Thy Neighbor (17 page)

As expected, the reply from Iris Gray was prompt. Friend request acceptance accepted. Then an invitation to chat on the IM. The lower right-hand corner of the screen popped up.

“Hello.”

I obliged.

“Hello.”

“Thank you for accepting my request. I know the subject is touchy, but I needed to get your attention.”

“So you have it. Now what?”

There was a long pause on the other end, so I opened a file in Word to keep a transcript. Here's how it went.

Iris: “Now we get acquainted.”

“I'm not in the mood to dance,” I replied.

“So don't dance.”

Long pause. I could think of nothing to say to this. Then Iris again.

“Talk to me.”

“I am.”

Pause again. Then me again.

“I don't like being manipulated.”

“I'm not manipulating you. There was no other way.”

“Why no other way?”

“Because you had to see for yourself.”

“What did I have to see?”

“The notes. The evidence. The handwriting.”

“And why did I have to see it?”

“Because you wouldn't have believed me.”

“You don't know that. And now I don't know what to believe.”

“Maybe not, but trust me, this was the kindest way.”

“What do you mean, the kindest way?”

“The kindest way to tell you. To show you.”

“Yeah, well, trust me, it's not kind.”

“None of this will be easy. You've been through a lot. I know that.”

“Then why not leave me alone?”

“Because you want to know.”

“Know what?”

“What I have to tell you.”

“Then just tell me. I told you I didn't want to dance.”

“I will tell you. But slowly. There's a lot to know, and it will take time.”

“I'd rather just have it out and over with.”

“It will be, eventually. But not all at once.”

“Who are you to decide what I should know when?”

“I'm trying to help you.”

“Or fuck with me. How do I know you know anything worth knowing?”

“It's not a question of worth.”

“So you don't want money?”

“God, no! Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Money to destroy the evidence. Seems pretty straightforward to me.”

“The evidence belongs to me. I will never destroy it.”

“Then what's the fucking point?”

“I told you. You needed to know. You deserve to know.”

“Or maybe there's nothing to know, and you're just having fun at my expense.”

“Calm down.”

“Fuck you. You plant crazy notes trying to frame me for something horrible, and you expect me to be calm.”

“No one's framing anyone. Relax.”

“I say again. Fuck you.”

“I think you may be confused.”

“Uh. Negative, asshole. Not confused. Just really, really pissed off.”

“Don't be. Look, Nick. The notes can't harm you. But you have to go slowly.”

“How about I rip out your liver slowly?”

“In the end, if that's what you want, then be my guest. Maybe I deserve it. But just hear me out.”

“Then fucking talk.”

“I am. I will. But you're going to have to trust me.”

“I will never trust you.”

“That wasn't a request.”

And that's where Iris blipped out. I sent three or four more stabs, but no answer. Just the slow blinking of the cursor. Black on white.

About an hour later I got a message in my inbox. It said: “I'll be in touch. Trust me.”

Goddamned manipulative son of a bitch.

I have no choice.

Since he'd started seeing Dorris, Dave hadn't been at his place much, but now, after the Heimlich maneuver and its aftermath, he was back to his old ways. Homebody nothin' doin', holed up in his home theater smoking dope and watching movies so bad they'd gone straight to video unrated, and so loud and grossly special-effected they made the house beams shake.

I knew him in this mode. Had been there, asphyxiated by my own brown breath, sealed tight in his subbasement, and buffeted borderline retarded by the sound track of
Demoniad III: The Pains of Hell
booming at me through five channels. That entertainment center was like something out of
A Clockwork Orange
, and Dave in it was like something out of Kafka, or a cheeky commercial for pest control: a giant roach smoking a roach.

I knew what he was doing even if I couldn't always see it—the cameras were still upstairs in the Sanizephyr and the antiquated DVD, which Dave now used exclusively for nightcap porn. But I knew what Dave was doing because I knew Dave. He wasn't complicated. He was lying back and letting Mama Kitty lick his wounds for him, because tongue therapy with Mommy was all bonking Dorris had ever been about. Mama Kitty was the first whore. There would never be another. He'd lie in her smothering embrace for a while longer, and then he'd be back out in the scene, looking for her next epigone.

