Slowly, slowly, slowly… and then real quick like I realized how many cups of coffee had elapsed between my first glimpse of Aaron on
the (CNN?) roof and my bowl of black jitter juice vibrating in my hand at the counter of Jim’s.
Have you done this? You are bringing the bottle to your lips and you happen to notice the level of liquid inside and you say:
Hey.
And you start to drink of course, but your brow is a little furrowed as you say:
How much of this have I really had?
But your mind will not reveal the facts to you, because it knows you can’t…
Handle The Truth.
I had watched from the second second to the last possible moment before setting out to open the museum to receive its conflicted
staff, turn them around gently, send them home and give the ones hiding in the workload additional work to hide in. I suffered the observation of skittish security as the bald lady in black dropped envelopes in the night deposit. I sat in traffic created by our
collective need to flee. Then I went to a diner that had subconsciously decided to beat back the horror by playing inane music so loud that the short order cooks resorted to shouting, which made transactions impossible to complete without pure hollering. Would I
like a warm-up?
Yes, please.
So within the hour I was back home, speeding out of my mind, over-medium eggs rumbling menacingly in the gut, stripping off
clothes, shutting down radios, turning televisions to face the wall, unplugged, darkening monitors with violent shoves, spreading out the cool piece of cotton and getting down on the floor to just be low and
unencumbered, silent and uninformed, a typanum of human suffering, sounding to the things that struck it.
Upstairs, through the floor, I heard a chirping. I entrained my breathing to it, then had it taken away later in the day when I learned that was the first broadcast of the sound of the locating
devices worn by firefighters, disappeared in swirls of ash.
The shimmering noise of debris, the damper of precipitate, the padding of feet on ash, and the inarticulate cry…then the pompous
theme music of brand-identified disaster, the wincing howl of microphones in press conferences, and the jarring chorale of
bipartisan leaders.
What to do with this new neural fasttrack between the ear and the heart?
Score it.