ROY EDROSO

South Williamsburg, Brooklyn

When the smoke, dust, and fear had sufficiently settled I crawled out of my Williamsburg bunker and bicycled to Cobble Hill to get drunk. The friends I visited were still a little tense. I was more than a little tense. I had been walking a small circle for days, the television bombarding me throughout with fresh atrocity photos, declarations of war, American flags, and overtired anchorpersons. I went outside sometimes, but I never left the circle. Now I was in Cobble Hill. "C'mon, let go to Manhattan," I told my friends. "Reclaim the space."

We reclaimed instead a local bar, dark and sparsely populated, and drank beers and shots while the Clash played over the sound system: "London calling, to the faraway towns/Now war is declared, and battle come down..."

At one in the morning I hopped on my bike and began the journey home. It's odd piloting a bike, drunk, at one a.m. through city streets in wartime. I felt like George Orwell, though my interior monologue was more like that of Barney on The Simpsons: "La la la la la la la! Hello, fishies!"

I got as far as South Williamsburg, the Hasidic neighborhood with squat buildings, windows fretted with heavy iron gates, when on a street whose name I can't remember I heard a woman's voice: "Mister, mister, can you help us?"

In the darkness I made out two women, one young and one older, both wearing plain dresses of what appeared to be light flannel, with scarves covering their hair.

Of course, I said, and got off my bicycle.

"It's Shabbas," said the older woman. "We can't answer the phone. Could you please dial star six nine for us?"

They led me up creaky wooden steps to their apartment. It was like the old New York apartments I had once lived in--fat floor beams, plaster walls, ornate trim rendered illegible by many coats of paint--but larger, furnished with lots of bureaus and breakfronts and photos of men with beards, the walls a light color, the trim painted a dried-blood red at once lurid and severe.

I dialed *69 and talked to the respondents, identifying myself as the "Shabbas goy," got the info, signed off, told the women.

"How do you know about Shabbas goy?" the older woman asked.

"I've been living in New York a long time," I said, moving toward the door.

"You know what's been going on," she said in a low, serious voice.

"Yes."

"So what should be done?"

My first impulse was to say, "Nu, you're asking me? In Israel your people live perpetually under this threat. This is our first taste of that, and we don't like it, but we can't spit it out. You have your own ideas. What can I add? It's like Tiger Woods asking a weekend duffer how to fix his putt in time for the Masters. What do you want from my advice? With your covered heads, with your men's pais and prayer shawls, you're not even living in the same century as me."

But we were living in the same century. We were living in the same time, and in the same city.

They were looking at me, the older woman challengingly, eyes small and focussed, the young one's face blank, as if waiting for instructions.

"Kill the leaders, of course," I began. To get that out of the way.

"Then we should airlift CD players and VCRs into their countries, and play them Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys and Hollywood blockbusters, so they see how we live. They can choose between that and killing us. They can choose between hiding in the hills and living on dirt and blowing up buildings, and the way we live. I think they'll want to live the way we live. Everybody else does."

The old woman stared at the ground; the young woman still looked at me, face pale, eyes big.

The old woman offered me a small bottle of wine--actually she sort of shoved it at me, though smilingly. The young woman asked me if I wanted a cold drink. I declined, wishing them well, bowing my head and pressing my hands in front of me, in the Buddhist manner.

I went down the steps, boarded my bike and headed home, past an abandoned building that had been spraypainted with the legend NUKE THE WEST BANK.