This Used to Be a City
- Rats Fleeing
Every day, there were more sirens.
Burbank had been working from home for just over a week, spending ten hours a day in his
carpeted bedroom, living his professional life through Slack and Zoom and Google Docs. Doing what he’d
always done—calming his excitable boss, keeping his coworkers’ spirits up, and ensuring that the dozens
of blog posts and videos and PDFs needed to fuel his company’s marketing strategy launched on schedule.
Like everything was normal. Like a mysterious disease wasn’t spreading silently through the city.
Like the ambulances racing past hour by hour on his neighborhood’s emptying streets, heading south to
Lutheran or east to Maimonides, weren’t filled with his neighbors—people he’d eaten next to at taquerias
and diners, people he’d stood with at the crest of Sunset Park as fireworks exploded overhead. Bound for
ICUs that were already approaching capacity. Gasping like every breath might be their last.
As he typed away, his coworkers pulled up stakes. Fleeing to New Jersey and upstate New York, to
Kansas and California. To Rhode Island, where the governor had ordered police to set up highway
checkpoints, anything to stop the influx of high-risk New Yorkers into her state. (“They’ll never catch me!”
his coworker joked on Slack, safe in her parents’ spacious house near Narragansett.) Some of them
already carrying the virus, unaware that it was multiplying silently in their lungs and sinuses as they
reclaimed childhood bedrooms and piled into Airbnbs with siblings and ad hoc groupings of high school
friends.
More than a quarter million people left New York, but Burbank never seriously considered joining
them. This was his city, after all. And if New York was going to face disaster, he was going to face it, too. - Life in a Box
Between March and July, Burbank didn’t leave the apartment. And as he holed up there, the city
quietly closed down. Schools sent their students home, the subways stopped running at night, and all
non-essential businesses shuttered (the liquor stores, however, stayed open). But despite grand
pronouncements about the completeness of the lockdown in press reports and the governor’s daily briefing,
Burbank found the foot traffic outside his window to be as brisk as ever.
Sunset Park was an all-hours neighborhood, filled with essential workers—recent immigrants and
MTA employees and the healthcare workers he clapped for each day at seven o’clock. People who had to
go to work through the worst of the crisis; people who were putting themselves at risk so that everybody
else could stay home. It was a privilege, Burbank knew, to be able to camp out inside and wait for the worst
to be over, something he was thankful for and guilty about in nearly equal measures. At the same time, the
message from the state of New York was unambiguous: if you do nothing else, stay inside and slow the
spread of the virus.
And that, ultimately, was what he did.
Embracing the same-day delivery apps he’d always shunned, put off by the expense and the sense
that using them was an implicit admission that he was too lazy to make it to the grocery store. Waiting for
each drop-off with sanitizing wipes at the ready—and then, when those became impossible to find, using a
homemade concoction of water and bleach that could do the job. Leaving produce on the kitchen table for
days at a time, waiting for the virus to die of old age. Watching reusable bags pile up in the kitchen closet,
wondering the whole time whether the day might finally come when there was no choice except to throw all
of them out.
The longest walk he took in all that time was from his bedroom to the living room on the far side of
the wall. This cursive “u” of a journey led him through the apartment’s full-sized kitchen and then down a
short hallway to the futon where his partner, McCay, sat every day from nine to five. Doing what she could
to stay calm and pleasant and professional while trying valiantly to teach ESL to a class of overwhelmed
adults who now also needed to learn the finer points of Zoom.
To Burbank, the world outside felt distant. When the city’s death rate spiked in late March, rising to
dizzying heights already seen in Italy and Spain, Burbank found he was somehow able to absorb that
information, process it, and then keep going. Editing a blog post as the morgues filled up; writing project
plans and building out Asana boards as the state government turned Central Park and the Javits Center
into field hospitals. Telling himself that he was putting his energy into things he could control, instead of
pouring it into the void.
McCay, on the other hand, found this kind of compartmentalization impossible. While she was
teaching her class, the challenges that came with inventing a whole new practice from scratch kept her
mind occupied. But the rest of the time, life was a struggle. At night, she filled the hours with mobile games
and TV binges. And during the workweek, she popped into the bedroom unannounced—sometimes
multiple times a day—to update Burbank on the death toll, on the latest horrors (freezer trucks full of bodies
on the piers, whole families struck down by the by the virus), news that he received like a particularly
macabre singing telegram.
The intimacy that came with being together day after day with no respite was so intense and so
complete that Burbank could, perhaps, be forgiven for forgetting at times that they weren’t actually alone.
That, next to the living room, in a bedroom that they would later learn was too small to legally be called a
bedroom in New York State, lived Burbank’s younger brother, Patrick.
