Letter from New York

Native Hawaiian novelist Kiana Davenport was alone in her New York City apartment when the pandemic struck. By March 23, she wrote us, the city was “on total lockdown... stores nearly empty. Each day we go out like packs of wolves foraging for food...”

While completing her forthcoming novel, Mauna Kea, she also kept a record of New York’s “pandemic of grief,” and followed COVID’s effect on her family and friends in Hawai‘i. Engaged in volunteer work, she also became passionately involved in the Black Lives Matter protests.

This is her account of that year unlike any other in American, and Hawaiian, history. We thank her for it. —D.W.

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It recently occurred to me that the last human being I literally (not virtually) hugged was Michael Ondaatje. It was just over a year ago, a memorial here in New York City for W.S. Merwin, former U.S. Poet Laureate and life-long Maui Resident. Before Ondaatje read from Merwin’s works, we stood off in a corner, remembering another near-genius—Anthony Minghella. Though he had died in 2008, his early death was still a shock to many in the theatre and film world.

Felled by cancer at only fifty-four Minghella was, for many, the quintessential virtuoso—pianist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, director of operas and such luminous films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain. Whatever medium he worked in, his conceit was the light touch, lavishing audiences with magic and poetry without ever leaving his footprint. Ondaatje had been one of his closest friends. My association with Anthony Minghella was, unfortunately, brief.

A few years after my novel, Song of the Exile, was published, he had expressed interest in the possibility of adapting it for the screen. He was a jazz lover and much of the novel deals with jazz musicians in 1940’s Honolulu, New Orleans and Paris. But I felt the primary story—hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” kidnapped and imprisoned by the Japanese Army during WWII—would be impossible to adapt. But Minghella was considered a magician. So, we met.

He was short, thickset, and shaven-headed, built more like a stevedore than an artist. But he had the sweetest, most cherubic smile, and the most soulful eyes of any human I have ever met, large, hypnotically dark and piercing. His gaze was benevolent, soothing as a balm. Even his voice was soothing, mellifluous and soft, not harsh and clipped like most Brits. I felt that if he took my hand, all my sins would be forgiven. 

I don’t remember much of our meeting. I was too in awe. He talked primarily about characters in novels that attracted him—people lost, marooned, or so damaged that language failed them. His task was to give them expression. And he talked about time. The concept of time. How we’re doomed to race against it. He even loved the sound of it, how it reverberated and hung suspended in the mind. 

“TIME...such a ravishing word!”

That’s what the English language was for him. A ravishment. Sadly, we never met again. A future meeting postponed, then another. I learned that Minghella was ill, then, tragically, he died. He was buried in his birthplace on the Isle of Wight.

So. Years later, remembering him with Michael Ondaatje. That heartfelt hug.

Shortly after that night the country was hit by the Corona Virus and we entered a warp-speed metamorphosis. Rumors of hospitals filling almost overnight. Stores running out of staples. By the end of March 2020 all non-essential businesses were closed across the city. The governor issued a stay-at-home order. Faces were mostly still naked then. Recommendations for wearing gloves and face masks largely ignored. A new term, “social distancing,” was coined, and mostly ignored as well. Whatever this virus was, it would pass. The shortage of food would pass. New Yorkers were proven die-hards. 

As we know, the virus didn’t pass; it spread exponentially. Soon there were over 30,000 cases confirmed in New York City, and over 700 deaths. We were already outpacing China, the UK and Iran, and would shortly become the epicenter of the virus infection in the world. Face masks were now mandated and every day saw spikes in “cluster areas” of the city—poor neighborhoods flooded with immigrants. The pandemic would ultimately become the deadliest disaster by death toll in the history of New York City. By now subways had become a petri dish for breeding and spreading the virus. Overnight services were discontinued so workers could sanitize each car. Some of those workers would ultimately die from coronavirus. Many of us would not ride a subway again for over a year. We finally grasped that this virus was a rampaging killer. With all non-essential businesses shut down, hundreds of thousands out of work, the loss of tax revenues was reportedly climbing towards the billions.

The day the USNS Comfort majestically sailed into New York Harbor, people lined the shore, waving American flags. A floating hospital with 1,000 beds, big red crosses painted on its sides, it sailed past the Statue of Liberty who saluted it with her torch. People wept. A real “chicken skin,” requisite, New York moment. Still, the ship was purely symbolic. It would take more than 1,000 beds to rescue a city suddenly deluged with death.

By April there were over 72,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in New York City and over 2,400 deaths. (Plus what would later prove to be an unreported 2,050 additional nursing home deaths). With such galloping figures, and medical supplies running low, our city leaders swallowed their collective pride and called out for assistance. China responded by sending us 1,000 ventilators. Ironic, considering the much-chanted tropes of China having sent us the virus through Wuhan’s gory “wet markets.” Meanwhile, thousands of federal medics, Army reservists and the National Guard flooded the city. 

To leave our apartments even for food was suddenly terrifying. Touching anything seemed deadly, even with rubber gloves. Even eye contact seemed deadly. When cartons of desperately needed food arrived from relatives, I was afraid to touch the boxes. We were told this virus clung to cardboard, to shoes, to housekeys. I double-masked, gloved-up and carried the cartons to the basement, spray-coated them with Lysol, then went at them with boxcutters. For the next year, each time packages arrived, I went through this arduous process. 

