In what distant deeps or skies
burnt the fires of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was they brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp?

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-William Blake

“Firecracker.”

“What?”

“Firecracker – do not worry, we were just playing with firecracker.”

“But New Years was last week, what are you doing playing with firecrackers now?”

“Just come in, nothing happened, I will show you – firecracker is all.” It was just after 11:00pm when Manila Police Patrolman Ariel Fernandez stepped into the acrid cloud of smoke occupying Ramzi Yousef’s sixth-floor room. Patrolman Fernandez had come to the Philippines’ Dona Josefa Apartments after his senior superintendent, Aida Fariscal, received a call about a fire in the building.

As the night-duty officer, it was Fernandez’s job to check it out.

After arriving at the apartments, Fernandez and the firemen who’d responded to the alarm rode the elevator up to Room 603 where they found salt-white granules powdering the room. The apartment’s inhabitants, Yousef and one of his buddies from home, explained in accented English that they’d spilled some of the mixture in the sink, lit it, and then been unable to contain the cloud of black that came from the explosion that followed.

So they opened a window, and the black smoke billowing out of their sixth-floor window into the musky Philippine night made it seem from the outside as if their room was on fire. But, the occupants claimed, it was all just a miscalculated attempt at constructing some homemade firecrackers. For whatever reason, Patrolman Fernandez hadn’t noticed the various items scattered around the one-bedroom apartment that to the casual observer, or a police detective, might seem more than a little superfluous to making homemade firecrackers.

The four portable gas stoves all still new in their boxes, enough industrial-size cotton balls to fill the make-up needs of the Manila red-light district for an entire weekend, the bottles of sulfuric and chloric acid, the chemical glassware, the multicolored loops of electrical wire with accompanying timers, and manuals on chemistry and bomb-building. All in all, there was so much volatile combustible material that a spark of static electricity would’ve set off the explosives in the room and demolished the Don Josefa apartment complex.¹ Not sensing that anything was awry, Fernandez returned to file an informal report of a non-event back at headquarters.