6

Stefan shushed Marco and looked at me, eyes bleak and angry. The call had been brief, but the sound of that voice was as dismal as the stench of burning plastic, and I felt my mouth go dry.

Marco headed out of the kitchen, possibly searching for someplace saner and quieter. It crossed my mind then to say to Stefan that we should quit our jobs, sell the house and move as far away from Michigan as possible. We’d have to downsize, but we’d be free of this insanity. From a golden routine, we had gone to base unpredictability.

Vanessa was right: we were privileged white men who had never been treated the way millions of less fortunate Americans were treated all the time. Academia made our lives even more remote from reality. It wasn’t just a shock being manhandled and brutalized; it was as if we had been radically ripped from our own lives and dumped into an alternate reality.

“Son of a bitch,” Stefan said, and it was the second time in an hour I’d heard him curse in a way he never did. I didn’t object, but it bothered me that he didn’t sound like himself.

“We need an unlisted number,” I muttered, feeling a surge of helplessness, because I knew that nothing would make us safe, not even cancelling our landline. Nothing really could, not flight, not drugs. What was going to happen next? Hacking our email accounts? I thought of the terrible sad observation in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays: “In the whole world there was not enough sedation as there was instantaneous peril.”

Stefan rose and headed for the phone. “Hitting star fifty-seven gets you the number that called, right?”

“Forget it, Stefan. Knowing the number won’t matter. Anybody taking the trouble to disguise their voice like that would make sure you couldn’t track them. It’s like murderers using gloves. Whoever called us would have used a burner phone, or a payphone if they could find one, or a soft phone.”

Stefan sat back down heavily, pushed his plate away and finished his beer without any sign of enjoyment. “What the hell is a soft phone?”

“I don’t know how it works exactly, but it’s software so you can phone from your computer.”

“But all of that can be traced somehow!”

“Only if you have a subpoena, or if you’re the government and you don’t need one.”

“Great.”

“Still think it’s Bullerschmidt?”

Stefan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He’s malevolent, sure, but is he tech-savvy enough?” I answered my own question before Stefan could even consider it. “He wouldn’t have to be, you can probably get one of those voice things on Amazon. And who knows what else.”

“Or he hired someone.”

I felt momentarily ashamed of myself at how ugly our speculation was. But then what we were saying about the dean wasn’t uglier than what had happened to us.

“Couldn’t we hire someone?” I asked.

“You mean a bodyguard?” Stefan squinted as if seeing an ex-Marine in a black Brioni suit standing in the corner of our kitchen.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure what I was thinking.” I might have meant an assassin, but that never turned out well, in movies or in real life. Besides, we didn’t have a definite target.

Stefan abruptly pushed back from the table and said, “Let’s go out to the sunroom.” He didn’t even suggest cleaning up from our lunch, which was a sure sign he was distraught. Stefan wasn’t obsessive-compulsive, but he was orderly, and leaving a mess behind was totally unlike him.

Marco was already there, curled up behind one of the well-stuffed bamboo-framed blue chairs and didn’t even stir when we walked in and sat on the couch. I thought briefly of Vanessa’s warning to talk outside, but I needed to be indoors, as little protection as that might be.

“I know I said I wanted to shoot people,” Stefan brought out quietly. “But even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything, it wouldn’t help. There’s no such thing as closure after last night.”

“Well, maybe there’s justice. Or revenge.”

“The country’s changed. Vanessa’s right. Since the raid, I’ve been reading online about SWAT teams, and they’ve taken over the country. They’re supposed to suppress violence, but they only end up causing more of it.”

We had talked before about how too many Americans had lost their minds after 9/11 and the country had drifted closer and closer to being a national security state. How the president was somehow always referred to as the country’s commander-in-chief even though he was constitutionally only that for the armed forces. How military men and woman and military equipment were used as background for photo ops and speeches.

I asked, “What do you mean they cause violence?”

