Thy Neighbor (11 page)

“I'm not talking about me, fuckface,” she crowed. “I'm talking about her, and you can bet my word'll be more believable than yours.”

Whoa. Where was all this shit coming from? What had I said the other night? What had I done?

Nothing. Fucking nothing.

The woman had turned her children's home into a bordello, and she was going to claim the moral high ground with me?

Nuh-unh.

“I wouldn't try to play the outraged mother if I were you, Dorris. Have you checked a mirror lately? You look like the cook in a meth lab.”

“Right,” she hissed, turning on her kitten heel. “You are so fucked, you pathetic, twisted, infantile prick.”

She was halfway down the walk before she spun around again.

“I'll be back with the cops in five. Then we'll see who believes.”

“Oh, cool it, Dorris,” I blurted. “She's here. Unharmed. All in one piece, no thanks to you and Dave. Come in and see for yourself.”

She shot me a look about the Dave comment, but decided not to contest.

“You scared the hell out of her,” I hissed, “you fucking slag. Can't you at least put her in day care while you ply your trade?”

Miriam had appeared behind me, grasping at the belt loops of my jeans.

Dorris stepped close enough for me to smell the vodka and the sex on her breath. Her face had runnels of sweat on the brow and upper lip and along the trace of sideburns by her ears. She'd dyed them an alarming shade of copper, which only made them stand out more noticeably against the deep-lined mahogany of her cheeks.

She leaned in closer still, close enough to kiss me, and hissed:

“F-U, Nick Walsh. This is not over.”

She flushed and pushed me aside, pawing for Miriam as if she were a fork that had fallen down the sink and lodged itself in the disposal.

“Come on, missy. That's quite enough excitement for one day. We're going home.”

“Nooooo,” Miriam wailed. “I won't go. I won't.”

She pressed herself against my legs and wrapped herself around, arms and legs crossed and locked.

“Oh, yes, you will, little lady,” grunted Dorris through gritted teeth.

She peeled savagely at Miriam's fingers one by one, then tried for the twined ankles instead, but to no avail. The kid was latched like a poultice.

Dorris bellowed and huffed with frustration, her halitosis souring thickly around us. I turned my head away in disgust, leaving myself open for the strike, which came as swiftly and surreptitiously as the low blow always does.

Bam!

She hiked her knee into my balls.

I felt my throat close and my breathing stop, the familiar jolt, like pulling the panic brake on a train, the lock before the long, hideous screeching of wheels.

As I buckled and face-planted to the stoop, she pulled Miriam, shrieking, by her hair, and force-somersaulted her over my back and down the steps before I could even inhale.

I watched them go, pushing and tearing at each other, my eyes bulged and glazed, frozen as everything else.

Wait it out. Wait it out.

The waves of nausea came and came again, then the trembling, the adrenal haul through the bloodstream, juddering the limbs.

Everything was sideways, but I could see that they were in their driveway now. Dorris had a firm hold on Miriam, an upright full nelson with Miriam's arms pinned back butterfly, Dorris's hands locked at the back of Miriam's neck, and Miriam's feet limp atop Dorris's own, marching forward by force.

The front door opened and Dave appeared briefly in a pair of candy apple red briefs that, even from that distance, I could see were too shiny to be cotton. He stepped out of the way to let Dorris and her cargo pass, and the light caught the bulge of his codpiece.

Yep. Vinyl for sure.

Big as you please in the doorway with a ten-year-old in tow.

He glanced in my direction and laughed, then slammed the door behind them. The glass storm door rattled in its frame.

No mercy, my friend. Just wait. He could laugh at that when the time came. I was gonna hurt him till you couldn't even recognize his face.

Meanwhile, motor control was coming back. Slowly.

I was flexing my hands, then my arms, then my legs—still on my side—then on my back, flat against the stoop, staring up at the narrow panels of the aluminum siding, row after row under the eaves.

If I had a cent I'd have that redone, I thought. It's been—what?—fifteen years? More?

Seventeen. Yeah. Seventeen for sure.

I remembered Mom telling me about it. I was in my senior year at prep, I think, and we were having one of our Sunday phone calls. How's it going? How's school? How was your week? They were having the siding done, she was telling me, and it was going well. Normally I wouldn't have remembered a detail like that, but it was around the time when Mom was getting really friendly with Robin Bloom. Every week I heard a story. The parrot story or a sleepover story or something to do with that kid.

