I was in New York for the weekend, visiting a friend who lives on West 27th Street. We’d been in at an event in Brooklyn; in the cab home, the radio had been saying something about an explosion in Chelsea, on 23rd Street between 6th and 7th — four blocks from her home.
The part of my brain that always wants to believe nothing’s wrong said, “Oh, it’s a gas leak. A transformer explosion. It’ll mess up the traffic but we’ll be home in an hour.” I think everyone has that voice in their head, to some extent. But this time, something was wrong: The radio kept talking, something about an IED in a dumpster, dozens of people wounded.
The cab dropped us off at 29th and 6th. We couldn’t get any closer because everything was blocked off. We could see the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances four blocks down, and we jaywalked with magnificent impunity across 6th Avenue because, hey, what was going to hit us?
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