By now I was beginning to experience a growing sense of impairment from the lack of human touch. The current love of my life had gone to Zurich for research; now he was stuck there in Europe’s lockdown. He called several times a week but there was no loving hand to hold, no comforting shoulder to lean on. Most mornings I foraged for food with friends, but we could not touch. In the evenings I jogged with other friends; again we could not touch. Knowledge, intuition, comes to us through our five senses. Now one of those crucial senses, touch, was missing. We were beginning to feel impoverished.

“New Yorkers hardly reacted. With no reprieve in sight, we assumed that we were all eventually going to die.”

We discussed orphans who had seldom been touched in infancy, how they grew up disabled. How infants and pets respond almost ecstatically when held and stroked. Without touching, or being touched, I wondered if our other senses might fade as well. In fact, in the coming months some of us would temporarily lose our sense of smell and taste, and even hearing. There was a creeping fear that eventually all of our senses would fade. As humans, we would come unmoored. 

I had just turned eighty, and was still high-energy, madly in love with life and all its challenges. But suddenly, I felt old and vulnerable, a little less than human. It was no comfort that most folks felt that way. We were being altered in ways we could not fathom. It may take the fixity of years to fully grasp this pandemic that impaired us, and perhaps permanently altered us. I will ever be haunted by that crippling feeling of not being allowed to touch another human.

By now the corporate world and Wall Street were functioning electronically, as were grade schools and universities. Traditional classes had been supplanted by ZOOM sessions. A professor friend at N.Y.U. was forced to lecture to laptop screens. She hated it. Most of her colleagues hated it, but this was the new reality. Without warning, the virus had catapulted the world into a new epoch that could potentially render boardrooms and classrooms obsolete.

Meanwhile, we followed the news, the soaring rates in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco. We tossed statistics back and forth—deaths, recoveries, causes, cures—like seasoned epidemiologists. But we were just quoting. New Yorkers had no clue to what was really happening in the city, or out in the world. Life seemed to hinge on abstractions, it all seemed a horrible make-believe. Death seemed so pervasive, the fear so constant, denial so extreme, that we entered a kind of psychic numbing, finding a gallows humor in obituaries, in displaced corpses. Except for marrieds and live-in couples, the city was becoming a crucible of loners yearning for the touch—a hug!—of other humans, which was perversely counter- intuitive, because other humans were what could potentially kill us.

We began to drink alone while glued to nightly newscasts showing hospitals so congested that pediatrics wards were turned into respiratory wards. Other wards were overflowing into ICU’s. In disbelief we watched exhausted nurses in Hazmat suits and face shields hold the hands of the dying while their sobbing families waved to them behind window glass. Funeral homes were now so overloaded that families were holding funerals in parking lots. 

The city suddenly faced such dire shortages that face shields were now being rationed out to medical personnel. When city hospitals became glutted, temporary field hospitals were set up at, and juxtaposed with, the Aqueduct Race track, the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens, and in Manhattan’s pastoral Central Park. Ignoring the needs of New Yorkers’ beloved pets, all veterinarian clinics in the city donated their ventilators to human hospitals.

Death continued spiking in the city, then the testing for coronavirus screeched to a halt. Medical suppliers had run out of cotton swabs. New Yorkers hardly reacted. With no reprieve in sight, we assumed that we were all eventually going to die. I have always vowed that when it was time to die I wanted to be home in Hawai‘i, at peace in my favorite bay. One day with no forethought I packed a bag and headed for Honolulu. At the airport I found I lacked the newly required documents: proof of a coronavirus health test, and the negative results. Besides, by now most planes were grounded. I returned to the city, and like many New Yorkers, updated my will, wept, and cleaned out my closets. Then I joined the evening ritual of most of my friends—broke out the vodka and watched the sordid evening news: families tragically bidding ‘face-time’ farewell to loved ones in ICU wards, some victims so wasted they had already left this time zone. Only their shells remained. 

Across the city the virus proved twice as deadly for poor Black and Latino neighborhoods who already suffered from grossly inadequate health care. Of course, this glaring disparity was repeated across the country. Yet 75% of the frontline and essential workers in NYC were minorities. A year hence, more than 5,200 Latinos and low-income immigrants would tragically be dead from the virus. Mayor de Blasio claimed that we were experiencing the deadliest disaster by death toll in the history of New York City, so few people noticed when eight extremely rare Malayan tigers at the Bronx Zoo contracted the virus from humans and died before the zoo was permanently closed.

By May there were rumors that virus cases were declining, that the Stay-at- Home-Order would be rescinded. That schools would re-open in September. But spikes in infection skyrocketed in cluster areas of the city, and all rumors were squashed. Within days we were by blindsided by another cataclysm—the grotesque killing of an innocent black, George Floyd, by a white cop who knelt on his neck for nine-plus minutes while he called out for his mother. His brutal death, plus the execution-style “accidental” killing of a young, black EMT worker, Breonna Taylor, shot nine times by cops, and the cold-blooded stalking-murder of a young black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, by three Georgia rednecks, spear-headed the rallying cry across the country against the heinous and deep-seated racism against Blacks, Asians, and all minorities, that was the hallmark of America.

The world was already seething from mass COVID deaths and shutdowns, so we were ripe for the riots and “Black Lives Matter” protests that exploded in almost every country around the globe. A world-wide protest against the unwarranted deaths of thousands of innocent “minority” men and women who had been shot or beaten to death in cold blood over the past year, past decade, the past century. 

So we demonstrated, we marched. Banners waving, we joined torch-bearing crowds at Union Square. Locking arms—Blacks, Asians, mixed races—we held our banners high: 

BLACK LIVES MATTER!

DEFUND THE POLICE!

#8CANTWAIT!