She was everywhere, like a gravitational force that everyone bowed to and bended toward, often without even realizing it. And it wasn't just the neighbors, Gruber, and my mom. It was everyone.

I guess that's why I remembered this particular story so well, because I remember thinking at the time that it was just weird, the power that kid had over people. Even total strangers.

People like the guys putting up the aluminum siding. Gruff tradesmen, you'd think. Thermos and lunch pail kinda guys who'd have spent their breaks smoking and swearing and ogling the likes of Dorris Katz, if she'd been here then, or someone's teenage daughter walking the dog.

But fuck me if Robin didn't charm the pants off one of them. He practically fell in love with her, from the sound of it. Mom said this guy took a scrap piece of aluminum, cut it to size, and made a bracelet out of it. Worked on it every chance he got for a week. Spray painted it with moons and stars and shades of the night sky, and presented it to Robin, ceremoniously on bended knee, like a troubadour.

Crazy.

But that was Robin all over, I guess. This precious, beautiful, sweet fairy-tale girl that men and women fetishized and fell for. Flop. Flop. Flop. All the way down the line, like daisies under her feet.

And there I was, too, lying under the overhang, all Gumby on my back, my crotch in a knot, thinking of Robin Bloom seventeen years after the fact and wondering: Whatever happened to that bracelet?

Did Mrs. Bloom still have it enshrined somewhere in a Lucite case along with all the other heirlooms of Robin's loss? Or the ones she could bear to keep?

Maybe one of these days I'd ask her. Just go over, ring the bell, and say, “Hey, I've been thinking . . .”

Thinking what?

About what a jewel your granddaughter must have been? Oh, and sorry for your loss?

Is there a decency interval on condolence? Is this unseemly after so long?

I beg your pardon, if so.

Finally, I sat up. I'd stopped shaking and the nausea was gone.

Not a sign from across the street. You'd have thought the house was empty for all you could hear or tell of what was going on in there.

A terrible silence.

It made me think of those stories on the news now and again, the kind of thing you can't forget and that gives you the willies when you're just walking down a quiet suburban street. Like the story about that Austrian guy who had kept his daughter prisoner in the family basement for more than twenty years, raping her all that time, and had had seven kids by her, three of whom had never seen the light of day. Never. Meanwhile, the guy's wife was living with him upstairs purporting not to know a thing.

That ruined a restless early morning stroll for me every time. I'd be out walking off the booze before bed just as the sun was coming up, and instead of thinking what I might have once thought (once when?), or let's say what a normal person would think—something like, “Oh, isn't it lovely to walk through a quiet place where people probably leave their doors unlocked and let their kids play unsupervised”—I'd be wondering instead if there was some girl who'd been missing for twenty years holed up in a basement being gored daily and bearing a brood of inbreds to a monster.

And then I'd wonder, how many horrible things are going on right now in any one of these houses? How many quiet crimes are being committed? And not by marauding bands of escaped cons or cat-burgling sex offenders registered on a website, but by family members, who, as the statistics are always reminding us, are far more likely to bring about your demise than a stranger, and are in a far better position to do so without arousing suspicion. Without arousing any kind of response whatsoever. Without making a sound.

Who was ever going to know?

Who would ever even conceive?

Well, I would, for one.

And maybe I was the only one.

But I
could
know what was going on, and what's more, I could do something about it.

Hell, I could be the self-styled superhero of the behind-closed-doors, the savior of the stay-at-home, the supreme violator of privacy who violates for the private good, for the individual good, because he knows that privacy itself is a violation, or could be.

Maybe I could help Miriam after all. I didn't have to guess at what was going on in that house. I could head down to the basement and see for myself, right there on the monitors. Live.

Was this a cause I heard calling? Was this a mission for the unholy? A turnaround for the—what had Dorris called me?—the twisted?

Why, yes, I believe it was.

Whoa
.

Hang on.

Wait. Wait. Wait.

Pull back for just one second here, and think.

Help Miriam?

Well, now let's consider that a bit more closely, shall we?

Before you get too overzealous and prosecutorial there, Nicky boy, and start installing a hotline for the police commissioner, hadn't you better remember what Dorris said? What Miriam herself said?

Oh, you're confused. Not getting it, I see. Okay, then. Well, let's review. Dorris said what? That Miriam thought you were God or something. Was that it? Interesting choice of words, considering. Don't you think? And Miriam had said something about choosing. You chose her. She definitely said that. Remember now?

