She suddenly realized I was watching her, and she looked up. Like I said, we non-zombies recognized each other in a flash all that day. She blushed a deep blush, all the way to the roots of her gray hair. Then she turned and ran away at top speed, her heels going clack-clack-clack, the pink slip under her black dress flashing up and swirling around. She held on to the shopping bag as she ran.

The things people must have been pulling that day! Like those two Hoboken guys who heard on the radio that Manhattan had gone crazy. They put on a couple of gas masks and drove through the Holland Tunnel—this was maybe an hour before it was closed to all vehicular traffic—and went down to Wall Street to rob themselves a bank. They weren’t even carrying weapons: they figured they’d just walk in and fill their empty suitcases with cash. But what they walked into was a street gun duel between two cops from a radio car who’d been hating each other for months. I saw a lot of things like that which I can’t remember now while I’m testifying.

But I do recall how the tempo seemed to be picking up. I’d headed into Broadway, giving up completely on the idea of going to the office. There were a lot more traffic accidents and a lot more people sitting on curbs and smiling into space. And going through the upper thirties, I saw at least three people jump out of windows. They came down in a long blur, zonk-splash, and nobody paid any attention to them.

Every block or so, I’d have to pull away from someone trying to tell me about God or the universe or how pretty the sunlight was. I decided to, I don’t know, kind of withdraw from the scene for a while. I went into a luncheonette near 42^nd Street to get a bite to eat.