Everything Can Change

Lyin' here in the darkness
I hear the siren wail
Somebody going to emergency
Somebody's goin' to jail - New York Minute, The Eagles

A few more details about Malik’s murder have emerged, though the whole affair is still distinctly sketchy (in both an north American and British sense). No-one seems quite sure exactly why he was shot, nor what relation – if any – the kid who pulled the gun was to him. Having turned himself in, the 17-year-old will now probably spend most of the rest of his life on Riker’s Island. Thanks for coming – see you when you’re 70, and thereby are two lives destroyed. Not that I have any great sympathy for the murderer. Perhaps what strikes me most about the whole incident is how utterly banal and pointless the whole affair seems. A guy goes out for a late-night visit to a crappy Chinese takeout and is murdered while waiting for his General Tso’s Chicken. The takeout’s cash register likely had no more than a couple of hundred bucks in it. And the next day life in this great city goes on, just as before.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but when Dad was here for graduation I took him to Citarella, the gourmet store on 125^th. We walked right past the Chinese where Malik was killed; my point was to show how Harlem was beginning to gentrify.

There was hardly any coverage in anything but the Columbia Spectator and the New York Post; even the other tabloids in the city didn't mention it. I don’t know why this should be; maybe it’s just that New York is too jaded to care any more, but the cynical side of me imagines a news editor making the decision that a black man being gunned down by black kid in Harlem isn’t that newsworthy. Same old, same old - what else is new?

Anyway. I’ve been working steadily on grant proposals and paper research, seeing Kate when time allows it, and attending or organizing various JETAANY events and dinners. Summer has arrived, and with it the hot inescapable stickiness that permeates the very air around here at this time of year and seems to cling to you as you walk down the street. It’s arguably worse than Japan; for all that people talk of the heat in Japan, my three summers in Tohoku were relatively mild, and I did at least have a salary on which to run the air conditioning.

Summer heralds migrations, especially in a University area like Morningside Heights. People leave – the lease for UAH housing is up, and on Thursday (the last day of the month) the streets were thronged with people laden down with backpacks and hoisting stuff into removal vans. Much like last year, I grabbed a load of stuff from friends and acquaintances moving out, filling in almost all of the stuff that I had lacked in my place. Small stuff, mostly – wine glasses, plants, a chest of drawers, even an air conditioning unit (which, for the record, doesn’t work very well – I’ve gone back to just using fans. They’re less expensive, too). The packrat instinct is strong in this one.