I was making bets on how long it was going to take for my doorbell to start ringing again. Either that or I'd see him at the Swan with his nose in a pint of pale ale and his dick in a sling, blubbering to himself like an old hobo about the great injustices of the world and the cold treachery of womankind.

Most of us drink to make the rest of the world palatable to us, but Dave drank to make himself palatable to others. He figured, rightly as it turned out, that his cerebrum was only sophisticated enough to chew gum or walk down the street, not the idiomatic two at once. Thus, if he was drunk—language center compromised, motor function deranged—all his remaining brainpower would be given over to trivia—standing, leaning, bringing glass to lips—and he'd be constitutionally incapable of insulting anyone or, in fact, of doing anything more injurious (to himself or others) than braying at passersby in the parking lot. And that, only if he wasn't simultaneously taking a piss.

That was the mistake he'd made with Dorris. He'd let slip a clearheaded lacuna between bouts of effortful dishevelment and—
whomp!
—out had flopped Little Lord Schnastypants with his parasitic twin Ignoramus attached, and the honeymoon was over. The workings of Dave's mind were revealed, and the horror of recognition dumped in Dorris's lap like a placenta.

There Dorris, having lapsed carelessly into sobriety herself, beheld all at once the full and terrible form of the hydra-headed shegetz in her bed and, what's more, the clear and present danger he posed to her ten-year-old female child, whom, she then realized, he regarded as little more than a junior hole.

She'd known, of course, about Jack Gordon et al's treatment at Dave's hands all those years ago, and the insidious ramifications thereof—never forget!—but she'd convinced herself that the skinhead had grown out his hair, had hung his Bova boots in the garage, had expunged the offending hieroglyph from the epidermis of his left deltoid, what have you. He'd changed. She herself had changed him by the very fact of their congress.

Besides, as she told herself in the mirror when the weak-signaled distress calls of her conscience could sometimes be heard above the brainstorm of alcohol and drugs, assuaging her lust with one of the unbrissed was really no worse than succumbing to the occasional BLT.

Is it any wonder then that the dawning of sense came down so hard and heavy on them both? Or so quickly? It saw its chance and it took it. Two sots sober at the same time and so much—shall we say
cultural
?—volatility between them. It was like a critical imbalance of nature rectifying itself with a bang. The ill-fated strike of lightning undone the second time around.

“Phew!” said God and all the angels when it was done. “That was a close fucking call.”

And it was, too.

Better to have Dave back at the Swan or in his basement debilitating himself—in either case, for the public good.

Alternatively, his keeping would be back on me.

A reluctant brother.

But,
ach
, I tell myself.

Don't fight it.

This is all part of the punishment.

But Miriam. I felt responsible for her. And something else, too. Drawn, I suppose. Curious in a way that made me squirm and still suspect that there was some truth to what Dorris and Dave had accused me of, even if Miriam herself had denied it. Maybe it wasn't the truth of having violated or coveted her, or even of having attempted however ineptly to seduce her that drunken night while Dave and Dorris were safely out of eye and earshot in the kitchen.

But there has been more contact since then.

I confess.

Although I do not know how to feel about it.

My clearest time of day—I've said—is late afternoon when I am writing this and prodding myself to life with all the iridescent gels and syrups of the convenience store and the galloping black bile of the barista.

As cruel coincidence would have it—this is also just about the time of day when those straggling dribs and drabs of public schoolers are taking their ill-advised and too entitled shortcuts home across the backyards of iffy neighbors like me. School must be out by now for summer, or very close, and remedial courses begun. Most kids are playing video games all day at this time, or watching movies, or heading off to camp.

But not Miriam.

