The 40th and 41st Murders

It was a bad weekend in the Mission. Early Sunday morning, around 2:00 and 2:30 a.m., two young men were murdered. One was stabbed, and one was shot. The murders, police say, are unrelated, their proximity in time and location mere coincidence.

Also over the weekend and similarly unrelated: four men got into a knife fight on the corner of 16th and Mission that sent all four to the hospital, two in critical condition; up by Hartford, a man ran outside to find his 1987 Toyota on fire; and on Sanchez, a woman was held at gunpoint and robbed.

Unrelated, no doubt, for the purposes of law enforcement. But in another, less technical sense of the word, the adjective rings hollow. In other ways, “relation” makes some kind of subterranean sense.

Or maybe I’m projecting. Because last week, as I crossed 16th street on Valencia and the sun sank down behind the roofs of low-slung buildings and the shadows grew long across the sidewalk, I felt something strange. It was a feeling, sudden and fleeting—a feeling rather than a thought—and it passed through me like a ghost, like the sense of a memory, something I stumbled into by mistake. It was an urge, put simply, for what felt like violence. The impulse to shatter a window with my fist—I wouldn’t have even minded the blood—to kick something into pieces, to smash it and see it broken on the pavement.

As soon as I could name it, it was gone. In its place, the startling notion I’d been momentarily not myself, that I’d been inhabited.

And of course, I have been inhabited, as we all have been—those of us watching—by news, the imagery of killing, tanks and tear gas. The sounds and sites of fury and mourning. We are haunted by the dead but also by the living—photos of Eric Garner’s children, the many, many police officers who work hard to be good (in New York, only five percent of officers are responsible for more than forty percent of resisting arrest cases). And we are haunted by the yet unborn. At the gym, the video of Eric Garner being wrestled to the ground plays on a loop on CNN. This murder, over and over again, out of the corner my eye, on mute.

And so I cannot help but wonder if these events, this aggression, the city’s 40th and 41st murders of 2014, all within a matter of blocks, are related after all—not technically, not officially—but underneath the surface, like tremors, or feedback on the radio, or collateral damage.

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