Sure, yeah, I trawled through his stuff. I had held myself back for so long it felt like freedom. I went in his daughter’s room and sat on the bed, tried to envision her, to imagine the last time she was in there. It wasn’t untouched—it was clean but still recognizable as the room of a fourteen-year-old. I don’t know how to describe it except to say you could feel the past there.

  Shortly after the shooting I added Assess Self for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the list of priorities. The literature said this was often an aftereffect of a shooting, that the experience would persist in a halo of related symptoms. I wondered if burglary could be a direct result of that, if crime could perpetuate itself in this way and continue spreading out into a matrix in the world, and if so, maybe that was the reason why the guy was ransacking Katie’s DVD collection and I was in the middle of Danny’s living room with all the furniture circled like a fortress with several televisions at the center. Danny’d acquired something like a dozen cats since his wife’s death, which probably meant something in terms of his psychology, and they moved around my feet—half hopefully, half in warning—as I padded around the carpet, inspecting his DVD collection, which included what appeared to be a complete set of Emmanuelle films. Interesting. They might have been his wife’s, or perhaps he bought them as a tribute to his wife, who looked, before the chemo, more than a little like Sylvia Kristel, the star of the majority of them.

  I slid one in and turned it on. I looked at the photos of the two of them and their daughter on the wall. I looked at the screen. It was a little like watching a ghost. A sexy ghost.

  Obviously I didn’t get through more than a half hour of the film without resorting to masturbation. I admit it. It was not my house, not my DVDs, not echoes of my dead wife. It was barely even my body by the time I finished and hit eject, ashamed, though I wasn’t yet sure why, then powered off. Then the house was dark and his little girl was still vanished, his wife was still dead. The cats were everywhere.

  Headlights started to pass the house and soon it was regular, a metronome. Where does this sudden traffic come from? Could it be police? Could I be surrounded? What I feared was not the consequences but the confrontation, that Danny might come home unexpectedly, that Danny would see me here among his everything that is no longer either his or everything, since I am here and his wife is not, and he would shoot me down, imminent threat, as I stood to go toward him, to shake his hand or offer explanation, as society would deem appropriate. I would make it easier for him, I think, even now. Another pair of headlights passed through the windowshades but did not approach. I could tell him he really should get one of the security systems filled with lights. For the memory of Marie, his wife, I thought of her name just now in this equilibrium we can call a developing situation in my mind if not in the real room here in front of me. I could go, I realized, or I could stay and wait for him. But what would really happen is something unexpected. Maybe the cat-sitter shows up and dies of fright, or a plane drops from the sky through this roof and takes me down in flames. Or he could never return: maybe he left for good, abandoned it, what remained of his life, or maybe he was on that plane. Maybe he was dead in one of the rooms of the house and his life had eroded to the point that he would lie undiscovered here for four days, no one here to check on him, flesh torn off in tiny bits by cats, only to be found by his masturbating home-invading neighbor, himself the victim of a home invasion, and the beginning of a wave of them, every home invasion leading to another.

  But nothing happened. Everything collided in my mind and there were cats swirling through the darkness. Katie would disapprove. She hadn’t even called to harass me, which means she cares even less than I would have thought. It is unfortunate. I am singularly unfortunate. But I had power. I have power. I have a gun. I shot that man down and continue to do so every night. I came all over the DVD case of Emmanuelle in Space thinking about a dead woman and had to clean it up. This is a personal low for me, I thought at the time, though I don’t think that anymore. I’ve since surpassed it.

  I cleaned up, got up, and left his space. I did a couple of dishes, which seemed appropriate. I felt just a little smaller after, like I had reduced myself in some barely noticeable way, but mostly I felt new. Maybe this was post-traumatic stress disorder, where you go a little crazy later and start masturbating in your neighbors’ houses? I reasoned my behavior could easily be explained in terms of biological irregularity in the brain.