That first night we chanted and marched for hours until the crowd had become a wave of humanity rolling down the avenues from Union Square to Washington Square, a six-block stretch that seemed like miles because of the thousands of angry marchers pouring in from uptown, downtown and all five city boroughs. After hours of protesting and calling for police reforms, inevitably violence broke out.

When homemade bombs began exploding, cop squads and SWAT teams advanced with clubs, tear gas and fire hoses. We ran, fleeing in all directions. Passing the Strand Bookstore, that beloved New York institution, I said a quick prayer that its windows would be not shattered. The gods were good, they remained intact. Rioting and protesting would go on all summer, all over the city and the country. If not a racial reckoning, at least a racially transformative movement long overdue, that would hopefully institute more radical police reforms. (Although, with America’s history, the conundrum of race will probably remain unsolvable for years.) 

In spite of the raging pandemic and masking and social distancing, whenever it was possible I marched, waving my Ka Hae Hawai‘i, and wearing my old baseball cap lettered I KU MAU MAU!

Each time I translated the words for strangers I felt great pride. Deep in my heart and in my soul, whenever I marched, for whatever cause, I was also marching in honor of my people of Hawai‘i Nei—the jobless, the homeless, the tent-cities, the children in rags. With billions of dollars in revenues from the military industry and from tourism, Native Hawaiians should not be subjected to such dehumanizing poverty, which is one of the most blatant signs of institutionalized racism. And I marched for Kahu Puanani Case and Dr. Noe Noe Wong, who for years have led Native Hawaiian kia‘i in their protest against building the Thirty Meter Telescope on our sacred Mauna Kea, a monstrosity that would destroy the mountain. As our leaders explained to the United Nations, the telescope is another example of systemic racism. Though I am far away from home, I will always march because I am kanaka maoli. 

And so we marched, we protested. It felt good. To raise our fists and shout. To be alive.

What plunged me back into the grim realities of coronavirus was the death of a friend, Maria Verona. Life was suddenly deja vu. In 2001, two days after 9/11, I had stood at the bombed World Trade Center, searching for missing friends including Heather Ho, beloved friend from Honolulu, then Executive Pastry Chef at Windows on the World Restaurant, on the 107th floor of the North Tower. An award-winning chef, she planned to open her own bakery and had already given notice. I remembered how we had once stood on the Observation Deck of the North Tower, trying to call Honolulu on our cell phones. I remembered Heather’s beautiful smile, her love of pastries, her laughter.

By then the Towers had collapsed. Ground Zero resembled an exploded volcano. Ash everywhere. The smell of scorched death. That was how I met Maria. A young news reporter assigned to cover Ground Zero, she was also searching for a missing cousin, a broker on the 105th floor of the North Tower. For days we trekked from Manhattan to Staten Island to New Jersey, hospital to hospital, searching for survivors. A doctor finally took us aside and explained that no one above the impact zones had survived. We stared at ash-covered workers and fire trucks, trying to grasp that much of the debris was from incinerated humans. In 2002, forensic specialists identified Heather’s remains through her dental records. Her family in Honolulu finally had closure. Maria never received proof of her cousin’s death.

In NYC we kept in touch, forever bound by those days at Ground Zero. One night Maria told me that she and her cousin had been madly in love; they had been secret lovers for years. But, being first cousins, their marriage was forbidden by her family. She had never recovered from his death on 9/11. She had never married. I hadn’t seen her for several months when I got word that Maria had died two weeks after she was diagnosed with coronavirus. Her family said there were underlying complications. Her immune system was weak; for years she had been subject to colds. I thought of the many ways our bodies camouflage a broken heart.

I grieved for Maria, her unlived life. But after the grief and shock, her death galvanized me. I would honor her by getting out and volunteering, no matter the governor’s stay-at-home orders. I stocked up on masks and hand sanitizers and went out into the city, joining groups that delivered food to shut-ins, to homeless shelters, to cardboard denizens living in abandoned store fronts. We emptied trash bins from field hospitals and municipal hospitals, delivered pizza to exhausted nurses. We delivered coffee to security guards in parking lots where massive trucks were parked. 

“Some nights I pulled off my mask and stared in the mirror. The pandemic could last for years. Could mouths become genetically recessive?”

Eventually we learned from the guards that the trucks were refrigerated—each so large they held sixty corpses. Hospital morgues had begun to overflow. Body bags were piling up in corridors. When funeral homes reached capacity, and their cremation chambers broke down from overuse, corpses were packed into the refrigerated trucks and parked all over the city. Death began to outpace New Yorkers. You could smell the stacked-up dead from field hospitals in the parks. More freezer trucks were brought into Manhattan. Then hundreds, maybe thousands, more. We heard rumors, then we saw it for ourselves. The freezer trucks now parked on side streets everywhere. We began to recognize them, knowing what they contained. When trucks were full, sometimes bagged bodies were temporarily propped beside the trucks.

At the height of a sudden heat wave, the inconceivable became reality. New York was overwhelmed by the dead. With overcrowded morgues and glutted funeral homes, even the city and borough crematoriums began breaking down under the volume of corpses. Then the unthinkable happened. Refrigeration in the trucks broke down. And they began to leak. New Yorkers were suddenly faced with body fluids of decomposing cadavers glistening in our streets. 

Neighborhood dogs were first alerted by the smell. They sniffed around the trucks, then backed away. Children stood and stared. We all stood and stared. It was like a disaster movie. Puddles of deadly pathogens were poisoning our streets. The city had reached a critical mass. Neighborhoods had to be swiftly cordoned off while death-care personnel in Hazmat suits and visors packed corpses suffused with the deadly virus into body bags full of ice, and carted them off to hastily established round-the-clock disaster-morgues—massive death-warehouses set up at marine terminals in far South Brooklyn. 

