Giving Rosalba my number violated the terms of my voluntary service and perhaps professional ethics. That we talked at all was a mistake. “Jesús R.” had been assigned to her, but something in their initial interaction made her demand a replacement. Thanks to a rickety state system put up in forty-eight hours, Rosalba was mistakenly directed to me, a speaker of high school Spanish. I told her I am not culturally appropriate and would she mind holding. But she was distraught and did mind holding very much. She didn’t want me because I was “Anna P.” but because I was not “Jesús R.” And besides that, a flock of lovebirds had taken up residence on her bed for the express purpose of tormenting her.

Volunteering for the COVID-19 Emotional Support Hotline was the least I could do when my passive form of responding suddenly became essential. Nobody knew the scope of the crisis in terms of lives and the fraying of social nets, but they knew that talking to a stranger had to be an immediate public option. I followed protocol by quizzing Rosalba. Did she live alone? Did she have family checking in? Did she have COVID symptoms? Did she have a bottle of sanitizer?

What Rosalba had were two adult sons in Miami—they were the dual sunrays of her life. The bane of her existence—beyond the locked-down Heights—was her philandering husband, Oswaldo, who had taken off to the DR in February and was consequently stuck there.

Rosalba was angry about Oswaldo but more so that someone had sent all the birds she had ever owned into her apartment. They had congregated on the bed where they sat roosting, staring at her accusatorily. She would not sleep on the bed with this battalion of birds. She had to make do on the terrible sofa. She was sixty-eight and until the shutdown had worked cleaning offices in the Adam Clayton Powell building on 125th Street. She’d just got a birthday cake from Maritza’s for Oswaldo’s seventieth. She ate the whole thing in one sitting with her friend Carmelita and Carmelita’s daughter down the street. Oswaldo had left for “back home” because he did not want to celebrate his birthday with the woman he said was always bringing him down.

I tried to assess Rosalba according to a checklist and connect her to city health services, but all she wanted to talk about was Oswaldo and the birds. Our forty minutes were up in no time. “Give me your number and we talk again.”

I could not bring myself to say that that was not allowed, that she could call back but would be assigned to someone else. “Catch it and close it” was the odd phrase that flew into my head as I debated what to do. I realized it was what a long-ago client had frequently said when he believed he was leaving himself exposed. I remember he worked for the Port Authority and had a drill sergeant’s ability to prevent himself from seeing how terribly sad his life was. I gave Rosalba my number.

My personal demographic meant that my feed of callers was going to be a certain way. Most were afraid and angry, self-described as “older”—never “old” but “older.” Older than what? I’d wonder. Older than someone who doesn’t need to call for help? You’d think that many callers would be people who lived alone, isolated and anxious about the prospect of unending solitude. But many appeared to have abundant family and friends with whom they might FaceTime. It seemed that free therapy was a draw even when civilization appeared to be crumbling.

After that first call with Rosalba, I had to educate myself about her assailants—peach-faced lovebirds that reminded me of marzipan decorations atop birthday cakes. Why was I going ahead with this off-road therapy? I didn’t know. Maybe I had a professional obligation to try to find out what had happened with Jesús R. that so offended Rosalba. But did it really matter in the grand scheme of eight hundred and forty-eight people dying every day? No, it did not.

When Rosalba called me again, we did FaceTime and arranged to Skype. She had a tablet. I could not see the bed or the birds. I could see that she was pretty, with pretty eyes.

“Are the birds always there?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. “Enough to always fill my bed.”

She explained that these were lovebirds that had accrued over many decades. When she’d go to a party or a wedding or even to the clubs on Dyckman and everyone would be drinking and laughing, Oswaldo would be seducing a young woman in plain sight. Someone’s niece usually, a girl of sixteen. Rosalba would drink too much and vow to her late sister that she’d go home and throw his things out on the street. But she only went home to drink from the kitchen rum bottle. When things were really bad, she’d go to the basement outside the super’s apartment where she kept her birds, the two of them together. She’d open the cage and shoo them off into the night, even if it was winter.

