Thing Two

Here's something I didn't consider. In Maplewood, and in Northampton, I expect the best. When I'm lying in bed at night with my head by the window, and from far away in the dark I hear a scream, I assume its some jackass kid running amok. I hear a bang and thing "car backfiring". I hear lots of raised voices and think "someone's having a late night tonight".

Not here. Yesterday I was lying in bed and I heard a blast and the sound of shattering glass. I'm 99% sure it was a gun going off. I assumed from the start it was a gun going off. I sat up and listened hard while the rest of the night echoed in the silence left by the shot and my ears started playing tricks on me. Or maybe they didn't. But its enough to make you go crazy. I hear screams and I hear shouts and I hear what sounds like women crying and the school children here never stop yelling and every noise that lights up the night with sound is a gun firing.

But it is. We are right next to two different army barracks. We are surrounded by abandoned buildings and the hollow shells of bricks and mortar that use to be houses and churches and schools. There isn't shattered glass in the windows because glass was never there to start out with. There isn't spray paint scarring the sides of the buildings-just charcoal graffiti on the insides, pictures of Jesus, pictures of Allah. There isn't abandoned things-because anything usable has long since been stripped from its place. Most buildings don't have a roof, the ones that do have drooping tin, poised like a knife pointing down at the ground, ready to fall. Women and children live around the broken walls and families live right up to the edges of the barracks and children play in the empty church. 4 out of 10 men walk around with guns slung over their shoulders-sometimes more depending on where you are.

This isn't a sterile place. Its endlessly touchable. Bare feet touch every surface-from the cement floor of the patio to the coarse rocks and rubble of the road. There are no screens to keep out bugs. No glass to keep out people. Nothing cutting you off or restricting you from going anywhere and doing anything. Even the roadblocks are just long sticks propped up against two trees. Roadblocks you could snap with the touch of your bumper. The only thing stopping you is violence. Guns and mines and dangerous men. If it weren't for those things, I think you could do almost anything here.
And so people do. When you see a fire, its a big fire, quenched and coaxed by diesel. When you hear a sharp crack tear through the air, its a gunshot. And you never know why people are screaming. For all I know it could be of laughter, and I try to teach my ears to tell the difference between mirth and pain. But from far away, its hard, and it makes an overactive American mind go wild.

So I am lying in bed and I hear the gun and the glass shatter and then the vacuum of silence. And then, to my straining ears, comes the sound of crying and shouting. The crickets chirp too loudly to tell. I hear a baby cry and a woman yell, and then a blur of angry voices, but soon enough it blends seamlessly into the rise and fall of my breath, going in and out of me and I don't know what I've heard because everything here ends without definition. It fades.