Even at 4 o'clock in the morning, on a deserted block in Chelsea, what our neighbor saw did not seem unusual. He had the New York reaction of the 1980's, and assumed she was just another one of the city's huge corps of the deranged, the homeless, the addicted, the drunk. He didn't even consider going downstairs to help her; after all, how many dozens didn't he help just that day? To do so would have taken hours and dollars that cannot be spared, so my neighbor did what any of us would have done. He went back to sleep.

I cannot say I blame him. I was sitting in my living room while the murder took place right in front of my windows. In my sleeplessness, I was drinking hot milk and flipping through a travel magazine, steadfastly ignoring the weird murmurings of the girl outside. In fact, I didn't even think of getting up to see what might be wrong. Years of living in New York City had trained me: The distress you hear is nothing serious. It's only a drunk or a bum.

A few hours later, when the detectives questioned me, I was ashamed to admit what I had heard. Perhaps it wasn't her, but it probably was. If only I hadn't been so smug, if only I'd gone to the window, perhaps I could have done something. The doctor next door says no one could have saved her, but I tell myself I could have held her, or reassured her, or even tried to get a description of the assailant. At least she wouldn't have died so pitifully, ignored by her neighbors because they thought she was a drunk, when in fact, she was looking for help.

That this should be a normal reaction says something about our life here. What begins as compassion, when you first arrive, gets ground to dust by the daily barrage of people dressed in garbage bags, passed out in doorways, making loud, plaintive pitches on the subway or displaying their mutilated limbs in an attempt to get some change. The sheer numbers of these people exhaust the soul. To live here at all, you have to be callous.

The morning after the murder, I washed away the victim's bloodstains that covered the sidewalk; as I did, a stream of people in business clothes walked by, neatly picking their way past the stains, papers and briefcases tucked under their arms. No one seemed to notice or care what I was doing. No one asked what had happened. They averted their eye—avoiding the pain—keeping their mind on more important things. That someone died here was just another incident to file away, another fact of this strange place.