I broke for the aisle behind me. Carrying Serena in my arms, plunging through the phantasmagoria, out of the light, back into the flickering shadows of the aisle. I raced down the short slope, charging at the swinging doors.
I made it out into the corridor, headed down the corridor toward the red exit light, part of a swiftly moving stream of black dinner jackets and glittering gowns. The whole building seemed to be shaking now with footsteps and motion. The walls seemed almost to be rocking. The ceiling seemed to jump as if the roof would fly off. My stream of people crashed into another coming from the opposite direction. We converged and meshed and became one greater stream under the red light.
The door under the light was open by the time I reached it. Serena and I went through it with the rapid wash of rhinestones and bow ties flashing past on either side of us. I stepped out into the cold, damp air and took a great, welcome breath of it. But there was no time to feel relief. I was in an alleyway-a different one from before. I had to keep running or be knocked over. We all kept running, trying to reach the alley exit, trying to reach the street and put some distance between us and the doomed theater. Even here-even outdoors like this-we could hear the thunder in the theater continue to grow. It sounded as if some enormous tsunami were ripping itself out of the ocean bed and hoisting itself up to the surface of the sea.
I was halfway down the alley when the tidal wave caught up with us. Every theater door flew open. The people burst from them in the full flight of panic and swept over me in a flood. I clutched Serena to my chest with all the strength I had. I heard her scream, then heard her screams lost in the thousands of screams all around me. Wild faces were everywhere and the solid softness of bodies engulfed us. The tide pushed us and stopped and spurted forward suddenly in a broken rhythm impossible to outguess. I fought frantically to stay on my feet, clutching Serena, shoving to left and right to make a way for us. I felt myself lifted up and carried and hurled down to the pavement so hard I thought I would fall. But the crush lifted me up and bore me on, my toes scraping over the alley floor. I had lost all control. I was being carried along at the mercy of the billowing surge of the mob. I was conscious of my racing heart and a flow of some chemical energy through me that I suppose might have been called fear. But I was detached from it. It was something happening inside my body, not to me. In me, there was only an intensity of experience and force all funneled into my effort to keep my feet, to hold on to Serena, to go on, and to survive.
Now, as if gushing from a culvert, we broke out of the narrow alley and spread out into the street. We were broadsided, jostled, and then joined by the greater crowd swarming out of the front doors. As if we were one enormous force, we carried the barricades away, knocked them down and trampled them. We caught up the thousands of spectators waiting outside and engulfed them and bore them on. Finally we began to spread out over the streets and the sidewalks, flowing in both directions toward the avenues, away from the theater. With every step, the mob's first explosive energy diminished. It began to flow and eddy. I gained my feet again in the midst of it. I began to move by my own will. I began to think again. I felt the rhythms of my body beginning to slow and calm.
By the time Serena and I reached Broadway, I was able to stop, to turn and look back at the New Coliseum. Its gorgeous white facade stood imperturbable and grand. The spiraling sweep of arched, column-framed windows were bathed in the spotlights and the kliegs sweeping back and forth majestically in front of it. The last of the people inside were just now spilling out of the various doors, the flow of black tuxes and brightly colored gowns filling the street and spreading toward the avenues. As the people began to disperse and calm, their rush of movement slowed. Like the surf breaking into pools on the shore, the mob broke into groups and couples and individuals again. Some continued running toward the avenues in their anxiety, but most were content to slow down and walk away or stop at the corner or even just outside the theater's doors. People began to look at the theater over their shoulders or to turn around and watch it expectantly.
Nothing happened. The movement of the crowd slowed even more. More and more people came to a standstill. Some began to curse. Some began to shake their heads and laugh.
I was at the corner of Broadway. The lights of Times Square soared into the night behind me. The spotlit grandeur of the New Coliseum rose above the milling people on the street before. After the thundering panic, the honking horns of the jammed traffic and the shouts and talk and footsteps and music of New York everywhere seemed almost harmonious and sweet.
I set Serena down on the ground, holding her up on her bound feet with my arm around her shoulders. With my free hand, I worked the duct tape off her wrists. Then I held her under the arm while she bent over and worked the tape off her ankles. I looked out, meanwhile, at the gowns and tuxes pooling in the street. I heard more laughter-cursing, too. My eyes passed over smiling faces and puzzled faces and angry faces. I saw people who had fallen or simply collapsed in the gutter and were lying there with others kneeling beside them. Finally my gaze came to rest on one man standing in the street about twenty yards from me-twenty yards, I mean, closer to the theater. It was Patrick Piersall. He was panting, out of breath as I was, exhausted. He looked old, deteriorated, squat and paunchy in his black sweatpants and orange pullover. He was still gripping his gun, holding it down by his side now. He was staring up at the swirling rise of the theater facade with a sort of dazed, stupid fascination.
Serena straightened beside me, unbound. She looked at the theater, too. We all looked at it, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
"What the hell was that all about?" I heard someone say.
I wondered myself. I felt a fresh anxiety slowly growing up inside me. In my spent, empty mind, bits of information were beginning to assemble themselves like pieces of matter coming together in space. An entire alternative story told itself to me in an instant. In this story, I had inherited my mother's disease, had begun to see connections and patterns and logical progressions that had no bearing on reality. I had found a teenaged girl in a bad situation and connected it to a professor whose philosophy I didn't like. In my madness, I had tortured the poor professor into inventing some sort of conspiracy against American culture, an attack on the New Coliseum. Maybe I was even suffering hallucinations, and my life had become like one of those French theories in which reality could not be distinguished from the images thrown up by society…
"My God-" I began to whisper.
Then the New Coliseum exploded.
I could not take in the vastness of the catastrophe. I could only stand and stare.
There was a hugely loud yet strangely echoless thump. There was a great heaving movement in the street. There was a punching blast of air and heat that knocked me back on my heels. I felt a jolt of terror and a kind of awe as every one of the big arched windows that spiraled up the front and side of the building flashed with fire then went suddenly black. Glass flew-enormous slanting shards and little confetti fragments of it flew out everywhere-fanned out into the night with what almost seemed an air of frantic gaiety. The glass caught the white of the spotlights. It caught the colored lights of Broadway. It glittered and sparkled gaily, shattering and tinkling and raining down over the ducked heads and raised arms of the crowd in the street. The whole theater seemed to expand for a moment and then, remarkably, settle back into itself as if it were unharmed.
After that, there was a second of uncanny stillness.
After that, the theater crumbled.
Before our eyes, the fabulous structure turned to jagged stones and dust and, with a long, dying roar, spilled down out of itself and over the pavement. Once again, the people began screaming. They ran and stumbled over each other, trying to get away from the white onslaught of debris and the thick spindrift of dust. I saw people caught by the tide of stone and knocked over. Some were buried under it. Some were carried away.