Love Saves the Day

The crowd continued to grow. It became increasingly restive as the day went on—community board members, friends and relatives, tenants from neighboring apartment buildings swelled our ranks, until there were over two hundred of us and cars couldn’t drive down Stanton Street. Jostles became shoves. Murmurs rose to shouts. Chants went up. Who came up with them? How did everybody know to say the same thing at the same time? “Give us fifteen minutes!” the crowd howled with one voice, fists in the air. “Give us fifteen minutes!” Or else they chanted, “Mr. Moriarty, stop this party!” referring to OEM deputy director John Moriarty, who was on-site that day.

I did try to make Laura leave. The Red Cross had set up a relief center a few blocks away, and I tried to send her there. “No,” she told me. One hand fell to rest on Mr. Mandelbaum’s shoulder. “We’re not leaving until we know Honey is safe.”

“Laura—”

“No!” Her voice was edged with panic. “I’m not going! You can’t make me!”

You can’t make me. A child’s argument. But Laura and I had never argued. We were as close as two fingers on the same hand, she and I.

Eventually, somebody came to me with a petition. Somebody else came with an affidavit. I signed both. I was told papers were being prepared and notarized at the nearby middle school. A judge had been found who was willing to have the papers delivered to his home on a Saturday. For the first time in the nine hours since our building had been evacuated, I allowed myself to feel hope.

Suddenly Laura was beside me. She held Mr. Mandelbaum’s arm. What was she doing here, near the barricades? I had thought, I had been certain, that we’d both understood the terms of our unspoken agreement. She was to remain safely across the street with Mr. Mandelbaum. If he wanted to try talking to the cops again, I would bring him over. There was no reason for her to be here. No reason at all.

Yet here she was. “Fifty years I’ve lived here,” Mr. Mandelbaum was saying now. His voice was no longer a quiet plea. It had gained volume, agitated for the first time. “Everything I have in the world is in that apartment, but I don’t care. I don’t care! Just let me go to my cat. I’m begging you!” He dragged the wet sleeve of his coat across his face.

The cops continued to ignore him. He was only an old man, after all. They didn’t budge for him. Their eyes moved only for Laura, moved up and down, taking her in. A tall, slender, beautiful girl, wearing jeans and a red cotton T-shirt that clung to her body in the rain.

I could see Laura’s tight face, the crease between her eyebrows far too deep for a girl her age, as she fought to restrain her own tears. Tears for this man she loved, and the cat she loved almost as much as the man. I couldn’t hear her words, but I knew she was adding her own soft, murmured pleas.

A gust of wind came up. It blew Mr. Mandelbaum’s coat backward, molded Laura’s T-shirt more tightly to her chest. The cops’ eyes drifted downward. Sly grins scurried across their faces.

Something uncoiled inside me. It curled my hands into fists, set my heart to pounding so hard I could hear it inside my own ears. My body flooded with a surge of rage so pure and sharp that, for one exhilarating moment, it was indistinguishable from joy.

The crowd roiled again, chaotic now. I was pushed hard from all sides. I struggled to remain standing. I had the wild thought that I had caused this, that my rage had spilled over and seeped into the people around me.

But it had nothing to do with me. I had taken my attention away from the crowd for a second, and in that second the crowd-mind had reached a consensus I knew nothing about.

A crane had arrived.

It rumbled down Clinton Street. Its neck was yellow. Gradually the neck stretched itself up until it rose as high as our building’s roof. From the end of the yellow neck hung a brownish gray beak with a row of thick metal teeth, each longer than a man’s leg. The bottom half of the beak was a slab. It would catch whatever chunks the teeth tore out.

Large metal containers and lighting trees were maneuvered into place. It had been hard to gauge the day’s passage under such a gray sky, but I realized with a kind of dizzy surprise that soon it would be nightfall. There were sounds of machinery switching on and off. Then only the low-gear rattle of the diesel engine of the crane’s cab.

The beak opened its maw and poised over the roof, waiting.

The crowd roared and surged and broke in waves against the police barricades. But underneath the waves, in deeper places, were currents and crosscurrents. Related to the waves, yet unaffected by them.