There each body was processed, tagged, their information entered into computer systems. Then they were wheeled out to clean refrigerated tractor trailers, placed on a numbered shelf and if they were lucky, eventually picked up by a funeral director. This is how the New York City death-care system was dealing with mass death. Those not claimed after fifteen days were sent to nearby Hart Island and buried in pine boxes atop each other by inmates from Riker’s Island. Great efforts were made to keep the death-warehouses out of the news. 

Our American psyche still found it hard to confront mortality. Later in the year, when The New York Times ran 1,000 names from the 200,000 dead, readers collapsed. HELP lines were flooded. The printed names seemed to make their death more actual. I kept thinking of the unclaimed dead. Their names mixed up or lost, their families never notified. Who wept for them?

In spite of the riots and mass-deaths, June brought a faux-euphoria to the city. Trees abloom—birds singing their hearts out. But we still consciously avoided other humans, even close friends. New Yorkers had begun to look creaturely, not altogether human. Sartorially speaking, we now resembled Russian serfs, wearing the oldest clothes we owned which, after they became force-fields of scent, we simply threw away. Laundromats were rumored to be breeding grounds for the virus. By now, sign language had become popular because masks muffled our words. The memory of face-to-face small talk became such a precious thing, we stopped calling it “small talk.”

After four months, we were suffering from brain fog, a mental fall-out caused by constant stress that was slowly cascading into trauma. Psychologists described it as a kind of moral injury, a constant assault on our bodies and our souls. Then we started suffering memory loss—like loose light bulbs in a socket. Face-to-face conversation had become a thing of the past—white space—and without that visual, animated connection, perhaps our brains had gone on hiatus. Friends forgot to feed their dogs. They took them for walks, and left them in the park. When something funny happened in a food line, no one laughed. Instead we mimed chuckles by bouncing our heads up and down in pseudo-gaiety. We were no longer connecting. Besides not touching, we were forgetting facial expressions, forgetting how to speak. Some nights I pulled off my mask and stared in the mirror. The pandemic could last for years. Could mouths become genetically recessive?

Friends ZOOM’d back and forth, comparing our symptoms. We were all drinking excessively, binge-watching movies excessively, and everyone seemed to be dreaming of the dead. Our mothers, our fathers, friends betrayed, lovers deceived. We wanted them to come back, to hold us and forgive us. I dreamed of my late husband three nights in a row and woke up smelling his cologne. I dreamed of Auntie Minnie Kelomika and Uncle Ayau, who hanai’ed me and raised  me in Kalihi, and woke up smelling the Chinese parsley on Auntie’s hands when she had taught me our ancient myths ...Hanau Po‘ele I ka po, he wahine... 

Dreams had become our palpable reality.

As death rates escalated, more loved ones dying, more black banners were hung from our windows. More votive candles glowed. The only outlet for our pent-up grief and hysteria was the “Clap for Carers” hour at 7 p.m. each night when, across the city and the boroughs, we hung out of our windows, blowing horns and whistles, banging drums and pots and pans, shouting, nay shrieking, our thanks in a dozen different languages, to essential workers, doctors, nurses and support teams laboring 24/7 in order to save lives. Of course, our gratitude was deep and genuine, but that hour was also our only outlet, that wisp of liberation when each day we could stand maskless and give vent to our inexorable isolation, our longing to be touched, to be held, to not be alone.

Summer arrived as the early hysteria of the pandemic degraded into a deep malaise and hopelessness. The word “vaccine” was frisbee’d back and forth in Washington, then dropped. “Metal mouth” grew common—a metallic taste that erased smell and appetite. We were told it was either a pre-condition of the virus, or purely psychosomatic, a layman’s version of what thousands of medics were suffering. In truth we were all suffering. Locked inside this massive city like hapless dogs in a kennel, we watched corporations fail, Wall Street close, the stock market plummet. I watched my world of publishing shut down. Authors suddenly felt we were not only sealed off from the rest of the world; we were suddenly future-less, career-less, our art, our income seemingly vanished, irretrievable.

Then, Nature momentarily brought us back to life. City beaches were opened. Parks abloom with tulips, magnolias. Trees were avenues of bursting buds. Without the normal glut of humans in the early months of COVID, squirrels had formed gonzo gangs and stormed the parks in raucous packs that both cheered and frightened us. Birds swarmed in flocks, singing their hearts out. Free of humans, earth had come back to life. Now crowds poured out onto the Great Lawn and Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Mutinous adolescents ripped off their masks and shirts and ran through the park shouting “FREEDOM!” Couples lolled on blankets, savored blue skies and chugged wine under their lifted face masks. Friends compared Netflix and Hulu, online poker and chess, and even colon-cleansing to alleviate the day-to-day boredom. Oh, and orgasm—did one remove one’s mask for that?

For a brief while we felt human, frivolous and childlike. We had been granted a reprieve—the virus would soon dissipate, or herd immunity would kill it. Then, Evie, my beloved cousin from Kalihi, died in California, and on the same day I learned that Derek Ho had died at fifty-five. Our World-Surfing Champion, our Nureyev of the Pipeline. How often we had car-pooled out to the North Shore to watch and applaud his incredible surfing. So, I mourned for two.

