Today’s run: 2.3 miles. 24 minutes. YT: 287.38. Still following the 10K plan, which called for 2 easy miles today. Good God the wind felt great.

I’ve been torn about whether to keep the blog tightly focused on running reports and tips, and eventually try to monetize it, or to let it sprawl a bit as my creative outlet. Today I’m going to sprawl, to see how it feels.

So, I’m posting one of the many little vignettes I’ve written so far about NY life. They’re not stories so much as asides.

Through Boarded Windows

At 1 a.m. a wail pierces the relatively quiet Lower East Side night.

“Waaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhkkkkk!”

A pigeon blinks, and then: “Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me, help me, help me.”

Times 30.

I shoot upright. Old person or child? Hard to identify. The voice comes from the little alleyway between my apartment and the next. I realize quickly it is actually coming from the next apartment over. The screaming is loud, but muddled – through a wall. It isn’t stopping.

“Help me! Help me! Auuugggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Mama, help me!”

More wails, uncontrolled. It starts to sound as much like shrieks of panic as pain.
“I can’t get up, I can’t get up, I can’t get up!”

Old lady.

I won’t be able to get directly to her, since she is inside the other building. So I reached for my phone. Just then, I hear voices. This is maybe 45 long seconds after the screams have begun. My heart pounds.

“Where are you? What’s wrong?” the voices say.

A couple men, a dog, and a woman with a voice like a river are on the scene. It’s hard for me to hear the conversation, but the gist is that they can’t get inside to help her but that help is on the way.

The woman with the voice of a river is repeating over and over, slowly, calmly, “You’ll be alright.” The old woman takes an occasional, very brief, break from her wailing.

Meanwhile, I piece together the scene. Directly across this alley I stare into so often are two windows. Both are taped and boarded up. Staring into them now, I see that for the first time I can remember, I can see a faint glow through the windows. Or has it always been there?

My landlord has told me that the woman who lives there is old. Crazy. After the city came to inspect her place, maybe kick her out, she went into deep cover.

I decide that this is the woman who has fallen. This is the woman who now needs the help of her neighbors.

And I imagine what they will find when the police arrive and they force open the door – the grey gardens of the Lower East Side. I imagine a tiny apartment, fastidiously kept, and yet filthy. Every thing in its place in the cupboard, but covered in muck because the dishwasher’s eye is no longer discerning; the mind confused about whether an item has been washed or is foul.

I imagine a china cabinet with cracked glass that now collects trinkets from the street, little gems that only she can see sparkle. A child’s shampoo bottle shaped like a genie’s pot, with a multicolored wrap of plastic. An impressively flattened tin can. A set of hot-pink artificial nails missing the pinky, discarded by the beauticians across the street.

And behind of these things, relics of before. Two Hummel figurines. Some glassware that she has never used.  A small crystal dolphin.

All these treasures are now similarly beloved.

In the bathtub I imagine a cat mummified by time, her precious pet, interred in a ceramic tub that she has long stopped using because it’s hard to get into, and because, well, the cat lives there now.

I imagine her frying eggs and sometimes, when the butcher who has known her for thirty years makes a house call, bacon. These savory delights she prepares in the tiny frying pan that is incrusted with years of grease but still turns out pretty tasty eggs.

And I imagine her bed, covered in a grimy sheet that she hasn’t changed in years. It’s hard to change, yes, but the passage of time is equally the problem. Monotony and withdrawal, boarded up windows condemning her to a life of artificial light have rendered time obsolete. Now there is only hungry and not hungry, asleep and awake. Some times those states blur as well.

Until tonight. Tonight she has fallen and is in agony. Tonight she will meet the neighbors who never see her.  Tonight she understands time again.

The police arrive, and male voices now interrupt the gentle flow of river, which has continued uninterrupted – you’ll be alright, you’ll be alright – for 5 minutes at least and has helped calm me as well.

Again, I can only catch snatches. But the door gets opened, and I grasp that they are preparing to lift her into a wheelchair and take her to the hospital.

The screams worsen and hysteria resumes as her body is heaved into the chair. But then she gets quiet. I can hear once more the low voices of her neighbors, and now the rehearsed, mechanical tones of the paramedics.

Then, finally, I hear her voice again, weak but loud enough for me to hear:

“Do you have my keys? My keys. Need to lock the door.”

She is safe now, and needs to make sure everything else in her life, which has been sucked into a tiny point in space, this boarded up apartment, like a dying star that no one ever mapped, is safe too. She must know that she can return there.