A prolonged silence followed “winter.” She had quietly begun sobbing. “I am a killer.”

“You were in pain,” I said. “You were suffering. You didn’t mean to do it.”

“I kept letting them go.”

She believed they were happy, the birds, even in their cruel basement cage, whereas she was sad with her longtime partner. The birds mocked her. She didn’t say “mocked” but I was sure that’s what she meant. And yet she always got another pair to fill the empty cage.

“Do you miss Oswaldo?” I asked.

“I miss my Rickie, my Manny.” She said that her all-time favorite bird was named after her older son.

“Is Rickie one of the birds you see on the bed?”

“I don’t know!” she exclaimed in distress. “There are too many all the same!”

Although she admitted to never going to church anymore, she said she thought there was a “white COVID God.” She was afraid she was being judged by this white COVID God who brutally metes out punishment. “It is not like in democracy,” she said.

I tried to comfort her. “You have to let go of that guilt.”

She told me she did not want to go “to Isabella,” which I knew was a nursing home on Audubon—on a hill. She was terrified of going “up there” to die.

“You are only sixty-eight,” I said.

“I don’t want to go up there.”

“You’re too young for Isabella.”

“I have heart condition.”

“You need to stay inside and protect yourself.”

“I have to go to Gristedes.”

“Don’t go to Gristedes, Rosalba. Have your groceries delivered.”

I didn’t know what to make of the birds on the bed. What were they up to? When a virus jumped from animals to humans, birds were their launching pads. I wondered if Rosalba had mentally made this association with avian flu unawares. Maybe she thought that if COVID came to humans from an animal, it would have to be an animal that was spiteful. So why not the lovebirds that had been let free in the dead of winter? I had just read where the French were thinking of killing all their ducks as a protective measure.

In my very different life of paying clients, the one I worried most about in the context of COVID had early dementia and lived at home with her husband. They had money—and children with even more money. They were the kind of people who’d have already left town by now, did not have to worry about caretakers who were asymptomatic carriers. Dorrie was the classic Upper Westie who’d had everything even when things were terrible back in the seventies. But that’s precisely why she and Harris were not leaving, even with a house in the Hamptons. To say that I worried about Dorrie is not to say that I liked her. In Nora Ephron movies, women like her are delightful because they know what they want. In real life, they are pathologically open about their selfishness. They bait you by relaying the terrible things their children have done to them emotionally, and when you express empathy they attack like a raptor.

Right after lockdown, Harris had asked that I take him on as a client because of his anxiety. I couldn’t believe I initially declined accepting payment, saying that I would do it as a friend under these circumstances. But he immediately called nonsense (relief!). He had a lot of money and needed places to spend it. Dorrie was becoming disinterested in our remote therapy and, per her husband, watching The Crown “on an endless loop.” During my Skype sessions with Harris, she was usually doing this noiselessly in another part of their massive apartment.

“Already last November,” he told me, “she was mixing up the Vermeers at the Met and the Frick. I knew it was the next stage we were entering!” They were the kind of cultured white people who go to the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center every year for Ellis Marsalis’s birthday party. This would be their social interaction with people of color.

During our sessions, Harris would get up and walk away from his laptop for long periods of time but continue shouting from the kitchen while running water. It was bizarre, but at least there was no guy showing me his dick. He’d come back to the laptop wearing yellow rubber gloves and holding a scrub sponge: “I like to call this the Grimsky-Korsokov portion of the show!” He suddenly had to do their dishes. He would not have their “regular people with the buckets” inside the apartment.

