The cold room

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I was alone, except for the body, and for a white-hot July sun directly overhead. The sky was milky to the horizon, the atmosphere so charged with ozone, it seemed as if the merest spark would set off an explosion. Before me, strips of yellow tape closed the mouth of a short street paved with cobblestones. The cobblestones ended at the foot of an oblong dirt mound overgrown with dried weeds and yellowing grass. According to Officer Manny Bloom, the body of a deceased white female was positioned between the dirt and a head-high fence that prevented access to the East River.

I stood where I was for a long moment, watching the lights of Officer Bloom’s cruiser retreat to the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge five blocks to the west. The reason for my isolation was up on the Bridge; a derailed, Manhattan-bound J Train that had initially re-kindled the fears unleashed by the attack on the World Trade Center. As all New Yorkers know, these fears do not go away. They hibernate, instead, like frogs in the bed of a dry pond, prepared to regenerate at the first drop of rain.

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