Ghost Talk 

Kitty, listen: I’m thinking about you.

I’ve got eight more minutes before this Ronkonkoma bound train pulls up and, two stops later, delivers me to a job I keep threatening to quit. And I’m thinking about you.

Across this concrete platform, past train rails vibrating with electricity, in the same place where you bled to death on a March night in 1964, dogs now trot, dressed as ghosts and pumpkins. A canine costume contest timed for the season. Is that a Malamute or a swashbuckling pirate?

It’s October, Kitty, and the planet is in rougher shape since you left it, but New York is finally starting to cool off. I forget for a moment that this October—this entire year, for that matter—has been hotter than the one before, which was warmer than its own predecessor. This seems the likely sequence of events now, temperatures climbing on and on forever, until there is nothing left for us but dust and ash.

Kitty, there’s a writer I adore named Colson Whitehead. Like you, Whitehead was born here, in this gargantuan metropolis erected over Lenape bones. You were born in Brooklyn, Kitty, and Colson Whitehead hails from Manhattan, a thirty-three square mile stretch of stone and steel everyone imagines when they hear the letters N and Y and C. Manhattan puts the city in New York City, but it is only one part of a whole; the head of Voltron—a vital piece—but not the body. When a dreamer dreams of New York, places like your native Brooklyn and our adoptive Queens—this borough where the buildings weakly aspire to touch the sky—are forgotten.

In his book The Colossus of New York, Whitehead explores New York’s mutant nature, how this city is one of inconsistent shape. One generation’s New York is not the same city that belongs to their successors. Whitehead reminisces on his own New York: the bygone bars, businesses, and people that now only populate the ghost of a memory. Whitehead admits that, for him, he will always recognize the MetLife building as the PanAm building, no matter the signage change. However, he’s well aware that the generation before him remembers that space as something else, before fifty-eight stories of glass and steel flowered there.

My New York is not your New York, Kitty. This Kew Gardens has mutated from the Kew Gardens where you writhed, bleeding, in the dark of early morning. I attempt to run through a mental inventory of how this neighborhood has changed since I first came to know it. The empty nail salon and hair studio. The chicken joint that was an Indian joint that was a taco joint that was a vitamin shop. Tell me of your Kew Gardens, Kitty. Tell me where you ate and tell me where you shopped and tell me if the movie theater on the corner had already transitioned into a porno house and I will tell you how it clawed its way back to respectability. Before this big loud train comes and whisks me away from this costume contest that was once a crime scene, tell me.

Kitty, here’s the legend: you died screaming for help while thirty-eight witnesses in the apartment building looming above you ignored your pleas. New York City: the cold iron behemoth that moves too fast, never sleeps, and when it sees something says nothing.

“Oh my god!” you shrieked. “He stabbed me!” Stunned by the inexplicable brutality of a total stranger.

Time allows truth to seep into light, as it has with the story of your slaying. Though I suppose truth even sounds like conjecture to the dead. The facts say you weren’t completely ignored. “Let that girl alone!” bellowed Robert Mozer, one of your fellow apartment building residents. Mozer’s shouting scared off your attacker, but the killer returned to finish his sins while you lay in the apartment building’s shadow, out of sight from the windows above. What do you know of Karl Ross, the young man who witnessed your stabbing but was so mortified by what he saw all he could think to do was call a friend?

In the backyard of a nearby house a cloth ghost dangles from a tree branch, contorting in the wind. Another festive marker of spooky season. Isn’t it a shame ghosts are supposedly doomed to haunt the spots where their earthbound vessels expired? Wouldn’t you rather levitate over Brooklyn, Kitty? At least then you could visit your childhood home—the street corners where you loitered when you were a young girl, sucking down sodas and staring into the sun.

You are not really here, Kitty, and I know that. You are not here because your New York is not a New York that exists any longer. A ghostly woman folded into the ghost of a city. A spectral nesting doll.

Kitty, I’ll tell it to you straight: the police regarded calls about your attack as low priority, though I’m sure you realized that when no one came to your aid. New York City did not possess a 911 emergency call system in 1964. Police response was left to the discretion of individual precincts. On that night in March, the cops couldn’t bother with another assaulted woman. They let you die, asphyxiating on your own blood.

Perhaps if the police regarded the calls of a woman screaming for mercy in the dead of night a bit more seriously you might still be here, still in that same apartment building overlooking the train tracks where I stand waiting. I imagine you looking down on me now, a wrinkled woman with gray hair and a steaming cup of tea in her hands, watching from your window as dog owners parade their costumed canines. You shake your head. What happened to the New York of your youth? What happened to this city’s grit and edge—the same grit and edge that allowed your murder? Is it possible, Kitty, that those halcyon mean streets were always vanishing, from the moment you were pulled into this world? Shea to Citi. PanAm to MetLife. World Trade to dust.

There's an episode of the television show Girls where the show's central characters attend an experimental play based on the false reports of your murder and the apathy that insulated your neighbors. In the universe posited in the show's play, the residents of your apartment building ignored your cries with not only disregard, but purposeful bitterness. I've watched the episode multiple times now and it is still unclear to me if the show is intentionally leaning into the legend of your killing in order to explore the episode’s own themes and ideas of idleness and disorientation, or if Sarah Heyward, the writer credited on the episode, is yet another individual misinformed regarding the night you were taken from this world.

Maybe for you, Kitty, getting the facts straight isn't so important. No one who heard you screaming for help, no one who witnessed your silhouetted form struggling to fight off your attacker, no one who ran to the nearest payphone to dial the police, no one, Kitty—no one—ran to your rescue. No hand fluttering out of the dark to pull you to safety. You died. In the back of an ambulance on your way to the hospital as the sun considered rising. A formality at that point; there was no saving you.

Let me be honest here, Kitty. I, too, once believed the myth: a city so cold and detached from its humanity it shrugged and rolled its eyes as you died the same way you were born, wailing and covered in blood. That episode of Girls first taught me who you were and how you died. It took me even longer to realize this place where I stand, a place I've walked past hundreds of times, was where your death unfolded. As an act of penance, Kitty, I now point this spot out whenever I can. “That's where Kitty Genovese was attacked,” I say. “That's the building where she lived.” And when they reply, these friends and acquaintances and relatives, they say, “Who?”

New York moved on a long time ago, Kitty. A city such as this, phoenix in nature, must quickly bury its dead if it is to be reborn. There is no space for ghosts when the apartments are already too small and the rent is too high.

Kitty, when I tell you this next bit I know it will sound like a fabrication, and believe me, I understand the importance of adhering to truth when communing with someone whose life has been so enmeshed in lies, but tonight when I get off the train, back where this all started, in the parking lot where your blood christened pavement, I hear a kitten call from the dark.

I search the bushes and shadows for the kitten, but my investigation yields nothing. The little thing continues to cry, close enough to hear but too enrobed in the night's pitch for me to find. Crying for mother or crying for mercy or crying for a death it feels needling in. I kneel and offer my hand to the chilly October dark.

“Kitty,” I call. “Kitty.”

I wonder who I expect to answer.