Thy Neighbor (16 page)

“That's different. He's different. I have to protect myself. I've had to learn that the hard way. I had a weird feeling. I had to know.”

“So what do you know?”

“Just that you know Damian. That's all.”

“Really? You had to know, and that's all you know? I don't believe you.”

“Fine. Take it or leave it, Nick. That's all I know, and it's all I want to know.”

She stood up.

“Never mind. It doesn't matter. This conversation is over.”

She shied past me at the door and I didn't move to stop her. It was the only time she'd ever left without touching me, without that tacit promise of return, and all I could think of was that word ‘untraceable,' a word that sounds exotic and fantastic and desirable until you need, and then it sounds tinny and sharp, like the pin being pulled from a grenade.

“Am I capable of harm?”

It was the last thing I asked Mrs. Bloom that night.

“Do you think I'm capable of harm?”

And she answered in that same gnomic way she'd answered everything else.

“We're all capable of harm.”

Yes, yes, but
me
, I'd thought, scratching at the palm of my hand. What about me? Me, Nick Walsh, individually, not me, son of the tribe that was thrown out of paradise?

But she didn't have an answer for that. How could she? What experience did she have of harm, except as its transitive recipient? Needle to daughter to mom. The gut punch of grief. Then something or someone to Robin to surrogate mom again. A sideswiping act of God. And last, the common thing, heart attack to husband to wife. Widow.

She knew the butt end of harm. That she did. But not the fist of it. Not the kind of mind that writes megalomaniacal love notes to little girls, or abducts them, or gives birth to them and leaves them on doorsteps. Even what Karen had done was unfathomable to her.

As for the rest, she couldn't bear to look.

And yet she had looked at me, really looked at me sitting there across from her, the sugar bowl and the coffee mugs and the welcome rudeness between us. But she had looked at me unknowingly, just as I had harbored Monica unknowingly, so it didn't count.

You didn't know what you were looking at most of the time.

You just didn't, even when you thought you did, even when you believed you actually were all of those flattering things you told yourself you were.

Shrewd and circumspect and discerning. Intelligent. You still didn't know. Even Albert Speer said that. Right, Dad?

Tra-la!

And herewith—cymbal crash—a rare line from Pop for the occasion.

One seldom recognizes the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder.

So true, old man, so true. You had your hand on my shoulder all the way. Through the test scores and the study habits, the final exams and the colleges of choice. You favored the small schools, where the faculty-student ratio was low and you felt the experience was more hands-on, more conducive to the transfer of knowledge, or the feisty pursuit thereof.

“You'll get lost at a big university,” you'd said. “You won't get the individual attention. You'll get survey courses taught by graduate students and shooting-star professors who are too preoccupied with their book tours and speaking fees to give you the time of day.”

You said not to apply to Columbia, because Harlem was a hole. You said that NYU was mediocre, and, anyway, too full of Jews. You let me try Harvard as a long shot, because you couldn't resist the cachet, but we both knew I didn't have the numbers, and we both turned out to be right.

So I loaded up with the small schools, the ones with tasteful surnames and remote locales, and the forgiving admissions policies for dreamers who didn't test well.

I had the test scores of a space monkey, but I wrote an essay about God and how I'd spent my last winter vacation on a retreat at a monastery in Spain. Your idea, of course. The monastery and the essay. But it worked. I got in to all those buttoned-down middlebrow schools that you'd be proud to wear on your sweatshirt. And then I chose one of them and went there, because you, Daddy, thought it was the best.

Yes. You had your heavy ham hand on my shoulder saying, “Good boy” or “Work hard,” and when I turned to look at you, it's true, I did not see the devil. I do not see him still, except in the traces of a bad deed that happened so quickly, so passionately, it might have been any one of us on the wrong day with the wrong confrontation.

A lapse and eternal damnation.

Yes, surely, you are among the damned, if there is such a company, wandering, groveling, stewing somewhere, in some time or supernumerary dimension, but you are not a cliché of the damned, any more than you were a cliché of the devil. You do not smell of sulfur. You smell of slow determination and your golf bag, and the Brylcreem in your hair.

So how was I to know? How am I to know? Does the devil play golf? And where were the horns under your hairline? Was Satan so impeccably groomed? Or just Lucifer, who must have lost his luster on the descent?

I don't know, Dad. I don't know.

I do not recognize the signs.

Even in myself. I do not.

