Nowhere Read Free Page B

collected that I found it difficult to report to anyone in authority.
    “Would you let me through?” I asked a beefy, beery man who had apparently come from the Hibernian bar a block or so north: he still clutched his glass of foam.
    “Naw,” he genially replied. “I was here first, pal.”
    “But I lived in there,” I protested.
    “Call that living?” He remained rooted.
    I abandoned this fruitless colloquy when a cop came through the nearby crowd.
    “Officer!” I cried. “That was my home, where the bomb went off!”
    But he, too, was indifferent and pushed me aside with the heavy and, I always suspect, mocking courtesy of the New York police officer. “ Exkewse me. Hey. Awright. Lemme. OK, folks. Huh? Naw. Yeah?” So far as I could hear, though they seemed to cover every eventuality, none of these noises was made in actual response to anything said by anybody else.
    I tried another cop or two, with no better success, but then, seeing some television newspeople arrive and emerge from their vans with hand-held cameras and lights, I decided to make application in that quarter, and maneuvered myself through the crowd until I confronted Jackie Johansen, a local channel’s sob sister, easily recognizable but in person displaying a graininess of cheek and lifelessness of bleached hair not evident on the home screen.
    “Jackie!” said I. “I’m the man concerned. It was my home that was bombed. You’ve got an exclusive interview!”
    She stared briefly at me with her pale eyes, and then turned to one of the males in her entourage, a short, very hairy, clipboard-holding man in worn denims and Nike shoes, and asked: “Who the fuck is this?”
    “A nothing, a schmuck,” said he, thrusting into the crowd, breaking a route for Jackie and a lithe fellow toting a camera. They vanished.
    “Ah, humanity!” sighed someone to my right. I turned and saw a derelict whose discolored skin and blue teeth looked vaguely familiar: he had been amongst the lot on the steps of the post office when I came home only—what?—an hour or two ago. Now I had no home. Foul as he was, I had an impulse to hurl myself on his malodorous chest and cry my eyes out—but this was gone in an instant. I grimaced and headed away from the crowd.
    But this embarrassing acquaintance was relentless! He stayed on my heels, moving remarkably nimbly for a wino, crying outmoded historical banalities, which for some reason annoyed me more at this moment than obscenities would have: “ ‘Man is a political animal.’...‘Power tends to corrupt.’...‘A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’ ”
    I’m afraid that all I could think of at this juncture was the feeble “ ‘Let ’em eat cake.’ ” I hustled on towards Third Avenue, having no destination in mind, but was soon stopped by a jeer.
    “That’s ‘ Qu’ils mangent de la brioche ,’ ” shouted the bum. “Not gâteau, nor was it said by Marie Antoinette!”
    I was stung by this gibe. I turned slowly, ransacking my brain for something, anything, that could be launched as a Parthian shot.
    But before I managed to make a sound, my tormentor came close to me and said, in a quiet but authoritative voice, as contrasted to his derelict’s bombast: “Follow me. I’m one of Them.”
    I don’t know why, but I trusted him, probably on the mere strength of his scholarly pretensions, to be at least more than a common bum. He pushed, as if drunkenly, past me, maintaining the imposture, and lurched to the corner of Third. I came along behind. The avenue was deserted, all of local humanity being over at the site of the blast on Lex. My man staggered to the curb and stepped down into the gutter between a parked VW Beetle and a large, battered gray van, where, hands at his crotch, he was seemingly preparing to urinate but was actually checking discreetly on the clearness of the coast; having determined which to be acceptable, he scratched at the door of the van. One of its panels soon