full of water. Three hundred
1
SKETCHPAD BY EDWARD STEED
seemed louder than the doctor’s voice. dollars on the self-checkouts! They were CORONA CUPBOARD: DAY 20
I scroll through the photos of my fa- calling people from all departments to
ther on my phone. I need to arrange for come up and bag. The empty shelves!
a veteran’s funeral for him, but that may You can’t buy a can of tuna fish, there’s
not happen for weeks, even months. I no Chef Boyardee—things that you nor-
am hoping that, in Heaven, Dad has mally wouldn’t want to buy. For two
read my last text: “You were always there weeks, it was Thanksgiving, Christmas,
for me.” In this life, he never had the and a snowstorm all together, times ten.
chance to open it. We didn’t have gloves, we didn’t have
—Victor Zapana, Jr. Plexiglas at that point. It was just: We
1 gotta get the customers out. We got
THE NEW DRILL beaten up but we came together. These
HAZARD PAY are times that none of us have ever seen,
but we knew what we had to do. Now
we have Plexiglas. We use only every
other register. We have tape on the floor
six feet apart, where people should be
standing. They’re trying to get us masks.
In the beginning, we were not allowed
hate to be like this, but my commute to wear masks. They didn’t want the cus-
Iminutes
is wonderful now. It takes me fifteen
to drive to work, at the Stop &
tomers to feel intimidated.
I wing it. To be honest, when every-
Shop in Howard Beach. Normally, it’s body was staying home at first, I was
at least half an hour. This is my first day pissed. I wanted to stay home. But then
off in three weeks. I’ve been working in I said, “Chris, really? You have a mort-
the grocery business for more than thirty gage, you have bills.” I’m thankful that
years. I started as a cashier and worked I have a job. I go in now at four in the
my way up to bookkeeper. Grocery work- morning, so I get up at ten to three. I’m
ers have always been treated like trash. exhausted. I interact with well over a
You can go into a bank and wait on the hundred people each day, between em-
line, and nobody will say a word. You ployees, customers, venders. Some days,
have two people on a line in the super- you can’t hide. Yesterday was so busy, it
market, and holy hell breaks loose. actually aggravated me. I’m starting to
I’m fifty-two. I have three children. I think people feel immune in the store.
have my little one at home. She’s twenty- I have my Clorox wipes. I wipe down
two. And a pit bull named Mookie. I grew my keyboard, my mouse, my stapler,
up in Malverne, went to St. Agnes. I had adding machine, the pen, any drawer
my associate’s degree in theatre. I wanted that I will use with a handle, the phone,
to be an actor on TV. Still do! But, you the desk—everything I touch. My hands
know, life happens. Waldbaum’s was down are killing me they’re so dry. I don’t wear
the block from where I lived. That was eyeliner anymore, because I’m always
my first job. We weren’t rich. I had to pay afraid it’s gonna run and my fingers are
for the car. I had to pay insurance. And always near my eyes.
then you just get caught up, and full-time Our union and Stop & Shop have
came around, and I did it. worked together. If you do test positive,
Things got busier here at the end of or you have to be quarantined, you’ll be
February, and then it just got really, re- paid for the two weeks. It’s pretty good.
ally crazy. One day I’ll never forget: I God forbid it goes longer than that—
got in at six, and I heard a lot of noise then you’ll have to start dipping into
outside. When the doors opened, they personal time. If you leave to take care
came in like banshees. Ten minutes after of a family member, you won’t be paid.
six, the checkout girl was on a register But we’re getting a ten-per-cent pay in-
with her line literally down the fro- crease. I guess some people call it haz-
zen-food aisle. I went to help. It was like ard pay. Before, nobody ever, ever said
that supermarket show where they just thank you. When somebody says thank
throw everything into the wagon with you now, you really know they mean it.
no thinking. Water was the biggest thing. —Christine Merola
I don’t understand. People were buying (as told to Zach Helfand)
quickly, evading treatments. One drug
DEPT. OF SCIENCE was not enough. His team devised the
idea of an AIDS “cocktail”—a combina-
tion of three or four drugs that, acting
ATTACK MODE in concert, could corner the virus. In 1996,
Time named Ho its Man of the Year.
Can we create antivirals to combat the next pandemic? In November, 2002, a novel disease
broke out in China: severe acute respira-
BY MATTHEW HUTSON tory syndrome, caused by a coronavirus
called SARS-CoV. Ho was asked by Chi-
n 1981, a young man visited Cedars- what was considered a fringe popula- na’s top public-health officials to advise
Ishortness
Sinai hospital, in Los Angeles, with
of breath and with curious pur-
tion—gay men. But Ho, who had emi-
grated from Taiwan when he was twelve,
them. “The most dramatic memory I
have is going to Beijing, arriving in the
plish lesions on his skin. After review- speaking no English, had an underdog late afternoon or early evening, and going
ing biopsies and scans, a twenty-eight- mentality and would not be dissuaded. to the hotel along the biggest avenue,” he
year-old medical resident named David He made several discoveries through- recalled. “If you remember the Tiananmen
Ho found an odd fungal infection in the out the nineteen-eighties about H.I.V., incidents of many years ago, with the pro-
patient’s lungs and a rare cancer, Kapo- the virus that causes AIDS, and in 1990, tester and the tank, that’s the boulevard.
si’s sarcoma. These conditions were both at the age of thirty-seven, he moved to It has ten or twelve lanes. There was only
associated with immune deficiency, New York to become the director of the the car that’s driving me and one ambu-
though nothing in the patient’s history Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. lance for as far as one could see.”
explained why he would be in such a A year later, he received a call asking him He went on, “That’s when I got in-
state. He was given antibiotics and dis- to fly back to L.A. to test a very impor- terested in coronaviruses, serving as a
charged; not long after, he died. Over a tant patient. There, he confirmed that consultant and seeing the devastation
few months, Ho and his colleagues saw Earvin (Magic) Johnson was H.I.V.-pos- firsthand in several cities throughout
five men with similar symptoms. They itive. The following week, Johnson dis- China.” Back in New York, Ho began
wrote up the cases and sent them to the closed his condition and announced that investigating the coronavirus family.
Centers for Disease Control—the first he was retiring from the N.B.A. Ho has Some coronaviruses can produce lethal
report of what became known as AIDS. cared for him ever since. Johnson later diseases, like SARS; others are among the
Ho continued to explore the disease. said that he’d never thought AIDS would causes of the common cold. But, he said,
“Some people were very concerned that kill him, because Ho had assured him “the SARS epidemic ended in July of 2003.
I was so intrigued by those few cases at that better medicines were in the pipe- By the next year, there was hardly any
the very beginning of my career,” he told line. In 1994, Ho found that a certain interest. Funding for that area kind of
me. “ ‘Why would you want to devote class of drugs could dramatically reduce dried up. So we simply dropped it and
your career to an esoteric disease?’” Par- the viral load in AIDS patients. But, within went on with our H.I.V. work.” In 2012,
ticularly one that seemed mainly to afflict each infected individual, the virus evolved another coronavirus, MERS-CoV, caused
With each new virus, we’ve scrambled for a new treatment. Our approach has been “one bug, one drug.”
16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
an outbreak in the Arabian Peninsula; (and may have helped encourage the evo- tired of being behind the ball. He’d like
Middle East respiratory syndrome, as it lution of warm-bloodedness). Prions? to see a penicillin for viruses—one pill,
was called, sickened more than twenty- These are responsible for mad-cow dis- or, anyway, a mere handful—that will
five hundred people and killed more than ease and its human variant, but are mostly eliminate whatever ails us. He and his
eight hundred. Ho followed it with in- avoidable by preventing food contami- colleagues aim to have these next-gen-
terest, but this outbreak, too, passed nation and refraining from cannibalism. eration drugs ready in time for the next
quickly. Then, this past December, a dis- Protozoa? Malaria has killed perhaps pathogen. “We have to be proactive,” he
ease with similar symptoms flared up in half of all humans who have ever lived. told me. “We must not be in a position
China and, within a month, was linked But protozoa are typically transmitted of playing catch-up ever again.”
to another coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Ho by vectors such as mosquitoes and fleas,
told me, “My Chinese heritage caused which are limited by climate and geog- iruses are quite conniving for things
me to focus more on the news coming
out of China in late December and early
raphy. Viruses, the report concluded, are
the real menaces.
V that are not alive. A bacterium is a
living cell that can survive and reproduce
January. However, the experience with Not just any viruses, though. The on its own. By contrast, a virion, or virus
SARS also put a pause on our natural re- likeliest candidates are those with a ge- particle, can do nothing alone; it repro-
action to jump in and get involved.” His nome of RNA, which evolve faster than duces only by co-opting the cellular ma-
attitude shifted when the story did. “It those with DNA. Viruses that spread chinery of its host. Each virion consists
was the growing magnitude of the out- before symptoms appear also have a con- of nothing more than a piece of DNA
break that told us, ‘Oh, we’d better think siderable advantage. (The only infec- or RNA encased in protein, sometimes
about getting into this,’” he said. tious disease we’ve wiped out, smallpox, surrounded by a lipid membrane. When
Ho was just setting up his lab at its is not contagious during the incubation it gets itself sucked into a cell, it manip-
new home, at Columbia University. He period.) And the most daunting are those ulates the host into building the proteins
is friendly with Jack Ma, the founder of transmitted by respiration, rather than necessary for viral replication—in essence,
the e-commerce giant Alibaba, who asked by feces or bodily fluids, which can be turning it into a virus factory. Some of
how he could help. In February, Colum- controlled through sanitation. Viruses the proteins start to work on duplicating
bia announced that Ma’s foundation had that can move between animals and hu- the virus’s genome; others form a new
awarded a $2.1-million grant to Ho and mans are especially hard to manage. All viral coat. Those components get bun-
several Columbia colleagues to develop in all, this character sketch gets us pretty dled into entirely new virions, produced
antiviral drugs.This project was prompted close to identifying two classes of viral by the thousands, which then pop out of
by the COVID-19 crisis, but the mission assailants: influenzas and coronaviruses. the cell and make their way to other cells,
goes beyond it; the researchers are think- None of our off-the-shelf treatments within the same body or in a new one,
ing not only about the current pandemic equip us for such a pandemic. If bacte- happy to sail on the winds of a sneeze.
but about future ones as well. ria invade, there’s a long list of antibiot- The fact that viruses have so few mov-
What will the next global pathogen ics you can try. Between ciprofloxacin ing parts is one reason they are so hard
be? “If you’d asked me that three or four and amoxicillin, we can treat dozens of to destroy without carpet-bombing the
months ago, I would have said influenza,” different types of bacterial infection. For host organism. “They’re basically evolu-
Ho told me, with a chuckle of dismay. the roughly two hundred identified vi- tionarily optimized to be minimalists, so
For scientists, this isn’t just a thought ex- ruses that afflict us, there are approved there aren’t a lot of targets,” David Baker,
periment; it’s the sort of question that treatments for only ten or so. And the a biochemist at the Howard Hughes
shapes years of research. Two years ago, antiviral drugs that exist tend to have Medical Institute, told me. The strate-
a team at Johns Hopkins issued a report narrow targets. Only a few have been gies employed against bacterial diseases
titled “The Characteristics of Pandemic approved for use against more than one are generally useless when it comes to
Pathogens,” which was based on a liter- disease. Many drugs that work on one viruses. Some antibiotics, including pen-
ature review, interviews with more than virus don’t work on others within the icillin, interfere with proteins that form
a hundred and twenty experts, and a same family; antivirals suited for some the cell walls of bacteria, causing the
meeting devoted to the issue. It grimly herpesviruses (such as the one that causes germs to burst open and die. (Viruses
considered the possibilities. chicken pox and shingles) aren’t suited don’t have cell walls.) Other antibiotics
Could bacteria do us in? Outbreaks for others. Some antivirals can’t even treat interfere with bacterial ribosomes—tiny
of plague have wreaked havoc through- different strains of the same virus. intracellular structures that manufacture
out history, but the development of effec- And so every time a new virus ap- proteins—or mess with an enzyme cru-
tive antibiotics in the past century “took pears we scramble for a new treatment. cial to a bacterium’s metabolism. (Vi-
bacteria off the table as a global biolog- Our usual antiviral approach is, as re- ruses have neither.) When a strain of
ical risk for the most part,” Amesh Adalja, searchers say, “one bug, one drug”; often, virus does have an obvious vulnerability,
a physician at Johns Hopkins and the it’s no drug. Ho has spent forty years there’s no guarantee that another strain
report’s project director, told me. Bacte- fighting the AIDS epidemic, which has will share it—an obstacle for crafting
ria can evolve, and develop drug resis- killed thirty million people and still kills generalist antivirals. And viruses tend to
tance, but usually not quickly. How about nearly a million a year; he has seen three mutate quickly and readily acquire drug
fungi? They threaten some species, but coronaviruses ambush us in the past resistance, as Ho found with H.I.V.
don’t adapt well to warm-blooded hosts two decades. Like many scientists, he’s The most valuable weapon against
viruses remains the vaccine—but vac- ings are kitty-corner.) A few hours be- to the process of pharmaceutical devel-
cines (at least the kinds we’ve formulated fore our appointment, though, I got a opment. Each library—a case filled with
so far) tend to work against only specific, message: the university had barred vis- thousands of chemicals—is packed in
identified viruses, and have to be taken itors. All nonessential employees had dry ice and shipped from facilities else-
before infection. Since they’re not effec- been sent home. Ho and Chavez could where straight to the laboratory door.
tive for everyone, moreover, we’d want carry on with their work, since they were In standard “high-throughput screen-
antivirals for acute treatment even if we researching sars-CoV-2, the virus that ing,” you might take a plate with three
had a vaccine in hand. And fast-mutat- causes covid-19, but I wouldn’t be al- hundred and eighty-four wells, each three
ing viruses, like influenza, present a mov- lowed in. When I asked if Chavez would millimetres wide, and introduce into each
ing target, which is why, by the time a give me a virtual tour of the lab by Face- well a tiny sample of the same viral pro-
new batch of flu vaccine is manufactured Time, he was skeptical. “It’s not gonna tein—in this case, a particular protease—
every year, it’s already outdated, power- be that exciting, man,” he warned me. but a different drug candidate. It’s as if
less to fight much of what comes along. “You know what biology looks like. It’s you were testing three hundred-odd in-
These limitations typically apply to an- like moving clear fluids from one thing secticides against one kind of pest. But
tibody therapies as well: they tend to be to another. It’s not gonna blow your Chavez has devised a method that lets
specific to a single, already encountered mind.” The lab, sparsely peopled, con- him study more than one viral protein
virus, and can’t be stockpiled for use tained a dozen PCR machines—DNA- at a time. In each well, he will place about
against new ones. That’s why Ho and his amplifiers, each about the size of a toaster twenty coronavirus proteases, plus about
colleagues, like researchers elsewhere, are oven—and shelves cluttered with sup- forty proteases from H.I.V., West Nile,
looking for molecular vulnerabilities in plies and glassware. Debbie Hong, a dengue, Zika, and so on. “I can do as
virus families, and ways to exploit them. graduate student, was hunched over a many as I want,” he said. “Why would I
The earliest antivirals were discov- lab bench, holding a pipette. stop at coronavirus?” In effect, he’s test-
ered by means of empirical observation, “It’s not like the movies, with la- ing an array of insecticides against a me-
and almost through happenstance. The sers and lights and, like, crazy cells in nagerie of pests—aphids, weevils, Japa-
first antiviral drug that came on the green,” Chavez said as he panned his nese beetles—at once.
market, in the early nineteen-sixties, was iPhone around his lab. “It’s all pretty The innovation came naturally to
a repurposed anti-cancer drug put to benign-looking.” Chavez. “My background was in build-
use as a topical treatment for a herpes Chavez’s antiviral research focusses ing new technologies,” he said. “And so
infection that attacked the cornea. An- on a particular type of protein involved I was, like, ‘Oh, I think I have a clever
other early drug, ribavirin, was devel- in viral reproduction—a scissoring en- trick. Let’s play around with it.’” He and
oped in the nineteen-seventies, and zyme known as a protease. In normal Debbie Hong tried it. “We were, like,
worked against several DNA and RNA cells, ribosomes read instructions en- ‘Holy crap, there might be something
viruses, including those that cause pneu- coded in RNA and make a batch of some here.’ And this is the opportune time to
monia and hemorrhagic fever. The same specified protein. When a virus like sars- really apply it full scale.” The approach
decade also saw the development of acy- CoV-2 presents itself to a ribosome, the could speed the identification of chem-
clovir, which Ho called a “true break- intruder’s instructions are followed— icals with broad effects—ones that work
through”; it inhibits the reproduction making the particular proteins that the against an array of viral proteases, not
of a variety of herpesviruses. A series of virus requires in order to replicate. But just one. (The main protease used by the
advances came in the nineteen-eight- the ribosome delivers the batch of pro- new coronavirus, researchers say, is sim-
ies, in response to H.I.V. One history teins all linked together in a long chain, ilar to one used in picornaviruses, a fam-
of antivirals, published in 1988, decried a “polyprotein.” So both cells and viruses ily that includes poliovirus, the hepati-
the toxicity and low efficacy of earlier then slice up these polyproteins into the tis-A virus, and the human rhinovirus.)
drugs: “Two decades ago, antiviral ther- smaller pieces they need. It’s a little like Chavez estimates that his multiplex
apy fell somewhere between cancer che- what happens at a newspaper-printing project could take one or more years.
motherapeutic principles and folk med- plant, when a huge roll of paper spins “But if, at the end of that process, I
icine.” Today, with advances in genomic through the press and then gets sliced could have a compound that I know
analysis and computer modelling, re- up into individual broadsheets. works not only against the current strains
searchers hope to find drugs that are Cells and viruses both use proteases but also on a lot of the future ones, that
both stronger and broader in their effects. to do the slicing; for Chavez’s team, the would be very useful to prevent this sort
Different researchers are targeting vi- challenge is to identify new compounds of event down the road,” he said. “Be-
ruses at different points, like generals that will inhibit viral proteases without cause it’s not a matter of if it’s gonna
probing for weak spots along an advanc- interfering with a human cell’s proteases. happen again—it’s simply a matter of
ing front. He’s planning to test about sixteen thou- when it’s gonna happen again.”
sand drugs, taken mainly from three “li-
OPPOSITE: MAGNUM
ne afternoon in March, I was set braries” of compounds, many of which o replicate, viruses need to chop
O to visit the lab of Alejandro Chavez,
a frank and fast-talking pathologist and
have already been tested for safety in hu-
mans. “If you have some information on
T things up; they also need to glue
things together. Proteases do the chop-
cell biologist at Columbia who is col- toxicity, it’s very helpful to advance the ping. Another class of proteins, called
laborating with Ho. (Their lab build- compound faster,” Chavez said, referring polymerases, do the gluing. Interfere
SHOWCASE BY MOISES SAMAN
The photographer’s wife and child, in Amman, Jordan, March 21st: “It’s day two of a
mandatory curfew—a violation can get you up to a year in jail—and the sun is out after
a week of bad weather. Today, the government released a statement explaining the need
for such extreme measures, and informing us of what to expect. It also announced that,
in the past twenty-four hours, four hundred people were arrested for breaking curfew.”
with the polymerases and you interfere
with the assembly of the viral genome.
DNA and RNA molecules are strings AFTER SEX, CHECKING FOR INSTAGRAM POSTS
of smaller molecules called nucleotides. BY MY KIDS, AND OTHER AVOIDANCE STRATEGIES
A good way to stop polymerases from
functioning, it turns out, is to supply decoy I lay awake reviewing the math.
versions of these nucleotides. A virus is Trump had said there were just 15
tricked into integrating these building cases in the country. There were 64 then,
blocks into its own genetic sequence. but only for an hour or two. I was wondering
These nucleotide “analogues” are faulty
parts; once they’ve been added to a chain about the numbers we can’t know:
of viral RNA, they effectively bring things at this moment there’s a secret true number
to a halt. It’s as if you’d been assembling of people actually carrying coronavirus,
a toy train from a pile of cars and some- the same way there is a number
one slipped in a car with no hitch on the
back, ending the sequence prematurely. of living blades of grass on earth right now.
Human cells are generally good at de- We understand we can’t count them,
tecting and avoiding such defective parts; but we can agree there exists
viruses are more easily duped. an exact quantity, counted or not.
One pioneer in developing such poly-
merase inhibitors is Mark Denison, the Scientists of the plains and meadows,
director of the Division of Pediatric In- of our city greens and suburban lawns,
fectious Diseases at Vanderbilt, who— of our mowing and grazing patterns,
remote learning being the new way of could model a fair estimate, I believe.
things—spent an hour and a half on the
phone talking me through a PowerPoint Sex is one way to count sheep,
presentation. Denison began studying and when I rose from bed I asked you
viruses in 1984, working with Stanley What will happen to funerals
Perlman, a microbiologist now at the and rituals for burying the dead
University of Iowa. “I couldn’t spell ‘mo-
lecular biology,’ I couldn’t spell ‘pipette,’”
Denison recalled, but Perlman took a
chance on him. “I didn’t really under-
stand how difficult the problem is, which cold-called Gilead, a pharmaceutical desivir, had been developed, without
is a good thing.” He persisted, with his company with a specialty in antivirals, notable success, for use against Ebola.
wife occasionally nudging him back to asking to try its hepatitis-C drug so- This research helped Denison and
the lab. “Ultimately, I started seeing the fosbuvir. He recounted, “They said, his longtime collaborator Ralph Baric,
incredible, terrible beauty of viruses, and ‘Well, no, you can’t. That’s our multi- a virologist at the University of North
how unique their replication patterns billion-dollar drug. We don’t know you.’” Carolina, land a large N.I.H. grant, in
were and how much we had to under- But they were open to collaboration, 2014, to study coronavirus drugs. Den-
stand about them.” and sent Denison’s lab a selection of ison and Baric have been particularly
Denison has been studying poly- other compounds. Denison and his team excited about a small-molecule drug
merases and nucleotide analogues for got to work testing them on a corona- known as NHC. (It’s technically a nu-
the past thirty years, and he points out virus called mouse-hepatitis virus, which cleoside analogue—nucleosides lack the
that coming up with these decoys is es- is safe to work with because it doesn’t phosphorus group that nucleotides
pecially challenging when dealing with infect people. “To our shock, basically, have.) This one also sneaks into a grow-
coronaviruses. Unlike other viruses, coro- the very first one we tried had activity ing RNA chain, but, instead of halting
naviruses are excellent proofreaders against our model virus,” he told me. construction immediately, it introduces
when it comes to reproducing their ge- “And I thought we made a mistake, and mutations in subsequent copies. Deni-
nome. Another small protein sits on top then it worked again. So I wrote them son says that NHC checks all the boxes:
of the polymerase, checking its work as back and said, ‘Umm, this looks like it it inhibits multiple coronaviruses (in-
it goes down the RNA chain. “It’s like works.’ They said, ‘Here’s sixty chemi- cluding SARS-CoV-2), has a high bar-
an autocorrect on your phone, if it cal modifications of that same drug.’ So rier to resistance, and protects mice that
worked well,” he said. Coronavirus ge- we tested all sixty, and every single one have been given the drug even before
nomes, which are about three times the was more active than the original com- infection. Unlike remdesivir, which has
size of the average RNA virus’s, “are the pound. But one of them was really good. to be infused intravenously, it can be
biggest and baddest,” Denison said. And they said, ‘Well, then, here’s the taken orally, as a pill—an easier and
Still, he figured that there was a way one we want you to work with.’ ” It cheaper way of administering a drug.
to elude the proofreaders. In 2012, he turned out that this drug, called rem- (To be sure, neither NHC nor remde-
viruses depend on, the cell often has a
backup for itself.
Where Chavez and Denison are tar-
geting viral proteins, then, Einav focusses
on host proteins—in particular, a class
if there’s really a pandemic of enzymes that are co-opted by viruses
and people can’t gather to shuttle themselves inside invaded cells.
in numbers? You were drifting off. A few years ago, she discovered two cel-
I remembered how I’d lie awake lular enzymes required for viral infec-
tion and found that, in mice, two drugs
when we were trying to have children that impair these enzymes reduced den-
and freeze myself in a pelvic scoop gue and Ebola viral loads. In lab-grown
or with legs in the air like a flipped insect cell cultures, they slowed the replication
for long minutes after the fact and not get up not only of dengue but also of other
pathogens in the Flaviviridae family,
all night so none of the seeds such as West Nile and Zika. Einav’s col-
would “fall out”— laborators are now testing these drugs
as if to let leak by even a jot on the new coronavirus. She’s hopeful,
would lower the odds, though I knew given that they’ve also shown promise
against the virus that causes sars. But
in each teaspoon 20 to 40 million might press she notes that they didn’t work for DNA
their luck. Back then, as I noted viruses. An infinitely broad-spectrum
that trying to make life was comical antiviral, she acknowledged, may be out
(and hatched new strains of the question: “I don’t think it’s one
for all, but it might be one for many.”
of insomnia), I reasoned Other host-directed drugs are being
into the darkness that respectfully tested for use against SARS-CoV-2. A
not jostling them all pancreatitis drug, camostat mesylate,
might yield me the one. inhibits a cellular enzyme that helps
some viruses dock with cells, and was
—Deborah Garrison shown last month to work against the
new coronavirus, at least in cell cultures.
And, because the same enzyme is en-
sivir has yet been shown to work in clin- Boston, is one enthusiast of this strat- listed by other coronaviruses, like the
ical trials.) egy. Frustrated that some of her hepa- ones that cause SARS and MERS, there’s
“Most people do extensive testing titis-C patients were beyond the help hope that the drug might be effective
on one drug, then see if it works more of available treatments, she turned to against a range of these viruses. Chavez
broadly,” Denison said. “We took the research, spending five years looking for told me that if Einav’s compounds work
opposite approach, which was: we don’t a way to target hepatitis C and study- in patients—always a big if—“I think
even want to work with a compound ing a drug that looked promising. She it could be a jackpot. These are all in-
unless it works against every coronavi- became discouraged when she realized teresting ideas. I think you really want
rus we test, because we aren’t even wor- how narrow-bore it was. It worked a multipronged approach.”
ried about SARS and MERS as much as against one strain of the virus but proved
we are about the one that we don’t know useless against others, and resistance to t a moment like this, the urgency
about that’s going to come along.” it quickly developed. “In the end, I re-
alized how limited the scalability of this
A of such research is self-evident. But
the market has not encouraged the de-
he usual goal with antivirals is to approach is,” she said. “That was actu- velopment of drugs for use in acute in-
T interfere with the virus, not the
host. But some researchers have taken
ally how I then transitioned to the host-
targeted approach.”
fections. The big investment has been
in drugs for chronic viral diseases, such
a seemingly counterintuitive approach, Host-targeted drugs, she believes, as aids and hepatitis B. “If you start
seeking to change the host environment could have a broader application than looking at acute viral infections”—which
in a way that makes it less congenial to other antiviral drugs. No matter which hit suddenly and kill you or pass on
viruses. With “host-targeted antivirals,” specific virus invades them, human cells through—“it’s pretty gloomy,” Einav said
the aim is to disrupt certain processes have the same basic machinery. The of the financial prospects that pharma-
in the human cells which are used for challenge is typically to find a dosage ceutical companies see. David Baker, of
viral replication but—with luck—not high enough to bother the virus but not the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
for much else. Shirit Einav, a Stanford so high that it harms the host. It helps noted that, although cancer drugs are
virologist who completed medical school that our cells feature redundancy: if you also expensive to develop and bring to
in Israel before doing a residency in interfere with one cellular protein that market, “there will always be people dying
of cancer.” But pandemics arrive infre- cost much more than that, but funding Health Organization has launched a
quently and don’t necessarily stay for from foundations, along with public insti- multi-arm trial across many countries,
long—characteristics that make them a tutions, can ease certain pain points—for with room to add more arms and coun-
commercial liability. “It’s one of those instance, by making it possible to solicit tries. It’s called the Solidarity Trial.
cases where a traditional market econ- compounds for a pandemic-drug library
omy doesn’t work so well,” Adalja, of of candidates for screening. I asked Trevor n my call with David Ho, he led
Johns Hopkins, said. “Suppose you made
a SARS antiviral in 2003,” after its 2002-03
Mundel, the Gates Foundation’s presi-
dent of global health, how we might pre-
O me on a FaceTime tour of his spar-
tan office and sprawling lab spaces.
run. “You would not have had a return pare for the next global contagion. Let’s Hanging in an atrium was a two-story
on investment, because sars was gone.” say we had a drug that worked against tapestry depicting a double helix, which
In 2014, Timothy Sheahan, a micro- a broad spectrum of coronaviruses, and he’s had for twenty-five years. It was
biologist now at the University of North maybe other viruses, too. Would we man- made by a man who helped design Ho’s
Carolina and a collaborator of Denison’s, ufacture and stockpile billions of doses, previous lab space and who later died
joined a group at GlaxoSmithKline work- just in case? Who would pay for that? of AIDS. Down a hallway, Ho pointed
ing on broad-spectrum antivirals for res- He said that, if drugs with clear broad- through a window to a high-contain-
piratory infections. A year later, the proj- spectrum potential came along, government facility with PCR machines, cen-
ect was shut down. “I gained insight into ments likely wouldn’t need much con- trifuges, incubators, and microscopes.
how pharma works and how hard it is vincing. At a minimum, countries might Venturing inside this area requires head-
to develop drugs that not only work but make tens of millions of doses available to-toe protective gear.
are safe,” he said. (He noted that many for health-care workers and other criti- Another room housed the lab’s most
drugs that seem safe in animal models cal employees. But in the absence of truly expensive machines, including one that
prove otherwise in human trials.) “Twenty broad-spectrum antivirals we might need makes cells fluoresce and one with a
years ago, most if not all Big Pharma twenty drugs that act on different com- sign warning “CAUTION LASER IN USE.”
companies probably had some antivi- ponents of infection. Then we’d need to (Chavez’s disclaimer notwithstanding,
ral-drug program. Now there aren’t many.” stockpile all twenty. green cells and lasers aren’t just for mov-
Jason McLellan, a molecular biologist at Mundel, a former pharmaceutical ex- ies.) The main lab was big and open,
the University of Texas at Austin, pointed ecutive trained in mathematics, high- with the capacity for seventy-five re-
out that, of the six human coronaviruses lighted two basic challenges when it searchers. That day, it was nearly empty.
known before the Wuhan outbreak, the comes to preparing antivirals for pan- The “nonessential” people who had been
two that caused SARS and MERs killed demics. “One rate-limiting factor is man- sent home included AIDS researchers.
only a few thousand people combined, ufacturing. People find that a boring As he walked back to his office, the
and the four others cause a common subject, but if you don’t get manufac- deserted corridors reminded me of Ho’s
cold. “I’m not sure you can fault compa- turing right you can end up with noth- description of the empty boulevard in
nies for not doing a bunch of drug de- ing,” he said. “The other thing that is, Beijing. Now at his desk, Ho reflected
velopment on coronavirus,” he said. Den- of course, rate-limiting is clinical stud- on negligence and hubris. “We as a so-
ison’s sense of the need for basic, non- ies. And you saw how chaotic that can ciety dropped the ball after SARS,” he
commercial research makes him voluble be with Ebola, and initially in China”— said. “Just because the virus went away,
in his gratitude to the N.I.H. “They’ve he was referring to the covid-19 pan- we naïvely thought, Well, you know, good-
supported me doing this work for about demic. “There were a lot of studies being bye, coronaviruses.” There’s no reason,
thirty years,” he said. “And so I think this done that were not well designed or Ho said, to think that it will ever be pos-
demonstrates the critical importance of controlled. And we start to see that in sible to bid such a farewell: “This is the
doing fundamental research on every other places as well: everybody’s jump- third coronavirus outbreak in two de-
known human-virus family and under- ing in with an observational study.” cades.” There is, undoubtedly, a fourth
standing their mechanisms and their A better platform for doing clinical somewhere on the horizon, if a different
unique targets, because you just don’t studies would insure better data, but ge- RNA virus doesn’t encircle the world
know which family it’s going to come ography stands in the way. Because pan- first. There is no way to predict what dis-
out of next.” All these researchers agreed demics move fluidly across borders, on- ease it will cause—it won’t be SARS, or
on the importance of developing multi- going studies like Gilead’s remdesivir MERS, or COVID-19—but certain things
ple broad-spectrum antivirals; all recog- trials in China risk running short on will be the same. Masks will come out,
nized that the private sector was unlikely patients if an outbreak is contained in streets will empty, fear will take hold. One
to be a mainstay of support. one location while flaring elsewhere. thing might be different, if Ho and oth-
Last month, the Bill & Melinda Gates “You’ve got to have a global clinical study ers like him have their way: there might
Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard where you can shift around where you’re be a therapeutic arsenal already in place.
pledged a hundred and twenty-five mil- getting patients from,” Mundel told me. “This one is teaching us the lesson
lion dollars to the COVID-19 Therapeutics “And nobody has ever had that kind of that we should persist and come up with
Accelerator to help researchers, regula- clinical study that’s been global and could permanent solutions,” he said. “We need
tors, and manufacturers overcome some pull from different geographies as things to persist until we find a broader solution.
of the market impediments to drug de- pop up. So that’s what we’re trying to An outbreak due to this virus or some
velopment. Creating a new antiviral will put in place.” Meanwhile, the World other viruses will surely come back.” 
(I spoke too soon; on March 27th, it was
LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES announced that all beaches would be
closed through April 19th. So now the
beaches, too, are full only of absence.)
HOME ALONE TOGETHER Shaped by a threat that is at once in-
visible and implacable, the necessary unity
Shared isolation is the new solidarity. and solidarity must lack all the excite-
ment traditionally associated with peo-
BY GEOFF DYER ple coming together in common cause
for events such as the March on Wash-
ington, in 1967, or Woodstock—or, going
farther back, the outbreak of the Amer-
ican Civil War, when one excited by-
stander observed, “The whole popula-
tion, men, women, and children, seem
to be in the streets.” This fusion of the
festive and the martial was beautifully
expressed by the poet Philip Larkin in
his famous description of the crowds of
men who, in 1914, lined up to enlist, “as
if it were all /An August Bank Holiday
lark.” Despite invocations of the Blitz
spirit and the mobilization of wartime
rhetoric, there is not even an enemy
now—because the person most likely to
harm you will be your friend, neighbor,
lover, parent, or child. So there is none
of the collective fever of purpose and de-
termination—or, at least, that fever must
be experienced in isolation. Lovely things
like the applause for health-care work-
ers are attempts not only to make visi-
ble and audible our appreciation but also
to share our isolation. The times they are
a-changing, with stunning rapidity, but
Dylan’s rousing exhortation has now to
be completely reversed: Don’t gather
’round people . . .
The required form of isolated soli-
darity is, weirdly, both in synch and at
fter everything changed, suddenly of a post-apocalyptic world, aspects of odds with what, for the past decade or
A and unexpectedly, in New York on
September 11, 2001, evidence of catastro-
this scenario have an idyllic quality: streets
devoid of traffic and crowds.
so, has seemed an increasingly solipsis-
tic withdrawal, whereby, even as people
phe was there for everyone—for all the In Southern California, with its gor- appear physically to be on the streets,
world—to see. The damage was both a geous sky and sea, the beaches have been they’re psychically disappearing into their
horrible reminder of what had happened quieter than usual since the beachside phones. Now we’re on our phones at
and a portent of what might be still to parking lots were closed, but people have home as a way of being on the street,
come. Today, even in some of the cities been allowed to jog or do yoga as long kicking ourselves for all those hours
most afflicted by the coronavirus pan- as they maintain a suitable distance from wasted outside, looking at screens when
demic, there is no physical devastation, one another. And yet. Having topped up we could have been looking at one an-
while death and illness, though wide- their already top-of-the-range immune other. As a collective act, we are encour-
spread, occur invisibly, behind closed systems with cold-pressed juices and aged to retreat deeper into the burrow
doors. Photographs in newspapers show boosts, the same people who were ener- of phone-life to allow maximum free-
workers in hazmat suits disinfecting the getically maintaining the perfection of dom and minimum risk for those who
streets, but few of us have witnessed such their perfect bodies—bodies capable of have actual physical and essential tasks
scenes for ourselves. The evidence of the bench-pressing enormous weights and to perform. The best we can do is dis-
calamity is overwhelmingly of absence, running from Malibu to Santa Monica— appear into the great indoors: an unprec-
of empty streets and tourist spots. As might suddenly, for no visible reason, find edented inversion of everything that has
previously glimpsed in filmic depictions themselves incapable even of breathing. constituted solidarity, and one requiring
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN REA THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 23
had been established whereby my wife
panicked and I calmed her down and
then we switched roles at various times
throughout the day, until, just before
sleeping, as a kind of surrogate for sex,
we got in a panic together. In the bath-
room one night, she unleashed a brief
scare-surge by wondering whether floss-
ing our teeth, with all the hand-in-mouth
action it involves, was just about the
most stupid thing to be doing right now.
But if we stop flossing doesn’t that mean
the virus has won? The lesson of the
Alamo, surely, was that they flossed to
the last man. I’m going out on my mint-
waxed shield, I decided, and went right
back at it. Each of us felt constantly on
the verge of coming down with some-
thing that could only be one thing: bow
waves of impending malaise, pre-head-
aches within the larger angst-induced
perma-headache, dry throats tingling on
the brink of becoming sore. Then, a cou-
“How can you say I don’t give back? I’m on the co-op board.” ple of weeks ago, my wife started feel-
ing strange, or “quivery,” as she put it.
Quivery turned briefly into feverish be-
• • fore subsiding into complete exhaustion
and an increasing tightness in the chest.
a more widespread commitment—to nities are not produced by sentiment Over the next several days, the feeling
support more extensive international or mere good will. They grow out of a of being completely exhausted changed,
coöperation—than has ever been seen. shared struggle.” though this hardly seemed possible, into
Our solidarity also requires that we Part of this struggle, for us now, is to even more complete—even deeper—
get away from passively wishing “they” carry on with a reduced version of nor- exhaustion. There was hardly any cough-
would do something. Of course, there are mal life at a time when everything non- ing and no shortness of breath: both good
many things that only the government Covid-related seems so pointless. Last signs, according to the doctor she spoke
can provide and do, but we have a part week, I wrote to a student about an over- with, but her symptoms certainly fell
to play, mainly by not doing things—at due essay, conscious, even as I did so, within the broad spectrum of COVID-19.
the very least, not going out, not buying that, in the larger scheme of things—at Here in Los Angeles, there was only
stuff we don’t need, not going to the hos- a time when, for example, Liverpool a dim hope of getting that suspicion
pital unless we have to. In Britain, the re- seemed destined to be denied an En- verified by a test. The criteria to be met
sponse to the National Health Service’s glish Premier League title it had all but were so stringent that a test seemed all
request for volunteers shows how des- won—this counted almost for nothing. but indistinguishable from a postmor-
perate and ready people are to convert As, in a still larger context, does the idea tem. Since we’ve been keeping entirely
energetic passivity into agency. I pro- of Liverpool winning the Premiership, to ourselves, the most reliable way of
pose—subject to scientific and govern- or even the existence of the Premiership, finding out if she has it is to see if I get
mental approval—that, for those who or of sports generally. But in some con- it. So I am the test. I am the canary and
get the virus, recover, and are given the texts everything counts almost for noth- our home is the coal mine.
all-clear, T-shirts be made available, saying. We routinely say of a setback, “It’s The “alienation” that residents of L.A.
ing something like “I’ve had it, I’m over not the end of the world.” Well, of course naturally suffer from—as a result of the
it—and I’m ready to help.” The appe- it’s not. Even the end of the world as we immense sprawl—means that social dis-
tite to help is matched by a longing for know it turns out not to be the end of tancing is built into the fabric of the city.
a renewed and properly inclusive sense the world. So, to downgrade Fitzgerald’s But that’s of little help once the idea of
of community to move beyond the vari- rhapsodic claim at the end of “The Great distancing gets internalized, moves in
ously circled wagons of identity politics. Gatsby,” we plod on—or don’t stop plod- and takes up residence like an uninvited
Many times in the past week, I’ve thought ding on—for the simple reason that, house guest whose stay is of unspecified
of something said by Larry Harvey, the with few exceptions, we are programmed duration—and, in a worst-case scenario,
co-founder of Burning Man, about the to keep putting one foot in front of the could be for the rest of our lives. Repli-
experience of building a temporary city other. That’s what feet are for. cating the global strategy, we are trying
in the inhospitable desert: “Commu- On the home front, a ploddable rhythm to flatten the curve in our apartment,
hopefully extending the interval between tinguishing one day from the next is the of the new and hitherto invisible apoc-
infections so that my wife recovers from mounting toll of deaths in whichever city alypse: hazmat suits, police, barricades.
hers before I show symptoms of mine. has assumed the unwelcome distinction But still the main impression was of ab-
In the meantime, it’s important for me of becoming the latest viral hot spot). sence. We had expected to be in a long
to be tender and cool in equal measure. On a larger scale, the fact that men convoy of congealed traffic, but there
Musically, the master of this combina- may be at a higher risk of fatal infection were just three cars ahead of us. It was
tion was Miles Davis, and so, on the rare is perhaps another sign that we might as if we had turned up for an outdoor
occasions that she ventures from her bed, be living—or, more accurately, dying— concert so far ahead of time that only
I express my affection in suitably Davisian through an eagerly anticipated phenom- the security had arrived.
style: “Keep your distance, motherfucker.” enon, the end of patriarchy. Like any rea- In California, one’s interactions with
I’ve always done the cleaning in our sonable man, I was rather looking forward people tend to be every bit as pleasant as
place, and the new need for enhanced to this but am now worried by two things: the weather, and so it proved here. I had
hygiene means that I am now cleaning the vexed political chestnut of whether read that you were meant to wear a mask
all the time that I’m not cooking and car- the ends justify the means, and whether to the testing site, but mine (part of a
ing: a limited life that is also quite ful- I’ll be around to see it. Meanwhile, that packet sent by a friend in China) broke
filling. There are other ambiguous posi- throbbing embodiment of patriarchy, as I put it on, so it dangled pointlessly
tives, too. I liked the way the virus put Donald Trump, is emerging from the from one ear as we drove up to the check-
an end to the hug as greeting, something pandemic with his reputation consider- in area. “Your outfit is almost as good as
that I started doing after moving to Cal- ably enhanced. The old accusations— mine,” a person in a white hazmat suit
ifornia even though I always felt that ev- that he is a misogynist, a racist, and so and shaded goggles said. The voice say-
eryone could tell I was just going through forth—now appear parochial and nar- ing this was a woman’s. Deeply hidden,
the motions. But now there’s no one to rowly partisan. They may not have been there it was, the voice of the opposite sex,
greet. Still, it’s good that the recent mean- laid to rest, but they should, at least tem- with all the mystery and wonder that en-
ing of “cancelled” has sort of cancelled porarily, be set aside while a sense of his tails. In the midst of a situation demand-
itself out. For a while, it was an opinion true stature becomes clear: as the enemy ing military efficiency, there was room,
or a demand elevated to the level of fiat of all the American people. Having made still, for charm. She checked us in, asked
about someone who had given offense that claim, I feel the need immediately us to close all the windows except mine,
of some kind: part of a cultural move- to qualify it, since Trump remains a true which was to be kept open only five inches.
ment, a cumulative total of grievance. friend of the terminally poor: those so We moved up to another hazmat suit,
Now it once again refers to something reduced in spirit that their only way to who, having handed over a test-kit box,
that has had to be called off, to unani- measure the value of life is by the single- told me to wind my window all the way
mous disappointment and the satisfac- minded accumulation of wealth. up so that we were securely locked within
tion of no one. The cancellation of the our own potential contagion. I wished so
Big Ears music festival and, recently, of h, but here’s another late-breaking badly that my mask had not broken that
Wimbledon hit me hard. These are events
I was looking forward to. Now there is
O bit of news. After a week of almost
motionless sickness, my wife discovered
my instinct was to ask my wife if I could
borrow hers.
nothing to look forward to except being that she could get tested. Driving us up We moved on, put the car in Park,
able to leave the house and not fretting to the edge of Brentwood on the 405, I and scrutinized the kit’s simple instruc-
constantly if my wife is getting sicker or was filled with a sense of pur- tions as if our lives de-
I am starting to get sick. Normally, a can- poseful adventure—we had pended on them. My wife
cellation is a source of personal affront, left the house!—that she felt swabbed her mouth and
but now that everything has been can- too ravaged to share. A jour- sealed the test stick in a
celled everywhere it has become part of ney that might normally have tube—not as simple as it
the general condition of existence. That’s taken ninety nerve-shredding sounds: the stick was too
what happened during the First World minutes took less than twenty. long and had to be broken
War, when, after worrying that they might If only L.A. were always like on the edge of the tube,
miss out on the fighting—because it this! Then things took an om- but it was yoga-ishly bendy
would all be over by Christmas—people inous turn. Following direc- rather than brittle—before
settled into the feeling that it might never tions from Google, we found sealing the tube in a plastic
end. The proposed end dates of the cur- ourselves in the Los Angeles National bag, which she then sealed in a bubble-
rent lockdowns and closures are pretty Cemetery, a vast and beautiful expanse wrap bag before returning it to the box.
arbitrary in practical terms, but they serve of white headstones and emerald grass We crawled forward, broke the seal on
the useful function of making life seem that made it seem as if that earlier crack the window, and tossed the box into a
manageable. The alternative—everything about the elision of test and postmortem blue bin indicated by a final hazmat-
shut everywhere for the foreseeable fu- had become an actuality. We had made suited sentinel, who waved us on. We
ture—would make us feel like we had a navigational error, but only a slight one: drove out past the huge and patient cem-
fallen out of time (at a time when it’s al- the drive-through testing site was just a etery. All the time in the world, it seemed,
ready difficult to remember which day of couple of minutes from the cemetery. resided there. The sky was its usual ex-
the week it is, when the main way of dis- And there it was, our first real sight pectant blue. 
thought of Lyon, rather than Paris or
ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY Provence, because it was said to be the
most Frenchly authentic and was known
historically as the world’s gastronomic
GOOD BREAD capital. Daniel Boulud, the most suc
cessful serious French chef in the United
For a newcomer to Lyon, a bakery apprenticeship reveals a way of life. States, was from there, as was Paul Bo
cuse, the most celebrated chef in the
BY BILL BUFORD world. The restaurateur JeanGeorges
Vongerichten had trained in Bocuse’s
kitchen, as his saucemaker. “Lyon is a
wonderful city,” he told me. “It is where
it all started. You really should go.”
Why not? My wife, Jessica Green, a
wine educator and lecturer, lived for the
next chance to pack her bags. (She also
spoke fluent French, which I did not.)
And our twin boys, George and Fred
erick, were three years old—possibly the
perfect age to move to a new country.
Our landing, though, was surprisingly
rough. Lyon seemed unwelcoming, sus
picious of outsiders, and indifferently
itself. “Our town is not easy to love,” a
Lyonnais novelist had written in the
thirties (the Fascist Henri Béraud, who
was also not so easy to love). “It is an
acquired taste. Almost a vice.”
We got an apartment by the River
Saône, situated auspiciously on the Quai
SaintVincent. (Vincent was the patron
saint of winemakers.) A gnarly firstcen
tury aqueduct column by a post office
reminded us that the Romans had been
here. In entryways, I found stone stairs
rendered concave by boot traffic. Far
ther up the quai was a former monas
tery courtyard, overgrown but graceful.
In our quartier, there were workshops,
not shops: a bookbinder, a violinrepair
Iweek,ncompels
Lyon, an ancient but benevolent law
bakers to take one day off a
and so most don’t work Sundays.
oven doors banging, people waving and
trying to get noticed, toohottotouch
baguettes arriving in baskets, money
person, a seamstress, a guitarmaker, a
oneroom pastry “factory.” The next street
over, Arabic was the principal language,
An exception was the one in the quar changing hands. Everyone left with an and women, their heads covered, fetched
tier where I lived with my family for five armful and with the same look, suspended water by bucket from an archaic faucet.
years, until 2013. On Sundays, the baker, between appetite and the prospect of an There was also—on the nearby Place
Bob, worked without sleep. Latenight appetite satisfied. It was a lesson in the Sathonay—a porn shop, park benches
carousers started appearing at three in appeal of good bread—handmade, aro occupied by drunks, drug deals, graffiti
the morning to ask for a hot baguette, matically yeasty, with a justoutofthe on most surfaces, dog shit everywhere.
swaying on tiptoe at a high ventilation oven texture of crunchy air. This was At a playground, sparkly with bits of
window by the oven room, a hand out their breakfast. It completed the week. broken glass, we watched small children
stretched with a euro coin. By nine, a This was Sunday in Lyon. hitting one another. And yet the quar
line extended down the street, and the For most of my adult life, I had se tier, for all its inyourface grittiness, also
shop, when you finally got inside, was cretly wanted to find myself in France: had energy and integrity and an abun
loud from people and from music being in a French kitchen, somehow holding dance of small eateries. The food wasn’t
played at high volume. Everyone shouted my own, having been “Frenchtrained” grand, but it was always honest, char
to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, (the enduring magic of that phrase). I acterized by bon rapport qualité-prix—
good quality for the price, an essential
The bread from Bob’s boulangerie united a neighborhood of food fanatics. feature of the Lyonnais meal. Our apart
26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY LEO ESPINOSA
ment was opposite a mural called “La reflection, that I should start with you, Bob was clearly waiting for me. He
Fresque des Lyonnais,” two millennia in your boulangerie”—he knew that he ripped open a fifty-kilo sack of flour,
of the city’s famous citizens painted was my backup: that, in effect, I was lying. lifted it without a sign of strain, and
onto a six-story windowless wall. The “No,” he said. emptied it into a large steel basin. He
same building housed Bob’s boulan- “No?” I pressed. “Bob, you make the grabbed a milk carton with the top cut
gerie, where, friends told us, you could best bread in the city. I want to learn why.” off and told me to follow him to a
find the best bread in the city. His gaze drifted above my head. He sink—a startling sight, filled with coffee
The boulangerie was where the boys seemed to be imagining what it might paraphernalia, grounds everywhere, a
discovered the word goûter (from goût, be like for me to work there. sandwich floating in something black,
meaning “flavor,” and probably the sin- Bob was forty-four. He was jowly a wet roll of toilet paper. He negotiated
gle most important word in the entire and wide of girth and, when unshaven, the carton to a position under the fau-
language). A goûter is an afternoon looked something like a genetic inter- cet and ran it hot.
snack—eaten universally at 4 P.M., when marriage of Fred Flintstone and Jackie “You arrive at the correct tempera-
children get out of school—and an ex- Gleason. His hair was brownish and ture by a formula involving two other
ception to two of the city’s implicit rules shaggy and usually matted with flour. factors,” Bob explained. “One is the tem-
about food: you do not eat standing up, There was flour in his beard and on his perature of the air. This morning, it is
and you never eat between meals. A clogs, his sweater, and his trousers. (He cold—it is probably two degrees. The
goûter is devoured instantly. The boys wore an apron, but it didn’t help.) Bath- other is the flour—”
discovered Bob’s pain au chocolat and ing was not a priority. He slept when “How do you know that?”
didn’t understand why they should eat he could, and seemed to live by an in- “It’s the temperature of the air.”
anything else. ternal clock set to an alarm that was al- “Of course.”
They also discovered Bob’s baguettes, ways going off—yeast, dough-making, “These two factors added together,
which Frederick developed a practice the unforgiving speed of a hot oven. He plus the water, should equal fifty-four
of assaulting each morning before eat- knew that his bread was exceptionally degrees Celsius.” So if the air was two
ing: breaking one open with his hands, good, but he did not see himself as a degrees, and the flour was two degrees,
sticking his nose inside, inhaling, and genius. In a city of food fanatics, he was the water would have to be fifty.
then smiling. On Wednesdays, when just a baker. He was, in fact, just Bob. “Hot,” I said.
Bob was closed and we bought baguettes And he wasn’t even that. His real name “Exactly.”
elsewhere, Frederick subjected them to was Yves. (No one knew why he went The water from the tap was steam-
his test and, without fail, found them by Bob. I once asked him, and he was ing. Bob filled the carton.
inedible. (Bob was thrilled by Freder- vague: “Somebody, a long time ago . . .”) I asked, “Bob, you don’t use a ther-
ick’s findings.) Bob’s bread had aromatic “Yes,” he said slowly: Oui-i-i-i. He mometer?”
complexity and was long in flavor in actually seemed to be getting excited. I “No.”
ways that we’d never known before. We could see excitement in his fingers. They “Do you own a thermometer?”
were at his boulangerie every day. Some were drumming a counter. “Come. Work “No.” He considered. “You know, I
days, we went three times, which con- here. You will be welcome.” might.”
cerned him: “You’ve had enough bread “I will see you tomorrow.” I thanked Bob poured the water into the basin
today. Go home!” him. We shook hands. I made to leave. and started an apparatus attached at the
“You live across the street, right? You top, a kneader. It appeared to have orig-
e had been in Lyon a month can stop by anytime. If you can’t sleep, inally operated by turning a crank, and
W when the evidence was inescap-
able: I couldn’t find a restaurant to take
come over. At three in the morning, I’ll
be here.”
at some point had been upgraded with
a washing-machine motor. Two hooks,
me on. I had cooking experience, but it I thought, If I can’t sleep at three in looking like prosthetic hands, scooped
was mainly Italian, and Italian, I was the morning, I don’t go for walks. But up the dough very slowly. “It is no faster
discovering, didn’t count. I was at home I understood the message. Bob was mak- than if you did this with your own
pacing (panicking, frankly), when I de- ing himself available. I’ll be your friend, hands,” he said.
clared to Jessica, “I’m going to work for he was saying. “Then we take some of last night’s
Bob. In fact, I’m going to walk over dough.” La vieille pâte. It was brown
there now and present myself.” t three on a weekday morning, and cakey, wrapped in plastic film. He
It was eight in the evening, but I was
pretty sure he’d be there. Bob was known
A when I set out for my first train-
ing, the city was lonely. The river was
pinched a bit between his thumb and
forefinger and tossed it into the basin.
for his extreme hours, his light on in cold-making to look at and thick like He took a second pinch, scrutinized it,
the back when the rest of the quartier motor oil when a barge appeared (sud- thought better of the quantity, and
was dark. And he was there, but he was denly, unexpectedly) a few feet away. tossed in half. This, in effect, was his
heading home for a nap. From Thursday to Sunday, Lyon was “starter,” yeasts still alive from last night
Bob knew why I was in Lyon. He also all-night drinking, loud music, car burn- that would be woken up in the new
knew that I hadn’t found a kitchen to ings, vandalism, vomiting. Now there batch. It wasn’t the only source. I knew
work in. So, when I made my proposal, were no vehicles, no people, not a light enough about yeasts to know that, here,
straight out—“Bob, I’ve decided, on on in any apartment. they were everywhere. You could peel
“ ‘Bread has been made here for a long
time.’” The family bought the boulan-
gerie, for what was then about eleven
thousand dollars, and got it ready. (It
was probably—I couldn’t keep myself
from thinking—the last time the floors
were cleaned.)
Bob returned to Paris, and a sign
went up: “Philippe Richard Artisan Bou-
langer.” But it seems unlikely that
Philippe intended to remain. He had a
family and a business in Nantes, eight
hours away. He called Bob: Quit your
job, he said, and come run the boulan-
gerie with me. In effect, he was begin-
ning Bob’s training (what in French is
called a formation), helping him find his
calling. “Without Philippe,” Bob said,
“I would be nothing.” After a time—six
months? A year? Bob couldn’t remem-
ber—Philippe announced that he needed
to return to Nantes. He’d be back, he
said. It had been fifteen years. Bob hadn’t
changed the sign. “I will never take it
down,” he said.
From our balcony, with a moun-
tain breeze coming off the Saône, the
• • smells of the boulangerie were inescap-
able. When you live here, you have no
them off the walls. You could scrape resented companionship. He was at choice: Bob’s bread enters your living
all you needed from underneath Bob’s ease among them. He introduced me space. The boulangerie was the village
fingernails. as the guy he was training to make equivalent of a campfire. It held the
I looked around. On every available bread, his way. restaurants together. It united chefs and
surface, there was an unwashed coffee diners. It made the quartier a gastro-
mug. Fabric couches, used for shaping ob had not set out to be a baker. nomic destination.
baguettes, were draped across wooden
poles, like beach towels still damp from
B In his twenties, he worked in a law
library in Paris, a job that he loved. His
Once, I asked Bob for his secret: “Is
it the yeasts? Are they what make your
last summer. A light bulb dangled from father had been a baker. His older bread so good?”
the ceiling. There were the flickering brother Philippe was a great one, who “Oui,” he said very, very slowly, mean-
blue lights of the ovens. The darkness had already opened three bakeries, as ing, “Well, no.”
put you on your guard. You could trip well as doing stints at ski resorts in the I pondered. “Is it the leavening?” Bob
here and die. winter and in the Caribbean during always insisted that a slow first rise—
He stopped the kneader and tore off the spring. called le pointage—was essential to good
a piece of dough. It was thin and elas- It was Jacques, another brother, who bread. Factory bread-makers use high-
tic. “You can see through it,” he said, discovered, by accident, the boulangerie speed mixers to whip a dough into read-
laughing as he stretched it across my on the Saône. He had come upon a iness in minutes. Bob’s took all night.
face like a mask. space for rent, situated in front of a “Oui-i-i-i.”
Tonight’s dough would be ready the footbridge, but it was filthy and filled “The final resting?” Bread gets its
next afternoon. The morning’s ba- with trash. He investigated: two floors, deeper flavor in its last stages, people say.
guettes would be made, therefore, from thick stone walls, a worn stone stair- “Oui-i-i-i. But no. These are the
last night’s. case, and, in the back, an old wood-burn- ABCs. Mainly, they are what you do
“Let’s get breakfast,” Bob said. ing oven. He wiped off the soot. It said not do to make bad bread. There is a
An off-track-betting bar opened at 1202. He became excited—the river, the lot of bad bread in France. Good bread
six. The coffee was filthy, the bread was history (“La Fresque des Lyonnais” was comes from good flour. It’s the flour.”
stale, and the clientele might be flat- then being painted on the back wall)— “The flour?”
teringly described as “rough” (phleg- and summoned his father, Philippe, and “Oui,” he said, definitively.
matic one-lunged hackers knocking Bob. “My father looked at the property I thought, Flour is flour is flour.
back sunrise brandies, while studying from the outside and said, ‘Yes, this “The flour?”
the racing odds), but, for Bob, they rep- is a good boulangerie,’” Bob told me. “Oui. The flour.”
Bob bought a lot of flours, but a farm Four, I said to myself. Four. I know of bread, me with another, trying to keep
in the Auvergne provided his favorite. that word. up: Les Oliviers (“Exceptional food”—
The Auvergne, west of Lyon, is rarely “Four?” I said, aloud this time, which a double pump—“Michelinlisted but
mentioned without an epithet invoking was provoking, probably because it wasn’t not pretentious”), young chef, tough
its otherness. It is sauvage—wild—with “yes” or “no.” guy shoulders, an affectionate face, bag
cliffs and forests and boar. Its mountains “Au four? C’est au four? Le pain!” drop, highfives, out.
were formed by volcanoes, like so many Denis bolted down the stairs in what One eating establishment after an
chimneys. In the boulangerie, there was seemed to me like histrionic distress. I other: in, then out. Many seemed less
a picture of a goat on a steep hill. It was heard an oven door being slammed open like businesses than like improvisations
kept by a farmer friend, who grew the and a bread tray yanked out on its rollers. that resulted, somehow, in dinner. Chez
wheat that was milled locally into a flour “Oh, putain!” Albert, created on a dare by friends. Le
that Bob used to make his bread. The For me, the door was the prompt. SaintVincent, with a kitchen no larger
picture was the only information that Of course. Four! It’s “oven”! than a coat closet. In the Seventh Ar
Bob’s customers required. Who needs a The bread was ruined. (Putain means rondissement—industrial, twouptwo
label when you have a goat? “whore.” Pute is also “whore,” but down housing, gray stucco fronts—we
For Bob, farms were the “heart of “putain! ” is what you say when you’ve arrived at Le Fleurie, a bistro named
Frenchness.” His grandfather had been burned a full tray of baguettes.) after a Beaujolais cru, as accessible as the
a farmer. Every one of the friends he wine. “I love this place,” Bob said: a daily
would eventually introduce me to were ne evening, Bob announced, “To chalkboard menu on the sidewalk, twelve
also the grandchildren of farmers. They
felt connected to the rhythm of plows
O morrow, we do deliveries. It is time
to meet the real Lyon.”
euros for a threecourse meal (lake fish
with shellfish sauce, filet of pork with
and seasons, and were beneficiaries of Bob delivered bread via an ancient pepper sauce), polemically Tshirtand
a knowledge that had been in their fam dinky Citroën that he hadn’t washed— jeans informal, the food uncompromis
ilies for generations. When Bob de ever. On the passenger seat were plastic ingly seasonal (i.e., if it’s winter, you eat
scribed it, he used the word transmettre, sandwich wrappers, a halfeaten quiche, roots). Bob walked straight to the back,
with its sense of “to hand over”—some a nearly empty familysize bottle of Coca a sack on his shoulder, the familiar rou
thing passed between eras. Cola, and editions of the local paper, tine. Then, the day’s last delivery com
Le Progrès, that lay open at such specific pleted, he asked after Olivier, the chef,
eorge and Frederick, enrolled in a spots as to suggest that this is what Bob and was directed to the bar.
G neighborhood school, were learn
ing their new language, hesitantly at
did while driving: he caught up on the
news. He pushed it all to the floor and
Olivier Paget, Bob’s age, was born
in Beaujolais, father a plumber, grand
first and then with sudden fluency. Jes invited me to sit. Inside was a fine white father a vigneron, cooking since age
sica, with a mimic’s gift for languages, cloud, as though the air had reached a sixteen; normal chef stuff, including
spoke with authority and ease. point of molecular flour saturation and stints making fancy food with grands
Was my French improving? No. none of it would quite settle. The car ex chefs, like Georges Blanc, with whom
Did my French even exist? Meh. plained why Bob so seldom bathed. Re Boulud had trained. But Paget, his
I had a bad episode with four—the ally, what would be the point? (In the training complete, situated himself in
word in French for “oven” (pronounced wintertime, Bob had the ap a remote workingclass dis
as if someone has just hit you hard on pearance of an old mattress.) trict, made good food at a
the back). It sounds the same if the Bob drove fast, he talked fair price, and filled every
ovens referred to are in the plural (fours). fast, he parked badly. The seat, every lunch and din
And fours were, of course, what Bob first stop was L’Harmonie ner: tight.
baked his bread in, the bluelit, glass des Vins, on the Presqu’île, “This,” Bob said, “is my
door contraptions on the ground floor. a wine bar with food (“But idea of a restaurant.”
One afternoon, there were two peo good food,” Bob said). Two As Paget poured glasses
ple in the back of the boulangerie: Denis, owners were in the back, of Beaujolais, Bob con
Bob’s sole fulltime employee, and me. busy preparing for the lunch fessed to liking the idea of
Denis—thirty, with cropped blond hair service but delighted by the grande cuisine—cooking of
and dressed in white, like a proper sight of their bread guy, even though he the highest order. He still hoped that
baker—was upstairs. I was below, mak came by every day at exactly this time. one day he would experience it prop
ing dough. When I bounded up to re I was introduced, Bob’s new student, erly. “I tried once”—a meal at Paul Bo
trieve a sack of flour, Denis asked: the quickquick, bag drop, kisses, out. Next: cuse’s threestar Auberge, with Jacque
bread—was it still in the oven (au four)? La Quintessence, a new restaurant (“Re line, his wife. No one could have arrived
At least, I think that this was what he ally good food,” Bob said, pumping his with higher expectations. Few could
said. He repeated the question, and this fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, have been more disappointed.
time it was more like “Don’t tell me frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the in It wasn’t the food, which Bob doesn’t
that the fucking bread is still in the troduction, the bag drop, kisses, out. We remember. “We were condescended to,”
oven?” What I heard was strong emo crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a side he said. Waiters sneered at them for not
tion and “four.” walk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack knowing which glass was for which
wine, and served them with manifest When I crossed the city, I met peo- will eat a grand meal and enjoy it. You
reluctance. ( Jacqueline is Cuban and ple I knew through Bob. I was starting will make me something from the rep-
black. That evening, there was one other to feel at home. ertoire of la grande cuisine. It will be like
black person at the restaurant: the foot- And then I quit. Bocuse but without all the Bocuse.”
man, dressed up in a costume reminis- I stepped into the boulangerie to “Of course I will,” I said.
cent of Southern plantation livery.) The tell him. He smiled.
bill was more than Bob earned in a “Bonjour, Bill.”
month. It had been a mugging.
Bob knocked back his Beaujolais,
and Paget poured him another, and,
“Bonjour, Bob. Bob, I have decided
to go to cooking school.”
I could have hit him in the nose with
Istitut,tried working for Bob on Saturdays,
but it was too much. Then, after L’In-
I found work in a restaurant kitchen.
as I watched the easy intimacy be- my fist. He took a step back, as if he (“Good food there,” Bob said, “but bad
tween them, I believed that I was start- had lost his balance. “Oh,” he whispered. bread.”) Bob continued to be in our life.
ing to understand what I had been What had I done? I tried to explain, He made a bread, combining American
seeing all morning: a fraternity, recog- how I needed to learn kitchen skills first. and French flours, that expressed our
nized by a coat of arms visible only to “Of course.” friendship. We called it a Lafayette.
other members. And that I would be back soon. If More than a year later, we asked if
Through Bob, I learned about the he would have me. That there was so we could take him out to dinner. It was
city’s eating societies, a proliferation of much more to learn. an indirect apology. I hadn’t cooked for
them: one for the bouchon owners; an- The air seemed to be leaving him. him yet.
other for the bouchon eaters. One for His shoulders sloped. He was just a baker, He picked the day: a Tuesday—i.e.,
the true bistros, and another for the his posture said. He was Bob. Just Bob. not a school night. (Bob closed on
modern ones. There was the Gueules “You’re going to L’Institut Paul Bo- Wednesdays, like the schools, so he could
de Lyon, which, by the designation of cuse,” he said—the most prestigious be with his young daughter.) He had
its members, included the city’s eight school in France. It was a statement, both bathed and shaved, a radical sight.
coolest, philosophically unfussy, kick- not a question. He had also determined the itinerary,
ass restaurants. At least three societ- “I am.” which began with his friends at L’Har-
ies were committed to hosting a real He whistled. monie des Vins, because they had just
mâchon. (This is the all-day Lyonnais “But I will be back.” taken delivery of the new Saint-Péray,
“breakfast” practice, featuring every He didn’t believe me. a small-production white wine made
edible morsel of a pig, limitless-seem- We stood like that. He seemed to be by Alain Voge. Bob taught us that, where
ing quantities of Beaujolais, and loud, thinking. we lived, a wine sometimes has a re-
sloppy parades of singing men who, “At L’Institut Bocuse, you will learn lease date, like a play’s opening night.
by then, are trying to remember how la grande cuisine,” he said forthrightly, Bob talked and talked and talked.
to get home. I feared it.) And there with energy. He knew plenty about us. He wanted
were serious grownup societies, like Les “I don’t know.” us to know about him. He talked about
Toques Blanches, whose members were “Of course you will.” He seemed ex- his father, a farmer’s son (“My grand-
the grandest of the region’s grands chefs. cited. “For the first time in my life, I father, my great-grandfather, my great-
great-grandfather, all of them, for gen-
erations, were paysans”), who became
the renowned town baker, a patriarch
whom his many children sought advice
from before making major decisions,
and who, for no reason that anyone
understood, no longer spoke to Bob’s
mother. (“It was strange. He spoke to
the rest of us.”)
About his mother, eighty-five, who
pretended not to be distressed that her
husband of fifty-nine years and the fa-
ther of her seven children no longer
spoke to her.
About his wife, Jacqueline, who was
a single mother when he met her, on a
vacation to Cuba, and who agreed to
marry him only if the proposal was
blessed by her priest, a disciple of
Santería, the Caribbean religion.
About returning to Cuba to attend
“Relax—it’s all online.” a ceremony, people dancing and chant-
ing, until the priest stopped the pro- standard, there were plenty of other big- a street light, seeming to stare at noth-
ceedings: “He held my face between his stick bakery words, like ficelle (string), ing. The light changed, then changed
hands, and looked into my eyes, and and flûte (flute), and bâtard (the fat one, back. He didn’t cross. His thoughts were
declared, ‘Your family traded in the flesh the bastard). It doesn’t matter: it is not like a black tide moving back and forth
of our ancestors. You cannot marry Jac- the name that is French but the shape. inside his head. I feared for him.
queline. Leave my sight.’” A long bread has a higher proportion “I have to change my life,” he told
About his returning to France, heart- of crust to crumb than a round one. The Jessica. “I must make Lucas a partner.”
broken, and being told by his mother shape means: crunch. Lucas was the first baker Bob employed
that there was merit in the priest’s dec- When I made baguettes, I was aston- who had his lightness of touch. “I have
laration, that there had been a terrible ished at both the labor and the unfor- to share the workload.”
rupture in the family, because one branch giving economy—you pull off a small He seemed to have instantly gained
traded in slaves and the other found the piece of dough and weigh it on an old weight. He wasn’t sleeping. The nights,
practice unacceptable. About how Bob metal scale, roll it out, grab he said, were the hardest:
returned to Havana and explained his one of the couches from a pole “That’s when I think of him.
history to the priest, who then blessed to let it rest, let it rise again, I have never been closer to
his marriage. slash it, bake it, and then col- a human being, those nights,
About his six siblings (by then we lect ninety centimes for your making bread.”
were at Les Oliviers, Bob talking faster efforts. The slash is effected One Saturday night, as
and faster to say it all): Marc, an archi- by a light slice with an an- Bob mourned, a kid threw
vist in Paris; Jacques, between Paris and gled razor blade, une scarifi- a rock at the back-room
Lyon, doing this and that; a couple of cation, done so weightlessly window, shattering it. On
sisters; another brother; and then Philippe, that you don’t crush the loaf. Saturday nights, everyone
dear Philippe, four years older than Bob, But I had trouble with the slash—I comes into Lyon. It is noisy and drunken,
and the one he talked to the least because couldn’t do it without exerting pressure, and stuff happens. On this particular
he thought about him the most.“Philippe,” just as I couldn’t roll out the dough with- Saturday, Bob was in the back, think-
Bob said, “is my greatest friend. He is out squishing it. Bob had a touch that ing of his brother. The broken window
half of my soul.” seemed to be lighter than air; he left no was an affront. Bob, apparently, gave
When Bob was growing up, every fingerprints. chase down the Quai Saint-Vincent.
member of the family worked in his fa- The result was irresistible. Once, when Is it possible that Bob thought he
ther’s boulangerie at Christmas and we were having lunch at Le Fleurie, Bob could catch the vandal? By what im-
Easter. Bob had emerged with a refrain: directed my attention to a woman on pulsive leap of the imagination did he
Everyone deserves good bread. It was the far side of the room: well dressed, regard himself as a sprinter?
like a calling or a social imperative. A gray hair in a bun, eating by herself. She The quai there was badly lit, the curb
boulanger can be counted on by the peo- was removing a sliced baguette from the stacked with boards left over from a con-
ple he feeds. basket and meticulously putting it, piece struction project. Bob tripped and fell
by piece, into her purse, where there ap- and broke his leg. He had to pull him-
ONonce, I asked Bob, “Which of your

