Collateral.

Something changes in you when you’re escorted into your apartment by a cop, one SWAT team member’s footprint still on your kicked-in door, the smell of gunpowder and smoke still in the air, the bullets long removed, but the holes they left behind still in your floor, ceiling, couch.

Fortunately, I wasn’t home when it all happened. Fortunately, all things considered, the end result wasn’t that awful—every door in the building opened by force during the evacuation, some fire damage, many broken windows. Fortunately, no one got hurt. Well, I suppose, almost no one.

Perhaps stories like this happen all the time. Some guy killed his mother, then drove to his girlfriend’s place to hide. Not the smartest idea to use the mother’s car; the police found him, surrounded him, asked him to come out. He refused. Then—shots fired at the police. Then—random discharges in random directions. Then—trying to set the apartment on fire. Then, eventually, about an hour later—a sniper taking the guy down.

At least, that’s what I think happened. They never tell you much, as it turns out. They didn’t as I was coming back home from dinner, approaching the block where my apartment building was. “Critical incident,” one cop muttered and since I spotted SFFD trucks parked nearby, I assumed it’s some sort of a fire. But then, why would I want to “get out of there quicker if I were you”?

I slept at my friend’s that night. I pieced some of the story from the news reports coming in, random tweets tagged #sfgunman, and conjecture fueled by years of action movies. But I wasn’t sure it was my building right until the following morning; I didn’t know that it happened to be an apartment just below mine until I walked in; I didn’t anticipate the damage and the bullet holes in my living room until I saw them with my own eyes.

That was a few days ago. Since then, I have been struggling with figuring out how to feel about all this. What’s the right balance between overreaction and complacency? Can you ever be ready for someone to play Jenga with your Maslow’s pyramid? Are you supposed to be afraid? Angry? Ashamed?

You see, I originally decided to move to the edge of Nob Hill and Tenderloin as an experiment. I’ve always loved cities—their history, their infrastructure, their troubled past, their hopeful future. What do they mean to people. What do they enable people to do. I not as much read as devoured The ghost map, The works, The power broker, and many books more. And I decided to try to see the city as it really was, not in the splendor of one of the upscale neighbourhoods, but via the gritty, noisy, messy reality of its downtown. Good ideas come sometimes when you force yourself to feel uncomfortable, I thought.

You wanted an experiment, Marcin. How are you liking the results?

Perhaps stories like this happen all the time. This one happened to me. I walked the cop out saying “Thanks for keeping us safe,” and I was surprised how his blasé demeanour made me feel more at ease. The artifacts are slowly disappearing—the BIOHAZARD labels from the ground floor, the tired reporters waiting to pounce at the sidewalk, the blood from a neighbour’s window, CSI stickers in my apartment, the cop’s sitting chair with tons of newspapers, POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS in more places than it seemed to make sense. I walk past the third-floor corridor at least twice a day. I sit on my punctured couch and watch TV. I try not to imagine too much. But what happens next, I still have no idea. Will this be a big event or a footnote? Will I leave or will I stay?

Something changes in you when you’re escorted into your apartment by a cop, one SWAT team member’s footprint still on your kicked-in door, the smell of gunpowder and smoke still in the air, the bullets long removed, but the holes they left behind still in your floor, ceiling, couch.

I just wish I knew today what that something was.