When the bombs went off, we were watching TV. There wasn’t cable then, by which I mean cable existed but not in our apartment, so it was a prime-time network show that we wouldn’t necessarily want to admit in certain circles to regularly watching. Those circles being our circle and the peripheral circles in which we moved, or rarely moved, per se, but were considered nonetheless a part of. It was a show about sexy singles, featuring a complicated and ever-changing system of hierarchies and feats of strength and alliances and betrayals. We watched it every week and drank short fat bottles of Jamaican beer, which along with the surfboard rug Lou had gotten me for my birthday, created a sort of tropical feel to the apartment. Lou was wearing the hands-down sexiest faded pink thing, a negligee? It was short and low and shiny, and she’d found it pitched somewhere deep in her closet that day in a fury of late-summer cleaning, for which I thanked profusely all the powers that be while simultaneously ruing them for not revealing it to her sooner. She’d filled two big boxes with cast-offs to send to my little sister and her startlingly hot aunt, and her closet still looked exactly the same.

I mean exactly.

I was talking in a rant during the commercials about the tactics to which several of my most hated television-show characters had resorted when Lou looked strangely towards the window and said, “What the fuck is that.” I was still talking a little bit longer because I mean, you wouldn’t believe—or you would, if you happen to follow this certain show—what these people were up to, the sabotage, but she shushed me which was out of character for Lou and so seemed serious. I stopped talking though my mind was still racing with it, and muted the TV, and there they were, the bombs. “Are we being Bombed?” Lou said, very indignant. She pulled her legs down from off the arm of the big chair, where I’d been able to look over and enjoy them, and set them on the floor. She upset the ashtray with her toes. I went to the window. It was hard to imagine what else the sounds could be, but all the same, usually the things that we think are catastrophic like aneurysms or allergic reactions or gunshots or prime-of-life strokes are, respectively: headaches, mosquito bites, the courtyard door slamming, and heartburn. Not bombs.

Lou had what turned out to be heartburn once, which was diagnosed from the emergency room. Ditto the spider bite on my groin last summer. We live relatively well due to certain outrageous and fortunate conditions of happenstance and so can indulge our great fears with these emergency room visits, though we are prudent in not calling for ambulances. We walk, or take a cab.

It sounded like what you’d imagine bombs would sound like. They went off at a pretty steady pace. There was only the sound of the bombs and the erratic ticking which was normal and was a frond of the big plant getting caught in the rotating standing-fan. It always got caught, and we’d always mention it: “We should move the plant,” or: “We should move the standing-fan.” Both stayed where they were though, as we both stayed where we were, usually. The TV fritzed and we panicked. We ran for the door, although after the fact, we wondered aloud to each other exactly where we thought we were going. Why our apartment, still standing though bombs were going off out there somewhere, wasn’t as good a place to stay as anywhere else. Some open-air instinct it must be. We ran out and hit for the elevator and then took the stairs instead without discussion, both of us having perhaps an unnatural or perhaps the most natural fear of being trapped in an elevator during a bombing. Or blackout, or an elevator failure, which in the Simone Weil building was common enough.

Normally in a crisis I think we both tend to head north, where the violence is predictable and therefore manageable. But this night upon reaching the outside we saw the dam at 125th Street break and all of Harlem flood southward. The streets were packed. The bombs bombed away, but no one could tell where. They seemed to be the entire sky, though not even so much limited to up in the sky so much as all around. But everyone kept shooting nervous looks at the sky and running south.

I noticed that Lou was still in her…negligee? Chemise? I was still in my boxers and t-shirt, but it was an outfit that resembled something that someone would wear outside. Lou’s outfit however was solely crafted for the boudoir. And we were not shod.

Something I realized that night, though: I am the luckiest man alive. These people streaming through the streets, who presumably had been caught as unaware as we were by the late evening bombing, who presumably came as they were, so to speak, were wearing nothing even close to resembling negligees. They were not in faded pink silk, they did not have delicately-downed thighs poking out from under an unraveling bit of lace, they did not have haystacks of blonde hair tumulting most fetchingly out of what I like to refer to as a Fun Bun. No they did not. Only the girl with me, thank you very much.

No, thank you.

It was one of those things, though, where after the initial emergency, you realize that what had seemed spontaneous and devil-may-care turns darkly and dearly into negligee, people, street. And the door to the darkest bar in the neighborhood was open and who knew that the bombs weren’t in fact ahead of us than behind us anyway, and we’d left our beer at home.

