Untitled Document

07 July 2005

Bring It On

So, I was thrashing around this morning, almost as soon as my eyes opened. The alarm jolted me, and it hurt. I realized I would be getting up even earlier to catch a plane tomorrow. I thought about the Relationship, and I thought about the move, and in the darkness my eyes widened.

When does it stop hurting? When does it get a little easier? Plenty of time in the tomb, is that it?

It was just before nine in London and I had to get out of the Murphy Bed. No time to lie there, looking up. No time to think, though that is what I must do.

There is either too much to do, or nothing to do. I don't know. The move is scheduled to happen today, I had a call that said the bed is coming between 0745 and 1045, a window. The workers could be early, they do that sometimes, and if there is an attack here during rush hour, as there was in London, they might not be here at all.

I listened as I made coffee and the BBC scrapped the morning program and began to report a bus, or buses exploding. Double-deckers with no second decks. A power surge in the system, they said at first, sooty passengers. Trains with blown-out windows. Ominous talk of people laid out on the sidewalk and an unexploded device someplace.

Is it Madrid again? Are we all going to be Londoners when this is over? For a day, at least, until we become numb again?

Edgeware Road, they say. And Russell Square? Shoot, I had a flat near the station there once. The Garden Line, was it? Or the Jubilee or Bakerloo? Brown and Green and Yellow are the colors of the lines on the map. "Mind the Gap," the voice says. “Don't fall under a train.”

Peak of rush hour, they say. Six stations at least.

London on foot, the whole city.

Jesus.

The system is shut down, and we all pretend that this is not what we think it is. The summit of the industrialized nations, plus Russia, is meeting in Scotland. Security has been sucked away for what we would call a National Special Security Event. The Prime Minister is there, and so is everyone else.

London beat Paris for the right to host the Olympics in some future year yesterday. Is that it? Or is it the G-8?

Is this the front end of something that is going to happen at rush hour here? Should I be boiling water or filling the bathtub?

Of course it is terror, but there appears to be none of that. The response plan is working, as I hope ours will, and there is no one as indomitable as the people of London.

There are two dead at least. I can hear the higher vibration in the voices on the radio, professional as they are. There are no reports of casualties, beyond the two dead. Maybe this is a sign of weakness on the part of the bad guys, or maybe it is something else altogether.

Edgeware Road is where they found the Ricin pot bubbling on the stove in a flat occupied by militants. There are a lot of them in that part of London.

I don't know what it means. The first thing you hear is wrong, after all. I have disconnected the television, and there is a flash flood warning. Rain may be heavy after midnight. Highs in the upper seventies, they reassure me. The natural world continues. The remnants of the tropical storm are coming in.

The rain would put out the fires, I suppose.

The more the merrier, I thought grimly. Bring it on. I ripped some stereo cords out of the back of the radio. Come Ninevah, come Tyre. Wasn’t Ninevah a city in Iraq?

Funny what you think about in times of peril. Go ahead, you bastards.