“She’s on her way to shop when she sees, two buildings down from hers, something funny going on inside the vestibule. The door’s all glass, little iron grillwork on the front but no curtains or anything to stop her view, and a man’s on the floor with his pants half off and the top of his backside showing and going through what seems to be the sex motions. She doesn’t want to look hard, since in this neighborhood sometimes it can be anything you think it is and often much worse. But his hands are hidden so maybe he’s just doing it to himself, bad enough but not something threatening to her. Or maybe he’s having heart seizures on the floor or whatever they are like that. But then she sees another pair of hands — different, a woman’s or older girl’s — shoot up around him and one of them tears at his shirt and the other reaches for his hair as if to grab and pull it but never gets there, his head always backing away when her hand gets close. Maybe they’re both doing it together, high on drugs or something, not tenants there of course but from the outside, permanently or temporarily out of their right minds. No matter what it is someone should go to the door to see and possibly help, and she looks around but nobody is on the street up or down or if they’re far away she can’t see them, and if they’re in the windows looking at her she also can’t see them because of her bad long-distance eyes. She wants better to just get away. But then if the woman’s unwilling in all this, and that those hands aren’t part of the sex act but her fighting against it, she has to do something immediately like scream to attract attention or just to let the man know someone’s watching and maybe he’ll stop and get off her and go away. She walks down a step. He turns around — maybe he saw her shadow, because she thinks she walked too lightly for him to hear her — and sees her and pushes the door open a little with his foot and says ‘Mind your own business, lady, or you’ll get the same thing to you.’ Then he turns back to the woman he’s on and starts pumping harder as if to get the thing over with right away. The woman yells ‘Please, don’t go, stop him,’ and tears at his clothes. He punches her and she’s quiet and then he looks around again while he’s pumping on her and says ‘See this?’ and balancing himself on the door with one hand, picks up and holds out a knife. ‘I’ll cut your head off if you don’t get out of here. Go to your fucking place where you live and lock yourself inside it for the next ten hours and shut up forever about everything you saw.’ ‘But you’re on the street … doing it.’ ‘You heard me?’ and he swishes the knife in the air. She walks back to the sidewalk. The woman screams. The man’s still on top of her, doing it harder and holding her face down with his hand it seems. She hurries down the steps, bangs on the glass with her keys while she yells to the street ‘Help, someone, fire, fire,’ she heard she’s supposed to yell if she wants people to really take notice and come. ‘Help, please, fire, a woman’s getting raped, mauled, burned and raped. Fire, fire.’ He gets up, turns to her, penis erect, grabs it and jerks it back and forth a few times and then points to her and laughs, zips up, opens the door as she reaches the top step, woman’s on the ground pulling down her skirt and crying and clutching her neck, runs up the steps and grabs her from behind when she’s gone maybe five feet, hits her head and she goes down. Then he grabs her head by the hair and smashes it on the ground. All she remembers. He must have done it several times by the injuries she got but she only remembers it that once. Later in the hospital her son says ‘From what the police suggested the man had finished raping the woman and took her wallet. Then after he knocked you out he took your handbag and must have spit on your head because there was saliva all over it, or maybe you got it from the sidewalk when he knocked you down and beat your head against it. No one from any of the buildings around called the police.’ ‘That doesn’t mean they saw and didn’t call. It could mean nobody might have seen or heard anything.’ ‘Really doubtful, but OK. The woman who was raped was the first person to come to you. She sat you up so you wouldn’t choke from your bleeding and busted teeth and stopped a car to get the driver to call an ambulance and the police, both for you and her. Look, from now on no stepping in when you see something suspicious looking or terrible happening. Don’t even call the police from a street callbox or from your home or anywhere. The attacker might know where you live or go to great lengths to find out to get even with you. You did enough of that in your life. Let others take over. Now do you understand me? Just no more, and Jerry tells me to tell you the same thing.’ I can get a whistle,’ she says. ‘One that’s on a chain and looks like a nice pendant, so when I go out I can wear it around my neck without anybody much thinking about what it is. I’ve seen them advertised in the better jewelry stores — Fortunoff’s and Tiffany’s. If I don’t blow it immediately when I see something wrong going on, I’ll go down the street fifty feet to blow it. Every tenant on the block and maybe in the immediate neighborhood should have one or just carry a regular police whistle, but that I shouldn’t expect. But just think of it. Suppose I blew my whistle, someone heard it and blew hers. Then someone else heard that whistle and blew hers, till on and on this whistling went till the sound of it, altogether or just a few of them or one or two last ones, reached a policeman walking his beat or in a car. It might for now be one of the best ways to beat these crime things. And the rapist or mugger, or just a car thief, by hearing the whistles will have to know he’s a caught man if he stays. I’m going to bring it up at the next block association meeting. Or even contact the association’s president to call a meeting to talk about the growing crime on the block and my whistling idea.’”