The twin crises of the pandemic and Dorrie’s decline were assailing him at the same time. He told me about the movie he had watched “by accident,” Enemy at the Gates, about Russian and German snipers during the battle of Stalingrad. I suggested that that’s how many people felt about COVID—that it was a sharpshooter intent on killing them if they ventured out onto the deserted streets. He said that analogy hadn’t occurred to him and that he would “have to think about it later on.” He liked to talk about Bill Evans. He’d stop himself: “Alexa, play ‘Waltz for Debby.’ ” He told me that Bill Evans was the model for Charles Schulz’s Schroeder—“the way he hunched over the keyboard.” And yet he kept forgetting that he’d already asked me about Bill Evans. “Do you know who Bill Evans is?” I longed to reply, “Some white guy in a Black guy’s world?” I also longed to reply, “I am not culturally appropriate.” But I suppose that I respected him and Dorrie precisely because they did not leave a city where COVID had everyone in its sights.

Rosalba was ready to leave the city at a moment’s notice; she told me her sons in Miami were coming to get her and bring her to Florida where it’s safe. She had a go-bag ready although she did not call it that. She said she had the bag ready at the door ever since her beloved sister died suddenly in 2018. It was a terrible time for Rosalba, and to make matters worse, her nieces had their mother laid out at Ortiz, the funeral home where gang members who get shot in the head are closed in their caskets.

At this gangland funeral home, Rosalba told me she saw Jesús fluttering in the darkened corners of the viewing room and then brazenly landing for several seconds on the rosary beads on her sister’s chest. She knew she was the only one who saw this.

“Jesús?” I asked.

She frowned, as if to show she expected more of me. “The one who came back.”

“One of your birds?”

She nodded vigorously. “He came back to give Mal de Ojo.”

“You let him go when your sister died?”

She shook her head with the same vigor. “In 1997.”

“What happened in 1997?”

I could not understand the layered Spanish but I think it went like this: Jesús appeared on the fire escape as Rosalba was closing the curtains. He gave her the Mal de Ojo that Rosalba interpreted as “Why you let me go?” Rosalba asked the bird, “Why you come back?”

I suggested that maybe he was angry that he lost his mate; maybe she had died in the cold. But Rosalba only waved her hand. She suspected that Jesús had sent the birds to her bed but chose not to come again himself. “Vanidoso!”

Although the lovebird predicament was only becoming more baroque, I at least had solved the mystery of what made Rosalba enraged about Jesús R. when she called the COVID Hotline: it was simply his name. I ventured to ask: “If the all birds suddenly went away, what would that allow you to do again besides sleep in your bed? What would that mean for you?”

She thought for a moment. “That I was safe.”

“Then your sons wouldn’t need to come for you.”

She looked devastated. “They could come and stay. I would still sleep on sofa.”

“They’d have to quarantine.”

She looked away, irritated. “I can’t even get cheese!”

I told her I would get her cheese. “What kind of cheese?”

“Any kind of cheese!”

When we said goodbye, she again expressed hope that her sons would arrive before the ambulance came to take her up to Isabella. I could not persuade her to mentally uncouple those two possibilities. But then I didn’t expect her to take my counsel. I had sought a Latino colleague’s advice about the situation back at the start. He said that my being the white person speaking the administrative language was serving a need—probably to “purge without societal consequence.” He thought Rosalba was willing to “play analysand in English” because she could confess matter-of-factly; it was not the language in which she had an emotional stake.

After Rosalba’s call for cheese I headed out to Trader Joe’s. Everyone in line was young, was not going to die for their walnut pieces. The line was too long so I went to the shorter wait for Zabar’s. Inside, I thought of Dorrie and Queen Elizabeth and the lockdown Instagrams making the rounds—the ones with people dressed up like famous paintings. I thought of Girl with a Pearl Earring as a cat and a blue bath towel and I bought the largest wedge of Jarlsburg I had ever seen wrapped in cellophane.