breads makes you the proudest?”
hesitation. “My baguette.”
peared to be a napkin to fold it into. She
closed her purse and put her hand up
for a waiter’s attention: “Plus de pain, s’il
self back onto the sidewalk to avoid being
run over. Bob, whose work means stand-
ing on his feet, had to give up the bou-
“Really? The French eat ten billion vous plaît.” More bread, please. langerie for an inconceivably long time.
baguettes a year. Yours are so different?” Roberto Bonomo, the quartier’s Ital-
“No. But mine, sometimes, are what
a baguette should be.”
Bob took one and brought it up to
Ionepopped into the boulangerie late one
morning. Bob was in the back. No
else was there. I waited several min-
ian chef, was in touch with Bob and pro-
vided updates. After a month, he was
still supine, Roberto told us, but the break
the side of my head and snapped it. The utes before he walked out. seemed to be healing. Bob had attempted
crack was thunderous. “I was on the phone with my mother. walking with crutches.
The word baguette means “stick,” or My brother Philippe. He had an aneu- I began preparing a dinner for his
“baton,” the kind that an orchestra con- rysm this morning. He is dead.” return, a grande cuisine dish that I had
ductor keeps time with, and wasn’t used Il est mort. been practicing, tourte de canard (duck
to describe bread until the Second World Bob was pale, flat eyes, no affect, able pie). Bob needed some love and affec-
War, probably—and I say “probably” to relay the news but seemingly unable tion. He would, I was sure, really like a
because there is invariably debate. (There to understand what he was saying. “He piece of pie.
is even more about how to define a ba- is fifty. He was fifty. An aneurysm. This The boulangerie continued—Lucas’s
guette: Should it weigh two hundred morning.” bread was flawless—with one persistent
and fifty grams? Two seventy-five? Do Bob left to attend the funeral. When problem: the flour kept running out.
you care?) Tellingly, the word appears he returned, he was ponderous, in man- Lucas didn’t know how often Bob or-
nowhere in my 1938 “Larousse Gas- ner and movement. One morning, he dered it. In most bakeries, you buy flour
tronomique,” a thousand-page codex of didn’t show up at the boulangerie. An- in bulk; it is always there, you don’t think
French cuisine. Until baguette became other time, I watched him standing by about it. But Bob got his flour from small
farmers who valued its freshness. It was, ing, hear it in nighttime barges that slice would be akin to buying milk from a
in effect, milled to order. He might get through it, feel it in the dampness of the guy named Dairy.
some at the beginning of the week. On air. It’s never the same—rising, rushing, I drove to the town and got a coffee.
Friday, he would ask for more. Or on sinking, slow in fog, thick in the sum At the bar, I Googled “Degrange”—and
Wednesday. The deliveries would be mer—and is also always the same. Bob there he was. Minoterie Degrange. What
stacked by the staircase: forty big, dusty used to throw his unsold baguettes into was a minoterie? I looked it up. “Flour
sacks, fifty. Lucas, suddenly without flour, it. Only now does it occur to me that, mill.” It appeared to be within walking
had to close until the next delivery. with bread that he had made singlehand distance. I set off.
One Sunday, Roberto threw a party, edly, he couldn’t do the obvious and put After half an hour, my doubts re
only his regulars, his best food, the best it out with the trash. He seemed to need turned. The addresses were erratic, and
wine. Bob promised to come, Roberto to replicate the making of it in its un the street—flower beds, trimmed hedges,
said: “He’ll be on crutches, but he’ll be making, tossing the baguettes, one by garages for the family car—was unequiv
there.” When we turned up, Bob hadn’t one, as if returning them to nature for ocally suburban. Was there really an op
arrived yet. Babysitter issues, Roberto said. the birds and the fish. eration here, milling only local grains?
Bob died while we were drinking But then, just when I decided to turn
wine and eating bruschetta. A clot de ob had held the quartier together, a back, voilà! In the shade of tall trees, half
veloped in the leg, came loose, rushed
up an artery, and lodged in his lungs.
B community of likeminded food fa
natics, and when he died we briefly con
obscured by thick foliage, was a small
letterslot mailbox, no street number but
He knew at once that he was in fatal sidered returning to the United States. a name, Minoterie Degrange.
trouble. Jacqueline called an ambulance. We didn’t, we couldn’t, until finally, after The trees and a high metal gate, cov
He was unconscious before it arrived. five years in Lyon, we went back for many ered with graffiti, hid whatever was be
I learned this in the morning. I rushed reasons, including the fact that our chil hind. Next to the mail slot was a speaker
down to the boulangerie. I didn’t know dren, who could read and write in French, box. I pressed a button.
what else to do. I opened the door, and were having trouble speaking English. “Oui?” the speaker box said, a wom
the bell jingled, and Ailene, one of Bob’s I returned the following year on my an’s voice.
helpers, came out from the back, be own, to visit Lac du Bourget, the larg “Bonjour,” I told the box. “I have
cause it was the routine to come out at est lake in France, a piece of unfinished eaten a bread made from your flour, and
the sound of the bell. She saw me and business. I spent the night at La Source, I would like to meet the owner, Mon
stopped, lower lip trembling, holding a farmhouse turned into a restaurant sieur Degrange?”
herself still. I thought, If she carries on with rooms, which was run by a hus Nothing.
as though nothing has changed, if Lucas bandandwife team, members of the “But it’s lunchtime,” the box said
makes the bread at 3 A.M. and she sells Maîtres Restaurateurs, a chefs’ collective finally.
it, can we all pretend that Bob is still at committed to making as much as pos “Of course. I’m sorry. I’ll wait.”
home recuperating? sible from scratch: butter churned by Another protracted silence. Then the
The bell jingled, and one of the quar hand, fresh ice cream daily. gate opened and revealed an industrial
tier’s restaurant people appeared, a waiter. At breakfast, I scooped up butter on yard, completely out of keeping with its
He was bald, quiet, thin, one of the five the tip of my knife and tasted it. It was neighbors. A man emerged, round and
people who ran Chez Albert, a purple fatty and beautifully bovine. The bread robust, with a factory foreman’s forth
painted place, decorated with chicken rightness, wiping his mouth with a nap
images, that served good, unradical food. kin. He looked at me hard.
The waiter was bearing a large bread sack “Monsieur Degrange?” I confirmed.
that needed filling. He handed it to Ailene “Please excuse me. I ate a slice of bread
and said he’d pick it up later. that was made, I believe, with your flour,
“Bisous à Bob.” Kisses to Bob. and it reminds me of the bread that my
“Bob is dead.” Bob est mort. The waiter friend Bob used to make.”
stood, unmoving, taking in the simple, He pointed to a car: “Get in.”
declarative piece of news. Bob est mort. I got in.
He didn’t ask Ailene to repeat herself. “It’s all about the flour,” he said. “I’ll
He didn’t ask how or when or where. was curious. It had been sliced from a take you to Boulangerie Vincent. ”
The questions would have been an eva rectangular loaf and, to my prejudiced The boulangerie, a few miles down
sion, an effort to fill this sudden void eye, looked storebought and industrial. the road, was also a bar and a pub and a
with noise. I had a bite. It wasn’t storebought. Wow, restaurant with tablecloths. The door
“Putain de merde,” he said finally. I thought. This is good bread. opened directly onto the four and a cool
A nonsense phrase. Two bad words in The flour, the owner told me, was ing rack built against a wall. The top
one, as though it were the worst thing from Le BourgetduLac, on the other rows were for boules (“balls,” the ancient
you could say. Or it was just what you side of the lake. The name of the miller way of bread baking), about thirty of
say when you don’t have the words. was Philippe Degrange. I wrote it down. them. On the bottom were couronnes,
When you live on a river, you are never It didn’t seem right. A grange is where massive, each fashioned into a ring like
not thinking about it. You see it on wak you store your grains. Degrange? It a crown. A woman, carefully dressed,
affluent in manner, was negotiating with
the bread guy.
“Mais, Pierre, s’il vous plaît. Just one
boule, please. I have guests tonight.”
“I am very sorry, madame, but every
loaf has a name attached to it. You know
that. If you haven’t reserved, I can’t give
you one.”
“He does two ferments,” Degrange
whispered, “and starts at seven in the
evening. The bread needs ten hours. Or
twelve. Sometimes fourteen.”
Inside, men were gathered around a
bar—electricians, cable people, metal-
workers, painters, mecs. The room roared
with conviviality. Degrange ordered us
diots, a Savoyard sausage, and a glass of
wine, a local Mondeuse. Through the
door to a kitchen, I saw hundreds of
diots, drying in the air, looped by a string.
They were cooked in a deep sauté pan
with onions, red wine, and two bay leaves,
• •
and served in a roll made with De-
grange’s flour. and computer screens—except for the les valeurs sont transmis. Flavor and value:
It had the flavors that I had tasted at source material, freshly picked wheat that those are the qualities that are transmit-
breakfast. I asked for another roll, broke is tipped out from hydraulically raised ted. Only in France would “flavor” and
it open, and stuck my nose into la mie, trailers. I followed Degrange up ladder- “value” have the same moral weight.
the crumb—Frederick’s routine. It smelled like stairs to the third floor, where he Degrange gave me a ten-kilo bag of his
of yeast and oven-caramelized aromas, opened the cap of a pipe and retrieved flour. A gift. I said goodbye, an affectionate
and of something else, an evocative fruit- a cupful of a bright-golden grain. embrace, feeling an unexpected closeness
iness. I closed my eyes. Bob. “Taste.” to this man I had reached by intercom
“You recognize it,” Degrange said. “It It seemed to dissolve in my mouth, only a few hours ago, and who instantly
comes from wheat that grew in good creamy and sweet and long in flavor. knew what I was talking about: goût.
soil.” “What is it?” I was flying home in the morning
“Where do you get it?” “Wheat germ.” and reserved a boule at the Boulangerie
“Small farms. Nothing more than I wanted to take some home. “You’ll Vincent. I contemplated the prospect
forty hectares.” have to refrigerate it,” he said. “It is like of arriving in New York bearing bread
Small farms, he explained, are often flour but more extreme. It has fat, which for my children which had been made
the only ones in France with soil that spoils rapidly.” near Le Lac du Bourget earlier that very
hasn’t been ruined. He described conventional flour pro- day. On the way to the airport, I stopped
“Where are they?” duction—the sprawling farms in the to pick it up. It was dawn, and there
“Here in Savoie. And the Rhône Val- French breadbasket or the American were no lights on inside, just the red
ley. They grow an old wheat, a quality Midwest, their accelerated-growth tricks, glow from the oven. My boule was hot
wheat. And the Auvergne. I love the their soils so manipulated that they could and irresistibly fragrant.
wheat from the Auvergne. Everyone does. have been created in a chemistry lab. “The In New York, I cut a few thick slices
The volcanic soil, the iron-rich dirt. You bread that you make from it has the right and put out some butter. “I think you’ll
can taste it in the bread.” texture. But it doesn’t have the taste, the like this,” I said.
We drank another glass of Mon- goût.” He asked an assistant to bring him Frederick took a slice and sniffed it
deuse. Degrange proposed that we go a baguette, then tore off a piece, smelled and then slammed it into his face, in-
back: “I want to show you the factory.” it, and looked at it approvingly. haling deeply: “It’s like Bob’s.”
A Degrange has been milling flour “In the country, we don’t change as George ate a slice, then asked for an-
here, or on a site closer to the river, since fast as people in the city,” Degrange said. other and spread butter on it.
1704. Until modern times, the operation “For us, the meal is still important. We When the loaf was done, I made
was powered by water; on a wall was an don’t ‘snack,’” he said, using the English more from the ten-kilo bag. It was
old photo of Degrange’s father and grand- word. “What I learned from my father good—not as good as the boule from
father, seated before a mill paddle wheel and grandfather is what they learned from the Boulangerie Vincent, but still good.
three times their height. There are no their fathers and grandfathers. There is It had fruit and complexity and a feel-
mill paddles today. The process is whir- a handing off between generations.” The ing of nutritiousness. A month later, it
ringly hidden in pipes and generators word he used was transmettre. Le goût et was gone, and I stopped making bread. 
DISPATCHES FROM A PANDEMIC
Responses to the coronavirus crisis.
A TEMPORARY MOMENT IN TIME staying apart,” has galvanized a silence tional Institute of Allergy and Infec-
on the ordinarily festive streets of down- tious Diseases, took the stand, explain-
Sderhakespeare did his finest work under

