Cube Sleuth (21 page)

“Not at all. The last time I saw something like this, it was done by a wife who caught her husband in bed with the UPS guy.” The cop has a good laugh at that. Ah, the joys of homophobia.

The cop takes down my story. He never says he’s sure that I know who did this, but he nudges the conversation in that direction whenever possible.

He writes the report number on a piece of paper and hands it to me.

“Any chance they’ll catch whoever did this?”

He shakes his head. “Almost no chance, to be perfectly honest. I’d say absolutely no chance, but, you know, never say never. Something like this happens, you write a report, log it in the system, and it sits in there forever. Unless this happens to another car around here in the next few days, it won’t get a second look.”

“Thanks for your honesty. I figured as much.”

“Hopefully your insurance covers it.”

* * *

After taking pictures of my bedroom ceiling with my phone, I call my insurance company to file a report. I use the term
vandalizings
again with the insurance agent. The agent tells me someone will come out to look at my car the next day, that I should get a rental car and I’ll be reimbursed later.

The handyman comes while I’m on the phone with the insurance company. He whistles, impressed by the damage.

When I finish reporting my claim, I take pills for my headache, grab my keys and wallet, tell the handyman to lock up when he leaves, and begin my seventeen-block walk to the nearest rental car place.

* * *

I walk into Suzanne’s office two hours later, my shirt stained with sweat and my skin smelling like city streets.

I show her the cell phone pictures of my car under the pretense of commiseration, but really I want to prove that I’m not lying about why I’m late. I’ve used up all of my lies with her.

I was an hour late once and said I had a flat tire; I rubbed my hands on one of my tires until they were black before going into the building. I walked into Suzanne’s office, flashed my filthy hands, and said “I need to go wash these, just wanted to let you know I was here.”

I’ve also called her with my head sticking out of my apartment window to pick up traffic sounds so she’d think I was stuck behind an accident and not still in my underwear because I overslept.

Yes, I felt ridiculous doing these things, but I’d rather be ridiculous than unemployed.

My brother emails me to make sure I can still babysit my nephew the next night. I let him know what happened to my apartment and car, but that I’ll be there. I have a brief panic attack about accidentally dropping the baby into the garbage disposal while it’s running or accidentally selling him into slavery.

* * *

I call Nancy that night to tell her about my awful day. We’ve been talking more and more. I think about her a lot, fantasize about her, idealize her into the perfect woman for me. I always thought this type of romanticizing is strictly reserved for women I’ve never been with: the unattainable or the unattained, the unscratched itch. Being able to do this with Nancy feels great.

“Did you get your CDs? The stuff in your glove compartment? Your trunk?” Nancy asks the same questions my mom asked when I told her what happened.

“Yep, yep, and yep. There wasn’t anything good in the trunk though.”

“You should get mace or something.” Nancy is the only person I’ve told that Theo smashed my car.

“I’m a guy. I’m not getting mace. Mace is for women.” Meanwhile, what I
have
thought about getting is a gun.

“Mace is not just for women.”

“Sure it is. You’ve never known a guy who had mace. Neither have I.”

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t men who carry it.”

“Should I get a rape whistle too?”

“What if he shoots you?”

“If he was gonna shoot me, he would’ve done it when I was on his property wrecking his car.”

“You think he’ll tell the police what you did to him?”

“No, because then we’d both end up in jail after what he did today.”

“You should come stay at my mom’s. He can’t find you here.” My mom also wanted me to stay with her, but only because she thought the mold in my apartment would make me sick and because she feared the “hooligans” might try and beat
me
up next time.

“I appreciate that, but I’m not gonna hide from him. I’d have to come home at some point anyway.” I sit on my futon with my bat on my knees watching my bedroom ceiling drip, despite the rain having ended early this morning. Tarps cover my bed and dresser. Two buckets and a plastic trash can catch the water.

I tell Nancy about the unbelievable face-to-face conversation I had with my landlord when I got home from work that day. He told me that there were more than a dozen tenants with leaks as bad as mine, so there were no more available apartments of equal value to move into. He could move me into a nicer apartment, but my rent would go up.