Furloughed from his job as a cook, Patrick seemed to vanish during quarantine, disappearing for
weeks at a time without actually leaving the apartment. Moving about at night, or when Burbank and his
partner were in their bedroom. His movements sleek and near-silent, betrayed only by the creaking of the
apartment’s century-old floor.
Until he seemed to them almost fictional; a vague, ghostly presence.
Patrick had always been a loner, an insomniac. And much of Burbank’s childhood had been
marked by his brother’s midnight pacing, by Patrick’s half-conscious desire to keep the world and
everything in it at arm’s length. Something that had been made easy by growing up in a state and a town
and a house that all seemed designed to foster a sense of picturesque isolation. - Cinema Jericho
In retrospect, Burbank’s whole childhood had felt like a lockdown.
He’d grown up in Vermont, an indoorsy boy in an outdoorsy state. More likely to curl up with a book
than to run around outside, a tendency that bewildered his parents, who had met in the most 1970s of
ways—that is, as camp counselors—and spent their honeymoon hiking the Appalachian trail. Burbank, in
contrast, got itchy if he sat on grass for too long.
His mother had grown up in the same little Vermont town as Burbank. She’d lost her father when
she was young and Burbank’s grandmother had become the family breadwinner, putting four children
through college by hook or by crook. They never went without, not really. But life had been austere,
restricted.
It was important to Burbank’s mother that her own children have more she’d had, that they grow up
in a house of their own, with a big yard for all their childhood adventuring. And in the first flush of Burbank’s
father’s up-and-down career, his parents had made it happen. Building their sprawling house—a
four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath abode complete with a sunporch, a massive basement, and a living
room with a sweeping cathedral ceiling—and placing it on ten full acres of repurposed farmland. It was to
be an idyll, a refuge. From the leanness of his mother’s childhood. From the outside world and its crime and
corruption and wars and famine.
And maybe for her it was, at least for a while. But for Burbank, it was something else entirely.
Boredom was the watchword. This was before mass culture truly arrived in Vermont, before the
instant gratification that came with high-speed internet. Burbank had three TV channels at his disposal
(four, if you counted PBS—which he very much did not) and a modem that required the better part of an
hour to download a single MP3. But, with nothing to do, it can sometimes become hard to find the energy to
get through the day. Years later, he would joke with his partner that being in Vermont was like staying in a
house with a mild gas leak; not enough to kill you, but enough to keep you on the couch all day.
That all changed when Showtime Video opened.
It was the golden age of the video store, a bygone era where taking out a hefty bank loan to buy
thousands of VHS cassettes was seen not just as a viable business move, but a savvy one. After decades
where movies had existed as ephemera—flashing briefly on screens across the country, then resurfacing, if
at all, for annual TV showcases or the occasional revival at big city repertory theaters—it was suddenly
possible for filmmakers and movie buffs and bored teenagers to watch whatever they wanted whenever
they wanted, as long as there was a decent video store nearby.
Back then, Jericho lacked a lot of basic amenities. A grocery store. A sit-down restaurant. A public
pool. A decent library. But the one thing it did have was a video store—in fact, it had two. Video Matinee
came first, setting up shop in a wood-paneled strip mall right off Route 15 and providing a browsing
experience familiar to anyone who ever frequented a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. That is, a wall of
new releases, a wall of old favorites, and nothing much in between.
Showtime was different. The proprietor started small, but quickly leaned into a competitive
advantage that Video Matinee lacked—namely, space. Unlike its smaller rival, Showtime had the good
fortune to open for business in the front section of an old warehouse. The location was simple and spare
and not particularly welcoming, but it was also modular, expandable: all you had to do to add another row of
shelves was to push back the walls.
And push them back he did. The proprietor bought a movie review book and treated it like a
roadmap, buying up low-cost copies of failed 1980s star vehicles and underwritten indie romances until
Showtime was easily three times the size it had been when it opened. Everything was organized by
category, which made movies easy to find—unless, that is, you were looking for a film that could be filed in
multiple different sections. Burbank had once spent the better part of an hour looking for The Crying Game,
first under THRILLERS, then ROMANCE, then LGBT, only to discover it by accident in the IRISH MOVIES
section.
This approach opened up a whole new revenue stream built on scale. In addition to competing
one-on-one with Video Matinee for customers who just wanted the latest releases, Showtime built out a
massive back catalog, until it carried all but the most obscure titles. To monetize this endless library, the
proprietor launched a promotion that would become Showtime’s trademark: five movies for five days for five
dollars.
In time, this deal became the centerpiece of Burbank’s social life.
