He was dark-coated, taller, probably college-aged or a bit younger. He was a stranger—or stranger than a stranger because he was the first unfamiliar person I had seen in weeks. I felt a  sudden jab, a remembrance of a time when my life was built of strangers.

  

Earlier that afternoon, when my friend and I decided to walk from our homes on York Avenue – a tiny, leafy suburb of the Upper East Side, the shy cousin of Park and Madison – to the tangle of Times Square, we were in denial. We still conceived of this pandemic as an adventure. It was all going to be quite a story one day! And everyone knows that a good New York story includes a sojourn to Times Square.

We plotted our route through Central Park, where nature was celebrating the demise of humanity. The dogwoods burst into bloom, and the grass, untrampled and ebullient, applauded them. 

At Columbus Circle, where the park ends at the doors of the Plaza Hotel, the tone shifted. Here were people, milling around and talking and laughing. Here was New York. My stomach twisted in joy and terror. As we grew nearer to Times Square, we noted a strange thing: it was almost crowded. In fact, in order to get the picture I wanted of a barren, haunted plaza, I had to time the shot very carefully to make sure as few people as possible walked through the frame. 

We left in a stupor, disoriented, upset that there were so many people and upset that there were not enough. As we trekked back towards the park, the dark-coated man stopped us. He cut through the layer of isolation that had grown on us like mold. Stooping down slightly, he asked if he could come home with us to use the microwave.  

I blinked and looked at his empty hands. I said, “But you have nothing to microwave?” He shrugged and turned away, loping down the cracked pavement. My friend turned to me and hissed, “He had nothing to microwave? Isn’t the pandemic the bigger problem?” Still muddled, I turned and briefly considered running after him to correct myself: he couldn’t use my microwave because we were in the middle of a plague and I wouldn’t let a stranger into my house on a normal day. But he was gone. He had disappeared into the two New Yorks, both existing at the same time, one city of fear and isolation and one city of bustling normalcy, one that was real and one that was false, but who could say which was which.

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.