I told him that I would pay what I was currently paying for the better place, but if he thought he was going to weasel more money out of me as a result of his neglect he was crazy, stupid, or both.

My landlord grimaced. He said he couldn’t give me the apartment at my current rent, but could take fifty bucks off the rent for me.

I reiterated that I wasn’t paying so much as an extra peso for his incompetence as a building manager.

He nodded thoughtfully and offered this: I could live in my apartment rent-free for sixty days, and he would give me back my security deposit. That would cover my new bed and dresser and most of a deposit on an apartment elsewhere. I’d have sixty days to find a new apartment.

I took the deal mostly because I had no other option. As much as I hated my shithole, it was at least a hundred and fifty-a-month cheaper than any other property in the area. And I didn’t have an extra hundred and fifty a month to spare.

Nancy sighs on her end of the line. “You could stay at my mom’s ‘till you find a place. She’d love having a boy to cook for.”

My brother was right: I’ll never again find a beautiful girl as nice and loyal as Nancy. Finding her once was dumb luck and having the chance to win her back after how I treated her is somehow the opposite of karma.

Our second first date is less than a month away. I need to come up with something amazing. Already knowing what she likes and dislikes is a big advantage, but having been together so long makes originality difficult. Nancy has always been easy to please, but that won’t keep me from pulling out all the stops.

My brother Joe watches me try to assemble the baby’s bottle the way he just showed me. I thought a baby’s bottle was just a cylinder with a fake nipple on it, but inside there is actually a complex system of pulleys, levers, tunnels, and ductwork designed to keep air from getting into the baby’s stomach.

When the bottle won’t close, Joe shows me the assembly process again, this time more slowly.

I ace the test on my second try.

I follow him around the house with a notepad while he explains my tasks and their possible pitfalls:

“Five ounces of distilled water. Four scoops of formula. Close the bottle and shake it up. Don’t shake too hard.”

Got it.

“These diapers if he pees or poops, but this diaper before you put him to bed. It’s thicker, so he doesn’t wet through it overnight.”

Got it.

“After you put him in, just pull up on the bar until it locks. Don’t put a blanket on him.”

Got it.

“This end is always on. The other end is on the ledge behind the couch. Turn it on after you put him down for the night. Just play with the volume until you can hear him breathing. It mostly sounds like static, but you can hear him breathing if you try.”

Got it.

My nephew is eight months old. He crawls around, no walking yet. He can sit up if you put him in that position, but falls over from the slightest disturbance in his surroundings. He can’t stand yet, but when you hold his hands and stand him up, he tries to run in place like Barney Rubble.

He hasn’t said his first word yet, but makes a hundred different sounds with a wide range of inflections and emotional tones.

He likes to watch Winnie the Pooh cartoons. He finds light fixtures mesmerizing. The swirling beauty of the ceiling fan transfixes him.

He has blue eyes that look almost gray, and his face looks exactly like pictures of my brother at his age. His soft brown hair moves in crazy patterns on his head like fudge swirl ice cream.

I sit on the floor beside him and watch him chucking his plastic blocks at the gated fireplace. The living room floor is carpeted everywhere but in front of the fireplace, where it’s granite. The baby loves the sound of the blocks clanking across the granite.

Despite looking right at him, I feel an almost constant urge to reach out and touch his back or head or leg so I know he’s OK. I continually scan the carpet for choking hazards.

This baby is the only male I can call beautiful without feeling awkward. Physically, he’s no different from most babies, but he seems perfect to me. His hair and skin and smile and hands and feet are all perfect. He has endless potential. He might become a Nobel Prize-winning politician, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a poet-laureate, the Pope, the scientist who cures cancer, the first astronaut to walk on a planet in another solar system. In his big shiny eyes I see all the hope that Whitney Houston sings about in the first verse of “Greatest Love of All.”

His innocence can be my salvation.

