Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“We should have parked closer,” said Shirley. “If we had, we’d be there by now.”

Morris shrugged. He hadn’t gotten this far in life by wasting money. The parking garages around here were insanely expensive. For a few bucks a trip uptown to the cheaper lots on the Upper West Side was well worth it, even with the new subway fares. The Ackers were in from Rye for the day to catch a matinee on Broadway, have an early dinner, and then return home to Westchester. Mr. Acker was a recently retired employee of Time Warner, who over the course of his career had managed to upgrade his life by two neighborhoods, four automobiles, one boat, and zero wives from his humble beginnings on Long Island. If he never set foot there again, it would be too soon.

As he stepped off the curb, Mr. Acker looked down so as not to miss the step. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and nothing would be more ridiculous-or would kill him faster-than a stupid pratfall. When you got to be his age, what was once funny was now lethal. “Schmuck,” he said to himself.

Across the street, a pushcart vendor was just setting up at the corner. The man was slightly out of breath from his sprint uptown, but he had arrived in plenty of time, and now all he had to do was wait for his customers. His cell phone buzzed silently in his breast pocket, and he took it out and looked at the display. It was not a caller, but a text message. He read it, then began his preparations…

At that moment, Marie Duplessis, a recent immigrant from Haiti, was trudging up the subway steps at 42nd Street, and heading for one of her three jobs. She had taken the train in from LaGuardia Airport, where she worked cleaning the bathrooms at Terminal Six, and was now headed to the Condé Nast building to perform the same task for the journalistic princes and princesses still lucky enough to have paying jobs churning out copy that instantly outdated long before it achieved print. Luckily, she had had just enough time to stop off at her apartment in Jamaica to check on her pregnant daughter, Eugénie, who was all of thirteen years old.

Eugénie’s pregnancy had broken her heart. True, life in America, even in Queens, was preferable to Port-au-Prince, but there were trade-offs, differing social mores being one of them. At the Catholic girls’ school back home, Eugénie at least had a fighting chance to retain her honor, but here…The boys had found her quickly, like predators on a domestic creature that had suddenly been released back into the jungle, with predictable results. Back home there had been community, family, language, religion. If you stayed within those boundaries, there was still a chance that a girl wouldn’t have to go to the altar with child. Here in America, the only certainty for people like Eugénie was a trip to the abortion clinic, and that was something her mother was simply not going to allow. To Marie, every life was sacred, even this as-yet unborn offspring of her only daughter and some gangbanger, the kind of boy who would never have been admitted into her society back in Haiti. America might still be the land of economic opportunity but the trade-off in social dysfunction was not worth it. Which is why Marie had just made up her mind to take Eugénie home to Haiti to have her baby. She’d tell Eugénie just as soon as she got home this evening…

Stranded in the middle of the great intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Uwe, Helga, and Hubertus Friedhof watched the crossing signals carefully, awaiting the green light. They had been to the movies, where, despite all the years of English they had taken in school in Germany, they had hardly understood a single word of the dialogue, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the English they were used to hearing back home.

They were discussing this strange new language of the New World as they crossed the street, heading for one of the chain restaurants they had heard so much about back in Wiesbaden, one of those places that made Americans so amazingly obese, which they simply had to see and experience for themselves.

“Look!” exclaimed Hubertus, who was nearly 19 and about to leave for university. With any luck, under the German system, his parents would only be financially responsible for him for another seven to ten years.

Hubertus pointed up at the JumboTron and Jake Sinclair’s face. Everybody knew Jake Sinclair’s face, even foreigners, and in point of fact the movie they had just seen and hardly understood a word of had been made by Jake Sinclair’s studio. “…we betray our real values, the values that made this country,” Jake Sinclair was quoted in the electronic crawl-in real English-across the bottom of the giant screen, “the values that made this country the greatest country on earth…”

Uwe was just about to ask Helga why the Americans were always banging on about being the greatest country on earth when the light changed. The crowd moved forward, in that impatient New York way, but Uwe’s path was blocked by a young man standing stock-still. Being German, Uwe’s instinct was to plow ahead. He was sick of these Americans and their uncivilized ways, and it was high time he showed one of the natives how things were done in Germany. Back home, if somebody was standing between you and wherever you were going, you simply knocked him aside, whether you were a pedestrian with the right of way or a bicyclist zipping down a marked bike path onto which some hapless tourist had inadvertently wandered, or even a speeding motorist, exercising his God-given vorfahrt vom rechts.

The pedestrian signal had already turned to the blinking red hand, and the numerical countdown begun. Uwe pressed forward in that familiar way that Europeans have and that Americans, with their greater need for personal space, invariably resented. The young man, however, did not budge. Instead he barked over his shoulder. “What is your fucking problem?”

Uwe stopped, taken aback. In Germany, nobody spoke back. They simply got out of the way. But these rude Amis were a different tribe. Well, their days of strutting around the globe as if they owned it with their no-longer-almighty dollar were over. “Ja, okay,” said Uwe, “so now we can go, yes?”

Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz had come to America on an express visa from his native Saudi Arabia. It amazed him that, even after 9/11, Americas were still so friendly, so trusting. Part of that friendliness, true, was owing to the country’s desperate need for oil, which ensured that the old partners in Aramco would still have need for each other’s goods and services, and a little thing like 3,000 dead people and a gigantic hole in the ground in lower Manhattan would not be allowed to come between them. As long as America ran on oil-and as long as the Americans, unaccountably, tied both hands behind their backs by not drilling for it in their own country-Saudi-American friendship would go on and on.

It felt good to be standing here, just a few miles north of where his holy brothers had accomplished their spectacular act of martyrdom. Before he embarked on his own martyrdom, he had made sure to tour the holy site, still essentially empty after all these years. It was typical of the degenerate state of America and its inhabitants, he thought, to still be squabbling about something unimportant like a memorial when there was work to be done. They could have shown the world that even a grievous blow such as 9/11 would not stop them in their godless pursuit of commerce and harlotry, but instead they reacted just as the sheikh had predicted, in sorrow and fear.

When the Towers fell-something not even the sheikh had predicted-there was much joy across the ummah. But in the succeeding years, as blow after blow was plotted and then failed, the opportunity to bring forth the tribulations was slipping away. What was needed now was a killing blow. Beneath his breath, he began to pray.