Last night, sometime in that indigo cavern between 4 and 5am, I woke up, as I do most nights now, in an insomniac jolt. This is something that can usually be cured by drinking a glass of water or watching something mild and milky on my computer, some sort of visual sedative like old episodes of 90s sitcoms. Worst case, I get up and start doing work (my mother, a master of twisting her insomnia into a boon, says “the best thing to do is pop up and be productive if you’re just going to lay there like a log anyways”). Last night was one of those where I felt it best to move to my desk and start clacking away at the keyboard about nothing.
And then, I heard shouting outside, a woman screaming “No, please, no! Stop, don’t, please!” Of course I did two things at once; I grabbed my cell and clicked on the emergency mode, and then I peered through my blinds to assess the situation. I’m not sure what I would have done had it been the worst. Maybe shouted out the window-I see you! I see this!—maybe run down there with a bludgeon of some sort? I was honestly ready to do both; most likely because I had just seen The Dark Knight and was in a sallow mood about crime and terror in New York (more on that later), and also reeling from 2.5 straight hours of vigilante justice. But I wanted to stop whatever was going on and I suddenly felt like I was the only person awake enough to do it. It must have been what people might have felt in the city 15, even 10 years ago—that icy thought that someone is being brutalized outside your apartment while everyone else sleeps, and the realization that you and your trigger finger on 9-11 and your voice through a window may be the victim’s only chance of getting out of it. I had to remind myself to breathe.
After a careful examination, however, it turned out to be a domestic dispute. The girl’s lover was walking away continually and she wanted to keep him with her, literally jumping onto his back like an angry cat as he brushed her off with a lint swipe, over and over again. She finally crumpled in the street crying loudly, howling almost, yelling, mewling, sputtering, making noises that sounded like she was being slapped long after he walked away. I still considered calling someone or going down, but in the end, she scraped herself off the sidewalk and sulked back into a flourescent door. I’ve decided she can never know that I saw this, my neighbor’s 4am lamentation over a man that was louder than a crime scene.
And also: New York is getting scarier to me, if slightly. Not scary like blood on the streets, but an ominous feeling. Like all these empty condos in the gloaming are standing on precarious foundations. Say what you will about the ills of gentrification, and perhaps a grimier city really is more honest and breeds more art, and like it or not it is coming like a steam train as it is, but trigger finger is not something I want to have on a regular basis. Is that a common sentiment?