Even though he’s not my son, his birth and existence seems to be a sign from above that I need to grow up. He’s so tiny and fragile, I need to be strong and responsible in order to protect him. His existence demands that I become a man. And I haven’t yet. I’m still a boy, doing whatever makes me happy and pretending I’m a character in a murder mystery.

I’m not a character. Not a detective. After a few months of investigation, the two most likely suspects in Ron’s murder are Ron, and me. If the baby were old enough to understand my pathetic reality, I would be too ashamed to look him in his big shiny eyes.

“I’m gonna stop now,” I say to the baby. I make my voice sing-songy and arch my eyebrows so he smiles at me. I love talking to him because even though he can’t understand my words, I know he understands me better than anyone else. Babies don’t understand pretense, so you can’t help but be yourself around them. “No more detective stuff. Ron is dead and I have to accept it. He killed himself. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is.”

The baby crawls toward the fireplace and retrieves one of his blocks, immediately flinging it at the gate of the fireplace again. I put my hand on his little calf.

“I’m gonna do better at work. Try to show up on time. Try to get rid of my debts. Maybe do some freelancing.”

The baby screams the way I would scream if I were frustrated, but his face looks calm and content.

“I’m gonna be loyal to Nancy. Maybe I need to cut out the naked lady movies altogether.”

The baby laughs, looks back at me and scrunches his face into a smile.

“You know what naked lady movies are?”

He laughs again. I must be saying it funny. I repeat it a few more times until he goes back to throwing blocks.

“Time to get my shit together, buddy. I mean poop. Time to get my poop together. Not that other word. That’s a bad word. Poop is a good word. A great word, really.”

He looks at me again, expecting entertainment.

“Poooooop!”

He giggles.

“Pooooooooooooooooop!”

He laughs harder, a line of drool hanging from his outstretched tongue.

“Poo-ooo-ooo-ooo-OOO-ooo-OOOOOOOPa!”

It’s been years since I was onstage making people laugh. Cracking up this twenty-nine-inch audience fills that hole more than I thought was possible. And I wrote the material myself. Sure, it was only one word, but Ron would’ve liked it, would’ve said that it was a really deep Dadaist nonsense anthem that summed up our cultural depravity in one word. Then he would’ve added, “And it’s poop, so how can you go wrong?”

* * *

And just like that, I let go of the “mystery” of Ron’s death. As the night goes on, I feel a great sense of relief spreading through my body.

I give the baby his bottle after putting him in an overnight diaper. Drinking his formula, he holds the bottle with one hand and plays with his ear with the other, staring up at me the whole time. His constant, unselfconscious gaze hypnotizes me, and by the time he drifts off to sleep I feel like I’m about to, too, but the fear of rolling over in my sleep and crushing him keeps me awake.

After a half-hour of the baby sleeping in my arms, I carefully carry him upstairs and place him in his crib. I lift the front rail of the crib slowly and wince when it clicks into place. The baby doesn’t stir. I tiptoe out of his room like a thief in the night.

The house feels completely still, almost like walking through a photograph. I turn on the baby monitor and raise the volume until I can make out the baby’s rhythmic breathing through the warbling static. Sitting on the couch watching TV on mute, I listen to the baby’s breathing. After a few minutes, I start to breathe in and out with him. My body feels limp. The room hums like a quarter-fed vibrating motel bed. I float above my body. I think that if this is how it feels to be dead, death might not be so bad.

Considering that I just resolved to truly start living, death should be the furthest thing from my mind now right now. Time to become the version of me that my parents dreamed of when they looked into my big shiny baby eyes. Time to be a man. To get my poop together.

I go home after babysitting and sleep, well, like a baby.

When I wake up, I feel like I’m waking up from the bad dream my life has been for so long. Before Ron’s death. Before Nancy left. Before I broke my hand. Before I realized just how much of a rut I was in.

My sinuses are clear. I don’t have a migraine. Crisp air inflates my nostrils like I’m camping in the woods, even though I’ve been sleeping on a futon ten feet from a mildewy ceiling and buckets of stagnant water.