Word: screaming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...death of a battered New York City child raises pity, fury and a question: How are you to react when you hear a scream in the night...
...scream is one of the indigenous sounds of city life, like an automobile alarm that whoops and heaves, then stops, leaving the question hanging like a hawk as to whether a car was broken into, or did its owner set off the alarm by accident, and then lay it to rest. With human screams, the question is more complicated, since screams are not mechanical or automatic. Did you hear that, Harry? What could it be? A scream of delight, of fright? Hilarity, Harry? Do you think that someone is laughing too hard? Could it be hysteria, madness...
...other buildings in New York, in other cities, in all the cities, new screams will take up the slack. Sometimes the authorities will respond, sometimes not. The beating of women and children will continue in the hidden boxes of apartments: evil, secret noise. You will hear the scream, and someone else will tell you that it wasn't a scream, it was a kettle whistle; and no one will be sure if there ever was a scream, until a body lies in evidence. How is the citizen-listener to react? Rush wildly through the corridors until the sound is unmistakable...
...never know how you will react to a scream until you hear one. I can tell you how you will react at first. You will freeze. Your head will snap like an alarmed bird's and your eyes will swell, long before any practical choices begin to form between hiding under the bed and leaping to the rescue. You will freeze because you will recognize the sound. It comes from you; all the panic and the pain; all the screams of one's life, uttered and quashed, there in that dreadful eruption that has scattered the air. All yours...
...scream that comes from somewhere else comes from you. You have to go to it. You have to open the door to make it stop...