  The worst part for Danny was when his daughter had been gone for a week—her name was Marie, too, but she wanted to be called Mary in the way that kids want to differentiate themselves from everything they dislike about the world—and speculation in the neighborhood began to turn on Danny and Marie. We didn’t want to speculate about the rest of us. None of us could be responsible. We couldn’t even start to think it. We were all responsible adults with cars and cats and curs yowling through the nights, proclaiming their alarm at our perversities. The police weren’t releasing any new news. No leads. The parents were naturally persons of interest in the investigation, but nothing was disclosed to connect them to her vanishing. Statistics we saw on TV said that, in seventy-five percent of missing persons cases, the one responsible is a family member or someone who knows the girl well. But the woman on the television said that Danny and Marie were surely beyond reproach. And you could see it in the shot of them on camera as Marie delivered her tearful plea. It was moving, it really was. It could have been any of our daughters if we had daughters, that lovely trouble. Their faces were drawn like their window shades. The two of them had taken to living in near-darkness, and left the house as undisturbed as was possible while still living in it just in case there was some kind of useful evidence not yet identified by the authorities.

  This was five years ago. As soon as Mary disappeared my wife started her conjecture, throwing out theories, identifying creepy people we had encountered, even wondering privately about the perverts in our neighborhood who she claimed would follow girls around, to stores, and with cameras in their shopping bags, trying to take photos up their skirts and post them on the internet. She’d seen it happen a couple times, and had heard about it even more. She had this theory that the more leisure time our neighbors had, and let’s face it, we lived in a neighborhood that bespoke nothing if not leisure, the more fucked up they became. She would constantly be asking me if I thought Gary’s wife was a lesbian, or if any of our friends were gay. Fuck, I loved her, but it drove me crazy, this constant speculation, like all of us were mysteries that we could crack open by the action of our brains. My feeling was that as friends, as family, as members of a neighborhood association, we owed it to the others to take them at their word, their closed blinds, their brusque greetings on the streets. It felt gossipy, particularly with Danny and Marie, because they had been our friends. Our neighbors were all interviewed by the police—this was before my wife had left, you understand—and so whatever speculations they had were encouraged. I know because we were all encouraged to attribute meaning to any tiny transgression or strangeness or outlying car or lurid comment or open window late at night or whatever we had possibly noticed, and in some cases actually logged or blogged or journaled already. These things were wheedled out of us. Anything could matter, they told us. This was important, they told us. Tell us the story. Don’t leave anything out.

  Here’s what I didn’t say to them, nor to Katie. I had seen Danny looking at Mary in what I assessed as unfatherly ways more than once. She was fourteen. She was going to be a beauty. She was a beauty already. Which made her a sort of myth. The women were allowed to say it, but the men were not. I don’t blame him or think it means any more than it did. And now she was gone. And had any of us entertained our thoughts about what might have transpired? Yes. I’m sure the answer’s yes. But, fuck, Danny was already getting the treatment from the police. Everyone assumes the guy’s responsible in the absence of another story, another angle to consider the disappearance from and keep it breaking news; of course it would be best if she was found alive, but in the absence of information people are going to talk and fill things in, and it was awful when my wife started doing it. We got into a confrontation over it.

  Had I thought about murdering my own wife before? If I’m being honest I’m saying yes. Not to say I would do it, but I had considered it, entertained the thought, let it through the logic gate in my mind and back out into the submerged whatever of it. Had I thought about making out with, off with Mary? That answer is yes also. We can hold a lot of ideas. We can hold a lot of grief. We can wonder if our lives might contain that other thing, just for a moment. Thought is the wrong word. Thought implies intention, which it should not. You are aware of the temptation, what is within you and might erupt at any moment, what you are capable of in spite of all the social interactions and the neighborhood associations: you could tear down anything in your sight. And then you back away from that precipice. You don’t have to verbalize it, make it part of a conversation, make it part of the theories on the whiteboard in the police station. You can keep it to yourself, fortress yourself in on weekends, maybe watch a couple of Emmanuelle DVDs and think of the dead. Adjust the sensors on your security system and reconfigure the programmable thermostat. There is a lot to keep you—me, any of us—busy with the world so we don’t have to open up our silences.

