Part 1
A Boeing 787 airliner traveling at 456 miles per hour will puncture the tallest building in Europe in 45 seconds.
It’s 8:56 on an early spring morning. Around London Bridge, suited and business casual-clad professionals emerge from Borough station, some glancing up at the sky every few seconds between sips of coffee from paper cups, their shoes polished or scuffed. Middle-aged men in baggy pinstripes pass bespectacled youngsters in hooded sweatshirts, backpacks on their backs, each side struck by a simultaneous sense of past and future, each side wondering where the other went wrong. Women who mastered the art of high-heel walking decades ago see girls in their 20s, fresh from the university hall and here they are, heading for their ping pong table startup offices, wearing tennis shoes. It all happened in the blink of an eye, salad days to golden years.
Generation to generation, they all share one commonality this morning, these 9 am late runners: the double-decker bus held up in traffic, the train held up by railway work, the tube held up by a power outage - regardless, they are caught in a double step toward the office, views of the sky only peripheral as their eyes are transfixed forward. But whatever they see, the plane is not yet close enough to impact to mean anything beyond the obvious for those on the ground - that this commercial airliner will fly straight behind the building. Because that’s how our visual perceptions have been trained. Because the out-of-the-ordinary occurrences only happen on TV or your smartphone’s newsfeed, not on your morning commute.
A crew of workmen in neon t-shirts and orange vests, one of them drilling a jackhammer into the concrete sidewalk. A family of Chinese tourists, the father with a camera strapped around his neck, the mother holding a map in one hand, her son’s small hand in the other. A young lawyer exclaims “oh my God,” but when the camera zooms in, her face is buried in her phone, and we see it’s not a gasp of exasperation, but amused shock at a photo sent from a friend capturing their drunken weekend escapades.
Distractions on top of distractions on top of distractions.
Look around, look away, look back to the sky. If you were standing on Borough High Street and the building stayed completely intact as it fell forward in your direction, you’d be shattered along with the glass, rendered into unidentifiable shards of dust and viscera - becoming one with the chaotic mess.
Twenty seconds to impact.
An alarm sounds from one of the nearby buildings.
Heads turn all around and the gasps begin. This will not be an overhead pass. Some start running, some pull their phones out to record. The jackhammer stops, and the workers are already out of sight. If this were a Saturday morning cartoon, they’d have run so fast all you’d see would be orange helmets spinning in place, hovering over the spots where their owners stood a second ago, and then they’d drop to the ground.
But this is a Tuesday morning and there are ten seconds to impact.
Hundreds stampeding through the streets and alleyways now. Hundreds screaming for their lives now.
You should run. You should be helping families with small children get to safety. You should be telling everyone who’s too busy filming on their phones that all their cumulative views on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube won’t amount to any satisfaction when they’re buried under twenty eight million pounds of pulverized glass and concrete and flame and smoke and ash and headlines.
Five seconds to impact.
But you’re standing still.
And all you can do is stare.
It happens.
Blast.
Tremor.
Explosion.
No one warns you about the smell. However bad they say paper mills are, if paper was made of hair, jet fuel, skin, processed carbohydrates, bone fragments, plastics of all type, furniture, kitchen supplies, computers, and, of course, paper.
You scream but don’t make a sound.
The smoke envelops the streets and fire tunnels through your nostrils through your throat through your lungs, burning every fiber of your internal organs, and it feels like you’ve been dropped straight into the sun
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
7:30 am.
Cough up what I first think are ashes until I realize it’s just the aftermath of two cigarettes a stranger at the bar donated me last night.
I grab my phone and check the newsfeed before hitting the shower. The first five headlines are about the investigation of Russia’s involvement in the presidential election. Another bomb went off in Istanbul. There are only two stories on London - pollution at an all-time high and an op-ed about Brexit.
I get out of bed to check the window and stare at the Shard, still piercing flight paths for planes treading just overhead.
