The Interloper (4 page)

I waited a week to check the new PO box. I didn’t think Raven would respond. I drove over to the Mailboxes Store in Second City. There was a personal letter in my box. I opened it.

Patty and I on our honeymoon were like any happy young couple on a honeymoon. We drank tropical drinks, lazed around the beach, stared at each other over fussy dinners, and made love when we felt like it. We stayed in a cottage, steps from the sand, isolated from but serviced by a large resort further up the beach.
It was utterly unlike the Spring Break images of Cabo San Lucas I’d seen on television. I was content to soak everything up quite passively, as I understood one was supposed to do, but Patty insisted on learning all the resort workers’ names, and she pointed out, again and again, plants, sea life, and insects that had been all but invisible to me. This was what I had fallen in love with on the chairlift, and I loved her even more for it now. Maybe I can be like this, I thought. Maybe I can be open and curious and kind like this.

We had been there four days when she decided we should rent a jeep and explore the Sierra de la Laguna, the local mountain range. She wanted a nature fix. We had snorkeled the day before, but I’d gotten disoriented because of some problem with my inner ear. According to her guidebook, the local mountains hosted an astounding variety of indigenous flora and fauna. We had loaded up the jeep with some picnic gear and food, and we were pulling out of the hotel parking lot when Eduardo, the goateed, effeminate concierge, chased us down.

“Telefono, telefono,” he said. “Emergencia.”

I did not know what had happened, obviously, but we had reached one of those moments, Fate’s forks, when in an instant our lives change completely.

Standing in the Mailboxes Store, looking at the short note signed “Henry Joe,” I knew I’d reached another of Fate’s forks. If I was going to move forward, I would have to create a picture of Lily. I didn’t want to borrow images of a random woman and use her for my purposes. I wanted her to be her own person, an image that couldn’t be traced back to anyone else. I
didn’t want to get trapped in some coincidence, or set Raven searching after some poor woman who had nothing to do with any of this.

When I am at a loss, I turn to the world of books. The library here is abysmal. Back in those halcyon days, a massive bookstore had just appeared a few blocks from our home, located in a building that had once housed a massive pet store, then a massive clothing store, then a massive audio-video store. A sun-faded banner hanging over the old audio-video store sign identified the place as “GBS Books,” the GBS standing for “Giant Book Sale,” inscribed on the tattered street-level banners. It was an enormous remainder depot, a book pound, where literature was adopted and taken home or put to sleep forever. The place was populated by two bitter staffers (one absorbed in a massive science-fiction tome), a crying child in the Children’s Corner, and a pee-smelling older woman making her way through the stack of expired calendars, one page at a time.

That was where I found
Photoshop Secrets for Everyone
. It described all of the various filters and techniques one could use to assemble futuristic photo collages, change backgrounds, “airbrush” away wrinkles, make fat people look thinner, even make someone look like someone else entirely. I took the book home and reviewed it thoroughly. The information was useful, but the prose was limp and, at times, unclear. I would not want my name on such a book.

Now to source material. Where could I find generic images of regular women? I spent some time browsing through stock photography catalogues on the internet. I couldn’t find
anything that looked enough like a casual snapshot. I had better luck with an image search engine. I tried several different searches: “snapshot,” “woman,” “young woman,” “female,” “normal woman,” “Jane Doe,” “Annabelle,” and so on, with limited success.

The magic words, it turned out, were “just me.” Something about the humility of that phrase yielded a great number of straightforward, unprofessional pictures of average-looking women, along with a variety of pictures of overweight men, prom singles, pornography, and people with their pets (“just me with my cats”).

Using the alchemical Photoshop, I created a composite Lily Hazelton that could not be traced back to any single individual. Lily sits on an overturned aluminum Grumman canoe, wearing short jean-shorts and a yellow tank top. She looks directly at the camera, smiling coyly—what a labor of pixels that was—and wields a paddle in her hands. Her nipples, thanks to a distortion trick, are slightly erect under the fabric of her tank top. A headband holds her straight sandy brown hair in place. She’s attractive, a little mysterious, outdoorsy but clean, and she’s just a touch out of focus.