Right.

So?

So, do the math. What does that add up to, smart guy? Still not getting it? Okay. Let's put it this way: What if, purely for the sake of argument, we allowed that you did somehow miraculously turn your atrocious peeping hobby into a superpower that could redeem your rotten soul and, in the process, save the American people from the scourge of their right to privacy? Let's say we granted that particular if for just a moment here. And let's call a spade what it is while we're at it, shall we? It's a pretty fucking enormous and lethargic if to begin with. But let's just say you did it. You became tinker tailor savior spy. Then what?

Well, in keeping with our theme here, I'd say you ought to be a tad worried about what you'll find when you finish all that snooping, wouldn't you?

I mean, what if the perp, the real badass behind it all, the guy on tape for all to see and slam the gavel on—
guilty!
—the really death-penalty-deserving scum of plain-Jane Middle America is, in fact, you?

What if you're the one sticking your schlong in Miriam's sticky bits and telling her not to tell? What if you
chose
her, just like she said? What then, wonder boy? What then? Will you turn the tapes on yourself? I'm just asking, 'cuz before you rush out and buy that cape and tights, you'd better know what you intend.

No recordings of that, huh?

Can't tape the doings when you're in the picture, right? But what if someone else could? What if someone else is watching the red record light while they're watching you?

Hoist, anyone?

Petard, perhaps?

Now there's one of Daddy's quotables for you. Or was it Mom's?

Pretty damn right on the money, no?

Yeah.

I thought so.

Thinkin' twice now a little? Maybe?

Damn right.

Idiot.

11

'Tis the sport to have the engineer

Hoist with his own petard.

That's the line Hamlet says.

About his college buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

He knows they're going to fuck him over—and he figures,
Ahh, let 'em try
. They're bunglers anyway, and they'll just blow themselves up with their own bomb.

'Course, that was before suicide bombers.

Time was, you could bank on the fact that the guy planting the bomb wanted to get out before it went off, and that was a kind of defense against it.

Sometimes.

But now. Blowing yourself up is the point. And how do you defend against that?

And do I even want to? Or is it the point? Was it the point all along?

To catch myself, kill myself, punish myself. That way. Hoist with my own petard. Caught by my own mischief. The subconscious works in circuitous ways.

Yeah,
Hamlet
.

Jesus. Mom made me learn that whole fucking play practically by heart in the sixth grade. She'd have me go through every speech and put it in my own words so that I'd really understand what it meant.

We did it with most of Shakespeare.

So, for example, when Macbeth says the bit about sound and fury signifying nothing, my version was: “Yeah, life. A lot of shouting and shoving that doesn't mean jack shit in the end.”

“Exactly. That's it,” she'd hoot. “Very good. This is fabulous. Go on.”

So I would. I did.

Making Shakespeare into slang for my own edification, and for the ancillary amusement of my mother.

Or was my edification the ancillary bit?

Unsure.

I made her laugh, though. God, I made her laugh.

She was probably smashed anyway, but who cares? Making her laugh was like winning the trophy or getting laid or falling in love. It was a swooning feeling all through me and an inherent sense of value, like I meant something, was worth having all on my own, just for being and being funny.

I didn't have that feeling very often, and even then it was conditional.

Make me laugh and I'll love you. Don't just be. Be a clown.

Or:

“As Ovid said,” said Mom, “‘If you would be loved, be lovable.'”

Ouch
.

Yep.

There was no being in the Walsh household. Not in the ontological sense. “Being” as a noun. As in, a thing or a state. As in, I, Nick Walsh, am a being. A lump. An entity. A boy with certain qualities and not others. A child that simply is. That exists. Period. And so is loved.

There was none of that.

Being was a verb.

To be. To act. To perform.

Then came love.

Maybe.

If you did it right.

It's all there in the Yeats line.

The other one, along with the Ovid, that Mom said all the time, just for the pleasure of the saying and usually half to herself, but loud enough to hear. The one that hurt like a motherfucker when it got inside you and wormed its mellifluous way around.

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned.

By those that are not entirely beautiful

Boom
.

Suck on that and see where your esteem goes.

I wonder if she taught that to Robin Bloom? Or if Robin taught it to Iris? And if so, did Robin interpret it the way I did? As the needle of all insults? Or was that only something a biological child would do, convolute his own inadequacy in the mouth of his mother? Whereas a mere student would simply take it how it was meant, as a world-weary sigh made into song.

