When the planes hit the twin towers on September 11th, 2001, I was in my apartment on East 12th Street. My girlfriend (now wife) was at her office in the East 50s. Not knowing if there were more attacks coming, and wanting to get as far away from Ground Zero as possible, we decided to meet at her parents’ apartment, on West 100th Street and Riverside.

One of my lasting impressions of that day is how the practical geography of Manhattan had been altered over the course of one or two hours. Downtown was a no-go zone, but so were all the major landmark areas such as Times Square, Grand Central, Union Square. How was I to get uptown safely?

Normally I would have walked over to Union Square, hopped on the N or R train, and switched at Times Square to the 2 train, which I’d take up to West 96th Street. By the time I was ready to leave the apartment (about a half-hour after the North Tower fell), I had no intention of taking the subway. The safest bet was to head up 2nd Avenue and cut across the north end of Central Park.

The walk took about two hours, and when I got to 100th street I found that people on the Upper West Side were doing what we now know New Yorkers do in a crisis: emptying supermarket shelves and waiting on lines.

Our current collective predicament has once again altered the geography in a way that reminds me of that day, but there are crucial differences. For a start, everywhere is dangerous this time around. Back in 2001, I was worried that the terrorists had more plans to execute, and I was trying to avoid the likely areas of attack. Covid-19 has no plan, just an evolutionary drive to infect wherever and whenever the opportunity to do so exists.

On 9-11, movement equaled safety, and there was a sort of dazed comfort in being part of huge crowds moving uptown, or over the East River bridges into Brooklyn and Queens. The weather was beautiful, everyone was together in the streets and if any danger was headed our way, we’d all be able to see it, moving through the plane-emptied sky.

Now, safety lies in stillness, in not moving and not being outside in crowds. This is nerve-wracking on a fundamental level. It goes against Fight-or-Flight 101: if you stand still, the big cat will get you.

Most people who have the means and opportunity to do so left New York City weeks ago, and it’s not just the practical considerations (fewer people, more places to walk without fear of infection) that led them to do it: it’s that animal need to move, to get away.

For those who’ve stayed, the current crisis has altered not just the geography of the city, but the manner in which we move through it.

When I leave my apartment now, walking down the street almost feels like driving. I’m constantly watching the movement of the other people around me, calculating their speed and trajectory, and adjusting my own so that we don’t get too close.

I’m also trying to take into account the movement of the invisible exhaust blanketing this particular highway: the germs that I and my fellow travelers are trailing behind us, like junkers with faulty mufflers. I do my best to avoid other people’s slipstreams. I walk at least six feet behind, preferably 45 degrees to the left or right, hoping that puts me outside of any cone of infection.

A few days ago, as I was returning from a trip to the drug store, a guy started walking behind me and yelling in a way that was either the result of alcohol or mental illness. He was going on about pedophiles and cursing someone (I didn’t look back to see if it was me) and all I could picture was the germs shooting out of his mouth as he ranted.

I was upwind of him, and the breeze was blowing southward, so I probably was safe. But I wasn’t safe from any droplets being ejected by anyone further north on Broadway, and that made me tense. As I approached my building, I saw a group of five men standing on the corner, talking loudly about sports, none of them wearing masks. I balanced my instinct to avoid them with my desire to not be seen avoiding them. As I passed, one of the men coughed absentmindedly, leaving me quietly traumatized.

Unfortunately, this is going to be the state of things for the foreseeable future. A friend recently returned to the city from Maryland, and said that things are notably different from when he left over a month ago: everyone is wearing masks and more carefully keeping their distance. Though new infections have gone down, there are still enough to scare people, and everyone is worried about the second wave.

The last time I rode a subway was on March 11th, when I returned home from a visit to the dentist. My dentist’s office is in a building on 2nd Avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets. The building is also home to offices of the Israeli consulate. There is always a police car out front, and to get into the lobby you have to walk past a row of concrete bollards that run the length of the block. Such bollards have been common in New York since September 11th, as have policemen standing outside of subway turnstiles to randomly search backpacks, or armed National Guardsmen standing with assault rifles in Penn Station or Grand Central. They’re just part of the fabric of the city, and no longer signal to me that something is wrong. Who knows what anti-Covid measures we will one day take for granted?