A thousand deaths happened that day. Most of the deaths went unnoticed, except by those that killed and those that died. The city survived because of the dead; the dead made room for the living, and the children and grandchildren of the living.
Near the edge of the city, at the perimeter of a landfill, in a place where they would not be seen, two brothers laboriously dug a deep hole and then dumped the body of a going-on-middle-aged hooker into it. The hooker had died at their hands; the reasons didn't matter.
In Harlem, a man barely in his twenties leaped from the top floor of his tenement house and died instantly when he hit the pavement, fifteen floors below.
On East Houston Street, in The Bowery, a sanitation engineer standing too far out in the street, waiting for his co-worker to return with a load of garbage, was clipped by a passing taxi and sent sprawling head first into a street sign. He broke his neck.
In the Holland Tunnel, a woman on her way out of Manhattan to visit her daughter in New Jersey, began swiping furiously at a bee on the inside of her windshield and hit another car head-on. A gasoline tanker, just behind her, jackknifed into the wreckage and exploded within seconds. The resulting inferno killed a dozen people, and sent another dozen to various hospitals in Manhattan.
In Greenwich Village, a four-year-old boy playing with his father's .38 pointed the weapon at his mother, said "Bang!" and pulled the trigger. The bullet lodged in his mother's lung; she died four hours later of massive hemorrhaging.
These were the kinds of deaths that happened regularly in Manhattan. And those who paid attention to them would merely shake their heads and cluck that accidents happened all the time, there was really nothing anybody could do about it, or they'd whisper that the Mafia had its hands into everything, or proclaim that they'd never have a gun in their house.
These were the kinds of deaths that people could deal with.
In a sense, they were a form of entertainment. They were, at least, understandable. And they were mundane. So they frightened no one.