A guy came out with a couple of fifths, a stinking, dirty guy, strictly a Bowery type. He was all happy—you know, the millennium.
We both saw the other didn’t have the pop-eyed look. (This was the first time, but all that day I had a lot of those flashes of recognition. You immediately noticed someone without the pop-eyed look.)
“It’s great, hah?” he said. “All over town. Help yourself, fella, help yourself to the sauce. You know whatsa-matter with ’em, hah?”
I stared at his maybe three, maybe five teeth. “No. What?”
“They’ve been drinking water. It’s finally caught up with them. Poison, pure poison. I always said it. You know the last time I had a glass of water? You know, hah? Over twelve years ago.”
I just turned my back and took off and left him standing there.
Walking fast, uptown on Sixth, I said to myself, where the hell am I going? I decided to go to my office on 42nd Street. It’s like when there was a subway strike. I still belonged at the office.
For a while I looked out for a taxi, but you know, there were damn few cars going up the avenue, and most of them were traveling very, very slowly. Once in a while, there’d be one going fast, highway speed or beyond. Plenty of accidents.
The first accident I saw, I ran over to see if I could help. But the driver had already crawled out. He looked at the fire hydrant he’d knocked over, he looked at it spouting and shook himself and staggered away. After that I passed up the accidents. I just kept an eye out to see that no cars were coming up on the sidewalk after me.
But that geyser of water made me think of what the bum had said. Was it something in the water? I’d had coffee, but I’d set up the percolator the night before. And I hadn’t had time to brush my teeth. Doris, the guy in the brown sweater in the subway, they hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, they hadn’t touched water. Neither had the bum. It had to be the water.
I didn’t know anything then about that bunch of LSD kids, you know, one of them being the daughter of a Water Supply engineer and getting her hands on her father’s charts and all the other stuff that’s come out. That poor guy! But I knew about enough to stay away from anything that used water from a tap. So, just in case, I stopped in at a self-service grocery and got a six-pack of soda, you know, cans with pull-open tops.
The clerk was looking at the back wall in a trance. He had such a scared expression on his face it almost made my hair stand up. I waited for him to start screaming, but he didn’t. I walked out and left a dollar on the counter.
A block further on, I stopped to watch a fire.
It was in one of those small, scabby loft buildings that line lower Sixth. There were no flames visible, just a continuous balloon of smoke coming out of a third-floor window. A crowd of sleepy, dopey-looking people were in front of the place, mixed in with a bunch of bored, dopey-looking firemen. The big red fire engine was all the way up on the sidewalk with its nose inside the smashed window of a wholesale florist’s. And a hose that someone had attached to a fire hydrant was just lying there, every once in a while coughing up a half gallon of water like a snake with tuberculosis.
I didn’t like the idea of there being people inside, maybe burning to death very quietly. So I pushed through the crowd. I got up to the first floor landing and the smoke there was already too thick and smothery for me to go any higher. But I saw a fireman sitting comfortably against the wall on the landing, his fire helmet slid down over the front of his face. “No beer,” he was saying to himself. “No beer and no steam room.” I took him by the hand and led him downstairs.
There was a light rain going on, and I felt like getting down on my knees and saying Thank You to the sky. Not that the rain put out this particular fire, but, you know, without the occasional drizzles we had all that day keeping the city damp, there wouldn’t have been much of New York left.
Right then, I had no idea that what was going on was limited to New York City. I remember wondering, as I took shelter in a hallway across the street, if all this was some kind of sneak enemy attack. And I wasn’t the only one thinking that, as I found out later. I mean the nation-wide alert, and the hot line, and Moscow frantically trying to get in touch with its delegate at the U.N. I just read about the treaty the Russian delegate signed that day with the delegates from Paraguay and Upper Volta. No wonder the Security Council had to declare everything that happened at the U.N. in those twenty-four hours null and void!
When the rain stopped, I began to work my way north again. There was another crowd in front of a big Macy’s window on 34th Street near Sixth Avenue. A half-dressed guy and a naked girl were on a couch—the window display was advertising furniture that week—and they were making it.
I stood in the middle of all those trance-like stares and I just couldn’t pull myself away. A man next to me with a good leather briefcase kept murmuring, “Beautiful, beautiful. A pair of lemon-green snowflakes.” Then the Herald Square clock, the one where those two statues with hammers bang away at a great big bell, that clock began to sound off the strokes of twelve noon. I shook myself and pushed out of the crowd. The guy and the girl were still making it.
A woman on the edge of the crowd, a very pleasant, gray-haired women in a black dress, was going from person to person and taking their money away. She’d take wallets away from the men and little money purses out of the women’s pocketbooks, and she’d drop them in a large paper shopping bag. If anyone made the least sign of annoyance while she robbed him, she’d leave him alone and go on to the next one. The shopping bag was hanging kind of heavy.
She suddenly realized I was watching her, and she looked up. Like I said, we non-zombies recognized each other in a flash all that day. She blushed a deep blush, all the way to the roots of her gray hair. Then she turned and ran away at top speed, her heels going clack-clack-clack, the pink slip under her black dress flashing up and swirling around. She held on to the shopping bag as she ran.
The things people must have been pulling that day! Like those two Hoboken guys who heard on the radio that Manhattan had gone crazy. They put on a couple of gas masks and drove through the Holland Tunnel—this was maybe an hour before it was closed to all vehicular traffic—and went down to Wall Street to rob themselves a bank. They weren’t even carrying weapons: they figured they’d just walk in and fill their empty suitcases with cash. But what they walked into was a street gun duel between two cops from a radio car who’d been hating each other for months. I saw a lot of things like that which I can’t remember now while I’m testifying.
But I do recall how the tempo seemed to be picking up. I’d headed into Broadway, giving up completely on the idea of going to the office. There were a lot more traffic accidents and a lot more people sitting on curbs and smiling into space. And going through the upper thirties, I saw at least three people jump out of windows. They came down in a long blur, zonk-splash, and nobody paid any attention to them.
Every block or so, I’d have to pull away from someone trying to tell me about God or the universe or how pretty the sunlight was. I decided to, I don’t know, kind of withdraw from the scene for a while. I went into a luncheonette near 42nd Street to get a bite to eat.
Two countermen were sitting on the floor, holding hands and crying their hearts out. Five girls, secretary-types, were bent over them like in a football huddle. The girls were chanting, “Don’t buy at Ohrbach’s, Ohrbach’s is expensive. Don’t buy at Ohrbach’s, Ohrbach’s is expensive.”