I was coming home from a bookstore where I’d just been reading about a character from Irish mythology–Noisi, Deirdre’s husband. He was said to have had hair like a raven, skin white as snow and cheeks red as blood. An image of Noisi in my mind’s eye, I started following a Greenwich Village tour group I didn’t pay for. I walked with the group for a few minutes, until the leader looked at me with such malice I thought I’d better leave.

I headed down MacDougal St. As I started crossing through the park, a boy rushed up to me, screaming, “Some motherfucker drove their car through the park!” Scowling, he ran toward the middle of the park where the car had stopped when it hit the fountain.

An enormous mob had formed around the car, a gray clunker. They lifted the car off the ground, and then dropped it back down. They tore an old woman in a long beige raincoat from the car and started beating her. I panicked, thinking maybe my boyfriend had been hit. He often walked through the park; we lived just a block away. I started running, scanning the faces of the wounded and the dead to see if he was among them.

I saw a lot of things I wished I hadn’t–people on park benches when the car hit contorted into unbelievable shapes, smashed into the seats, some even wrapped around them like ribbons. One person was pierced through the waist by a bench. Others lay bleeding on the ground. I didn’t find my boyfriend anywhere and was afraid of being crushed by the mob. I kept running until I came to the park’s edge where I saw a face that made me stop. It belonged to a teenager. He looked just as I imagined Noisi might have: He had soft, wind-blown dark hair. A bright red blush dusted his young white cheeks. The problem was he lay on the ground, his head turned the wrong way so that his face looked over his back. His legs were wrapped around his torso. A young man with a worried expression held the boy’s wrist, as if by keeping track of how often the teenager’s heart beat, he was keeping him alive. The ambulances began arriving, at least 40 in all, sirens screaming. Two paramedics put the boy’s twisted body on a stretcher and carried him away.

On the news that night, I learned that the boy was a 19-year-old NYU sophomore named Carlos Oyola. He had died shortly after the young man and I left him to the paramedics’ care. I watched as his mother cried into a newscaster’s microphone. I thought of sending her a card but never did.

* * *

Author’s note: I witnessed the aftermath of the April 23, 1992 Washington Square Park “massacre” when Stella Maychick, 74, mistakenly stepped on the accelerator rather than the brake as she shifted her 1987 Oldsmobile into drive. She veered into the park, killing five people and injuring 26 others. NYU named a scholarship in honor of Carlos Oyola, who lived at 367 Second Street in Brooklyn.

Ellen Lindquist’s short-short “In the Hawaiian Garden Where I Came to Escape Feeling Sad” was selected to teach a course in flash fiction at the University of Glasgow. In 2004, she was invited to submit poetic texts to the London Art Biennial. Visit her here: www.ellenlindquist.blogspot.com.

If you say the word “mail” to our doorman, David, he flinches. When I’m mad at him, just to annoy him, I say, “Is the mail in?” He won’t let me get near the mailboxes if the mail isn’t in. “Snotinyet,” he’ll shout out quickly, to stop me. Sometimes he watches from the corner of his eye, looking up from his crossword puzzle, to catch me before making a move to the mailboxes. A few times I’ve gotten to the box before he was able to say, “snotinyet.”

Our doorman substitute, Rodrigo, who usually collects garbage, is so large he almost doesn’t fit into his royal blue uniform. He has a head of bushy black hair and a big mustache. He doesn’t say hello to anyone. When I pass by him and say, “Hello,” he just stares back. After two years, he still doesn’t know I live in the building. “May I help you?” his voice booms out as I walk into the lobby. “I live here,” I say.

I had a fight with the doorman-in-training from Spain. He wouldn’t let the Chinese food delivery boy up on the elevator. I told him over the intercom that the other doormen would have let him up. When I got down to the lobby, he told me again, “Delivery boys can’t go up. You have to come down.” I told him not to worry about it and he was miffed.

When a friend came and asked for me, our oldest doorman, Chester, said he didn’t know who I was. My friend went to wait at the restaurant next door. When I found her, she was angry. We went back to the apartment and after introducing her, I said to Chester, “Now you know who my friend is and you remember me, I hope.” Chester scowled at my friend. My friend scowled back at him.

These doormen all need something to perk up their lives. Perhaps doorman contests or raffles held by the tenants? Maybe they should play hopscotch in front of the building. What harm would there be in doormen drawing on the cement with chalk? Or perhaps they need to desert their doorman demeanor and their posts and jog together to Central Park, a mighty herd of doormen running away in doorman abandon.