I Was Watching an Episode of Seinfeld...

I was watching an episode of Seinfeld on the satellite yesterday afternoon, when an explosion detonated just a few blocks away. It does not come all at once. There is a build up. Yes, it happens very quickly, but this build up can be discerned. There is a low rumbling which seems to originate from within, as if one's stomach is upset. Am I hungry? I wonder, turning to the window. The rumbling grows louder, and it is now no longer from inside me. Now, it is all around me, and as the roar grows louder, it begins to feel as if I've been hollowed-out. My body is a vacant cavity, and all blood has has taken refuge in my brain. Immediately, I have a terrible headache, and my extremities are rigid. My head and eyes are staring through the window as the cacophony swells. The glass is vibrating violently, but does not want to shatter. It does not want to break, and I don't want the glass to break either, because I'm very close to it, and still staring directly through to the street and buildings beyond. There is a frozen man on the sidewalk opposite my apartment. He is turned away, his head tilted slightly upward, his arms bent and half-raised, like he is waiting to catch a ball arching down from above. There is no ball, of course, this is simply the position in which he has become petrified. I wonder about the expression on his face. I wonder if he happens to be stuck with a smile, and if this helps to improve the situation at all. I've recently finished a book in which it was said that much of our emotional state is dictated by the expressions we make with our face, not simply the other way around, as is intuitive. So, who knows? if he's smiling, this might all seem like a real great time. There is a grimace on my face. This is not fun for me. There is no time to try to smile. There is time to recognize the grimace, and to wonder about the man, and now to notice that my window has taken on the seeming properties of a liquid, rippling within each segment of the pane, but there is no time to smile. I will try to smile later. We will all look back on this one day and laugh. The man across the street is crushed by a collapsing facade. We'll all laugh one day.

It's over, and there's a kind of silence. It is a thick silence, not so much that there is no noise, but more that I am experiencing a deafness. Quickly, I realize that I am still staring, and that my window has not broken, and that my television program was not interrupted during this event. Sensing it is now safe, the blood rushes back to my limbs, and I rise purposefully from my chair, knowing I must check on the man beneath the rubble.

The street is desolate as I exit my building, and run to the man. Usually, after one of these episodes, the streets are bursting with angry, wailing throngs. I think that everyone gets the sense things are safest immediately after an attack, and so they become more brazen. This time, there is no one. My hands and fingers become scraped and bloodied from trying to sift through the pulverized concrete. A gurgling groaning sound emanates from one corner of the pile, and I decide to do most of my work in that area. I was hoping that chance would have created a space beneath the rubble for the man, the brunt of the weight being distributed across a wider swath, and not upon him directly. However, after rolling away a particularly large hunk of concrete and twisted rebar it became obvious this was not the case. A crushed nose had been revealed. It seemed that swelling had already begun, and so the nose was quite large, and deeply purpled. The surrounding debris pressed heavily on the rest of the man's face, and my eyes watered at the thought of what that much pressure could possibly feel like. I hurried to clear the rest of the debris, working from the head down until his snarled body was free.

He might have still been alive, but by this time, others had arrived, eager to take over for me, and so I let them. They will drag him to his feet, and then rest his body upon a make-shift gurney. Through the streets, to the nearest medical center, they will run with the man aloft, crying for revenge, and the man will die somewhere along the way, but they will have anticipated this, and so when they arrive at their destination, it is not the hospital, but instead the morgue. His body will be piled with the rest, and this med-evac team will disperse, dreaming righteous dreams.