quarantine, I keep hearing. I won-
how the Bard would regard today’s
town Austin that tells a story in a whis-
per: infected droplets are spreading
through the air, and this is the new way
ing the stakes and the contours of the
global public-health crisis to a bewil-
dered nation. He is a man charged with
“craft hour” in our apartment, which we are caring for one another. telling an unhappy story with no clear
ended after eight minutes. I’d Googled Next, we played doctor, a game that end in sight. He insists on empirical
“easy art projects anyone can do,” and involves my son hitting my forehead verification, and he has maintained his
selected “DIY jellyfish.” We forged with his toy hammer and then saying, equilibrium, and his authority, on the
ahead, with the same delusional opti- in a gentle, condescending falsetto, “It’s rolling ellipses that carry him from one
mism that has fuelled our recent “pan- not hurting you, Mama.” It’s a bright, press conference and mounting crisis
try meals,” when we have three of a rec- false voice he learned from us. This to the next.
ipe’s twelve ingredients. We had to game has taught me something essen- Fauci’s unvarnished candor is often
improvise a little, since our shopping tial about the gaslighting that kids rou- at odds with Trump’s jack-o’-lantern
list had prioritized diapers, medicine, tinely experience from adults—some- reassurances, glowing and hollow. Fauci
Clorox wipes, gallon bags of dour le- times well-meaning, often self-serving. is never self-congratulatory, and, ton-
gumes and their party-girl cousins, “Just a little, little poke . . .” ally, he sits level on the water, neither
coffee beans. Of the many things I’d On March 11th, after the World overly buoyant nor despondent.
failed to foresee: a need for googly eyes, Health Organization officially an- “Is the worst yet to come, Dr. Fauci?”
hole punchers, and vials of glitter. We nounced that the coronavirus was a Representative Carolyn Maloney, of New
wound up with a Styrofoam coffee cup pandemic, President Donald Trump York, asked at the March 11th hearing.
stabbed through with neon straws. spoke at a congressional hearing on “Yes, it is.”
“Mama, this is not a jellyfish,” my three- the issue. “This is not a financial cri-
year-old son, Oscar, said, with a preter-
naturally mature sorrow.
We rarely watch the television, but
sis,” he assured us. “This is just a tem-
porary moment of time that we will
overcome together as a nation and as
IInambyrecent
touched, and sometimes rattled,
the children’s innate faith in us.
weeks, I’ve felt like a child
on this first weekday morning of an ee- a world.” myself, tuning in nightly to watch press
rily quiet Austin, Texas, we decided to It’s not hurting you, my son prom- briefings, hungry for reassurance and
keep it on, a portal to the wider world. ised, bringing the hammer down. direction, eager to hear experts subtitle
Dr. Irwin Redlener, from the National a novel reality for me. A press briefing
Center for Disaster Preparedness, said, t’s hard to know what’s true right is a story told in medias res, and even
on CNN, “We are so incredibly under-
prepared for a major onslaught to the
Iaccelerated,
now. Everything feels heightened and
including the speed with
our most trusted experts, like Dr. Fauci,
can narrate it only from their blinkered
hospitals, which is basically now inev- which fact overtakes fiction, and a truth perspective in the present tense. Nobody
itable.” Shortages of I.C.U. beds and can mutate into a lie. A few days ago, yet knows how or when the COVID-19
ventilators. Hospitals rationing gloves I had an entirely different understand- pandemic ends.
and masks. “Googly eyes,” Oscar said, ing of the threat. My son was still at- My son’s questions are my own, and
and I nodded. It took me three min- tending his day care. We were debat- I have no answers—
utes to remember the word for the doc- ing whether to cancel a family reunion “When will the germs go away?”
tor’s expression: apoplectic. in April. On March 16th, staring at our “What will happen to the people with
Homeschool lessons this morning ghostly reflections in empty store win- no homes?” “When can I see my Gaga?
have included: “Your sister’s head is not dows, now tenanted by mannequins in My Nonni? My Papa? My Tia? My
a bongo” and “Don’t touch those crack- bikinis who failed to get the memo, I Lala?”
ers to your penis before you eat them, feel a kind of ontological whiplash. Why Limbo is a hard place to settle into,
son.” Sometimes you need to sacrifice was I so slow to understand the grav- and describing the unknown to a new-
a good feeling in the name of hygiene. ity of this emergency, even as the virus comer is not easy. The C.D.C. offers
On the TV screen, the Surgeon Gen- caseloads continued to grow exponen- parents this guidance for talking to chil-
eral appears, begging Americans to keep tially around the globe? dren: “Avoid language that might blame
their distance. This paradoxical mes- On the television, a bespectacled Dr. others and lead to stigma.” Be truthful
sage, “We need to come together by Anthony Fauci, the director of the Na- and accurate. Fauci has good parenting
NEW YORK CITY, BY JORGE COLOMBO

