ABSTRACT
for Cbico It is past midnight in a thick fog when sirens call us to the terrace. We look down onto blossoms of bright fire opening from manholes on Fifth Avenue. There are men standing and smoking in rubber jackets outside a garment district café, the lights fluttering, the fire offering us its electric smoke. In bare feet and robes—the cat and dog at our feet—we hear the heat pound tubes stuffed with wire. And somewhere down there, under the softening blacktop, the gas mains wait to take in the whole block. We bring the two or three small relics of our lives, the dog and cat, and the elevator to the street. There is a cold wind and ice in the gutters. There is the street's midnight population leaning against the wall of Reverend Peale's Sunday Church. We note the taxis that deliver strangers to watch with us as the street shrivels and begins to flow around the manhole covers. They are all there: men of the brigade, the police, women from nearby hotels, their furred men, the strangers from the city. What we see is the tip of the iceberg, they tell us—and underneath the tubes alive with flames. For an hour we watch from the corner— 129in this weather tragedies are distant. The elevator back up contains the momentary explosion in the eye where disasters flare— our section of New York, between the flowers and furs, is full of bright red petals. We reach the ninth floor and step into air powdered with radiator heat. The tiny, muffled beats of fire below the street pant through the window an even pulse. The dog moves into the living room where the fire is dying on bricks. The cat takes the warm tiles of the bathroom. We stand silently, listen a few minutes, then move to each other. Our own fire is watered by the conviction that things are right. Later, we listen to the small puffs of heat spit from the manholes outside, smell the smoke from live wires bound with rubber that smolders into morning.
