Yesterday was Queensday: a 24-hour flea market/street party where the already narrow streets are often so crowded it's like drowning in orange quicksand. My father would have collected data about crowd density (Where are the bottlenecks? How quickly does density change over time and distance?), human factors (average reach, speed of travel, state of health), initial distribution of bodies, density and virulence. All we had were pockets full of salt packets we'd liberated from restaurants over the past week. Salt sometimes calms them down if they're really freaked out or in extremely bad shape, like pre-Romerian. But really, it's like baby aspirin to plague victims.
And if I'd known in advance what complete pandemonium it would be, I would have just stayed in bed and bagged the whole thing. On the plus side, it's too cramped for a major feeding frenzy. But when the crowd is that packed, you could be surrounded by bodies and not know until you got home and discovered that "bump" you felt in the Leidseplein was not just someone lifting your wallet.
Also, I have a thing about crowds. When I was six, I got separated from my parents doing Christmas shopping in Union Square. They found me two hours later in Macy's security office. Apparently, I didn't even know my name when they picked me up. I was totally zoned. I still have no idea what happened during those two hours. It's happened a few times since then (Times Square on New Year's Eve. That was just dumb.) but mostly I know that crowd = blackout and I avoid accordingly.
None of which explains why she jumped me. The Vondelpark was packed with little kids doing dance routines or selling their old toys for a quarter. I hadn't seen any bodywork at all, kid or adult, when I met up with Gemma outside Vertigo, but after four hours of crowd life I was already seeing the black fireworks of imminent unconsciousness. We made our way off the path and into the bushes along the side of the park and there she was: a young woman lying on the ground. Through my sputtering vision I could just i.d. her Viktor and Rolf H&M raincoat and I thought, "She must have fought hard for that and now it's going to be all dirty". Then with no warning, no sound, she was on me. God, she was fast. Too fast and too pretty to be Romerian and too reckless to be anything else. She must have knocked me down because when Gemma pulled us apart, she just rolled over where she was on the ground and crawled deeper under the bushes, like a sick dog.
Why would a body attack another body? I must have asked that question a hundred times while Gemma dragged me up out of the orange quicksand and then back underground to the monketerium. She just kept saying, "I don't know."