Because I do not know the answer to the question: Am I capable of harm? Deep harm. Fatal harm. Diabolical harm. And under what conditions? Perhaps that is the only relevant question. Not if, but when?

“We are all capable of harm,” she said.

And that is what she meant.

No if. Just when.

But to that I would add the real question, and that is the question I did not ask, because it is the question to which she could not possibly have or wish to know the answer.

The first question is routine.

Am I capable of harm?

Why, yes. Of course. Obviously.

That is only a matter of placement and provocation and incalculables so numerous that you had better not think about them, or you'd never get out of bed in the morning.

But the second question: How much?

How much harm am I capable of?

Ah. Well, that is something else entirely.

And that is not a question you ask an old woman sitting at her kitchen table of a companionable evening, even if you think she's the goddamned oracle of Apollo. And why? Because you do not really want to know the answer.

You know it already, which is why you asked the question in the first place, or half asked it, and then skulked away, soothed and appeased by a platitude.

The truth is, one seldom recognizes the devil, even when the hand on your shoulder is your own.

15

You see, this is why I hate Facebook.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I hate Facebook, prime among them being the fact that, despite hating Facebook, hating the very idea of it—its saccharine amity, its overweening groupiness, its inane, interminable blah, blah, blah—I've joined the nodding herd and posted a profile on it anyway, just like every-fucking-body else.

Yes, I've spent the time—way, way too much time—on my profile, deciding—no, it's worse than that—painstakingly culling what's cool and not cool to say about myself, what sounds right but is marginally true as well, or fibable if pressed.

I've taken the five hundred warped webcam snapshots of myself, been duly horrified by the results—am I really that rubber-faced? slab-nosed? droop-eyed? edemic?—and tried all the ameliorating effects—sepia, pencil sketch, black and white—but to no avail.

I've selected, from the measly offered list, what's safe or advantageous for the world to know about me, which amounts to very little—name, hometown, relationship status (“Other”?). And in the end, I've clicked that oh-so-apposite submit button and posted my self's thumbnail to the ether, like the love letter or the last orders hastily dispatched, going elsewhere, nowhere, and everywhere all at the same time.

Ridiculous.

But I submit.

To the religion of social networking.

And then what happens?

Well, exactly what you'd expect to happen. You get repeated, rapid-fire friend requests from all the fuckups, lamebrains, asswipes, and outcasts that you never kept in touch with all these years for a reason, and you find out they've become exactly what you'd expect them to have become: married, kidded accountants, salesmen, software designers, and schoolteachers, all posting this year's crop of family photos from the mid-March getaway on the Mexican Riviera or the Oktoberfest booze-up/corn maze with the kids.

And then, of course, there's the thimbleful of people you actually want to find who, apparently, don't want you to find them, and for all the same reasons stated above. You're their good-riddance classmate, cabinmate, teammate, regretted hand job, rim job, spit swap of whichever sad and shady stage of life and venue where the floor was tacky underfoot and the goings-on were best (and, thus, ruthlessly) repressed.

Friend request ignored.

Sure, you make a few connections on Facebook. Emphasis:
few
.

But you spend the rest of the time marveling at why it is that Jimmy or Joanie or whichever other generic and superfluous Your Name Here that you, in a moment of weakness, accepted as your friend thinks you give a rat's ass that they are, at this very moment, having a glass of conscientious Pellegrino in the tub and reading
Eat, Pray, Love
for the fourth time aloud to imminent progeny number three—it's a girl!—in utero.

I mean, fuck.

And yet, as I found out today when I logged on to my account, if it could—and, yes, I'm here to tell you that indeed it can—it gets worse. Because not only is Facebook home to the mind-numbingly logorrheic stay-at-home mom and the quietly desperate actuary languishing in his six-by-six-foot cubicle. It's also home to that holed-up cyber-psycho who has a special message just for you.

Or for me, as it happens.

And no, thank you, the rank ironies are not lost on me here. It couldn't have happened to a ruder pest. The peeker is being poked. The spier has been spied. I get it.

Nicky boy has a friend request from a stalker who is calling himself Iris Gray.

Iris Gray.

Can you beat that?

No photo, natch. Instead, per Facebook's template, just the blank outline of a male. Silhouette. White on blue. A male.

Okay, whatever.

But it's the message attached that's the real eye-burner.

It says simply: “What about those pink notes?”

A strong opening move, wouldn't you say?

King's pawn to D4, or something.

