So I get home from work tonight, and in the doorway downstairs, I find a young man trying to help an old lady with a cane get through the door. She looks to be in her seventies or eighties. She seems to be saying something about possibly having a stroke, so I ask if I can help in some way. Both of them basically just give me blank stares and keep talking to each other. However, the elevator in our building is slow, so I end up sharing an elevator with them. She lives on the sixth floor. I live on the seventh. The guy doesn’t live in this building. I have never seen either of them before this. During the elevator ride, the lady starts asking us if we are going to kill her, and rambling about how she can’t believe she’s inviting strangers into her apartment. Then she starts crying, because according to her, yesterday was the anniversary of her son’s death. By the way, I’m pretty sure both of these people are drunk, but the woman definitely is. Anyway, I step off the elevator on the sixth floor to let them off, and the elderly woman is stumbling quite a bit. I ask again if I can help, and the man says that might be a good idea, so I accompany them down the hall to her apartment door. On the way down the hall, this woman almost falls down twice, and the man catches her. When we get to the door, things get really weird. Her key doesn’t seem to be working, and I’m not sure what the plan is here anyway. The man helping her seems equally confused, and keeps gesturing to me behind her back that he has no idea what was going on either. Her key doesn’t work. I ask her if she’d like me to try the key. She says no. She can’t figure out how to make the key work. I ask her if she is using the key for the door downstairs or for her apartment door. She seems to consider this for a moment, then tells me out of the blue to leave her alone. I back off a bit. Then she tells both of us to leave her alone and get away from her, so we back off a bit more. I am really confused as to what I should be doing at this point. The man seems confused too, but together we sort of decide to move down to the other end of the hall, where it bends, and watch from a distance to see that she gets into her apartment okay. She doesn’t. I hear a noise and turn to watch from about 80 feet away as she looses her balance, falls straight backward, bangs her head on the floor, and seems to be motionless on the ground for a minute. I’m sure that this “minute” is actually only a second or two, because as soon as I see her falling, I am already started bolting down the hall back toward her. The man is close behind me. The woman is moving when we reach her, but seems much more upset and confused than before, and she makes no attempts to get up off the floor. In her eyes I see what looks like utter terror mixed with deep, deep sadness. I ask if she is okay and she says she is definitely not okay, and that we had better get away from her and leave her alone. Both the man and I assureher that we are only trying to help her, which only makes her more upset and defensive. She starts swearing at us, telling us to “get the fuck away from” her, and that she doesn’t know us. She won’t let us help her. I ask if she knows her neighbors as I motion toward the door next to hers, if she might be comfortable letting them help her up. She says yes, she knows them, “but they’re Africans.” At this point, I am so disgusted by the racism in her words and her expression that I want to walk away. I cannot, however, in good conscience leave this old, drunk, sad, helpless woman to whatever fate might befall her, regardless of her racism. So I respond with, “Okay?” She continues to tell me that they are loud and rude people. I told her I am just trying to help her, and that maybe she would be more comfortable with them helping her if they know her. She immediately informs me that they do not know her, other than from when she bangs on the wall to try to communicate to them that they need to be quieter. I ask if she wants me to call an ambulance because she fell down, to which she responds that she most certainly did not fall down, but instead accuses me and this other man of forcing her down to the ground. I tell her that is impossible as we had been at the other end of the hallway, but she continues to hurl accusations and curse words at us and tells us to “get far away” from her. Somewhere around this time, the man and I finally exchange names and shake hands. His name is D__ C_____. We aren’t sure whether to call the police or not. Then I have the idea that she might know J_____, our building’s maintenance man. I ask her if she knew him, and she says she does. I ask if she knows in which apartment he lives, and she tells me the number. I find his door at the far end of the hall, around the corner, and start knocking. Meanwhile, I call Karen to explain what is going on, why I’m not home yet, and ask her to come down one floor to meet me. J_____ finally comes to the door, looking very upset that I am knocking on his door so close to midnight. J_____, by the way, has somewhat of a difficult time with English. So I’m trying to explain to J_____ what exactly is going on, but in a hurried way, so he can realize that I actually need his help, when D__ comes around the corner, and that’s about when I start hearing the yells. The woman on the floor, alone now, has started yelling for help as loudly as she can. J_____ finally realizes something weird is going on and he starts out the door. Moving faster than him, I head back toward where the woman is at the other far end of the hall, and along the way I meet Karen. Without actually doing anything, Karen’s presence makes me feel better. It makes me feel like what I’ve been doing so far has actually made sense. Somehow, Karen just being there makes me more confident. It’s weird, and kind of cool, but I don’t have time to think about it now because I need to get back to the woman and make sure she is okay. She look about the same as when I’d left her to get J_____. J_____ gets to her, and she seems to calm down with a familiar face around, so Karen, D__, and I back away to a farther distance in order to keep her from freaking out again. D__ seems a bit worried about getting sued or something, so he gives me his business card in case I need to get ahold of him or something. Then D__ leaves. Karen and I watch from a distance as J__ struggles trying to help the woman up off the ground. The woman is not making it easy for him. Next thing I know, two cops appear on the sixth floor, asking Karen and I where to go. I’m not sure who called the cops or what for, but I correctly assume they are here to deal with this old woman on the floor, so I point them down the hall. Between J_____ and the two police officers, it still takes another ten minutes at least to get the woman into her apartment and sitting on a chair. Meanwhile, the woman starts yelling at the cops, swearing, and calling them names just as she had done when D__ and I were trying to help her. I can hear the cops making sarcastic replies that are more for each other’s sense of humor than responding to her insane accusations. This makes me feel better, because I know they’ll believe me if I have to testify about this or something someday. A neighbor next door on the other side from the one I gestured to earlier, who is, by the way, most definitely not “African,” sticks his head out, and this is when I figure out that he must have called the police when the woman started yelling for help. Eventually, the two cops and J_____ get this woman situated in a chair inside her apartment, and the cops head back down the hall our way. I tell them my part of the story very briefly, and they assure me that I don’t need to worry about anything. They get on the elevator and head downstairs, while Karen and I walk up a flight of stairs to the floor on which we live, bewildered, wondering what is up with the other tenants in this building, and what in the world just happened.