He shook his head wearily. “The team shows up, regular people freak out, think they’re being attacked by thieves. They’re asleep, they’re surprised, they don’t hear anyone say the word ‘police,’ they panic. And even drug dealers can think they’re being hit by other drug dealers. If anyone has a gun, they’ll go for it, and sometimes use it. Either way, they’re the ones who get shot, most of the time. Cops even use SWAT teams for things like insurance fraud. Some dermatologist cheating Medicare had a small army take him down.”

“Wait—that actually happened?”

“Yes, he was in Memphis, but they had enough weapons for Mogadishu, and he was shot and killed. Nick, it’s worse than what Vanessa told us. The War on Drugs, it’s turned into the War on Terrorism—right here, right now. What I’ve been reading makes me sick, because it’s become run-of-the-mill and only makes the news when there’s a lawsuit or somebody important gets targeted by mistake. The standard for evidence to get a warrant now is unbelievably low, warrants are sealed a lot of the time, and cops don’t get prosecuted if they shoot someone, but judges hammer you if you shoot a cop thinking your house is being invaded. The Fourth Amendment is basically dead.”

Stefan was not given to rants, so a speech like this from him was unprecedented. Listening to these harsh realities was doubly unpalatable in a lovely, calm, blue and gold room filled with philodendrons whose leaves were heart-shaped.

“You haven’t been checking out any crazy websites, have you?” I had to ask. I didn’t know what being humiliated in jail might have driven him to. I could see him diving into survivalist or libertarian forums, going over the edge after he’d been so profoundly abused. It was abuse to turn shock and awe tactics on an American citizen with no criminal record. SUM’s writer-in-residence, for God’s sake, a professor.

“Everything I read was legit, not rumors or conspiracy theory. Like the Los Angeles Times. The Denver Post. The New York Times. This isn’t made up, Nick. It’s news. It’s real. Judges sometimes even give the cops more than they ask for, they turn regular warrants into what they call no-knock warrants.”

“So they could have just stormed in without even saying anything.” It wasn’t a question. I felt into the horror of those hours and imagined them beginning even more violently than they had, without the tiny preamble. In that moment, as crazy as it was, I wished I had bought a gun years ago. But I didn’t say anything. Instead, I reminded Stefan that we had been talking about who might be out to get us, or one of us. I was afraid of going any deeper into how perverted law enforcement agencies and the judicial system had become. Stefan may have gotten his information from legitimate sources, but if he steeped himself in it enough he would likely become a crank, or chronically depressed, or worse, be targeted for surveillance by the FBI or NSA. And I would be swept along with him, one way or another. Marriage was like that.

And that’s when I told him about the threat at the stop sign when I’d been walking Marco, and how the car might have hit us. Stefan was surprisingly calm. It was as if this information was somehow welcome, was a piece of crucial evidence, though what either one of us could do with it, I didn’t know.

“I thought the swatting would be it, I didn’t really think anything else would happen, like the phone call, and this nut in the car,” he said. I must have looked blank, because he explained: “That’s what the FBI calls it, ‘swatting,’ when somebody sics a SWAT team on you and it’s fraudulent.”

“But swatting’s what you do to flies.”

“Don’t blame me for the term,” Stefan said.

“Well, I guess that fits. It turns you into an insect.”

From another yard, I could hear a lawn mower going, and somewhere else nearby, someone was warming up a grill.

“It definitely wasn’t Bullerschmidt in the car,” I said, trying to put some pieces together, half-closing my eyes to concentrate. “I would recognize his voice.” Which meant that if the dean was involved, he had hired someone to harass us. Was that safe? Wouldn’t he be afraid of being exposed? Unless he had some kind of hold over this guy. Or, worse, more than one person was out to make us suffer.

“If it happens again,” Stefan said, “you have to get the license plate number.”

“And do what? Call the police? The same police somebody turned on us?”

Stefan actually threw up his hands.

“Cheer me up,” I asked. “Tell me what Father Ryan said.”

“You can call him Ryan.”

“I know, I try to. Forget that now. You seemed better when he left, did he give you advice or something? Don’t tell me you felt better hearing about East Germany.”

