It started this summer. When we could go outside again. We awoke from that long hibernation that took away our winter and spring and when the summer came we followed the rising sun. We emerged from our caves and the snow melted away and we could see all we had lost, all we had to gain. We stepped outside and the world stood before us, and it was sunny and bright, but it wasn’t the world we left.

Outside is different than it was before. Outside is where you get sick, get hurt, get lost. So now I look over my shoulder more. I am not the same. Who is?

***

It is unusually warm for October. An almost imperceptible layer of white covers the sky, a milky blue. I decide to take a walk. This is how I break up my day. It is lonelier now and I find it hard to separate my time into neat little squares the way I could before. 

I take little with me: my keys, card, hand sanitizer. I slip on a light jacket and fasten my mask onto the bridge of my nose. I ride the 14 floors that separate me from the ground in silence. As I step outside I am met with a warm breeze and I applaud my choice of jacket. I don’t bring headphones. I like to let the sounds of the city subsume my thoughts until the two dissolve into one— a meditative symphony.

I live a block away from Grant Park, one of Chicago’s largest green spaces. The park is flanked by great expanses on either side: the city on one, and the lake on the other. Downtown is pushed up against Michigan. Tall grey stems crowd the avenue, all fighting for a chance to see the water.

I approach the corner and I spot a woman on the phone at Roosevelt and Michigan. A man stands beside her looking toward the park just across this busy intersection. As I wait for the light my ears perk up, antennas shifting with the movement around me.

“He’s wearing—” A truck rolls by and her voice is drained out by the whining of the engine.

“He’s right there, you’ll see him there.” 

She gestures with her hand as she talks. Her movements, like her words, are strong, decisive.

This could be anything, I say to myself, she could be talking to anyone, about anything. But the urgency in her voice tells me I should listen. Her tone is not shrill yet, but she pays attention to her directions. She wants the person on the other end to understand. The light changes and I walk away, but I cannot leave my uneasiness at the curb. 

In a split-second decision, I don’t enter the park. I diverge and follow Michigan Avenue instead. I’ll walk another block and take the 11th St bridge into the park today. For another view, I lie.

Trees have started to change colour. Muddy yellows and shy oranges peek out from the edges of the foliage. A man lies on a blanket reading in the grass. There is a group doing aerobic exercises ahead. Mothers and fathers roll strollers around. Dog parents stop to let their puppies say hello.

I hear them before I see anything at all. As I round the corner into the park my head is suddenly filled with a screeching siren call. I look back and a police car is charging down the road in my direction. Everything I know expects the car to go racing past me, chasing down something bad and disappearing into the distance of the city. But it doesn’t and it stops and turns onto the sidewalk, rolling without hesitation between the trees and through the grass. I hear another one, and then another, and another again, and like an a cappella troupe the sirens harmonize, joining one after the other, rhythm steady and strong. The park is drowning in their song.

Cars start arriving from all sides, tires gripping the grass under them, and lining up at the edge of the skate park. The sirens don’t stop and I can feel the anticipation rising in my chest from the ones still en route. I hear them blocks away. I hear them rounding Wabash, and then Roosevelt, and brace for the turn onto Michigan.

My brows are furrowed, my eyes wide. Where is it? What are they looking for? I turn to the exercise group. They are in a circle now, mid-squat. They move on to a series of deep lunges. I turn toward the crosswalk and a man, sweaty from a run, stands next to me as we wait for the light to change. I shoot him a worried glance as more police cars circle the area. He seems unfazed. I start to question myself. 

Three men, a security guard and two contractors, are huddled when I get to the other side of the road.

“Do you know what’s going on?” the security guard asks me. 

“No,” I answer, “but I don’t want to be anywhere near it.” They laugh but I am not joking. 

When I return I race to the windows of my living room, eager to get a view of the commotion, to learn the reason why. I look down, expecting the lights, the zigzag pattern of cars on the lawn, officers in padded vests, but I see nothing. They are gone. There is only a dog chasing after a ball, its owner walking leisurely behind it. 

***

The source of the sirens, I would learn later, was an armed man in the park. A man with a gun, I am told by my boyfriend after a failed search of the local news. 

“Have you heard anything?” I text him that afternoon, “I can’t find anything online.”