5,000 miles from Hawai‘i, I had panic attacks, thinking of my cousins and their children and grandchildren, if they were observing the rules, wearing their masks, keeping their distance. With our love of ‘ohana it would be near impossible to keep families from gathering. I worried about our health issues back home, the high rates of diabetes, and obesity, and how historically Hawaiians were susceptible to diseases that only a few generations back had nearly wiped us out. But when I called home, cousins assured me that everyone was healthy, the kids were being home-schooled. Airports were closed to tourists, and though many stores would tragically go into bankruptcy, the rates of coronavirus were very low compared to the rest of the country.

Their news buoyed me up, until without warning, the pandemic once again accelerated. Before summer was in full swing deaths shot up alarmingly, not just in New York City but across the nation. Monster raves and maskless beach bashes exacerbated the spread even further. Alarmingly, reactionaries even here in liberal New York continued condemning mask-wearing as a political ploy, urging whole communities to go maskless, thus contributing to exploding death rates in parts of the city and the country. Lastly, our summer fantasies were crushed by Dr. Fauci, infectious-disease guru, who predicted that autumn would be our worst nightmare, that the virus would spread like wildfire once COVID-carriers were shut indoors with other humans.

Hearing that autumn was now forecast as the Ninth Circle of Hell, my next-door neighbor, Ann, a corporate lawyer, said she couldn’t take the isolation anymore. She was weary of ZOOM’ing, of consulting with clients on Facetime. She was flying down to Mexico for R&R. Mid-flight she got into an altercation with her seatmate who kept removing his face-mask. Trying to distance herself, she got up from her seat during air turbulence, fell and hit her head on something sharp. While stewards tried to revive her, the wound bled backward into her brain. She died half way to Puerto Vallarta. I didn’t know Ann well; still, her sudden death was shocking. But so much death was coming at us in those days that I couldn’t seem to process hers. In the end I preferred to think of her as not really dead, but sunning on a beach in Mexico. And that is how I still think of her.

Before the virus hit, I had been trying to finish a new novel. Now I could not concentrate, could not make sense. I had read two brilliant novels the year before, Half A Yellow Sun, and The Sympathizer. I could remember neither. I set to reading them again. For a few days I remembered everything, brilliant dialogue, graphic descriptions. Several days later...nothing. It was more than loss of memory. Like the rest of the city, and the world, I was living through a hideous kind of metamorphosis where reality had galloped into the Apocalypse. What fiction could compare to this? None of my writer friends were writing. But everyone said they were taking notes. I wondered what kind of novel could come out of this. Would we still be capable of nuance?

By those summer months of 2020, workers had been furloughed in the hundreds of thousands. Streets and avenues were a maze of signs, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES. Eventually entire blocks of stores would be boarded up. People with summer homes in upstate New York or the Hamptons had already fled the city, some never to return. Restaurants had valiantly struggled with “physical distancing” and mask laws which were rapidly killing their business. Ignoring predictions of the excruciating, dystopian autumn months to come, the city initiated “al fresco dining,” zoning off forty to one hundred miles of streets, where curbside sections were allocated for outdoor dining.

Over 10,000 restaurants signed up for the zoning. Soon there were miles of restaurants offering Moroccan-like tents with linen partitions separating diners. And eerie glasslike “bubble booths” where each couple dined in their own futuristic pod. Viewed up and down the length of the city’s streets and avenues, it was a lovely sight. At night, white linen tablecloths and napkins, flickering hurricane lamps and hanging lights lent the city a magical fin de siecle glow. 

Wanting to support struggling restauranteurs, we tried dining al fresco. But with reduced kitchen help, menus were severely limited; some dishes tasted, well, recycled. Waiters served skittishly behind masks and gloves, and even the chicest little boites smelled of hand sanitizer. But mostly, we were spooked by the idea of eating out in public. How many aerosols—microscopic droplets of coronavirus—could enter or leave one’s mouth each time we opened it for food or drink? Sadly, within months, many al fresco restaurants would go broke and close. The bravest stayed open through autumn with heaters installed, a boon for lonely New Yorkers. As for popular watering holes, by late July, two hundred bars in the city had been shut down for violations. Forty others had lost their liquor license.

The longed-for elation of the summer months was slowly erased by escalating death rates. By July 406,800 cases of coronavirus had been recorded in the city. Over 25,000 victims had died. Most from communities of color and high poverty. A disparity reflected across America. A barely contained hysteria grew amongst New Yorkers and in fact most of the country. We felt helpless. Under the grossly incompetent administration in Washington, the U.S. was leading the world in COVID cases and deaths—more than any country on the planet. With the top scientists, the most advanced medical facilities and the greatest economic resources in the world, it seemed uncanny that we were surpassing the rates of Third World Countries.

Rumors spread of shortages of medical personnel. Nurses were collapsing from exhaustion, and compassion fatigue. Hospitals were running out of dialysis machines. They were running out of face shields. More field hospitals were erected in the parks, more makeshift tents. By now thousands of cardboard communities had sprung up throughout the city, wherever stores and movie theaters were permanently shuttered. At night groups of the homeless huddled in rags inside their cardboard huts, up and down the avenues and streets. Not all were perennially homeless. Young stockbrokers slept in the recessed entrance of a nearby private school. They explained they had been furloughed and could no longer meet their rent. Even Gen Y were living out of boxes.