advice as well: “It’s really, really tough With an embarrassment of #quar- ises. The other mother coughs, and apol-
because you have to be honest with the antine memes. ogizes; almost balletically, we separate
American public and you don’t want to Of the language generalized by this the children. My son follows without a
scare the hell out of them.” My son ac- new virus, “flatten the curve” is the three- peep of protest, a docility that fright-
cepts the answer “I don’t know” a lot word spell I find most useful. “Flatten ens me, as whatever my face is doing
more gracefully than I do. the curve” is a night-blooming locution seems to be frightening him.
that seemed to appear in everyone’s A few months ago, in this same park,
peaking of Shakespeare—he was the mental back yard at the same time.There I’d look skyward at this hour to clock
Sof words
minister who officiated marriages
that have endured to this day,
it was, right when we needed it, a phrase
to recast the stakes of the pandemic
the moment when a great scattering of
starlings begins to wheel as one. Called
weirs of metaphor that we still use when after containment had failed and peo- murmurations, these flocks gather in
we go fishing for new truths, lines of ple needed a way to understand both the purple Texas dusk. Spiky iridescent
poetry that nearly all English speakers the tsunami-like horror and the hope birds that stitch themselves into a sin-
repeat, as well as phrases so common prompting measures like statewide man- gle animate cloud. (Starlings are an in-
we have forgotten their origin: dates to stay indoors. “Flatten the curve” vasive species; in 1890, a Shakespeare
That way madness lies. caused a paradigm shift for me; it taught enthusiast released sixty starlings into
Wild-goose chase. me, in three words, to stop thinking of Central Park, as part of a whimsical
Into thin air. myself as a potential victim of Covid-19 mission to introduce to North Amer-
Lie low. and to start thinking of myself as a vec- ica every bird ever mentioned in Shake-
We have seen better days. tor for contagion. It alchemizes fear speare’s works; today we have two hun-
Today, we are witnessing the shot- into action. The phrase is an injunc- dred million.) These enormous flocks
gun weddings of words into some tion: it says, gently and urgently, that it can execute sharp turns and vortical
strange unions, neologisms sped into is not too late for us to change the shape spins with a magical-feeling coördina-
existence by this virus (“quarantunes,” of this story. tion. A thousand starlings bunch into
“quarantini”), epidemiological vocabu- a living fist over the trees, relax west-
lary hitched together by Twitter hashtags. uiet is disquieting on the streets ward, shear away behind the eastern
It seems like there is a parallel language
contagion occurring. “Self-isolation,”
Q of downtown Austin. For two
hours, I drag my son behind me in his
skyscrapers. With a kind of muscular
clairvoyance, each bird seems to antic-
“social distancing,” “abundance of cau- black wagon. He is holding his “magic,” ipate the movements of the others. What
tion”—pairs of words I’d never seen to- a bamboo stick, singing a nonsense is deciding them? What permits a thou-
gether in a sentence back in January song. I feel like we are staging a G-rated sand autonomous actors to move as one
have become ubiquitous. These phrases remake of Cormac McCarthy’s “The body, at these unbelievable speeds?
are travelling even faster than the virus, Road.” Maybe PG-13, since the public A recent study described how these
eye to mind, ear to mouth, disseminated bathroom was closed, and after an ac- birds are able to “manage uncertainty
by our iPhone screens and televisions. cident my son is now pantsless. in consensus”: “Flocks of starlings ex-
“Community spread” may be my least On a distant hill, a tiny silhouette hibit a remarkable ability to maintain
favorite on the Covid-19 vocabulary appears, gliding on air. A boy on a cohesion as a group in highly uncertain
list. It makes me picture a local theatre scooter. My son begins waving franti- environments and with limited, noisy
company with terrible British accents cally, like a marooned sailor spotting information.”
sneezing onto the audience. Nudists the rescue chopper. “Hey, kid!” But the Rolling the stroller down the hill, I
rolling like seals on checkered picnic boy’s mother sees us and leads him in wave to strangers on their porches. Wind
blankets. “That’s a you problem,” my the opposite direction. “No kids,” my chimes cast their melancholy spell, as
husband says. Fair enough. son says, bewildered and then resigned. the skyline turns into a pink Stone-
Language is everywhere these days, I sit between two large rocks, eating henge. Two boys are dribbling a bas-
and humans seem to have less and less sunshine with him. A lizard does push- ketball in the growing dark, their tiny
to do with it. Are there English ma- ups. Two sunburned white guys in their eyes peering out from a garage. Nobody
jors chained under the earth, forced to sixties stroll by, chatting about the se- crosses the six-foot barrier; you might
write these lines, or did an algorithm crets they keep from their wives. “Hey, argue that humans have never been less
of some kind generate them? The Mad nice to have a big guy with you at a time like a flock than at this moment of vol-
Libs of the press releases and public like this,” one of them says, patting my untary isolation. But I also feel that our
statements . . . son on the back. I freeze, say nothing. stasis is itself a kind of secret flight. Ex-
With an unholiness of fiscal re- A mother and her four-year-old ternally, we are all separating from pub-
assurance. daughter join us; we keep accidentally lic spaces, cancelling weddings and grad-
With a cornucopia of dread. closing the gap between our bodies and uations, retreating into our homes. This
With a punch bowl of amnesia. apologizing. Our kids want to play chase. physical separation belies what is hap-
With an oil barrel of greedy optimism. No, we say. My son, who has an ex- pening on another plane: people are re-
With an I.V. drip of information. traordinary legal mind, suggests a loop- sponding to the crisis with a surprising
With a loneliness of symptoms. hole: can they run next to each other? unity. More swiftly than I would have
With a paucity of masks. “We won’t catch each other,” he prom- thought possible, hundreds of millions
BOLOGNA, ITALY, BY BIANCA BAGNARELLI
are heeding a difficult call to stay at is surely among us, but it still feels dis- the morning in a sweat, without fail. I
home. It’s a way of soaring into forma- tant, cosmopolitan. How soon before don’t have the virus. I have the fear. The
tion. And yet “murmuration” seems like that changes? Will it have changed by sickness is bad, but the response is worse.
the right word for the great conver- the time you’re reading this? I am a Leningrader. My grandfather
gence of humans travelling through this I drive by the houses of friends, their died during the siege, trying to defend
time together, listening to the latest front parlors lit. Their lives look so toasty the city. Stalin was unprepared for the
news with our whole bodies, alert to in the morning fog. Approaching my onslaught; he had executed his best gen-
subtle atmospheric changes, making own house, I can see a stack of freshly erals before the war even began. The
constant recalibrations in response to laundered towels in the upstairs bath- Army was unprepared. My grandfather
the fluxing crisis at speeds to rival the room window and this places me in a was likely not issued a firearm. My fa-
dervishing starlings. How rapidly we deep, familial calm. I know of worka- ther used to say that some soldiers fought
are adjusting our behavior, to protect holics desperately looking for work. the Germans with sticks. Seventy-five
one another. Some in tech or finance who usually years later, our nominal leader has elim-
—Karen Russell spend their days in airport lounges may inated the pandemic-response team, has
1 be surprised to discover that they have surrounded himself with sycophants
THE PROPHYLACTIC LIFE families. My six-year-old spends much and duraki. The increasingly scared and
of the day in a laptop haze as his play- depressed tone of his appearances re-
ere in the village of X, we remain dates and education Zoom by. When calls Stalin’s tone when he first realized
H hopeful. As inhabitants of an old
Yankee town, we have always practiced
the sun sets, we engage in fierce rounds
of the Russian card game Durak (“the
the scope of the crisis. What will our
leader do when he realizes he is cor-
social distance. Half of us still seem to Fool”). According to some traditions, nered? How will he ever give up power
live in the Before Times and half in the the loser, or Fool, must scrunch under and surrender himself to his reckoning?
New Truth. Our market, post office, the table and yell out, “Koo-ka-ree-koo!” I top off the tank of my car every time
and liquor store are full. In a wealthier (“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”). This is what I go for a drive. The border with Can-
village nearby, people wear high-end I’ll remember twenty years later, if there ada is now closed.
face masks while they shop. In a poorer is a twenty years later: acting the rooster We are walking a lot more now. I
village with greater exposure to state to my son’s delight. walk about six miles every day, always
television, a sign at a café warns of the During the day, I present without trying out new routes, discovering unex-
virus from “Wuhan China.” The virus symptoms. But I wake up at three in pected pastures brimming with muddy
sheep. The weather is cold, with occa- with a friend who told me some very Italy, so we can imagine. She then tells
sional intimations of spring. Everything bad news with a smile. A long farewell us about her new life in the village with
is awaiting resurrection. I spend twenty hug from an Italian friend who is in her young children and her husband,
minutes looking at an owl as she scans her nineties. Drinks with a man who an anti-Fascist professor who writes at
the horizon, west, south, east, north. I has fallen in love with his wife for the an oval table in their kitchen. We hear
have never noticed the power of a squir- second time. I run through their lives about their routines, their bitterness,
rel’s jaw as she grips an acorn. Lord, like an A.I. trying to learn its way into their delights, and their trepidation, sus-
please help me make something out of humanity. My mind rotates around and pended, as they are, in a rich and eerie
all this stillness. around, like an owl’s head. Rumination lull. The essay wears an epigraph from
Deep in the woods, the tree frogs is the coin of my realm. Interiority Virgil: Deus nobis haec otia fecit. God
and vagabond geese make for an awful breeds interiority. We are all living in a has granted us this respite.
symphony, as if they are trying to out- Rachel Cusk novel now. And a respite it turns out to be, as
honk and out-screech one another. A During the early days of the New the appalling, crystalline last paragraph
flash storm overtakes me as I pass a Truth, I want to grow out a beard that of the essay makes clear: “My husband
derelict international children’s camp. I will be the envy of the local farmers. But died in Regina Coeli prison in Rome
shelter inside what used to be an out- before I do I go down to the village and a few months after we left the village.
door theatre space. Above me are draw- get a passport photo taken for the After When I confront the horror of his sol-
ings of the flags of various countries. Times. They make you take off your itary death, of the anguished choices
There is a rotting wooden stage, along glasses for passport photos, but I always that preceded his death, I have to won-
with the exhortation “Change the forget: are you allowed to smile any- der if this really happened to us, we who
World.” I step on a Nerf football that more? I think of life under the table and bought oranges at Girò’s and went walk-
looks like it has been mauled by the the laughter of my boy. The corners of ing in the snow. I had faith then in a
local possums. my mouth crinkle. Koo-ka-ree-koo! simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled
On another walk, I meet an elderly —Gary Shteyngart desires, with shared experiences and
couple on P— Road. The man is wear- 1 ventures. But that was the best time of
ing a Marist College cap and his age THE NEW CALM my life, and only now, that it’s gone for-
makes him part of the vulnerable de- ever, do I know it.” The essay closes
mographic. (As an asthmatic, I am vul-
nerable as well.) “Another human being!”
the man shouts. “Another human being!
Iwithdon’t feel much like reading these
days; who does? Who has the time,
all the kids at home? Or who can
with a date, 1944.
As the wise wisely instruct us to
count our blessings—which I do—I
Which road are you from?” I tell him. concentrate? Yesterday, my reading con- also can’t help but wonder how to sus-
“We had someone from O— Road sisted of “Go, Dog. Go!,” a feat achieved tain this sense of gratitude through the
walking here yesterday!” It is as if we while trying to fathom, or simply to undulations of daily domestic life when
are living in medieval times, a meeting bear, the feeling of delighting in pho- so many of our homes balloon not only
of pilgrims on the dusty highway. What netic discovery as I sit on a warm couch with love and recognition but also with
news do you bring of O— Road? next to a person I adore, while so much stress, turbulence, even violence, from
My friend N. suggests tele-drinking. fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and panic surges forces within and without. If this ques-
I finally give in and download Zoom outside. An outside that looks like noth- tion is rhetorical, it’s because I don’t
on my laptop. At first, it’s a bit awk- ing but an empty street, flat—if not ra- want anyone—including myself—to
ward, but soon I get soused and chummy, diant—with the new calm. feel that they’re doing kinship wrong
laughing and shouting at the screen. I The feeling led me to pull Natalia if and when it hurts. Today, for me, it
don’t like how quickly I can get used to Ginzburg down from the shelf; I felt a hurts. It is sweet, and it hurts. I think
this. Maybe we were preparing for this sudden need to reread “Winter in the it hurt sometimes for Ginzburg, too,
life all along, the prophylactic life of Abruzzi,” an essay I consider one of the and it’s not clear to me that it could
homes and screens and pantries. “How most perfect and devastating ever writ- have been different, even if she knew
are things in the city?” I ask N. “I’m not ten. It’s only five and a half pages; I all that was to come.
in the city,” he says. Oh, right. managed to read it while shepherding The murder of Ginzburg’s faith in
I dream of the books on my shelves my son through another utterly cha- “a simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled
being used as kindling by invading otic, thoroughly well-intentioned Zoom desires” is cruel. It is also the sound of
squatters. The dream has a peaceful class for second graders. human lives cresting against material
finality to it that I actually like. In the Ginzburg’s essay begins as a descrip- and mortal limits, of flesh grinding into
dream, I am watching the squatters tive tale of a small Italian town in win- history. Earlier in the essay, she drives
from a distance. Perhaps I am watch- ter: cavernous kitchens lit by oak fires, the point home: “There is a certain dull
ing them on a screen. But, if that’s the prosciutto hanging from the ceilings, uniformity in human destiny. The course
case, then where am I, exactly? Where women who’ve lost their teeth by age of our lives follows ancient and im-
is my mind’s eye? thirty, deepening snow. Then, on the mutable laws, with an ancient, change-
Sometimes when I wake up at three second page, Ginzburg tells us simply, less rhythm. Dreams never come true,
in the morning I scroll through the Be- “Our lot was exile.” She doesn’t say why, and the instant they are shattered, we
fore Times. A recent restaurant meal but it’s the early nineteen-forties in realize how the greatest joys of our life
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, BY ADRIAN TOMINE
lie beyond the realm of reality.” I differ might be able to outfox it—it can be a he married, always dismays. But during
from Ginzburg in that I have never relief to admit our folly and rejoin the a coronavirus-task-force press confer-
been able to look for (or find) any joys, species, which is defined, as are all forms ence, when one hears him on the radio,
great or small, beyond the realm of re- of life, by a terrible and precious pre- from another room, his voice has music.
ality, whatever that means (I am read- carity, to which some bodies need no Sorry. It does. A singer’s timbre; it is
ing her, after all, in translation). Or, at reintroduction. easy on the ear. Trump’s is a voice you
least, I haven’t yet. But her sense of an- I think I reached for “Winter in the use to calm down people you yourself
cient and immutable law seems to me Abruzzi” because I needed this reminder, have made furious. (His foremost mim-
spot on, and, in certain circumstances, I needed its stern and tender fellow- ics—Alec Baldwin, Stephen Colbert—
a great relief. ship, which it delivered to me today have not captured its pitch, its air, its
I don’t mean to imply that there across seventy-six years and 6,331 miles softness, which they substitute with
aren’t ten thousand reasons that we (much farther than six feet away). That dopiness, which is also there.) For the
shouldn’t be where we are today, or that the essay brought me to tears was not first ten minutes, before his composure
no one is responsible for the suffering new. But this time, rather than weep slackens and he becomes boastful and
at hand and to come. People are re- for Ginzburg alone, I wept for us all, as irritable, he actually just wants to be
sponsible, and we know their names. we, too, bought oranges at Girò’s, and Santa Claus in his own Christmas movie,
People were also responsible for the went walking in the snow. and the quality of his voice is that of a
murder of Ginzburg’s husband, who —Maggie Nelson pet owner calming a pet. I hear it!
went from writing at that oval table 1 And for those ten minutes the ani-
surrounded by his children’s toys to THE NURSE’S OFFICE mal part of me is soothed. The part of
dying of cardiac arrest and acute chole- me that understands only seven En-
cystitis in prison (the latter being a gall-
bladder infection likely brought on by
torture). I only mean to say that, for
Swhatodentsuehe Trump’s
me: I sometimes find Presi-
voice reassuring. Not
says. Not the actual words (al-
glish words and wants a biscuit in the
shape of a bone wags its tail.
The first time the stock market heard
those steeped in the belief that great though once in a while one of his “in- him speak soothingly, at a press con-
calamity should not, cannot, be our credibles” reaches inside my chest cav- ference in March, it shot up happily.
lot—or that, if we work hard enough ity and magically calms the tachycardia). Exactly like a happy dog. The second
or try hard enough or hope hard enough Trump’s primitive syntax, imperfectly time, the market was not so fooled. The
or are good or inventive enough, we designed for the young foreign woman third time, it was tired and seemed to
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, BY RUTU MODAN
say, Really? The anxiety of quarantine, If one looks up the 2003 SARS out- very still, so the virus—the shooter in
sheltering in place, economic down- break on the World Health Organiza- the school—won’t get us. “Nobody here
turn—the anxiety itself is getting tired, tion’s Web site, one sees descriptions but us chickens.”
and when anxiety gets tired it turns into that are very like those for this new But such weird non-zombie sadness
despair. And now? Trump’s almost daily coronavirus, which is a close relative. in the world! As we work remotely and
voice has lost some of its velvet. It has Symptoms (respiratory distress), sources remotely work and others lose their
gone a little scratchy, like an old record, (bats, civets). This go-round, the term livelihoods entirely. Who knew our so-
as if he may have a sore throat. The “SARS” has become simply “the corona- cioeconomic structures were so flimsy?
hospital ships are magnificent and un- virus” (a general virus listed on the can On our laptops, we spend a lot of time
believable. The recovery later this year of Lysol, which kills SS.S per cent of participating in group e-mails and
will be just incredible. The experts are germs); Trump has tried to call it the Zoom parties and solitary tours of You-
tremendous. Chinese virus, because of the Wuhan Tube. Perhaps, like me, you have Goo-
So what are we dealing with? Let us tie. Regardless, it is SARS again, mu- gle-stalked Brian Stokes Mitchell, and
not make everything about Trump. (Al- tated only slightly. Why no medicines have listened to him sing “This Nearly
though a germophobe brought down were developed for the first SARS virus, Was Mine,” from “South Pacific,” thirty
by a germ is a weird irony that one could why no wartime effort was brought to times in a weekend. No? The perfor-
talk about for a long time.) Sometimes, bear on it back then, remains a mystery mance takes place at Carnegie Hall, its
while we are socially distant, this all can (though in 2003 the Bush Administra- stage the very throat of civilization—
still feel strangely like an active-school- tion was very busy invading Iraq). and of civilization now momentarily
shooter drill. Using a real but amateur Meanwhile? We are in the zombie shuttered. It is also a song made for
shooter? Let us hope so, since the nurse’s apocalypse, which my students have quarantine, with a bit of quarantine
office is in chaos. Still, as with active- been writing about for well over a de- written into it. Perhaps, after all the lis-
shooter drills, the P.T.S.D. of the enac- cade, so young people are mentally pre- tening, and realizing that you are learn-
tors is real, and we have no choice but pared. Is a virus not a kind of zombie, ing all the words—do not the hours fly
to follow instructions. Things are slowly a quasi life-form moving in and out of as day flies from moonlight?—for a mo-
being put in place, but other things are inertness? It is zombie time: the virus ment you feel that you and Brian Stokes
a mess. Most alarming are the statis- can’t be transmitted when all of its hosts Mitchell have somehow always been
tics on ventilators, respirators, masks. have died. So we are all social-distancing; soul mates (were you not born the same
The nurse’s office. that is, pretending to have died, lying year?) and that you need to tell him of
PARIS, FRANCE, BY VINCENT MAHÉ SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, BY JISU CHOI
your feelings to make him understand (a As the comedian Rob Schneider has of us to wash our hands frequently,
verbatim phrase from your seventh- remarked, not even intending to be cough into our elbows, and avoid close
grade diary). funny, “I’ve seen people handle death physical contact.
This is the mad dash of love in the with more grace and more dignity than “It will be hard not to touch,” we
time of cholera, the exaggerated eccen- people running out of toilet paper.” But said to one another. “We’re Haitians.”
tricities of isolation. One friend writes wickedness brought on by panic can be In saying this, we were perhaps echo-
in an e-mail that with his new leisure swept away by other breezes. Even with- ing what so many other groups around
at home he is exploring the blades of out the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, I the world had said on similar occasions:
his food processor and slicing every- sometimes think I hear them. “We’re_______.” We did what we could
thing in sight. Another friend writes —Lorrie Moore with elbow bumps, but there were oc-
that she meets in a neutral room of her 1 casional lapses into tearful hugs and
house once a day to have tea with her RIPPLE EFFECTS kisses, until someone jokingly suggested
daughter, who is home from college. a butt bump, which a few of us tried,
To provide a sense of variation and café
society, they use different tea sets and
meet in different neutral rooms.
Iansuspected that things might be get-
ting serious when, at a memorial for
elderly friend, who’d died long be-
with mutual consent. We were not yet
fully aware that there were people
around the world dying painful and
The musicians who have Zoomed fore COVID-19 was a pandemic, many lonely deaths, some attached to venti-
their concerts and made amusing vid- of us tried to figure out how to greet lators, and far from the arms of their
eos to cheer us up (shout-out to the tal- one another. The scenario might have loved ones.
ented Chris Mann!) show the human amused our friend, who’d died of nat- Saying that we’re Haitians might also
spirit at its most resilient. People are in- ural causes, in the arms of his wife, have been an acknowledgment of our
deed incredible. And music may be what at the age of ninety-three. His memo- past collisions with microbes. In the early
will keep us sane if misty-eyed in the rial was one of the last gatherings on nineteen-eighties, the Centers for Dis-
apocalypse. The more maddening world the main campus of Florida Interna- ease Control named four groups at “high
where everyone seeks advantage over tional University, which soon after- risk” for acquired-immunodeficiency
someone else and pits his or her chil- ward moved to online learning. The syndrome: intravenous-drug users, ho-
dren against the children of others will remarks on our friend’s life and work mosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.
ultimately have to bow down to a differ- were preceded by a public-service an- Haitians were the only ones solely iden-
ent, more democratically uplifting one. nouncement reminding the sixty or so tified by nationality, in part because of
MADRID, SPAIN, BY ANA GALVAÑ GUANGZHOU, CHINA, BY JUN CEN
a number of Haitian patients at Jack- political protests. This, too, will pass, vive. And Miami is home to a large
son Memorial Hospital, in Miami. In one poetic cousin, a fellow sunset lover, number of Haitian-American medi-
October, 2010, nine months after a mag- kept writing, increasingly concerned cal personnel, who could become ill as
nitude-7.0 earthquake struck Port-au- about me as the death numbers rose the pandemic spreads.
Prince and the surrounding areas, Nep- in Florida. “I hope you and your hus- The ripple effect of lost wages, and,
alese U.N. peacekeepers stationed in band and your children will live a long even worse, lost lives, in immigrant
the north of Haiti released raw sew- life. I hope when you finally die at a communities will gravely affect the
age from their base into one of Haiti’s very old age, they’ll say you had eaten economies of our neighboring coun-
most used rivers, causing a cholera ep- a lot of salt.” tries, according to Marleine Bastien,
idemic that killed ten thousand people “Or had seen a lot of sunsets,” I the executive director of Family Ac-
and infected close to a million. As of replied. tion Network Movement, a commu-
this writing, Haiti has had only fifteen When I first moved to Miami’s nity organization that works with low-
confirmed cases of COVID-19, but, fear- Little Haiti neighborhood, in 2002, I income families. Bastien and her staff
ing that the disease could ravage the would often hear my neighbors say, were forced to temporarily close their
country and its fragile health infra- “Whenever Haiti sneezes, Miami offices, but their mostly elderly clients
structure, Haiti’s President, Jovenel catches a cold.” That is, whatever was kept showing up to ask for help. She
Moïse, declared a state of emergency, happening in Haiti could have ripple has been trying to work out a system
imposed curfews, and closed schools effects in Miami homes, workplaces, for her center’s case managers, mental-
and airports. schools, barbershops, and churches. health professionals, and paralegals
During the weeks before Haiti The reverse is also true. Already, hun- to provide services by phone or on
had any COVID-19 cases, friends and dreds of Miami Haitians, like many WhatsApp. “Poor immigrant commu-
family members there would text and other Caribbean and Latin-American nities already have a great deal of need,”
WhatsApp-message me and others to immigrants who work in the tourism, she says. “This crisis will only multiply
tell us to watch out for the disease. It hospitality, and service industries here, the need.”
was a reversal of sorts, in which our have lost their jobs owing to COVID-19. Complicating matters is the Trump
fragility now seemed greater than Not only will they have trouble pro- Administration’s recent Public Charge
theirs. They’d had more experience viding for themselves; they will also rule, which can lead to green cards being
with day-to-day disruptions, includ- be unable to send money back home denied to people seeking and receiving
ing months-long lockdowns due to to those who count on them to sur- public benefits. Cheryl Little, the ex-
ecutive director of Americans for Im- 1 struction is not only about dispensing
migrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm in HUMANISM, REMOTE information; it is also about bearing
Miami, is also worried about how witness, grappling with the complexi-
COVID-19 will affect vulnerable immi-
grants, particularly those in detention.
“Misinformation, xenophobia and panic
Iandskipped the Literary Arts departmen-
tal meeting of Monday, March 9th,
I shouldn’t have. Item seven on our
ties of another.
But Zoom and its shortcomings
hurtled down upon the LitArts pro-
have been running rampant in the wake agenda, “COVID-19,” suddenly became gram, like every other on College
of this pandemic,” she wrote in a letter item No. 1, and the upshot, as I soon Hill, and there was nothing left to do
to her organization’s supporters. “De- learned, was that we, the teachers of but learn how to use this interface, to
tained children and adults in crowded creative writing at Brown University, try to cause the humanness to shine
facilities have limited control over their were now to begin the process of teach- through the ones and zeroes. I shared
access to hygiene and adequate health ing writing “remotely,” meaning, as the news with my students, bumped
care. Many of our clients are immuno- we all have come to know, via Zoom, elbows with them one last time. And
compromised. People who are detained or Google Hangouts, or Canvas, or then they were gone.
are packed in like sardines in these Whereby, or Slack, or Padlet, or simi- I posted a call for Zoom help on
places, which are petri dishes for the lar platforms. Facebook, where I learned about “shar-
virus,” she told me. “We have countries How I felt about this suggestion of ing your screen,” “breakout groups,” and
that have now closed their borders and “remote learning” was: what a mess. I “asynchronous teaching,” for the kids
are refusing to take deportees, which teach primarily undergraduates, and all who are taking my course from Mum-
means that people will simply languish I could think about was the graduat- bai and Singapore, and who won’t re-
in detention and continually be vulner- ing seniors, and the hellish last semes- liably be able to stay up until two in
able to the virus.” ter they were going to have, panicky, the morning for class. It turns out that
One thing that this virus has shown trapped at home, mitigated in their in- many of my friends have taught digi-
is that, when anyplace in the world dependence, likely to go without a grad- tally for years, in community and prison
sneezes, any one of us can catch a cold, uation ceremony, and stuck in a little workshops, through public libraries and
and a deadly one. I am still amazed at video postage stamp for hours a day. Y.M.C.A.s, and their students have be-
how quickly everything has changed They were enrolled at a great univer- come stronger writers, have learned,
since that memorial service, just a few sity, but would not be able to make use and grown.
weeks ago. Our friend had lived a long of it, not the libraries, not the common Remote learning may be the only
and beautiful life. He’d suffered some, rooms, not the rehearsal studios, not feasible way to instruct in this lethal
but he had also experienced a great the laboratories. And close behind this time, but that doesn’t mean remote
deal of joy. He had eaten a lot of salt, initial feeling was anxiety about the learning represents the best idea in hu-
as my cousin would say. Now I find product itself, the online product that manist education, or that it is anything
myself hoping that my neighbors, my I was about to be selling to the stu- like the long-standing model of the lib-
friends and family members, my chil- dents, a product that was hard to be- eral arts, a two-thousand-year-old idea
dren, all of us will get to eat just a lit- lieve would not be inferior. of teaching that may be the basis for
tle bit more salt, and not suffer too A frequently repeated theoretical po- the university itself. What we are sell-
much while doing it. sition in my creative-writing classes is: ing now is a hastily arranged experi-
I remember telling a friend at the Literature is a humanist form. This idea ment. And it’s easy to grieve over that.
memorial service how I was planning is not only so old-fashioned as to be But what we cannot give up on, in our
to be in Chile this week, with my fam- baldly quaint at Brown, like a beverage grief, is the students themselves, at home,
ily, to launch the Spanish edition of in lead-lined pewter; it is also some- panicking, and soon to be found in the
one of my books and to visit some times considered just plain wrong. Many video postage stamp on Zoom or Slack
members of the Haitian community a student has cast a jaundiced eye upon or Canvas or Hangouts. I know I can
there. My oldest daughter would be the very conception of humanism. still explain split infinitives to them, no
turning fifteen while we were in San- But humanism is exactly why, in my matter what. Now, if I can just figure
tiago, and, because her birthday often view, a classroom with human bodies out how to call through the wireless
falls during spring break, she’s come in it, struggling over the meaning of a networking to their hearts.
to see these purposely timed work trips short story, works. Because the literary —Rick Moody
as special excursions for her. This week, arts are not the same as the study of 1
while we were observing Miami’s stay- economics or astrophysics. The literary EIGHTYISH
at-home order, I asked my daughter arts are about emotions and human
what she wanted to do for her birth- consciousness, and so the instruction ne measure of my simmering, so-
day, and she said that, just as we had
done a few times before, she wanted
can’t be converted into data points. The
literary arts are more about a human in
O cially distant derangement is this:
after many days at home, I have dis-
to drive someplace pretty to see a beau- the room feeling something, express- covered how much I like to say the word
tiful sunset. Maybe next year we will ing it, and the other humans listening, “Fauci.” I walk around my apartment
be able to do that. and, ideally, feeling similarly. Such is after the President’s press conferences,
—Edwidge Danticat the invention of compassion. Our in- chanting it like an efficient mantra, or
a Dada acting exercise. “Fauci. Fauci? listen to the pigeons who hold meet advertised a Web site, insearchofsha
Faucifaucifaucifauci. Fauci!” The sur ings atop the airconditioning unit out lom.com. I visited the site later; its con
name belongs, of course, to Anthony side our bedroom window. So far, they tents are strangely vague—as far as I
Fauci, the elfin, permanently smirking don’t seem to notice a difference. can tell, it’s for a branch of Jews for
immunologist who directs the National A few days ago, I walked around the Jesus. But the question on the little sign
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Dis corner to the liquor store. This was be keeps coming back to me. If real peace
eases, and who has become an impor fore the full urbansurgeon look—mask is indeed possible—either the inner
tant player in the Trump Administra and brightly colored gloves—had made kind that casts out anxiety or the inter
tion’s farcical grapplings with covid19. its way to Flatbush, where I live. Just personal kind that produces worthy pol
His obvious competency would be com outside my building, a woman saw my itics—I suspect we’ll find out very soon.
forting if his boss weren’t his own kind getup and shouted out, more to herself —Vinson Cunningham
of communicable plague. and the others on the sidewalk than to 1
For me, the syllables have come un me, “That’s right! Haha! You ain’t fuck FLIGHT HOME
tethered from the personality. Fauci. I’m ing playing!” I felt a bit silly, but left my
not so much restless, or bored, as try mask on. Every time I breathed, a bit n January 31st, my mother texted
ing to ward off horror by submitting
my smallest thoughts to a kind of deep
of steam escaped and fogged the lenses
of my glasses.
O the group. My uncle replied, and
then my aunt, my cousin, my mother
sea gigantism—that weird process by Later that afternoon, I think, al again, my uncle, my aunt. My aunt is
which creatures closer to the ocean floor though it might have been the next day, a nurse. She types very fast and some
grow fearsomely huge. I walked with my wife down Flatbush times I wake up to twenty, thirty text
On Wednesdays—only three so far, Avenue, toward her mom’s house, where boxes from her. I did not reply imme
but rituals tend to stick—I videochat we’d pick up some packages and wave diately because I was still reading the
with a group of my highschool friends. hello. It’s normally a twentyfiveminute cycle of chats from earlier. My father
At the beginning of each call, we take walk, but now it seemed interminable. did not reply because typing Chinese
turns ranking how distressed we are, on Walking outside these days requires too tires him out. My grandmother finally
a scale of one to a hundred. (The stan much geometry, too much spatial intel replied to say that panicking was use
dard one to ten had insufficient texture, ligence. Older men, apparently untrou less—Delta had cancelled her flight
we figured out early on.) Last week, one bled by the dictates of distancing, were from Detroit to Shanghai, so we would
buddy showed up in a tuxedo, as a gag. seated, as they always are, at folding ta just have to rebook. China Eastern was
He wore the pleated pants and every bles and on the hoods of sedans. They still flying out and we got her on the
thing—sipped on his vodka looking played cards, made jokes, drank from next available flight, on March 30th, a
like a cloistered first violinist. Styrofoam cups, blasted music. I tog month later than planned. My parents
I admitted that I’d been “eightyish,” gled swiftly between annoyance at how live in Detroit and my grandmother
and ran down my list of complaints. they clogged the sidewalk, concern for was visiting them. She lives in Nan
I miss the subway, toward which I their health, and then—probably fore jing. My uncle and aunt live in Nan
haven’t felt any special romance since most—envy at what looked like a good jing. My cousin lives in Shanghai. I live
high school. I miss airplanes, which ter time. We took sweeping, parabolic de in New York.
rify me. I miss the Upper West Side, tours around their tight huddles, some The new flight was to leave from
where I spent my highschool years, times slipping between parked cars and J.F.K. and my grandmother is eighty
and where my mother still lives. I worry walking in the street. One persistent, seven. She is alert, funny and sardonic,
about my daughter, who’s holed up with petty worry is how much of a dweeb I a retired city architect and a longtime
her mom. I worry about my mother, feel like when I’m thinking about in professor in the field. But her head can
who lives alone. I worry about my wife, fectious disease. tilt while she talks. She is hard of hear
who lives with me. I miss church, al Outside, I imagine that each strang ing and unsteady on stairs. She has hy
though the last time I participated in er’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of pertension, arthritis, insomnia. My par
the “sign of peace”—the part where ev fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of ents planned to drive her from Detroit
erybody shakes hands—I refused to my breaths into my body and cut through to New York, where we would see her
even look at my right hand until I got my lungs like a spray of glass. I keep off. Privately, my mother asked me to
home and could wash it. thinking about the last party I went to, find my grandmother a face mask.
The other sound that rings in my a month ago: a small affair, over dinner, I asked my closest college friend, a
ears, embarrassed as I am to admit it, in Harlem. We sat suitably separated doctor. She had been packing all month
is Trump. Whenever I try to talk about around the table, trading elbow bumps, to move into a condo that she and her
him, about how his addled response to knowing that this was a last hurrah. husband bought. He broke his leg on
our crisis will surely lead to death, about On the walk, as the sun began to set, a ski trip and couldn’t help. The week
how quick he is to lie and how slow he we passed a small storefront with a of their move, because of firmer social
is to comprehend, the space between cheaplooking banner across its front, distancing measures, the condo board
my eyes starts to tingle and my nose which read “In Search of Shalom.” In asked them to wait. Unfortunately, they
goes numb. CNN is all but abolished a window was a smaller sign that said could not—new tenants were about to
in our home. Instead, I read books and “Shalom in real life: Is it possible?” Both move into their rental. At a large hos
jixiansheng
361667513
BERLIN, GERMANY, BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
pital in New York, my friend was pre- home from school. He believes that a to Kunshan, where Jiangsu authorities
paring three floors for COVID-19, eight concept should never be so complex that will screen her again. Then another bus
I.C.U.s in total, where she predicts that he cannot explain it to them. To sim- to Nanjing, where she will be quaran-
supplies will become scarce. She put plify details, the key word is “exponen- tined at home for two weeks. On the
the face mask for my grandmother in tial.” Exponential growth and impact. first and the last days, a health worker
a floral gift bag and left it with her door- In January and February, my uncle will come to check her temperature. My
man. In the bag was also a tin of hot- sent us a daily ticker count of the num- uncle will be allowed to deliver food,
chocolate mix. ber of cases in China and the number but only to the doorstep. The door can-
Who would believe this? I ask my of deaths. The count window had a not be opened.
fiction class, now online, to consider the calming blue border and a white type- On March 25th, the flight was can-
credibility of events and what a reader face. In March, he began sending a ticker celled, as were most April flights to China,
will accept. count for Europe and the U.S. By the and my grandmother is still waiting to
Not so long ago, I studied epidemi- numbers, China is now safer than most be rebooked. Once her visa expires, she
ology. For my doctorate, I had been of the world. But the country is trying will have trouble reapplying for another,
trained in chronic-disease epidemiol- to fend off a second wave, and this comes which will make it hard for her to visit
ogy, but infectious-disease data are not at a cost for its citizens abroad. us again in the future, so most likely she
unfamiliar. I.D. epidemiology starts with It took my entire family several days won’t. I am looking into what we can do
models, moving people from bins of to figure out “the procedure.” After land- about her pills. Her doctors are in China.
susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recov- ing in Shanghai, my grandmother would Will she be able to see one here?
ered (R) and, potentially, back to bin S. wait in a multi-hour screening line to Epidemiologists follow populations.
The true flow rates between these bins receive a green, red, or yellow card. Com- We study how large groups funnel from
are still unknown—and probably vary ing from New York, she would almost unexposed to exposed, from control to
by country, by health system, and by certainly receive a yellow one. I think case. The larger the sample, the higher
speed of preventive response—which of soccer, which my grandmother likes the case number. The higher the case
explains why current predictions have to watch. She sits formally and with number, the more precise the results.
such a huge range for the coronavirus. her arms crossed. When the ball is We do not think in terms of anecdotes
Under the subject line “crazy times,” my passed well, she lifts her arms up an or individuals. At the individual level,
doctoral adviser and I have been e-mail- inch and says “good ball, good ball.” statistics break down. But my grand-
ing. He has two teen-age kids, both now From Shanghai, she would board a bus mother is part of a statistic. She is one
of many people in the large bin of S, ers against the Clippers; I like mid-cap trunk road in Vanity Fair.” When the
and if she moves into I she becomes consumer goods. What makes Trump’s street celebrated its two-hundredth an-
an anecdote. line compelling as poetry is how it sounds niversary, last year, superfluities were
—Weike Wang at once like Wallace Stevens and a bookie. still abundantly represented among the
1 Plato warned us against poets. I’m retailers that could afford its rents:
TRUMP’S MEASURES not sure I fully understand his argu- Coach, Burberry, Lululemon, Apple.
ments for deporting them from the Re- Apple was the first to close volun-
“ I like the numbers being where they
are.” This was Donald Trump’s
public, but now I’m sobered by this
statement of his about numbers: “The
tarily. It did so on March 14th, when the
company announced that all its retail
justification for attempting to prevent property of numbers appears to have stores worldwide, outside of those in
the Grand Princess passengers from the power of leading us towards real- China, would temporarily cease opera-
disembarking on American soil. (He ity. . . . The soldier must learn them in tions—displays of devices designed to
made the statement on March 6th, a order to marshal his troops; the philos- invite touching having been alarmingly
hundred years ago.) I can’t not hear it opher, because he must rise above the rebranded as possible vectors of conta-
as a line of poetry. After all, it scans— world of change and grasp true being, gion. When I rode my bike down Re-
five alternating stresses, a line of pen- or he will never become proficient in gent Street’s dramatic curve on the af-
tameter. And the prosody entangles the the calculation of reason. Our guard- ternoon of Sunday, March 22nd, all the
statement in my mind with the his- ian is both soldier and philosopher.” stores were shuttered. Apart from a cou-
tory of verse, especially since, from an- Our guardian in the White House ple of guys in track pants eying the Rolex
tiquity until the early nineteenth cen- is neither; he’s just a failed poet like me, display at Mappin & Webb, the upscale
tury, “numbers” meant poetic meter, the unable to marshal the troops to build jewelry store, the sidewalks were empty.
number of syllables or stresses in a line. the new hospitals, to manufacture ven- We’re accustomed to reach for the phrase
“Numbers” denoted orders beyond the tilators. He wants to protect the num- “post-apocalyptic” to describe an urban
poetic, too; it named the harmony of bers, not the humans they are supposed landscape devoid of life, and the Chris-
the universe. “All is numbers,” the Py- to denote. The grownups and the post- tian preacher with the microphone and
thagoreans claimed; Trump’s raising the ers used to say, Don’t be a statistic. That the amp who was haranguing an almost
question of numbers sounds like part meant don’t get shot or O.D., but for deserted Piccadilly Circus added to the
of an ancient debate. Alexander Pope: Trump it means: die without being dystopian atmosphere. But what the
“But most by numbers judge a poet’s counted, and without counting. He likes streets really recalled were images of Lon-
song; /And smooth or rough, with them the numbers being where they are. don during the economic crisis of the
is right or wrong.” How to end on a note of optimism, nineteen-seventies, when Prime Minis-
Trump-speak has always been a rad- however frightened and furious I am? ter Edward Heath imposed a three-day
ically rough and wrong kind of poetry. Iamb: an unstressed syllable followed week to conserve fuel, and power cuts
The line that’s haunting me sounds tra- by a stressed one, the sound of a heart- regularly dimmed even the busiest thor-
ditional, but usually Trump is avant- beat, the oldest number, an embodied oughfares. Now the city looks not so
garde: his non sequiturs, his use of dis- rhythm held in common, a force big- much post-apocalyptic as post-capital-
junction, his mangling of syntax can make ger than any tyrant or fool, a collective ist, as if the fever of consumption that
his rallies resemble nightmarish (and pulse that beats beneath his sophistry. has come to characterize the metropo-
much more crowded) versions of poetry —Ben Lerner lis had finally burned itself out.
readings I’ve attended in which nonlin- 1 That Sunday ended a weekend that
ear language is conceived of as an attack AVENUE OF SUPERFLUITIES was a turning point for London. Schools
on the smooth functioning of bourgeois closed on Friday afternoon, remaining
political rhetoric. (Those were the days.) egent Street, in central London, is open only for the children of “key work-
Trump campaigned in this pseudo-po-
etry, and he fails to govern in it, too, using
R a sweeping boulevard laid out by
the architect John Nash at the request
ers”: nurses, police, supermarket staff.
Students in the equivalent of the tenth
language that intends to inflame or ob- of his close friend and client the Prince and twelfth grades, who had been ex-
scure but almost never refers to anything Regent, later King George IV. Nash, pecting in summer term to sit an in-
real. Like many poets, he conflates beauty who had made his name building coun- tense sequence of exams, for which they
and truth: We’re going to have a beau- try houses for aristocrats, was a Geor- have been preparing for two years, were
tiful wall. Beautiful (Confederate) stat- gian-era precursor of New York’s Rob- informed that exams were cancelled,
ues. Beautiful rallies (despite the virus). ert Moses: a town planner who sought and they’d be assessed by their teachers
He has said that he’s “automatically at- to separate the poorer, more squalid and mock-exam results instead. “She
tracted to beautiful—I just start kissing eastern side of London from its newer, feels like she’s been fired,” the father of
them . . .” He likes the numbers being grander, wealthier west. Nash’s instru- a devastated sixteen-year-old girl told
where they are. Melania is a 10. ment for dividing London was Regent me. Public transport had already con-
On the one hand, an (unintentional) Street, a wide concourse devoted to lux- tracted. On Friday evening, the Prime
evocation of a poetic lineage. On the ury shopping. The journalist George Minister, Boris Johnson, appeared at the
other, the language of a gambler: I like Augustus Sala described it in 1858 as government’s now daily press confer-
the six; I like those odds; I like the Lak- “an avenue of superfluities—a great ence to announce that cafés, bars, restau-
rants, and night clubs should close that them, earlier in the week he had reas- town. First, to El Ahorro Supermarket
evening and not reopen the next day. sured Londoners that going outside for and Fiesta Mart, for beans and eggs and
Johnson longs to be liked; his default fresh air was still something they could tortillas and paper towels. We hit Phoe-
manner is a blithe fulsomeness, which do. As a result, the parks seemed hardly nicia Specialty Foods, a Mediterranean
even in the current crisis he has had less crowded than they would have been grocery on Westheimer Road, whose
trouble shedding. “We’re taking away on any other bright spring day; walk- shoppers piled carts with pita, garlic,
the ancient, inalienable right of free- ers and joggers on narrow paths ob- and lamb. Then we went to a Super H
born people of the United Kingdom to served social distancing only up to the Mart, just outside the city’s inner loop,
go to the pub,” he said, as if delivering point of mathematical possibility. On for face cleanser and chicken and shrimp,
the news with a jovial dig in the ribs. either side of Regent’s Park Road, a and then to another H Mart, in Bel-
(A week later, Johnson released a self-re- pretty street of upscale boutiques and laire’s Chinatown, near where I live, for
corded video in which he announced restaurants, rival florists were open, their everything else. We found shelves full
that he had tested positive for the coro- storefronts bursting with bouquets, as of chili oil and Clorox wipes and curry
navirus, and was in isolation at 10 Down- if for a wedding, or a funeral. blocks. It only took a few hours.
ing Street.) In contrast, Rishi Sunak, —Rebecca Mead In line, at one point, I asked the reg-
the Chancellor, appeared statesmanlike 1 ister guy if they had any Tylenol, and
when, in the same press conference, he THE FRONT LINES he tossed two boxes into my basket.
announced that the government would When I asked if they had any face masks,
pay eighty per cent of the salaries of aybe five weeks back, a friend liv- he laughed. “How about you tell me
workers put on furlough because of the
virus, up to twenty-five hundred pounds
M ing in Tokyo hit me up online
about groceries. This was after the first
where you find some,” he said.
Watching the shelves empty all over
a month. Within days, the Transport confirmed coronavirus case in the States, America on Twitter and Instagram, you’d
Secretary, Grant Shapps, effectively na- but before the inertia of global inevita- think everyone in this country only
tionalized Britain’s railways, to prevent bility we’re all stuck in now. He said I shopped at Sprouts or Trader Joe’s or
the private companies that run them needed to stock up on Tylenol and rice, Whole Foods. But Houston is diverse,
from collapsing. Having celebrated a and whatever the hell else I needed to and its grocery stores reflect that. We’ve
landslide victory in the elections last make myself comfortable indoors, with- got loads of little markets catering to
December, the Conservative Party may out restaurants, for an extended period their respective communities, and folks
end up introducing the most socialist of time. When I asked why, he sent a link in parallel communities pass through
policies Britain has seen in decades. detailing the virus’s spread from metrop- them routinely: African markets in the
Beyond Regent Street, London’s the- olis to metropolis. Then he sent six more. corners of strip malls, sprawling Asian
atre district, around Leicester Square, “You don’t want to be sick going to markets, Latinx groceries in clusters.
was empty. Earlier in the week, John- the grocer’s,” he said. “And you don’t They carry the staples for their respec-
son had called on the public to avoid want to be fucking around at the gro- tive flavor profiles (furikake, Scotch-
theatres and cinemas, but stopped short cery store if you aren’t sick.” bonnet peppers, ancho chilies, and thirty-
of ordering them shut, angering venue In Houston, preparation is tied to the four varieties of doenjang), but they sell
operators who would thereby be de- city’s topography. Harris County’s share basics, too. If you can’t find toilet paper
prived of possible insurance payouts to of upper- and lowercase storms in the at Seiwa Market, chances are you can
cover their losses. By Friday, the order past few decades has produced a reliable find it at Karibu Mini Mart or Viet Hoa
to close had come. Farther north, am- equation: if there’s even a whiff of an International Foods. And if they don’t
bulances with wailing sirens headed to emergency on the horizon, our grocery have it then there really is a problem.
University College Hospital, on the Eu- stores begin to fill. The shoppers tend Two weeks later, as the work-from-
ston Road, while nearby Harley Street, to move in waves: there’s your First Wave, home decrees came down, and I started
famous for its private medical clinics, folks who just triple up on everything, missing a spice here or a morning crois-
was deserted. On Saturday, the govern- because they’re older or they’re preppers sant there, I popped by my neighbor-
ment announced that a deal had been or they’re refugees, or maybe they’ve just hood grocers to stock up. I could tell
struck with Britain’s private-hospital sec- seen some shit in their lifetimes. Then that things were starting to get strange.
tor, making an extra twenty thousand there’s the Second Wave, folks who sur- But, for most of my local stores, busi-
staff, eight thousand hospital beds, and face after the plausibility of an emer- ness went on as usual. In a market tucked
twelve hundred ventilators available. gency coalesces (more folks of color). inside the Hong Kong City Mall, lines
I passed an ambulance parked on There’s the Third Wave, once the emer- weren’t any longer than usual. Families
the street outside a block of housing gency becomes imminent (the stores get stalked the produce aisles, fingering ci-
for elderly people, its doors open and crowded), and then the Fourth Wave, lantro and scallions (scarcities else-
its stretcher readied for use. Across the after city officials legitimatize the Bad where), juggling cannisters of Lysol
street lay the green expanse of Prim- Thing. That’s when you end up texting wipes and packages of flour (which had
rose Hill, one of London’s loveliest parks. in line, hunched over your cart for hours. disappeared throughout the city). Every
It was Mothering Sunday, and, while So that weekend, just before every- fourth shopper wore a mask. Every other
the Prime Minister had urged citizens thing started getting cancelled, my boy- shopper wore a pair of gloves.
to call their mothers and not to visit friend and I made our rounds around At H Mart, I grabbed a bottle of
BELGRADE, SERBIA, BY JASU HU
citron tea by the register and was weigh- navigating this situation, together, for life, but as the natural ongoing outcome
ing whether it was worth five bucks when some time. But the burden is not dis- of trauma and isolation. And though at
the woman behind me asked if I wanted tributed equally: besides nurses and times I functioned, I nonetheless could
to trade it for ginger-lemon. I looked doctors, caregivers and delivery people, not bring myself to write, or read much,
hesitant, but the dude behind the counter grocers are on the front lines. They don’t or cook for myself, or exercise, or open
wiped both bottles down and handed get to work from home. God forbid the mailbox. I let the mail sit, until the
them back between gloved fingers. that we’re anything but grateful. mailman, unable to fit all the flyers and
These grocers had—right along with I ventured into a decimated Whole bills and tax notices, emptied the box,
their counterparts in emergency ser- Foods the other day and managed to wrapped everything with a rubber band,
vices—helped keep their cities running. snag the last pecan pie. At the register, and left the bundle on the entryway
But once I got outside, walking to my I asked the cashier, a Latinx dude, how floor. Those were bad days, when I made
car, a white guy behind me yelled a loud it was going. He looked sleepy. But he it outside and into the neighborhood—
“Hey!” I turned, thinking he was talking smiled, and said that the day had been the days when, on my way out the build-
to me. But the target of his anger was chaos. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ve ing’s front door, I found that mail. The
an Asian woman halfway across the got this. But it’s gonna fucking suck.” problem was terror. The problem was
parking lot. He yelled “Hey!” again, fum- —Bryan Washington that I was not safe. There was danger.
ing, pointing to an abandoned shop- 1 I’d lost my sense of belonging, and lived
ping cart. He seemed, for some reason, MUSIC WILL BE IMPORTANT in abjection, lonely, cut off, trying not
to think she had left it there. He asked to die but working just to stay alive. Fear
the woman what the fuck she thought e’re all going to be spending some and loneliness can both seem to last an
she was doing.
The woman and I exchanged looks.
W time alone now. I once spent the
better part of a year by myself in my
eternity. Maybe at some time in your
life you’ve hidden yourself away, scur-
I walked over and moved the cart, wav- apartment. It was 2016. I was not under ried past the mailbox, let the phone ring,
ing her away. The guy gave me a long house arrest. I was not in quarantine. I if it rings at all. Maybe you’ve distanced
stare and climbed into his truck. Two was sick with what we and our doctors yourself from friends, or lost them for
kids sat in the back seat, blinking through call major depression. I would rather good. What will happen to you if you
the windows. call it suicide, which I see not as an event go outside? I put the mail in the back
Last month, the mayor issued a stay- or a deed, not a consequence of anguish of the closet, and then took an Ativan.
at-home order, signalling that we’d be or deliberations over the meaning of And yet I needed people’s voices. I
LONDON, ENGLAND, BY BILL BRAGG
needed to see faces, to look into anoth- music; and Bartók and Mozart and Bach. that might seem inexplicable, yet also
er’s eyes, to hold someone’s hand. Sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, concrete and real. Who hides behind the
We like to say that we are wired, as that year when I couldn’t easily leave the curtain in the window across the street?
if we are computers or electrical grids. house, I listened. I was always shaking And what about over there, or down the
My wiring is shot; she needs recharg- and hyperventilating. I felt my body street? How many of us might we find
ing; he’s in shutdown mode; you have pressed down, as if by some weight that on the block, the avenue, the neighbor-
power. We say that music soothes the I could not see. It was a feeling of being hood, the city, the land? How many of
savage beast. The expression is a mis- crushed from every side. Maybe you’ve us were afraid to live, afraid to die? Dear
quote from the English Restoration felt this. Maybe you’ve felt that you can- God, take care of my brothers and sis-
playwright William Congreve, who in not stand straight, or make a smile. Some- ters. Take care of our families. Take care
fact writes of the savage breast, not beast. times I got up from the sofa and paced, of the people in hospitals and on the
“Musick has Charms to sooth a savage but then I might stop to adjust the speak- streets. Take care of our doctors and
Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knot- ers, angle them a little. In? Out? Was I nurses. Take care of our war veterans. I
ted Oak.” A savage breast is what we sitting the right distance away? I put my was never a soldier, never went off to
feel when we are alone too long. gear on platforms made to dampen vi- fight, but all through that year I cried for
My apartment faces south. There is bration, and added big fat speaker cables. the veterans. They return home wounded.
a tree outside the living-room windows, The music seemed incrementally to I put on my records and prayed. I
and across the way are brownstones in soften, and, as I fiddled with the system, was, we could say, sitting in music. I
a line, painted blue and red and pale it came to sound, to feel, more and more wasn’t wired. I was wire. The sound
yellow. On sunny days, the living room close. That’s how I think of it now: lis- waves were wire, and the air in the room
is filled with light. In spring and sum- tening as intimacy. My shoulders dropped. was wire, and the walls were wire, and
mer, with the windows open, you can The muscles in my neck and face relaxed. the books in their shelves were wire,
hear the birds. The year that I was alone, I breathed more deeply. I prayed and I and my body was wire. I found my com-
I sat on the sofa and listened to the wept. I stood at the window and watched munion with others who were alone.
music that had mattered to me when the people on the sidewalk below, par- And I might notice, when I felt you
I was young, Steppenwolf and Pink ents with children, groups of friends, near me, that I was tapping my foot,
Floyd and Black Sabbath. I put on neighbors bringing home groceries. I and that my thoughts were, for the mo-
the music that I came to later in life, thought of all of us who, like me at that ment, clear, and that I could smile, a bit.
jazz, and electronic and experimental time, lived in danger and in fear, a fear —Donald Antrim
I
n the summer of 2013, Ziria Namu-
tamba heard that there was a mis-
sionary health facility a few hours
from her village, in southeastern Uganda,
where a white doctor was treating chil-
dren. She decided to go there with her
grandson Twalali Kifabi, who was unwell.
At three, he weighed as much as an av-
erage four-month-old. His head looked
massive above his emaciated limbs; his
abdomen and feet were swollen like water
balloons. All over his tiny body, patches
of darkened skin were peeling off. At a
rural clinic six months earlier, he had
been diagnosed as having malnutrition,
but the family couldn’t afford the foods
that were recommended. Twalali was his
mother’s sixth child, and she was preg-
nant again—too far along to accompany
him to the missionary facility, which was
called Serving His Children.
“We were received by a white woman,
later known to me as ‘aunt Renee,’” Na-
mutamba attested in an affidavit, which
she signed with her thumbprint, in 2019.
At Serving His Children, Namutamba
“saw the same woman inject something
on the late Twalali’s head, she connected
tubes and wires from baby Twalali to a
machine.” Days later, while Namutamba
was doing laundry in the clinic’s court-
yard, she overheard another woman say-
ing, “What a pity her child has died.”
Soon, the person called Aunt Renée
“came downstairs holding Twalali’s life-
less body, wrapped in white clothes.”
Twalali was one of more than a hun-
dred babies who died at Serving His
Children between 2010 and 2015. The
facility began not as a registered health
clinic but as the home of Renée Bach—
who was not a doctor but a home-
schooled missionary, and who had ar-
rived in Uganda at the age of nineteen
and started an N.G.O. with money raised
through her church in Bedford, Vir-
ginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help
the needy, and she believed that it was
Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished
children. Bach told their stories on a
blog that she started. “I hooked the baby
up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote
in 2011. “I took her temperature, started
an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested
for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”
In January, 2019, that blog post was
submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed
against Bach and Serving His Children
in Ugandan civil court. The suit, led by “My desire to go to Uganda was to help people and to serve,” Bach said. Last summer,
A REPORTER AT LARGE
THE MISSION
Renée Bach went to Uganda to save children—but
many in her care died. Was she responsible?
BY ARIEL LEVY
as accusations against her led to a lawsuit and to death threats, she moved home, to Bedford, Virginia.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK STEINMETZ THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 51
a newly founded legal nonprofit called David Gibbs, who previously led the lights, in front of two-story brick store-
the Women’s Probono Initiative, lists effort to keep Terri Schiavo on life sup- fronts climbing a hill.
the mothers of Twalali and another baby port, and now runs the National Cen- Selah, whom Bach adopted after she
as plaintiffs, and includes affidavits from ter for Life and Liberty, a “legal minis- was brought into Serving His Children
former employees of S.H.C. A gardener try” that advocates for Christian causes. as a malnourished infant, had a scarf
who worked there for three years asserts Over the years, Bach said, she had as- wrapped around her neck and wore her
that Bach posed as a doctor: “She dressed sisted Ugandan doctors and nurses em- hair in long, neat braids. She waved at a
in a clinical coat, often had a stetho- ployed by her organization in “emer- neighbor, who was inching up the pa-
scope around her neck, and on a daily gency settings and in crisis situations,” rade path behind the wheel of a vintage
basis I would see her medicating chil- but had never practiced medicine or fire truck. “I know him!” she said, radi-
dren.” An American nurse who volun- “represented myself as a medical profes- ant with excitement. He smiled and threw
teered at S.H.C. states that Bach “felt sional.” Bach sounded nervous, but she her a handful of candy canes.
God would tell her what to do for a firmly denied the “tough allegation” The elementary-school band marched
child.” A Ugandan driver says that, for against her. She had used the first per- by, playing a clamorous carol, followed
eight years, “on average I would drive son on her blog as an act of creative li- by a Mrs. Claus on a giant tractor. The
at least seven to ten dead bodies of chil- cense, because a simple narrative ap- next parade participants were on foot:
dren back to their villages each week.” pealed to donors; in fact, she’d had a the Sons of Confederate Veterans, wear-
The story became an international Ugandan medical team by her side at ing Civil War uniforms and carrying
sensation. “How could a young Ameri- all times. “I was a young American Confederate flags. “It’s pretty conservative
can with no medical training even con- woman boarding a plane to Africa,” she for me here, and it’s not very diverse,”
template caring for critically ill children said—inexperienced and idealistic, work- Bach said quietly. She had not intended
in a foreign country?” NPR asked last ing on an intractable problem. “My de- to move back to Bedford, but she’d left
August.The Guardian pointed to a “grow- sire to go to Uganda was to help peo- Uganda in a rush last summer; after the
ing unease about the behavior of so-called ple and to serve.” accusations against her spread, she’d
‘white saviors’ in Africa.” A headline in started receiving death threats.
the Atlanta Black Star charged Bach with his winter, Bach stood on Main Bedford is a town of sixty-five hun-
“ ‘Playing Doctor’ for Years in Uganda.”
The local news in Virginia reported that
T Street in Bedford, Virginia, watch-
ing the Christmas parade with her par-
dred, but it feels even smaller. “It’s still a
farming community, though that’s not the
Bach was accused of actions “leading to ents and her two daughters, one-year- primary occupation of most people any-
the deaths of hundreds of children.” old Zuriah and ten-year-old Selah. The more,” Bach’s mother, Lauri, said. Lauri
Bach made only one televised ap- sidewalks were crowded with people and her husband, Marcus, a trim man
pearance in response, on Fox News. wearing jeans and Carhartt work clothes, with a gray beard, ran an equine-therapy
Wearing a puffy cream-colored blouse, some sitting on folding chairs with cool- program out of their barn while their chil-
with her blond hair half up, she was pic- ers they’d packed for the occasion. Gar- dren were growing up. Neither of them
tured on a split screen with her attorney lands and wreaths hung from the street had ever been outside the United States
when Renée told them she was moving
to Africa, but they weren’t worried. “We
raised our children to be world-changers
and to be risktakers,” Lauri, who has been
the U.S. director of Serving His Chil-
dren since 2313, said. “I felt like, if she’s
doing what God calls her to do, she’d be
safer walking alone in a village in Uganda
than driving to the Bedford Walmart.”
As we talked, a float at the top of the
hill started slipping backward; the trans-
mission was giving out. A dozen men,
including Marcus Bach, raced up and
pushed it onto the flat road ahead. “It’s
just what you do—you go help people,”
Lauri said. “People should be driven to help
others. And, in my opinion, they shouldn’t
be judged for who they try to help.”
efore Renée Bach went to Uganda,

