Ebola came to the apartment building across 147th Street on Oct. 24. As Dr. Craig Spencer took his temperature across the way, I was battling cockroaches and on the phone with my super, begging him to turn off the heat. I walked by his apartment on my way to a lecture at school. I asked a guy with a notebook what was going on.
The roaches that had made themselves apparent that day were so gross with their mysterious skittering, and now seemed all the more contagious with the news. All those recent stories about New York rats and bacteria. Now this. Good grief. The heat – the pipes clanking, the windows fogging – now carried notes of a faraway virus. No chance of catching it, but still. Welcome to New York.
West 147th Street was unusually quiet for the homecoming of a global health crisis. It was reporters mostly. The usual after-school block riot was mute. As the news got out, a few neighbors stood on stoops and on the edge of curbs. One man, on a bike, who called himself El Dragone, shouted to a cameraman from Mashable and two reporters from city dailies, and me: “It’s not a virus, it’s a plague.”
A virus of the body and what? A plague of the Western imagination? He wheeled off. [Dr. Spencer was declared free of the virus and set to be discharged from Bellevue Hospital Center on Tuesday.]
One neighbor, a friendly cable guy, said, “It hits home.”
Is this my home? I wonder.
I went back to my apartment and opened a window. My cat sat on the sill. We were in an atmosphere of proximate, impossible danger and fleeting community. A big big island and all was quiet on 147th. Good luck, Dr. Spencer.
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