For months, New Yorkers had been following the progress of Nick Cordero, a young, Tony-nominated Broadway actor. In March he was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. A week later he was diagnosed with coronavirus that progressed so fast he was put on a ventilator and treated with dialysis. His condition worsened so rapidly that in April his right leg was amputated, because of blood clots. By May his lungs were so full of holes he had to breathe through a tracheostomy tube. Still, his body kept fighting, determined to defeat this scourge. His young wife went public, asking friends and theater-lovers to pray. Tens of thousands responded on Twitter, Facebook. Nick had become our Odysseus, our wrecked warrior, struggling to make it home, a symbol of hundreds of thousands of Americans fighting for their lives. He fought valiantly for ninety-five days until his lungs gave out. After six weeks in a coma, he died in late July. He was forty-one. In perfect health when the virus attacked him. He left a widow and infant son. His death only intensified our pandemic of grief.

This virus had its own psyche, sneaky and perverse. Attacking, then retreating. By September it started spiking again; schools and businesses were briefly opened, then shut down. The hardest hit groups were, again, in the poorest hoods of blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans. Very slowly we began to grasp a new phenomenon. Wealthy New Yorkers who in June had fled the city for their summer homes in upstate NY or the Hamptons, were not returning as they traditionally did in the fall. That die-hard, metaphysical allegiance to New York was quickly evaporating.

With Broadway Theatres shut down, blocks of stores boarded up, cardboard cities of the homeless proliferating, we began to wonder why any of us remained here. The city now globally ranked as the Epicenter of COVID 19. Week after week we watched moving trucks loaded up with furniture leave the city. The middle-class and working-class sector of New York were beginning their own exodus. 

When the virus momentarily retreated, politicians debated the wisdom of re-opening schools and businesses, while hopeful mothers went berserk from home-schooling. Then, across the country, the throwbacks of Americana stepped up their mask-burning rallies, their rockabilly concerts, massive beach parties. Here in Brooklyn and Queens, Orthodox Jews declared they were being targeted on religious grounds, and refused to observe mask protocol. Across the country, the virus spiked again.

As it advanced and retreated so unpredictably, once again our collective mood yo-yo’ed up and down. For many of us, there were long bouts of weeping, then zombie-like states of binge-watching, staring at screens, oblivious to what was on them. We talked to priests and therapists. Even though we were in touch with family via long-distance calls, we entertained suicidal urges because what good was life without our art, our careers, the closeness of loved ones? Once again, we stopped functioning, erasing the existential records of our lives. The residue of who we were.

Each time the virus retreated, our mayor and governor rallied. By October there was talk of something called Phase Four—reopening of museums, schools and gyms. No one paid attention, forecasts went up and down. But by early November the coming presidential election began to arouse our interest, though most of us feared another four-year term by the cretin in the White House who thought face-masks were for “sissies,” and kept assuring America that the virus “would pass.” As the elections drew closer, New Yorkers woke from our stupor enough to register, and ultimately vote. The day Biden/Harris won the election we ran out into the streets, cheering and weeping with relief. Even CEOs and doormen openly wept.

Before we could catch our breath, the Ninth Circle of Hell that had been predicted for the winter months arrived. Positive rates of COVID sky-rocketed again. Public schools were closed indefinitely. From grade schools to universities, students reluctantly slogged back to virtual and hybrid classes, and ZOOMing. Once more, home-schooling mothers went quietly berserk. Our only reality was the constantly recurring thought, How long can we endure? President- elect Biden brought us hope. He was already lighting fires under the scientific and medical establishments, promising “Help Is On The Way,” drug companies were getting ready to roll out vaccines for designated Americans, and eventually everyone in the country. We waited, only half-believing.

“At night the stars seemed brighter, the moon larger, no longer upstaged by a glittering city below.”

By early December, we had experienced almost a year of “virtual communications.” We had ZOOM’ed and face-timed ourselves into stupors. ZOOM fatigue set in, the utter weariness of staring at faces in a 13-inch grid. The shock of staring at oneself. The claustrophobic, box mentality. The self-consciousness, self-focus and self-evaluation while I was supposed to be addressing book clubs across the country. 

And with each passing month of daily ZOOMing and face-timing we became obsessed with the idea that the sleep-disrupting LED spectrum blue light on phones, computers and iPads was also indelibly imprinting on our brain cells. Would we become fragmented, unable to gain traction? Would the effects be permanent? 

December brought rumors that COVID vaccinations would begin in nursing homes by the end of the month. Rumors abounded, again, few of us believed them. At this stage, even Christmas seemed a rumor. How could Christians observe this former holy day when such world-wide horror prevailed? For the majority of us, far from families and loved ones, Christmas passed with a vague remembrance of masked friends warily gathering, half decipherable greetings, self-consciously bumping elbows, making toasts to those felled by the virus, then rushing home to our solitary caves, wondering, What will the New Year bring? Will it be worse?

Of course, in other longitudes and latitudes folks were not experiencing the pandemic holidays as morbidly as shut-in New Yorkers. In Florida, my nieces were sunning on beaches. They were snow-boarding in Utah. Cousin Rick Liu, who now lives in Basel, Switzerland, spent the holidays solo-skiing on the slopes of Engadin. Kapana, a calabash cousin from Maui transplanted to Barcelona, pressed on with her dream of becoming a bailaora, by practicing flamenco three hours each day in empty cabarets. Ola! Hawaiians do get around. Conversely, my beloved Alice Walker was fending off raging fires as well as coronavirus. She and neighbors in Mendocino County had tasked themselves with building underground man-caves in which to stash food supplies—and themselves—if the fires moved much closer to their homes. Which, thank god, they did not.

