Journal entry, August 13, 2002 4:44 P.M.:

Lyrics from "Muddy River" by Laurie Anderson.

Rain keeps pouring down
Houses are cracking. People drown.
Cars are rusting here. A church floats by
Washed in the blood of the lamb...

Blackness here. Sitting at my silent computer. The office has died; no modern office can be considered alive in a blackout. Computers are out, phones are out, lights are out. The only sounds I hear are murmurs from the other people in this locked room and an alarm that has begun clamoring in the lobby. Now, though, I hear new noises: the alarm is the elevator alarm. People are trapped aboard.

And all the superhighways have disappeared
One by one. And all the towns and cities and signs
Are underwater now. They're gone...

I leave work after security guards free us from the sealed electric doors. It is 102 outside, and the temperature inside was rising quickly, the temperature inside our locked room. (Sitting in the dark feeling like a fire is building just over your shoulder is disconcerting.)

On the sidewalk, beneath the molten orange sun, horns are blaring on the other side of heat vapors so thick that gazing at traffic feels like I am looking at the cars, trucks, and buses through an old nickelodeon. A woman in a grey sedan is crying as she screams into a cell phone. Ahead, the rush-hour thick intersection has no operating street lights. Madness is rising.

Mud is everywhere.
Fish are swimming in the fields.
Everybody's running around, they're yelling
Is this the end of the known world?

I cross the intersection where two men are being carried on stretchers into ambulances. Apparently, no working traffic lights means GO to everyone. The mangled husks and strewn parts of their SUVs litter the intersection like war.

Men and women in their boats
Try to save what they've lost.
They're yelling, "It's all gone now.
We're never gonna find it again."

Another ambulance sits in Harvard Square where an older woman is being electrocuted by an EMT. The paddles appear to be doing no good at re-starting her heart. From only two feet away, I can see sweat from the brow of one EMT drip into her slack, open mouth. A moment later she revives, screaming. I enter the station.

But when the muddy river starts to rise
It covers us all. And when I look into your eyes
Two tiny clocks two crystal balls
We begin again. We try.
We begin again. Down by
the muddy river.

On the platform, which is bathed in the sickly yellow of emergency lighting, hundreds of people mill about in a frantic cacophony. A megaphoned announcement by an MBTA representative whose white shirt has been rendered translucent by his sweat lets the waiting passengers know that two trains have blown fuses and are disabled on the tracks. It will be some time before anything moves again.

It will be some time before anything moves again.

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