Terrortown

Some people say they’ll be stopping every train heading into Penn Station — every train, northbound and south-, from Connecticut or New Jersey, Long Island, whatnot. Others guess they’ll stop trains randomly — that, oh, sure, they’re saying they’ll stop them all: but they won’t, of course they won’t, they never could. They just want to scare them. Them? The bad guys. Terrorists. Right?

Other people are saying you won’t be able to get near Madison Square Garden. That they’ll be running metal detectors on every corner in a six block radius, passing us through them, funneling commuters like cattle in a chute. Some are saying you’ll have to get ID’d just to walk down the block. What good the ID check would do is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’ll have Secret Service on hand, guys with phenomenal memory, entire mugbooks of terrorists, known and suspected, perused, digested, stored in their heads — guys who can take one look at you posed under bad DMV lighting and compare it with the entire mental file.

Many are taking that week off, August 30 through September 3, fuck it, who needs the hassle. Makes sense. But imagine it: New York: Republicans flooding in, New Yorkers flooding out.

It makes sense.

You get jumpy walking down the street. You get jumpy in the subway, on the bus. You were probably jumpy anyway — this is New York; but now you’ve got eyes in the proverbial back of your head, and they are wide. Because people carry stuff in this town: backpacks, boxes, shoulder bags and grocery sacks, whole crates. The stuff is bulky, heavy. It’s got gravity. Once, even recently, this might have been counted one of the great things about New York — that you could see, at any given moment, anyone hauling anything. I’ve seen people moving entire apartments by subway, doing it cheap, one box at a time. I’ve seen air conditioners, stereos, sporting equipment. I’ve seen computers. I’ve seen laundry, suitcases, dogs and cats in portable houses; mice, birds, snakes. Sometimes you have no idea: it’s just a giant leather bag, or a giant plastic bag, or a giant cardboard box holding god knows what. As always, you try not to look — or at least you try not to get caught looking. But whatever it is, whatever you can imagine, you’ll see it. Everything — that’s what you’ll see: everything; and it will be out here among us, being hauled.

So what was once one of the great things about New York has now become ominous. Even backpacks — even those thin little rectangular computer packs, very sleek: they portend. What’s in there? Why so heavy? Why so secret, so covered up?

We had our first suicide bomber this week. He was homegrown, but that hardly matters. Damage is damage. Potential damage is damage. Not terror, this one, but not unrelated: a New York City policeman, injured, distraught over friends and colleagues lost on 9/11, descended into self-loathing and depression, genuine organic mental disorder — so they speculate — that had always been there, got worse. Became despair. Is this what passes for irony these days? The cop had been a rookie on that day. Afterward, he could no longer function. He was losing his job, being pushed into early retirement, permanent disability. He loved the brotherhood, but he let the brotherhood down; and then the brotherhood let him go.

Who knows how people think? We know this: he made a bomb. He carried it, allegedly, into 42nd Street. That’s Times Square station, the New York City subway system — possibly the busiest warren of musted and urine-fouled tunnels on the face of the earth. He wanted to kill himself. And he wanted to take some of us with him — many of us, because let’s face it, there’s never a time when there are only a few. A peculiarly American thing, that: disgruntled civil servant takes page out of Palestinian handbook. The other Middle Eastern export. But of course the psychology, in America — the motive — is always personal.

Why did he do it? We don’t know why. We will never know why. There is no explanation for a thing like this, no trail of logic as we properly define it that would lead us to his conclusion, make us say Aha, so that’s the reason, now we see. We can’t see. This is what makes it unpredictible. This is what makes it — dare I breathe the word? — this is what makes it terror.

So the cops, the sane ones anyway, they’re out on the street again, as they were when the war on Iraq began, as they were in the wake of the attacks themselves. We are getting used to them. The sight is not unpleasant. They are regular guys and regular gals, as far as we can tell; they’re tough, sardonic, forever a little pissed off. Some, believe it or not, are jolly. They joke and laugh with one another. They seem confident. And the mere fact of their presence tells us something is being done.

