When they re-emerged from the building, the stretcher between them had grown a human-shaped hump. I leaned in, breath bursting on the windowpane, peering at that strange and terrible camel. I could just make out, laying across the hump, a blanket, out of place on this day, which scorched the concrete until it shimmered and swirled. 

A horrible little couplet – a memory – suddenly rang in my ears: 

Cover the body to keep the head warm.

Cover the head to conceal the body. 

I strained to see the blanket’s exact placement but I was too far away, sitting way up in my cloud. The couplet was a version of what my father said to me two decades ago when they covered up our departed neighbor, Muffy, and wheeled her out. On this hot summer day, just as I had done twenty years earlier, I stared at that cloth and the shape beneath it. At some point, my lungs constricted and the little bursts of breath ceased, and silently, I started to drown. 

“Lucy? Hey, Lucy? Are you on mute? We can’t hear you anymore.”

***

In medieval times, wise kings built their castles on the tallest hill so that they could see danger as it approached—or so I was taught by my third-grade teacher, a tiny, birdlike woman from an ancient New York family. But she didn’t say what happened when the king looked out his window at the vastness and saw death rolling towards him across the fields, slow and determined. She didn’t say if the king wished instead that he built his castle on a low, flat beach so that when danger came, it came as the sudden darkness of a wave, washing him away before his next heartbeat. She never explained that to bear witness is not to be in control. Sometimes, it is merely the chance to say a longer prayer. 

I doubt my parents considered that when they moved to the 29th story of a building that turned its back to the East River to face ceaseless Manhattan. I think that they were more interested in the massive windows that account for half of our wall space. They were excited to be part of the constellation of life that is visible through those rectangles. To see and be seen. To hold their toddler up to the skyline and point all the way to the Empire State. 

This was, of course, decades before the Zoom world made us all two-dimensional figures, stuck behind a sheet of glass.

Back then, in the sunlit years of childhood, I always felt safe in my apartment. Even after I got mugged, the individual escaping only with my sandwich and my ability to trust, I rode the elevator up into the clouds and felt untouchable. I sat down on my skyward chair and watched a football game through fourteen different windows in the neighboring building. 

I always considered our windows a great gift, something I could never live without. But that changed when a plague crept its way into Manhattan. Suddenly, the windows were lidless eyes showing dead streets and solitary figures, the blinds useless because the truth slipped in and pooled on the carpet. The sirens never stopped, their howls more familiar than silence. Every hour, I would peer up the street, trying to catch a glimpse of the morgue in Central Park, bodies lying in the field where we used to picnic on the last day of school, little girls in pinafores staining their white socks with red dirt. 

***

When I was that little girl in a starched school uniform, smeared with dirt and naivete, I saw my first instance of death. It was quiet and shuffling and quick.

Muffy was an elderly woman who lived a few floors above me. She always wore a pink cardigan and came to the playground across the street to watch us play hopscotch. When she was wheeled out, they brought her down the service elevator to the back door of the building, where I was waiting for the bus with my father. I remember his recoil, his grimace when Richie, the doorman supervising the EMTs, whispered to him, That’s Muffy. 

Dad, what’s in that bag? That’s Muffy, pumpkin. What’s wrong with her? She got very sick. But can she breathe in there? No, sweetie, she’s gone. She’s gone and so they covered her from head to toe.

There is something horrific to me that we cover the dead, bag them, and sneak them down the back elevator. But I can’t say I am not relieved that I only saw black plastic, not a still, pallid face.

Or, at least, that’s what I was thinking last week, in my college apartment in Chicago, when my roommate texted me: Come outside. I replied: I’m writing an essay, can it wait a sec? He answered: Please come now. When I creaked open the front door, still tugging on my slippers, he was there on the sidewalk with a question on his lips “What does an outdoor, traveling morgue look like?”

“What? Jesus. I don’t know, it was like little house things and generators, I think.” The truth of it was that as much as I had craned my neck, looking out my window towards the East Meadow morgue, I never truly wanted to see it. Still, he tugged me to the neighboring building, the Ronald McDonald House, and pointed to the parking lot, where there were three large trucks, parked and settled, with large generators attached to them. 

“Is this one?” Evidently, we had both seen the articles – Illinois has no more room for the dead. So I squinted, just like I did back in the spring, looking, not seeing, and said, “I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

***

When I said that, I felt a familiar rise in my throat, a phantom bile. That guilt of being able to listen to the rising numbers on the news and think, “God, I’m glad that’s not me.” To eat dinner at a full table, each family member or roommate in their chair. That was a guilt I had become intimately acquainted with during the spring in Manhattan.

Hand-in-hand with the guilt came the dark, shapeless fear of a positive test. But somehow, the city still carried on as best it could. It was as if we knew there was a horrific beast chained and snarling in the corner, already fat from devouring some of our friends and neighbors but still ready to tear us limb from limb. Its tether was fraying and about to snap, but for some reason, most of us still sat calmly, made small talk, updated spreadsheets and discussed the best place to go for pasta. Whether it was coping or resilience or denial or delusion, I still don’t know. 

What I can say is that two months after we locked down, I should have been more prepared. Hardened, exoskeletal. Aware of what I might see out the window. But I wasn’t. Maybe it was the boredom of another Zoom class or maybe something, some smudge of color, caught my gaze. I looked out the window. And then I saw.

An ambulance, one of the many that lit up this summer like fireflies, was parked just up the street, waiting. And slowly they emerged, three people and one virus. The EMTs loaded their ward inside the vehicle and I stared. Then my Civ professor, small and blurry in the Zoom portrait of her Chicago apartment, asked me how Marx would respond to Gustav Fröhlich’s portrayal of Freder in Metropolis. And then she asked again. And again. 

Of course, she wasn’t being insensitive. Or, perhaps, only as insensitive as it is to ask anyone to continue working through a plague. She assumed I was on mute or that my audio was glitching or that her audio was glitching or that Zoom had frozen. She did not assume that I was watching a person get carted away and I was wondering if it was my childhood friend who lived in that building and I was realizing that this was the first time in many years since I had seen someone so sick and I felt sick because it might be the last time I ever see that person and I couldn’t even make out their face. 

My professor did not know what I had just witnessed. But then again, neither did I. To this day, I’m not sure that the person hadn’t simply fallen down the stairs and broken their leg, and that’s why the EMTs had to carry them out on a stretcher. I’ll never know but I will think I do. I will always see COVID’s thumbprint on that memory.

My professor called out to me again, a note of finality in her insistence. And for all the unanswered questions in my mind, I did happen to know how Marx would respond to Gustav Fröhlich’s portrayal of Freder in Metropolis. I took a lumping swallow and answered. 

Outside, the ambulance trundled away, bawling like a mother, peeling like a knell. It went west towards the hospital, the park, the morgue, the sunset, the end, the feverish unknown. 

Lucy Ritzmann is currently a writer and fact-checker at the South Side Weekly. She will be graduating from the University of Chicago with a minor in Creative Nonfiction in June 2021. To see more of her work and receive updates, follow @lucy_ritz on Twitter.