Thy Neighbor (33 page)

That is the worst of superstition.

The loop of time. The loop of tape.

For me?

Stop it.

Stop this now.

And don't listen. Don't think. Anymore.

Burn it.

This has not been deserved.

There is no significance for you.

In suffering.

I popped the tape out of the machine.

Don't think.

Don't think.

Don't answer the fear of what might be.

There is no prophecy in this.

No same place to come back to and die.

I eased a loop out of the cassette and pulled, right arm flinging to the right.

Again, again, again.

Until a pile of shining ribbon was lying on the table.

Scooped it in both hands, dropped it in the trash. Full circle.

The mesh trash where Robin had placed the first note.

All four notes were there on the desk. I threw them in on top of the tape.

And poured on some Jameson for closure.

I walked through the hall, through the kitchen, for matches, then the door.

Sliding out back.

Striking.

Slitch. Whoosh.

I dropped the bright gold match into the bin.

And a sickly blue-green flame leapt up.

Above a scar of melted black plastic bubbling, and the ash of a girl's diary expiring.

27

They had the service for Robin at Temple Israel. Same synagogue, same rabbi who buried John Bloom.

Mrs. B. greeted the mourners with her signature poise and salt of the earth. Most of them were people she hadn't seen in years or barely knew. They were there to be part of the history that they had heard, and sometimes said, so much about. The real estate agents and the classmates all grown up, the professionals who'd had some contact with the myth, or years ago maybe with Robin herself. Dr. Cunningham's widow was there with his surviving sister, Rose. Dorris and Jonathan Katz were there with the kids, chastened, looking like a family, remorseful over the good fortune they'd scorned.

Gruber and family were there, too, including, at Mrs. B.'s insistence, Jeff, who was ravaged with guilt and remorse over the accident and had thought it more seemly to stay away. But Mrs. B., being Mrs. B., took him aside and worked her magic, erasing all blame and the validity of self-torture. I can see her saying it: “Just come if it will make you feel better. If it won't, don't. But let it go, dear boy, let it go. This is not yours to carry.” Or something like that. And I can see Jeff crumpling to the floor in relief and admiration, worshipping, as I did, the release in an old woman's words.

Jeff's case is still pending, natch, so no one knows for sure what's happening. My guess is he'll plead to involuntary and do a stint of probation/community service, or at the very most wear an ankle bracelet for a while. Definitely no time in juvie, even. He's a model kid despite his surroundings, and the lawyers involved will settle, no question, because there isn't a jury in four counties who'd convict an abuseling son of Gruber's for shooting at the oncoming ghost of Robin Bloom at five in the morning while having at it with the old man over his pistol collection.

Just a guess, but judging by the size and mood of the crowd at the funeral, the whole incident has been like a great collective sigh of relief for the community, as if someone—thank God it didn't have to be them or theirs—had finally slain the succubus and broken her curse.

Dave, Kitty, and Sylvia even showed up at the service, looking painfully related, like day-old sausages all gray in a row—same girth, same face, same hypertension. It's a testament to Mrs. B. again—a huge one—that they even let those three bears in the door, given Eggnacht, but then maybe everyone figured this was part of the purge. Tears of the neo-Naz wash away the stain? One Jew is very like another? Mourn one, absolve all.

God only fucking knows. Mrs. B. had way too much class to even notice, and—oh, I don't know—maybe she had a few other things on her mind just then. She wasn't likely to be concerned about whether Dave had completed his sensitivity training after all this time, or whether this was part of it. Every person there, including me, was an invader more or less. It didn't matter what your stripes were.

It made me sick. The whole service—being there, knowing all the dirty lines of contact that had run between the corpse and the crowd, and between the presiding and the lesser mourners—was like watching a lurking, slinking pack of scavengers circling a kill, waiting for the alpha to finish his meal.

At the mingle after the service, it got worse. Then it was like a receiving line for my spy self and his drunk infelicities, patching over or poking at all the shit that had gone down in recent weeks between my neighbors and me.

Katz offered me his hand and, with typically vulgar self-absorption and bad taste, said, “Did I do this?”

“How's that?” I said, not even looking at his face.

“Well, I don't know,” he stammered, guiltily. “I guess I just thought I might have set this whole thing in motion.”

I locked in on him coldly.

“Is that why you came?”

He looked away, embarrassed.

