A Gloomy Entry

Freakish warmth last week was followed by freakish, bone-chilling cold made worse by Arctic winds. Homeless people froze to death in Greenpoint, in the vacant lot where they liked to hang out drinking. Horrible rain, and now it is cold and still again, so clear you can see the brightest stars, not an easy thing in light-polluted Brooklyn, and the world seems strangely scrubbed and peaceful, though I know it is just an illusion. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, last week a 7-year-old girl was beaten to death by her stepfather (while the mother stood by) for taking and eating a container of yogurt from the refrigerator; previously she had been confined to a room and tied to a chair, dunked in water, beaten, obliged to eat cat food and use a litter box, as if she were not quite human. Oh, and sexually abused; have I missed anything? Nixzmary Brown, at the conclusion of her sad short life, has briefly become a cause celebre in New York, as people ask, how could this happen? How could people behave so badly? How could social services and the neighbors fail to notice anything amiss? Thousands lined up to see her in death, laid out in her coffin, only a handful of whom had known her in life, as if to testify there are some things that shock even New Yorkers. As if she died for our sins, and we didn't even know it.

I did not sit down to write about Nixzmary, yet somehow she haunts me. Her face all over the tabloids. Yet how soon she will be forgotten! Replaced by the next strange or shocking event, even as she displaced the fake fireman, who in turn routed the Chinese deliveryman stuck in the elevator. A million stories, and nobody gets too long.