Monday, September 03, 2012

I was in London, where there was some talk that they’d switch from the pound to the dollar. (It seemed like a terrible idea to me.) In a pub, something was playing on TV about a horse race. It then appeared that the broadcast was a replay of something that had happened right outside the pub, and then the screen became a window, and the corner of a horse racing track wound around the outside of the pub, elevated like a train track to second-story height, with the building on the inside of the corner. The pack of horses galloped by. In its midst were two official-looking people, a man and a woman, who were running alongside one of the horses and trying to guide it, as though it were going astray. They wore the sort of uniforms that airline check-in attendants do. They could not control the horse. It and two others bolted toward the window. I still understood that this was TV footage of something that had happened in the past, so I wasn’t worried. The horses crashed through into the pub and amid panicking customers. I wondered how many people were hurt, or died, in the catastrophe. I stood in the bathroom, which was off to the side and therefore out of harm’s way. I wondered if anyone had been lucky enough to be there the moment the horses had crashed in.