B her aspirations were conventional.
“I wanted to get married and have five
kids,” she told me at her parents’ house,
“Can you help me bury the groceries all over the neighborhood?” as she tried to distract Zuriah with a
miniature Santa so that she wouldn’t pull The recipients of her program con- that Bach had access to resources they
ornaments off the tree. “I was a super tended constantly with illness, but didn’t. “We were getting referrals from
plain-Jane, straight-up white girl.” But, nobody could afford to go to the doc- twenty-seven districts—people were trav-
not long after she got her high-school tor. In Uganda’s public hospitals, patients elling for eight or nine hours to get to
diploma, members of her church told are frequently expected to pay not only our center,” she said. “We were, like, ‘How
her that an orphanage in Jinja, Uganda, for medicine but also for such basic sup- did you even hear about us?’ But, all of a
needed volunteers. A town of eighty thou- plies as rubber gloves and syringes. For sudden, they’re knocking on the door.”
sand on the northern edge of Lake Vic- many families, even the cost of transport Serving His Children registered as an
toria, Jinja is a bustling place, where peo- to the hospital was prohibitive. So Bach N.G.O. with the Ugandan government,
ple sell bananas and backpacks from stalls often drove sick kids to the and received a certificate to
along red-dirt roads, and hired motor- town’s pediatric hospital— “carry out its activities in the
cycles weave around crammed minibuses which everyone refers to as fields of promoting evange-
decorated with pictures of Rambo and Nalufenya, for the neighbor- lism; provide welfare for the
Bob Marley. Bach arrived in 2007, join- hood it’s in—and paid for needy.” Bach hired a Ugan-
ing a large missionary community. “I felt their care. “Looking back, dan nurse named Constance
very at home and at peace there,” she that wasn’t—well, actually, Alonyo to care for the chil-
said. She loved being immersed in a for- nothing we did then was sus- dren, and, as she raised more
eign culture and absorbed in her work. tainable,” she said. “But it money from America, she
When Bach returned to her parents’ was just a way of being like: brought in more nurses, nu-
house, nine months later, she didn’t know I don’t know anything about tritionists, and eventually
what to do with herself: “I was really medicine, or health care doctors. But she did not get
trying to seek out what school I was here—or even about Uganda. But I can S.H.C. licensed as a health center for
going to go to, what career path.” Then pay for your malaria medicine so you nearly four years. Bach insists that this
she had an “almost supernatural experi- don’t die.” shouldn’t have been confusing: “All of
ence,” she told me. “It became really clear, In the fall of 2009, Bach received a our clients signed a release stating, ‘I re-
as if God was, like, ‘You’re supposed to call from a nurse at Nalufenya, who told alize that this is not a registered hospi-
go back to Uganda.’” She laughed, rue- her that the hospital had some kids it tal, this is a nutritional-rehabilitation fa-
fully. “This sounds like such a white-sav- was “refeeding”—bringing back to nu- cility.’” The forms were in English, one
ior thing to say, but I wanted to try to tritional health after bouts of severe acute of more than fifty languages spoken in
meet a need that wasn’t being met.” malnutrition. “She said, ‘They’ve been Uganda. Many of S.H.C.’s clients were
Bach decided to start a feeding pro- here for a really long time, and they can’t illiterate.
gram, with money raised through her pay for their stuff anymore. They’re med- Medical supervision was crucial, be-
church, offering meals to children in Mas- ically stable. Can we send them to your cause treating malnourished children is
ese, a neighborhood on the edge of Jinja feeding program?’” The hospital promised not a simple matter of providing meals
that she described as “very slumlike” but that a nutritionist would visit every week or milk. In a state of severe malnutrition,
vibrant. “There were a lot of people from to check on them. Three toddlers and the body starts to consume itself in order
the internally-displaced-persons camps their guardians came to live with Bach. to survive; intracellular enzymes stop
up in the north,” she said. “People from Tending to those children opened functioning properly, and so do major
a lot of different tribes and clans.” Bach her eyes to the omnipresence of malnu- organs. When nutrients are introduced,
needed a headquarters, but she struggled trition in the area. “It was almost like a huge shift in electrolytes can cause a
to find a house to rent. “Masese was on malnutrition was the stepchild of health potentially deadly condition known as
the side of a hill, and everyone lived in care,” Bach said. Perhaps, she thought, refeeding syndrome. In world-class pe-
mud homes—when it rained, all the rain this was why God had sent her to Uganda. diatric intensive-care units, physicians
would wash houses away,” she told me. She could care for malnourished chil- closely monitor patients’ electrolyte lev-
“Every person that I contacted, they were dren and hire nutritionists to educate els and adjust treatment accordingly.
all, like, ‘Why are you moving there as a their parents, then ask the families to Bach, of course, could not provide any-
single white girl? You’re going to get help in her community garden. “They where near that level of care. But nei-
robbed out of your mind!’ And I was, like, would be giving back to their child’s re- ther could the hospitals that were call-
‘No—I just feel really strongly that’s where covery, not just getting a free handout, ing her to take patients. “Tomorrow I
we’re supposed to be.’” Through a friend, and learning at the same time!” she posted am picking up 4 more children from the
she found a sprawling concrete house to on her blog. hospital,” Bach blogged in July, 2010. She
rent from a government official who was Bach was astonished by the response. asked her followers to pray for the chil-
away in Entebbe, and she started offer- A twelve-year-old came with her infant dren’s recovery, adding, “I also ask that
ing free lunch on Tuesdays and Thurs- sister. A neighbor brought in a baby she’d you please pray for my sanity.”
days. She hired a few people to cook, found in a pit latrine; the mother was Bach was overwhelmed by what she’d
serve food, and help with activities, like fifteen years old, dying of H.I.V. and tu- taken on. She asked around to figure out
craft day and Bible club. By the end of berculosis. (That baby was Selah, whom how to keep medical charts that would
the year, Bach estimates, she was feeding Bach later adopted.) Medical professionals be intelligible to staff at Ugandan health
a thousand kids a week. throughout the region quickly realized facilities. “Everyone would be, like, ‘Just
came worse. If she was not a doctor, why
did she put a health facility and bring
our kids there?”
Namutamba said that even the chair-
man of her village thought that Bach
was a doctor. “Then the child died, and
I wasn’t told what killed him,” she said.
She grew upset speaking about the con-
sequences within her community. “The
village scorns me for not taking care of
the child right, and the mother of the
child has questioned my judgment,” she
said, motioning toward her daughter.
“Now I want Renée to face justice, so
another mother doesn’t end up in a sit-
uation where her child has died and she
doesn’t know why. Renée came to Uganda
and presented herself as a medical per-
son, and so she should compensate me.”
Primah Kwagala, the attorney who
founded the Women’s Probono Initia-
tive, explained that the lawsuit is based
on charges of human-rights violations
and of discrimination. “Treating Ugan-
dan children without proper medical
training and certification is a violation of
their right to equality and freedom from
discrimination on the ground of race and
social status, contrary to Article 23 of the
Constitution,” she said. She suggested
that S.H.C.’s staff did not believe poor
people merited equal treatment: “Maybe
Bach founded her center in 2009 and soon was feeding a thousand children a week. you assume, because they’ve paid you
nothing, they are entitled to nothing. We
buy a school notebook and write in it— Serving His Children and returned with say that is discrimination.”
that’s what everyone does.’ There were his corpse. The other plaintiff against When I asked Kwagala why she had
a lot of things like that, where no one Bach, Annet Kakai, rested her head on selected these two families’ cases for her
had an answer. But, in the beginning, the back of a wooden bench in front of lawsuit, she replied, “Because they had a
we were just trying to keep our heads her. She had travelled for hours on un- bit of evidence. Everyone else is just say-
above water.” paved roads to get to this hearing, and ing, ‘That happened to me,’ but they
Bach had been raised to believe that her dress looked tight and uncomfortable. don’t have anything to show for it.”
Christians have a responsibility to help Television crews from Ireland and The evidence, though, is not clear-
the needy, and that with tenacity and the Netherlands had cameras trained cut. According to the court filings on
research ordinary people can achieve on the women. There was also a corre- Twalali, the staff at S.H.C. made every
most things they set their minds to. Her spondent from German public radio, effort to save him. I asked two inde-
mother had taught her and her four sib- along with two journalists from Aus- pendent doctors to review his medical
lings at the kitchen table, using curric- tralia and a podcaster from Florida. The records: a clinical instructor at Harvard
ula from a Christian homeschooling hearing was perfunctory: the magistrate Medical School with expertise in global
service. A form that Serving His Chil- told attorneys from both sides that they health, and a Kenyan researcher who
dren provided to volunteers contained had to attempt mediation before the has studied malnutrition for more than
a motto: “You don’t have to be a licensed court would intervene. a decade. Both noted that Twalali was
teacher to teach, or be in the medical After it was over, Kakai sat beneath extremely sick when he was admitted,
COURTESY MARSHALL FOSTER
field to put on Band Aids.” a tree in front of the courthouse, frus- on July 30, 2033. He had a fluid-filled
trated. “I’m looking for compensation— abdomen and swollen lower limbs, typ-
n a hot day this January, Twalali Ki- if I didn’t want that, I would not have ical of children with prolonged protein
O fabi’s mother sat in a courtroom in
Jinja, with a baby strapped to her back.
come and brought my case to court,”
she said. “As far as I can tell, Renée is
deprivation, and a cracked mouth in-
dicating a severe vitamin deficiency. He
Next to her was Twalali’s grandmother not a doctor, and she gave my child the had malaria, a respiratory infection,
Ziria Namutamba, who had taken him to wrong medicine, and then the child be- anemia, and dehydration from diarrhea.
A stool sample, sent to a private hos- gle most important factor in matters of really high esteem, with the impression
pital for analysis, indicated infectious life and death,” he told me. that she’d gotten in over her head, and
gastroenteritis. Twalali’s grandmother remembers see- there was no help to be found, because
After Twalali was admitted, a night ing Bach personally treat the baby. But, it’s Africa—which is obviously not true,”
nurse examined him, and made a note when Twalali was admitted, Bach was on she told me. “What raised my flags is
to discuss antibiotic treatment with a her way to the United States, and she re- she didn’t really seem to want my help
doctor. The nurse inserted a plastic can- mained there for the duration of his stay; once I was there. If I asked basic nurs-
nula into Twalali’s vein to infuse anti- her passport is exit-stamped July 10, 2013. ing questions—‘Are there any contrain-
malarial medication, and a nasogastric Kwagala told me that this meant noth- dications for this medicine?’—she’d be,
tube to supply nutrients and fluid. He ing to her: “You could have that stamp like, ‘Don’t worry.’”
was placed on oxygen, and his vital signs created on the street. ” Kramlich left S.H.C. after less than
were monitored hourly. In the morning, The case of Kakai’s son Elijah is no four months. In her resignation letter,
he was examined by a doctor, who more conclusive. The court filings con- she told the board, “Although Renee is
confirmed the nurse’s decisions and coun- tain no medical records for him, because very intelligent, quick to catch on, and
tersigned the medication doses; in the according to S.H.C. he was never admit- unquestionably dedicated and moti-
six days Twalali stayed at S.H.C., that ted. Kakai says in her affidavit that in vated, the fact remains that she has no
doctor visited him three times. July, 2018, Elijah received a diagnosis of formal training in the medical practice
Following initial treatment, Twalali’s tuberculosis at a hospital. An S.H.C. with which she works every day.” Kram-
malaria cleared, and he was less lethar- driver brought her and her son to a health lich added that it seemed “unreason-
gic, happier. But his diarrhea got worse, center called Kigandalo, where S.H.C. able, and even dangerous, that an un-
and his temperature spiked. On July 15th, was running a malnutrition program in trained person like Renee should be in
he started refusing food, and by the early partnership with the Ugandan govern- a supervisory position.” Nonetheless,
hours of the next morning he was ment. But the nurses there wouldn’t admit she wrote, she was grateful for the ex-
semi-comatose, struggling to breathe. him, because they didn’t have an isolated perience: “There were so many parts of
On doctor’s orders, nurses attempted to ward for T.B. patients. They did offer Serving His Children that were such a
resuscitate him with intravenous fluids. some fortified milk, which Kakai ac- blessing to be a part of.”
He died at eleven o’clock. cepted, because her son was “small-bod- Kramlich moved back to the United
After reviewing the records, the Har- ied,” and they gave her money for trans- States in 2015. Her concerns might have
vard instructor told me, “My over-all con- portation home. Elijah got sicker, though, been forgotten if not for a friend of hers:
clusion is that there is no question this and the next day Kakai took him to a Kelsey Nielsen, an American social
child was regularly attended and in gen- government hospital in her own district. worker who was part of the same insu-
eral closely monitored.” She added, how- He died there three days later. “I strongly lar missionary world in Jinja. In 2018,
ever, that “the child likely needed higher- believe,” Kakai attests, that S.H.C.’s em- Nielsen began an influential social-me-
level and more frequent review by a ployees “did something to my child that dia campaign, called No White Saviors,
physician or child-health expert, and there led to his death.” It is possible that Eli- that took aim at the failings of Western
were a few deviations from standard man- jah received tainted milk at S.H.C., which aid in Africa. Bach became her primary
agement of malnutrition.” Her greatest killed him several days after he ingested target. “Kelsey, she got it in her mind
concern was that Twalali had received it. But it is more likely that he died as a that it had not been dealt with,” Kram-
“far more I.V. fluid far quicker than is result of his tuberculosis and malnutrition. lich told me. “She starts up this whole
typical.” The World Health Organiza- No White Saviors page, and she was
tion advises a conservative regime for nly one American medical practi- going after Renée. I was, like, Oh, boy—
malnourished children, out of fear that
excessive fluid can lead to heart failure.
O tioner provided an affidavit: Jac-
queline Kramlich, a nurse who volun-
buckle up. She’s a very passionate per-
son, even when she’s completely stable.”
But, the Kenyan researcher noted, teered at S.H.C. in 2011. As the suit
“this has generally been expert opinion points out, S.H.C. was not licensed as feel like this is happening at the
with hardly any reliable research evi- a health facility during her time there;
“ I right time in my life,” Kelsey Niel-
dence.” The W.H.O.’s restrictive ap- it did not issue official death certificates, sen said at a café in Philadelphia, when
proach has been a subject of debate for just summaries of treatment and of the she was in town visiting her mother,
decades, with some recent studies show- circumstances of death. Bach and her who lives in nearby Collegeville. If she
ing that larger volumes of fluid pro- family maintain that these were bureau- were younger, the success of No White
duced better outcomes. So the doctor cratic oversights. Kramlich argues that Saviors might have gone to her head,
treating Twalali had a quandary: too lit- the clinic’s management showed a lack but Nielsen was about to turn thirty,
tle fluid and the boy could die of dehy- of supervision and professionalism. Bach and, after a decade of intermittent work
dration; too much and his system could “did not follow orders of any medical in Uganda, she felt ready to lead a
be overwhelmed. The researcher said professional, but, rather, she gave orders movement that was about issues, not
that it was a judgment call, difficult to to her nursing staff,” she writes. egos. “People come up to us and treat
evaluate without seeing the patient in Kramlich arrived at Serving His Chil- us like we’re celebrities,” she said. “Peo-
the moment. “The discretion of the treat- dren a few months after finishing a B.A. ple online, too.” In a year and a half,
ing clinicians at the bedside is the sin- in nursing. “I went in holding Renée in the campaign has attracted more than
three hundred thousand followers. “It’s single-parent household, abusive father.” to relinquish their children to orphan-
a lot of human beings. And it’s fast.” For years, Nielsen blogged about the ages, by giving parenting classes and
Nielsen lives most of the year in Kam- mental illness that she inherited from her helping them pay living expenses. (Niel-
pala, where she shares an office with Ol- father, and the ways in which he tore her sen thinks of herself now as a “white
ivia Patience Alaso, a Ugandan social down. “I did what all good daughters of savior in recovery.”)
worker with whom she founded No abusive/absent Fathers do,” she wrote in Toward the end of 2013, a sick child
White Saviors, and Wendy Namatovu, 2016. “I became a chameleon who could named Sharifu stayed for several months
a more recent addition to the team. (They mold into whatever my audience wanted.” in Abide’s emergency housing. Nielsen
met when Namatovu, who worked at the When Nielsen was fourteen, her father posted pictures of him on Facebook, and
coffee shop that Nielsen and Alaso fre- died. “I went from being a straight-A Bach, noticing them, remembered that
quented, recognized them student to then running away he had been treated at S.H.C. that spring.
from their Instagram ac- from home for a week at a “We have a huge medical and history
count and introduced her- time,” she told me. “That was file on him,” Bach wrote to Nielsen. “I
self.) Their goal is to “de- like the marker, if you look can have someone get that to you.” She
colonize development,” by back, on my bipolar disorder added, with a frowny-face emoji, “It’s
holding missionaries and manifesting.” super sad we live in the same town but
humanitarians account- Ultimately, Nielsen was never get to see each other.” Nielsen sent
able for the assumption of able to get into Temple Uni- a friendly reply: “We really need to fix
white supremacy underly- versity, but needed five years the lack of hanging—coffee or break-
ing their charity. In Uganda, to graduate, because she kept fast?” She went on to say that Abide was
No White Saviors hosts going back to Uganda to vol- also hosting Sharifu’s grandmother, and
consciousness-raising work- unteer. In the college news- training her in “parenting/attachment
shops. On social media, it chides celeb- paper, Nielsen described her life in Jinja development.” If that didn’t work, they
rities for enhancing their reputations by much as Bach had: “Making trips to the would have to consider having Sharifu
adopting African children, solicits funds local hospital to pay for a 4-year-old adopted—his father, she said, posed a
for favored causes, and offers inspirational with sickle cell to have a blood transfu- risk to his safety.
messages. (For Valentine’s Day: “Roses sion, making home visits to the village.” Nielsen told Bach that one of her so-
are red, personal boundaries are healthy, She’d had malaria three times, but, she cial workers would follow up with Bach’s
‘justice’ systems protect the white and the told another paper, “I just love loving employees, but no one did. Sharifu got
wealthy.”) But the Bach story is what the Ugandan people. I could get malaria sicker, and Nielsen and her colleagues
has propelled the group to prominence. a thousand times and still feel this is took him to a hospital in Kampala, where
As the story broke in the international where I need to be.” he was given a diagnosis of heart prob-
press, Alaso gave an impassioned inter- Though Nielsen didn’t overlap with lems. “They started raising money on-
view to Al Jazeera. “People have taken Bach at Amani, she was well aware of line, because they couldn’t get him dis-
Africa to be an experimental ground her. To Nielsen, Bach and her friend charged without paying the bill,” Bach
where you can come and do anything Katie Davis “were, like, the cool girls of recalled. She told Nielsen that S.H.C.
and walk away,” she said. “If it was a Jinja.” Davis, another missionary, came would cover the shortfall. “I literally met
black woman who went to the U.S. or to Uganda at eighteen, and within five her on the side of the road one day and
any part of Europe and did this, they years had become the legal guardian of handed over the money, and Kelsey was,
will be in jail right now—but, because thirteen Ugandan girls, whom she wrote like, ‘Thanks, see ya,’” she said. “Then
of the white privilege, this woman is about in her best-selling memoir “Kisses they made this social-media post that
now free.” No White Saviors was sub- from Katie.” Nielsen said, “Honestly, I they had gone to see his cardiologist
sequently cited by NBC News, “Good remember wanting to be friends with and that it was like this miracle: he’s
Morning America,” and ABC News. Katie and Renée. They’re the cool, young healed! And that night the kid just died.
The BBC released a video introducing missionaries, starting their own N.G.O.s, Then I started seeing her around town,
the “founders of the movement,” showing adopting children.” She recalled a New and she would just look like she was
Nielsen, a white woman with reddish Year’s Eve party at Bach’s house in 2011: going to kill me.”
hair in a blue Hawaiian shirt, bumping “All white people and their adopted To this day, Nielsen blames Bach for
fists with Alaso, a thirty-two-year-old black children.” Sharifu’s death. When I asked her why,
with short hair and an intense stare. Nielsen described her feelings to- her response was convoluted. “He died
Nielsen first volunteered in Uganda ward Bach and Davis as simultaneously of a heart attack because of the number
in 2010, at an orphanage called Amani envious and disdainful. “I always thought . . . he was only like three and a half, four,
Baby Cottage—the place where Bach that I was a little bit better than them, and he had had too many . . . the stress
had worked two years earlier. Unlike because I actually went to school for on his internal organs . . . because severe
Bach, Nielsen felt alienated by her what I was doing,” she said. Nielsen malnutrition really puts a lot of stress on
fellow-missionaries in Jinja. “I had a bit started her own N.G.O. in 2013, with a kids’ organs,” Nielsen said. “I remember
of a different upbringing than a lot of fellow-missionary she’d met at Amani. sitting down and just telling Renée to
the other white women that end up They called it Abide, and they sought her face, ‘If you had followed up, you
there,” she said. “I grew up poor— to encourage impoverished families not would’ve caught that the abuse and ne-
glect was there, and that he was getting phone. The two women agree that Pa- ary, 2015, Kramlich met with the Jinja
sick again.’” tricia had an allergic reaction to the trans- police and filed a report.
“We would have loved to follow up fusion, and that Bach rushed her to a Kramlich now lives in Spokane, with
on our kids for years,” Bach said. “But hospital in Kampala. Five days later, when her husband and four children they
our focus was getting kids re-fed and the girl needed more blood, Bach offered adopted in Uganda. She told me that
back at home. It’s sometimes an eight- her own. (“I was praying that my blood the “cultlike” Christian milieu in Jinja
hour drive to get to one of our clients— would be to her as the blood of Christ is was “drastically disillusioning” to her
who all get at least one home visit from to me!” she wrote on her blog.) The trans- faith. “What you see over there is ‘I never
a nutritionist. Kelsey was, like, ‘If he had fusion worked, and Patricia survived. wanted to go to Africa, and then God
never been at S.H.C., he’d still be alive.’ Kramlich said she didn’t realize that told me I had to—it’s his plan, not mine.’
I was, like, ‘O.K., Kelsey, as a social the situation at S.H.C. required inter- The problem is, if you can’t make the
worker, what would your advice be?’ And vention until after she quit. But, follow- choice to do it, then you can’t make the
she said, ‘Hire more social workers; do ing her resignation, she heard many dis- choice to stop doing it.” Kramlich is a
longer follow-up care.’ And literally the turbing things “through the grapevine.” patient-care manager at Assured Home
next month we hired another social The most alarming account, she said, Health, a facility for the elderly. She is
worker, and we increased our aftercare came from S.H.C.’s head nurse, who told also a co-creator of the Instagram ac-
from three to six months. I don’t like her that Bach had performed a thora- count Barbie Savior, which follows the
her as a person, but she knows her trade. cotomy on a child. This strains credu- adventures of a Barbie doll engaged in
She went to school for social work— lity: a thoracotomy is a major surgery “voluntourism”: taking a selfie next to
that must mean something.” that involves opening the chest cavity to a black baby on a hospital cot, squat-
gain access to the internal organs. The ting over a pit latrine. The bio reads,
J acqueline Kramlich, who left Serving

