closed up my phone.
âHi.â
âI got worried about my grandma,â she said.
âShe was fine. I put her in the car. I was just thinking. Come on, letâs go back up.â
There was a crack of thunder, and a brief flash of lightning over towards New Jersey, but instinctively Maxine turned her head south. It was almost three years, but sudden noises in the city made her look south.
âItâs just thunder,â I said. âMaybe I should go AWOL, honey, and come out to the shore with you tomorrow. I could find someone to cover for me. I could try.â
âYou canât do that. Weâll be fine. Youâll meet us, and anyway we could use the overtime. Youâll come out in a few days like we planned,â she said. âI know. I still get jumpy when I hear something. We all fake being OK, and then you hear something. I know girls I work with who drink now who never had a drink before 9/11. I think about stuff and I think, I canât do it again, Artie. Thatâs what scares me, that I donât have anything left if it happens again. I figured that out during the blackout last summer, that I couldnât go through it again.â
August 14, the summer before, we were originally supposed to get married, me and Maxine. The day before we planned it, the city went dark. The lights went out.
Maxine was stuck at work downtown, the girls were with her mother in Jersey. My car was in the shop and I was on the subway, sweating.
That afternoon, getting ready to go home and get ready for our wedding the next morning, the electricity goes and Iâm trapped. People around me get edgyfirst, then frightened; panic sets in. We wait in the dark and the heat. I start talking to the crowd, telling them itâs OK. I talk to them through the dark crowded train. Afterwards, I help people out of the car and along the narrow path in the low black tunnel and up metal stairs on to the street. I do it because Iâm a cop and I have to do it; they cling to me. I feel their sweaty hands.
Itâs dark by the time I start home on foot, no lights, the streets jammed with people, some of them, people who missed trains, lugging suitcases. Everyone mills around, yelling into cellphones, gathering near yellow cabs that pull over to the curb.
Dozens of cabs everywhere, their radios turned up loud, have become mobile communications centers. Parked everywhere, the drivers lean out of their windows and pass news along to people who listen intently, convinced at first that itâs terrorists. The next big attack, we all think; the one everybodyâs been waiting for. I look up. I look for a plane.
âHoly shit!â
I say it out loud: holy shit. It was the first thing we heard, the first piece of TV footage when the plane hit the Trade Center, before the ball of fire. Holy shit! This time itâs only a blackout. A summer storm, power outage, a cascade. Whatever; just a fluke.
I get home that night thinking about my first blackout in the city. 1977 was my first year in New York. Iâm uptown near Columbia, people crowding around the university, everywhere the sounds of breaking glass and screaming and sirens. Feral kids roam the streets, lootingstores. I see a man hump a TV set out of a store window; another carries five radios.
I have applied to the Academy; I want to be a cop, I want New York. But that night I wonder, for the only time, if I should have gone somewhere safe and bland, Australia, Canada.
A girl walking by takes me by the hand and we go up on the roof of her building and there are maybe twenty other people, students mostly. I spend the night there on a blanket next to the girl whose name I never learn. When I wake up, I see the others, on blankets, plastic deck chairs, sleeping bags. Their faces are young and sweet in the early light. I look out over the city and watch the sun come up. Iâm hooked.
5
All night long, through a kind of boozy haze, I kept
âHi.â
âI got worried about my grandma,â she said.
âShe was fine. I put her in the car. I was just thinking. Come on, letâs go back up.â
There was a crack of thunder, and a brief flash of lightning over towards New Jersey, but instinctively Maxine turned her head south. It was almost three years, but sudden noises in the city made her look south.
âItâs just thunder,â I said. âMaybe I should go AWOL, honey, and come out to the shore with you tomorrow. I could find someone to cover for me. I could try.â
âYou canât do that. Weâll be fine. Youâll meet us, and anyway we could use the overtime. Youâll come out in a few days like we planned,â she said. âI know. I still get jumpy when I hear something. We all fake being OK, and then you hear something. I know girls I work with who drink now who never had a drink before 9/11. I think about stuff and I think, I canât do it again, Artie. Thatâs what scares me, that I donât have anything left if it happens again. I figured that out during the blackout last summer, that I couldnât go through it again.â
August 14, the summer before, we were originally supposed to get married, me and Maxine. The day before we planned it, the city went dark. The lights went out.
Maxine was stuck at work downtown, the girls were with her mother in Jersey. My car was in the shop and I was on the subway, sweating.
That afternoon, getting ready to go home and get ready for our wedding the next morning, the electricity goes and Iâm trapped. People around me get edgyfirst, then frightened; panic sets in. We wait in the dark and the heat. I start talking to the crowd, telling them itâs OK. I talk to them through the dark crowded train. Afterwards, I help people out of the car and along the narrow path in the low black tunnel and up metal stairs on to the street. I do it because Iâm a cop and I have to do it; they cling to me. I feel their sweaty hands.
Itâs dark by the time I start home on foot, no lights, the streets jammed with people, some of them, people who missed trains, lugging suitcases. Everyone mills around, yelling into cellphones, gathering near yellow cabs that pull over to the curb.
Dozens of cabs everywhere, their radios turned up loud, have become mobile communications centers. Parked everywhere, the drivers lean out of their windows and pass news along to people who listen intently, convinced at first that itâs terrorists. The next big attack, we all think; the one everybodyâs been waiting for. I look up. I look for a plane.
âHoly shit!â
I say it out loud: holy shit. It was the first thing we heard, the first piece of TV footage when the plane hit the Trade Center, before the ball of fire. Holy shit! This time itâs only a blackout. A summer storm, power outage, a cascade. Whatever; just a fluke.
I get home that night thinking about my first blackout in the city. 1977 was my first year in New York. Iâm uptown near Columbia, people crowding around the university, everywhere the sounds of breaking glass and screaming and sirens. Feral kids roam the streets, lootingstores. I see a man hump a TV set out of a store window; another carries five radios.
I have applied to the Academy; I want to be a cop, I want New York. But that night I wonder, for the only time, if I should have gone somewhere safe and bland, Australia, Canada.
A girl walking by takes me by the hand and we go up on the roof of her building and there are maybe twenty other people, students mostly. I spend the night there on a blanket next to the girl whose name I never learn. When I wake up, I see the others, on blankets, plastic deck chairs, sleeping bags. Their faces are young and sweet in the early light. I look out over the city and watch the sun come up. Iâm hooked.
5
All night long, through a kind of boozy haze, I kept
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