The rain keeps pelting my window. It’s been going for days now, just more and more water, seeming to come down with no end. I tap on my keyboard as I file my reports of sales for this quarter, but before long it is hard to distinguish their clacking from the drops falling outside.
I take a moment to itch the space between my mask and my cheek. I hate wearing the damn thing, especially when it rains. The cotton always gets soaked through, and I’m stuck wearing the wet rag on my face all day long.
As the clock drips toward 12:00, I wave to motion over to my boss, sixty feet away from me, to be ten times as safe. I shout over that I think I’m going to take a lunch break, and she nods in approval. We’re the only two left in the office these days; her the owner who refuses to close, me the one person who couldn’t afford to quit. I don’t know how we’re still in business. It feels like one of these days we won’t be.
I put the raincoat on over my ill-fitting dress shirt and sweatervest combo. The vest hides the fact that I can no longer button the shirt around my midsection, having bought it when I was young and “slim” felt like a description of me, rather than the shirt. I still like the pattern, though, and keep wearing it nonetheless.
The storm is coming down harder when I get off the elevator from the tenth floor. Looking around at the towers that surround me, I shudder at the emptiness. These monuments to interconnectivity and personal achievement seem like crude caricatures when one knows how empty they all are at this time.
I feel like a slice of pizza. That usually buoys me on these late autumn days. I start to walk down the street to my favorite shop near work, but after about a half a block, I get another idea. The place by my apartment in Brooklyn is open this time of day—I remember from the last time I was home sick, back before that seemed like a death sentence—and they probably don’t get too much business in the middle of the day. I turn and descend to the subway, resolved to get a slice before I have to be back at 1:00.
The subway platform is shockingly empty. Usually, there are dozens, maybe even a hundred, people milling about during the middle of the day, double at rush hour. But today, I am alone in the public space. There is no one around. I even find myself shouting, “Hello! Is anyone there?” only to hear my voice reverberate through the tunnels.
The train itself is no different. I am hermetically sealed within the engineering marvel, each crevice impeccably designed for maximum efficiency, the greatest number of bodies packed into the smallest amount of possible space. But with no one here, I could spread out, could lie on the subway floor if I wanted to. It’s probably clean enough to do so, with no one riding it. But instead I merely sit on one of the seats that borders the doors. A luxury I cannot usually afford.
When I get to the pizza shop, it’s closed, butcher paper plastered over the windows. I try to take a peek behind the glass, to see if it’s just a remodel because of the low foot traffic, or if it’s gone for good. My stomach rumbles as I try to see someone, anyone, moving inside. I worry that my mask isn’t good enough, that the droplets will cross through and infect the next person to look as closely as I am looking. But I can’t see anything through the gaps between paper and glass.