His Children shortly before Sharifu’s
nurse, Constance Alonyo, filed an affi-
davit in Bach’s defense. “They say I told
“Jesus. Adventure. Africa. Two worlds.
One love. Babies. Beauty. Not qualified.
death, told me that she had never un- Jackie that Renée has been doing wrong,” Called. 20 years young. It’s not about
derstood why Nielsen blamed Bach: “You she told me. “I went before the lawyer, I me . . . but it kind of is.”
know, there’s the Renée camp—‘Renée’s said, ‘No, I did not say that!’”
a saint, and she’s never done a thing wrong In 2015, as Kramlich prepared to move n March 12, 2015, soon after Kram-
in her life’—and then there’s the Kelsey
camp: ‘Renée is completely evil, and she
back to the United States, she felt that
it was her duty to do something about
O lich spoke with the police, Jinja’s
district health officer arrived unan-
deserves to rot in prison.’” In the follow- Bach. “I had a few friends—including nounced at S.H.C. and ordered Bach to
ing year, the opposing factions in Jinja Kelsey—and we grappled with: How shut down immediately, because her op-
exchanged claims and counterclaims do we handle this?” she said. In Febru- erating license was no longer valid. (This
about Bach, and the line blurred between
the verifiable and the outlandish.
Not everyone was worried about the
same things. Kramlich told me, “What
keys up the nonmedical public is, she
was doing I.V.s. That’s the least of my
concerns. Renée was good at I.V.s! We
used to say in nursing school, you can
teach a monkey to put in an I.V. But she
was prescribing medication. She started
doing femoral taps and blood transfu-
sions—I saw her do both of those things.”
When I pressed Kramlich about wit-
nessing Bach perform femoral taps, she
conceded that it happened only once, and
added, “In fairness, it was being taught
to her at the time by an American M.D.”
She had also seen only one blood trans-
fusion: on a nine-month-old named Pa-
tricia, who came into S.H.C. with criti-
cally low hemoglobin. She needed an
emergency transfusion, so Bach procured
blood that matched Patricia’s type from
a hospital in Jinja. Kramlich says that she
walked in on Bach performing the trans-
fusion; Bach says that a nurse was with
her, and a doctor supervised them by “Dinner’s ready, if you want to take a break from your personal space.”
to Nalufenya children’s hospital, where
Bach had arranged to provide food and
to sponsor medication. “I would wake
up so many mornings and a mom who
we’d sent to the hospital two days ago
would be sitting on my front step, with
her baby’s dead body, because she didn’t
have any way to get home,” Bach said.
“I wanted to put every one of those moms
in my car and drive them over to Kelsey’s
house and be, like, ‘This is on you.’”
Nielsen was having her own prob-
lems. In 2014, she says, she was sexually
assaulted. “My drinking got way worse.
My mental health was not O.K.,” she
told me in Philadelphia. Nielsen parted
ways with Abide, the organization she’d
started. “Uganda was my identity. Abide
was my identity,” she said. “I needed to
come home and experience just a really
sad, heartbreaking separation.” Back in
the U.S., she spent a week in a mental
hospital. “I did it three times before I
found the medication that worked,” she
added. During one manic episode, Niel-
sen went online and started posting about
Bach. “If you had a textbook of what
“Things are going great with Prince Charming. The problem mania looks like, that’s what it was,” Niel-
is his parents, King Cruel and Queen Haughty.” sen said. “Some of—a lot of—it was true,
but it was not dealt with properly.”
Since then, Nielsen has continued
• • posting on Facebook about S.H.C. “You
should *pray* about renaming your or-
was not technically the case; it had ex- on oxygen. And then, of course, within ganization KILLING HIS CHIL-
pired ten weeks before, but there was a the next three days eight of those kids DREN,” she wrote on the organization’s
three-month grace period for renewal.) did die. But he’s our authority—we page in 2016. “Must be nice to experi-
“He told us, ‘Get all these kids out of couldn’t say no.” (The officer did not re- ment on children medically with the help
here by five,’” Bach recalled. “It was one spond to requests for comment.) of YouTube videos and unending praise
o’clock, and we had eighteen kids, and Though Bach denies any wrongdo- from your literal unintelligent and igno-
most of them were new admissions! We ing, she followed the advice of her “church rant donor base. Please get out of Uganda
were, like, ‘What? Where are we sup- elders”—several male missionaries in willingly before I continue pursuing legal
posed to send them?’ He was, like, ‘I their late twenties who saw themselves means to have your founder and your
don’t care.’ ” as leaders of the Jinja Christian commu- board thrown in AMERICAN prison.”
Constance Alonyo described a cha- nity—and wrote an open letter acknowl- Though Nielsen and No White Sav-
otic scene: “Everybody was crying. The edging the accusations. “Over the years iors have raised money for Primah Kwa-
moms were crying; the workers were I have unfortunately been put in situa- gala’s case against Bach, Nielsen feels
crying. I said, ‘What is happening?’” The tions where I felt it necessary to act out- that it is not enough. “Primah’s given us
staff scrambled to find placements for side my qualifications,” she wrote. “I can some tricky advice—like not going to
the children. Bach said, “A couple of see and do not deny my past mistakes the police with this,” she said. (Kwagala
them could be discharged, and a lot of as a leader.” S.H.C. remained closed for denies saying this.) “But we met with
them we drove to this hospital that had two years. “The organization as a whole the Central Police in Kampala, the ho-
a nutrition program, about three hours was, like, ‘Maybe this is as good a time micide unit, and actually they’ve now
east of us. But it was a disaster. I mean, as any to take a pause,’” Bach said. started investigating. There are multiple
the D.H.O. looked me in the face and Eventually, S.H.C. reopened in part- families that Renée doesn’t even know
said, ‘Yes, some of these patients will nership with the government, at Kigan- we’ve been in touch with, that have been
die, but it’s not your responsibility.’ We dalo Health Center IV, with Bach serv- interviewed by the police.” Nielsen added
had this one infant who was like eight ing in an administrative post. But, in the that her group gave the police two thou-
hundred grams, super tiny. We had kids meantime, mothers kept coming to the sand dollars. “The way that money works
on oxygen who had to be transported house in Masese, so they were shuttled is, they never would’ve been able to go
forward without it,” she told me, ex- they can die.” He clapped his hands hard at a government health center called
plaining that the police had already bud- and fast. Every time a child died, it made Bugobero. “The thing that is wrong is
geted their resources for other cases. A other parents warier of the hospital. Point- to say that Renée was seeing patients,”
spokesman for the Kampala police de- ing at three babies on a cot, he said, “If he told me. “It is me—a doctor—who
nied the existence of any investigation one dies, a mother—a real mother—why was in charge. But she had the money.
into Bach or Serving His Children. would she stay? She says, ‘I have to go She said, ‘Doctor, give me the right peo-
Nielsen told me that she had never look for where there is support.’” ple to work with,’ and all I gave her were
witnessed Bach engaging in inappropri- According to a study published in qualified doctors working at govern-
ate medical care: “I would hear her talk 2017 in The American Journal for Clini- ment facilities.” He was particularly
about it, read the blog posts, all of that, cal Nutrition, fourteen per cent of chil- struck, he said, by a claim in the court
but, no, I wasn’t the one seeing her do dren treated for severe acute malnutri- case: Charles Olweny, a driver for
it.” She has no doubt, though, that what tion at Mulago Hospital—Uganda’s best S.H.C., said that he had ferried the bod-
she has heard is true. She believes that facility—died. The study notes that the ies of between seven and ten dead chil-
Bach’s supporters will stop at nothing to over-all mortality rate in Africa for children home every week. “There are not
protect her, but vowed that she would dren with S.A.M. is between twenty enough children in the district for that
not be dissuaded from her mission. “If and twenty-five per cent. During the many killings,” Wamasebu said. “And,
my dad can yell, ‘You’re not shit,’ and I years when Serving His Children func- if you are in a community which has
can watch him pin my mom up against tioned as an in-patient facility, its rate some leadership, would they just be look-
the wall and live in fear for fourteen years was eleven per cent. ing away? It is insulting!”
of my life,” Nielsen told me, “I can come “To be sincere, if you asked me to Bach’s accusers say that the Ugandans
up against Renée Bach.” work with Renée again, I would work who defend S.H.C. are covering up their
with her,” Tagoola said. “We still are un- own culpability. “If Renée goes down,
t Nalufenya, five cots were jammed derfunded, so her role would be very rel- you all go down,” one of them told me.
A into a small emergency room, with
three infants perched on each one; in the
evant.” Nalufenya receives support from
UNICEF, but, Tagoola said, “if we had
Wamasebu pointed out that, when he
was working with Bach and sending chil-
hallway, some thirty people waited on double, it would not be enough.” He dren to her program, Bugobero was the
benches to have their children examined. sighed. “It was out of desperation—from top-rated health center of its kind in
“And this is the morning!” Abner Tagoola, my position, ‘desperation’ is the key Uganda. “So the facility that is No. 1 is
the head of the hospital, said. “In the word—to help these babies that she did sending patients to be killed at that rate?
evening, you will wonder if it’s a hospi- these things. It’s not that she was over- It doesn’t make sense.”
tal or a marketplace.” Tagoola estimated enthusiastic to do miracles.”
that, on average, two hundred people a After the suit was filed, the Uganda ne morning, I went to the Jinja po-
day come to the hospital, and ten per
cent are admitted. I asked what hap-
Medical and Dental Practitioners Coun-
cil conducted an independent investiga-
O lice station to look at the initial re-
port that Jacqueline Kramlich had filed
pened to the other ninety per cent. “Ex- tion, based on interviews with hospital against S.H.C., and to ask if the guard-
actly,” Tagoola, a tall, commanding man administrators, leaders in the districts ians of any children had filed reports of
wearing a purple dress shirt under a white where the organization operated, and their own. I was told to wait on a wooden
coat, said. “In America, there’s health in- bench for an officer named Hudson. In
surance—there’s everything. Here, we a central courtyard, a ritual called the
are overwhelmingly congested.” Even “parade of suspects” was taking place: a
malnourished children who are admit- dozen young men were pulled out of a
ted to Nalufenya are rarely able to stay cell and asked to stand in front of their
as long as they should, he said: “We sta- accusers, while Hudson, a bald man in
bilize them, but they are still malnour- casual clothes, made marks on a clip-
ished, and then we take them back home. board. After a while, he summoned me
The structure by government to help into his office, where a poster on the wall
those who are still malnourished does read “Gossip ends at a wise man’s ears.”
not exist. That was the gap Renée was S.H.C. staff. “The team is unable to sup- When I brought up Renée Bach, he
trying to fill.” port allegations that children died in asked me several times to repeat the name
Bach’s critics accuse her of luring large numbers due to the services of and seemed to have no idea whom I was
mothers from Nalufenya to her own fa- S.H.C.,” the report states. “The team did referring to. If I wanted to see a copy of
cility. Tagoola, who has been a pediatri- not find evidence that Ms. Renée Bach, the report, he said, I had to pay a fee at
cian for twenty years, said that the idea Director of S.H.C., was treating chil- the local bank and bring back a receipt.
was ludicrous. “If a mother knows that dren. The community and the health I didn’t have time to go to the bank;
she is likely to get free food and she’s workers at Kigandalo HC IV were ap- I had another meeting planned, with a
going to get free medicine—what would preciative of her work.” man named Semei Jolley Kyebakola—a
you do?” He shook his head. “Some of Gideon Wamasebu, the district health former gardener for S.H.C., who filed
these things are contextual. In America, officer of Manafwa, worked with Bach an affidavit against the group and served
they can’t believe a baby can just die. Here, in 2012 to establish a feeding program as the translator when the dead children’s
guardians filed their court documents. lice had reported to him on my activi- man hurting a sobbing white five- or
He’d also built a sideline taking journal- ties. When I told him that I would not six-year-old, as she screamed for mercy.
ists to the villages outside Jinja to meet go with him to the villages, he said an- After I contacted the police and the
these women, along with several others grily that I had come only to protect my National Center for Missing and Ex-
who stepped forward after they heard fellow-mzungu. “And you call yourself a ploited Children, I let Kelsey Nielsen
about the case. Christian!” he yelled. (I told him several know that Kyebakola—whose number
I waited for Kyebakola at a crowded times: I call myself a Jew.) “The prob- she’d given me—had sent me child por-
restaurant on the edge of town, known lem is, whites, you claim you are Chris- nography. “Olivia and Wendy both said
for its goat stew. I texted him that it tian, but you are not. How do you ex- that it is common when there is a con-
would be easy to find me because I was pect me to live? You are telling me to cerning/disturbing video, people here
the only mzungu—white person—in the go steal! As a Christian, you should pay. will share it more as a concern over what
place. The first thing he said when he There is no money which is enough— is happening,” Nielsen replied. “It might
walked in was “You are the one who has but try! If you see Renée, tell her: it is have been good to ask him for context
been to the police station?” Hudson had better to settle out of court.” A few min- and to know why he’s sending it.” After
called to let him know. utes after I parted ways with Kyebakola, a bit of back-and-forth, Nielsen agreed
Kyebakola told me that he had seen Hudson sent a message letting me know that there was no condonable explana-
Bach practice medicine, and that the that he would not be supplying a copy tion. “I apologize for any of my initial
court case proved it. When I asked what of the police report. confusion,” she said. “I sometimes let
Ugandan doctors and nurses had done From time to time after that, Kyeba- Olivia and Wendy override my own re-
wrong in treating Twalali Kifabi, he kola sent me conspiracy-theory articles action when it’s ‘culture.’ ”
changed tack, complaining that he and and strange video clips via WhatsApp.
Charles Olweny were fired without One claimed that the scientist Robert ife has made Constance Alonyo re-
cause. “We just ask for a salary incre-
ment, but instead you terminate us with-
Gallo had admitted, “We were forced to
create the HIV virus as a secret weapon
L silient. She raised fifteen children:
three of her own, and twelve from her
out a reason!” he said. “If you are a Chris- to wipe out the African race.” Another, brothers, who died in the insurgency
tian, how can you do that?” He then about a man who implanted his “infected that racked northern Uganda after 1986.
told me that Bach had tried to hire blood” in Cadbury products, was accom- “It is a lot of children,” she said, laugh-
them back after a time. “She begged us. panied by obviously doctored photo- ing. “I am carrying the Cross!” But life
I say to Renée, ‘What you are doing is graphs of people whose lips had suppos- was difficult even before she became a
like a man using a condom: after throw- edly grown to enormous size after they mother. When Alonyo was a teen-ager,
ing it away, again you go back and put ingested the candy. Then, in February, I she was abducted from her school with
on the condom and use it.’” opened a video from Kyebakola and re- twenty-six of her classmates by Lord’s
I felt uncomfortable getting in a car alized after a few seconds that it was Resistance Army soldiers, who beat the
with Kyebakola, knowing that the po- grainy, violent child pornography: a white girls and dragged them into the forest.
“They walk us two miles, lock us in a
house, light it on fire. I said, ‘Why must
we die today?’” Alonyo persuaded her
classmates to form a human battering
ram, hurling themselves against a wall
until it collapsed and they were able to
escape. Her father’s house was also
burned, and his cows were taken. “After
my father lost all his riches, he took
Jesus as his Lord and Saviour,” Alonyo
said, and she followed suit. “Me, I love
Jesus Christ!” she told me, smiling ju-
bilantly. “Even as I am treating the chil-
dren, I am singing to the Lord. I do not
want to be the Devil’s toolbox.”
All of Alonyo’s colleagues at the Ki-
gandalo Health Center’s malnutrition
ward—a squat, three-room building
with giraffes and monkeys painted on
its walls—are born-again Christians, as
Serving His Children requires. But some
of their patients are Muslim; a woman
in a black abaya sat with an emaciated
baby on her lap, watching as Alonyo
tried to engage another infant with a
toy monkey. “Toko toko toko! ” Alonyo ing clothes, has tried to impress upon feeling to know that the funding dried
chanted, bouncing the monkey on the her boss the virtue of steadfastness. “I up. I think they were doing a lot of things
edge of a cot where a dazed baby named told her, ‘Renée, look here: what you are well. There was good food there. It was
Trevor sat under mosquito netting. carrying is the Cross,’ ” Alonyo said. a clean center. They had money! I just
Trevor, who had a fluff of reddish hair, “Jesus carried the Cross and fell down— don’t know why Renée couldn’t get out
a sign of edematous malnutrition, re- the Cross is heavy!” She shook her head. of her own fucking way.” Another for-
mained impassive. “They are talking that Renée killed. mer S.H.C. volunteer, a social worker
“He had severe, severe malaria,” Al- How did we kill? Did we strangle? Did named Bliss Gustafson, who now works
onyo said. All five of the babies parked we cut? Did we slaughter? You mean to for the New York City school system,
on cots in that room had some kind of say up till now, outside here, people are told me, “In my heart of hearts, do I be-
complication: malnutrition devastates not dying when they are sick?” She mo- lieve that Renée was probably a better
the immune system, and makes chil- tioned toward baby Hope. “If that child nurse than Jackie in that setting? One
dren more vulnerable to diarrhea, pneu- collapsed, are you going to say that Con- hundred per cent. Doesn’t mean it’s O.K.
monia, and malaria. According to stance killed that child? I am trying to The only reason she’s getting away with
UNICEF, four out of ten children under help with medicine, but it is not always it is that it’s black and brown babies in
the age of five die of malnutrition in possible, because I’m not God. That Uganda. White people who go to Af-
Uganda, and one out of three children child died because the child is too sick!” rica, we all make these sort of ‘I can do
that age is stunted. “There are many this better’ mistakes. We all have that
factors,” Alonyo said. “It can be the death
of the mother, or the death of the fa-
ther, who is the breadwinner. And then
Sutes’ince July, Renée Bach has been stay-
ing in a one-room house, a few min-
drive from her parents’ home along
mentality to some degree—that’s why
we go over there.”
I asked Bach if she felt that she was
it can also be polygamy—very many a road that bisects fields of brown cows. being tested, as Alonyo had suggested,
wives, very many children, no taking of One afternoon, she was sitting on the and she shook her head. “To be honest,
responsibility. It’s also lack of land: most floor, next to a little white tepee full of this whole situation has shaken my faith
of it has been occupied by sugarcane, so toys and children’s books. On the wall, in a serious way. When someone says,
they have very little land for farming, she’d tacked up a Theodore Roosevelt ‘This is what God wants me to do,’ I’m,
and the food that they get they put into quote: “It is not the critic who counts, like, ‘Yeah, sure.’” She missed the sense
selling it off, as they need to get also not the man who points out how the of devotion that she once had. “Every
some other commodities. And then there strong man stumbles. The credit be- day, I knew that I was supposed to be
is ignorance.” Some people simply have longs to the man who is actually in the there, and that’s a really powerful feel-
never heard of malnutrition: their chil- arena, whose face is marred by dust and ing,” she said. “And then shit hits the
dren get sick, and they have no idea why. sweat and blood.” fan. I’m, like, Wait, what? Was I not
In the next room, a baby named Hope Bach told me, “I am not sitting here supposed to do those things? Did I mis-
sobbed inconsolably as a young nurse claiming I never did anything wrong.” interpret what my purpose in life was?
tried to find a vein for an I.V. “Sorry, She said that she obsesses over poten- Even now, I don’t know what I’m sup-
baby!” the nurse said, as she pierced the tial failings, “recounting every interac- posed to do. Aside from being a mom,
infant’s skinny arm. Alonyo frowned: tion you’ve ever had with another human I have no idea.” Bedford was not a long-
infants are notoriously difficult to cath- and wondering, Was I hurting or was I term option. “Selah is the only black
eterize. “It is even harder now, because helping that person?” On reflection, some kid in her entire school, and that’s not
we don’t have the small cannulas we of Nielsen’s arguments had moved her. what I want for her,” Bach said. “It’s ac-
need,” she said, shaking her head at the “I believe in what No White Saviors tually still pretty racist around here.”
size of the port that the nurse was try- stands for,” Bach said. “There are a lot She recalled an incident at a fair, when
ing to insert. Since the story of the law- of people who go to developing envi- she heard one girl say to another, not
suit broke, S.H.C.’s funding has dwin- ronments and they exploit people. That quite out of Selah’s earshot, “That girl
dled, and the clinic has been running should be a global conversation: are we is so black I wonder if her parents left
out of supplies, including food for the presenting ourselves and the work that her in a fire.”
mothers of malnourished children. we’re doing in a way that’s honoring the Bach’s two sisters live in California—
“Now we can only give them beans and people we are ministering to, and car- one is a nanny, the other a doctor—and
posho”—a porridge made from maize ing for, or sponsoring, or whatever?” she was considering moving there. “I
meal—“which affects the quality of the But it is funding, as much as philos- want to be in a place where I could live
breast milk,” Alonyo said. An expat in ophy, that dictates the relationship be- a life of service again,” she said. “I gen-
the area had promised to graze his goats tween aid workers and the recipients of uinely enjoy helping people. And I feel
on the facility’s land so the staff could their services. As one doctor from Ma- like an idiot saying that, because every-
collect milk for the children, but he re- yuge who has worked with S.H.C. put one is, like, ‘You just killed a bunch of
scinded the offer. “Maybe he saw some it, “Let me be honest—most Ugandans, people.’ I would love to live in a really
information,” Alonyo said, “and then they see mzungus and they see money.” low-income, diverse community—like
he got worried.” This is not because they are corrupt; it’s immersion. Just to move into a Section 8
Alonyo, who was wearing a blue Serv- because they’re trying to survive. housing community, and not be com-
ing His Children apron over her nurs- Kramlich said, “It’s a complicated pletely ostracized, is an art.” 
FICTION
The Other One

Tessa Hadley
62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY BEA DE GIACOMO

