Ain’t It Beautiful (This Nightly Scream)

“The bear,
The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain
At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.”
- Wallace Stevens, “Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction”

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory… the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me… Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’”
- Jesus Christ, in The Ministry of Jesus according to Matthew, 25:31-40

As I pace through the benighted city, out of the darkness a scream echoes, deep, throaty, painful. A man, I think. The scream does not stop. It pauses only for shuddering intakes of breath, then comes again and again, hurtling through alleyways empty but for heaps of cardboard boxes and empty plastic bags whipping in the wind off Lake Michigan. The scream lashes with the rushing wind in tousled hedges, and it tangles with the fallen leaves along tree-lined side streets where even the lanterns duck behind the corners. I lift an eyebrow. Someone is hurt, or angry, or crazy, out there in the shadows.

I walk towards the scream; if I want to go home, I have no choice.

For a few seconds as I walk onwards, I try to tell whether I’m afraid. In another place I might have slowed my pace, might have stopped to squint in the direction of the scream. But I grew up in Berlin, where you learn about cities. I’m about to enter an ill-lit park at night in a fairly shady area on the South Side of Chicago. In places like these, people who look startled look vulnerable; they will lose their money, and sometimes more. So I know to keep my shoulders wide, my strides brisk, even, and confident, my face unconcerned.

With each breath, the scream descends by octaves until it’s little more than a throaty moan, then rises again. I see no one. A cop car creeps by at the other end of the park, but its occupant either cannot hear what goes on outside or feigns oblivion.

Further into the park, my eyes scan the darkness. Just outside the orange splotches of the streetlights that line the path in front of me, I see the outline of a man cowering in a patch of darkness. He is on his knees. Both his hands clasp the iron rods of a low fence that marks the end of the park. He screams and he screams, and for a moment my steps miss a beat. Even though I should know better, I slow down after all, then stop right in front of him. He raises his head in agony, rattles the fence with his shaking arms, and even in the shadows I can see the white of his wide open eyes, the white of his bared teeth. He does not, I think, see me.

I can hear now what he is screaming. “Please, no. Oh please, please. No.”

As I look down at the man, in my head I hear a whisper that I have heard many times since I moved to this area, louder each time. I shut it out. I need to think.

This area of Hyde Park is quite handsome during the day with its old trees now turning autumnally yellow and red, its elegant brownstones, its elaborate townhouses. But at night, the ghetto just to the north spills over into the nicer university district, and the haggard wander the streets asking for money, for cigarettes, sometimes barely conscious at all, mumbling through rotten teeth and matted hair. Sometimes AIDS has eaten their bodies to skeletons. Sometimes they just sway, blank-eyed, sweating in the throes of a tired high. If they can no longer ask for money, they curse silently or just stare. I step over collapsed bodies often in the doorway to my apartment building when I walk home from a late night at the library.

The whisper, a snippet of words that wafts forth from somewhere in my memory, started nagging me during the first few days that I came to Hyde Park, but I’ve only been hearing what it says since last week.

There is a row of benches not far from where the man is clutching the fence, and last week I walked past a woman lying face-down there. She was wearing what looked like a carefully put-together outfit accessorized around an elegant red dress. Yet, the effect was that of a rag doll shaken and violently tossed aside: her body was oddly twisted, one contorted arm flailed over her head, the other lay twisted across her back, one leg rested high up on the back of the bench, the other dangled so that her shoeless foot dragged the concrete pavement. There was a dark pool of something that mirrored the lamplight on the ground by her head, and she lay absolutely still.

“Ma’am, are you alright?” I mumbled a little stupidly, once I saw one of her fingers twitch.

She groaned. I waited. When I nearly reached out my hand, the woman suddenly turned her head in an oddly clipped motion, sneered violently, and began cursing at me. Taken aback, I looked down at the puddle beneath her and saw the shards of a broken glass bottle floating in it. I flushed in sudden anger and embarrassment, shrugged, and was about to walk off, when something about her face caught my eye. I had seen this woman before, just a few days earlier, sitting on this very bench.

One gorgeous early fall day the first week of classes, I was walking home from classes, listening to music I wanted to choose from my iPod for a mix CD Tessa had asked me to send her. I must’ve been smiling at the thought, at the chance to take my mind off schoolwork and be creative instead, at the music, at the light jacket sunshine, at the trees and vines covering all the buildings turning yellow and red in places. I love fall. When I thought nobody was watching, I might even have interspersed a dance step or two into my strides.

As I wandered through the park, I noticed that a lady who seemed to have snoozed off sat on the benches, but when I passed her she suddenly looked up, beamed at me, and, noticing my headphones, shouted, “It’s beautiful, ain’t it?” I nearly jumped. It took me thirty seconds before I got my wits together to smile back and say, “Yes, ma’am” somewhat lamely. It was the first nice thing a Chicagoan had said to me since I arrived. She nodded, smiled, and closed her eyes again. That encounter made my day.

It was the same lady. I felt sick walking off, her curses following me until I turned the street corner. And through my disappointment, I heard these words, clearly this time:

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite…”

It is this whisper I hear now that I’m staring at the man by the fence, who is still screaming. Is he having a bad drug trip? Is he insane? Is he so emotionally devastated that he’s entirely beside himself? I don’t know. All I know is that he’s crouching outside on a cold night, that he isn’t all right, and that he needs help. How can I help him? Again, I don’t know. But to just walk onwards to the calm warmth of my apartment, to have a cup of tea there and drive the night cold from my bones while I think about all the things I should have done – that doesn’t cut it. I’m what passes for a good person, I think. Good people take risks.

Cautiously, I stretch out both my hands and lower them towards the fists wrapped around the iron rods of the fence, thinking if I can touch his hands, that might calm him – and with my hands on his I can control him best if he decides to turn violent. My hands are still inches away, however, when the scream cuts off. The silence that follows has only the wind in the trees. We stare at each other. He sees me now. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds pass.

With a start, the man gets to his feet, takes off, and moments later the darkness of an alleyway swallows him. I straighten and put my hands in my pockets. Have I done the right thing? Once again, I don’t know. But my heart snarls inside my chest like a bear in his mountain snarls at the summer thunder. In my head, a whisper swallows the last echoes of the scream. And for a few minutes as I walk on – my shoulders wide, my strides brisk, even, and confident – I cannot even tell that it is night.