Loitering: New and Collected Essays Read Online Free Page A

cordons of yellow police ribbon closing off several blocks in Belltown, maybe fifty cops, a spooky antiterrorist vehicle the color of some nightmare rodent, plus a ruck of TV news reporters and their retinue of technicians. This guy—the Bad Guy—apparently thought he was just going to drink a few beers and bounce his girlfriend against the walls and go to sleep, but instead of a little quiet and intimate abuse before bed he’s now got major civic apparatus marshaling for a siege outside his window. No sleep for him tonight, and no more secrets, either, not at this unholy intersection of anomie and big-time news. The story’s been taken away from him, and other people are now trying to affect the plot. The police have a story they’d like to tell and so do the media folks and so, I suppose, do I, although in the hierarchy of things I suspect I’m just as clueless as the Bad Guy. When I arrive at First and Vine he’s busy negotiating by phone. He wants to know what kind of trouble he’s in.
    The falling rain makes a pleasant hum on the asphalt, but barely a block away the whole city gives out, dissolved in a granular fog, and I dreamily sense that out there, out beyond the end of the avenues and streets where right now the only destination I see is murk, there might be silence again, a silence we might enter and lose ourselves in and thereby forget all this cowboy businessof guns and women. Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I’ve learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I’m going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable. At first I don’t know in which building the guy’s holed up, and I assume it’s one of the high-rise Miami Beach–style architectural monstrosities that distort the human scale of this, the north end of Belltown. But this assumption is just pure cornball stuff, and I’m instantly aware that everything I feel and think is little more than the coalescence of certain clichés, that the Bad Guy isn’t a madman barricaded in the top floor of the tallest building, that he doesn’t necessarily plan to take potshots at pedestrians and commuters on their way to work, that he might just be drunk and deranged and wondering how he came to this strange pass on an ordinary evening that began normally enough and is now in the wee hours rapidly going to hell. In short, I don’t know anything about him, beginning with the most fundamental thing, like where he is.
    Not knowing where he is translates pretty soon into a polymorphous fear, and now it’s not just my neck constricting, but also my shoulders and my stomach and my balls, the fear having spread practically right down to my toes as I vividly imagine all the places a bullet can enter the body, and I try to squat casually behind acement wall—casually because I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the gathering pack of seasoned hardcore TV news journalists, who frankly seem, with all their unwieldy equipment and their lackadaisical milling around, like sitting ducks—until it occurs to me that the whole notion of being “behind” anything is a logistical matter I can’t quite coordinate, since I don’t know where the Bad Guy is. A ballistic line from point A (Bad Guy) to point B (author’s neck) can’t be established just yet, and for all I know I might actually be casually squatting right in front of him, cleanly fixed between his sights. In deer and elk hunting there’s a moment when you sight your quarry, when everything is there, and you feel the weighty potential of the imminent second in your every nerve, and this weight, this sense of anticipation, this prolepsis, can really screw up your shot. It’s as if the moment were vibrating, taking on static interference from the past and the future, and success depends on your ability to still it, to calm yourself through careful breathing right back into the singular present. The condition