War stories

Waiting for the Apocalypse in mid-August

By Louis T. Mayeux

           The Saturday morning sunshine, soft and mellow, soothed his spirit. Thankful for a few moments alone, the memory of the bad meltdown on the drive up still raging inside, Harry walked from his hotel toward the library on

Fifth Avenue

. His favorite place in the world, the old library, but he was too early. He walked along the front and turned on

41^st Street

toward Bryant Park.

             A few folks – some of them survivors of mental turmoil like him, he imagined, or street people seeking respite from their struggles – sat in the midmorning calm. One or two dog walkers eased by on the sidewalk. A man in baggy, ill-matched clothes slept, head nodding. A gray-haired man in a polo shirt read the Times.

       Harry laughed at the statues of William Cullen Bryant and Gertrude Stein. They reminded him of an old-fashioned, straight-laced uncle and a nutty aunt in some goofy literary family. He read the historic markers about how the park had been reclaimed from the drug dealers and crime in the late 60s and 70s. Harry felt the weight of his years descend. A Southerner, he had been coming to

New York

for nearly 40 years now. He remembered the wild old days of

42^nd Street

,

Times Square

, when anything was available. Quite head-spinning for a small-town Southern boy when he had found himself in the midst of all of that squalor, noise, motion, decadence. Now, it was almost too quiet, like the wing of a hospital for TB patients or highly nervous types such as himself. The silent ward.

        The news had been driving him crazy. Global warming. The birds dying. Oceans’, chemistry changing from alkaline to acid. The world was dying as he sat in his air conditioned space, his carbon footprint growing, his own fumes drifting upward and caught in the greenhouse impacted sky.

    The news gave him the jitters. Only the day before, stuck in a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike, his family sullen and angry at him, he shook in revulsion at the smog over

Manhattan

, shrouding the city with its sickening gray pallor. He wanted to leap out and point to the noxious cloud and tell his fellow polluters that this is what they were creating. Talk radio blabbed on and on from his XM Satellite Radio. Then he was in the Holland Tunnell, hurled into the clogged

Manhattan

traffic. At last they pulled in front of their hotel, the

Roosevelt

, packed with members of the Bangladesh Medical Society of America, whatever the hell that was.

        Harry walked to a booth at the edge of the park and ordered a coffee and a muffin and sat down at a table. There, at the edge of a puddle besides the booth, a small sparrow hopped about. A sparrow! He felt an unexpected joy, a lightness absent for days, weeks, months, perhaps years. The little bird leaped into the puddle, sending shimmers through the reflected sunlight.

    Harry sipped his coffee and looked around the park. The city slowly awakened – people sat in chairs reading books, magazines. He looked toward the great lawn, there the screen for the summer movie series stood in disconnected sections. The little bird continued his bath.

    His breakfast finished, Harry rose and said farewell to his little pal, the sparrow. Have a good life, my friend. He walked down

42^nd Street

. Folks window-shopped in the electronics stores, filled with iPods and iPhones and God knew what.

Fifth Avenue

was already filling with tourists. He checked his hands. He no longer had the jitters.