Valentine

It's February 16th and in the employee break room a single heart-shaped cookie sits face-down on the lid of a plastic carton. A chunk of the cookie has been snapped off. Pink sprinkles are everywhere. A lonely, broken heart...the most pathetically obvious metaphor imaginable. Yet there it is. It was here yesterday as well. It infuriates me. Why is it that people find themselves unable to take that last piece, that last morsel, that last slice? Is it due to guilt, or an unwillingness to clean the dishes (or, in this case, throw a disposable container into the rubbish bin, which is two feet away) or perhaps both? If we can't even be bothered to dispose of a single fucking cookie, what hope is there to tackle any of the world's catastrophes and crises? My rage dissipates as quickly as a sugar high, and I dump both container and cookie into the bin and head downstairs to clock in to another day of trying not to lose patience with my fellow humans.

Safer

When I get to work in the morning, everyone on the night shift looks rattled. They brief me on the events of the night before, then clock out and stumble home. I tell myself not to watch the footage, but of course I do. What is that part of us that needs to see a thing to make it real? And why would I even want to make it real? Best to leave it a myth, a dream, a jumble of words without an accompanying illustration.

But I watch despite myself, and despite the less-than-cutting-edge nature of the technology at hand. There are cameras on every side of the building, but the ones out front are mounted high up on the roof, and their focus is less than sharp, especially at night. They don't always record properly, and there are often glitches and dead spots in the footage.

In any case, a little before eleven, a man can be seen on camera standing by the retaining wall in front of the building. The picture flickers and suddenly he's lying on his back on  the sidewalk. A huge dark splotch spreads beside him. You can't actually see it spread because it does so very slowly, but if you look away then look back, you'll notice it's grown. There are other streaks of darkness across the ground which we later find out are urine. The man had stopped to take a leak against the wall, but now he's lying on his back. One of his legs twitches, just once.

A cop car pulls up. An ambulance follows, though it doesn't linger. Eventually more vehicles arrive and before you know it officers are everywhere. There's a flurry of camera flashes, and the body that so recently walked around and ate and drank and relieved itself in public is now just lying completely still, and continues to do so for hours until another ambulance, or possibly the same one, pulls up and a gurney is wheeled out and the body is placed on it and covered up and driven, without much urgency, away.

As far as graphic depictions of violence go, it's pretty tame. And watching it played back on a screen rather than see it in person, in real time, shields me from some of the shock. The sidewalk is quickly cleaned off, but there's still a dark stain that lingers for hours. I go out and look at it. It's not red or even brown, just sort of gray. It could have been left there by anything. 

The stain is gone by lunchtime, power-washed away by our custodial staff. You would never know that someone had died right here, but of course someone has died pretty much everywhere you can think of, on every street corner, in every building, in every room. Perhaps not stabbed to death though, which is what apparently occurred to that man during that gap in the footage. Life is riddled with these gaps. Sometimes it feels that life is mostly just gaps, with the actual moments of reality scattered like stepping stones across the void. As he stepped from one of these stones last night, after looking around and taking one last piss on our beautiful planet, a man was stabbed to death, and thus went toppling into the abyss. During my break I go out and look down at the perfectly blank slab of sidewalk no longer darkened by even the vestige of a stain.

Just before I'd gotten to work, one of the night guards was doing his patrol inside the building when he heard someone screaming and crying outside. He went out to find a half-naked woman sitting on the wall, pouring Dr. Pepper into her eyes. She sobbed that her boyfriend had just sprayed her with mace. The guard ran to get her a bottle of water and tried to help flush her eyes out. She asked him to call an ambulance. As he stood there waiting by the curb with her, passerby kept asked her if she was okay, assuming the guard was harassing her. When the authorities arrived, she put on the rest of her clothes and rode off with the paramedics while the guard filed a report with the cops. The main officer was the same one who had first responded to the stabbing earlier in the evening. The guard said the guy looked barely old enough to shave.

I'm surprised to see that the local news immediately runs a brief story about the killing. And they say that journalism is dead. Of course, it’s only a few lines, texted in by probably the only reporter left in the city and copied and pasted by every news outlet. 

Our director sends out an email with mental health resources compiled by HR, along with reminders about safety protocol.  "Use the buddy system as much as possible when leaving work after dark," is one suggestion. "Birdies (personal safety alarms) are available for check out from the control room" reads another. Only one employee takes us up on the Birdie offer, a petite, perky young woman who seems a little sheepish about asking to borrow one of the devices. "Yellow or white?" I ask her, holding them both up. They're nondescript blobs of plastic with a ring on one end attached to a carabiner. She says she likes the yellow but the white one matches her purse, and will therefore be better camouflaged. "How does this work, do you just pull the ring?" she asks. I say I guess so; I've never actually seen one activated. "Should I try it?" she asks, a mischievous gleam in her eye. I tell her to go for it. She yanks the ring and the little thing starts screaming and flashing. Maybe the idea is to annoy the attacker to within an inch of his life. She snaps the ring back in and smiles and thanks me and trots off, no doubt feeling safer already.