They were giving free drinks as it turned out in honor of the catastrophe. We each got ourselves a pint of a slickly-packaged Japanese beer we both enjoy, and clinked glasses before drinking. There were surprisingly few people in the bar besides us. Some college students who looked dangerously excited and bright-eyed, an old man from the street who Lou brazenly adores, despite his evident seediness, and a table of morose-looking military men, eyeing the blackened windows and not meeting each others’ glances. “I should dance for them?” Lou said. “Is that right?” She drank a little bit more, and then, as if starting a shift at a boring but tolerable job, stepped up onto one of the small tables they were sitting around. She danced a very slow dance, almost unbearably seductive. It was like she’d done this before, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Sure, it was probably the calamity of the century, so all bets were as they say off, but still. I mean, the bit of lace. The military men watched her without smiling, without even smirking or high-fiving. They just watched her like perfectly civilized people might watch a very serious and high-minded off-Broadway play, and she turned all around, giving them each I think a little attention. I sat down a little ways away. Her feet were filthy and I thought one of us should have remembered shoes. There’s glass on the sidewalks, and garbage. Tetanus.

She stopped at what seemed a perfectly natural time to stop, though there was no music, so there was by default no end. “Come on then doll,” one of the military men said then in a slight and unidentifiable accent, but she didn’t even pause. She slid in next to me and bit my earlobe a little, looking at them sidewise through her lashes. “I’m taken,” she said. “And I guess we can smoke, now.”

We lit up cigarettes which felt wonderful after the long time of the ban. No one argued. What could they say, when all we’d need to say back was Bombs, and look suggestively towards the ceiling which indicated the sky and so by proxy the events happening there. We smoked and finished our beers slowly, and when I threw my cigarette onto the ground I automatically stepped my foot on it to grind it out and it burned. “Bare feet oh bare feet,” Lou said during it, seeing what I was about to do but unable to stop it. She tapped her own bare feet on the ground, in a sympathy dance. “Ow ow ow,” she added.

We grimaced at each other but then she smiled so wide. Lou had been a child star, which doesn’t have what you’d think the implications might be. By that I mean that she is no more and in fact much less neurotic and awful than any single one of my previous girlfriends, who had never been child stars. Lou had been a child star of magnitude. You would know her, though not necessarily if you saw her now. She has not been a child star for many years. Nor a child. I didn’t know her then, as a child star or a child and I didn’t recognize her immediately as one of the familiar faces of my own childhood at all, and she didn’t mention it. And her name is a little bit different now than it had been in her child star days. One of my friends noticed, after a while, and suggested to me that my new girlfriend was in fact this child star. Once I knew, it was hard to not see the child star in her. I mean, not to see her child star face, so familiar to my own child self, looking out from behind her current face, so familiar to my own adult self. And it has to do with her smile.

We went back outside. We walked along with the people, south. Everyone was drinking freely on the street as they walked, from cans, bottles, paper cups. People carried their small children on their shoulders so there was a large sea of small children, of little legs and grubby feet at just about eye level. There were a hell of a lot of children. You don’t always see so many children here. The children are kept out of sight for the most part. They were out in force that night, treading the air. Who knew. I said to Lou, “Who knew there were so many children?” and she made the same wide-eyed shrug at me that I presumably was making at her.

She is my twin.

The children were exceptionally well-behaved, considering the circumstances. You expect children to cry and wail, or at least complain. Whine. When I think of for instance how I would have held up in any of the historical times, when I situate myself say side by side with Anne Frank, I always assume I would come up so terrifically short, on so many levels. I would have cried all the time. I cried as a child at fireworks. I cried at the sound of katydids for godssake, outside my grandparents’ house, summers. But these kids acted as if they were on a great adventure. Outside, at night! With all the people! Heading south!

You forget pretty quickly the specific calamity that brings about a set of circumstances, and adapt to the circumstances themselves. This was my brave thought. The bombs—what the hell! We were walking south. We had no shoes: that would be something to consider and resolve, if the circumstances themselves didn’t resolve. Lou was dressed just fine for the calamity, but not for the time, likely fairly soon, when the circumstances had gone their natural course towards normalcy. Then she would be in danger. Stranger Danger. I would have to figure something out in that arena as well. Did we have money? We did not. Did we have cigarettes? We did. We had grabbed our cigarettes and our keys, running from the house, out into the bombs. Human nature understands perhaps on some instinctual level what will be needed to get through an ordeal. What use money? Much use cigarettes. We smoked and smoked as we walked, and the sky smoked so for once we didn’t get the dirty looks. The bombs were not treating us so terribly, though presumably they were treating many many other people quite terribly.

