I sleep lighter lately and I don't know if this is due to age, the passage of time, medication, physical activity, age, location, age, or the passage of time. I think it might have something to do with age and the passage of time. I am thirty. Since I have been thirty, I often wake up with a start, the sound of a municipal vehicle or a boom car outside my window, or a retail gate closing up for the night. Or gunshots a few blocks away. Or someone yelling up to a tenant of the building beside ours, the one with no buzzer. Sometimes upon waking I cry, but not usually. In fact, the last time I woke up hours before I had planned, I did not cry at all, not even a little bit.
Someone was screaming hysterically for the police to be called yesterday morning when I awoke. It sounded like a woman. It was minutes before 7. From under my sheets and blankets and dreams I managed to slink over to the window, careful to not let all of the borough see my underwear, and I saw nothing. Then, a livery driver (I would know this in just a few seconds when he opened the door of his cab;) his white shirt covered in blood. He was quiet at first, then upon opening the door of his car, “Oh, shit…oh shit…” He came out of the car and began to wrap his hand in a white cloth. He then walked in the other direction. My insides lurched and I went for my cell phone. I tried to wake up Ian; I have a history of calling 911 when asked to and then being the only one hanging around when the police arrive, only to have to let them know that things have apparently gotten better and their services are no longer needed. When I was 18 this got me a lecture and several threats. “What do you think I should do?” Ian wouldn't wake up. “Fuck you,” I told him. But I was already dialing. An alarm goes off inside my phone. I think to myself how odd that is, and I note that it didn't happen the last time I dialed emergency, to let them know there was a refrigerator in the middle of Broad Street that everyone was swerving around. But that was a different city. I told the dispatcher what I heard. I told them what I saw and that I was just sleeping inside my apartment is all, I didn't know anything else, could they please come out to see? “Do you want the police to come and check out the situation?”
“That's what I woke up hearing someone screaming for.”
By the time the police arrived, ten minutes later, they had already called me back. “Is anyone out there now, ma'am?” I looked out my window and saw just the black cab, no one was around. “No.” The driver must have gone to the hospital. He must have gotten ice and a rag to wrap around his arm from the deli around the corner, and then taken off in the other direction to the hospital. I watched the NYPD car pull up, check out the livery cab, and then leave. I went back to sleep.
When I woke up a few hours later, the livery was gone. I have a story about how this event reminds me of my jury duty in Richmond right before I moved away, but its asinine.
Posted by Girrlock Holmes 