Remember when I told you I lived in Manhattan, Sixth and King, the summer after the towers fell? 2002. The blackout summer. Whole neighborhoods dropping into darkness like someone unplugged the city.
One night in August – thick heat, middle of the night – the power cuts again. Everybody drifts outside. Neighbors on stoops, kids running around with flashlights, people sweating through their shirts, waiting for the lights to remember us.
Then it comes. A sound. Low at first. A kind of deep growl. The sidewalk feels softer under your feet.
And the first thing that happens – before anyone even speaks – is everyone’s eyes find each other. That’s how you know it’s bad. No one’s looking at the sky, no one’s looking down the block. We’re faces in the dark staring at each other, trying to put into words what we hear is what we all think it is.
Because in 2002, you don’t hear a rumble like that without thinking: is it happening again?
The sound keeps coming, closer now, thicker, rattling the windows but doesn’t even have power behind it. Someone mutters, someone else shushes. The kids go still. All you can hear is the rumble and our breathing.
And it grows still closer now, and then – faintly – a life? Not collapse, not thunder. Music. The rhythm is wrong for terror. Somebody squints and says, “wait… is that… The Turtles?”
And sure enough, strutting down Sixth Avenue like a parade float from another dimension, here he comes. Gus Bombeater. Grenades spinning in the air, ragged grin splitting his face, and "So Happy Together" blares from some cosmic boombox.
He’s juggling bombs like they’re fruit from the corner store. Each one he swallows lands with a muffled burp deep in his belly. And we all feel the relief and awe at once.
A giant gingerbread man. But not sugar, metal. Alien metal. He’s dressed formal, like always. Some nights a suit, sometimes a green-and-navy tweed vest with a matching cap, the kind an old golfer might wear. The kind of outfit that makes you do a double-take, even before you realize he’s juggling live grenades down Sixth Avenue like it’s open‑mic night.
The crowd’s frozen, but me? I know. I know who that is. And seeing him here, on Earth, in the middle of a blackout New York street… it stops cold.
Now, I can’t explain how I know him, not here, not in this story. Let’s just say I’ve got my reasons, reasons that go back farther than this city.
But this isn’t about me. This is Gus’s story.