The inseparability of my illness with the pandemic has been one of the hardest things to wrap my head around. Within months of my diagnosis, the whole world had this immense, disruptive thing happen to it that made it seem as if, rather than just becoming sick, I had been dropped into some sort of allegory. My world was rocked and then the world itself rocked in response. It was as if I had caused Covid. Suddenly disease was everywhere.
I haven’t gotten used to it. I still wonder what my experience would have been like without a global pandemic as a kind of numinous echo, a globalized call-and-response between my own private calamity and widespread disorder. It is cancer’s great irony that in order to stay sane while you fight it you must shore up your delusions, trick yourself into fictitious interludes of wellbeing and bracket the disease to one side so that you can cleave some margin of happiness out of a whole hunk of misery. But it’s hard to pretend things are ok when okayness in general is force majeured out of existence. Now and forever? Well, I guess that’s the big question.
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I don’t get out much. I go into Manhattan for treatment, usually in cars. When I have energy and feel motivated, I walk short distances around the neighborhood. The city is out there, somewhere, but what I see of it is mostly a window view of brownstones and trees. The proliferation of remote working and social distancing has, in my case, played out in reverse. At the pandemic’s outset, when everyone was hunkered down and confined, when the immunocompromised in particular were advised to avoid close contact, I remained in circulation by necessity, venturing out nearly every week to get tested and treated. I became a kind of essential worker whose job it was to risk infection in order to keep living.
My present isolation has much less to do with Covid than it does with an incapacity for getting out of the house or, for that matter, rising up out of chairs. Fatigue, nausea, and pain have been far more ruthless captors than the virus ever was. For a writer, the antidote to privation ought to be obvious: keep writing. Let your imagination provision a more amenable universe, one that isn’t oriented around some bullying, cancerous star. The problem is I can’t write, not with any regularity and not if the subject is fiction. That other universe, I just can’t imagine it, and what I can’t imagine I can’t describe.
I can draw, though. Not faces or figures, but maps. I bought a sketchpad earlier this year and have been using it to plot out make-believe cities, nameless metropolises whose notional people have appointed me czar. This is not wholly out of left field for me. I’ve always been interested in urban planning and architecture. I also love the aesthetics of maps as visual art, the way they evoke with precision what they also omit: a landscape written in code, the schematic framework for something that is never schematic in practice.
When I look at the fantasy city I’m plotting out now, I can see influences from various places I’ve visited and lived in. But if I’m honest, all of its curlicue roads lead back to New York’s long linear ones. It’s New York that I think of when I lay out avenues and intersections, and it’s New York whose vise-like gridiron I’ve always wanted to “correct” by imperfecting. It’s also, I think, New York that I am desperately missing—even though I have never left the city, not even during the worst of the pandemic; even though I am presently more firmly affixed to it, embedded in it, than at any other point in my life.
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I worry about the city. I worried about the city before the pandemic and I worry about it now. Worrying about New York is practically a civic pastime. At any period in New York’s history, you can find Cassandras foretelling its impending collapse. (One characteristic of these laments is nostalgia for some previous era whose steadiness omits analogous forecasts of similar disasters by previous handwringers.) I don’t know if other cities have this problem. I do know that New York is uniquely devoted to its own myth and that its myth is a uniquely perverse one, the city basing its appeal on its obnoxiousness, this way it has of commingling cachet and sleaze. The 1811 grid is an expression of these contradictions. A whole island of rectangles running all the way north and laid out at a time when the most of the city was lumped below Canal Street and there were less than 100,000 people living in it.
I don’t know how New York has gotten away with being so ornery and immoderate, so unwelcoming to all comers, but it has. It’s succeeded. People keep coming because, as Mallory said about Everest, it’s there. Like a mountain, New York exists to be scaled, the whole point being that even if you never quite reach the top, at least you’ll get to see some of the most fucked-up shit imaginable as you make your way up. No one comes here expecting Paris unless they’re a moron or really misinformed. The true mark of if-you’re-a-real-New-Yorker is when you’ve moved beyond the initial romance and find yourself nursing a set of grievances about the city so fussy and particular they can only be tokens of love. If New York has a love language, it’s a string of obscenities: an extended middle finger and a hearty fuck you would seem to suffice. And if that doesn’t move you, try Paris I guess.
Still, it’s one thing to scale a mountain, another thing to make it your home. The bargain one makes with New York is that its amenities should make up for what you sacrifice in money and space to reside here. It’s a pretty good deal, actually. You don’t even have to be rich to make it work, since the city’s primary amenity is totally gratis and widely available. It’s the feeling you have when you’re here of being at the center of things, an ambiance of pervasive vitality. New York isn’t “the greatest city in the world,” which, rather than a thing, is a lyric in Hamilton—but it is the city taken to its logical conclusion: thoroughly palimpsized and insanely vertical and open all night.
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New York may survive the pandemic. I mean, it will survive the pandemic insofar as it’s not going anywhere. (“Cities are like trees,” Lewis Mumford wrote. “Once established, they must be destroyed to the roots before they cease to live; otherwise, even when the main stem is cut down, shoots will form about the base.”) The question is whether we will survive witnessing what New York revealed of itself during the pandemic, whether the city can swagger its way back to health and whether we will find that swagger convincing it when it does. After all, the whole premise of New York—of any city, really—is what we have spent two-plus years anathemetizing: i.e., the smooshing together of large amounts of people in dense indoor spaces. New York wasn’t made to be used the way we are using it and it’s really starting to show. There are only so many park walks a person can take. Every time I go into Manhattan, I find myself averting my eyes from the street. Midtown in particular is just eerie and vacant and what it has never, I think, been in its entire history, which is cowed—embarrassed and bashful and maybe even ashamed.
That’s what the pandemic did to New York. It made it become self-conscious. I hate it. It’s like seeing the President naked or something, the kind of thing you can’t memory-wipe. And while it’s hard to imagine all of those offices just staying half-empty forever, their vacancy represents a trend towards disconnection that predated the virus and that the virus accelerated. That’s the thing that is new. The city has been through a lot and it’s survived and emerged stronger, but it won’t be the same if humanity’s default setting becomes virtual and screen-oriented. Even as a relative introvert, I miss in-person meetings and crowded subway platforms and three-dimensional faces. I miss taking the city for granted, too. When New York feels vulnerable, everything else falls out-of-whack. As a background for cancer, what can I tell you? It hasn’t exactly been optimal.
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I’ve put the map-making project aside for the moment. This week was a scan week for me, which meant that the previous week was a scan week as well, a week, that is, of thinking about the scan week ahead. Cancer can metastasize anywhere, including in the mind, in your dreams. It spreads metaphysically. While I never possessed New York’s eff-you swagger, I do think I qualify as a New Yorker by this point, and I must say I feel unusually self-conscious these days myself. How I long for some miracle doctor to take me on as a dare, to scale my heights and send all the tumors into an avalanche, leaving me battered and stricken, but free of disease.
As for New York, an uptick in unprovoked expletives suggests we may be on the road to recovery: fired-off fucks begin to blossom along with spring flowers. Excelsior indeed.