“God, no. I just feel so awful about all this, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said in a tone that was distinctly not understanding. “This is a funeral for everyone but Robin. I've never seen so many different people gathered to mourn themselves.”

“I didn't mean it like that.”

“Nobody means anything. That's the problem. You're all here wandering around as if you'd had a summons and you're waiting for your name to be called.”

“Come on now,” he said. “That's not really fair.”

“Whatever.”

I said this dismissively—conversation over—but he lingered, shifting his weight awkwardly and straightening his tie.

“Listen,” he said, leaning in. His breath smelled of last night's booze and bad sleep. “What the hell happened with you and Simon?”

I chuckled dryly.

“See what I mean?”

“I'm just asking.”

“Yeah. Of course you are. Pediatrics is a small world out here, right? Wouldn't want it getting around that you hastened one of your colleagues to his end.”

“You really are a nasty piece of work,” he said, squinting at my nasty face.

I ignored this.

“So, old Simon. You want to know, huh? Well, I'd say you definitely put the kibosh on that old man. Led me right in. He was waiting with his neck out, just as you said.”

Katz looked as if I'd punched him in the stomach.

“Oh, relax,” I said wearily. “I would have found him with or without you. Or he would have found me.”

“What do you mean?”

“We had other business. It doesn't matter. Look—” I clapped him roughly on the shoulder. “All of this was already happening before you and I even had our first clue. Robin was a twisted bitch, okay? Sorry, but she was, and she'd have said it herself. This is what she wanted.”

He was shocked.

“What, to die?”

“And to tie us all in knots in the end. Big-time . . . If she's anywhere now, I guarantee you, this conversation is making her laugh. Hard.”

He looked at me with disgust.

“God, Nick.”

“What? Am I ruining your orgy?”

“Have some res—”

“I knew her, okay?” I said angrily. “I knew her up to the last moments of her life, and I knew what she was doing all along. There's nothing you can tell me. Nothing. Got it? And I'm not going to give you a handshake and a smooth-over because you feel kinda sorta bad about all this and you've figured out that you were wrong about me.”

It was his turn to balk.

“I wasn't wrong about you at all.” He snorted, shouldering past me with a last glare. “You've made that clear enough.”

He pointed his finger at me.

“I'm watching you.”

“Well, that's something, anyway,” I called after him.

He shuffled off without turning, huffing to himself and shaking his head. Within a few steps he ran into someone he needed to impress, and he pulled out his swooping, asskiss handshake again and the nauseating grin that went with it.

I was still gawking at him when Dorris touched me on the shoulder. She'd been trailing behind Jonathan with the kids, scrounging fistfuls of comfort from the cake table. She hadn't heard my exchange with the good doctor.

She was all sheepish pursed lips and motherish oh-isn't-it-just-awful, which softened me slightly, but only slightly. The rest of me wanted to nudge her into a pileup with Dave and kin, whom she was assiduously avoiding, and watch her squirm.

“I'm sorry, Nick,” she said, surprising me.

I nodded stiffly. “Okay.”

“No, really. I'm sorry about everything. I'm sorry for the accusations and the ugliness that happened between us. I had no right.”

She looked down at Miriam, who was now standing between us, her needy thumb hanging loose in the gape of my trouser pocket.

“I'm really ashamed . . . I got so caught up.” She shot a look across at Dave, who was huddled by the bar
sans famille
, sucking obscenely on a can of Coke. “I just lost all perspective on everything and I shouldn't—”

I felt again the old pathos of Dorris Katz sobbing in the mirror. I could see her face there up close in the glass, through the glass and through the dark glass of my TV, with all the furrows of grief gouging themselves deeper in the image of her face. I thought, too, of her ripping Miriam out of my grasp, or, rather, ripping me out of hers on my doorstep and marching her into the dungeon with Dave. I could see now, once again at close range, the copper-colored sideburns on her cheeks, poorly bleached, and the desperation they exposed. I thought of how hard I'd cried the first time I'd seen Dorris sobbing and cutting herself at home, a mother like my own, lost in motherhood and afraid and angry at the diminishment of her person in the role that had been prescribed for her.

“He was punishment enough,” I said, nodding at Dave. “And I really don't deserve an apology. I've treated you and a whole hell of a lot of people only marginally better than Dave treated you, and that's nothing to be proud of. I'm the one who should be sorry, and I am. I really am.”

