This is the tenth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).
I try to keep track of all my bad dreams, even the waking ones; what follows is a list of all the times since moving to New York when I’ve been awakened from a deep sleep by something terrible.
1. I am 23 and brand new to the city, sharing a crummy second-floor apartment in Greenpoint, practically next door to the local sewage treatment plant. I adjust pretty quickly to all the bumping and shouting downstairs -- the landlord's family lives right below us, and they're one of those vibrant households who show love for each other by screaming at the top of their lungs, slamming doors, and heaving large objects at one another from across the house. So when I'm roused one night by thumping in the hall, I just roll over and begin to fall back sleep. Moments later, our door rattles in its frame and the landlord’s twelve-year-old son pounds on it, squealing, “Fire, fire, there’s a fire! Everyone get out now!”
I sit up in the dark, wondering what I should grab on my way out. It’s useless -- I just moved across the whole country, so I’ve already gotten rid of anything I can spare. Everything seems equally essential and non-essential; deciding that people will feel much sorrier for me if I’ve lost everything, I don’t even put on my shoes, I just wrap a quilt around my body and skid down the stairs, just in time to meet the firemen at the door.
It turns out that it’s not even our building that’s burning, it’s the industrial laundry across the interior of the block. We can’t even see the fire, though there is smoke and ash in the air. After hunkering on the cold sidewalk for about fifteen minutes, we're allowed back inside: the authorities have decreed that the fire is no longer in danger of spreading. I'm a little disappointed that my first "this is not a drill" fire proves to be so anticlimactic. However, once back inside, my roommate and I discover that our kitchen windows afford a truly astonishing view of the burning laundry; the fire doesn’t actually look even remotely contained, we observe happily: huge greasy flames surge two stories into the air, blotting out the sky and giving off heat we can feel on our faces through the window glass. We fill an entire roll of film with pictures. Later, neither of us ever remembers to get them developed.
2. The following summer. There is an ear-splitting, drywall-rattling explosion. In a brainless panic I lunge out of bed and run toward the window to scan the skyline, my vision already blurry with tears in anticipation of what I'm about to see. Or not see. This is what I get, I scold myself, for moving here so soon after the attacks. FUCK. Car alarms from every direction are screaming in unison. I yank open the ratty screen and stick my head out the window, looking up and around wildly. A raindrop hits me right between the eyebrows; otherwise, all is calm.
Still panting, I go back to bed, feeling sort of stupid. I swear on my kneecaps though -- never before or since have I ever heard thunder that god-damned loud.
3. One year later, I’ve moved to new apartment -- three bedrooms, ground floor, a stone’s throw from Bushwick Avenue near the L train. Tex will move in and share my room eventually, but for now he just camps out several nights a week. We discover right away that having a street-level bedroom is sort of like having a tent pitched on the sidewalk. We hear every vehicle, every conversation, every footstep that passes. On one of my first nights in the new place, the two of us are jolted awake by a shrill mechanical roar from just a few yards away, as if a very large vehicle is seconds from ramming the wall overhead and running right over top of us. Lights shining in through the windows above us seem to confirm this possibility. Tex and I wail and clutch at each other convulsively like frenzied toddlers, until we realize that it’s actually just the hydraulic song of our weekly garbage pick-up. You sort of get used to it after a while, we discover.
4. My sister Kelly has graduated from college and moves into the next room. One night soon afterward, I find myself suddenly awake for no reason I'm aware of. When I roll over I get a jolt: Kelly is in our room, creeping towards the bed on her hands and knees, her long hair hanging in her face -- rather like that little girl in The Ring. I shout my surprise and dismay. When she responds in stifled gurgles, I realize this is an emergency. Help, I can’t breathe, she croaks almost inaudibly, her windpipe clenched to a pinhole.
My sister has had asthma nearly her entire life; the attacks sometimes trigger anxiety attacks which worsen the asthma symptoms, creating a dangerous negative-feedback loop. She has an inhaler, but if she panics and takes too many chuffs on it, the overdose can actually make symptoms worse. All of these details run through my head as I bolt over to her, trying to decide whether I should call an ambulance. She can’t speak well enough to tell me what’s wrong, she just keeps choking on her own throat and gasping I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. I’m pretty sure she’ll be okay if I can just calm down, but what if I’m wrong? What if she dies because I’m wrong?
Her body is half-rigid, so I lift and half-carry her back to bed, telling her she’s okay, she’s okay, she can breathe, she just needs to relax and let it happen. I am still not sure that this is the case, but I keep saying it, hoping to will it into truth. I lay down next to her, stroking her spasming back and shoulders and drawing deep, sympathetic breaths, encouraging her lungs to remember their natural rhythm. Together we begin coaxing ragged inhalations and exhalations from her grateful lungs; now she can finally think and breathe clearly enough to cry.
This may have been a closer call than I thought -- she tells me about waking up with an itchy throat, her mouth full of hives, her throat drawing closed. As it turns out, this is also the story of how Kelly finds out she has become allergic to raspberries.
