It started with a hunch (and was all a game of numbers)

My overtired self tends to assume the worst always, as opposed to my regularly-tired self who is only a slight pessimist in comparison. Maybe starting with the dream I had this morning that wasn't entirely a dream, the time between sleep and wakefulness that in my semi-unconscious state seemed like an hour but was probably five minutes. The dream where I forgot the shirt, missed the train, miscounted the money, fell on the ground, didn't stock up that almost started to materialize as I stumbled out of one station and to the next, to the 4 instead of the 2 because the 2 wasn't coming for 18 minutes at 6 in the morning. Waited for the R to roll around, angry at myself for being too tired to walk the 20 minutes to 3rd and 3rd.

7 hours in the heat but some money to show for it at least. A man with a certain knowledge that could be useful, and anyway he was entertaining. A mushroom sandwich on good sweet bread. Home to sweat that freezes in the air conditioner's cold dry stream. Some dinner and some wine, too tired to read but not to watch, and a supposedly early bedtime. Brush teeth admire self-administered haircut splash face and taste salt.

And then I walk back into my room and even the opaque black shower curtain-cum-windowshade is glowing red, orange, green, blue, red, orange, green all staccato. I say "don't look don't look don't look you dreamed all this last night" but of course I look and there's a cavalcade of police cars, ambulances, fire trucks lining my street and nothing is happening but I know something's about to. First I think it's my building and a disaster but I'm out on the fire escape looking down and my eyes tell me that there's no smoke and my ears tell me that there is no panic. I see other heads straining out of windows and I also see passers-by barely glancing, and both reactions strike me as strange even though I'm of the former.

Finally a stretcher into the building next door...and even though I'm fine, I know I'm fine as I'm of sound mind, I'm scared for what comes out on that stretcher and I think, "I will see blood, there will be tears" and so I keep glued to the spot and what I see finally is no blood, no tears, no scene. Just 16 men in uniform, seven emergency response vehicles and one human on the stretcher.

Now I don't know what happened in that building and I don't want to imagine it, but I do know that the man was wheeled out and he was alone. The good city workers of New York, done for the moment, wipe their brows and exchange some smiles and some words before driving away unceremoniously as if they do this every day as if this is a job and which they do and which it is. And one lone man in the back of an ambulance who is maybe not breathing and his only company are the two whose hands I see fluttering over his body as the vehicle leaves and makes my street black again, almost all black, at least eighty-five percent.

2-18-6-4-20-3-3-7-16-7-

and 1

(and 2)

and 85.

All come to roost in the city tonight between Manhattan and Brooklyn despite construction on the bridge. Hot heat of two islands perspiring onto themselves and each drop that falls is another person crammed into the subway car, another life working all day long, another soul restless for a place of overwhelming exactitude and unbridled excess. Tonight though I know one drop and one drop is a man without any mourners who we shut our windows on when it gets too hot to breathe.

I'm not really sure how to finish this one.