CITY UNMUTE by Sukhdev Sandhu

One day in March, the curtain finally falls. The building where I live in Greenwich Village is evacuated of the last of its 650 students who scatter across the city or to other states. Young Thug leaking out of dorm rooms, the pinging of elevators, the click of pool-table balls, dining-hall gossipation: all gone. Corridor noticeboards still display posters with QR codes for open mic nights, casting calls, Broadway shows, basketball games in Brooklyn. Each is an advertisement for business and vitality - “Make career connections”. “Declare your future. Move boldly forward.”

Now the future’s been suspended.

I rattle around like a ghost. For hours and days, I stare at my laptop with its intravenous drip-feed of darkening statistics. Sinking, sinking.

Then, as always when I’m in trouble, I turn to the streets.

Washington Square Park is normally more block party than bucolic retreat. To saunter across it is like drifting across a radio dial. There, sitting alone on a patch of grass, beating out ageless rhythms, is a Nyabinghi drummer. There, closer to the water sprinklers and dressed in brown corduroys, a young jazz trio. Over there, on the benches, a happy huddle of bearded soixante-huitards sing and strum Joan Baez numbers. Barking from the nearby dog run, the clank of skateboarders moving across steps and statuary, the cicada-hustle of outdoor chess players (“Game! Wanna game?”): to newcomers it can all feel a disorientating din. After a while, everyone gets used to it, filters it from their consciousness.

This morning – and for many mornings to follow - there’s little to filter. Scarcely a jogger panting through laps. No square-jawed men in chinos barking into their Blu-tooths or synching schedules with work colleagues so that they can go whack golf balls at the West Side piers. No immaculately moisturized professionals setting up conference calls as they head to their offices. No clatter from Citi bikes being docked by medium-distance commuters. No generator gurgle from halal food carts. The noises that jolted you into alertness, the noises that you cursed, the noises that made up the identity of this patch of Manhattan: all gone.

In SoHo, almost all the shops are closed. There are no tourists, no lines of customers waiting to get upgrades at the Apple store, no cars honking at jaywalkers. The whole neighbourhood appears shuttered. Its emptiness is resonant, instilling in me a desire to stop and to gaze, to ponder. It evokes otolithic memories of the area as it used to be in the late 1960s after the factories and sweatshops had moved on. The silence is pregnant. Lean in, it suggests. These cobbled streets and their spooked semi-derelict buildings drew in artists and adventurers who saw them as experimental spaces prickling with possibility.

Most of those spaces have long gone. If there seems to be little life here these mornings in March and April that’s partly because so many of the newer residents have decamped upstate or to the coast; not a few of them barely live here anyway, treating Manhattan as an upscale crash pad, one of their many international homes.

The fashion boutiques and luxury emporia that service the new money have put up meticulously designed notices that talk of being “committed to serving our customers and communities”. One promises that “as we navigate these uncertain times, we continue to send peace, positivity, and healing thoughts into the world”. Louis Vuitton declares that “the journey that was paused will eventually start again.” The language is startling for its upspeak and for its reluctance to mention why they have closed.

In poorer parts of town there is far less discretion. The doors of hardware stores and small eateries have handwritten signs.

“Closed because of epidemic.”

“Closed due to COVID-19.”

“Closed Until Government Notices.”

One restaurant owner has scrawled in red marker pen: “Dear Friends and Neighbors – Please do not pee or let you dog pee on our vestibule. It is GROSS and you are better than that!!!” There are charming solecisms (“We miss you, but we won’t you be safe”) and self-protective announcements about how the premises are protected by 24-hour alarm systems. In the early days, many shop-owners gave exact dates for when they would return; as the weeks went by, they promised to “see you later in the spring”; as spring creaks by though, they no longer bother trying to guess the future.

Now that the city’s burghers and business people are off the scene, the streets are being repopulated by the homeless. They’ve always been there – the number of homeless individuals and families in New York is higher than it’s been for many decades – but suddenly they’re more visible. A lot of them are scared of being infected in their shelters. Some make it over to near the West Side Highway where there are no cops and where they can have a whole block to themselves, lying down on the sidewalk and sunning it up without fear of arrest. Up on the steps of the huge Postal Service building on 8th Avenue, there is a mini encampment of them. There’s strength in numbers.

Round where I live the mood is more tense. Some guys prowl around like hungry lions, going into the few delis left open and yelling at scared Latinos to give them food or drink. One ruddy-faced old man who’s probably no older than thirty shouts at strangers, “Scabs! I got scabs!” - though it’s not clear whether he’s doing so to threaten them or get their pity. Another stands at the door of a corner store I’ve just entered and promises me he’s going to kick my ass, break my neck, or failing that, crash a pipe on my head. “You get within six fucking feet of me and you are fucking toast!”

Later that day, I hear a guy talking – possibly to himself: “Social distancing? Folks been social distancing from us forever!”