But, really, what can be done? Spend a little time here and you will wonder. Look around; walk; observe; and ponder. See the crowds, the sheer torrents of people, so many sizes, shapes, colors and styles, so many directions they move in, so many thoughts behind so many unreadable eyes. Just: so many. It is not possible to watch them all, let alone to search them, frisk them, x-ray their clothes and their bags. What can be done? You can’t know where they come from. You can’t know what they want. Most of all you can’t know what they carry in their bags, in their hearts.

What can be done?

We all think of it: how easy it would be. How unstoppable, how fast. We all think of it, all the time; and we don’t want to say what we think because we’re afraid. What if they haven’t guessed? What if they haven’t yet stumbled upon whatever simple yet infallible scheme we’ve dreamt up idly on a late-night ride or a midtown walk? Ridiculous, of course: that we could outwit men who think of such things and only such things all day and all night, devote their lives to it, take pride — monks of death, scientists of the furtive assault. But we are reluctant just the same. We tell our loved ones under cover of darkness, we tell our friends after bottles of wine. We look afresh at the things we do ourselves, and we try to imagine: what if ...?

Example. What if I rented a car. What if I drove it up the West Side Highway, onto the Merritt Parkway, out of state. What if I visited friends in a town, a small city even: Providence; Portsmouth, New Hampshire. What if my friends gave me a package. Let’s say they packed it in a suitcase and we put the suitcase in the trunk. Back I come, down the Merritt Parkway again, through the Bronx and past the George Washington bridge to the West Side Highway: Manhattan now, me in my rented car. The traffic is thick; I try to keep up. No one has time to notice me. They are busy, distracted, important people; and in my car I am small, cheap, generic, unworthy of remark. No one will stop me. No one will search me. No one will check my loaded trunk. I know: with the exception of the package, I have done exactly this, more than once. Into the city I come, up 96th Street and over to Central Park West. How easy it is; how convenient. I sail to Central Park West and find parking on a side street — 93rd, 94th, 95th. I leave the car and take my suitcase from its trunk. There is a subway stop at 96th: down I go. Ten minutes later I am at 42nd Street. Two minutes after that I am at 34th. And on and on. You see?

What keeps this from happening? It’s not cops. It’s not military. It’s not that no one ever thought of it but me. It is the simple fact that no one, yet, has had the desire. And we can rely on that no more.

So we don’t talk. We don’t tell each other these thoughts because we are terrified of the distance between unstoppable and inevitable — the mysterious math that we live by these days which suggests that if a thing canbe done, then sooner or later it will be done. And so if we can think it, they too can think it; and if they can think it — in their unknowable heads, their unknowable hearts — then it can be done. And if it can be done, then why, given the leave the world has taken of all logic, will it not be?

We don’t talk. The MTA does not talk. The police do not talk, and god knows the administration does not talk. Facts are scarce. Want to know what security precautions are planned for the convention next month — in this city, our city, where we live, work, love and panic; where we’ve already been attacked and will, we are told, over and over, inevitably, be attacked again? Visit the homeland security department’s web site. There you’ll find strong words, confident words, much bluster; but no plans. Visit the MTA site. Schedules, rules of conduct, maps; but no plans. Visit the official site of the City of New York — laudable information about affordable apartments; but, alas, no plans. You won’t find them on the official Republican National Convention site, either; or on the Madison Square Garden site, or the Port Authority’s. Maybe they’re coming. Maybe they’re in the works. We’ve got thirty-eight days to go, after all. But in the meantime those of us who live here — we’ve little but our rumors. We’ve little but our sense that they (they again: this time Bloomberg; Bush; Karl Rove and the symbolmongers at the RNC) have added dayglo orange to the rings of the target we were already wearing; that they have made it not only easier but more likely that something — something awful, irreversible — will be done.

The Republicans will come. They will have their convention; and they will have, too, their security. They will turn Madison Square Garden into a fortress. They will reroute traffic, stop trains, box protesters and frisk whomever they wish, recent judge’s orders notwithstanding. They will be safe.

The question is, what about the rest of us?