“He made me feel safer. He looked me right in the eyes and said very slowly ‘They’re not coming back.’ It was terrific.”

“But how does he know?”

“Because one of his brothers is a cop, up north, and Ryan said that since the warrant didn’t pan out, they wouldn’t be able to get a second one, no matter how easy it was to get the first. And even if they could, the publicity would be very bad, and we’d have a much better case against them in court.”

“Court? I would never sue anybody. It would eat me alive … Tell me again what Father—what Ryan said?”

Stefan repeated it, and I echoed the words slowly: “They’re not coming back.” They made sense. Whatever happened, we wouldn’t be facing a night of terror again. That would have to be my mantra. It helped, somewhat. I could already feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders tingling and loosening up. That’s when I realized I had been physically bracing myself for hours for another crushing raid at our house, another flood of terror and shame.

Stefan grimaced, his mouth twisted, and I thought he was in pain, but then he started to laugh. He stopped as if embarrassed.

“What? What is it?”

“You’re the one who always thinks of movies,” he said. “Well, I just remembered that scene in True Lies when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s interrogating his wife—”

“—Jamie Lee Curtis—”

“—in that huge concrete holding pen or whatever, and his voice is all distorted and crazy-sounding.”

I was about to ask how that really connected to anything, and then it hit me. I said, “Lucky Bitterman.”

He nodded. “Lucky Bitterman.”

Bitterman was a fairly recent import to EAR, a graduate of NYU’s top-ranked Film Studies program, and Lucky wasn’t a nickname; his parents had given him that name because they were inveterate gamblers. Lucky’s expertise was thrillers from Hitchcock to Brian de Palma. The department was beefing up its film courses and he’d been hired with tenure on the strength of James Franco as a reference and several screenplay deals. The hiring committee hadn’t known how few film deals ever turned into actual films and had been snowed by his apparent promise, his New York hauteur, his Franco connection, and his references to “Marty” Scorsese.

If it sounds hard to believe they could be so gullible and uninformed, a different EAR committee seeking diversity had once hired someone from Indonesia assuming she was Muslim. That was Lucille Mochtar, who had lived across the street from us in a house that was almost a twin of ours. Of course, the committee couldn’t ask her religion, but if they had, she would have told them she was a Christian. It hadn’t occurred to them anyone in Indonesia wasn’t a Muslim. Never underestimate the myopia and narcissism of a group of university professors working together.

The film deals had collapsed after Bitterman got to Michiganapolis; James Franco had never accepted an invitation to speak at SUM; and our department and Bitterman were equally disappointed in each other. But thirtyish Bitterman stood out even among our generally sour faculty for the steady bile he poured out on pretty much everyone and everything. He invidiously compared our university to NYU. He called all Michiganders “hicks” and thought the state was a cultural wasteland. He hated both me and Stefan and wasn’t afraid to admit it, perhaps because we were also from New York but liked living in Michigan. Unless it was that we were a couple. Whatever the reason, he’d called Stefan a hack writer more than once, and told me my Edith Wharton bibliography was a giant Post-It note. I actually thought that was kind of funny, but didn’t tell him.

A runner, Bitterman was a lean, handsome, blond, but his mouth was always turned down at the corners, his nose was usually wrinkling in disgust, and seeing him at any time of the year was like being splashed with a pail of scummy pond water.

Why did I think of him? Because Bitterman, who could not have been born with a more fitting name, had recently published a study of Schwarzenegger’s thrillers called Double Trouble. And even a good review in the New York Times Book Review hadn’t made him more collegial.

“It might have been him in the car,” I said. “I can’t be sure it wasn’t. I don’t know what he drives. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in the parking lot at Parker Hall.”

“That’s a good enough place to start,” Stefan said.

“The parking lot?”

“No, Bitterman.”

“And if it’s him?”

“Well, he likes Schwarzenegger so much, remember the line from Conan the Barbarian about what is best in life?”

I sure did: “‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.’”

Stefan gave me a high five, and I thought “Shit, this is dangerous territory.” But that didn’t stop me from contemplating sweet and lasting revenge.