"Doing all right?" She nodded. I will walk to the window. She walked to the window. This was the beginning. She saw it rippling outward from there, saw her path through the building as she left. She was upset about what she had seen. She would stand in the elevator and look at the numbers and know who was getting on. She would tell the taxi driver his brother was in the city and where to find him. She would walk home half in a daze, half in a panic, feeling frozen at the knowledge. Jared would be depressed. He would have lost his job. He would be irritated by her absence. She would lie and say that she was drunk and Mary Anne had bought shots. She was still walking toward the window. Each step was writ in stone. They formed a continuum that extended onward endlessly. She thought of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, the stuttering images. She would return to this place and see the doctor again and again. She would become important to them. Jared would be angry but would let her pay the rent. She would quit her job. She would split with Jared. She would change apartments. She would become distant from her friends. Mary Anne would see her and look afraid. Flashes, images on a fluttering film reel. Damay, who she’d only just met in the waiting room: Damay's flashing smile, Damay in bed, Damay walking with her in orange-leafed woods with a fearful feeling. Something was coming. She would lay in bed alone, a phantom pain in her shoulder, blood on the walls, people shouting. A crowd in the streets, hungry and shouting. A blue banner, a white fist holding a sheaf of wheat. Gunfire. Something was coming. She was at the window. This is now, she tried to think, but when she raised her hands to her face it was just one bubble in the stream, one flickering frame in the reel: she raised her hands, she had raised them, she would raise them, she was raising them. She was holding her head in her hands and staring out at the city below her, at the time radiating out from this point, at the Statue of Liberty, who seemed to turn toward her in concern. "The wave," she whispered, in warning and terror, only it wasn't a wave but a blinding flash of light that seared some inner eyelid. Another flash, or the same one over again, and again, like God's camera, but now she heard the boom and the roar and saw the fire exploding out through the city, a giant's fist smashing the buildings to glowing shards at a thousand miles an hour, hundred-story structures disintegrated to puffs of dust in a fiery hurricane. She heard the screams, a million cries of mortal anguish rising in a single howl only to be silenced by the next flash of light. She saw the panicked and futile attempts at escape, cut short by flash after flash, the city pounded flat and melted to glass. She saw the firestorm rising above the annihilated city. "No," she cried. "No, stop it, stop it!" She was weeping and shaking, she was hammering her fist on the glass, she had fallen to her knees, she was burning and blasted along with everyone and everything she had ever known. Then Braun was beside her holding a pneumatic syringe, murmuring useless reassurances. She looked up at him pleadingly, tears streaming down her face. "We're going to die," she told him. "We're already dead. We burn, we burn alive– " "It's okay," he said calmly. "Everyone sees that the first time." With a hiss like letting the air out a tire he pressed the syringe against her arm. BEST OF 092
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