She bows beneath the burden of her book bag, eyes on her feet. She knows the way so well. She cuts down the property line between Gruber and me, having crossed the main road behind my house and crept into the subdivision the back way through a door of loose planks in my fencing.

I've gotten so I can time this, three forty-five or thereabouts, sitting at the table in the kitchen, sipping, eyes over the brim, scanning for the sneakered foot, skinny leg, half-girl to slide through the slit of pine picket and out, full body, into view.

She lingers under the apple tree sampling the new-sprung fruit. Finding it sour, she stomps the rottens on the ground instead, if there are any so early in the year. She likes the way they splat and flatten into cakes that she can pick up and fling.

She finds a clear spot and sits. She has a family of dolls in her bag, which she removes and assembles in the grass, tilting them on their stiff legs to make them speak: whole listing, jerking conversations, back and forth, right hand to left hand and left to right, her face giving wild expression to their dance.

She looks up at the house occasionally, but sees nothing. Or I think she sees nothing, because her expression does not change. The mouth is a weak bow of longing and the eyes are like caves in her face. She stares, she scans the sun-blazed windows of the house for movement, as if they, too, are unfathomable eyes, and then, downcast, she goes back to what she is doing.

The dolls tussle and shout, throwing stiff-limbed punches and kicks, hurling insults in Miriam's voice. Then, abruptly, they stop, and Miriam sits breathing, holding the figures apart. Slowly, slowly they come together, and there is the relief of an embrace, the rigid heads unmeeting, the cartwheeled arms and legs turning on the dry axis of the chests grinding like the foci of five-pointed stars.

And then there are tears coming down her face, washes of them in sheets. Her cheeks and chin glisten. Her lungs sputter and protest like flustered wings in the cage of her chest, and a rain of sputum comes down in front of her.

It must tell you everything about me that I do not go to her then. That I do not open the door and go out and take her in my arms and cradle her to calm. Not as many times as I have seen it. I have not gone.

Instead I sit in fascination, the live picture framed in the window, so perfectly real, this interior life outside, for me, and voluntary. A prayer, a sacrifice, a ritual. It is the doing and the loneliness that count, and would make no sense if someone answered.

She leaves me offerings, or arts. A fallen starling, so softly dead, rung round with wreaths of berries and branches and sprigs of greens and dandelion. A trail of pebble cairns leads to a small trench, furrowed by dirty fingers, and in it there are figures she has fashioned out of sticks and bundled grass. They are gathered over plates and cups made of wrappers, bottle caps, and broken glass.

As I watch her there on the ground, crouched small, assiduous, answering the urge, so female, to make her plastic figurines enact relationships and eat and drink from tea sets made of trash, I wonder what it is to be a girl, vulnerable for life, who will never grow into a form that can protect her from the prying eyes and minds of men like me. She is what she will always be in this world, an animator by craft, a greenhorn yearning in a dry world to wring emotion from dead things.

And I am what I have always been, a vacuum of personality sucking its only substance through the holes in its skull. What I have seen, what I have heard, I am. The pastiche of stolen words and pictures that belong to other people and places has become the hodgepodge of me. Things observed, overheard, remembered wrong. Things that I do not even understand are there in me, sewn in, waving in the wind of an inspection, saying: This guy has absolutely no idea who he is. He's made it all up, and I'm the proof of it.

You cannot expect such a person to go saving people, fantasies of same notwithstanding, even when the drowning man in question is a little girl crying her pipes out in his backyard and leaving handicrafted signals of distress in every bush and cranny. He simply cannot help. He cannot act, because that is information going in the wrong direction—out—when he is only ever taking in, absorbing, copying—and that, poorly.

It's no good.

I'm not going to
do
anything.

And yet I watch. I wait for her and I watch, and I think she knows I'm watching. Yes, she knows. Of course she knows. We are communicating, if only in the deferred language of objects.

I put a crow's feather upright in the ground at the head of her starling, and a canopy of bright leaves over her tea party. I put the print of my hand in a clearing of soil at the base of the apple tree, and beside it she puts the print of her own.