in our ignorance. A few Brazilians. Gave gay-bashers license once again to work out their issues on swarthy civilians. We were indiscriminate in our discrimination.
It wasn’t that we didn’t care about the bombings. We just didn’t care about the city. Not really. Not that part. Not those streets. Most native New Yorkers, to be honest, had abandoned Times Square long ago. Thought of it mostly as a tourist preserve. Cursed the bright neon signs, the Naked Cowboy, and whatever errands might bring you there on a crowded Saturday to fight through the sluggish global herd.
It wasn’t long before native New Yorkers were all making the same grim jokes. Times Square? Roach bomb. Ha-ha-ha. Or, Times Square? I’ve heard it really glows at night. Or,Times Square? They finally figured out a way to get a tourist to step aside on the sidewalk. Or, Times Square? They bombed it? Well, who among us hasn’t thought of doing that at least once?
But the reality was that the walls had been breached and the tourists stopped coming and the streets emptied out and soon the rest of the people started packing up too. Some skyward, to glass penthouses and the lure of the limnosphere. Most just outward, to some other city without a toxic tumor in its midsection.
The car bombs didn’t help.
America’s big, and the long recession had hollowed out most of the rest of the East Coast, so it wasn’t that hard to up and move, to find another house, on another block, in another neighborhood, another job, another chance, in another city that wasn’t suddenly halfway poisonous. Where you didn’t have to stand and sniff the wind each morning from your doorway and try to gauge just how much death you could smell in the air, and whether today it was blowing toward you.
“Incremental Apocalypse” became the term of choice. Coined by some newspaper columnist, in an angry rant about the city quietly dying.
No zombie overrun. No alien armada. No swallowing tsunami. No catastrophic quake.
Just the gradual erosion of the will to stick it out.
A trickle became a stream became a torrent became an exodus.
So, sure, Times Square?
Times Square didn’t kill too many New Yorkers.
But it killed New York.
The day it happened, I was in Chinatown sleeping.
Deep in a custom-made dream.
Stooped over, wringing my hands in a waiting room.
Then slapping backs and unwrapping cigars.
Bright blue balloons kissing the ceiling.
Congratulations all around.
My wife died in that first one, the one on the subway. The small one.
The diversion.
On her way to acting class.
In the months after I could only hope she was riding in the first car. I hope she was standing right next to the bomb. I hope she picked up that damned gym bag, unzipped it, poked her head in, right before it detonated.
I hope it blew her to dust.
I hope that she didn’t lay wounded, twisted, in the darkness of that tunnel, waiting for sirens, waiting for help, hearing them carefully make their way down, advancing step-by-step through the wreckage, then die in the second explosion.
Everyone who was left died in the second explosion.
I hope she died in the first one. The diversion.
That’s what passes for hope these days.
21.
On my way back to Mark’s I make a detour to Hell’s Kitchen. Radio City’s too expensive to rent out on anything but Sundays, so Harrow has a Paved With Gold outreach center here, set up in a tidy storefront which is yawning awake just as I arrive. Strapping gents set out the pamphlet rack, while a wholesome blonde in a knee-length skirt sparks up the coffeemaker. Everyone has the whiff of missionary. Look too healthy to have been in New York for long.
I spot the clean-cut usher from the other night. Not in his suit now. Sharp slacks and a flowered Hawaiian. Looks like a Beach Boy.
I sit down in a folding chair opposite his desk.
Uncrease my brochure.
Tell me more.
I get the full pitch:
Fully subsidized dreaming on a pastoral country campus, a hundred
It wasn’t that we didn’t care about the bombings. We just didn’t care about the city. Not really. Not that part. Not those streets. Most native New Yorkers, to be honest, had abandoned Times Square long ago. Thought of it mostly as a tourist preserve. Cursed the bright neon signs, the Naked Cowboy, and whatever errands might bring you there on a crowded Saturday to fight through the sluggish global herd.
It wasn’t long before native New Yorkers were all making the same grim jokes. Times Square? Roach bomb. Ha-ha-ha. Or, Times Square? I’ve heard it really glows at night. Or,Times Square? They finally figured out a way to get a tourist to step aside on the sidewalk. Or, Times Square? They bombed it? Well, who among us hasn’t thought of doing that at least once?
But the reality was that the walls had been breached and the tourists stopped coming and the streets emptied out and soon the rest of the people started packing up too. Some skyward, to glass penthouses and the lure of the limnosphere. Most just outward, to some other city without a toxic tumor in its midsection.
The car bombs didn’t help.
America’s big, and the long recession had hollowed out most of the rest of the East Coast, so it wasn’t that hard to up and move, to find another house, on another block, in another neighborhood, another job, another chance, in another city that wasn’t suddenly halfway poisonous. Where you didn’t have to stand and sniff the wind each morning from your doorway and try to gauge just how much death you could smell in the air, and whether today it was blowing toward you.
“Incremental Apocalypse” became the term of choice. Coined by some newspaper columnist, in an angry rant about the city quietly dying.
No zombie overrun. No alien armada. No swallowing tsunami. No catastrophic quake.
Just the gradual erosion of the will to stick it out.
A trickle became a stream became a torrent became an exodus.
So, sure, Times Square?
Times Square didn’t kill too many New Yorkers.
But it killed New York.
The day it happened, I was in Chinatown sleeping.
Deep in a custom-made dream.
Stooped over, wringing my hands in a waiting room.
Then slapping backs and unwrapping cigars.
Bright blue balloons kissing the ceiling.
Congratulations all around.
My wife died in that first one, the one on the subway. The small one.
The diversion.
On her way to acting class.
In the months after I could only hope she was riding in the first car. I hope she was standing right next to the bomb. I hope she picked up that damned gym bag, unzipped it, poked her head in, right before it detonated.
I hope it blew her to dust.
I hope that she didn’t lay wounded, twisted, in the darkness of that tunnel, waiting for sirens, waiting for help, hearing them carefully make their way down, advancing step-by-step through the wreckage, then die in the second explosion.
Everyone who was left died in the second explosion.
I hope she died in the first one. The diversion.
That’s what passes for hope these days.
21.
On my way back to Mark’s I make a detour to Hell’s Kitchen. Radio City’s too expensive to rent out on anything but Sundays, so Harrow has a Paved With Gold outreach center here, set up in a tidy storefront which is yawning awake just as I arrive. Strapping gents set out the pamphlet rack, while a wholesome blonde in a knee-length skirt sparks up the coffeemaker. Everyone has the whiff of missionary. Look too healthy to have been in New York for long.
I spot the clean-cut usher from the other night. Not in his suit now. Sharp slacks and a flowered Hawaiian. Looks like a Beach Boy.
I sit down in a folding chair opposite his desk.
Uncrease my brochure.
Tell me more.
I get the full pitch:
Fully subsidized dreaming on a pastoral country campus, a hundred
Similar Books
Chair Yoga for You: A Practical Guide
Clarissa C. Adkins, Olivette Baugh Robinson, Barbara Leaf Stewart