You know, poetry.

Oh, blow me, how it was meant.

Who the fuck knows how it was meant. It's how it was interpreted that counts, and the damage it did as a result. And anyway, it was meant the way I thought it was meant. You can believe that. It had just that whisper-thin edge on it that was Mom to a T. A paper cut that hurt more than a bruise and could never be sewn up or scarred over, but just gaped and ached for the rest of your life.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I get it. Boo hoo. Your poor hothouse flower of a broken heart bleeds nectar. Your crisis is not compelling.

And you're right. Sort of.

But I ask you this anyway, just as a matter of interest.

Why does a little learning always make people cruel?

And pardon me, Mr. Yeats—it is a beautiful line, and I know you were describing the world as it is—but isn't the whole mythic point and gobsmacking punch of love that it doesn't have to be earned? That it's given over, legs in the air, on your back as a fucking gratuity, just 'cuz?

Otherwise, why not call it lunch, and come right out and say that it ain't free?

Or don't say anything at all, if you're so clever. Leastways not to your kid, who's hanging on your every word
and etching it all in memory.

Keep your corrosive asides to yourself.

Whaddaya say, Ma?

Mum's the word?

No?

Nice try, but not a chance.

The sport is hoisting with petards.

So, bombs away.

The sport.

It really pisses me off that he called it that.

Like it was fun. A game, and loss of life was just part of the scrum.

Fucking Hamlet.

What a dick.

I mean, what an absolute arrogant, self-absorbed, grandiose douchebag.

And lest we forget, a murderer, too.

Big-time.

By the end, he's responsible, whether directly or indirectly, for the deaths of at least seven people, including his girlfriend, his mom, and three of his very close friends, but he's remembered as the hypersensitive, suicidal flake who couldn't make up his mind.

How stupid is that?

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
my ass.

The guy was just a killer with diplomatic immunity and a big mouth.

But everybody loves the smarty-pants in pain, right?

I was no different. Any spoiled kid who has a vaguely philosophical bent, serious daddy issues, and a bleak outlook on life has thought of himself as Hamlet and thought himself mighty profound and soulful for doing so.

But if you're a guy who went to boarding school and college in the Northeast with a bunch of tribal nimrods, you probably figured out pretty quickly that the only preppy outlets for homicidal teen angst are pisswater beer and team sports, preferably violent team sports.

You weren't going around reciting “To be, or not to be” and musing on the cause of Hamlet's inability to act.

You played lacrosse, or football.

Or rugby, if you were in it purely for the hurt.

Except if you were me, the idea of rubbing groins and grubby shoulders with your frat brothers while doing them grievous bodily harm just didn't have the right zing to it. Concussive sports are for sadists who like it quick and hard, the kind of people who'd go to a public execution and bring snacks. My frat brothers. Masochists like me, on the other hand, went it solo and called it endurance, because it sounded better than calling it what it was: slow torture on the inside where only you could hear you scream.

Worked for me.

Sport, usually endurance sport on my own, is where I put my pain. And where I found it. That's right. My amateur, low-level, not-a-tragedy pain.

I put it in the gym, on the court, in the pool, on the track. Running so long and hard until I got that burn in my lungs for hours after, lifting weights until my limbs gave out, swimming laps for miles, nose in the blue, eyes rolling, brain afloat, going over a poem or learning the map of Africa by heart just so I wouldn't obsess about my failures or my ignorance and cringe.

I practiced my jump shot until I could hit—swish—off the feed pass from every spot on the three-point line, even though I never tried out for the team. On scorching summer days, I stood on the blazing painted hard courts at the country club perfecting my serve at a slow roast until I looked like I'd been in the pool, and the downy felt on every ball in the practice basket had turned matted and gray.

I still play.

Tennis that is. With Gruber's middle son, Jeff, actually, who's a good player already at sixteen. He plays the second spot on the varsity and he's only a sophomore. We hit once a week under the lights down at the high school courts or, when the weather's bad, at the club that his team uses for winter workouts.

It's like going back in time.

When we get a long rally going and all you can hear is the squeak of your shoes and the thwack of the ball, I can almost lose myself in the rhythm of my arms swinging and the loophole of the sweet spot, until it feels as if I'm not exerting any effort at all, or thinking—just fitting, with an audible click, into a preestablished pattern that exists in nature independent of me and is going on all the time.

