One of the enormous diggers at work on the Second Avenue Subway must have toppled over, I dreamed to myself when the blast woke me up a little after 3 a.m., and went right back to sleep. I didn’t guess that something was wrong until 7, when I arose to walk the dog. The dog had disappeared. She usually is more than eager to get out the door in the morning. This made no sense, but I hadn’t had coffee yet, a precondition for anything to make sense. Eventually I found the dog hiding in an improbably small gap under a piece of furniture, dragged her out, leashed her, and got her out of the house. The dog has the comic instincts of Scooby-Doo in the face of loud noises, and she knew that the big bang the night before could not have been a good thing.
The dog and I got a few blocks from the door and into the middle of what might have seemed like a street fair, if all the participants hadn’t worn blue uniforms, FBI-stenciled jackets or dark suits and sunglasses. Police cruisers, crime scene vans, news trucks and unmarked Grand Marquis clogged Third Avenue. Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded the local Starbucks.
The dog was wrong. This was not even a drill, let alone the real thing: a low-grade improvised explosive, not a real bomb, that took out nothing more than the side windows of a coffee shop. Either a lunatic or a very stupid terrorist had set off the whizbang in an improbable place. It was disappointing, though; I always had assumed that I was as safe north of 79th Street as in the Smoky Mountains. If terrorists wanted to disrupt Manhattan, surely they would do their worst in Midtown.
Eight years ago, I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from the top floor of the next big building to the north, the offices of Credit Suisse on Madison Park. It was just close enough to get a clear view, and just far enough away to avoid the smoke and stench.
This morning’s exercise wasn’t even a dry run. It resembled a real terrorist incident no more than Starbucks’ coffee resembles real Italian expresso. Even bizarre distractions of this ilk, though, help keep the mind focused. It is hard to imagine how prospective terrorists could read the administration’s moonwalking over terrorist interrogation procedures without concluding that the United States is incapable of engaging the problem without sticking its foot in its mouth. Whatever the debates of the last days might have done, they didn’t make this New Yorker feel any safer.
