LITMIR.BIZ

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for them, let them pass, and then began flying up the stairs. The flow of tenants petered out as I climbed higher. I got to the eighth floor and came out into a lightly smoky corridor. There was a door to a freight elevator room at the end of the hall and beyond that a door to a second hallway where the doctor’s apartment was. I ran to the end of the corridor and saw the door of the freight elevator room come open. I hoped to see Katy and the doctor hand in hand, making their way out safely. It was a fireman. He stopped me and turned me around.

      “My friend is in there!” I screamed.

      “I can’t let you go. You have to get downstairs right now. Go. Go!”

      “Is anyone alive? I’m looking for Katy Johannson.”

      “Get the fuck out of here!”

      I relented and walked back to the stairwell. The fireman turned and reentered the freight elevator room and I immediately doubled back to go find Katy. The fireman was still on the other side of the door, now clearly angry I had defied him. He raised a fist and sent me back where I came from. I heard a huge crash, like a ceiling caving in and I pictured my best friend pressed and flattened and desperate for air. The door to the stairwell came open and a wave of firemen filed by at top speed and pushed me to the side. Heavier smoke began to fill the hallway and I began to swoon and feel as if the walls and floors of the building were molten and elastic. I retreated to the stairwell like a pathetic child and listened to the firemen shouting orders at one another from the other side of the door. I sat there trying to absorb every sound and sight because it was all I could do. I wasn’t remotely qualified to take any sort of bold action. All I could seize was proximity. I felt the urge to run to the doctor’s apartment and sit down in the blaze. I hoped for Katy to pass me by or call me but instead there was a big deafening nothing. So I sat on the gray concrete steps in the sickly fluorescent lighting, waiting. I don’t know how long I was there. No one passed by. Eventually, another fireman opened the door to the hall and ordered me down to the ground level.

      I walked down the stairs and out into the street. I smelled my sleeves and they reeked of smoke, of things burned that should never be burned. Up First, I could see one more plume of smoke. Down First, I heard the swarm of protesters yelling and screaming. People were running up the avenue, some to the bridge, instinctively, as a sort of automatic 9/11-type gut response. Many seemed to have the palpable urge to get off the island, to get as far away from the center of the imaginary bull’s-eye as humanly possible.

      I stayed where I was, as close to Katy as the FDNY would allow. I checked my phone and saw the EXPLOSIONS ROCKING MANHATTAN headline. The cops and firefighters continued shuttling in and out, saying nothing to me because saying nothing is what they have to do. I checked Katy’s status updates. There was nothing since the last one she posted three minutes before the explosion. She must have posted it while she was in the elevator.

      DrinksOnKatyJ: U FOLKS BETTER GET USED TO THE IDEA OF ME

       STICKING AROUND HERE A LONG, LONG TIME! 12:13PM

      That was the last thought going through her mind. She was ready to welcome another thousand years of joy and happiness, and I had promised it to her. I had brought her to this place. I had planted that thought in her mind. I could’ve stayed strong and never told her a goddamn thing, but I barely put up a fight. Deep down, I wanted her to know it all. I wanted the cheap thrill of being her little cure matchmaker.

      And now she’s gone. No hospital admitted her. No one saw her leave. There’s nothing left of her. All the extra plans and hopes and dreams she had for herself will remain just that, forever.

      I can’t move.

      Date Modified: 7/3/2019, 4:08PM

      At The Protests

      Our apartment is uncomfortably spacious now. I see the wine stains on the couch, and I hear Katy’s manic giggling like she’s still present. I don’t ever recall seeing her moody or displeased, which makes her abrupt and violent end all the more unbearable. All I can do is keep drinking and banter with her in my mind.

      A pro-cure blogger named Ladyhawke posted another account of what happened yesterday, as witnessed from outside the UN. Apparently, she was one of the protesters.

      HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE?

      We were facing the UN and screaming our heads off when the explosion drowned us out for a millisecond. But no one knew what the hell was going on. One person in the crowd screamed, “They’re trying to kill us!” and that was enough to set people fleeing in every direction. One guy pushed me to the ground so he could run past me. I was lucky; I saw another guy who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, fall and get his head stepped on. I have no clue if he ever got back up. I got up and immediately began running up First Avenue. I assumed it was a terrorist attack. I mean, it was a terrorist attack. But I thought it was, you know, a terrorist terrorist attack. Someone from Saudi Arabia or something. My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets and not at the road ahead of them. So I got bumped into from behind and from the side, as if someone had released a stampede of blind bulls onto the street. I got kicked in the back of the leg. Now I have a black welt there the size of a lemon.

      Needless to say, now that we know what really happened, that these doctors had been systematically targeted—I’d argue they were assassinated—we are pissed. We’re already gathering outside the UN and the Capitol right now. We will number in the tens of thousands by morning, I can promise you that. How many more doctors will the president allow to be blown to pieces before he finally realizes he’s made a huge mistake? We’ve been protesting peacefully for months, but these pro-death people—who got what they wanted, by the way—are free to just randomly kill innocent people? These are doctors who treasure life enough to bestow more of it upon the rest of us. We’re through being nice about this. We’re not taking no for an answer this time around.

      —Ladyhawke

      I don’t know where any of this is going, and I don’t know which side will come out on top, or which side even deserves to. All I know is I feel an increasing urge to get the hell away from it all.

      Date Modified: 7/4/2019, 8:47PM

      “A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or

       A Lot Later On”

      Katy’s family is making funeral arrangements. All the organized grieving happens at light speed, as if it must be done before you realize what you’re grieving over. I miss Katy desperately. The bomb goes off in my mind every five minutes, and I’m left no less shaken by it each time. I have fevered daydreams of a blonde running from me and taking out a phone, pushing the secret code number that kills my best friend. I told the police about her. Every detail of her face and figure. I could have sculpted it from clay. They had a crude sketch drawn and posted. No one has responded. I’m not terribly optimistic.

      I’ve spent most of my time reading everything I can about the bombings. The same articles over and over again. I don’t know why I keep reading them—perhaps to help drive the reality of it home. They just released a partial list of the doctors killed. Their count (minus bystanders like Katy) appears to have settled at nine: Charles Bane III, Sofia Gonzalez, Gim Lau, Jocelyn McManus, Vishal Mehta, Frederick Polycronis, DDS, Ian Rosenhaus, Pameer Sanji, and Ameet Thakkar. I know Dr. X wasn’t a woman, nor was he Indian or Asian (unless he was very, very good at keeping his identity hidden, which it seems now he was not). That leaves three possibilities from this list: Bane, Polycronis, and Rosenhaus. At some point, they’re going to release his picture. I don’t know if I can stand to find out which one is him. I gave him seven thousand bucks in cash to keep me young for the rest of my life. And now he’ll never get to use it. The fact that he gave himself the cure only makes the finality of his death harder to take. Who the hell knows how many lifetimes were just robbed from him.

      I should have seen something like this coming. What happened in Oregon should have prepared me for it. But the truth is, I didn’t pay much heed to what took place in Oregon. It happened all the way across the country, so I guess even news about murder suffers from East Coast bias. There’s the added fact that I live in Manhattan. When you live here, you can pretend

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