  When Marie died, then, almost two years later to the day, the vans reappeared along the curbs with their transmitting equipment. This time it wasn’t the real reporters but the interns or the fact finders or something who were going, again, door-to-door, trying not to appear intrusive, but looking for material. They are always looking for material. Katie asked, Well, could you blame them? They want to know. We all want to know. Do we want to know? I said. Yes we want to know, she said. And pretty soon after that she was gone.

  I didn’t change much in Katie’s office, leaving the things as she had last arranged them. In a way it was just like what Danny did for his daughter. They could both come back. They could both reintegrate themselves into our lives. He had a garage sale after Marie’s death, after his family had come in to help him clear out some things and get some distance from it. The whole neighborhood was there at the sale, and lots of random people, maybe looking for items that had some connection to Mary. I bought two alarm clocks, overpaying for them, frankly, at ten bucks a shot, but it felt like doing something. They were nearly identical, still in the package, different colors. His and hers, it read, in a faux-elegant script. I keep them on my nightstand now at home. Why is a fine question. Who needs two alarm clocks, and who would put them on the same nightstand? I wish I could say I knew: I think I just wanted to contribute to his forgetting, and seeing them and remembering him helps that, maybe. Most of the stuff he sold was pretty crappy and nondescript. If I were him I’d sell everything I could so that the spaces in his house didn’t remind him of Marie. Some of us bought things to remind ourselves of Marie, and some of us of Mary.

  Later, I received a note in the mail informing me that I could go down to the station to receive my copy of the police report featuring my shooting and my no more weeping. I had taken to waiting for the mail with suspicion, as if the mailman knew things he wasn’t telling about me, about Katie, about Danny and Marie and Mary, about the final destinations of all of us and our newly separated lives or what remained of them. He had seen the forwarding information, surely, and noticed the decreasing supply of women’s magazines to the house. I could see it in his posture as he slid the mail truck up to the driveway, killed the engine, and slumped out toward the door, avoiding eye contact. They must teach you that, I thought, in the training, not to personalize, to avoid confrontation, to carry pepper spray or mace or a Taser in case of dog or other attack. He had to deliver the note from the police in person since it was sent certified mail. He looked at me as I signed it. I said hey, thanks, I appreciate your service. He asked me how I was doing. I said good, good. The weather was looking up again. I asked him if the police ever talked to him about that girl’s disappearance, if he had seen anything, if he’d care to add a story to the world. I said I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I asked: Could you? But before he could answer, I thought to myself that this was a successful social interaction, so I said never mind and thanks again and have a good one, and I closed the door before he was gone, along with whatever darkness he carried with him on his route, and he started up the truck again and pulled away.

  My copy of the police report listed the facts as I described them, which was reassuring. It described the intruder as the decedent, the incident as self-defense, me as shooken up, which I’m fairly sure is not a word. It listed the decedent’s name as Lewis Klatt. There were several sections redacted for some reason, blacked out with rough strokes of marker, and the whole thing had been photocopied a couple of times so had that deteriorating look. It didn’t contain much information about the decedent. It said his age was seventeen. It did not list his address or surviving relatives.

  It took a couple of days before I found his address on the internet. I found his social network page, which had a bunch of sad comments left after his death from those who were his friends. There was no note indicating that the page would be deleted. Oddly he—his mother, probably, learning things she didn’t know about her son only after he had left the world—liked a post the day after I shot him. I found his address where he lived with his mother, apparently, his father not being mentioned anywhere. A couple of days later I drove by his place in the evening. It was a four-square, maybe 1,500 square feet, in what Realtors would describe as an emerging neighborhood. A good investment, surely. No lights were on. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there as I sat in the heated car. The air was clear. Little was happening on this block. There were no streetlights. The whole place reeked of sadness.

  There aren’t any streetlights in this city because it is a darkened city with regulations against streetlights on most blocks and the use of halogen headlights, and even powerful flashlights, are discouraged. This is all so as not to interfere with the important work being done at the observatory just past the valley. The trade-off is that we pay more for our police department in the neighborhood where I live, because the lack of light demands more frequent patrols. I parked outside the house. I sat and watched. Nothing happened by virtue of my being there. I wrote a couple of memos to myself and went back home. I could feel something building inside me.

