Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 08:07:09 -0500 From: Alex Chaffee <alex@stinky.com> Subject: The Dead Guy (Note: this happened a week or two before Christmas. I wrote some of the following a few days after the event, but it took me until now to complete the story. Guess I needed a little distance.) I'm in Grand Central Station, killing time before meeting a friend at the information booth. Loitering at a newsstand, I'm scanning headlines while listening to the two vendors bicker in Arabic. To me it's nothing but lulling nonsense, but every now and then I make out the distinct syllables, "Black Woman." "Blah blah blah Black Wooman blah blah." "Blah blah Black Wooman *blah* blah blah?" I'm starting to ascribe all sorts of sexual fetishes to the men when my eyes fall upon a magazine in the rack called Black Woman. I decide to move on. As I approach the info booth I sense the sort of spontaneous crowd-within-a-crowd that forms at times of calamity in public spaces. A few people have stopped or slowed, and the triangulation of their gazes falls about 8 feet south of the booth. There are a number of uniformed men milling around, and a few more kneeling over a form on the ground. The kneeling ones have big "EMT"s on their backs. The form is a man, 60s or older, flat on his back. Heart attack or stroke, must be. Must have just happened. Mesmerized, I drift closer. They pull his shirt out from his waist and begin CPR. From my vantage I can see his hairy belly pumping up and down, bulging over his tight tan pants. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. "Okay, move it back, give them *room*, move it!" Casual authority creates a little order; the cops have done this before. One, two, three, four, five. Breathe. One, two, three, four, five. I notice two cops chatting, their crowd control duties momentarily complete. Their shoulder patches say "Metro North Police - New York - Connecticut." I'm wondering which state pays for their health insurance when more EMTs roll up, these ones from the NYFD. They've got a portable crash cart. I'm thinking how long it takes them to set it up compared to how quickly they got there. They pull his shirt completely apart and busy themselves. I've seen this all on E.R. The one with the paddles calls "Clear!" and the dead legs twitch, under the bulging belly. Silence as they check his pulse. A dramatic pause. But no. One, two, three, four, five. A guy in a normal station uniform, apparently one of the info booth workers, has made it his business to assist the calmer authorities by officiously patrolling the perimeter, keeping the onlookers back. He's a bit louder and more hyper about it than the police, bespeaking his inexperience. After ten or so minutes of this he's standing there, arms folded, and I see the bulb light up behind his eyes as he realizes something is missing. He quickly turns around and leans in to a woman who's still working the booth and asks her to get his hat. She doesn't hear him. "What?" "Hat! Get my hat!" "Get it yo' *damn* self," she says, turning back to her task of organizing some pamphlets. He's taken aback, but soon realizes that his self-bestowed field promotion doesn't give him any actual authority over his fellow workers, and slinks around back to the door, emerging a moment later fully chapeaued. "Clear!" While I'm standing there, passers-by periodically come up and ask me what's going on. My reply is formulaic. "Heart attack. He collapsed about 10 (15, 20) minutes ago. Yeah, they're still working on him, but he's dead." One attractive woman, very dark skinned with a lovely island accent, starts a conversation. She says, what a horrible thing to happen during the holidays. I tell her, in the past two weeks, death has come closer to me than it usually does. Two friends have each lost someone close to them, suddenly and senselessly. She sympathizes. We watch the CPR for a few moments. His shuddering belly is hideous. I glimpse his face. He needs a shave. "He was catching a train," I observe. "Or just got off one," she adds. One, two, three, four, five. After about 20, 25 minutes, they wheel him away. Officers and tool belt-wearing workmen gather what posessions fell from the dead guy's pockets and casually stuff them into plastic bags. Sarah shows up and I tell her what happened. We proceed to have a fun afternoon -- art, manicure, shopping for personal hygeine products -- but for the whole rest of the day, a cliche comes true: morbid images of the scene spring unbidden into my mind. This must be a faint glimmer of wartime flashbacks, PTSD. Thankfully, they've kept their distance since then. On the vaulted ceiling of Grand Central is an astrological diagram of the Zodiac. A plaque nearby states, "Grand Central's famous zodiac ceiling depicts a Mediterranean winter sky with 2500 stars. Said to be backwards, it's actually as seen from a point of view from outside our solar system." This plaque has always bothered me because, despite its self-assured tone, it is totally wrong. A spectator at a different spot in the universe would see a different orientation of stars altogether, with no recognizable constellations. The only way the "point outside our solar system" hypothesis could be true is if the stars were painted onto a great transparent sphere centered on the earth, and the observing point were outside that sphere, looking in. I was discussing the plaque a few weeks later with a friend who's an amateur astronomer, and he told me, yes, the plaque is well-known and snickered at among the star gazing community, but he offered the following alternate explanation. Imagine an omniscient, four-dimensional God, who lives outside the universe, but can look in at the whole universe from the outside. If He focused His attention on a point in space, then to see that point, he would have to look past all the stars on the way there, coming from all directions simultaneously. In that sense, the mirror-image Zodiac might represent the view towards Earth, as seen by the eye of God. The dead guy expired flat on his back, looking up at the vaulted ceiling. The God's-eye view of heaven was the last thing he ever saw. - Alex Grand Central Station, 1914: http://www.wcic.org/~newgal/grandcentral.htm Note the info booth in the center Bad Astronomy Site: http://smart.net/~badastro/bad/grandcen.html alt.tv.ER Page: http://www.digiserve.com/er/erdex.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright � 1998 Alexander D. Chaffee (alex@stinky.com). All rights reserved. See more at http://www.stinky.com/almanac/