I had returned to my apartment to prepare some sandwiches and obtain some fruit for a long, early morning at the office and was on my way back to the Ford House Office Building when, as I stepped the icy 4th Street sidewalk before the I-395 underpass, I was approached by a middle-aged white woman of compact size and sturdy build—eyeglasses in plastic frames, was she carrying a bag of any kind?—who, in the low-pitched squeak of a pack-a-day-since-age-14, uttered very directly to me:
“Careful.”
Walking ahead toward the underpass, the longer of two on my commute, I did not reply and had only paused fractionally to acknowledge her, perhaps only even in my own mind (a California stop, as it were). The machinery of nodding and wishing ‘good evening’ was late to roust, and its lazy foreman scarcely held audience of my conscience as I looked ahead and realized that the path underneath the eight-lane interstate that had been lit every night before this was now anomalously dark—it is perhaps one hundred feet of sidewalk (surely less than two hundred), but from the approach it was a rectangular blankness onto which parked cars were drawn in perspective. The vanishing point, where light ceased to exist.
A chill swept from my cerebellum to the center of my back to my triceps and back up to my brain and to my heart—the other side, a street lamp at last. I stepped quickly to the intersection with E Street, turned right, stepped faster. I hadn’t looked back. It swept again, in waves at pace equal to my heartbeat as it pounded heatlessness into my forearms and singed the capillaries at the tips of my fingers, continuing in the silence of my strides, subsiding at pace equal to the urge to turn my head to look behind me.
I didn’t know I could feel so cold without being numb.
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