Somewhere on the street below, a man was screaming from four bullet wounds. Upon hearing the four explosions, me and my roommate hung our heads out my bedroom window on either side of a chipped white box fan propped within the frame to suck out the heat. The day had been a hot one. The screams sounded like they were right in front of our building. She kept trying to place the sounds. I kept thinking how that was like making guesses on where we'd see blood the next day.
From across the fan we exchanged fearful, nervous smiles which I misinterpreted as meaning amused. For a moment, I imagined my roommate to be as inappropriately sadistic as me. This only further amused me. And the pathetic screams. How can I laugh at a man screaming his life out?
And today this rain. I woke to church music and rain. The church music I took, strangely, for the shot man’s immediate funeral. I realize now that it is Sunday, a day originally set aside for church music, and besides, this assumption makes no sense. They wouldn’t be burying him already. Furthermore, there’s nowhere to bury him around here.
I woke to disappointment. Two things were immediately disappointing. The first: I had planned to photograph two parades today, my only day off, and with rain falling from the sky both parades would be cancelled. The second: the rain would have washed the gunshot blood from the sidewalk.
Last night I barely slept. And I’d like to say it was due to a crawling, nagging fear of being ambushed or gunned down or, selfishness aside, sympathy for the man who died on the sidewalk. He must be dead. We threw our robes on (the roommate and I) and tore down the stairs just as they were loading him into the ambulance. We had waited until we heard the sirens because we knew it was safe (at least this is how the retelling goes-in reality it was simply at this point that curiosity got the best of us and we couldn’t see a damn thing from the roof) to head downstairs and join the sidewalk gawkers. Right in front of our building but on the other side of the street. So we’re safe.
We watched the ambulance sit with him inside it for fifteen minutes before rolling off in the vague direction of nothing. The police precinct is one block away from our building and it took them nine minutes to arrive. A Hispanic guy. Or black. Definitely not a white guy. Either he died on the gurney right there or, or, or…what? He must have died right there. Why else would the ambulance just sit there in the street with him inside of it? These mysteries…
The mysterious witness I spoke to on the sidewalk. He was thin, black and small framed. I say this as if I were picking him out of a lineup, and in truth, since he disappeared directly after speaking to me, perhaps I am the lone witness to the lone witness. Of a lone crime? Only the lone know the lone.
He was thin, black and small framed. He had a mostly shaved head and was dressed well but plainly. I was standing and staring when he randomly muttered “Shot him four times.” My head whipped left to catch this update. “What?” I said. “Where? Four times? We heard four shots. From the window up there. Me and my roommate.”
The man drew two fingers in the shape of a gun down the right side of his body to illustrate as he spoke, “He got shot in the head (he pointed), the neck (he pointed), the trunk (or torso-he pointed), and the leg (he pointed)” I was agape. I managed a “Wow. That’s fucked up.” I had barely managed even that but it kept him talking. He continued. “I saw him running down the street.” Certain he could not mean the victim, my natural response was “Who?” He said nothing, perhaps because he did not hear me. I reiterated “Who? The shooter? You saw the shooter?” This elicited a response. “No”, he said. “The guy that got shot. He was running down the street like he was trying to get away. Then he got shot.” I pressed on. “So you saw him get shot, then?” He said no. “You saw him running and then you said he got shot so you saw him get shot? You must have seen the shooter.” He shook his head and quite convincingly said “No.” I turned back to the scene. “Still, you should tell the cops what you know, though.” I turned back to him to deliver some straightforward moral responsibility via eye contact. He had vanished. I went back inside.
The real reason I didn’t sleep? Run of the mill insomnia. Run of the mill technology-induced insomnia. The computer and all it has to offer at 5 am. Checking Craigslist, the Times, the gossips…inertia. And then imagining I heard the door being pried open, remembering I left it unlocked, frozen to hear another sound and to determine the level of danger I was stupidly sitting through. Eventually, I managed to creep into the kitchen and see that I had already locked it, but not without being absolutely certain the killer was hiding behind the bathroom door with a .45 aimed at the back of my ear. So perhaps my insomnia was caused by a combination of inertia and sympathetic terror. But I’m hard on myself and, therefore, accuse myself of the inertia.
I stayed inside as long as I could today. No parades, so much rain. And then dinner with a friend just now. Delicious food and I devoured it while telling the owner, the bartender, my friend and half the customers about my sleepless night and my harrowing tale. The bartender gave me a free glass of wine. Because of my harrowing tale. Because it happened across the street from my building. I don’t even know if he’s dead or not. On the way home I bought a cookie. It was chocolate chip and harder than I generally like, but overall…fine.
I was walking alone, having dropped off my friend, having eaten my fill and I crossed the street across from my building to stand where it all happened. This is what I saw: powder blue rubber gloves-one pair which were glossy from the rain, several bits of napkin and random incidental trash, and a crack in the sidewalk full to the top with rain and deep red blood.
It was one of those places where four independent cracks in the cement come together and form a sort of spider shape, or triangle shape, or maybe a shape like a web of lightening. A place where the sidewalk is deeply crumbled. On a dry and dusty day such a shape will cease to be a certain shape and merely appear dilapidated. Fill it with rain and blood, and I will stand there staring at an angry shape, testing the color with my eyes, deciding if the sidewalk is faking.
I took a bite of my chocolate chip cookie which I was still finishing. Maybe a crumb fell into the blood. Maybe evaporated blood falling new with the rain landed on my cookie. I think I hope so.
I looked one way down the street and imagined the man I saw bandaged running from a gun. I looked the other way down the street and heard his screams again. I thought of how long it took the police to respond, and of the ambulance that sat and the witness who vanished and the rain which had not washed the blood completely away. I thought of how the police, the ambulance, the witness and the rain had all really failed that guy.
