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the shallow doorway of the hôtel de passe of which my current burden, the petite harlot, was a relentless customer if she could find a series of live ones. And of course all windows were shattered for a quarter of a mile by the punch of sound.
    Being at a right angle to the blast, and a street away, we suffered only the bruises sustained in the plunge to the street I took owing to the aural shock. Which Bobbie, for such was her name, had the effrontery to chide me for!
    “Chrissakes, Rus,” she sibilated indignantly, hopping to her feet and brushing at the scuffed buttock of her designer jeans, which incidentally she wore a good deal more modestly than did most current females who were freebies.
    “So don’t thank me for saving your life!” I said. I was still sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, looking towards Twenty-third Street. I had not yet made the foregoing list of casualty-buildings. Indeed, for a moment or two I was enjoying the odd serenity that claims me on the very threshold of total collapse. I could reflect gratefully that while the Whatever Liberation Front were thoroughgoing swine to plant that bomb, I could not hate them for warning me, in fact demanding that I leave the premises. I could only assume that if the restaurant were still occupied, a similar call had been placed next door, and to whoever was available in the other buildings.
    Still breathing deeply from my exertion, though otherwise, so far as I was aware, in standard condition (which is to say, at thirty-five somewhat flabby though underweight; hair, teeth, and eyes OK)—I am holding back the narrative here, because I have always been fascinated by the tendency of reality to be amateurishly timed.
    Meanwhile, various persons came running towards the locus of the explosion, from up or down Lex and out of the numbered side streets. Bobbie was sufficiently eager for business, owing no doubt to her exigent pimp, to solicit several of the males in the collecting crowd, and in fact she finally netted a chap with a gray mustache and tinted eyeglasses, who led her to a double-parked Chrysler Imperial whose engine was idling and whose plates had been issued by the state of New Jersey.
    Eventually, though in reality it was probably all of twenty seconds, I got to my feet, remembering to hope that I had not fallen into the dog dirt that was once again extant, now that the population had become blasé about the poop-scoop ordinance, and finding none on a finger-search of my clothing, I approached my late office- cum -home, much of which was no doubt represented now in the pile of rubbish that filled the street. But more, in fact most, as I could see when the angle permitted, had plunged to the lower portion of the building, and had been followed by the roof and the furnishings thereof: vanes and vents and great slices of the surface of Tar Beach. The jagged walls of the first three stories contained all that had stood above and made a kind of giant topless box of rubbish.
    Somewhere in the thick of things was the play on which I had heroically labored for so long, without, however, having had the sense to make an extra copy of it for preservation in a safe place.
    On the other hand, one might profitably see this experience as the opportunity for a new beginning, and in truth nobody had ever seemed to cotton to that now buried work even as an idea—even when sitting drunk on the next bar stool (having got there on my money) in my local, a Third Avenue establishment frequented by people who fancy themselves as belonging to the intelligentsia because they can often name the principal players in prewar movies, follow pro football, and drink less hard liquor than any previous generation.
    The police cars began to arrive; and the fire department, in many companies and with much apparatus, clanged in from all points. Before I could collect my wits (which of course had been badly jostled), such a crowd of professionals and amateurs of disaster had