emblazoned, the leather would defy the summer heat, the
chains would bang like drums through the always-percussive
air hitting the cement. You could hear the anguish of the
motorcycles, hear the anguish of the streets, as the burning
rubber scarred them: the police cars would pull out fast and
there would be a din of dull anguish sounding like distant war,
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there would be the pain of acute exploding sounds that made the
buildings move and shake and your body was shocked by it even
before your mind could understand that you had not been killed.
There were fires too, loud red fire trucks: real fire, the
building across the street next to the precinct building burning,
the top two floors burning, the building right next to mine
burning. The red lights would flash like great red searchlights
and the sirens would scream right into the blood: and there
would be fire.
Across from the precinct in a gravel lot the police parked
their regular civilian cars and boys played basketball.
The street seemed to be overrun with uniforms, fires, guns,
cars careening in and out. The red searchlights and sirens made it
seem that the Martians had landed, or the army, or war had come,
or giant insects, or man-eating plants. Each day was a surreal
drama, an astonishment of military noise and civic emergency.
It was not the usual exile of the Lower East Side: condemned
into a circle of hell from which there was no exit, no one ever
left alive, no sign anywhere of what others call “ the social
order” ; instead, the social order swarmed and crushed sidewalks, was martial and armed; the social order put out fires that continued to burn anyway from one building to the next,
flaring up here, flaring up there, like one continuous fire,
teasing, teasing the men with the great hoses and the heroic
helmets. It was not the usual Lower East Side exile: one was
not marooned forever until death with only seawater to put to
one’s parched and broken lips: one could scream and maybe
someone with boots and a gun and a uniform and a right to
kill would take time out from the military maneuvers of the
swarming militia and keep one from becoming a corpse. One
hoped, but not really, that a single woman’s scream might be
heard over the military din. Right next to the precinct, in the
building next door, a burglar crawled into the apartment of a
woman in broad daylight, the middle of the hot afternoon,
simply by bending the cheap gate over her fire escape window
and climbing in the open window. The army did not stop him.
When he set the fire that killed her as she napped that afternoon, the red searchlights did not find him; the sirens, the hoses, the trucks, the helmets, did not deter him.
*
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