Timing Is Everything/Life Goes On

Someone was shot outside my building today.

I don't know when it happened. I didn't even know it had happened until I went downstairs around 4 to pick up my food from the delivery guy. There was police tape all up and down the block and an officer at the door explaining that no one could leave the building.

I was bewildered. "What happened?"

The cop replied, with a look like I had 2 heads, "Someone got shot."

Jesus Christ.

I went back inside, joined the others loitering in the lobby — the couple watching out the window, the guy waiting to walk his dog — and called the restaurant to cancel my order: "I'm sorry. There's police activity outside my building and I can't leave."

Two women in suits came in to take our names and apartment numbers. In typical unfazed New Yorker fashion, we all asked how long it was going to take before we could go back outside. No one asked about the victim. I waited around for a few more minutes then went back upstairs.

I was still hungry. About an hour later, I wandered back down to see if any progress had been made. We were allowed out of the building now, but the road was still blocked off to cars. Crowds had gathered on both sides of the street. There were two cops standing off to the side of the courtyard next to a white sheet on the ground. I naïvely thought nothing of this. Just some sort of clean-up thing, I assumed. I walked down the block to the deli and got a sandwich.

Back home, about 2 hours later, I got up to feed the cat and realized there was only about a scoopful of food left in the bag. Walgreen's is still open, I thought; I figured the police must be done by now. I put on my sneakers, grabbed my keys and headed back outside.

Downstairs, they were just beginning to roll up the police tape. Someone was wailing. I looked over to the spot on the right where the cops had been before. There was an ambulance parked by the curb. They were wheeling out a body.

Jesus Christ.

There were 2 guys standing near me, looking pensive. "Do they know who it is?" I asked. "Was it someone from this building?"

"I don't know," the guy closest to me answered. "Crazy shit. It's like something you see on TV right here in front of you."

His friend shook his head and said, "Just some punks. And all these people taking pictures and taping it on their phones. That's just ignorant."

We stood in silence until the ambulance drove away. The wailing had stopped. The cops rolled up the last of the tape. I made my way to Walgreen's.

On my way back, it seemed like business as usual back on the block — the same old guys sitting on folding chairs in front of the bodega, the same women pushing strollers and shopping carts past the laundromat, the same bunch of kids shouting on the sidewalk across the street.

There were faint traces of blood on the concrete outside the building, and a single flickering white candle.