Motus Mentis

My insider sources tell me there is an “uptick” in the “chatter” lately; this is their way of saying that the murmurous rustle of nefarious voices has got louder, or more insistent, or something, and that it seems more likely than usual that some horrible and murderous attack might be imminent.

I hardly know what to do with information like that. I live in New York City, and I ride the F line each day from Brooklyn, right up the middle of Manhattan Island, to the 42nd Street station. I spend the day in a metal-and-glass office building about a hundred yards from Grand Central Station, and then I do the whole thing in reverse to get home. My lovely wife works in Manhattan also, and our daughter — who watched from an eighth-floor classroom window of Stuyvesant High School, two blocks from Ground Zero, as the towers burned on 9/11 — lives and works here as well. (Our son is away at college.)

We New Yorkers are proud of our city, and plenty tough; we aren’t about to be chased away. But we know, all of us, that we are living in the crosshairs, and frankly it surprises me a great deal that we have gone seven years without another assault. It would be so very easy to do, it seems to me, that I honestly cannot imagine why it hasn’t been done. Not a day goes by that I don’t half expect to see people stumbling dazed and bloodied from the subway, or to see, worst of all, that blinding pink flash from the direction of the harbor. But what is there to do? Life goes on — unless it doesn’t. And if we can no longer enjoy living in this astounding city, we’ve already lost.

But still…

Now it’s cold outside, and everyone is swaddled in voluminous down coats. Not that I’m longing for summer, mind you.