Peripheral Senses

TW: terrorism

Her fingers are trembling when she presses the keys. Just three numbers, and for that she needs three tries.

“911, what’s your emergency?” The familiar refrain from TV shows. Nothing she’s ever had to hear, herself, before.

“This is an anonymous tip,” she says, feeling foolish, instantly. One doesn’t have to say their tip is anonymous. One merely doesn’t give one’s name. Lessons for a next time. 

“There are bombs in the Garden. Hurry. You must hurry. Get them out. There’s no time,” she says, her voice somewhere between a scream and a whisper. The images are flashing in her mind, explosions, bloody limbs. A stray arm, torn from a body.

“Calm down, Ma’am,” says the operator. “Can you give us your name?”

“You have to hurry,” she says, sobbing. She’s feeling desperate now. What’s in a name? But this is no time for poetry.

“Which garden? How do you know there are bombs?”

She realizes the extent of her discombobulation. She’s failed to tell them where. Her son’s face flashes in her mind. Then an image of him, face apart from body, limbs asunder. She shudders.

“Terry,” she says. “My son’s in there. Madison Square Garden. He’s at the concert, Ten Thousand Maniacs.”

“I need you to tell us more.” 

She can tell from the voice that this person does not believe her. This nameless, faceless operator thinks she’s just another one of the thousands of crazies who call every day to report the crimes that aren’t. Out of madness, despair, loneliness, a desperate cry for attention. But she’s not one of those. She’s desperate all right, but not for lonely-person attention. She realizes she has to change this dynamic, and now.

“I’m going to call all the news outlets,” she says, a new urgency in her voice. She’s found some strength now, and her tone is clearer, stronger, lower, and her hands are no longer shaking. “ABC, CBS, Fox News. I’m going to tell them I planted the bombs there, I called you to warn you, and you did nothing. Then when the arena goes up in flames, and everyone is dead, they’ll blame you, the NYPD for doing nothing. For ignoring a terrorist attack that was called in.” 

She is quiet for a second, now that she’s issued her final warning. And she knows that this is what she’s going to do. She needs to force their hand.

“Ma’am, I need you to give us your name and location.” The operator sounds worried now and she’s wondering which of her words did the trick, was it the phrase “terrorist attack” or “called in?” 

She disconnects the phone. She’s wondering if they’ve traced the call already. They must have. She was too slow at the start, unconvincing, a novice. She shouldn’t have started off with the premonition, who’d believe a random psychic? No one. Not until it’s too late. Better to pretend to be the terrorist than be an actual psychic. 

*

She jabs at her phone to call her son, and it goes to voicemail. Again. 

“Terry?” she screams into the phone. “The Garden, it’s going to blow up,” she shouts. “You need to get out of there.”

In her mind, the images begin to flash, over and over again. The explosion, always from the center of the stage and then ripples of mini-explosions through the seats, leaving bodies in their wake. She is sobbing now, hysterical, how to cope with this, the impending loss of her only son, why won’t he answer his phone, she’s tried a million times, and now she’s scared the police will be here at her door any second. Picking her up to ask her the unanswerable question: How did you know?

She’s had the power since when she was small. Of course, no one believed her for the longest time. She can pick up waves in the air, tremors, the lightest of vibrations, they tell her things. Most of all, she can smell things. Like with Aunty Edith when she was small, and her stomach had not even begun to curve, and she’d not even missed her first bleed, but she knew from the heat emanating from her belly, and that slight smell of milky sweetness from her skin. She went up to her and put her arms around her body, her face against her tummy and said: Baby wants a hug. And then the adults looked at her and Mum said, she always says the strangest things. But eight and a half months later, they found out she was right. And deaths, she could tell when someone was going to die. The thing is, the dying, they always smell different too. And she’s been able to sense these things.

She’s made a living off it for the longest time. There are many charlatans in this city, but she’s the real thing. She went to the regular schools for a while, but the things they taught her there, they bored her. She has no need for science and geography, she can feel the future from the vibrations in the air, the heating and cooling of currents and the way the wind blows. She knows of another bigger apocalypse that’s coming, the gases are all out of whack, but she is powerless to stop its relentless march. 

But the little disasters, of those she can warn people, change the course of their events. She smells out the sadness, the hopelessness in people and tells them things to change their paths. Except Terry. She hasn’t been able to help the sadness of her own. Isn’t that always the way it goes?

*

This one, she thinks she can change. She runs out, jumps into a taxi and calls the ticket line for MSG. She hits zero repeatedly, she needs a live person, and when finally she gets one, the taxi is at 23rd and 8th. It’s slow going, the traffic is thick this evening. It’s humid too but the reason she’s sweating is the fear that she’ll be too late. 

She screams into the phone scaring the guy manning the ticket booth, “There’s a bomb at the Garden, evacuate, evacuate immediately.” The taxi driver, unfazed, checks her out in his rear view mirror. Maybe he’s had a lot of crazies in his cab, he’s not taking her seriously. After all, this is Manhattan. 

But then she hears the police sirens up sixth avenue, their familiar whine, too loud, but this time, so welcome. She’s never felt so relieved at that sound. There seem to be a million of them roaring up the road. She feels a sudden rush, an immense relief flooding through her body, then an enormous tiredness. The taxi is at a standstill. She fishes out a twenty and hands it to the driver. She gets out of the car and starts walking. 

*

She tries her son on the phone again. This time he answers.

“Terry?” she says. “You’ve gotta come home. It’s not safe there darling, are you out?”

“Yes, I’m out,” he sounds angry. “Someone called in to report bombs.” She thinks he's upset, he must have been looking forward to the show, the sound of Ten Thousand Maniacs.

“Yes, yes,” she says, hurriedly. “It was me." 

“How did you know, Mum?” he asks.

“I’ve had this smell of chemicals for days, Terry, lingering on the periphery, it didn’t all come together till now, but then today, I got an image, my darling, everything blowing up. I’m so glad you are safe,” she is sobbing again now, this time with relief. She can’t believe she’s managed to save his life. “I’m not sure how much time I have darling, I’m sure they’re coming for me, to ask me how I knew.” 

She doesn’t tell him of the lie she told to convince them this was real. That she was the terrorist. The danger she's put herself in, for a bigger cause.

“I wish you hadn’t called it in, Mum,” he says. His voice is fading. She can’t believe what she is hearing. She knows he has been depressed, angry for so long, about so many things, but she is finding this hard to take, this death wish.

She stops walking, comes to a standstill on the sidewalk. She is a pillar, processing emotions, and a stream of pedestrians flows around her, uptown and downtown.

“What are you saying, my love? Come home, come home and we’ll talk it through,” she says, bereft.

“No, I can’t, Mum,” he says. “No one is going to pay attention to the things that matter till a disaster strikes at home. And I just can’t be around you when I plan the next one. I can’t take the risk that you’ll sense it on me, and give it away. Again.”