We managed to get through the month and the New Year with midnight calls to family and still-quarantined loved ones, and with “ZOOM Happy Hours” that became a nightly ritual. Friends cheered each other in our little ZOOM boxes as we tossed back drinks and avoided all discussions of COVID. Our focus-ability extremely low, we discussed films half-watched, books half-read, MEGXIT, celebrities who were practicing placentophagia—the consuming of one’s placenta after childbirth, a centuries-old practice now going Hollywood. And, by the by, did folks know that Hawai‘i was the first state to legalize a woman’s right to take her placenta home from the hospital? Hana Hou!

We argued over Nostalgic Rock: Pink Floyd versus Dire Straits, and how many dozens of times we had replayed Mark Knopfler’s orgasmic solo on “Sultans of Swing.” We discussed racism—America’s enduring shame—and speaking of shame, were we still dropping ordnance on Afghanistan? When talk grew too bleak we reverted back to humor. But it was forced humor. By now we had lost our protean innocence, the childlike abandon of laughing out loud.

Thus, we slogged our way into the new year with lingering anxiety but with hope that Joe Biden could keep his campaign promise and deliver New York City and all of America from this never-ending scourge.

Before we could virtually witness his inauguration, America was blind-sided by the Capitol Riots. Waves of rampaging dissidents tearing through the Capitol Building swinging axes and ropes, looking for Democrats to hang or bludgeon to death. The images on the screen were so inconceivable that at first we thought it was staged, the way folks thought the Moon Landing was staged in the 1960s. But the blood looked real, the dead bodies looked real. And congressmen running for their lives was real. 

For a few hours the pandemic was forgotten while we watched our nation’s capital overrun by thugs. Curiously, SWAT teams and uniformed police seemed to arrive almost after the fact as if they too, thought it had been staged. But somehow the thugs were pushed back and subdued, and finally, Joe Biden appeared and assured us that he was fine. Our country was going to be fine.

On his inauguration day we stopped holding our breath. People were still dying, but numbers were down. Hospitals were still filled but there were fewer admissions. In a few days numbers spiked again, but Biden gave us hope. The humble manner in which he asked the country to come together as one nation and help him defeat this virus, moved us, gave us strength enough to believe. Here was a leader long humbled by his own past tragedies and losses. A compassionate leader, exactly what our country had lacked for four long years. And here was Vice-President Kamala Harris who gave women, and minorities, hope. It seemed such an alien word after all this time. Hope. It had been missing from our collective consciousness since Barack Obama had stepped down as President. 

In January, the state age requirement for vaccines was dropped from 75 to 65. With more vaccine sites opening across the city and the state, by the end of the month over 600,000 vaccine shots would have been administered. There were still almost 5,000 cases of COVID-positive cases diagnosed each day. But death rates had dropped to 60 per day. Travelers into New York City from out of state were still quarantined. But the governor promised that public schools could re-open in February. The subway system was re-opening full-time. There was a hint of a slow restabilization in the city. We still wore masks and observed physical distancing, but food was now plentiful in stores, and folks were less wary of venturing out onto the avenues.

That was how we became aware that while we were preoccupied with surviving and mourning loved ones, the physical New York City had radically changed. There had been and continued to be a mass exodus of not just the wealthy but now the middle and working-classes, in search of jobs, cheaper rents, warmer climes in less congested towns across America. Suddenly, residential and office buildings, formerly glittering edifices that lit up the night sky, stood dark. With museums, art galleries, and theatres closed, most traffic had disappeared as well. The city’s broad streets and avenues—once congested with cars and buses—were now essentially empty. Kids on skateboards and bikes swerved up and down the avenues from Harlem to Union Square—a distance of over four miles—cutting lazy figure-eights. We kept waiting for the crowds, the traffic, to return.

A spokesman for the Shubert Organization, which owns seventeen Broadway Theatres, went on the air to address New York City. His forecast for the future of the Broadway Theatre District was grim. Since the lockdown I had walked through the area, block after block of closed theatres, some so old and illustrious they went back to the Gaslight Era. The Belasco. The Helen Hayes. The Lyceum. The Hirschfeld. An area of over 30 blocks, composed of 40 theatres intersected by Broadway, the Great White Way, it was now a landscape of empty marquees, a ghost town where time stood still. 

Since the lockdown of the Broadway District a year previous, over 97,000 jobs had been lost. In the mass exodus from the city a whole generation of young talent was gone, probably never to return since there were no jobs for them. The loss of theatre revenues was multiplied by the loss of revenues of other businesses that depended on Broadway theatre—restaurants, hotels, transportation services, broadcasting companies etc. Their cumulative revenues in the billions of dollars. Even with the hope of theaters re-opening by fall 2021—an extreme long shot—they would have to open at 100% capacity, every seat filled in every theatre, or Broadway would never recover from its losses. It would be the end of an era.

The news seemed like one more nail in the city’s coffin. We were still grasping the growing exodus out of the city, and how it was affecting each of us. I live in an old fortress of a building on Madison Avenue. It’s no longer grand, but is much sought-after because of its hundred-year-old, carriage-trade history. Of the twelve apartments on my floor, nine were suddenly vacant. Tenants were leaving town in droves. The apartment building next door now had sixty vacant rental units. Landlords dropped monthly rents by $200-300 just to keep tenants from leaving. At one point there were over 67,000 vacant rental units in New York City. For a while it threatened to morph into an empty shell, but now with the availability of the COVID vaccine, small groups of people were trickling back. Still, it would take years to return to its former self. 