W
hen Heloise was twelve, in gotten the name of the hospital, so I can’t And there were no obituaries in any of
1986, her father was killed Google it to check. Probably it doesn’t the big newspapers; Clifford would have
in a car crash. But it was a exist now.” felt slighted by that, if he’d been able to
bit more complicated than that. He was “Did you see her?” know it—he’d have believed that it was
supposed to be away in Germany at a “Who?” part of the conspiracy against him. Prob-
sociology conference, only the accident “Delia, the lover.” ably no one read his book these days.
happened in France, and there were two “Delia wasn’t the lover. She was the Sometimes, when Heloise spoke to
young women in the car with him. One other one. The lover was killed instantly, her therapist, she imagined her father’s
of them was his lover, it turned out in in the accident, when they hit the tree. death slicing through her life like a sword,
the days and weeks after the crash, and They took her body away.” changing her completely with one blow;
the other one was his lover’s friend. He’d Heloise and Angie were sitting drink- at other times, she thought that, in truth,
never even registered at the conference. ing wine at Angie’s kitchen table, in the she’d always been like this, reserved and
Didn’t it seem strange, Heloise’s mother same skinny four-story Georgian house sulky, wary. She knew other children of
asked long afterward, in her creaky, sur- in Bristol where they’d all lived long ago those brilliant, risky marriages of the
prised, lightly ironic voice, as if it only with Clifford, in the time before the ac- nineteen-seventies who were taciturn
touched her curiosity, that the two love- cident: Heloise and her older brother, and full of doubt like her. Her parents
birds had taken a friend along with them Toby, and their younger sister, Mair. had been such an attractive, dynamic
for their tryst in Paris? The lover was Angie hadn’t even changed the big pine couple, so outward-turning; the crowd
also killed; her friend was seriously in- kitchen table since then, although she’d of friends dropping in to talk and eat
jured. Heloise’s mother, Angie, had found done things to the rest of the kitchen— and drink and smoke pot was always on
out some of these things when she rushed it was smarter and sleeker now than it the brink of becoming a party. From the
to be at her husband’s bedside in a hos- used to be, when the fashion was for ev- landing on the top floor, where their
pital in France: he lived on for a few erything to look homemade and authen- bedrooms were, or venturing farther
days after the accident, though he never tic. She and Clifford had bought the down the deep stairwell, Toby and He-
recovered consciousness. table from a dealer in the early days of loise and Mair, along with strangers’
That time was blurred in Heloise’s their marriage; she had stripped off its children put to sleep on the spare mat-
memory now, more than thirty years later. thick pink paint with Nitromors. And tresses, had spied over the bannisters on
She’d been convinced for a while that then she’d worked with that dealer for a the adults, who were careless of what the
she’d accompanied her mother to France; while, going through country houses with children witnessed: shouted political ar-
vividly she could picture her father, mo- him and keeping his best pieces in her guments; weeping; snogging; someone
tionless in his hospital bed, his skin yel- home to show to customers. She couldn’t flushing her husband’s pills down the
low-brown against the pillow, his closed part with the old table, she said; so many lavatory; the husband swinging his fist
eyelids bulging and naked without their friends and family had sat around it over at her jaw; Angie dancing to Joni Mitch-
rimless round glasses, his glossy black the years. And now she was seventy-two. ell with her eyes closed, T-shirt off, her
beard spread out over the white sheet. pink nipples bare and arms reaching up
But Angie assured her that she was never eloise didn’t have her mother’s gift over her head, long hands washing over
there. Anyway, Clifford had shaved off
his beard by then. “I should have known
H of lightness. Angie was tall and thin,
stooped, with flossy gray silk mingling
each other; Clifford trying to burn five-
pound notes in the gas fire and yelling
he was shaving it off for someone,” Angie in her messy, faded hair. Vague and charm- to tell everyone that Angie was frigid,
said. “And why would I have taken you ing, she had escaped from a posh county that Englishwomen of her class were
with me, darling? You were a little girl, family whose only passionate feelings, born with an icebox between their legs.
and I didn’t know what I was going to she said, were for dogs and property. He- Angie called him “a dirty little Jew,” and
find when I got there. I’ve mostly blocked loise was stocky, top-heavy with bosom, then lay back on her beanbag chair,
out my memory of that journey—it was and serious, with thick, kinked tobacco- laughing at how absurd they both were.
the worst day of my life. I’ve no idea how brown hair and concentrating eyes; she
I got across London or onto the ferry, looked more like her father, whose ut that was all ancient history, and
though, strangely, I remember seeing the
gray water in the dock, choppy and fright-
Jewish family had come to the East End
of London from Lithuania in the early
B now Heloise was in her mid-forties,
divorced, with two young children, run-
ening. I was frightened. I felt surrounded twentieth century. She didn’t think her ning her own small business from home—
by monstrosities—I suppose I was wor- personality was much like his, though; finding and styling locations for photo
ried that his injuries might be monstrous. she wasn’t audacious. She had kept the shoots—and making just about enough
Once I was actually there and I saw him, obituary that appeared in an academic money to live on and pay her half of the
I was able to grasp everything. I had time journal—Angie said she didn’t want it— mortgage. When she met a woman called
to think. It’s a bizarre thing to say, but which expressed shock and sadness at Delia at a dinner party, the name didn’t
that hospital was a very peaceful place. the loss of “an audacious original thinker,” strike her at first; it was just a name. It
It was connected to some kind of reli- whose book, “Rites of Passage in Con- was a late summer’s evening, and dinner
gious order—there were cold stone floors temporary Capitalist Societies,” was re- began with white wine outdoors in a
and a high vaulted ceiling, nuns. Or at quired reading for radicals. The obituary small, brick-walled garden, its smallness
least that’s how I remember it. I’ve for- didn’t mention the problem of the lover. disproportionate to the dauntingly tall
back of the terraced house, built on a “Delia’s like the Pied Piper!” he en- still a couple of places free. Teaching was
steep hill in Totterdown; there were es- thused. “At the end of the morning, she a great pleasure, she added. She liked the
paliered apple trees trained around the leads the kids around the community company of children, and had never had
garden walls. The guests’ intimacy thick- center in a sort of conga line, playing any of her own. Heloise marvelled at how
ened as the light faded; birds bustled in away on these violins as tiny as toys, past calmly Delia talked about herself, not
the dusk amongst the leaves, and a robin the Keep Fit and French Conversation trailing ragged ends of need or display.
spilled over with his song. Venus pierced and the Alzheimer’s Coffee Morning, all “And what about your own playing?”
the clear evening sky. They all said that of them bowing away like crazy at Schu- somebody asked her. “Do you still play?”
they wouldn’t talk politics but did any- mann and Haydn. Some of these kids She belonged to a quartet that met
way, as if their opinions had been dragged have never heard classical music in their twice a week, she said, and played some-
out of them, their outrage lives before. And yet it all times with another friend, who was a
too stale to be enjoyable. Was sounds great: it’s in tune! Or pianist; they put on concerts from time
it right or wrong to use the almost in tune, almost!” to time. “I had hopes of playing as a pro-
word “fascism” to describe Antony and Heloise had fessional when I was young,” she added.
what was happening in the been close friends since uni- “I won some competitions and dreamed
world? Was the future of so- versity. He worked for the of being a soloist—it was probably only
cialism in localism? Their city planning department, a dream. But then I was involved in a
host, Antony, put out cush- which was innovative and car accident in France—I damaged my
ions on the stone seats and chronically short-staffed neck and my hands—I was ill for a long
on the grass, because of the and underfunded. Like her, time. And that was the end of that.”
cold coming up from the he was bringing up his chil- The light was almost gone from the
earth; he poured more wine. Heloise had dren as a single parent; his wife had left garden. Antony had slipped inside to
her hair pinned up; she was wearing her him and gone back to Brazil. Heloise serve up the food. He was a good cook;
vintage navy crêpe dress. had secret hopes of Antony. He wasn’t appetizing smells were coming from the
She liked Delia right away. the kind of man she’d ever have chosen kitchen. Through the open glass doors,
Delia was older than the rest of them, when they were young together—too Heloise could see yellow lamplight spill-
with a lined, tanned, big-boned face and kind, not dangerous enough—but re- ing over his books piled up on the coffee
an alert, frank, open gaze; her dark hair cently she’d come to see him differently. table, a folded plaid blanket on a sofa,
was streaked with gray and cut in a ga- It was as if she’d turned a key in the door the children’s toys put away in a toybox;
mine style, fringe falling into her eyes, of her perception, opening it onto a place beyond that, a table set with glasses and
which made her look Italian, Heloise that had existed all along. How whole colored napkins, a jug filled with fresh
thought, like an Italian intellectual. Antony was! How nourishing his com- flowers and greenery.
Around her neck on a cord hung a strik- pany, how sound his judgments! She “It was such a long time ago,” Delia
ing, heavy piece of twisted silver, and as kept her hopes mostly hidden, though, said, laughing to console the others when
the air grew cooler she wrapped herself even from herself. She was afraid of spoil- they exclaimed over her awful loss. “Like
in an orange stole, loose-woven in thick ing their friendship through a misun- I said, I was very young. It was really all
wool, throwing one end over her shoul- derstanding, or a move made too soon. very tragic, but don’t worry. It happened
der. Everything Delia did seemed grace- Delia said that intonation always came to me in another life.”
ful and natural. Heloise was full of ad- first, in the Suzuki method. No mat-
miration, at this point in her own life, for ter how simple a piece you’re playing,
older women who managed to live alone
and possess themselves with aplomb; she
it should sound right from the very be-
ginning. The conversation became an-
Ither.thadwasThere
possible that Delia’s accident
nothing to do with Heloise’s fa-
might have been two acci-
was learning how to be single again, and imated, because the other guests were dents in France, two Delias. If it was the
she didn’t want to end up like her mother, parents of young children, too, and in- same accident, then why hadn’t she iden-
volatile and carelessly greedy. Delia was tensely concerned about the creativity of tified Heloise when they met or guessed
a violinist, it turned out, and taught vio- their offspring. Heloise thought that Delia whose daughter she was? Heloise was a
lin to children, Suzuki-style; this was how looked amused, as if she was used to par- pretty unusual name. But then, why
she’d got to know Antony, because his ents thinking their children were prod- would Clifford have mentioned his chil-
younger son came to her classes. She igies, because they liked banging away dren’s names to a girl who was only his
hadn’t been to his home before, and said on a piano. Antony wished that his older lover’s friend? Perhaps he had met Delia
that she liked the neat creative order in boy would take lessons, but he had been for the first time on that fateful day: it
his garden; it made her think of a medi- diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, and was likely that she’d come along only
eval garden in a story. And she was right, wasn’t good at following directions; Helo- for the drive, a lift to Paris. Anyway, he
Heloise thought. There was something ise thought that this boy was sometimes wouldn’t have been talking about his
Chaucerian about Antony, in a good way, just plain naughty, though she didn’t say children to either of those young women.
with his pink cheeks and plump hands, so to Antony. When she suggested that He’d have been pretending, at least to
soft, shapeless waist, baggy corduroy trou- she’d like to bring her own five-year-old himself, that he wasn’t really the father
sers, tortoiseshell-framed glasses, tousled daughter, Jemima, to the class, Delia told of a family, that he could do anything
caramel-colored hair. her the time and the venue. There were he dared to do, that he was as young and
free as the girls were, his life his own to that this was exactly the look she’d been tucked under her chin, and bowed out
dispose of. And, after the accident, when trying for. She put her outfits together, al- her answers to Heloise’s questions in
Delia had endured months and perhaps ways, with the same effort she might use snatches of “Twinkle, Twinkle” or “The
years of suffering and rehabilitation, and in dressing a room for a shoot, working Happy Farmer” instead of words. And
lost her hope of a career as a performer, toward some idea at the back of her mind, Delia in the different context of the
why would she have wanted to find out like an old photograph or a painting. classes was a revelation: not kindly and
anything about the family whose hap- For the rest of the evening, she’d been encouraging, as Heloise had imagined
piness had been ruined along with hers? more lively and talkative than usual, con- her, but crisp and unsmiling, even stern.
She’d have wanted everything connected scious of the extraordinary story of the Making music was not a game, she con-
with Clifford to fall behind her into accident that she was hoarding inside veyed, but an initiation into a realm
oblivion. Into the lead-gray sea. her, charged with emotion and as dra- of great significance. The children re-
Heloise talked all these possibilities matic as an opera. Watching Delia, she’d sponded well to this, as if it was a re-
through with her therapist; she didn’t enjoyed the way she held her fork, the lief that something for once wasn’t all
want to talk to anyone else, not yet. The poised, elegant angle of her wrist and about them. Unconsciously, they im-
therapist was wary of her excitement. her rather big brown hand; how she sat itated Delia’s straight back, the flour-
She asked why it was important for He- up very straight and listened to the oth- ish of her bowing, the dip of her head
loise right now to find a new connection ers with intelligent interest, reserving her on the first beat of the bar; they were
with her father, and suggested a link be- own judgment. She did have Mediter- carried outside themselves in the mu-
tween the breakdown of her marriage ranean heritage, as Heloise had guessed, sic’s flow. Their parents, too, were in-
and her feelings of abandonment at the though it was not Italian but Spanish. timidated and gratified by Delia’s sever-
time of her father’s death. “What did Her politics were quite far left but not ity. She liked them to stay to watch the
you do, when this woman told the story doctrinaire; she was well informed and class, so that they could encourage good
of her accident? How did you react?” thoughtful. As she grew older, Heloise practice at home during the week, and
“Somehow I was all right. I’d drunk decided, she’d like to wear clothes in De- mostly they obediently did stay.
a couple of glasses of wine, I was feel- lia’s easy style, made of homespun wool Usually, Heloise sat through these
ing surprisingly mellow—for me, any- or linen, dyed in natural colors. sessions with Antony, and toward the
way. And then, when I suddenly under- end of the class one or the other of them
stood who she was—or might be—I felt
as if something clicked into place, and
I belonged to her. Or she belonged to
Jzukiemima wasn’t a musical prodigy, it
turned out. But she enjoyed the Su-
classes and for a while, in the first
would go off to pick up the two older
boys—Heloise’s Solly and Antony’s
Max—from their football club. Through
me. Everything belonged together. It flush of enthusiasm, even carried her the crowded busyness of the rest of her
was probably the wine.” tiny violin around with her at home, week, Heloise anticipated with pleasure
Antony had called them in to eat, just
as Delia was finishing her story, and He-
loise had stood up from her cushion on
the stone bench, elated. She’d almost
spoken out then and there—but she’d
had more sense, knew that this wasn’t
the right time to open up anything so
momentous, not in company. However
well balanced Delia appeared, it would
be painful to have her buried history
brought back to life. So Heloise had gone
inside instead, ahead of the others, and
put her arms around Antony, who was
standing at the sink lifting a tray of veg-
etables from the bamboo steamer. Be-
cause of the kind of man he was, he wasn’t
annoyed at her getting in between him
and the tricky moment of his serving up
the food, but put down the vegetables
and hugged her back, enthusiastically.
“Hey, what’s this in honor of?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just. Such a nice
dinner party.”
He said that she looked lovely in her
vintage dress with the Art Deco brooch,
like a learned Jewess from Minsk or Vil- “For future reference, when God starts talking about how messed
nius in the old days, and Heloise realized up the world is, he’s really just fishing for compliments.”
this hour of enforced mute stillness, play when he was younger. She wished said made her too drunk to cook safely.
squeezed up against Antony on the com- she had some such privileged way into He had to fry the enchiladas, with a lot
munity-center benches, in the big, char- intimacy with Delia; she was shy in the of flame and noise, under her laughing
acterless white room, with its missing face of the older woman’s authority, her supervision, as she hung on to his shoul-
ceiling tiles and broken Venetian blinds, self-sufficiency. Delia was always per- der. Heloise thought that her mother,
feeling his companionable warmth along fectly friendly, but she would never join despite her fierce feminism, actually pre-
her flank, buoyed up by the children’s them for lunch; she rehearsed with her ferred the company of men, powerful
music. The room smelled of hot plastic string quartet, she said, on Saturday af- men. Women’s winding approaches to
from the lights, and of sweat from the ternoons. Heloise suspected that she one another, all the encouraging and
Zumba class that came before Suzuki. took in, too, with some distaste, the mess propitiating, made her impatient; she’d
Sometimes, she and Antony bought at their shared table in the café: the chips rather be up against men’s bullishness,
lunch together afterward at the café in afloat in spilled water, the older boys their frank antagonism—she had even
the center, depending on how wound high with adrenaline from their game, enjoyed sparring with Richard. And
up Max was from football. None of this obnoxiously shouty, eyes glittering and Angie liked the way Toby made fun of
would have been so straightforward if faces hot, hair pasted down with sweat. her radicalism, as if she were some kind
Antony’s ex-wife, Carlota, the boys’ of Trotskyite firebrand extremist, while
mother, hadn’t gone back to Brazil. He- eloise’s brother, Toby, was over she accused him of selling out; they had
loise couldn’t help feeling a surge of
selfish relief when she thought of it; she’d
H from L.A., where he worked in
the music business; he came to spend a
this teasing, challenging rapport. Still, it
was notable that he’d chosen to live thou-
found Carlota abrasive and difficult. few days in Bristol with their mother. sands of miles away from her.
When she’d told Antony once that her Richard had the children on Saturday Heloise had thought that she might
ex-husband, Richard, had complained night, so Heloise went to have supper speak to them about Delia. Perhaps her
that she wasn’t spontaneous, Antony with Toby and Angie at the old kitchen mother could tell her something that
confessed in exchange that Carlota had table. Toby was like their mother, rangy would make it clear, at least, whether
called him an old woman. “Which was and tall and thin, with silky graying red- this was the right Delia. But she was
kind of surprising, coming from her,” he dish curls; he had the same rawboned surprised, once she was inside her old
added, with the modest amount of owl- sex appeal that Angie used to have— home, at her reluctance to mention her
ish irony he permitted himself, “as she indolent, indifferent to what anyone discovery. She could imagine Angie
was supposed to be such a feminist.” thought about him, scratching carelessly taking Delia up, inviting her round to
Heloise had told Antony years ago, at the hollow white belly exposed under talk, celebrating her, the pair of them
when they first knew each other, about his too-short T-shirt, leaning back in growing close, bound together by their
her father’s accident, although not about his chair and stretching his long legs long-ago disaster. Or Angie might be
the lover, because that had still felt sham- under the table, so that his big feet in scathing, and recoil from making any
ing then, private. Angie had always scruffy Converse trainers intruded into new connection with those days. So,
wanted to tell everyone everything, as Heloise’s space. He and Angie were mes- when Heloise told them about Jemi-
a twisted, crazy joke: wasn’t life just merizing when they exerted their allure, ma’s Suzuki class, she didn’t mention
bound to turn out like that! Now Helo- auburn like angels; and then sometimes the teacher’s name. Angie loved the idea
ise came close, on several occasions, to they were unabashedly ugly, ill-tempered, of Jemima communicating through her
explaining to Antony her occult con- violin. She was an inspired, enthusiastic
nection, through the accident, with grandmother, throwing herself into her
Delia: a connection that might or might grandchildren’s world, siding with them
not exist. Each time, however, the mo- and seeing everything at their eye level;
ment passed; Max threw one of his tan- also fretting to Heloise and Mair, when
trums, or Jemima spilled her water. And Toby wasn’t there, about the teen-age
she hadn’t said anything, yet, to Delia son he had in the U.S. and never saw,
herself—with every week that she de- from a marriage that hadn’t lasted a year.
layed, it grew more difficult to imagine Mair complained that Angie had rein-
bringing up the subject. The whole story vented herself over the decades. “You’d
seemed so improbably far-fetched, and, with their pale-lard coloring, blue eyes think now that she was some kind of
even if it had really ever happened, it small with exhaustion, the sex-light hippie earth mother, dedicated to her
was a million years ago, in another age. withdrawn like a favor they were bored offspring. Which isn’t exactly the child-
At the Suzuki classes, anyway, Delia was with proffering. hood I remember.”
too remote, impersonal: she belonged Angie was happy because Toby was Inevitably, they talked about politics
to everyone; it would have been inap- there; she was girlish and gauche, clown- in America; Toby knew a lot, in his la-
propriate to take her aside and make ing. In honor of the occasion she’d made conic, disparaging way. Watching out
that special claim on her. something ambitious for supper—en- for totalitarianism, they said, everyone
Apparently, Antony was having viola chiladas that had to be assembled and had been oblivious to the advent of the
lessons with her, one evening a week. fried at the last minute—and then Toby illiberal democracies. And what did it
Heloise hadn’t known that he used to mixed L.A.-style Martinis, which she mean for the world, if America’s com-
son, wanting his reassurance. Cruelly,
Toby smiled back at her, implacable.
TRANSPIRATIONS And she did look old at that moment,
under the bright kitchen light, despite
Leafing branches of a back-yard plum— her lovely, careless dress with its zigzag
print: the loose skin on her face was pa-
branches of water on a dissolving ice sheet— pery, her shoulders were bowed, her skull
shone through her thinning hair. He-
chatter of magpies when you approach— loise couldn’t help wanting, whatever
Mair said, to deflect her mother’s atten-
lilacs lean over the road, weighted with purple blossoms— tion from certain hard truths. She asked
if there was a copy anywhere of Clifford’s
then the noon sun shimmers the grasses— book; Angie stood blinking and absent
from herself, as if she had no idea what
you ride the surge into summer— Heloise meant. “Whose book?”
“Dad’s book. ‘The Whatsit of Con-
smell of piñon crackling in the fireplace— temporary Capitalism.’”
“Oh, that book. Good God. I’ve no
blued notes of a saxophone in the air— idea. Why? You can’t seriously be enter-
taining the idea of reading it?”
not by sand running through an hourglass but by our bodies igniting— “I just thought suddenly that I never
have.”
passing in the form of vapors from a living body— Toby said that there was a whole
box of them, under the bed in his old
this world of orange sunlight and wildfire haze— room. “They’re a bit mummified, sort of
shrunken and yellow.”
world of iron filings pulled toward magnetic south and north— “You can have all of them if you want,
darling,” Angie said. “Get rid of them
pool of quicksilver when you bend to tie your shoes— for me.”
“I don’t want all of them. I only want
standing, you well up with glistening eyes— one copy.”
When Angie had gone to bed, Toby
have you lived with utmost care?— asked why Heloise wanted the book any-
way, and she said that she’d been think-
have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves?— ing about their father. He rumpled her
hair affectionately; in childhood games,
adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses— she’d been her brother’s faithful squire,
in awe of his glamour as he advanced
gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, ahead of her into life, knowing all the
the Milky Way— things she didn’t know. “I thought I went
with Mum to France,” she said, “after
—Arthur Sze Dad’s accident. But she told me no.”
“Why would you have gone?” Toby
said. “None of us went. We had to stay
pass was no longer set to liberal? But it Angie was drained, done for. This was with that ghastly family, the Philipses,
had never really been set there in the something she had to get used to, she and they were sanctimonious and sorry
first place, Angie protested. Toby played said, now that she was an old woman. for us. I got drunk for the first time on
them his latest music, then went hunt- Weariness came rattling down all at once their bottle of gin, really sick drunk, threw
ing upstairs in a cupboard for a box of in her mind, like a metal shutter across up all over their stair carpet, and they
cassette tapes from his youth, and came a window, peremptory and imperative, couldn’t even be mad with me, under
down with a quiz game and a cricket so that she had to go to bed. “But I wish the circumstances. I can remember think-
bat. He tried to make them play the that you’d really begin to be an old ing at the time—this is awful, really, con-
game, but too many questions referred woman!” Heloise joked, placating her. sidering that Dad was dying—that from
to TV stars and football contests they’d “It’s about time. Shouldn’t you be knit- now on, under the circumstances, I could
forgotten—in fact, to a whole vanished ting? You’re meant to be tedious and re- get away with just about anything.”
world of perception. Heloise told awful petitive by now. With a nice perm.” Heloise said she’d been convinced,
stories about Richard; there was such “Toby thinks I’m tedious and repet- though, that she’d seen their dad in the
relief in not having to defend him to her itive already.” hospital. “He looked so peacefully asleep,
family any longer. By eleven o’clock, Angie couldn’t help flirting with her without his glasses: you know, how he
the words, with miraculous ease, to the
flow of her father’s thought.
When she picked up the book again,
however, over her coffee the next morn-
ing, while she waited for Richard to bring
back the children, she got bogged down
in its technical language: “the signifi-
cance of changing notions of value for
the development of a capitalist econ-
omy,” or “the process of differentiation
makes sense if we see it as a continuous
process of negotiation.” It would take a
huge mental effort on her part to even
begin to master Clifford’s ideas, and she
wasn’t convinced, in her daylight self,
that it was worth it. She was afraid that,
as the years had passed, the relevance of
his formulations might have slipped away,
as relevance had slipped from Toby’s
quiz. The book’s pages had an unread,
depressing smell. In the end, she lent it
to Antony: he was better with that kind
of writing than she was. If he felt like
“He thought the creature seemed more conciliatory of late.” dipping into it, she said, she’d be inter-
ested to hear whether he thought it was
any good. She liked to think of Antony
• • having her book in his safekeeping.
Then, one stormy Thursday morning
was never peaceful in his life.” It was kid, his girlfriend’s kid, making his nose in half term, Heloise turned up unan-
awful to think, she added, that their bleed. Angie hadn’t liked it. They hadn’t nounced at Antony’s house with Solly
mother had travelled all alone to France. seen much of Terry after that. and Jemima. She had rung to ask him if
“She wasn’t alone. She had her boy- they could come round, but his phone
friend with her.” eloise began reading “Rites of Pas- was switched off; in desperation, she’d de-
“What boyfriend?”
“Terry? Jerry? That guy who kept
H sage in Contemporary Capitalist
Societies” as soon as she got home that
cided to take a chance, drive over anyway.
It had rained every day of the holiday so
his furniture here to sell it. I couldn’t night. She seemed to hear her father’s far, Richard was away, and Heloise had
stand him.” own voice—which she hadn’t even real- given up inventing things to do; often the
“I’d forgotten about him. But that was ized she’d forgotten—right in her ear, ur- children were still in pajamas at teatime.
just a business relationship—he wasn’t gent and confiding.This sense of Clifford’s Rain came sluicing across the big win-
her boyfriend.” closeness made her happy, just as it used dows of their flat, the conifers thrashed at
“Oh, yes, he was.” to when she was small and he read to her the end of the garden, wheelie bins blew
Toby said that he’d once come across at bedtime, or told her stories about his over. The rooms were like caves inside
Angie “doing it,” as he put it, in his mock- family or from history—she understood the noise of water, either greenish and
ing, slangy drawl, with the stripped-pine only years later that he’d never really been spectral or bleak with the lights on in the
dealer; this was in Clifford and Angie’s to Kiev or Berlin or Moscow. He hadn’t middle of the day; the children crouched
bed, before the accident. Heloise was censored these stories or tamed them to over their screens, whose colors flickered
shocked and didn’t want to believe it; make them suitable for a child; he’d called on their faces. Jemima accompanied back-
but probably that sex scene was the kind her his little scholar. His good moods to-back episodes of “Pet Rescue” on her
of thing you couldn’t make up, unlike a couldn’t be trusted, though; he would violin; Solly played his Nintendo until he
picture of your dead father at peace. And come storming out of his study, ranting was glazed and drugged, shrugging He-
she did remember vaguely that Toby had at the children if they made any noise loise off impatiently if she tried to touch
fought with the furniture dealer, at some when he was trying to write. Didn’t they him. The idea of Antony’s ordered home
point in that awful time after Clifford’s care about his work, or believe it was im- was a haven in her imagination. He would
death—a real physical fight, fisticuffs, portant? Now Heloise was reading the be struggling to keep up with his work
here in this very kitchen. Toby said that actual words he’d written, describing the while at home with his children, just as
effectively he’d won the fight, although barrenness of life under consumer capi- she was; only he was better at it, better
Terry had knocked him down. Because talism, the loss of the meaning that was at everything. His boys at this very mo-
it didn’t look good, did it? Big beefy once created through shared belief and ment, she thought, would be making art,
macho bloke beating up a skinny weak ritual. And she seemed to see through or laughing at an old film. When An-
tony saw her, he’d know that she’d been Heloise still thought that Delia meant can scarcely remember Clifford, either,
trying her best, that the dreary shirtdress they should talk about whatever was or why he once seemed essential to her
she’d put on was meant to be domestic happening between her and Antony. The happiness. A few things: that he was over-
and sensible. She thought that it was time children were squeezing past her already, exuberant when making love, as if he was
to make some offer of herself, to find a shedding wet coats, dropping to the floor anxious to impress. That he was moved
way to express how she wanted him. in the hall to tug off their Wellingtons, to tears when she played Brahms, though
His front door was down some stone making a show of their eager compli- he argued that it was all up for nine-
steps, in a narrow basement area crowded ance with house rules. Solly would teenth-century music. And the soft cleft
with bikes, and tubs planted with herbs be relishing the prospect of playing shape of his chin, revealed when he shaved
and shrubs; the muscular gray trunk of a Max’s games without Max; Jemima was off his beard, disconcerting, as if a third
wisteria wound up from here, branching in a phase of exploring other people’s person, younger and more tentative, were
across the whole front of the house. He- houses—she could spend hours staring in the bed alongside them. They had met
loise was worried—once they’d rung the into their cupboards and drawers, touch- at a concert: he was a friend of the father
bell and were waiting in the rain, which ing everything inside carefully, one item of someone she knew from the Guildhall.
splashed loudly in the enclosed stone at a time. When Heloise followed Delia But she can remember getting ready,
space—at not hearing the children inside. into the kitchen, she saw Clifford’s book in the flat she shared with Barbie, that
She didn’t know what to do if Antony on the table. Delia stood facing her, with morning they left for France. Clifford
wasn’t in. She was counting on him. Then her hand on the book, in a gesture that was expected any moment, and Barbie
the door opened and Delia stood there, was almost ceremonial. was still packing, holding up one after
in a gray wool dressing gown and nice “If this is your father,” Delia said, “it another of the big-shouldered satiny
red Moroccan leather slippers. She had makes a strange connection between us.” dresses she wore, splashed with bright
those weathered, easy looks that are just flower patterns, deciding which looked
as good in the morning, without makeup; t some point later, Heloise told her right for Paris, where she’d never been.
she seemed taken aback when she saw
Heloise, and, for one confused, outraged
A mother the whole story, though not
about Delia moving in with Antony, not
Delia was anxious at the prospect of being
without her violin for three whole days.
moment, Heloise thought that Delia’s yet, in case her mother guessed that she’d She hardly thought about Clifford’s wife
dismay was because she’d been caught had hopes herself. “There was no tree,” and children; she discounted them—she
out—Antony and Delia had been caught she said. “Apparently they spun across was unformed and ignorant and very
out together—in something forbidden two lanes and smashed into a lorry com- young, used to discounting whatever got
and unforgivable. She knew perfectly ing the other way. Delia doesn’t remem- in the way of her music. Was Delia sure,
well, in the next moment, that there was ber this, but it’s what they told her. You Barbie worried, that it was all right for
nothing forbidden about it. Antony could made up the tree. And it was Delia, after her to travel with them? Didn’t Delia
do what he liked. He didn’t belong to her. all, who was the lover; it wasn’t the other and Clifford want to be alone together?
“Delia, it’s you! Is Antony home?” one. The other one died.” Barbie promised to make herself scarce
“He just popped out to buy bread for Angie sat listening stiffly, cautiously, as soon as they got to Paris.
our breakfast. I thought you were him, as if there were something bruising and Delia wanted Barbie to come. Per-
coming back.” dangerous in this news for her, even after haps she was beginning to be tired of
“Breakfast! Gosh, we’ve been up all this time. “So what’s she like, then, Clifford. Or perhaps she wanted to show
for hours.” the lover-girl?” off her grownup lover to Barbie, who
Heloise knew how absurd she sounded, Heloise said that she was hardly a girl. hadn’t met him, or to show off Barbie to
accusing them. “Where are the boys?” She wanted to say that Delia was cold Clifford, have him see what lively, attrac-
The boys were with Antony’s mother, and shallow and selfish, but she couldn’t. tive friends she had. Barbie wasn’t a mu-
not due back till after lunch. Heloise had “She’s pretty tough. She’s made a life for sician; she was a primary-school teacher.
blundered into what should have been a herself. I like her—she’s a survivor.” She was a voluptuous blonde, efferves-
lazy lovers’ breakfast: fresh rolls, butter, “What does she look like? Is she cent and untidy, with thick calves and
honey, scrolling through the news with scarred? I hope so.” ankles, always in trouble because of her
sticky fingers, sharing stories. Imagining She wasn’t scarred, Heloise said, as no-good boyfriends, or because she drank
it, she was stricken with longing. Her far as she could see. too much, or fell out over school policy
children had been counting on their visit, with her head teacher. Climbing up onto
too: Jemima, whining, pressed her snotty elia has never been able to remem- the bed now, she was holding one of her
face into Heloise’s thigh; Solly kicked at
the wall and swore. “I knew there was no
D ber anything from the time she and
Clifford and Barbie set out for France
dresses in front of her, singing and pre-
tending to dance the cancan. In Delia’s
point in driving over.” until she woke up in hospital. Or just memory, the window is open that morn-
“You’d better come in,” Delia said. “I’ll about woke up—into a long dream of ing in her bedroom, it’s early spring, she’s
make coffee.” pain, in which she was the prisoner of happy. The slanting low sunlight is daz-
“You don’t want visitors. We’re the enemies speaking some alien language zling in her dressing-table mirror. 
last thing you want.” that was neither English nor French.
“But you’d better come in. We ought Slowly, slowly, she’d come back from the NEWYORKER.COM
to talk.” dead. And now, after all these years, she Tessa Hadley on what happened next.

THE CRITICS
THE ART WORLD
OUT OF TIME
Mortality and the Old Masters.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
W
e will have so much to say tainment. Consider the heaps of bodies
to one another when the that accumulate in Shakespeare’s trage-
coronavirus crisis is over: dis- dies: catharses of universal fear. The per-
tillations from solitude, in cases like mine. sistence of religion in art that was in-
At seventy-eight, with bad lungs, I’m creasingly given to secular motives—
holed up with my wife at our country Bible stories alternate with spiritually
place until a vaccine is developed and charged themes of Greek and Roman
becomes available. It’s boring. (Remem- mythology—bespeaks this preoccupa-
ber when we lamented the distracting tion. Deaths of children were a perpet-
speed of contemporary life?) On the scale ual bane. Paintings of the Madonna and
of current human ordeals, as the pan- Child, most grippingly those by Giovanni
demic destroys lives and livelihoods, mere Bellini, secrete Mary’s foreknowledge of
isolation hardly ranks as a woe. It’s an her son’s terrible fate. The idea that God
ambivalent condition that, among other assumed flesh, suffered, and died was
things, affords time to think long thoughts. a stubborn consolation—Mary’s to know
One of mine turns to the art in the world’s and ours to take on faith or, if we’re athe-
now shuttered museums: inoperative ists, at least to marvel at as mythic poetry.
without the physical presence of atten- An ineffably sacramental nuance in
tive viewers. Online “virtual tours” add paintings from the Dutch seventeenth
insult to injury, in my view, as strictly century, which luxuriate in the ordinary
spectacular, amorphous disembodiments existence of ordinary people, evokes the
of aesthetic experience. Inaccessible, impermanence of human contentment.
the works conjure in the imagination a Never mind the explicitness of that time’s
significance that we have taken for memento mori, all the skulls and gutter-
granted. Purely by existing, they stir as- ing candles. I am talking about an aware-
sociations and precipitate meanings that ness that’s invisible, but palpable, in Rem-
may resonate in this plague time. brandt’s nights—his fatalistic self-portrait
Why does the art of what we term in the Frick Collection comes to mind—
the Old Masters have so much more and in Vermeer’s mornings, when a young
soulful heft than that of most moderns wife might open a window and be im-
and nearly all of our contemporaries? (I mersed in delicate, practically animate
place the cutoff between the murderous sunlight. The peculiarly intense insouci-
scourges of war that were witnessed by ance of a Boucher or a Fragonard—the
Francisco Goya and those that Édouard sensuous frolics of France’s ancien ré-
Manet, say, read about in newspapers.) gime, immune to concern about abso-
I think the reason is a routine conscious- lutely anything disagreeable, including,
ness of mortality. Pandemic diseases and God forbid, social unrest—protests, in
ABOVE: SERGE BLOCH
innumerable other causes of early death favor of life, rather too much. (Young
haunted day-to-day life, even for those folk dallying at court provide the sole but
creators who were committed to enter- turbulent drama in Fragonard’s “The
Confidence teeters precariously in Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.”

Progress of Love,” a marvellous suite of that is continuous with the one that you ended the dynasty in Spain, amid the
paintings that is also at the Frick.) Only occupy can make you feel invited to walk country’s steep decline as a European
as the nineteenth century unfolds, with into it.) The work’s conundrums orbit power.) Margarita Teresa lived to the
improvements in sanitation and other the question of who—situated where ripe age of twenty-one, married off for
living conditions (for the rising middle in space and when in time—is behold- diplomatic reasons, at the age of fifteen,
classes, at least), does mortal insecurity ing this placid scene in a large room at to become the Empress of the Holy
wane—barring such episodic ravages as the court of the Hapsburg king (and Roman Empire and to bear four chil-
tuberculosis and syphilis, which, like AIDS Velázquez’s employer) Philip IV which dren, only one of whom outlasted in-
a century later, could seem to the un- captures life-size presences with the in- fancy. Her reputed charms did not in-
affected to be selective of their victims— stantaneity of a snapshot. The painter? clude her vicious anti-Semitism. (She
and death start to become an inconve- But he’s in the picture, at work on a can- encouraged her husband, Leopold I, to
nience in the lives of other people. vas, with its back to us, that can only be expel Jews from Vienna and to convert
Now, in our world of effective treat- “Las Meninas.” Some characters, mildly the city’s main synagogue into a church.)
ments for almost anything, death obtains startled, lock eyes with ours; others re- But the glory of her promise in “Las
at the extremes of the statistical and the main oblivious of us. (But who are we?) Meninas” suddenly casts, for me, a
anecdotal, apart from those we love, of There’s the riddle of a distant mirror shadow of ambient and forthcoming
course. People slip away, perhaps with that doesn’t show what you would as- death and disaster. There would never
the ripple of an obituary: celebrity news sume it shows. be another moment in the Spanish court
items. What with the dementias atten- Presuming to grasp the whole is like so radiant—or a painting, anywhere, so
dant on our remorselessly lengthened hazarding a unified theory of relativity good. It’s the second to last of Velázquez’s
lives, many slip away before the fact. Can- and quantum physics. Despite ending greatest works. He all but discontinued
cer is an archipelago of hospital medias I had started—mystified—I congrat- painting, in favor of taking on more
cine, normalized across the land. (I have ulated myself on parsing evidence of the prestigious court duties, and died in
cancer, but with fading awareness of it artist’s chief ingenuity: a perspectival 1660, at sixty-one. Philip IV survived
as immunotherapy gives me an unex- scheme that resolves at a viewing point him by five years.
pected lease on continued life.) The twen- not centered but offset to the right, face This sort of reëvaluation can happen
tieth century shifted our sense of mass to face with a jowly dwarf and opposite when events disrupt your life’s habitual
death to the political: war, genocide, and Velázquez’s rendered position to the left. ways and means. You may be taken not
other numerical measures of evil, lately (Speculations that he must have painted only out of yourself—the boon of suc-
focussed on terrorism, opiates, and guns. the scene with the aid of a large mirror cessful work in every art form, when
Our mourners are respected—and lav- requires one to believe, implausibly, that you’re in the mood for it—but out of
ished with optimistic therapy, as an as- he and a number of other visibly right- your time, relocated to a particular past
pect of a zeal for mental hygiene that handed characters were southpaws.) I that seems to dispel, in a flash of unde-
clears away each night’s corpses before was in aesthete heaven. But, three months niable reality, everything that you thought
every workaday morning. We may well on, marooned by fear of the virus, I’m you knew. It’s not like going back to any-
return to shallow complacency when the interested by an abrupt shift in my at- thing. It’s like finding yourself antici-
present emergency passes. (There’s the titude toward the painting: from lin- pated as an incidental upshot of fully re-
baffling precedent of the 1918-19 influenza gering exhilaration to vertiginous mel- alized, unchanging truths.The impression
pandemic, which killed as many as a hun- ancholy. “Las Meninas” is tragic, as an passes quickly, but it leaves a mark that’s
dred million people, largely young, and apotheosis of confidence and happy ex- indistinguishable from a wound. Here’s
left so little cultural trace.) But right now pectation that teeters precariously—a a prediction of our experience when we
we have all convened under a viral thun- situation that Velázquez couldn’t have are again free to wander museums: Ev-
dercloud, and everything seems differ- known at the time but which somehow, erything in them will be other than what
ent. There’s a change, for example, in my subliminally, he wove into his vision. we remember. The objects won’t have al-
memory of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meni- At the lower middle of the painting tered, but we will have, in some ratio of
nas” (1656), which is the best painting by stands the stunningly pretty five-year- good and ill. The casualties of the coro-
the best of all painters. old Infanta Margarita Teresa, coolly navirus will accompany us spectrally.
self-possessed and attended by two Until, inevitably, we begin to forget, for
Ito nstudying
December, I spent most of two days
“Las Meninas” during a visit
Madrid, when I believed that my end
maids. She is a vessel of dynastic hope,
which proved not to be entirely mis-
placed. Unlike three other children of
a while we will have been reminded of
our oneness throughout the world and
across time with all the living and the
was near. I had set myself the task of ig- Philip IV and his queen (and niece), dead. The works await us as expressions
noring all received theories about this Maria Anna, she survived childhood, of individuals and of entire cultures that
voluminously analyzed masterpiece and, and, unlike her remaining sibling, a have been—and vividly remain—light-
on the spot, figuring out its maddening younger brother, she seems to have es- years ahead of what passes for our un-
ambiguities. It’s big: more than ten feet caped the genetic toll of Hapsburg in- derstanding. Things that are better than
high by about nine feet wide. Its hang- breeding. (When her brother ascended other things, they may even induce us to
ing in the Prado allows for close inspec- the throne, as Charles II, his ruinous consider, however briefly, becoming a bit
tion. (The picture’s illusion of a space disabilities, impotence among them, better, too. 
years that followed, she started a radi-
BOOKS cal newspaper and began opening what
she called “houses of hospitality” for
those who needed something to eat and
A RADICAL FAITH somewhere to stay.
Eventually, Day’s Catholic Worker
The life and legacy of Dorothy Day. Movement would serve the poor in more
than two hundred communities. Under
BY CASEY CEP her guidance, it would also develop a cu-
riously dichotomous political agenda,
taking prophetic stands against racial
segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft,
and armed conflict around the world,
while opposing abortion, birth control,
and the welfare state. That dichotomy
seems especially stark today, when most
people’s beliefs come more neatly pack-
aged by partisan affiliation. But by the
time she died, in 1980, Day had become
one of the most prominent thinkers of
the left and doers of the right. In her
lifetime, it was the secularists—includ-
ing Dwight Macdonald, in a two-part
Profile published in this magazine, in
1952—who called Day a saint. Now,
though, the cause of her sainthood is
officially advancing within the Catholic
Church, a development that has occa-
sioned a new biography and a documen-
tary, both of which explore the conten-
tious question of who owns her legacy.
SmaresheGodDorothy
wasn’t sure if she was afraid of
or the ground, but the night-
Day had as a child fea-
tured a noise that got louder and nearer
until she woke up sweaty and terrified.
She had been born in New York, in 1897,
but her family relocated to California
in 1904, and they were living in Oak-
he Federal Bureau of Investigation emergency. Day would have disagreed land two years later, when the San Fran-
T didn’t know what to do about Dor-
othy Day. It was 1941, and Director
with them: not because she felt she was
dangerous but because she knew that
cisco earthquake struck. That tragedy
changed Day’s life in two ways. First, it
J. Edgar Hoover was concerned about the nation was already in an emergency, affirmed her preëxisting fears about an-
Day’s onetime communism, sometime and had been for some time. nihilation, while simultaneously stirring
socialism, and all-the-time anarchism. The emergency was poverty, and Day in her a theory of mercy based on her
After months of investigating—inter- had been alarmed by it her whole life. mother’s nightly reassurances and the
viewing her known associates, obtain- She first encountered it in the slums of broader response of collectivity and char-
ing her driving record and vital statis- Chicago, where she lived as a teen-ager, ity. Why, she wondered, couldn’t the
tics, collecting her clips from newspaper and she saw it all around her in New community care for all its members so
morgues, and reviewing the first of her York City, where she moved after drop- generously the rest of the time? The
autobiographies, “From Union Square ping out of college, and lived for more second change was more pragmatic: her
to Rome” (“an interesting, running ac- than six decades. Even before the Great father, John, was a sportswriter who
count of the life of the authoress”)— Depression, Day had been sensitive to could barely support his wife and five
the F.B.I. decided that the subject of the plight of the poor, a sensitivity that children on his salary, so when the earth-
Bureau File 100-2403-1 would not need ultimately shaped her calling. At thirty, quake destroyed the press that printed
to be detained in the event of a national she converted to Catholicism. In the his newspaper he moved the family
again, this time to Chicago.
Day, devout and left-wing, believed we needed “a revolution of the heart.” John and Grace, his wife, had been
married in a church, but they never took authoritarianism left her eager to cast off White House with the suffragists, and
their children to worship. Even so, Dor- her religious faith, which her comrades took a billy club in the ribs at an anti-
othy, their middle daughter, was a pious regarded as risible. She joined a literary war riot. “Bohemian” doesn’t begin to
child who read Scripture as ravenously club called the Scribblers and submit- describe Day’s life in this period. Her
as novels and watched with interest as ted work to a magazine and a newspa- drinking was legendary, even by Green-
her friends and their families prayed. At per on campus, along with the local paper wich Village standards; the literary critic
twelve, she demanded to be baptized at in Urbana–Champaign. Her writing was Malcolm Cowley claimed, in his mem-
a nearby Episcopal church; in high school, more impressive than her grades, which oir, that Day could hold her liquor bet-
she learned Greek and practiced her included an F in biology, so, when her ter than most gangsters. Some of that
translation skills on the New Testament. family moved back to New York, Day drinking took place during Prohibition,
She tested her way into a scholarship at dropped out and went with them. and was thus illegal, and much of it took
the University of Illinois, where she ma- Day’s father had helped her brothers place at a bar alternately known as the
triculated not long after the socialist Eu- find journalism jobs, but he refused to Hell Hole and the Bucket o’ Blood. Day’s
gene Debs got nearly a million votes in help her, so she was left to knock on the friends were all writing books or appear-
the 1912 Presidential election. Like many doors of papers around the city. When ing in them, and she was said to be the
other students, she was drawn to the col- that failed, she remembered the alter- model for characters in “The Malefac-
lege Socialist Club, which is where she native media and leftist publications she tors,” by her onetime roommate the nov-
heard a lecture by Rose Pastor Stokes, a had learned about on campus, and found elist Caroline Gordon, and in “A Moon
feminist who went on to help found the a job with the Call, a socialist daily in for the Misbegotten,” by her onetime
Communist Party of America. which her first byline appeared under lover the playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Politics change like the weather, and the headline “Girl Reporter, with Three Day herself wrote a book during this
this era of falling atmospheric pressure Cents in Her Purse, Braves Night Court.” time: an autobiographical novel called
is nicely captured in “Dorothy Day: Dis- A few weeks later, she interviewed “The Eleventh Virgin,” published in
senting Voice of the American Century,” Leon Trotsky, who was then living in 1924. It told the story of a disastrous
a new biography co-written by John the Bronx. After that, she managed to affair she’d had with an older writer,
Loughery and Blythe Randolph. It was craft a feature from a three-minute con- which ended after she attempted sui-
the great age of “isms,” especially on versation with Margaret Sanger’s sister, cide and had an illegal abortion, a pro-
American campuses, and at first Day newly released from prison and desper- cedure performed by an ex-boyfriend
enthusiastically embraced them. Her ate to drum up support for the Ameri- of the anarchist Emma Goldman. Day
family had always been financially mar- can Birth Control League. wrote the novel while honeymooning
ginal, and that left her receptive to all In between writing for every radical in Europe with a different man. The re-
politics that prioritized the poor; at the outlet in town, Day palled around with bound ended no better than the previ-
same time, a rising atheism and anti- Marxists, got arrested for picketing the ous relationship: one morning, Day took
off her wedding ring, left it on the bu-
reau, and walked out of the marriage.
She moved back to Chicago, where
she took jobs in a department store, at a
library, in a restaurant, and as an artist’s
model. Her employment was erratic, but
her politics were consistent. When the
Chicago police raided the Industrial
Workers of the World boarding house,
PREVIOUS PAGE: BOB FITCH PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVE / DEPARTMENT OF
Day was there, and got arrested for pros-
titution—only because the police couldn’t
arrest people for socialism. She was re-
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS / STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
leased from jail a week later, and even-

