118 essay Sirenland The crisis in New York City Briallen Hopper The sirens never stop. There are so many that I have nightmares about ambulances speeding down the street three or four abreast like chariots, wheels flying off, whips crack ing, horses’ mouths foaming. Then I’m jolted awake by an urgent mechanical groan, as if the driver is flooring their horn right next to my bed. Sometimes, rarely, there seems to be a lull, and then, suddenly, far off, a distant rising and falling line of sound. It must be a hallucination, I think; I am finally losing my mind, making sirens out of silence. But then the sound gets closer and shriller and starts to bore into my ear, and I know without a doubt that it’s real. My brain keeps translating the sirens into metaphor because it can’t bear what they really mean: Thousands of people are strug gling to breathe. Thousands of other people are risking their lives to try to save them. I live three blocks from Elmhurst Hospital, the public hospital in Queens that turned into a global COVID-19 epicenter overnight. New York City has the most cases on the planet, Queens has the most cases in New York, and Elmhurst Hospital has been flooded Sirenland | 119 with hundreds of patients from Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights, the hardest- hit neighborhoods in the city. Witnesses describe what’s happening there as a tsunami, a siege, a warzone, an apocalypse. The hospital is operating at five times its ICU capacity. Health care workers wear their masks and other personal protective equipment over and over again. Patients are cut off from everyone they love. Frantic family members call for updates and can’t get through for days. Ventilators don’t get freed up till some body dies; immediately another patient is hooked up. There is no space to put all the bodies, so a refrigerator truck parked by the hospital serves as a makeshift morgue. The need for social distancing means that I have to physically distance myself from the suffering that has flooded my neigh borhood. But I don’t want to be distant. I want to remember the people who had to fight for their last breaths here. The mother of a student at Queens College, where I teach. A trans activist who worked for decades to organize and care for our neighborhood’s many vulnerable trans women, helping them get access to AIDS tests and immigration assistance and bailing them out of jail. The priest at my church, who preached extemporaneously in Spanish and English with equal hope and faith, and who placed a wine- dipped wafer on my tongue the week before the churches closed. All of them died last week. The sirens bring me closer to them. Most Elmhurst residents can’t #StayHome and order takeout. They are the ones delivering the takeout. They are delivering pack ages, stocking shelves, ringing up groceries, cleaning subway cars— essential employees forced to keep going to work with a cough and fever until they can’t breathe. Or they’ve lost their jobs as wait ers, bartenders, barbers, caregivers, and now they aren’t sure how much longer they’ll be able to afford a home—an apartment, a basement, a bunkbed—to stay in. Elmhurst is 71% foreign- born and over 93% people of color. Even before COVID- 19, most of its residents were struggling to keep up with the rising cost of shel ter. And its population density is particularly lethal in a pandemic: Elmhurst has some of the highest numbers of people per room in 120 | Briallen Hopper the city. There is no way to self- isolate when you are sharing your bedroom and the air you breathe with two or three other people. A few weeks ago, when I began to feel what was coming for my neighborhood and the world, my body began to rebel. I couldn’t eat. My throat closed when I tried to swallow. The next day, while I was lighting a candle to pray, I abruptly shat my pants. I assumed I was becoming an embodied metaphor or cliché, literally shitting myself...