Fight Terror With Curtains

Jimmy Breslin

November 20, 2001

Hastings, who is known as Wartime Hastings because that's what the president tells him, that he is at war, began the day in his 23rd Street apartment by limping on a bad right ankle to the two bedroom windows that had a blackout cloth covering them. He decided to untack them for the day. But the blackout curtain would be up again at night. He kept the house air-raid dark at all times after sunset. Wartime Hastings was certain that he was the first person in New York to run a blackout.

His limp came from walking out of the bedroom and into the blackness of the kitchen where he twisted his ankle on a table leg. This was minor, he knew. At the start of this war, he had read in a book about London at war that the blackout transformed conditions of life more thoroughly than any other single feature of the war.

It has.

Wartime Hastings shuts down all light early, and then tries to watch television. He brings himself right up to the screen and has his chest almost against it. He feels he is soaking up the light so that not a glimmer comes into the room. Such a glimmer would be suffocated by his blackout curtains, he was sure. He was confident that he had all light stopped during the World Series. His eyes pained him because they had stared straight down to see the action. This was fine, for the reward was to watch pitchers like Johnson or Clemens. But each time the television news hummed into his chest about more terrorism, he became nervous and turned it off. When he woke up in the morning and found he had missed one of the great games, he was furious.

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However, he took on a new fear every night.

"I fear Jakarta," he told people in the office one day. He sells television advertising.

Hastings, stumbling about in his blackout, interpreted all war news as warnings of imminent personal danger.

All the news said that the Taliban gunmen were moving out of the major cities of Afghanistan.

Wartime Hastings decided that this meant that the Taliban were going to set off a nuclear bomb in New York. He was sure that they knew we would retaliate with a couple of our own; therefore they wanted to be out of the Afghanistan cities and in holes in the high mountains.

"We strike back, and they're not even there!" he exclaimed.

He walked out the front door of the apartment house and flattened against the building. Then he inched along and turned the corner and began walking. He got to the Eighth Avenue subway at 14th Street.

"Anthrax."

He continued on. At Sixth Avenue, he stared moodily at the stairs.

"Smallpox!"

He walked on. Finally, at an IRT stop he remembered that this was the place where the CIA tested defenses by throwing a light bulb of supposedly harmless gas through the grating and onto the platform, where it broke, and the trains came in and carried the dust all through the system.

Wartime Hastings started walking. He had to be at Fifth Avenue and 47th Street. He thought about taking the bus, but he saw buses stuck in traffic and on streets that were packed with people.

Right away, he said to himself, "Luxor!" That was the place in Egypt where a dozen of bin Laden's people got into a big crowd and began shooting until the people were dead.

He walked over to First Avenue, which was not so crowded. He couldn't see bin Laden starting a shootout here. At 57th, however, he had a different feeling. This was New York at noon. The streets were crowded with an amazing amount of people, stepping quickly, eagerly, not the least bit wary of the day - Hastings saw them all getting blown up by hand grenades thrown by people running out of buildings.

He went into a Fifth Avenue building and made his call. He saw three men. Two were pleasant. The third was a sour old man who sneered. Hastings thought he could hear the guy whimper at the sight of the big curved sword they were going to use to cut off his head.

He went home and threw up his blackout curtains. The last thing he saw out his window was an eighth or a quarter of a moon, curving white in the dark sky. It looked like one of the flags of a Middle Eastern country. He didn't know which one. But he was going to have a blackout for all of them. Then someday soon, when the army comes onto the block and makes everybody black out, he will be able to tell his neighbors that it is all right, it just takes a little getting used to before you get on a wartime footing.

He got home from work at 6 and immediately threw up the blackout curtains.