We looked at each other, stricken, suddenly. “Where the hell are these bombs?” Lou said.

“Maybe Downtown?”

“Who’s Downtown?”

“Who’s Downtown. Who’s…are H and J still Downtown? Weren’t they moving?”

“I think they moved. I think they’re…what about…fuck what about A?”

“A.” I didn’t mean to immediately adopt the mourning tone for A, as if he had absolutely been bombed to smithereens, but A, A! A was one of our favorites.

Is. Is one of our favorites. A was okay. We only didn’t know yet. Rest assured, though, A is still committing blasphemies in bars and private parties all over the city, to this day.

But we didn’t know.

“The bombs may not be Downtown. Maybe they’re in Brooklyn.”

Everyone we know is Brooklyn. Brooklyn’s no good. We’d said to them all so many times Brooklyn’s no good but did they listen? They said oh, Brooklyn’s so great, so great. Now they’ve got the smithereens bombed out of them. “Maybe they bombed Queens.”

“My aunt’s in Queens. And my little cousin.”

Queens is no good. They wouldn’t bomb Queens. That’s how bad Queens is. No one in their right mind would bother to bomb Queens.

“The bombs are here. They’re so here.”

We nodded, both. The bombs were so here. Right here in the center of the freaking universe, where we for some reason also were, always found ourselves. Right in the freaking center of everything.

“Remember when we were going to move to Maine, or Europe?” Lou said.

I remembered wistfully. “No one’s bombing Maine.”

“Do you think they’re bombing Marseilles?” she said.

“I doubt it.” God I felt bad. “Do you think we can talk I mean seriously after all this about making some changes?” I said.

“God yes. What are we doing here, right in the freaking center of everything?”

“That’s just the same page I was on.”

We nodded vehemently at each other, and privately at the street, at the sidewalk, at this wreck of a city that would soon be a memory, if not entirely, at least for us.

Good riddance.

We’d get a little car, I thought. Some cute junker. Something friendly. We’d go to someplace Lou couldn’t pick out on a map. Which could be just about anywhere. She’s got a wide-ranging but laughably spotty base of knowledge. She knows these random things, things which come in handy and impress the hell out of me and everyone, but the gaps, the gaps. For instance: we were watching a sit-com, and a character suggested whimsically that Guatemala was in Africa. We laughed, me and Lou both. At the commercial interruption, I’d said, jokingly, “You know where Guatemala is, don’t you?” And she said, with what turned out to be a combination of surety in case she was right and apologetic jokiness in case she was wrong, “India.” Well, there it was. Turns out she could not under threat of dismemberment fill out a map of even the United States. She is not entirely sure who fought who in any single war, or who most of our Presidents have been, or in what order anything occurred. She does know about an hour’s worth of solid speech in Italian—the words, that is, though not what they mean. She played a waifish braided Italian orphan once, in a film that took place during some war or another, or some time in history when the Italians were not enjoying much popularity. She remembers to this day her dialogue, and she presumably once knew the general gist of what she was saying (I watched her in the film; it brought my entire family to tears), but no more, no more. She doesn’t know what exactly happened with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but there’s that famous picture of her sitting in Castro’s lap, wearing his hat with a rakish insouciance. She remembers everyone being tense on the Cuba trip, where she was filming a British film, but not why. She remembers Castro as friendly, and generous. She thinks the Russians were the first to land on the moon.

She is however the smartest person I know. No mind for details, sequence, spatiality, but there are other things. And they outweigh the startling lapses.

We’d reached the north end of the Park. People think the Park is dangerous, due to some bad press every once in a while, but we like the Park. We find a Park to be a friendly place. We are two of the seven people who make good and regular use of the public swimming pool in the Park, every summer. A public pool is a dirty and terrible place, but this particular pool is nothing less than a testament to modern pristine glory, due to low usage and a dangerously high chlorine level. We turned in to the Park, taking the eastern-most tine of the fork of traffic, if that particular metaphor isn’t as forced and elaborate as it seems.

Triage stations were set up all around. Lou remarked that it looked like Bosnia, and then she glanced nervously at me, the nervousness less about the state of affairs here than the state of affairs in Bosnia, presumably unsure whether Bosnia was in fact still a site of conflict and ruin. I nodded sagely.

