Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
NEIL
NOW
What can I say about Phaedra Lewis except from the moment I met her, I wanted her. I still remember the early days, sitting at the bar, burning down cigarette after cigarette like we wanted to inflict real damage. Gin and tonics on the counter, swiveling on our stools in the dim orange light.
"Why are you here?" she asked me one night.
"Like, here at the bar?"
"Here at school." It was our first year as graduate students in philosophy.
I was already wasted, but I poured back the rest of my gin. "Guns of Brixton" came on the jukebox and a group of girls stumbled in.
"I think because I watched a woman die once." I had never uttered the words out loud before.
Phaedra's eyes widened, and I felt her lean in. "That's not what I was expecting." Wisps of her blonde hair floated like strands of a spiderweb in the blurred bar light.
Truth be told, most of my memories are fragments. Broken bits, cut glass. But this one—this memory of the woman drowning—was different.
It was summertime. I must have been six years old. My brother, Ethan, only four. Our family had piled into my dad's Oldsmobile Cutlass, and we'd driven across the country from Indiana to California. Rows and rows of crops, sun-scorched fields that touched the sky. My comic books spread across the back seat. Motels and fast-food chains. Then, one day, we sat on a beach in Los Angeles—hot sand beneath us, waves crashing, seagulls overhead—like we'd been cast in a commercial for something that looked like real life but wasn't.
Ethan and I dug a trench that filled with water when the tide came in. My mother was lying on a towel, a T-shirt draped over her face to block the sun. From somewhere down the beach, someone started shouting. We all leaped up. My mother grabbed our hands and held on tight. The sun bounced off the ocean, and I could see a woman swimming out past the breakers. One minute, her head was bobbing; the next, it slipped below the waves. It was like a video game. There, gone, there again.
Up and down the beach, people ran into the water, but no one dared to swim out. The riptide was too strong. When help eventually came, they carried her body out of the surf and laid her in the sand. They did chest compressions and affixed a breathing apparatus. But even I could see it was too late.
Ethan and I stood in front of our trench, the water filling and draining, while the dead woman lay on the beach.
"You know what I think about all these years later?" I said to Phaedra that night. "The quietness. All of us just standing there."
She looked at me, a sheen to her eyes. "You think someone should have done more?"
"I don't know." I smashed the butt of my cigarette into an ashtray and tugged another from the pack. "Later, we found out that the woman's husband was on the beach. And her kids. Two boys—same ages as me and Ethan."
"Jesus," Phaedra said. "That's horrifying."
It was then that she told me about Kitty Genovese. In 1964, a young woman was raped and stabbed to death in Queens, New York, while thirty-eight people watched from the safety of their apartments.
"I mean, what does that say about who we really are?" she asked. "Thirty-eight sets of eyes. You know how many called the cops? None." Phaedra shook her head. "We all think we'd be different. That we'd be the ethical one."
Five years later, I would be married to Phaedra Lewis and writing my dissertation on bystander apathy. Kitty Genovese, the center of my work.
Even now, all these years later, it's hard for me to separate the smell of gin, Phaedra's beautiful face, the drowning woman, and Kitty Genovese. All those pieces seemed to find each other that night, and I felt certain of only two things in the entire world: I was falling in love with this beautiful girl, and I would never be a bystander.
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