I had no idea what kind of woman Henry Joseph Raven would like. Lily looked wholesome but adventurous. I followed my gut when it came to piecing together her features. Only when I was finished, putting the picture into the envelope along with a note (below), did I notice that the Lily Hazelton still hovering on my screen looked like my cousin Eileen might have looked if she were still alive.

Patty was my second true love. Her impossible predecessor: my cousin Eileen. Would I have fallen in love with Eileen had we not been placed under the same roof? I’ve thought about it endlessly, and I believe she could have pierced my heart even had we grown up on opposite sides of town. She was older, haughty, worldly, and despite our propinquity, always distant. She had developed from an early age a sense of the theatrical, and she had created an aura about herself, which she maintained seemingly without effort. Every once in a while, though, I could feel one eye trained on me, to see how I was taking it all in, to make sure she was still on top. When I moved in with my aunt and uncle, she treated me more like a houseguest or a nuisance than a new younger sibling. It was an ideal arrangement. I was close enough to feed the flames of my love; she was too distant to extinguish them.

One day things changed. I was thirteen, she was sixteen. I was in my bedroom, on my bed, examining a
Playboy
magazine I’d smuggled from my uncle’s collection for temporary use. The
house was deserted. My aunt and uncle had gone to a convention and weren’t supposed to return until nightfall, and Eileen was rehearsing a class project at a friend’s house. I took the opportunity to liberate my self-pleasuring activity from the confines of the tiny bathroom (fan on, water running) and enjoy myself in the
plein air
of my bedroom (music on, shorts off). I lay there, wad of tissue at ready, stroking myself with one hand, flipping pages with the other, trying to make the moment last, when my door swung open.

Eileen appeared in the doorway, smiling. I panicked, pulled sheets over myself, groaned in horror, and all the while the image of her smile burned itself into the back corner of my brain. This was not a smile of embarrassment, nor a smile of pleasure at my embarrassment, but a smile of calm, concentrated desire. She appeared at the end of my bed. I told her to go away. She shook her head, still with that smile on her face. The door, I noticed, had gotten re-closed in her wake. Then, as she moved toward me, she uttered a phrase I will never forget: “Let me help you, Owen.”

I was her first boyfriend. We were mildly ashamed at our being cousins and being together; nevertheless, it was a secret well kept from the rest of the family. She alternated between aggression and shyness. She wanted or didn’t want certain things to happen. I was too young and inexperienced to know where we were heading next, so I always let her “drive.” That was the language we used—she was old enough to drive, I wasn’t. (Later, much later, I saw the play
How I Learned to Drive
, in which this metaphorical construct was pursued in telling the story of an uncle’s initiation of his niece. I walked out, to Patty’s disappointment.
Rather than explain any of it to her I faked stomach cramps for the next two and a half hours and pretended to vomit in our locked bathroom, pouring cup after cup of water into the toilet while retching intermittently.)

Eileen and I kept it up for a summer, at the end of which we were discovered. My aunt and uncle were horrified. There was talk about sending me back to live with my father, but it was decided that Eileen and I had learned our lesson. They would keep their eyes on us. My aunt didn’t trust my father. A few months later, Eileen got herself a boyfriend, some eleven years her senior.

I moped for a while, couldn’t untangle my feelings, chased various other girls who reminded me of her. She moved out a year and a half later. During my college years, Eileen lived in what she called an “artists’ colony” and others called a “sober community center,” but which was in fact a shooting gallery for addicts, and unlike any depiction of one I’d seen in movies or on television. I visited her there only once. Her room was in a lofted space, hidden behind a series of false bookshelves, and had no windows. She’d painted the walls bright colors and light came over the top of the bookshelves and down the angled ceiling. It was a tiny, cramped, cozy space which made me think of a camping tent. I didn’t see any bathtub when I was there.

We went for a walk and an almost unrecognizable figure from my high school lagged just behind us. My cousin shouted expletives at him to go away. He had been the most talented—naturally talented—young pianist at my school and was now convinced we were going out to “score” and wanted in on it. Eileen and I had a cup of coffee down the street. She, who had
been my sexual initiator, had lost all sense of sexuality about her person. She wanted money but didn’t ask for it. I left her something to help her “get back on her feet” and gave her my phone number at the college. She never called.