In midtown, most shops are shuttered and there’s no garbage on the streets. It’s clean, unnaturally clean. Like a digital rendering of space. I turn towards Seventh Avenue only to find the air pungent with weed. Guys are standing in doorways shooting the shit. Someone cycles by, hands over to one of them a folded bill, accepts a wrap in return, cycles away. Seamless. Meanwhile a boombox plays what sounds like - can it be? Mantronix? It’s a tableau straight out of 1983 lore, out of a John Carpenter movie. That city was fallen, the official story insists; it was a dystopia in need of social and ethnic cleansing. Here, this afternoon, the compound of dope, beats and chilling feels inoffensive, balmy even.

Around midday, I often go to my dining table and do what a number of my friends do: switch on my laptop in order to hear the daily press conference given by the State Governor. I’m not sure if I’m really listening to find out the exact numbers of the sick and dying that he reads out. Rather, it's a tone: there is something reassuring in his measured delivery and parsed sentences which contrast with the hissy fits and bellicose lies of the president. There’s a second-hand memory of World War Two, of families perched around a transistor to hear consequential stories solemnly delivered by reliable newscasters. Not the maddening rent-a-gobs of modern-day cable networks. There’s solace too in the act of collective listening. How would our world be different if more of us were willing to forgo our privatized ear-fodder in order to listen – and respond - to the same broadcasts?

Sometimes, at 7 o’clock in the evening, I go to my window and join the informal scratch orchestras that have formed around the city to give thanks to medical workers. Although I can’t actually see any workers or even residents in the apartment blocks across the way, I’m temporarily overwhelmed by the hollering and bashing of pots and trays. It’s a pick-up symphony, a muddled-medley, and – I’m not sure what we’re doing. Is this just an upgrade of the Mexican Wave to entertain ourselves before the night’s drinking begins? Shake bones shake. Is the noise we make to remind us that we’re still alive?

Momentarily I envisage other hoorahs and heraldings. For the sexagenarian doormen who commute ninety minutes each way by bus and train to look after the buildings in which we live. For the deli guy who the other day I saw run half a dozen blocks to return a five-dollar-bill a customer had dropped. For the old lady who sings to the pigeons near Judson Church and throws them feed each morning. I think too of starting a collective boo – morning and night! - to anyone in digital marketing or the business of salads.

Some nights I can’t get to sleep on account of the sparrows. They’re so chatty! Every sound they make says, “Alive! Alive-ho!”

Some days all I hear are sirens.

Rainy days full of staying inside and having metallic-sounding confabs on Zoom.

“Can you mute yourself?”

“Can you unmute yourself?”

It’s rare that there’s absolutely no one around. Every other block there’ll be a pair of guys unpacking a truck. A couple of Latino men delivering food. As they pedal off to their next job, they fiddle with the boomboxes they’ve fixed to their bikes. One puts up the volume for If Leaving Me Is Easy by Phil Collins and the song lingers in the air long after he’s disappeared from view, as lonesome as a discarded glove.

It’s awkward when someone is heading in your direction. Their masks give them a highwayman edge. My first instinct is to squint at them quickly. Friend or foe? I find myself, even on broad sidewalks, moving to the edge of the paving. Who would be out and about at a time like this? Minor noises that I can’t immediately identify or locate are doubly troubling. My ears amplify every decibel. Canny or paranoid? In all these respects, it feels like the experience of walking at night time.

By May the streets are still becalmed, but the walls are getting restive. Posters saluting the faces of medics are tattooed with messages such as “Stop Fauci” and “Social Distancing Is Social Distortion”. On an East 11th Street doorway some smartarse has scrawled “Coronavirus Better Get Me First!” Down below Houston, a wag has marker-penned “I miss stealing from Sephora” on the shutters of the cosmetics store.

Every few blocks there are apocalyptic warnings about 5G. The wall of a sushi restaurant reads “You fucking dirty Japs.” Down in Tribeca I spot another wall with three different graffiti – “We ain’t shit”, “Pay No Bills”, “Let’s be Lonely Together” – that inadvertently create a triptych capturing the prevailing mood of hopelessness flecked with defiance.

Here are some of the sounds I miss most:

* Lovers breaking up by cellphone. “Fuck you forever!”

* 3am in Milano’s bar: strangers snogging as Kraftwerk’s Neon Lights plays on the jukebox.

* The Balkan accordionist on the 6 train. Every accordionist in this city.

* Old-timers sipping Americanos on benches outside cafes and complaining about the Mayor.

* Clumps of kids by Tompkins Square Park rhyming and freestyling late into the evening.

* Schoolchildren screaming as they jump into the outdoor pool at Sullivan Street playground.

* Black nationalist preachers chanting down the white man at Union Square.

* The guy who sits on a stool down the block from me and trills, “One penny! One penny for the homeless! No one should be hungry!” He’s been there for almost a decade.

* That guy by Avenue D who talks to squirrels.

* Eggs frazzling on the stove at B&H diner on a winter’s morning.