He tells me that night about the gunman, information he learned through a colleague with the Citizen app.  

“A gun?” I exclaim over dinner, my eyebrows furrowing above my salmon. Was this danger real? I find it hard to know what is real now, what is a threat and what is a show.

“Yeah,” he says, “It’s fine,” shrugging it off like a red line delay. 

And what about that person, that man with a gun, the reason for the opera of sirens, the light show of blue and red. I think of him on the other side of the line of cars and vested officers. One gun surrounded by many.

“Aren’t you scared?” I ask him finally. 

“Nope.”

I am scared. But not of the gun. I am scared of not knowing what is real, not being able to trust what I see. My neighbourhood is flooded with police, sirens are a daily call, but I never know what they are chasing. Before, I could see a police car with flashing lights and trust there was a reason, a cause. Now, flashing lights don’t always mean something bad. Often times they mean nothing at all. Over the summer, police cars lit up the street every night. They formed a long line down Michigan Avenue, blue lights flickering like fireflies in the sky. 

“Why are they here?” My mother asked as we drove down Magnificent Mile in August. “What happened?”

She had come to help me move the rest of my things before I started school. I saw her neck crane toward the window in the passenger seat, trying to gauge how far the line of cars stretched back. 

“Nothing,” I said, “they are here every night.”

As a wave of protests against police brutality and racism took place around the country, this already heavily policed part of Chicago saw an even higher level of surveillance. Yet, of the more than 7000 Black Lives Matter protests that occurred nationally, less than 200 resulted in any form of violence. Some argue that the police were there to protect protesters, guard this First Amendment right from any unwanted violence. But is hard to feel welcomed against a row of SUVs. As summer came to a close, the number of protests became less frequent, but by end of September only 48% of the officers temporarily stationed downtown were sent back to their original patrol districts. A police memo published by a local news station reported that “visibility” was key to officers on patrol downtown, stating that Police cars would be turning on their Mars lights for the length of their shift. This comes in late September, over a month after the looting occurrences of August. Chicago still needed to appear under control.

And this is the problem I see, the source of my fear. Sirens alert our ears, flashing lights a sign for our eyes — they are sensory tools, explicitly designed to speak to our most basic receptors. But we must remember that they are just that, tools. Like guns or batons holstered at the hip, horses, or handcuffs, they must not be used in vain. Because then they are weapons. 

This takes me back to a memory I often think of. I am walking along one of the small streets that open onto the Place de la Concorde. It is late November 2015, in Paris, and I am a freshman in College. The street is a narrow corridor, cobblestoned and grey. For some reason I know I am wearing a skirt and trench coat and I can still feel my bag slung over my shoulder. I am walking toward my school, it is on the other side of the river beyond the Place, by the Quai d’Orsay. Like in the park, I am walking and suddenly I am met with a sound, it is a rumble this time. It is the low groan of a machine pulling itself forward. Behind me is an army tank. It makes its way down the street. It is like in the movies, one long ribbed ribbon wrapped around the wheels. I move to the side and let it go by and it roars forward onto the Place de La Concorde. Sometimes I question if this memory is real. But I can still see it turning the corner onto the Place, light hitting its back as it rolls forward into the open. I have held onto it for years. I always see the scene from above, looking down at myself next to this tank strolling toward the Seine. 

This happened after the Bataclan, when Paris was armed. After the Bataclan I looked around more too. Everyone did. I stopped taking the bus and metro. I walked. I racked up a large Uber bill. 

In Paris terror pronounced itself and it was loud. It wanted us to know it had come and the damage it could do. It was a day and a night and all that came after. But what happens when we cannot see the danger? When it doesn’t stand up and yell I am here, and we cannot point clearly to our monster? What happens when flashing lights no longer mean what they used to? When a line of cars is there to protect something we cannot see? When a line of cars is maybe the monster itself? In Paris I looked over my shoulder because I was scared it was going to happen again. Now, I look over my shoulder and wonder if it’s happened at all.

 

Marie-Capucine is a masters student in art history at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities, Marie-Capucine graduated in 2019 from Dartmouth College with a degree in English and history. There, she served as editor of The Dartmouth’s weekly magazine, Mirror.