On Fifth Avenue where pricey designer  stores had been closed and boarded up since the lockdown and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a few stores began to open. But for now, Fifth Avenue was dead, bereft of traffic and people, tourists a thing of the past, so stores stood empty of customers. Many would shut down for good. New York is a tough town, it thrives on chaos, and always bounces back. It survived the flu epidemic of 1918, The Crash of '29, the Great Depression, untold crashes and resurges of Wall Street. It survived black-outs and brown-outs, the AIDS epidemic, the devastation of 9/11. It always bounces back. I knew that in time, wealthy New Yorkers who had fled the city would return to their co-ops and penthouses and private clubs. The country would bore them, and the city has always catered to them. But, what would the city be without its middle-and working classes?  The people that for generations have given the city life, exuberance, and great diversity.

With New York paralyzed for over a year, 100,000 workers had been left unemployed. 1.2 million jobs, mostly low-wage positions, had been cut. 80,000 small business would never recover, never re-open, eliminating jobs for half a million workers. Estimates kept changing every week. By early March 2021, the latest estimate of the total loss from sales tax and tourism revenues for New York City was... $11 billion dollars. The most conservative predictions were that city revenues would not fully recover until 2024.

Once again, our collective mood vacillated wildly. With COVID vaccine becoming available to more age groups, there was an intermittent sense of liberation from the scourge that had crippled the city and the country for over a year. But that was quickly tempered by the shock of the reverberating silence in the streets—shuttered stores and restaurants, shockingly empty apartment buildings, the long-gone traffic. At night the stars seemed brighter, the moon larger, no longer upstaged by a glittering city below. And even with the vaccine now available we were warned that new variants of the virus were sweeping through Europe and could soon hit New York, which meant all bets were off on the road to normalcy. Now we were double-masking, reminding strangers to Step back! Step away!

One day without warning, sirens went off across the city. We instinctively ducked our heads. It was COVID REMEMBRANCE DAY. One year ago, a pandemic had been declared and, like the rest of the country, New York City had gone into lockdown. Now, all day thousands of memorials were live-streamed across the city. Thousands of mourners weeping, praying to their laptop screens. That year flashed past—untold deaths, riots. How had we survived? In New York City alone, 794,000 people had been infected with the virus. Over 30,500 people had died. Across the country over 30,000,000 Americans had been infected with the virus. Over 500,000 had died. I thought of the mass deaths, mass burials around the globe. What will the future be with tens of millions traumatized?

New Yorkers are still averaging 7,600 positive cases a day, and 4,000 hospitalizations. But deaths from coronavirus have dropped to a miraculous 65-70 per day. By mid-March, 2021, 18% of New Yorkers had had at least one vaccine dose. More than 9% had been fully vaccinated. 1,056,422 doses were administered this week. By now, early April, almost one in ten Americans have been fully vaccinated. But Dr. Fauci, still our infectious disease guru, warns against relaxing the mask mandate and physical distancing, or hand-shaking, or, god forbid, hugging too soon. As variants of coronavirus surge again in Europe, we realize we are still vulnerable. Still we plan, we dream of summer gatherings, of flying home to loved ones.

Though the city is still comparatively empty, each day more people are venturing outside. Almost every evening now, a young man comes to play his trumpet beside the Great Lawn in Central Park. The composition he plays is quietly melancholic, but then glides into notes of a piercing, magisterial sadness. He plays slowly and flawlessly. Runners in the park stop in their tracks. They come off the jog paths to stand and listen. Everywhere, strollers stop, turn and listen. Perhaps it’s the acoustics of Central Park, but his heartrending notes seem to echo across the baseball fields and lakes and ponds. Even birds fall silent. He plays the composition through, then sits down and rests. When people approach, offering him donations, he gently refuses. After a while he stands and begins to play again. He moves around the Great Lawn, playing that same heartrending composition for hours. Everywhere, people listen, or look off into the distance, remembering.

The young man has a sweet face, boy-band features. He’s maskless and gloveless and wears an old gray hoodie, “MOM” scrawled on the back in orange magic marker. I pray that that is not a loss he has experienced, that he is playing his trumpet for the rest of us. Sometimes when he finishes playing, people approach and shake his hand. An old lady recklessly kisses his bare face. I am recently vaccinated, but have not yet shaken the hands of even my closest friends. Yet one day I reach out and shake his hand, amazed at the warmth of it. My first flesh-to-flesh human contact in over a year. I ask what he’s been playing, what he plays every evening.

“Johann Sebastian Bach...his Flute Sonata in E-Flat Major.”

I thank him, wish him well, and walk away. Years back, Anthony Minghella had talked about Bach as his great compass, his icon. And I suddenly remember his preoccupation with time, how we are doomed in the race against it. Right now, most of us are weary, our future uncertain. But we have survived this terrible rip in the texture of time. We are still here. And life is still a ravishment.

---

Image by Andre Benz.

Editor’s Afterward

When we wrote Kiana Davenport to ask if she would contribute a lead piece to the debut issue of The Hawai‘i Review of Books, she agreed on the spot. But she worried it would take energy away from her novel, Mauna Kea, and so suggested she send us a short story. Of course, we said.

On March 12 she emailed: “I had started to send you a short story but then  realized...Good God! What fiction could compare to this past, catastrophic year in American history.”

None better, as it turned out.

The result is vivid personal witnessing of a global catastrophe in the world’s greatest city by someone with the ability, the perspective, the passion and the sensibility to tell it. Davenport’s Letter From New York is in the tradition of those diaries of Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe during the Great London Plague. We know there are others telling their side of this global story with great power and compassion, but to those of us in Hawai‘i, it’s likely none will have Davenport’s resonance.