At 4:15, we were awakened when our neighbor chose to ignore his alarm clock.
At 5:20, we were awakened by screams.
Fear and confusion is a bad way to wake up. We blinked, listening, hearts racing. We look outside. A house behind ours had lights on in a second floor room; someone in it ran toward the front of the house. On the first floor, a dim orange light flicked off. An untranslatable clunking, a few more screams.
The tranquil tedium of morning is shaken off and we’re at our posts. Me, at the back door, which I lock with urgency if I step away. My wife at the window, holding the shade to the side rather than lifting it. This is the house with Sparky, a dog likes to bark at ours, the sum total of what we know about it. Quiet conversation, do we call the police?, has someone already? More screams. A booming voice from next door to us: the police are on their way. We text our upstairs neighbor. We fret. We check our locks. Finally, after way too long, the deep groan of a DC cop car and the paint on the houses outside flickering red.
A siren is the sound of tragedy brushing against your life. The background characters in our lives sometimes move front and center, performing brief dramas, receding. There are years of maneuvering and conflict and love that propel everyone forward and into conflict, which we forget. We only know our own paths; to us, these moments of tension and furor are bizarre, as though Rosencrantz and Guildenstern began a fistfight in the audience. Then the actors move forward again, altered, as do we.
We called the police; as we did, the dispatcher received another call from the house itself. A “family matter;” to us, a relief. The matter unresolved, the drama subsided, that family and Sparky fell again into the background of our lives. We and the neighbor that yelled and the cops and the ambulance driver and God knows whoever else stayed quietly in the background of theirs.
At 7:30, we were awakened by rain. The tedium was back, if not entirely the tranquillity.