There were makeshift tents everywhere. I don’t actually know myself what Bosnia looks like, but I’ve seen enough re-runs of MASH to know that what it looked like here was war. We approached a tent. A large woman in large white garb immediately shrunk me with a glare and captured Lou into a scratchy-looking blanket, as one might capture a freshly-bathed mongrel before it has a chance to wriggle itself dry on the couch or carpet. “You can’t be running around in the streets like this,” she told Lou, looking directly at me. “You dirty pimp,” she did not say to me, but suggested with her look. Lou looked appeasingly pathetic and hangdog. She let herself be bundled and coddled. It made me furious. Just for a moment though. Just until she made her ears poke out from the blanket and made the mouse face at me.

The nurse started in on Lou’s feet, placing a small plastic basin on the ground in front of her and carefully cleaning them with a soft sponge. Between the toes and everything. Once the dirt was off, there were a few small cuts in evidence, and these the nurse swabbed and dressed. Despite my pimpish neglect of the girl in my care, I received the same treatment. This was a good nurse. People pay good money to spas and salons for nowhere near that level of attention and care.

Once we were both bandaged, the nurse wondered around for something to keep our feet out of trouble for whatever the next leg in our journey might bring. She produced both plastic and paper bags, which she put on our feet and attached with twine. “These should last you a while at least,” she said, “though God knows why I bother. I suspect those feet didn’t start out clean, even before the bombs.”

She was so right.

Lou started to shed her blanket, but the nurse kept her swaddled with an impressive show of force, with arms the size of hams. “You keep that on until you’re home,” the nurse said disapprovingly. “And hang your coats on a hook by your door, for the future. I haven’t seen so much skin since the Cabaret caught fire.”

“Thank you,” Lou said, and took the nurse’s round face between her two small hands and planted a kiss on each cheek. “If you ever find yourself in Paris, won’t you look us up? We are at 17 Rue des Martyrs, a charming flat with plenty of light and wine. Let us repay you, please, if ever the opportunity arises.”

She got a little bit of a smile from the nurse. She didn’t exactly crack the grim clay of her face, no glistening eyes or whatnot, but Lou’s charm, even when she’s obviously lying, is hard to trump. “A bientot!” Lou cried, waving back at the little triage station, as we shuffled away in our bagged feet.

The sky was silent. It was hard to know just when that had happened, if the bombs had stopped bombing for quite some time and the roaring had just been residual echoes in our ears, or if the silence was brand new, fresh as our feet. People still moved about, but a bit uncertainly now, a step and then stopping to look at the sky, which was only now after all black and a bit sooty, not too different from how it usually was.

We, however, moved with purpose. We had only temporary shoes, and we wanted to keep our feet in the newly minted condition to which the nurse had restored them for as long as we could, for who knew when we’d ever be able to get them like that again? We moved north, against the stream. We walked on the right side of the street as though we were traffic. It seemed so much quicker home than the journey away.

The Simone Weil building stood. We used the big gated entrance, because it was the grandest way in, involving some sense of ceremony. We took the stairs. Our apartment was exactly as we’d left it—our little beers stood half-full in front of our respective sitting-places, little puddles of wet around them; the ashtray Lou had overturned was still overturned, with an ashy toeprint beside it. The TV displayed an emergency screen, which at this point, after so many false tests of the emergency broadcast system, fails to evoke any real sense of urgency or alarm. The fan whirred.

Silently.

We stared.

The branch of the plant which ordinarily was caught in the fan was no longer. Not only no longer caught in the fan, but no longer in existence. No evidence that it had ever been. We looked all around, at the plant itself, under the couch and under the big chair; we peered into the fan even though it quite clearly did not have a frond caught in its maw.

“Someone once told me,” Lou said skeptically, “that their curtain caught in their fan when they went out to grab an ice cream cone from the truck, and was completely gone when they got back except for a little pile of ashes.”

There was a little pile of ashes all right, but it was impossible to know what were overturned-ashtray ashes and what were plant ashes. The plant looked a little skimpy and off-balance. The not-ticking sound was eerie. I un-muted the TV set and the high whine of the emergency signal filled the room.

Lou lit herself a cigarette, dropped the blanket from her body, and fell into the big chair. “Oh well,” she said, stretching out her bare legs and wriggling her bagged feet, “I suppose it was inevitable.”

It probably was.

Kira Henehan is the author of two chapbooks: The Investigations (A Rest Press) and Seven Palms (Fungo Monographs). Her work has appeared in journals such as Fence, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, and Chelsea, and reprinted in a Pushcart Prize anthology. She lives in New York.