5. Six months later, Tex and I have moved into the larger, quieter back bedroom. My eyes open in the darkness because of a sound that I can’t quite place -- a steady tapping coming from the wall near the foot of our bed. Groping blindly for the wall, I press my palm flat against it, hoping to get a better sense of where the sound is coming from; instantly a sleeve of cold water floods over my hand and down my arm. Cursing, I leap for the light switch. I literally can’t believe my adjusting eyes: there is a waterfall in our room, two feet wide from ceiling to floor. I begin hurling blankets and towels grabbed at random, stanching the spread of what turns out to be the upstairs neighbor’s dirty dishwater -- a pipe has disintegrated somewhere within the walls, and the water has rerouted itself to follow the path of least resistance.
"It’s an old building," the super explains the next day with a shrug and a daft grin, "What can you do?" Not much, apparently. That summer, the adjacent outer wall remains so perpetually damp that a carpet of weeds sprouts from the soft, crumbling wood, pushing toward the sun through cracks in the aluminum siding.
6. During our last month in the Bushwick apartment, I receive my first actual middle-of-the-night emergency phone call. It is just after 4 AM. Kelly is at the police station. She is literally not herself -- despair has distorted her voice, rendered her unrecognizable. My sister was out with friends at a bar, she tells me. One of them decided that she’d had too many drinks to walk home safely, so with the best of intentions, he hailed a cab for her -- one of the sleek, black outfits from the neighborhood car service -- and pointed her homeward.
Kelly no longer lives with us, so “home” is a little farther away than it used to be. Midway through the journey, the driver pulls over to the curb and stops. They are nowhere, she realizes, idling somewhere in a desolate maze of factories and industrial warehouses. Alarmed, my sister struggles to overcome the alcohol in her brain and asks the man to keep driving. He doesn't respond. Then the vulnerability of her position begins to dawn on her, and she begs him to keep driving. He demurs, switches off the ignition instead. He gets out of the car. He opens her door. He climbs into the backseat.
On the phone Kelly recalls these events out of order, shrilling out the details as they occur to her. I am too heartsick to hear any more than necessary. She begged as he groped her, she tells me. She was too scared to fight, too drunk to think clearly, and had nothing to bargain with except the contents of her purse, which ultimately he accepted in exchange for not taking things any further. The man ejected her into the street lost and disoriented, paying himself over a hundred dollars in cash in the bargain.
I get dressed in the dark. She is on her way to the hospital now, where they will inspect her bruises and officiously comb her for evidence -- a hair, anything -- that could tie her attacker to previous cases. At this late hour, the only way for me to get there in a hurry is by car service. I stare at the back of the driver’s head in stony silence, wishing I could stop his heart with the force of my irrational anger, wishing I could freeze his innocent blood into icy sludge.
Kelly bounces back fast. It’s what she does. During the next week she accompanies police officers on nighttime ride-alongs. The cops are, thankfully, as eager as she is to identify the false driver before he hurts anyone else. They tell her that to impersonate a driver, all someone has to do is steal the tags from a car-service vehicle and apply them to a similar make and model. It happens more often than we think.
They prove to be incapable of hunting down her assailant. As weeks pass, I am surprised at my capacity for impotent, unfair hatred -- walking through the neighborhood, these cars and their drivers are everywhere. I try to remind myself that mostly these are men with families, with sisters of their own. Still, it is a long time before I can see one without fighting the urge to flag him down, to lean in through the passenger-side window and hiss into his face: I know it was you.
7. Tex and I finally find our very own place, just the two of us. It’s less than three blocks away from my first New York apartment, but they’re three significant blocks, and our newly renovated one-bedroom apartment is in a grand old building with a real lobby and a generous view of the Manhattan skyline. I’m excited -- five years of toil and hardship in the city have finally yielded a result I can be somewhat proud of. We move in over Fourth of July weekend. We enjoy the fireworks from our very own roof.
A few nights later, we are rattled out of sleep by a series of rapid-fire reports coming from somewhere very nearby. BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! BLAM-BLAM! BLAM! We grip the bed in involuntary paroxysms of fright. “Someone’s shooting up the street!” Tex pants. No, I counterpoint, it’s just asshole kids setting off their leftover firecrackers, like they do every summer. Fucking asshole kids. We lay awake for several minutes listening for sirens, hearing only silence. “See?” I say. “Go back to sleep.”
The next morning I get up and leave early to meet a friend for coffee. When I skip down the stairs and out the front door, I’m greeted by streamers of yellow tape running up and down the length of the block, barring any cars and passersby. A single officer stands guard over the entrance to the apartment building three doors down from us; there is a body lying on the ground at his feet, draped in a white sheet -- too small to be an adult, I think. The pool of blood emanating from beneath the fabric has already begun drying at its sluggish edges.
As I pass through, I meekly ask the officer what happened. “A drug bust,” he tells me. Police were raiding the apartment when the dealer’s dog lunged at an officer -- was fired upon in self-defense. Glancing over the officer’s shoulder I can see bullet-holes in our neighbor’s sliding glass doors, right at street-level. The Sanitation Department has been dispatched to come pick up the body, the officer explains. But it’s Sunday. Could take a while.
That explains why we hadn’t heard any sirens, I realize. The cops were already here.
The next day we see an older man attempting to hose the bloodstain off the sidewalk; a faint shadow persists until after the first snowfall that winter. A lot of people move out of that building during the fall-- there always seems to be another truck parked outside of it, boxes coming in or out. Near the gutter where the dog’s body bled out, someone plants a tree; an early cold snap seems to stunt its growth, and after that all of its branches grow straight down.
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