How Little We Know

In seventeen minutes, Harry will be severely injured. In about another twenty minutes after that Harry will be dead.
As he unwittingly waits for the hammer to fall, Harry stands with his back against the west facing wall of the Stanwick Building, a ten-story office he’s worked on the tenth floor in as a data entry clerk for the last fourteen years, smoking a cigarette. The butt is menthol, bummed off a co-worker because he didn’t want to buy a pack when he had a pack on his nightstand – the pack he left behind. Harry flicks an ash from the tip, watches it as it floats to the sidewalk and then slowly lifts his head, eyes tracking upward in line with the source of an unfamiliar noise. The sound is something like a screech, more accurately a sustained buzz, and is getting closer.
Annette is coming back from her long lunch, customary in the summer months when she has less and less to do and more time to fill looking busy than she knows what to do with. Usually she will make copies of her firm’s transaction reports and file them manually or from her desktop for the first three and half hours of her day, starting from nine-fifteen until around twelve-five when she goes out for lunch. Being so regular and dedicated has its advantages; no one notices the extra ten minutes break Annette sneaks from time to time.
As she approaches the Stanwick Building, she gets to about twenty feet from where Harry is standing, and she sees him looking up. He seems to be just getting the point of a joke he heard earlier, Annette thinks as she raises her hand to wave hi, and because the seventeen minutes are up, Harry is being struck by and air-conditioning unit that came loose of its moorings in the window of an unoccupied office on the ninth floor, the floor below the archive room where Harry and Annette work.
The air-conditioner strikes Harry squarely on the head, sending him to the ground in a heap of splashing crimson and a mournful, unintelligible wail of pain. He lifts both hands to his forehead and writhes on the ground. Annette rushes over to his side.
The midday sidewalk is filled with pedestrians moving in their chaotic patterns toward designated appointments, drug deals, sales calls, betting windows and the rest of it and some begin to notice the injured man, the blood seeping into the pavement as it pools beneath the barely audible figure in a beige sport coat, black slacks and tennis shoes. They also see and hear the tall, lean red-haired lady in her prim royal blue skirt and white blouse kneeling next to the man shouting, help, anybody – for God’s sake, help – and some of the people begin to mill around the scene. Someone takes out a mobile phone, and others start asking questions like what happened, did anybody see it fall? A wiseass says that guy saw it fall, that’s for sure, and someone else says, he’s bleeding to death, man, that’s not right.
Vincent runs the newsstand outside the Stanwick Building and has seen Harry come and go for the last fourteen years, along with all the others that come and go, and his face is twisted in alarm as he also dials up an ambulance and then calls the precinct house on Sixth Avenue, so they’ll send some beat cop quick to the scene. Annette yells over to Vincent to get some help, quick – he’s dying, she says. Vincent is on hold now, waiting for someone to get back to him and continue taking enough information to dispatch assistance. Harry’s mouth isn’t moving the way it should, but he tries to speak, making wet gurgling sounds that Annette can’t understand as she hovers over him, her right hand holding his left and her left hand stroking his back. It’s as if by smoothing out his jacket she can make him whole again.
Vincent starts speaking again in a very fast and clipped Arthur Avenue patois, rattling off the time and location of the event and describing the victim in a rough outline. There’s not much need to be overly-specific; there’s only one guy on the street right now bleeding as much as Harry and Annette is still by his side. Vincent says this to the operator, hangs up and comes out of the newsstand over to where Harry has fallen.
Vincent’s ice-blue eyes dart back and forth, scanning the crowd that’s gathering and asks did anybody see anything, did you or you or you hear it falling? No response, just a few shrugs and mutterings. Although it is never recommended to move an injured person unless you have training in such things, Annette and Vincent turn Harry over so that his ruined face points to the sky, his left eye obscured by the shattered bones of his skull. The left cheek is gashed and cut to the bone as it hangs from a single thread of tissue. Harry works his jaw spasmodically with no words coming out, just jets of now blackening blood and other bits of flesh that have come loose from the crash. Annette swallows hard and feels sick at her stomach, clutching her sides so as not to vomit.
The smell of blood in the air and Harry’s desperate struggle to speak threatens to overwhelm Annette, but she steadies herself and cradles his head up a little as she kneels beside. I barely know this guy, she thinks, as he struggles. Vincent puts his hand on her shoulder and standing next to her looking for a sign of relief. Others in the crowd listen for sirens, hoping for a wagon to show up and clear this mess away so things can go back to normal.
Harry turns his good eye toward Annette’s hand on his shoulder, and he wants to tell her how much he appreciates her trying to help, but his windpipe has been crushed and he doesn’t have long to live. Harry thinks back, looking into her eyes – of all the times he’s seen her busy doing her work, trying so hard to look busy and how he never said anything. He also thinks about all the times he saw her making it unsteadily back to he cubicle after a long lunch in the summer months and how she was never really drunk, just getting there, as the say. Through bloodied nostrils Harry gets a whiff of gin and tonic coming from Annette’s now-ragged breaths, her eyes cloudy with concern, half a buzz, and tears.

Annette feels Harry’s right arm going slack and his attempts to moan out a cry for help or some last words grow more labored as the minutes melt off the clock. Time speeds up and Annette’s sense of the present is of a series of flashing images, as if everything outside of her and Harry is moving in fast-forward, but they are in slow-motion. She wonders if he ever thought about her, ever noticed her at work or desired her when she walked past his desk in the archives room when she slipped back in from her long lunches. She wonders this, but is snapped back to the moment that is crawling by as Harry spits out more blood and coughs dryly. She feels guilty for thinking of herself at this moment, but it passes. Vincent leads the paramedics over to where Harry is and they move Annette off to the side after asking if she’s all right. No, it is Harry who is dying she says.
One of the paramedics is a rangy black man with dreadlocks and his partner is a compact, powerfully-built blonde with her hair in a ponytail. They take out their equipment and the stretcher and begin clearing Harry’s airway and try to get him to breathe with an oxygen bottle. He begins to spasm and goes into shock when Annette is moved out of his sight, such as it is with only one good eye. The tall paramedic shouts something into his radio in code and the blonde medic spits out the plastic top of a hypodermic needle and injects Harry with a clear solution. The two medics lift Harry’s stretcher and roll it onto the ambulance as the only onlookers concerned with Harry’s fate – Vincent and Annette – look on.
Vincent’s thick forearm is around Annette’s shuddering shoulder and she is crying fast, hot tears as she tries to explain to two policemen what happened, or at least what she saw of what happened. Vincent pats her shoulder gently and she buries her face in his chest, unable to go on. He continues telling the policemen what he saw, how fast it all happened and the policemen write down the facts and thanks them for remaining calm.

The sirens are silent what seems a very long time, and Annette sees the paramedics through the back windows of the wagon. They continue to work on Harry, injecting him and taking his blood pressure and attempting to restore to flow of blood to his cracked-open brain and Annette sees the tall medic’s dreads whip back and forth furiously as he shakes his head. His blonde partner throws down the blood pressure cuff and slowly shakes her head as well.
The sirens start up quickly, and Annette and Vincent are escorted into the Stanwick Building by the two policemen, who are telling them that everything that can be done will be done, and that their friend will get priority treatment.
As Harry breathes his last and the wagon careens out of sight, neither Annette nor Vincent feels it necessary to say that Harry wasn’t their friend. Harry was just some guy who worked in the office and smoked his cigarettes in front of the newsstand.

End. Rev4. 18 February 2010, 12.21 a.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer