I want to say who I was on that Thursday, because there is a version of this that has been told back to me a few times in which I was some kind of instinct machine, and I was not.

I was a fifty-two-year-old man on light duty with a bad L4, four years from a pension, who had spent the previous decade doing work that mostly did not matter.

I had twenty-nine years.

Eleven of them on patrol in the Fourth, six on a community response team that got defunded, four in a school liaison job that I liked more than anything else I ever did, and then the desk.

The desk is where they put you.

It is not a punishment and everybody treats it slightly like one.