tually made her way back to New York.
There Day fell in love with a man
named Forster Batterham. After the
abortion, she assumed that she could
not have children, and so was aston-
ished when she became pregnant, then
awed by the birth of a daughter, Tamar
Teresa, in 1926. Without consulting Bat-
terham, an atheist, she stopped a nun
on the street and asked to have the baby
baptized. Plenty of new parents are in-
“I can’t wait to get home, run around outside, spired to return to religion, and Day
and finally eat some fresh food.” would later write of how God had long
haunted her life, but she could never those who wanted to support the labor off. But there were more than twenty
fully explain why she was so suddenly movement. The editors confessed that thousand people living on the street in
and urgently drawn to Catholicism. The it wasn’t “yet known whether it will be New York City alone, and the Catholic
nun she stopped, Sister Aloysia Mary a monthly, a fortnightly, or a weekly,” Workers, as the paper’s writers and read-
Mulhern, didn’t agree to the baptism since they had no idea if any subscrip- ers came to call themselves, knew that
right away, because Day was not yet tions or donations would follow. far more sweeping action was needed.
Catholic; over the next few months, the Trusting in what Christ preached In the winter of 1934, Day and Mau-
pair studied the catechism together, and about the lilies of the field, Day and rin rented a four-story, eleven-bedroom
talked about the faith into which the Maurin focussed on the present, letting building on Charles Street, the first of
activist had become convinced that she God provide for their future. That didn’t their hospitality houses. From the start,
and her daughter needed to be received. mean money wasn’t an issue; it always the Catholic Workers served the sorts
was. They wouldn’t hoard it, of individuals even other so-
atterham did not believe in mar- so an endowment was a non- cial reformers might not
B riage, and, after converting to Ca-
tholicism, Day left him. Then she met
starter, and relying on gov-
ernment funds was anath-
have allowed through the
door: the mentally ill, the
someone else: a fellow-Catholic named ema to them both, so they drunk, the offensive, the dis-
Peter Maurin, who, although never ro- often went begging, which obedient, the ungrateful.
mantically involved with Day, was, in they felt helped them live in When challenged by an-
the deepest sense, her soul mate. Mau- solidarity with those they other Catholic activist about
rin liked to call himself a French peas- served. Grocery bills, print- an encounter with a racist
ant but in reality he was equal parts phi- er’s bills, electric bills: they and anti-Semitic guest on
losopher, troubadour, and troublemaker. asked for money to pay them Charles Street, Day said she
He had heard about Day from some all, and for extensions or for- would not remove him: “He,
other Catholic radicals and was wait- giveness when they could not. (Years after all, is Christ.” The man, an alco-
ing in her apartment when she came later, when they faced a substantial fine holic with dementia, lived with the Cath-
home one day in December, 1932. Most from the city for the allegedly slumlike olic Workers until he died.
people would have called the police, but and hazardous conditions of their head- Within a few years, there were thirty-
she listened patiently as he expounded quarters, the entire amount was paid by two hospitality houses, from Buffalo
on his many ideas and theories and W. H. Auden.) and Baltimore to St. Louis and Seattle.
dreams and programs and plans. Day and Maurin sent the Catholic Day and Maurin continued to publish
Day had just returned from cover- Worker to parishes and priests around their newspaper and to organize for
ing the Communist Party’s hunger the country, and it soon had a circulation labor rights, racial integration, and rad-
march in Washington, D.C. What Mau- of a hundred thousand. They published ical equality. Hardly a protest took place
rin couldn’t have known is that, before the paper monthly, and it became a mix- in New York without at least a few Cath-
leaving the city, she had gone to the ba- ture of articles that Day thought would olic Workers showing up. Not even the
silica at Catholic University and prayed promote and influence the political left Bishop of Rome was spared: when the
to find a way to alleviate the suffering and what Maurin called his “easy essays,” gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery went
of the hungry. The country was three prose poems that amounted to apho- on strike against the trustees of St. Pat-
years into the Great Depression, and risms: “The world would be better off / rick’s Cathedral and the Archbishop of
Day worried that her writing was not if people tried to become better. / And New York, the workers supported them,
doing enough to help; it seemed obvi- people would become better / if they including by picketing the office of the
ous that Maurin was the answer to her stopped trying to become better off.” chancery. The Church hierarchy was
prayer. She quickly agreed to the first It was Maurin who began writing even more vexed by Day’s pacificism,
of many of his ideas: a newspaper to about how the early followers of Jesus which was so unpopular during the Sec-
serve the poor. had kept “Christ rooms” in their homes, ond World War that the newspaper’s
The first issue of the Catholic Worker offering rest and hospitality to strangers. circulation collapsed and Church offi-
came out on May Day, 1933, and asked, He lamented the end of that culture of cials tried to have “Catholic” removed
“Is it not possible to be radical and not welcome, and implored priests and bish- from its title.
atheist?” A religious press printed twenty- ops to use their rectories and diocesan
five hundred copies, and, at a time when properties for such a purpose. With more ut Dorothy Day was always equal
the economy was so constricted that
there were literally no new nickels and
than ten million Americans unemployed,
more than half the country living below
B parts “Catholic” and “worker.” Many
followers of the Pope found her politics
dimes in circulation, Day sold the paper the poverty line, and two million people inconvenient and offensive; many left-
for a penny each in Union Square. She without homes, Maurin asked why the ists thought her faith oppressive and ab-
had written most of its eight pages her- Catholic Church wasn’t doing more to surd. Day’s family initially mistook her
self—arts coverage, exposés on child address the crisis. The newspaper had se- conversion for an emotional crisis, and
labor and racial discrimination, an arti- cured an office and enough of a budget her friends suspected that she had sim-
cle about the Scottsboro Boys going to that he and Day could occasionally rent ply traded her political fanaticism for
trial, and a list of upcoming strikes for apartments for people who had been laid the religious variety; both camps were
surprised when it lasted. Had Day been loried as a “sop thrown to the proletariat.” who sought abortions like the one she’d
an anodyne Protestant or an agnostic To the socialists and communists had, needed the birth control she’d once
Unitarian, her spirituality would have who stood with Day on the picket lines used, were abused by their priests, or
raised fewer eyebrows, but she opted in and protested with her in front of state- were discriminated against because of
to what many of her friends regarded as houses and corporate headquarters, such their sexual orientation. She opposed
the most regressive and patriarchal insti- teachings seemed as nonsensical as the Social Security, believing it to be over-
tution outside of the federal government. Immaculate Conception. And her dis- reach by the state, then lived long enough
That government, by contrast, was tance from would-be allies only increased to watch it save many senior citizens
somewhat assuaged by Day’s religiosity. during the sixties and seventies. Although from financial ruin. She saw the atroc-
Part of what kept her F.B.I. file from she had been plenty countercultural in ities of the Holocaust ended by the Al-
getting any larger was the assurances her own youth, she disapproved of the lies through the global conflict she had
offered by the very hierarchy her leftist drug use, sexual promiscuity, and gen- opposed, and she witnessed the suffer-
friends so despised: as one agent noted, eral disdain for authority that came with ings caused by the Cuban Revolution,
“Church officials believe her to be an hippie culture. Many of the young peo- which she had praised.
honest and sincere Catholic.” That was ple who showed up at the houses of
hospitality—and at the kibbutz-like
putting it mildly: Day took to the Ro-
sary and the saints, the confession and
the liturgy, the miracles and the sacra-
communal farms the Catholic Worker
Movement tried to establish—did not
IdownnMovement,
the early years of the Catholic Worker
Day joked that she wrote
how much money came in and
ments as, to quote the psalmist, a deer even know who Day was, and they were how much money went out but never
longs for flowing streams. She felt that as confounded as the old left had been reconciled the two columns—which is
the Church had cured her alienation and by her joy in the ritual of worship and more or less how she lived her life. Un-
isolation, drawing her into fellowship her solace in the habit of prayer. But what fortunately, it also more or less describes
with a community of living souls. “We most alienated Day from her fellow- Loughery and Randolph’s biography: a
cannot love God,” Day wrote in her mem- radicals was her conviction that what comprehensive, chronological account
oir “The Long Loneliness,” published was needed was not a violent revolution that never arrives at a meaningful sum-
in 1952, “unless we love each other, and but “a revolution of the heart,” as she mation of the life it chronicles. It doesn’t
to love we must know each other. We called it: an ability to see Christ in oth- go much beyond what has been written
know Him in the breaking of bread, and ers, and to love others as God loves us. before: by Day herself in her memoirs;
we know each other in the breaking of As the years passed, faith and radi- in collections of her letters and diaries,
bread, and we are not alone any more.” calism, which coexisted so seamlessly in carefully edited by Robert Ellsberg, the
It wasn’t all balm, though. Day had Day herself, grew further and further managing editor of the Catholic Worker
reservations about Catholic dogma, was apart in the outer world. The left wanted in the late seventies and the son of the
dismayed by the faith’s history of impi- less heart and more revolution; the faith- Pentagon Papers whistle-blower; and
eties and intolerance, and, above all, had ful, less revolution and more heart. Day in the biographies “Dorothy Day: The
no patience for its failures to live up to wanted what she always had: justice for World Will Be Saved by Beauty” (Scrib-
Christ’s core teachings. Still, to her mind, the poor and peace for all. There was ner), by her youngest granddaughter, Kate
her politics were not contradicted but an admirable consistency, perhaps even Hennessy, and “Dorothy Day: A Radi-
confirmed by the Catholic Church, both obstinacy, in much of her political life: cal Devotion” (Da Capo Press), a percep-
in the Gospels and in two of the most in the nineteen-tens, she had picketed tive portrait by the Catholic Worker
consequential encyclicals of the post- for suffrage; in the twenties and thir- turned psychiatrist Robert Coles.
industrial age. The first, Pope Leo XIII’s ties, she had marched for the hungry; A more compelling addition to the
1891 “Rerum Novarum,” praised labor in the forties, she criticized the govern- many studies of Day is Martin Doblmei-
unions and called for reforming capital- ment for the internment of Japanese- er’s new documentary, “Revolution of
ism, asserting that “some opportune rem- Americans; in the fifties, she refused to the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story,” the
edy must be found quickly for the mis- participate in civil-defense drills and latest in his “Prophet Voices” series, which
ery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly protested nuclear proliferation; in the has already featured films about the theo-
on the majority of the working class.” sixties, she denounced the Vietnam logians Reinhold Niebuhr and Howard
The second, Pope Pius XI’s “Quadrage- War, inspiring the men of the Catholic Thurman. (The movie aired on PBS last
simo Anno,” delivered forty years later, Worker Movement to become the first month and is now available on PBS.
affirmed the earlier teaching and called in America to burn their draft cards; in org.) Admiring without being hagio-
for a new economy based on solidarity the seventies (and in her seventies), she graphic—an obvious temptation with the
and subsidiarity. Both encyclicals showed was standing with Cesar Chavez’s farm life of a putative saint—it’s a fine exam-
a respectful apprehension about the role laborers in California when she was ar- ple of what Day herself was always ex-
of the state, believing that it should not rested for the last time. tolling: a kind of personalist experience
interfere in the private lives of its citi- Yet, for almost every one of those whereby our hearts are changed not by
zens or usurp the moral authority of the stands, she took others that she or his- airtight argument or moral perfection
Church. This explained Day’s ongoing tory or both later judged less kindly. Day but by direct encounters with human
anarchism and her hostility to govern- defended the Catholic Church’s sexual needs and those who rise to meet them.
ment welfare programs, which she pil- ethics at the ongoing expense of those Both the documentary and the bi-
ography attempt to sate the curiosity of
a public newly aware of Day because of
the effort to have her sainted. Not ev- BRIEFLY NOTED
eryone is pleased by that possibility.
Loughery and Randolph write that some Hex, by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight (Viking). This swift-mov-
conservatives are “horrified at the pros- ing, sardonic novel follows Nell, a botanist, as she navigates
pect of canonizing a woman who had the fallout of her expulsion from graduate school, owing to
an abortion and a child out of wedlock the accidental death of a colleague. Although Nell’s research
and who condemned capitalism far more career ends prematurely, she persists in nurturing her inter-
frequently and vehemently than she est in poisonous plants by cultivating them in her apartment.
condemned Marxism-Leninism,” while She also remains obsessed with her academic adviser, who is
some progressives “fear the loss of her otherwise occupied—by her husband’s affair with Nell’s best
radical edge,” believing that sainthood friend, and, soon enough, by her own affair with Nell’s ex-boy-
“would be antithetical to her very un- friend. Dinerstein Knight paints a withering portrait of this
institutional, anti-hierarchical approach web of toxic romances, and of the excesses of academia, while
to spiritual growth and social change.” illustrating how both the heart and the mind can be broken
That controversy reflects the con- and reshaped by changing circumstances.
tinuing animosity between the two cen-
tral aspects of Day’s identity. The Cath- New Waves, by Kevin Nguyen (One World). In this début novel,
olic Worker Movement still exists, with two disgruntled tech workers—Margo, the sole black woman
nearly two hundred houses of hospital- engineer at her firm, and Lucas, the only Asian-American
ity around the world and a newspaper non-engineer—form an odd couple whose plan to steal their
that is still published and sold for a penny employer’s customer data is derailed when Margo is killed
(plus postage if you take it by mail), and in a car accident. Lucas moves to a rival startup, where he
it still evangelizes for the “personalist” moderates its Snapchat-like service (designed to abet whistle-
approach—those revolutions of the heart. blowers, it is instead frequented by sexting teen-agers), and
But Day’s influence is also felt in the sifts through Margo’s digital remains in the form of chat-
Democratic Socialists of America, the room transcripts and WAV files. While satirizing the tech
insurgent political organization that was world’s social mores, Nguyen also unearths the biases that
founded in the nineteen-seventies by govern our digital infrastructure, which are omnipresent in
Michael Harrington, who had been an everything from the algorithm behind Pac-Man to the un-
editor at the Catholic Worker in the early derpinnings of surveillance technology.
fifties, but who left after losing his faith.
He went on to publish “The Other Heaven and Hell, by Bart D. Ehrman (Simon & Schuster). This
America: Poverty in the United States,” elegant history explores the evolution of the concept of the
which became the basis for John F. Ken- afterlife in Western thought. Tracing its development over
nedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on several millennia—from the dusty land of the dead in the
Poverty. Unlike Day, who fought for Epic of Gilgamesh to Virgil’s Elysium and Dante’s Para-
suffrage but never voted, the D.S.A. has diso—Ehrman delves into the messy processes that gave rise
poured a great deal of its energy into to doctrines like Purgatory and bodily resurrection. Well-
electoral politics to change not only trod subjects are presented with engaging clarity, and more
hearts, but parties and systems. contentious theories are laid out carefully. Examining why
Needless to say, neither approach, per- certain concepts have proved so durable while others have
sonalist or structural, has succeeded. Even fallen away, Ehrman asserts that humanity’s visions of the
before the coronavirus devastated our afterlife speak to its deepest “needs and aspirations.”
economy and added millions to the un-
employment rolls, half a million Amer- Three Brothers, by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by
icans were homeless, twenty-seven mil- Carlos Rojas (Grove). This memoir of growing up during the
lion lacked health insurance, thirty-eight Cultural Revolution focusses on Yan’s memories of his fam-
million lived in poverty, and forty million ily: his father, who toiled in their field; his elder uncle, who
relied on the Supplemental Nutrition sold home-made socks and wore a jacket covered with patches;
Assistance Program, which the current and his younger uncle, thought to be the one who got away,
Administration is trying to cut. In the who worked long shifts at a cement factory. Yan recalls both
face of that national emergency, one sus- the immense pleasure brought by simple luxuries—candies,
pects that Day would insist that no one sweet potatoes, a shiny polyester shirt—and the initial allure
is the rightful owner of her legacy, be- of the city, where life seemed to have meaning beyond the
cause, as yet, no one has fulfilled it. Stop repetition of the harvest and building tile-roofed houses for
talking about me, she’d almost certainly one’s children to get married in. He left, eventually settling
say, and start talking about the poor.  in Beijing, only to yearn for his ancestral land.
ical text that helps define her own prac
BOOKS tice, “The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media,
Occults.” In necropastoral space, she
has written, nature is “poisoned, mu
READING THE SIGNS tated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill
effects and affects.” The words of the
Joyelle McSweeney and the poetry of catastrophe. living commingle sickeningly with those
of the dead. All poets write in language
BY DAN CHIASSON exhumed in part from their ancestors;
in McSweeney’s work, prior language
takes hold of a poem by seepage or
contamination, in the stealthy way that
“bugs, viruses, weeds and mold” do,
going about their relentless work. As
occult ideas about poetry go, McSwee
ney’s is surprisingly grounded: poetry
isn’t a séance, as it was for Yeats or James
Merrill; it’s a biohazard, teeming with
linguistic contagion.
The power of McSweeney’s work
cannot be separated from its associa
tion with forms of oracle and sooth
saying, and so it is uncanny that it should
arrive in the middle of a global pan
demic. Her style is created by loosing
outbreaks of sound, and then contain
ing them on the page. “Toxic Sonnets:
A Crown for John Keats” is a cascade
of fourteen fourteenline poems, set in
motion when McSweeney reads about
“the tubercle” that killed Keats on a
screen whose glow “wrap[s] the motel
room in light.” A “crown” of sonnets—
an old form, now again in vogue—is
a kind of regulated excess: the last line
of each poem spills over and often be
comes the first line of the next. It’s the
perfect form to suggest a spiralling,
obsessive Internet rabbit hole, and its
final section is a scary tour de force of
he American poet Joyelle McSwee the title mutating from one phrase to open tabs. In the face of death, “life
T ney’s new book, “Toxicon and
Arachne,” is actually two books, bound
another. “Arachne,” the sequel, is named
for the child, “8 pounds, black hair, and
converts its currency”:
as one and yoked together by disaster. a heart shoved aside by its guts,” who dollar bill: killfloor: T-cell: chemical spill:
gyre: fire bred to sink its tooth in bone and
In “Toxicon,” written while carrying died tragically after her “odd alloca breed
her third child, McSweeney imagines tion of thirteen days.” McSweeney fears its own accelerant: rude, encamera’d
her body as a poisonous, dangerous that she will “hemorrhage rage,” then predator drone: thousand-pleated lace rill
host, a “nest of scum” or a “jet engine” “lie down where all the hemorrhages at the throat: rouge to make the corpse look
with a “stork torso” caught inside it. start. & cremate the house & collapse flush
with cash or lust: best guest: grave
The world that awaits the child is on the street.” “Toxicon” is poetry communicant: data drill or bank or dump:
equally, extravagantly lethal: “factory dragged into the pit of a nightmare; plastic
hens” carry “their viral load” while the “Arachne” is its unbearable, almost un asp that guides the chemo to the lump:
“zika mosquito” dips its “improbable thinkable, coda.
proboscis / into the human layer / and McSweeney, who teaches at the Uni “Relations stop nowhere,” Henry
vomits an inky toxin.” The poems are versity of Notre Dame, has published James wrote; but McSweeney’s four
written in a frightening, crusty im three previous books of poetry, plus teenline boxes organize them, as do
pasto, the hard “T” and “x” and “c” of novels, stories, verse plays, and a crit her unsettling rhymes and manic puns.
The line breaks create both recursive
In McSweeney’s work, ambient horror turns into devastating personal loss. and propulsive meanings: “breed,” a
78 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBAR
PROMOTION
noun when it’s part of the phrase “bone becomes a portent of the child’s death.
and breed,” becomes a verb when it’s (“What a name for a baby soap: dread
stitched to the phrase “its own accel- plus bereft.”) The passage that follows
erant”; “flush,” which means either rich is imaginative play of the darkest pos-
or full of blood, can imply “cash or lust.” sible cast:
Some poets strain for these effects.
O rose O ruined map of clots do not
McSweeney, inundated by them, uses open your eyes for me now
form to manage the flood. In “Bio Pic,” when we are even now preparing you for
a scroll of phrases seems generated by Dreft
unconscious associations, or by eerie preparing to take the tomb out
best-guess technologies like autocor- I mean the tube and
wheel you away in your
rect and predictive text: plastic bassinet
delete the fun I suspect that people who have lost
-ction til it hangs on air
lazy as a fan an infant will find in “Arachne” a world
in erased place of forensic detail they never thought
would make its way into poetry, and
The poem suggests the lurching way some may wish it hadn’t. I can imag-
that we write now, sometimes in tune ine it only because McSweeney wrote
with, and often in opposition to, what these poems, with their curdled, ruined
our devices assume about us: “poten- anti-joy, a sorrow too sudden and new
tate / pomegranate / palm or pomade / to be called by the name of grief. The
handgrenade.” The alternatives seem chemicals that created anticipation in
to pop up almost of their own irritat- the brain for months still pool in the
ing volition. aftermath of tragedy. The crib and the
A writer of McSweeney’s intense “cheerful wallpaper,” the Dreft and the
receptivity suffers the onslaught of her diapers could all belong in the photo
style almost as a series of physical blows. cloud or Instagram feed of a happy par-
The violence, the catastrophe, the Tech- ent. Instead, here they are, in an elegy.
nicolor hellscapes are nearly too much “Catastrophe what crowns me,”
to bear. “Toxicon” is babyproofing in McSweeney writes. “What makes me
an apocalypse: the fact of McSweeney’s survive.” The costs, though, are exor-
pregnancy rings out from every lethal bitant. “I summon all mine vanity,” she
detail. She is shaken by the thought of writes, employing the beautiful, archaic
snuff sites, crime-scene photographs, English borrowed from the ghost pres-
and grim hospital tableaux. The mind ences that circulate throughout her
that cannot unhear the echo of “hand- poems (Keats, Anne Bradstreet, Sir
grenade” in “pomegranate” races ahead Thomas Browne, and so many others):
to macabre visions of freak accidents,
and crash my plane
as “when the teenager seizes in the into the abandoned nursery
driveway, her hatchback /glides down
into traffic on its own.” & break my brainstorm down
I mean my brainstem
starved of oxygen
“A rachne” begins with an omen:
training her eye to her daugh-
eating itself
emitting its bleat
ters’ level, McSweeney sees that the like a nameless weed
sidewalks are full of “kinetic sand” (a on the edge of the galaxy
fringing the galaxy’s cunt
vaguely radioactive-seeming substance in that wrecked room
that was a brief fad toy) “in place of
smashed robin’s eggs.” The idiolect The kamikaze fantasy arises, like ev-
that McSweeney perfected for all-over, erything in this frightening and bril-
ambient horror must now zero in on liant book, not from a pleasant “brain-
a loss so targeted and personal that it storm” but from the animal reflexes of
feels, at times, like a sick prank. “Was the “brainstem.” The defeat is total: a
it for this,” she asks, echoing the same rout, a blowout. Now that the tables
question Wordsworth put to himself have been permanently turned, “the
in “The Prelude,” that “even the un- popsong plays” on “the toy turntable”
ready man” has become “catastrophe’s in the nursery and also—you can hear
host”? A box of Dreft, the baby soap, the faint pun—“in eternity.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
jixianshe
ng
Goode, a wealthy conservationist,
ON TELEVISION once ran his own menagerie, the infa-
mous Manhattan night club Area, where
he partied with Madonna, Warhol, and
WILD THINGS Basquiat in the eighties. Goode and
Chailkin were originally planning to
“Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” on Netflix. make a film about the underworld of
endangered-animal smugglers when, in
BY DOREEN ST. FÉLIX 2014, as they searched for collectors of
rare reptiles in Florida, other charis-
matic megafauna caught their attention.
As Goode recently told Rolling Stone,
“What fascinated Rebecca and I was
the ‘Best in Show’ aspect, where the
people are almost more interesting than
the exotic animals they’re keeping.”
Goode’s choice of inspirational com-
parison—a mockumentary—is telling;
in “Tiger King,” from the edge of the
frame, he delights in the near-unbeliev-
able eccentricities of his subjects. “Oh,
she’s dressed perfectly,” he murmurs
when Exotic’s nemesis, Carole Baskin,
the proprietor of Big Cat Rescue, a Flor-
ida animal sanctuary, first appears, draped
in her signature leopard print.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates
that there may be more tigers living in
captivity in the U.S. than in the wild.
The creatures at Exotic’s Garold Wayne
Zoo, a park near Wynnewood, Okla-
homa, are caged and fed roadkill; the
employees, among them drifters fed on
Walmart dumpster meat, fare about as
well. There is a dark comedy in the doc-
umentary’s elliptical form, which pairs
older footage of Exotic’s acolytes along-
side more contemporary interviews. Since
leaving Exotic, John Finlay, Exotic’s for-
mer husband, who is inexplicably shirt-
ho deserves the directing credit I might have passed over “Tiger King” less in interviews, has had his pelvis tat-
W for “Tiger King: Murder, May-
hem and Madness,” which, in the long
had not so many memes appeared on
my timeline, including one, framed as
too—“Privately Owned Joe Exotic,” in
large script—covered up. Human suffer-
last week of March, became Netflix’s a “coming out of quarantine” fantasy, in ing is dangled before the viewer like raw
most popular title? The answer isn’t which Exotic, pacing with the aid of a meat; one former animal handler has a
straightforward. True, it was the docu- crutch, a big cat behind him, says, mat- missing forearm that goes, for an agoniz-
mentarians Eric Goode and Rebecca ter-of-factly, “I’m broke as shit,” and ing forty-eight minutes, unmentioned.
Chailkin, along with a team of presum- “I’ve had some kinky sex. I have tried Rick Kirkham, a former reporter for
ably traumatized editors, who tamed drugs.” Eyes circled with kohl, silver “Inside Edition,” decamped to the G.W.
five years’ worth of footage, new and hoops like binder rings in his lobes, Ex- Zoo to shoot what he and Exotic hoped
found, into this outrageous and outra- otic is a Scheherazade of country Okla- would be a hit reality show, “Joe Exotic,
geously viewable seven-part true-crime homa stock, a lonely cult leader in the Tiger King.” “He was like a mythical
series. But the subject of “Tiger King,” fetching getup of a zookeeper. He is character living out in the middle of
Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who was also an outsider artist with an ability to bumfuck Oklahoma,” Kirkham says.
born Joseph Schreibvogel and goes by hold hostage many species—big cats, Kirkham’s cast might also have included
Joe Exotic, is at least as responsible for boyfriends and husbands, employees Exotic’s fellow-zookeeper Bhagavan
bringing a unity of vision to the show. and documentarians. (Doc) Antle, a burly tiger enthusiast
who styles himself as a guru, and who,
“Tiger King,” a kaleidoscope of terrible taste, is prestige trash. depending on whom you ask, has three,
80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL WINDLE
four, five, or nine much younger wives; for the Baskins, “Tiger King” remains which Exotic, giving a eulogy, describes
and Mario Tabraue, a Cuban man in loyal to its eponymous subject, and foot- a sexual maneuver that Maldonado liked
late middle age who ran a cocaine ring, age is mercilessly edited to make her to perform. Maldonado is not only a vic-
went to prison for racketeering, and is seem like a hippie murderess. At one tim of Exotic’s egotism; he is a casualty
supposedly the inspiration for Tony point, on learning that one of Exotic’s of “Tiger King,” too.
Montana in “Scarface.” (“I sold drugs employees might have tried to have him But I’m being a downer, aren’t I?
to maintain my animal habit,” Tabraue killed by spraying perfume on his shoes “Tiger King” is prestige trash: narratively
says at one point.) before he entered a tiger cage, she count- ambitious but self-aware. True crime is
The reality show struggled, Kirkham ers, without missing a beat, that sardine far from journalism. (Exotic’s history was
explains, because Exotic would not re- oil would have been more effective. more thoroughly investigated in a New
linquish control over his own story. (Most Chailkin and Goode are less inter- York magazine story by Robert Moor.)
of the footage was lost in a mysterious ested in getting to the truth of the mat- In the series’ final episode, Exotic, sen-
fire.) In “Tiger King,” too, Exotic exploits ter than in revelling in their subjects’ tenced to twenty-two years on charges
himself before anyone else can, spinning chintzy vanity projects: Baskin’s YouTube of animal abuse and attempted murder
his biography—the closeted youth; the channel (“Hey, all you cool cats and kit- for hire, is beamed in from a county jail.
suicide attempt; the flight from home; tens”), Doc Antle’s videos of women His empire has fallen; he has learned,
the adoption of wild animals as a surro- dancing with primates, and, most mem- he says, that it is wrong to cage a living
gate family—into an affecting queer trag- orably, the country-music videos in which thing. Online, viewers have passionately
edy. Authenticity, for Exotic, is an ouro- Exotic is shown singing, suspiciously debated Exotic’s sentencing. Was he
boros of performance. In the second well, about man and cat. When, in 2016, framed? “Tiger King” provides no sense
episode, after we are shown the gruesome Exotic runs for President—the meme I of closure. After bingeing on the seven
footage that explains that missing fore- saw was a clip of a campaign video—he episodes, I felt hoodwinked, hungover.
arm, we watch as Exotic, who has found gives out condoms adorned with the slo- So what was it all about? I’ve sat with
the time to put on a shiny E.M.S. bomber gan “For Your Protection, Vote Joe Ex- a few theories—that “Tiger King” is a
jacket, visits the G.W. gift shop. “Ladies otic.”The documentary is a kaleidoscope takedown of the libertarian ethos, a dis-
and gentlemen, before you hear it on the of terrible taste, and Goode and Chailkin patch from the last frontier of white co-
news, I’m gonna tell you myself,” he says luxuriate in their subjects’ mullets, bad lonialism, a Trumpian fable. (In late
to his customers in the manner of an cowboy fringes, and acid-blond bleach March, Exotic asked the President for
m.c., before informing them that an em- jobs, which, these days, in fashion- a pardon.) The only observation that
ployee has been mauled. forward circles, amount to a kind of feels true is that “Tiger King” is what
fucked-up glamour. The directors are not we watched two weeks into our isola-
he plot of “Tiger King” centers on judgmental, guided instead by the plea- tion. Comfort television wasn’t working;
T the battle between Exotic and
Baskin. She campaigns for the closure
sure principle. Consider the troubling
story of Travis Maldonado, one of the
we needed something uglier. For the
past four years, we have trained ourselves
of the G.W. Zoo; Exotic films himself young men whom Exotic seduces, we’re not to laugh at the antics of bad men;
shooting at dummies he has named Car- told, with the help of weed and meth. our collective embrace of “Tiger King”
ole. Exotic is convinced that, in the nine- Maldonado was nineteen when he mar- speaks of a renewed craving for the crass,
ties, Baskin murdered her husband and, ried Exotic and twenty-three when he the politically incorrect, the culturally
perhaps, fed him to her tigers. She de- accidentally shot himself in the head, a insensitive—an outlet for the id now
nies the accusations with a bemused grin moment witnessed by Exotic’s campaign that the ego is under siege. In any case,
while pretending to tolerate her current manager as captured by security footage very briefly, it was the other thing that
husband, Howard, who follows her that is included in the fifth episode. This everyone talked about—and for that rea-
around like a needy pet. Unfortunately shocking turn is followed by footage in son we were grateful to be horrified. 
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Julia Suits,
must be received by Sunday, April 12th. The finalists in the March 30th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 27th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
“ ”
..........................................................................................................................
THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION
“We’re trying to teach him not to beg at the table.”

Ben Herschbein, Palm Desert, Calif.
“Past the alligator, through the ring “I know I don’t look familiar,
of fire, first door on your left.” but, believe me, I eat here all the time.”
Gregory W. Kirschen, Woodbury, N.Y. Phil Walker, Fallston, Md.
“Let’s just say he’ll have what you’re having.”

Wilson Muller, South Pasadena, Calif.

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What are some of the books highlighted in the document?

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PRICE $8.

99 APRIL 13, 2020

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE

BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 1

stories from is the author of “Among the Thugs”

Gary Shteyngart (“Dispatches from a Lorrie Moore (“Dispatches from a Pan-

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

Classic New Yorker pieces,

PERSONAL HISTORY POSTSCRIPT

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 3

APRIL 8 – 14, 2020

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

for her painterly photographs, for which she

queer black men—is loose and convivial, as

6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020

caretaker’s elementary chores—their toll is into an unidentifiable oblivion—as on

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 7

Pain and Gain

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020

With the COVID-19 crisis forcing schools and many

ONonce, I asked Bob, “Which of your

Sderhakespeare did his ﬁnest work under

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 35

BERLIN, GERMANY, BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

efore Renée Bach went to Uganda,

J acqueline Kramlich, who left Serving

The Other One

62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY BEA DE GIACOMO

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 69

THE ART WORLD

Confidence teeters precariously in Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.”

leased from jail a week later, and even-

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 81

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“We’re trying to teach him not to beg at the table.”

“Let’s just say he’ll have what you’re having.”

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