RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
I run the oven at a place on the corner. I'm not going to say which corner, because the landlord's still deciding whether we have a lease or a pile of bricks. You want to know what one of those fights looks like from the ground? It doesn't look like anything. That's the part nobody tells you. By the time you understand what's happening, it's already over your head and you're under a table.
Here is what I actually saw, and I'm only going to tell you what I saw.
Tuesday, a little after the lunch rush. There was a sound like the air itself getting hit. Not an explosion. Explosions you hear and then they're done. This kept going, this low pressure in your chest, like standing too close to a speaker. The front window flexed. I want to be clear: glass is not supposed to bend. It bent. Then it was gone, and so was the awning, and Maria who does the register had a cut over her eye from something I never found.
We didn't see who was fighting. People online are very sure. They've got the flying ones named, the colors, the whole roster. From the floor of my shop I saw two shapes too fast to be shapes and a third thing that came down through the building across the street like the building was a suggestion. I saw the dust come up the block toward us in a wall. I saw a delivery bike folded around a parking meter with no rider, and I have not stopped thinking about the rider.
The official number is four. I counted six going into the ambulances myself, and that's just our block, and I don't know which of those six were on the list and which weren't. Mr. Okafor from the dry cleaner is one they didn't count, because they found him Wednesday. He'd been at his counter same as me.
The agency people showed up before the fire trucks. Take that however you want. Clean jackets, no badges you could read, and they walked the wreckage with little gray boxes that beeped, looking for something specific that was not us. When I asked one of them was it safe to go back inside, he said a building inspector would be in contact. That's the whole conversation. A man feeding a city does not rate an answer.
So here's what the oven was for, those three days. The power held on our side of the street, which was luck. We made pizza. We made it for the guys digging, for the medics, for the family camped on the curb because their apartment is a category of debris now. I didn't charge anybody and I'd do it again. That's the only protection I've got to offer. You can't punch any of these people. You can't even see them clearly. But you can put something hot in the hands of the ones who stayed.
What I want on the record is small. Not the names of the fighters. The names of the block. Maria, eleven stitches, came in the next morning anyway. Okafor, who pressed my shirts for nine years and got counted late. The rider I never found. The kid who keeps asking when the heroes are coming back, and how I'm supposed to explain that when they come back is the problem.
They'll rebuild Wabash. They always do. The map gets a fresh coat. But the people who tell you these fights are far away have never had to sweep the glass, and the people who win them never come back to see what winning costs at street level.
I'll be at the oven. Somebody has to feed whoever's left.