Not that I play.

But this player definitely has my attention.

And then some.

I'd even go so far as to say I'm scared. Truly. I mean, it was one thing to keep finding these notes, convinced, as I had pretty well become, that it was all my own work—and the excessive drinking that was making me forget. But now it's official. Someone else knows. Someone else is in possession.

Of the paperwork, or its implications, at least. And maybe more.

It's Gruber, of course.

Who else could it be?

Unless it's one of Gruber's boys, but I can't see that. What's the possible motivation or means? Mental means, I mean.

Eric's in a crate half his life, and when he's not, having been rendered semiretarded by this treatment, either he's at special school still trying to grasp the rock-bottom rudiments of the three R's or he's in front of the tube playing ultraviolent futuristic war games on Xbox.

Jeff and I are pals and see each other often. No grudge there, or I'd know about it.

J.R. is so steeped in anabolic steroids and militia camps I doubt he's even on the grid. At the breakfast table not long ago, he announced that the U.S. Armed Forces were too PC for him to bother with—“too concerned about civilian casualties to get the job done in the sandbox.”

I'm sure by now he's been so indoctrinated by the weekend warrior set that he thinks computers are Orwell's telescreens, part of the vast government panopticon watching
us
. If he knew about the cameras, he wouldn't be in the least surprised, and he sure as shit wouldn't write to me on Facebook. He'd kick in the back door, throw a hood over my head, and spirit me upstate to one of his deer hunters' goon forts where I'd wake up in a circle of inbred Dave types feasting on muskrat and questioning my loyalty to the secessionist U.S. of A.

Mrs. B. is the only other person who knows about that bird, or knows that it's alive and well, and she would never use its name as a pseudonym. Just thinking of Iris made her cry. Besides, she'd never use a pseudonym, much less designate herself as male. She'd never use the Internet. She doesn't even have a computer.

But then again, neither does Gruber.

Does he?

Not in his study anyway.

Yeah, but between them, his boys must have more hardware than they can keep track of. Judging by the look of the basement, that house must be a graveyard of motherboards. Besides, there are always Internet cafés and Internet courses for idiots free at the public library.

It's Gruber.

That Nazoid.

He's found the cameras.

Either that or Dave and Dorris have hired him as their bodyguard for Miriam.

That's possible.

Absurd, but possible.

Gruber would know Dave as the perpetrator of Eggnacht, if nothing else, and given Gruber's flaunted heritage and general comportment toward anyone whom he even suspects of being sub-Caucasian, I'd be surprised if he didn't send St. George's oaf a commendation on behalf of the Aryan Brotherhood when he saw Jack Gordon with egg on his face splashed across all the local papers for weeks.

Either way, alone or in Dave and Miriam's employ, it's Gruber.

Gotta be.

Gruber, who thinks he's being all stealth calling himself Iris Gray because he doesn't know that I know that he still has that bird jailed in his study piping the sonnets of Robert Frost in a perfect imitation of Robin Bloom.

Or does he know it?

No. That's paranoid.

Even if he did find the camera in his pencil sharpener, how in hell would he trace it to me? And wouldn't he be just as likely to do what J.R. would do in the same circumstance? Walk across our adjoining patch of grass and put me in a wheelchair?

I dunno. Maybe he's learned a thing or two about restraint in the hopes of spending his retirement as a free man.

How likely is that, though, really?

A lifetime of brute force without even so much as a Filofax, and suddenly he's the cunning hint dropper of the photon dot? The friend finder of Facebook? And more unlikely still, the stealth pink planter of black valentines?

Nick, man, your nerves have gotten the better of you. Take a breath. Have a piece of Nicorette and use your head. Chew on this for five and get a grip.

Right. Okay.

Question: So who's left?

Answer: Jeff.

Question: No, come on?

Answer: Yeeees. Think it through.

Have I been too quick to dismiss my singles partner?

Really? Jeff? Clean Jeff?

He is the only one in that house who's brainy and tame enough to do it. There is that. But why? I can't figure it.

He'd probably be thankful for the cameras—fodder for his day in court if he ever got one. Besides, I've never filmed him doing anything in the least incriminating, or even embarrassing. The guy's a machine of schoolwork, workouts, and sleep. He's like a prisoner of conscience in his own home. Model inmate.

But what do I know?

What did I know about Monica?

True.