I smiled down at Miriam.

“Do you accept?”

She looked up, confused.

“Huh?” she said.

“Do you accept my apology,” I said.

She frowned and shook her head.

“Unh-unh.”

Dorris and I looked at each other and laughed.

“Yes,” said Dorris. “I do. I do accept.”

“Well, okay, then,” I said.

She took Miriam's hand from my pocket and squeezed it.

“Well, okay, then,” she repeated. “Good.”

She kissed the tips of her fingers at me and slid into the crowd waving backward as she went. Miriam didn't even turn around.

Meanwhile, Dave had seen us watching him. He was still waiting to catch my eye. When I turned to him, he shrugged exaggeratedly, threw up his hands, and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “So what now?” or “What's been has been, right?”

A nasty piece of work, I thought. Yeah, there. That Alders creature, she'd said. How strange to hear that, to think of it being on her mind and thrusting to the fore in the last argument. And now it is written here in these last transcripts, my long association with this emblem. Dave, the standing image of every base inclination I have ever hated in myself. This was the self that I was still being, or still capable of being in the company of my neighbors—hadn't Jonathan said or shown as much?—the self that I would always revert to with them, because they could provoke me like no one else. Like family.

Here was the front of the familiar, the mask that had been my face. All of these people, this place, this revolving grief and punishment growing out of this neighborhood and this ground, as surely as we had. Robin was right. The knots you tie that make a net you cling to. With every turn the trap cuts deeper.

Get away, I said to myself then. Just get away. That's the message. That's the course. And as I said this, I believed it for the first time. I could move. A plan and motion conceived. You cannot stay here and change. Isn't this the proof of it, standing right there, courting liquored apathy with you as usual?

I looked across at Dave, and as kindly as I could, I shook my head. No, I just can't do it, fatso. Not anymore.

He cocked his head sideways, like a dog trying to get a tone of voice.

I shook my head again, more slowly. Just quit it.

Then his face fell, in surprise, I think, as much as anything else. He knew I meant for good. But he recovered quickly, sliding into that lazy, sleazy turn of mouth that I had come to know so well.

He would be fine. He would be Dave, eternally standing in line at the all-night drugstore buying Twizzlers and chew. He would slop over himself over the years, in great globular folds, a row of teats down his front, and he would shuffle to and from the bathroom with a cane by the time he was fifty, if he made it that far. And then, one day, they'd find him dead in his basement chair with his flesh fused to it.

Leave now, I said to myself, and someday you'll read about it in the paper.

And so I did. I turned and I went.

And as I was squirming through the crowd with my shiny, freeing resolution in mind, eyes down, avoiding, making my way purposefully for the first time in years toward an exit, it was then that I knew I was going to have to sell the house in absentia. Gut it, scrape it, clean it, and leave it. Right away. As in: now. A mission. Go out. Go home. Go quickly. There is nothing else to do but this.

I didn't even say anything to Mrs. B. on the way out. She was busy being gracious to the gawkers in a corner, and, anyway, she would understand. I had a plan for that, too.

I walked out in the automatic daze of my intentions, drove home, and started in.

I took the smashed video equipment first, eight heavy-duty garbage bags full, and ran it to the dump. And I can tell you, right from the overbearing heart of a boy who cried for elusive absolution, no confession to the parish priest ever felt that good. Watching those bags tumble down the embankment into that ripe, piled, rag-strewn midden, I felt high and soaked through with the shirking of it.

I made a dozen more trips to the dump this afternoon and evening, my car piled with bags full of everything detachable in the house, until all that was left was the furniture and a duffel bag full of my clothes.

I am writing this now sitting at my emptied desk, in this criminal room, for the last time. When I finish, I will take my duffel bag and my laptop and put them in the car. I will drive to the FedEx/Kinko's on Maple and Fourth, print these pages, bind them, and post them to Mrs. B.

Then she will understand everything.

And that is an end to our acquaintance. An exit. As quick in the making as it was slow in coming. A decision and change. An escape, which can happen only when the moment is right, and must happen in the moment. Now. A complete break, a run for the gate when the guard turns, when the guard and the prisoner are both me.

Flit
.
That's the way. Slip out and gone. Become someone else somewhere else, and you will know the story of names changing, and the hitch of people not quite changing, their pasts forever lost but never leaving.