The birds must think we’ve gone extinct. One day we were there—spilling out of subway stations, lining up at theatres, packing into restaurants and airports and polling places—and then we all went inside and never came back out. Times Square is totally empty, but the lights are still on. (Glad that someone was able to pay the electricity bill this month.)
When the illustrator Christoph Niemann went for a run on a recent Sunday, in Berlin, he spotted “a lonely musician playing ‘Country Roads’ on bagpipes, in front of the usually bustling Brandenburg Gate.” He drew it. Jun Cen, an illustrator in Guangzhou, drew a scene from his new quarantine routine. “Sometimes my friend and I meet up at a flyover that is close to both of our homes,” he said. “Watching the empty roads, we smoke a cigarette or two, chat a little bit, then home. That’s how we keep each other alive mentally during the quarantine.” On the beaches of Tel Aviv, black flags are put up when the ocean is too dangerous to swim in. “This morning, the ocean was calm and beautiful,” the illustrator Rutu Modan said. But the flags were up anyway. “The danger was somewhere else.”
“Without any people around, every place looks the same, united by the feeling that something sinister lies in a completely deserted space,” the illustrator Bianca Bagnarelli said. She has drawn a postcard from Bologna, where there are six hundred and sixty-six porticoes, and no tourists to walk beneath them.
Of course, there are a few places that feel more crowded than ever. Like emergency rooms, and morgues, and Central Park, where a small city of white hospital tents sprang up seemingly overnight. Even our own homes. “It turns out that I was a pretty good husband and parent as long as my wife and kids were out of the house all day,” Adrian Tomine, an illustrator in Brooklyn, said. He has drawn a scene from his apartment: a sink full of dishes, dirty laundry scattered everywhere, his daughter climbing the walls. It is labelled “Day Two.”
—Tyler Foggatt