Maybe that's why he's so withdrawn and impersonal, never much for talking over beers after a game. I always thought it was life in H-block that had rendered him near mute, but maybe it's me. Maybe all this time he's been playing not tennis but chess.

Oh, Christ. Who cares? I don't have the energy to speculate anymore. At this point it hardly matters. The game is on and I'm ready.

Do your worst, Iris Gray, my man, whoever you are.

Let's see what you got.

Friendship, is it, you're requesting?

Or a duel?

Fine.

Click.

I accept.

Meanwhile, today I finally had the stomach to go downstairs and check out what might be going on at Dorris's place. I haven't dared to look since Dorris as Mother Brown gave me tonsillitis of the scrotal sack on my own front stoop. What's more, I haven't cared to look since Dave pulled his whole
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
routine a few days later.

I actually yanked out the wires on the monitors, Katzes' numbers 1, 2, and 3, and they stayed yanked until this evening when close scrutiny of the Grubers yielded nothing more than the usual lobotomized Ellie lambent before the light-emitting diode in the living room, Gruber himself in his study lovingly fellating the snub nose of his Walther PPK, and Iris, inspired as ever, interjecting spots of Hopkins, I think it was, at intervals.

My heart in hiding stirred for a bird.

There was no sign of the boys.

I had to change the channel.

On KatzBO, the only news I got of the hostage Miriam was through Dave and Dorris's conversations about her, which of course took place postcoitus with the two of them flopped like a couple of leopard seals after a meal, seeping sebum and electrolytes onto the black sateen sheets. Word was, Miriam was conducting a strike of sorts in her room, door locked, lights out, and Justin Bieber on repeat crooning at his bluest and mooniest.

Bless her, she maintained my innocence of all but sympathy and kindness, or so said Dave, who had been assigned the wearisome task of prying the truth out of her, or whichever distortion of the truth would best suit Dave and Dorris's need for a scoundrel to blame their damage on.

She held firm, Miriam did, even in the face of bribes to do otherwise, or so claimed the exasperated Dave, pounding the teak headboard with his fist.

“She won't give,” he shouted. “She won't fucking give.”

“Shhh, baby,” cooed Dorris. “Shhh.”

Baby?

There is no hell where Dave is anyone's baby.

“Listen,” Baby said, hefting his wet bulk onto an elbow, “can't we just take her to a doctor?”

“Are you crazy?” Dorris wailed.

“No. No, listen. I mean, can't we just take her in and say, ‘Hey, Doc, can you take a look and tell us if anyone's been messing with her?'”

“If anyone's been
messing
with her? I can't believe what I'm hearing. What do you want him to do, a pap smear? She's ten, Dave.”

“No, I know, but I mean, can't the guy just get out his headlamp and find out if her Heimlich is still intact?”

“Hymen, you idiot. It's hymen. Even I know that. And no, he can't. No geriatric pediatrician is going to go spelunking around in my daughter, especially not without Jonathan finding out about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's in the field, genius. Pediatrics. They all know each other. Trust me, he'd find out.”

“Well, can't we go out of state and find some hole-in-the-wall, low-budgie guy who'd give us what we want?”

“Low-budgie? This isn't a snuff film, you complete shithead. This is my daughter. My God. What am I doing? What
am
I doing?”

She leapt out of bed, enraged.

“Get out,” she screamed, pointing savagely at the door. “Get out of my house.”

“What, baby? What?” said Baby.

She tore the covers off the bed.

“Get the fuck out. NOW!”

Dave slid to a sitting position, legs akimbo, all flaps and folds and mounds of flesh.

“All right, all right. Don't lose your shit. I'm going.” He groaned, throwing his feet to the floor.

“Damn right you're going.” Dorris sneered.

After that, the usual screeching and cursing that Dorris had done with Jonathan went on for a while between the two of them as Dave dressed. Dorris did all the screeching, while Dave merely grunted a series of nasty, half-inaudible asides as he searched for his clothes and other accumulated belongings under and around the furniture. He threw everything into a couple of pillowcases and walked out without a parting shot or even a glance in Dorris's direction, as if he'd just had the sudden urge to do some spring cleaning and had forgotten that Dorris was even there.

Dorris collapsed in a heap on the floor in the pile of covers she'd ripped from the bed, wailing herself senseless until, exhausted, she fell into a juddering trance and finally a leaden sleep. At some point later in the evening, I checked the monitor again and saw that Miriam had joined her, spooned in on the near side.