For that twenty minutes or hour or however long it lasts, I could swear I'm a teenager again. I have the same feeling I had then, that I've joined some cycle, or tide, or silent music and become a passive part of it, like a body being brought in by a wave, catching a ride on an unseen force.

I forget everything.

Even—especially—myself.

It was always that way in sport. The times when it happened, when my heart rate would settle at 150 and my breathing would steady itself faster and I would leave my body, or seem to, and float on the high of physical exertion—those were the times, the few times, when being really was a state of grace, separate from parental expectation and the onus of not knowing who I was.

But it didn't happen that often.

I chased it, pawed for it and the relief it brought me. But it came only when it wanted to, either because I'd eaten the right combination of things at the right time or because I was well rested and in a good mood—or, fuck knows, because the moon was full and Mercury was retrograde.

There wasn't any formula.

It just floated in and blessed me for a while and made me numb to the knife in my mother's laugh and the stab in her tutelage.

That was Mom.

A little learning made her cruel, sure, and the drink made her lethal, but until she and Dad did their last, I had it easy.

When I think about what I've seen in the last thirteen years—Miriam, Dorris, Dave, the Grubers—I'd even go so far as to say I had a free pass on the home front.

If I've learned anything from spying on my neighbors, it's that (to mangle Tolstoy) every family is extravagantly fucked up in its own way, and cruelty has a thousand faces.

A little learning is only one of them, and a minor one at that.

Take Gruber. Now there's a brand of cruel that's almost subhuman, except that he did the kind of appalling calculated shit that animals are incapable of.

Eric took the brunt of it.

Because he was the youngest, because he was the weakest, and because he was a bed wetter, among other verboten things.

Big deal, you'd think, right?

Rubber sheets. Extra laundry. No sweat.

But not to Gruber.

What did Gruber do in response to this comparatively minor domestic disturbance that afflicts millions of “normal” boys and families at one time or another and passes of its own accord without the use of corporal punishment?

He reacted like it was a trial sent from God, inflicted maliciously on him alone, the master of dogs and men, for whom when and where you cleared your tubes practically took on the significance of a religious rite.

Seriously, Eric probably would have been better off if he'd been gay.

One good whipping and it would have been over.

After all, cock is something you could swear off.

But the soiling?

That was beyond Eric's control, and thus beyond Gruber's, so it just brought out the brownshirt in the old bastard.

He broke the boy like a dog, or tried to, mostly because he persisted in believing that this involuntary nocturnal emission was a bad habit or a defiant act for which, as with so many other things, iron discipline was the indisputable cure.

It must have been going on for years by the time I got my cameras in there, because Eric was already twelve by then and onset for this sort of thing is usually a lot earlier than that. Besides, as much of a dirtbag as I knew Gruber to be, I don't think even he would have resorted right off the bat to the extreme measures he was using by the time I got online.

At night, all night, he made Eric sleep in an extralarge dog crate down in the basement. He had it set up by the sectional couch down there with the overhead light on for Eric's added discomfort. The cage was within range of the cameras that Damian had put in the gaming system, so I got to see the whole gulag rigged up in detail—not that there was much to it. It had a padlock on the outside—to which, of course, only Gruber himself had the key—and no blankets or bedding of any kind on the inside. Just Eric, naked and white as new, curled on the removable plastic floor pan.

Gruber had clearly once used the crate to train his Rotties, though now, apparently, having become masters of their own micturition, they enjoyed the privilege of sleeping on luxury plush Fatboys upstairs.

But Eric, he was looking through crossed bars at the couch that was within groping distance. The comfy, sprawling, cloudlike couch that he knew the swaddling potential of because he sat or lay or sprawled on it playing Xbox for hours most afternoons.

Ah, afternoons, and evenings and mornings, too. How sweet they must have seemed. The waking times of day when his bladder was not a liability.

That poor kid. Tortured by his bodily functions. Imprisoned by something he couldn't help or stop.

Now that
is
malicious punishment from God.

Occasionally, for a good portion of the night, if I wasn't with Monica or Dave, I'd sit in front of the monitors and watch Eric sleep. I'd zoom the camera in as far as I could so that the cage and Eric in it took up the whole screen, and I could see every move he made. Sometimes, depending on his position, I could even see the expression on his face.