Kuta, Bali

In the trudging hours of the last 3 days, the echo of the Boom has bounced through our lives incessantly in slamming doors, in suddenly screaming car horns, in the shouts of people on the street. The impossibility of every decision..left or right at the corner, to sit in the front of one restaurant or the back of another, to open the curtains or leave them shut - drips with the weight of the consequences that equally trivial decisions carried just a few nights earlier.

That night, we stood at the corner of JL Legian and Poppies Gang II with new friends Jane and Camille deciding where we'd start our evening out. To the right was the Bounty. To the left, the Sari. Left or right?

Right, one less street to cross.

15 paces later we stood at the entrance of the Bounty deciding where we'd sit. In the front were a couple guys playing acoustic guitar and dozens of thick storefront windows that would be blown violently in shards across the restaurant 30 minutes later. In the back was a tall pirate ship raised high off the ground and blocked from the Sari by a tall brick building. Acoustic guitars or Pirate Ship?

The pirate ship would be a bit of a novelty and I don't think that guy tuned his guitar properly - Pirate ship.

Two decisions..these are what begin my memory of last Saturday night.

We had ordered different drinks and were passing them around for each other to sample. On the stage, drunken tourists were singing open mic karaoke and we almost had Jay talked into doing Lady In Red for Camille. I believe I felt the air pressing hard against me before I heard the Boom...which came like a bull with horns down..a first hard strike and then a massive bodied rumble. It was instantly dark. Dark and then BRIGHT as the huge fireball balooned for a few seconds into the night sky. And then it was dark again.

We were all standing. I remember this surprised me..everyone was standing and I don't remember anyone getting up. I looked for Jay..the girls..all standing.

The smell fell on us. Something chemical, electric, burnt. And screams..they melted into one scream that lasted the entire night. Shouting. People thinking out loud, reacting, panicking. We ran down the stairs of the pirate ship and into the front of restaurant. People were bleeding, but I couldn't focus on any one person. Camille is a nurse and went immediately to someone. He was bloodsoaked..there was no part of his head that was not red. It was from the glass. He was lucid and calm and deliberate in his words and this brought me to the same place. Camille began to work with him and I started to look for other people. I lost Jay and the girls at this point for a short while. I remember bolting from place to place, like someone frantically trying to keep plates spinning on poles only to have every single one crash. A man came at me with one eye blown out - his head turned 45 degrees to the left so he could see forward out of his right eye, but it didn't matter..he saw nothing. Someone came to him from the side and we took his arms. There was a taxi that had pulled into the front of the club. We put the one eyed man into the taxi and as I put my head in to help him sit, I remember vividly the terrible smell of burning flesh..the skin of the of person in the other side of cab pasted to the cheap vinyl seats..and him screaming hoarsley as another injured person was forced into the car with him.

I saw Jay again with a guy who had several pieces of glass lodged in him. He wasn't hurt badly, but was in shock, rambling. Jay was talking to him, and seeing him, I started thinking about our safety. The embassy bombings in Africa - 2 coordinated bombs..and of course the 4 part Sept 11 attack..these flashed through my mind along with thoughts of gas lines and falling walls as things to be aware of.

People were yelling for water and I went looking for it..and for napkins. I remember the pathetic worthless feeling of standing looking at dozens of my traveling community bleeding to death and me with a small bottle of mineral water and a fistful of napkins. I got angry. I ran into the street and towards the fire. People were running or walking like zombies..it was calm and chaotic..there was life and death and a the line between the two was a smudge of ash.

"Is it my blood or someone elses..is it my blood"? Someone was talking to me, but it was too dark to see. I turned with the fire to my back so I could see him. I poked and examined as best I could. "I don't feel anything," he said. I couldn't find anything. I told him he was fine and sent him in the right direction. I rocked back as I stood up and felt something soft under my heel. I spinned around. It was an arm, up to just below the elbow. There was a huge swollen foot next to it. I stared at it. I looked up for a second, maybe for its owner, but it was impossible to see more than a yard or two. I couldn't decide what to do. Should I try to get it to someone..what about ice? I remember wasting 30 seconds standing in the wreckage of a bomb blast trying to figure out where I could get ice for an arm before it came to me how unbelievably stupid that was. I reached down to pick it up, but didn't. I stood back up and tried to look around. A girl appeared as a silhoutte against the fire carrying someone that looked twice her size and screaming for water. Someone ran to her and took the other side of the injured person. I felt the water bottle in my hand and went over and thrust it into her now free hand as they rolled by me.

The fire seemed to be raging hotter and I could see less and less. The faith I had in my sense of direction started to fade. I walked a few steps in what I thought was the way back to the Bounty..but ended up walking to the hollowed entrance of a shop. Several bodies were laid out, lifeless. One girl was kneeling over another that had lost a leg. The blood pooled on the sidewalk. I have no memory of the next few minutes.

The next thing in my head was a seemingly instant moment of panic in the people. Almost everyone was running now for some new reason that I wasn't sure of. Perhaps it was just the first time I noticed it, but I had no idea then and so I ran too. And in a minute I was back at the open front part of the Bounty..and there was Jay and Camille and Jane. They had arms full of table cloths. I yelled for Jay. I told him that we needed to get out of the area or maybe he told me, but soon after the four of us were running, and everyone was running.

We went to the beach because it seemed like the safest place. We sat and stared out at the waves and the stars with our backs to the orange fire glow of the city and felt nothing at all.

Around 4 A.M. we wandered back to our hotel - Ronta's Bungalows - which was about 2 blocks away from the Sari. There are only 16 bungalows here and the rest of the occupants were sitting out front together with candles waiting for everyone's return. The two Swedish girls in the room below and an australian woman across the courtyard never made it back. The clay tiles on the roof had fallen through the cheap wooden paneling and shattered over the floor of our room. We slid the debris off our beds and collapsed.

An hour or so after passing out..about 6 a.m., there was a huge crash. Jay jumped instantly out of bed and not more than 2 second later more clay tiles fell through the ceiling and onto his bed. We ran out to the balcony completely spent and miserable to see what could be next. The police were outside in the courtyard looking up above our room. We walked through to the front of the room just in time to see an officer (whose walking around up there had dislodged the clay tiles) hand down a leg, and then a plastic bag with a hand, and 2 more bags full of tile and person. I shook my head disbelieving that people's limbs had landed twice as far away from the explosion as we were at the time. We packed and left the hotel with that the sad punctuation to the fragmented memory of that night.

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