senses all come back online. When you’re back to using your actual organs, your eyes and ears and nose and nerves all open for business again.
Light searing your optic nerves. Odors numbing your nose. Sound galloping across your eardrums.
The wake-up call.
It’s painful. Everything seems too real for a time.
The too-sharp edges of the actual world.
20.
I collect myself and take the 2 train north toward Trump Tower. There are so few passengers at this hour they only run four cars to a train. And there’s no such thing as express anymore. Everything’s local. Making all stops. Except Times Square.
We rattle through without braking.
Times Square sealed off like a crypt.
The first explosion was small, on the subway, a diversion. Gym bag in the first car of a Manhattan-bound train. Intended to draw first responders down into the tunnel. Ambulance, EMS, fire crews, which it did.
Then came the second explosion.
The dirty bomb in Times Square went off about an hour after that.
Chaos opened the door to chaos.
Like a burglar sneaking in a side window, then unlocking the front door for his friends.
It was midmorning, Monday, holiday season. Just starting to get cold.
I remember they’d lit the big tree the week before. Local weatherman flipped the switch.
My Stella always liked to go into Manhattan to see the Christmas windows. She didn’t mind braving the holidaycrush, standing twenty-deep in a spillover crowd. She had a taste for magic. Silver snowflakes and mechanical elves, shilling name-brand gifts. Santa’s helpers, doing the robot, that was always my joke.
She used to talk about us renting a little flat in the Village. Nothing fancy, but on a pretty street. With trees. The city had a pull on her that I didn’t share. But she’d read all the romantic memoirs. The ones about a city rich with artists and poets and dreamers, the old-fashioned kind.
In my more sour moods, I’d remind her we were about a hundred years and a million dollars too late.
Irony is, pretty soon we could have had our pick.
That morning she watched me empty a pint bottle into the toilet bowl and made me promise it was the last time, for the last time.
She thought the drinking had something to do with the baby, or more to the point, the not-baby. Our inconceivable child. We’re looking to trade one bottle for another, is how she put it. That was always her joke, when she was in the mood for joking.
So I poured out the last bottle and swore never again on various graves. Truth was, I just wanted her to leave. I had an appointment to keep that morning.
Besides, it was easy enough to kick the bottle.
By that time I’d discovered the beds.
They drove it straight down from upstate, down the Henry Hudson, left at Forty-Second, right into Times Square, no stops. Made the whole trip on one tank of gas.
Officials later said if they hadn’t blown themselves up they would have died in a few months anyway, just from handlingthe radioactive waste. Maybe if they’d had second thoughts. Dithered while they withered away in a quiet farmhouse somewhere.
The world’s first long-term suicide bombers.
But they didn’t. They drove it straight into the heart of Manhattan. Like a stake.
A van stuffed with a bomb stuffed with fertilizer salted with waste lifted from a radiotherapy clinic in foreclosure. Enough to poison twenty city blocks.
Crude stuff. But somehow fitting.
A bomb made of shit and someone else’s trash.
Pulled to a stop outside a TGI Fridays.
Whispering a final fevered prayer.
Back doors blew open and gave birth to a toxic cloud.
Shattered windows. Splattered tourists.
Glass. Blood. Sirens. Smoke. Screams.
Hair. Bones. Ashes. Skin. Flesh.
Charnel carnage.
Almost biblical.
A loosed plague.
We fought that morning, like many mornings, like most. I was back from my leave, back at work but not really, and not often. And she was just starting to realize that Broadway was a lot more crowded than a high-school stage in
Light searing your optic nerves. Odors numbing your nose. Sound galloping across your eardrums.
The wake-up call.
It’s painful. Everything seems too real for a time.
The too-sharp edges of the actual world.
20.
I collect myself and take the 2 train north toward Trump Tower. There are so few passengers at this hour they only run four cars to a train. And there’s no such thing as express anymore. Everything’s local. Making all stops. Except Times Square.
We rattle through without braking.
Times Square sealed off like a crypt.
The first explosion was small, on the subway, a diversion. Gym bag in the first car of a Manhattan-bound train. Intended to draw first responders down into the tunnel. Ambulance, EMS, fire crews, which it did.
Then came the second explosion.
The dirty bomb in Times Square went off about an hour after that.
Chaos opened the door to chaos.
Like a burglar sneaking in a side window, then unlocking the front door for his friends.
It was midmorning, Monday, holiday season. Just starting to get cold.
I remember they’d lit the big tree the week before. Local weatherman flipped the switch.
My Stella always liked to go into Manhattan to see the Christmas windows. She didn’t mind braving the holidaycrush, standing twenty-deep in a spillover crowd. She had a taste for magic. Silver snowflakes and mechanical elves, shilling name-brand gifts. Santa’s helpers, doing the robot, that was always my joke.
She used to talk about us renting a little flat in the Village. Nothing fancy, but on a pretty street. With trees. The city had a pull on her that I didn’t share. But she’d read all the romantic memoirs. The ones about a city rich with artists and poets and dreamers, the old-fashioned kind.
In my more sour moods, I’d remind her we were about a hundred years and a million dollars too late.
Irony is, pretty soon we could have had our pick.
That morning she watched me empty a pint bottle into the toilet bowl and made me promise it was the last time, for the last time.
She thought the drinking had something to do with the baby, or more to the point, the not-baby. Our inconceivable child. We’re looking to trade one bottle for another, is how she put it. That was always her joke, when she was in the mood for joking.
So I poured out the last bottle and swore never again on various graves. Truth was, I just wanted her to leave. I had an appointment to keep that morning.
Besides, it was easy enough to kick the bottle.
By that time I’d discovered the beds.
They drove it straight down from upstate, down the Henry Hudson, left at Forty-Second, right into Times Square, no stops. Made the whole trip on one tank of gas.
Officials later said if they hadn’t blown themselves up they would have died in a few months anyway, just from handlingthe radioactive waste. Maybe if they’d had second thoughts. Dithered while they withered away in a quiet farmhouse somewhere.
The world’s first long-term suicide bombers.
But they didn’t. They drove it straight into the heart of Manhattan. Like a stake.
A van stuffed with a bomb stuffed with fertilizer salted with waste lifted from a radiotherapy clinic in foreclosure. Enough to poison twenty city blocks.
Crude stuff. But somehow fitting.
A bomb made of shit and someone else’s trash.
Pulled to a stop outside a TGI Fridays.
Whispering a final fevered prayer.
Back doors blew open and gave birth to a toxic cloud.
Shattered windows. Splattered tourists.
Glass. Blood. Sirens. Smoke. Screams.
Hair. Bones. Ashes. Skin. Flesh.
Charnel carnage.
Almost biblical.
A loosed plague.
We fought that morning, like many mornings, like most. I was back from my leave, back at work but not really, and not often. And she was just starting to realize that Broadway was a lot more crowded than a high-school stage in
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