* The staff at Chatham Square Library stalking the aisles to shush noisy patrons.

For much of April even the construction stops. Construction never stops in Manhattan! The place prides itself on turnover and transformation so that any half-decent café that’s been open for more than a decade gets talked about as if it’s as a revered piece of antiquity. Building owners tart up exteriors to bump up prices and kick out old tenants. Developers promise their clients the skies and dross up the avenues with yesterday’s idea of luxury. On any given day your ears are assaulted by grinders and welders and hammers and jackhammers. You feel not so much awed as crushed by the roar of excavators and compactors. You feel collaterally damaged.

So, for a few weeks, as things go into slo-mo, as the relentless push for tomorrow abates a little, the city feels … nice. There are few cabs. I can walk for minutes without seeing a bus and, even when I do, it will be empty. The bland ambience of traffic and gridlock, the choked lungs it produces, the wage-slave rhythms to which so many of us are tied: it is – for all the worries about furloughs and unpaid bills – strange and liberating to be free of these.

And then there are those ridiculous fro-yo parlours, expensive gyms offering ‘prison’-style workouts, hotels hotels hotels, cashless salad bars, every bloody WeWork space ever, concept stores, deluxe condos. Who needs any of that shit? Who needs more banks with scarcely any tellers? More self-serving pharmacies? This has been a sputtering simulation of a city for a long time, given over to corporate chisellers, its signals weakened, its musics compressed. Who wants to go back to that monophony?

It’s in Chinatown that I experience the city’s deceleration and diminuendo most acutely. Chinatown, full of migrants – legal and illegal, from decades ago and more recently – is one of the few places with a pulse left in manicured and branded Manhattan. The tenements in which they live were once populated by tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews fleeing shtetl pogroms; they’re still cramped, and so life – in all its gossipy, argumentative noisiness – happens outdoors. Hawking and hustling. Tiny margins. Vivid parades. Cacophony and calligraphies. The smell of street theatre.

But today, in Columbus Park, the quiet is overwhelming. There are no old ladies playing mahjong. No old men, puffing out plumes of tobacco smoke, cursing as they lose at cards. No metallic melodies and keening refrains from the musicians performing old Chinese operas. Normally the younger kids, double the size of their stooped grandparents, would be shooting hoops and high-fiving each other on a nearby basketball court. But they’re not there. Nor are the grumpy vegetable stallholders on nearby Baxter Street. Nor the young couples sipping bubble tea at the modish cafes on Mulberry. Nor the itinerant erhu player on Pell Street.

I feel bereft at this missing audio archive, its loss intensifying the grief brought on by the fire that ripped through the nearby archives of the Museum of Chinese in America earlier this January. I head across Bowery, past East Broadway where I normally go to get the cheapest bok choy and daikon in town, all the way down Catherine Street. Normally at this time of year, here by the East River, with fast-moving trucks slish-slishing by, groups of elderly women from the nearby projects can be found doing aerobics to the accompaniment of turbo Sino-pop. Bam bam bam! Again! Bam bam bam. Again.

Oh I could cry….

One morning, walking in Little Italy, I stop still and listen. It’s the wind. There’s been a lot of wind recently. Back before all this started, I used to think of wind as something that slammed or bludgeoned, something that hit buildings and trees, that turned umbrellas inside out. But the wind these last few weeks is cleaner. It feels as if it’s travelled a long way to deliver a message – and that it's saying something important in a language no translation app could recognize. There, on Mott Street, I strain my ears. There’s more to this than ‘this’, it seems to be singing. More to here than ‘here’. I’m not hallucinating. The wind is promising me something rather than threatening me. Transports. A map of elsewhere. Messages from the past. Or is it whispers of the future?

It’s approaching the end of May. The streets are crawling out of hibernation. ‘For Sale’ signs are going up. Workmen methodically disassemble and gut shops. A few cafes offer takeout margaritas. People are returning, squinting and tentative, to the sidewalks. There’s pollen and hip hop in the air.

Over the last few months the city has been re-tuned. Marginal frequencies have come to the fore. Humans v cars. Humans v birds. Humans v atmospherics. Humans v anti-humans. There’s been a subtle modulation. New soundings, new possibilities. Can New York go forward? It surely can’t go back.

Now is the time. Unmute yourself, city!

1pm, 31 May. I had just finished writing these words last night when I heard noise outside my window. All day there had been shouting and drumming, a swelling and collective cry of rage for the murder of George Floyd. Now I watched masked young people glide down the street on roller skates, joining with cyclists and placard-carriers to form a flotilla of dissent. “Black Lives Matter,” some chanted. They were confronted by police cars. Above them helicopters hovered. Still they roared. “No Justice, No Peace!”

Then, late into the evening, there was fire.

Cheering.

Breaking glass.

Screams.

A euphoric exhalation.

This morning, on a wall by Union Square: “Riots Speak Louder Than Words”.

jonathan JuniperAugust 28, 2020