Walking the empty streets presented an odd tension—like that scene at the end of Hitchcock’s The Birds, where Tippi Hedren carries the caged lovebirds past roosting birds as far as the eye can see, attempting to get in the car before they go all Game of Thrones on her and Rod Taylor. I decided to extend my wandering into the park, where lately the rats were out in broad daylight. In some kind of homage to Harris, I had just watched Enemy at the Gates, where the sniper combatants are ridiculously pretty men who try to get starving people into their cross-hairs. I looked up how many Russian civilians died during World War II—20 million. Where was the epi curve for that? You wonder why the older Russian women look you up and down bitterly, there’s your answer. They were raised by starving mothers. Context seemed impossible, but that didn’t make the rain-slick world any less dour.

Rosalba had been calling me regularly, but suddenly I did not hear from her. I had all this cheese and didn’t know where she lived. A couple of days bled into a week. So I called and got her voicemail in Spanish. I called a few more times before getting Rosalba whispering that she was at the hospital, at Allen Pavilion, but she could not talk. So it has come to this already, I thought. More days went by, another Skype encounter with Harris complaining about the doorman not wearing a mask. I finally called Rosalba’s number and got a woman’s voice. It was Carmelita, whose English wasn’t great. “Her sons. She must talk to Rickie.”

It was a frustrating end to a frustrating situation and I was surprised to have been left so angry. Too angry for my profession. Was the Times going to dutifully profile the Dominican office cleaner with the bad heart, emptying wastebaskets for thirty years and before that doing other’s people laundry . . . did nothing to any living creature except exotic birds?

On my walks, any lone pigeon doddering on wiry coral feet across an empty park made me think of Rosalba. “Jesús!” I’d shout. What was it about her that was so engrossing? That she was so different from the people desiring free therapy? Maybe it was that she had no expectation that she deserved the things she wanted. Even with Oswaldo, she never said “I deserve a faithful husband.” She was tormented by an unfaithful husband, but she didn’t seem to think she had any reparations due. She never demanded justice. But now I was demanding justice on her behalf. Why couldn’t the ageless Jesús use his mysterious powers to get Oswaldo to apologize? To say to his wife: “You are sixty-eight and you should be retired and happy, not emptying people’s trash. You have worked hard and you love your sons. You are a good wife and a good mother.”

Then, when things were looking better across the city at the beginning of May, I got a call. It was Rosalba, and my eyes teared. Her sons hadn’t come back, but her husband did. The philandering Oswaldo somehow got a flight home from the island he had always thought of as home. It was he who was admitted to Allen Pavilion, not for COVID but for kidney disease. He was put on a plane as an act of mercy.

After a couple minutes of our familiar way of chatting, I sensed she was calling for a reason. “Do you want to ask me something?”

Yes, there was a something. Would I give Oswaldo a kidney if he needed it?

“I’d give you a kidney,” I said, “but I don’t know about Oswaldo.”

She laughed as if relieved. “He may not need kidney! Because he is not going to live long. He is too sick for chasing girls.” She laughed again. “And girls, they would make him sick. He is going to get it and that will be how he goes.”

Later on when we Skyped, she turned the camera to finally allow the panorama of her apartment, where her bedroom was a large alcove off the living room. I was imagining Oswaldo looking like Oscar de la Renta, but he looked like a walnut shell. He was lying on the bed, trying to be flirtatious with a stranger he could barely see on Rosalba’s tablet. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t got COVID and had to wonder if he was not blessed in some way. You could surmise from the deep wrinkles that smiling to the fullest was his at-rest expression. People like to say of such faces: “He lived hard but look at the laugh lines!” I would never dare conjecture what compelled Oswaldo to live the way he did. I just felt bad about all the dialysis equipment.

There were no lovebirds in sight. I asked Rosalba if she wondered where they’d gone. “They are there!” She held up her arm toward window light like that scene in The Sound of Music where the head nun sings “Climb Every Mountain.” Rosalba’s pose was a victory pose. Oswaldo was home and could not chase girls, and he was very ill during a pandemic. Rosalba had prevailed against the lovebirds. She had earned this moment of glory even though everyone was still afraid and anxious. Even though Rickie and Manny were still in Miami. She had earned it, the laurel and the crown, the right to call “Vanidoso!” on Jesús and live to tell. §