Six months later, my aunt called to invite me to Eileen’s funeral. She’d died, in the bathtub, of a drug overdose. I spoke with her friends and with other cousins, and I heard rumors that she had left a note. My aunt never mentioned any note. Perhaps she wanted to make it seem less her fault than willful suicide, or perhaps there never was a note and Eileen’s death had actually been an accident. I never found myself able to ask.

The young woman lying in the coffin was both Eileen and not Eileen. I had not seen her for six months, and she’d been doing serious drugs; she bore little resemblance to the healthy pre-drug Eileen of a few years back. She was thinner, of course; her hair looked synthetic. Most people, upon encountering a corpse in a viewing room, look at the chest, for signs of breathing. On television, people walk up slowly and sadly or throw their bodies on the casket, but in real life most people, whether they admit it or not, look for a final sign that their loved one is really, truly dead.

Half a year earlier any trace of sexuality had been missing. In the casket, it was back, thanks to her mother picking out a dress from the days of clean Eileen, and thanks to a makeup artist who had probably mistaken her unhealthy looks as the pall of death and decided to restore her to a long-gone, fictional Eileen-hood that none of us who knew her had seen for years. Which is not to say she didn’t look like a corpse. Her skin had lost its translucency (once prized by me) and had gone as opaque as a candle.

It wasn’t until her funeral that I charted my cousin’s appetite for self-destruction and linked it to the way she had treated me as a boy. I had always considered our summer to be my first legitimate encounter with the opposite sex, but looking back on it, I began to wonder where she had acquired the forwardness, the enormous sexual appetite that never seemed entirely her own. And so my experience of Eileen’s funeral was one of scrutinizing the older men, relatives, and friends, for he who had been there first.

Raven’s reply number two was brief:

I could almost hear him laughing.

The next morning, I kissed sleeping Patty goodbye and made my way over to the office, where I hoped I could forget about Lily a moment and get a few things accomplished. When Patty was asleep, a part of me was asleep.

Neil was sitting at my desk when I arrived. My cubicle had a window at one end, his did not, so I was not surprised to see him there in his usual Hawaiian shirt and navy blue pants. I was not surprised, either, to see my trash can stuffed with the remains of his fast-food breakfast.

“Out,” I said.

“Sorry, man. Hang on a sec. Let me just save these docs.”

“Quickly,” I said. I stood behind him and looked out the plate glass window. It was dirty. “Did you leave those handprints on the window?”

“No.”

“They weren’t there when I was here a few days ago.”

“Maybe you should come in more often.”

“My wife is having a difficult time, remember? And I get more work done at home without you bothering me every five minutes. Now could you please clean the window?”

“I didn’t get it dirty,” he said. He held his hand up to the glass to show me that the handprints did not match. “Probably someone’s kids.”

“Did you bring your kids in here?”

“Nope.”

“Could you at least take your trash when you go?”

He did.

I pulled my files out of my bag and got ready to work on them, but found I could not concentrate. I fetched myself some coffee. Neil snacked and breathed, I felt murderous. Every time I looked up, I saw a child’s greasy handprints blocking my view of the office park. I am not by nature a neat person, but I do like a clean working environment. I called down to maintenance and asked them to send someone up to wipe away the handprints. They summoned a sympathetic janitor who sprayed and squeegeed the window clean.

I got in a solid four hours’ work on the software manual before Raven crept into my consciousness again. Lily had managed to tap one avenue of appetite, and Raven had responded. He hadn’t seen through my ruse. It was a start. But did Raven really mean to
dismiss such an eager correspondent? Either he was trying to test Lily in some way or he had succumbed to one of those destructive impulses so common to the criminal mind. It seemed to me he could have milked a real Lily Hazelton for more pictures before testing her tolerance for obscenity. This line of thinking brought me to the conclusion that the “test model” was not necessarily the most likely explanation. I leaned toward the “impulse model.” The same brain chemistry that would allow someone to kill another human being without thinking about the consequences might also move him to “kill” a correspondence without considering the deleterious effects it would have on future contacts.