Chuck went downstairs to raid his storage locker while we moved back into their place to watch CNN. He came back up loaded down with hockey bags stuffed with equipment and supplies.
After setting it all down in the middle of the room, he fished around, pulling out bags of freeze-dried food and camping equipment before finding the medical masks. They looked like the ones you’d wear if you were spray-painting something. He handed them out and then went out to distribute some to the neighbors.
Chuck tried to get us to wear latex gloves, but Lauren refused, and so did I. The idea of holding our infant son in gloves, protecting ourselves like he was some kind of pariah, was too much to seriously consider. If he was sick from whatever they were talking about on the news, we were already infected, so there was no sense in it. Wearing the masks was more to protect other people.
But in the outside world, who knew? Luke probably just had a cold, and we might be walking into a mass of infected people in a hospital. It was impossible to say, but we had to be sure Luke was safe. I put some of the latex gloves into the pockets of my jeans.
Susie went down the hall to see if Pam, the nurse, was home yet. I was hoping she might take a look at Luke, or sneak us in the back entrance of a hospital somewhere, but no luck. She and Rory weren’t home. We tried their phones, but the cell networks were completely jammed.
While Chuck talked about how to recognize the signs of infectious diseases, dispensing advice about not touching or wiping our faces, I combed through a White Pages looking for nearby clinics and hospitals, scribbling the information on a piece of paper. I was relieved to find the phone book, stuck in the bottom drawer of a kitchen cabinet. I hadn’t seen one in years. My first impulse had been to search the map on my smartphone, but the screen remained stubbornly blank. It was getting no incoming data feed. My usual stream of messages, after a brief flood of concerned e-mails from friends, had stopped as well. I couldn’t access the Internet at all. Neither my smartphone nor my laptop would load any Web pages, or at least not anything intelligible. When I tried Google, either nothing would load and an error message would pop onto the screen, or a random Web page would appear: an African tourism site or a college student’s blog. So I scribbled on paper.
As we left the apartment, half of our neighbors were out in the hall, talking in quiet whispers with masks hanging around their necks. They edged away from us as we walked out, mostly away from Lauren, who held Luke. The Chinese family at the end of the hall wisely stayed inside. Richard had called down for his car service to drive us, and I wanted to thank him, but as I held my hand out, he shrank away and put his mask on, muttering that we’d better hurry.
Outside, Richard’s black Escalade and driver were waiting for us. The driver, Marko, was already wearing a mask. It was the first time I’d met him, but Lauren seemed to know him.
First we tried the Presbyterian clinic just around the corner on Twenty-Fourth. It was listed as open, but when we arrived, people were streaming out and telling us it was closed. We circled around to the Beth Israel clinic nearby, but there was a line stretching onto the street already. We didn’t even stop.
Lauren cradled Luke in layers of blankets, humming lullabies to him. He’d given up crying and was just sniffling and squirming. He could sense something was wrong, that we were scared.
The warmest things we’d been able to find in our closet for Lauren were a leather jacket and scarf, and I was still wearing the thin jacket and sweater from earlier. It was warm inside the Escalade, but bitterly cold outside.
I found myself worrying that Marko would abandon us somewhere if it got too late. He must have a family somewhere too. It would be impossible to find a taxi, with all this going on, and Lauren had said that the subways weren’t working either. I tried bringing this up with Marko, but he just said not to worry, that everything was fine, that we could trust him.
I still worried.
The streets of New York had transformed from holiday festive to cold and desolate. Long lines of people snaked out of convenience and grocery stores and outside bank machines, and there were long queues of cars waiting for gas at the stations. People hurried down the streets, loaded with bags and packages, nobody speaking, everyone staring at the ground. None of the packages looked like Christmas gifts. New Yorkers always had the feeling that their city was a target, and now it seemed, from the hunched shoulders and furtive glances I saw on the streets outside, that the monster was rearing its head again.
It was a collective wound that had never quite healed, affecting anyone who came here. When Lauren and I had moved into the condo in Chelsea, she’d been concerned that we were too close to the Financial District. I’d told her not to be silly. Had I made a terrible mistake?
We stopped at the emergency clinic at the Greater New York Hospital on Ninth between Fifteenth and Sixteenth. The place was swarming with people, and not just sick-looking people, but crazy-looking ones too. The woodwork of the city was opening up. I got out and tried to talk to the police and EMTs at the entrance, but they shook their heads and said it was like this all over the city. Lauren waited inside the car, her eyes following me as I walked around trying to find someone to talk to, anyone that might be able to help. One of the cops suggested St. Jude Children’s up at Penn Plaza on Thirty-Fourth.
I jumped back in the car.
On the drive to St. Jude’s, Luke started crying again, wailing now, his face red and apoplectic with each shrill scream. Lauren trembled and began crying as well. I put my arm around the two of them, insisting it would be okay. Finally reaching St. Jude, we saw there was no crowd of people outside the emergency room, so we jumped out and ran in, only to be confronted by a mass of people inside.
A triage nurse gave us a quick inspection, replacing our masks with ones she called N95s, and we were immediately cordoned off into a set of rooms that were crammed with other parents and children. I found a chair for Lauren in one corner, next to a leaking water fountain, beneath yellowing posters about the importance of the food pyramid for young children’s health. We waited for what felt like hours. Finally, another nurse appeared and led us into an examination room, saying that seeing a doctor wouldn’t be possible, but that she’d have a look.
After quickly examining Luke, she said it looked like a cold and that there had been no cases of bird flu in their hospital. She promised us that they had no idea what the news was talking about and gave us some Children’s Tylenol, asking politely but firmly if we could go home. There was nothing else we could do.
I felt powerless.
True to his word, Marko was waiting outside when we came out. The cold was intense. Opening the car door for Lauren and Luke, I felt my hands become numb. The wind cut through my thin jacket, and long plumes of vapor spun into the air with each tired breath. A few tiny snowflakes had begun to fall. The idea of a white Christmas usually excited me, but now it felt ominous.
On the drive back, New York was as quiet as a morgue.