For teenagers, Jericho was a wasteland. There was no mall, no teen club, no coffee house;
adolescence was conducted in the backs of school buses, in band hallways and rec rooms. But Showtime’s
vast collection and its teen-friendly prices made it the one place in town where you might run into friends
and enemies, crushes and exes. And even if you were too shy and awkward to connect with the people
around you, the movies housed there opened up other opportunities for connection.
With the stories they told. With the emotions locked up inside you. With the world that existed
beyond those ten solitary acres.
Riding home, Burbank would feel the anticipation build. Turning the hard plastic cases over and
over in his hands. Studying the dated typography, the worn copy on the back. Testing the coiled rubber
bands used to hold together two-tape wonders like The English Patient or Lawrence of Arabia. Just waiting
for the moment when he could bounce down the basement’s creaky wooden stairs, feed that first tape into
his family’s sleek black VCR and—for ninety minutes, at least—escape into the screen.
Exploring 1940s Morocco and Hong Kong during the last years of the Cold War. Falling in love with
Winona Ryder and Carole Lombard and maybe even Paul Newman, if he was being honest with himself.
Spending hours staring, enrapt, gazing at the TV. Sobbing. Laughing until his stomach hurt. Rewinding that
gratuitous bathtub scene one more time.
Discovering beauty at 24 frames a second.
In time, Burbank built up a solid group of friends. Learned how to drive. And, on Sundays over
summer break, started hosting an informal film series in his parents’ unfinished basement that showed off
all he’d learned. Pairing William Powell and Dudley Moore, Koyaanisqatsi and The Atomic Cafe. Taking
pride in the way his friends reacted to the movies, as though he’d had something to do with creating them.
Back then, Burbank thought he might make movies someday, that maybe he’d be a screenwriter or
even a director. But two decades later, he found himself writing about the finer points of push notifications,
his love of the cinema expressed in trips to Film Forum and the massive binder packed with old DVDs that
he couldn’t bring himself to throw away. - Two Windows and a Screen
At the height of the crisis, if you were lucky enough to have a stable place to live and a white-collar
job that you could count on, your problems were small but persistent. Your favorite bars and restaurants
kept closing. The delivery guys insisted on ringing the doorbell two-dozen times at a go. Your landlords
grew obsessive about trash pickup times or the comparative heaviness of your footsteps.
For Burbank, the small annoyance that tormented him was this: there just wasn’t anything to look
forward to. The end of the crisis, perhaps, but how many months or years away was that? And how do you
make your way through those oceans of time without any smaller anticipations, without some intermediate
stops along the way?
Weekends still existed, of course. But without anywhere to go or anything concrete to do, they felt
like pale shadows of their former selves. Evenings were similar—when Burbank’s workday ended, he often
found himself putting away his company laptop and then opening up his personal one, trading one virtual
experience for another. It was a luxury, he knew, to fixate on these small difficulties when others were sick
and dying. But that awareness did nothing to resolve the issue; it only made him feel bad.
So, instead of wallowing, he decided to build out a calendar of future happenings, however small.
Joining book clubs. Attending a weekly wine class on Zoom. Calling into virtual dance parties and socials.
Ensuring there was always something waiting just over the horizon. But as the death toll rose and the
ambulances roared day and night and the morgues hit capacity, he found sometimes that a wine class a
week away just wasn’t cutting it.
On these days, he and McCay would order pizza. Wipe down the box with sanitizer, thinking the
whole time that it was probably for nothing; someone had already touched the pizza, after all. Knock on
Patrick’s door, quite aware that he wouldn’t come out and eat no matter how nicely they asked. Then curl
up together on the living room futon. Debating what to watch for fifteen or twenty or twenty-five minutes,
then disappearing for the evening into their television.
Watching as Kim Basinger and her lover burst out of the Stillwell Avenue D/F/N/Q station, racing
past crowds of tourists and neon signs advertising erotic videos and Schaefer Beer, then gallivanting
beneath the Wonder Wheel with a fistful of pastel balloons. As Rachel Sennott, dressed for a funeral, walks
past an endless procession of Ditmas Park Victorians with her ex-girlfriend, their expressions pained, their
arms loaded up with aluminum steamer trays. As Cher strolls down Cranberry Street in that iconic
charcoal-gray coat, moments away from meeting her fiancé’s estranged, one-handed brother for the very
first time. As Mickey Rourke and his cousin picnic together at one of DeSalvio Playground’s stone chess
tables and loudly plot a robbery that’s destined to go bad, his hair one big curly puff. As Phoebe Cates and
her boyfriend make their way through Times Square in matching Celadon work outfits, dodging taxicabs
and hotdog vendors and extras dressed as middle-aged businessmen, a billboard for Do The Right Thing
looming behind them. As dozens of real-life commuters steadfastly ignore Sacha Baron Cohen until the
moment that he decides to release a live chicken on the 4 train. As an awestruck Mindy Kaling emerges
from the subway at 51st/Lex for her first day of work as a TV writer, carrying a teal umbrella and three
boxes of star-crossed cupcakes. As Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner rush through
the rubble of Park Avenue, passing fleeing sightseers and burning cars before halting, stunned, in front of
Grand Central Terminal. As Abby Quinn, wearing a puffer with rainbow trim, waits for her train beneath the
main concourse’s 125-foot ceiling, bound for the country house where she’ll lose her virginity. As, two levels
down, Edmund Clements and a ROTC cadet and a Texas debutante watch a tuxedo-clad Chris Eigeman as
he waves goodbye and climbs onto a late-night train upstate to visit a stepmother of untrammeled
malevolence, very possibly to be killed.
