by Joseph Wallace

I remember that the sky was tainted a sickly yellow that night, like an old bruise, and that the air smelled of a mixture of gasoline and ozone and rot.

It was my seventeenth birthday. I escaped from my family as early as I could, and headed to Brooklyn Heights to hang out with my friends. We sat on the Promenade drinking Bud out of quart bottles and looking at the Manhattan skyline, the distant lit-up buildings glowing red in the bad air. But I felt restless. Something behind my eyes itched. I didn't want to be sitting there. I wanted to be moving.

How about the Cocoa Exchange, someone said.

The what?

This rooftop park in the City's Financial District, open twenty-four hours and lit with neon. Or so someone said. I didn't care--I just said, Let's go.

Let's take the subway, someone said.

No, I said. We'll walk.

So we set out across the Brooklyn Bridge. Today, New York's financial district might be a bustling place, but back then it was a dead zone. No one lived there. The offices shut before dark, and after that the place might just as well have been a roadless area on a map. I remember that everyone we saw on the bridge that night was heading our way. No one else was going where we were going.

That suited my mood just fine.

We talked louder than usual when we left the bridge and walked along the dark streets. Seven of us walking abreast past a naked man screaming at the sky, another who ran away, shouting, as soon as we turned a corner and saw him. And then one more, a gaunt man with long, stringy hair and staring eyes, staggering toward us down the sidewalk, muttering curses as he shouldered past my friend Jason.

I heard a wordless shout from behind us once he'd passed, but I didn't turn around. We'd reached the Cocoa Exchange and the ladder that led up to the neon park. Three went up the ladder before me. I'd stepped up two rungs when I heard a scream of terror, shockingly close behind me.

I turned my head and looked down. The man who'd pushed past us was crouched there, no more than two feet from me. He was holding a knife. As I watched, he lunged forward at Jason. He ripped upward with the blade, but Jason danced away from the knifestroke and then spun around and ran away. I still remember the panicked slapping sounds of his footsteps against the pavement.

The man straightened and looked up at me. I saw his eyes glitter in the streetlight as they met mine. As I stood there, unmoving, back to him, helpless, I realized that I must look as if I was asking to be stabbed. One quick movement of his knife, and I would fall backward onto that dirty sidewalk and lie there, feeling my blood leaking into the gutter.

He moved his wrist, and the blade gleamed. Then, with a grunt--a verbal shrug--he turned and walked back the way he'd come. He was done with us. He'd decided to let me live.

When we found Pete, he was bent over in a dark doorway, saying again and again, "Am I cut? Am I cut?" We ran our hands over his clothes, his body, expecting at any moment to feel the telltale wet warmth. But somehow the blade had missed its mark.

I hear that the Cocoa Exchange is still there, all these years later. People say the neon park is something to see.

But speaking personally, I wouldn't know.