  I did not think I wanted forgiveness for shooting the intruder. The report spelled out the justifiability of the situation. I knew I had acted in self-defense, even if I might have been, in retrospect, projecting some of my substantial reservoir of rage about Katie onto the kid and when I shot him he was shot, and Katie was not, and the world waiting outside of teenage girls’ windows was not shot or even deterred from whatever they might continue to go on doing, and that was the end of it. And I didn’t want any kind of retribution. Or even an encounter with his family. I wanted to rifle through his things. I wanted to break in and achieve the kind of intimacy a person can only gain by breaking into a house. When I broke in, I wanted to find his life laid out for me. What fucked-up things he masturbated to. What things he did beyond his life as described on the social networking page, and we all know you can’t trust those facades anyhow.

  So I found myself outside the house wearing dark-green-and-black sweatpants. I moved from window to window, sliding out of the security light in front toward the back where nothing was activated by motion. I pressed my hands to each window. There were no pets. In the house there was only silence.

  In the back window I could see the flickering LED on what appeared to be an answering machine. It flashed a number, twenty-eight, and had several blinking lights. I tried the latch on the window. It was open. These people, who were these people, who thought nothing of the possibility that someone could come in and take their lives apart?

  I entered the window. I waited for something to happen.

  I felt like all my life I was waiting for something to happen.

  And things did happen to those around me. Katie left or was forced to leave, depending on whom you talked to about it. Danny’s life fell apart, his wife, his daughter gone.

  And now I was in the decedent’s house, leaving a card for the home security company that I used on the kitchen table. Let this be a lesson to you, I thought. Let me make my point this way.

  I heard a string of firecrackers going off, maybe a block away. It started my heart up. I thought it was a gun, an uzi maybe, that was how uncomfortable I was in the neighborhood. But that thought receded with the sound into the silence.

  I went upstairs. The stairs each creaked distinctively. Though I knew no one was home you never really knew anything about anyone, I thought to myself. What if Danny did it, I thought to myself.

  The door read LEWIS: ALL OTHERS STAY OUT, like a kid’s. I checked out the other rooms first. Then I opened up his door.

  All of his possessions made up a pile on the floor of his room. It looked like it had been searched. The blinds were open and I looked out into the street. Cars passed. I held my breath then let it out. I sat down on the decedent’s bed.

  The question I had was whether I’d done something unforgivable, or if Katie had, or if anyone had. When I went to college and applied for the requisite set of credit cards, I found out that my parents had been applying for credit in my name for a couple years, having exhausted their own creditworthiness, and my whole score was shot. I was angry. This was years before I met Katie, but the credit traces shadow you for a decade, so I had to explain it to her. She believed me at the time, but later, after she left, she told me she had come to doubt me. I had not forgiven my parents for this, nor for their many other transgressions, and I had told them this, and when they died it didn’t change a thing.

  Later, when having breakfast with my sister on one of her rare returns to this town, this country, we were talking about this, and she told me she had forgiven me for that time when I had hit her in the head repeatedly with a set of igneous rocks that I had stolen from the church when they had their rock and gem show for kids. She was a little drunk on the mimosas when she told me this. I had not remembered what I was thinking. She said she knew that, that she wondered what I had meant by it. She dabbed off the makeup to show me the scars across the side of her face. I told her I didn’t remember that at all. Did I do that? I touched her face. It smelled like lamb. She said there were many things that I had done. Was it possible that she had made up this story for her advantage in future family gatherings? Or were they actual wounds inflicted by my hands? She was twelve, she said. Don’t you remember when we had to go to church and when we spent most of our time breaking into the world of Boy Scout paraphernalia hidden away in one of the storage rooms? she said. You know, when you had touched my face and we would listen to muffled hymns being sung a room or two away? I had only vague impressions. I guess it didn’t mean that much to me, I said.

 

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