If you looked through one of the living room windows right then, you would have seen Burbank
sitting on a futon that could be any futon, in a living room that could be any living room, the screen flashing
blue and white on his face for hours, for days, for weeks. But inside, his mind was in frantic motion. Building
a model of his city out of location shoots and soundstages, fragments of comedies and dramas and the
occasional musical. All the little details accreting in his mind, transforming themselves into a diorama of
New York City. Becoming something that could stand in for the city until the day came when he could be out
in it again.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Burbank told McCay, eyes a little wet. “Feeling homesick for a place that
you’re right in the middle of?” - Safe Zone
Later, after the crisis is as over as it’s likely to get, after Moderna doses one and two and a
perfunctory booster shot, Burbank will find himself back on that futon, viewing the last episode of a TV
show he’s always meant to watch. Sitting next to McCay, tanned from a summer spent at outdoor concerts
and beer gardens and friends’ rooftops. Their Sunset Park apartment traded for one in Bushwick, his
brother upstate and thriving. Everything the same but also different, the way that life tends to go.
As the episode winds to a close, they watch the main characters stroll past corrugated metal
barriers and endless barbed wire in their wedding finery. Leaving the zombie-free safe zone by the Red
Hook waterfront without a thought, without a care in the world. And Burbank will realize with a start that this
is the first thing he’s watched that’s set in the New York that exists today. Not the NYC he lived in for the
past fifteen years, but—metaphorically, at least—the city he’s going to live in from now on. - The Skyline and Everything After
That July, just as the city’s first titanic wave of death finally started to ebb, Burbank’s landlords
completed their months-long renovations of the shared backyard. To celebrate, Burbank and McCay and
even Patrick decided to spend Independence Day back there. Grilling. Drinking beers. Like a normal
summer’s day.
Burbank threw himself into meal prep, becoming so preoccupied that it was only as he got ready to
carry the food downstairs that he realized that this was the first time he’d put on shoes since March.
A few weeks later, Burbank’s younger sister, Brooke, drove down from Saranac Lake to rescue
Patrick from that tiny apartment, for a few weeks at least. To play it safe, they all met in the backyard, sitting
in the sun briefly as they caught up—though there proved to be little to talk about after months of isolation
and inactivity. The weather. The books they were reading. Their hopes for the future. Burbank saw his
siblings off with a wave, then went back inside. Discovering that evening that ten minutes of direct sunlight
had given him the worst sunburn he’d ever had.
As the days passed, Burbank and McCay began to spend more time outside, a little horrified at
how isolated they’d become and how breathless they got after carrying groceries up a single flight of stairs.
Starting with short strolls around the block, then expanding outward. Avoiding Fifth Avenue and other busy
thoroughfares. Preferring to take long, looping walks on the far side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Over there, surrounded by empty warehouses and decrepit factories, they didn’t have to worry about
running into other people—though they certainly saw their share of feral cats. Making their way down to a
waterfront park that had been carved out of abandoned piers and railyards. Passing vacant lots that would
soon become same-day delivery hubs and parking for mobile vaccination vans.
Down at the water’s edge, Burbank stood and stared across the East River at the Manhattan
skyline, which looked cold and distant. Thinking again about that strange homesick feeling. And realizing
that what he really missed was the New York from before the crisis, the city that had once been his home. A
city that now felt far away, separated from him not just by an expanse of water, but by months of suffering,
by vast fields of the dead.
In time, vaccines will be tested and approved and jabbed deep into the soft flesh of his left arm.
And once that happens, Burbank will walk these streets like he used to, full of hope and fear, certain that
whatever is to come will be different than what was. And a year from now, in Midtown, he’ll spot a row of
empty storefronts on the far side of Ninth Avenue. There, as he waits to cross, too out of practice to jaywalk
the way he once did, he’ll notice something graffitied on a plate glass window. A lament. A battle cry.
This used to be a city, it says.
And, he thinks, it will be again.