24

When I came into the house, Monica was there waiting for me. She was sitting at my desk looking at the obituary for Dr. Cunningham with a slack expression on her face.

“Hey,” I said.

She looked up, momentarily startled.

“Oh, hey.”

She tapped the paper with the back of her hand.

“Did you know him?”

“A little,” I said.

“Your doctor?”

“No. A friend’s.”

“Yeah?” she said. “Which friend is that?”

“No one you know.”

She threw the paper on the desk, seeming to accept the dodge, and turned toward me.

“So what’s the emergency?”

Her tone was hard and superior, as if she were talking to a hysterical child prone to blowing life’s little mishaps all out of proportion. I felt a pang of embarrassment. Embarrassment that I had been so in need, so without emotional resources as to beg someone I hardly knew—via someone else’s voice mail no less—to come and rescue me in my own home in the middle of the night.

“It’s passed,” I said curtly.

She raised her brows skeptically.

“That was quick.”

“Emergencies usually are.”

This came out reproachfully instead of coolly, the way I had meant it to.

“Yeah, well, that’s one of the downsides of being untraceable,” she said. “Can’t rush to help a fuck buddy in need.”

“Since when do you say fuck buddy?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Since I got a fuck buddy, I guess.”

I did not like this mood, whatever it was. Not now especially. She could be of no help to me like this.

“Glad to know I’ve made a lasting contribution,” I said, trying to match her nonchalance and failing.

“I wouldn’t say lasting,” she scoffed. “Isn’t that the beauty of fuck buddies? They come and they go?”

I smirked.

“Usually.”

She nodded, pursing her lips dismissively.

“Why are you so hostile?” I said.

“I’m not hostile.” She smiled fakely. “I’m just not making an effort to be nice.”

“Was it so hard before?”

She thought about this for a second.

“Yes, actually. Often it was.”

“So why bother? Why did you show up at all?”

She looked away.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t judge you about Damian. I just didn’t know how else to get in touch with you. I’m sorry if it put you in a bad spot.”

“It didn’t,” she said.

“So what is it then? Are you angry that I called you to ask for help? I know it’s been a while and maybe you figure I have no right, which is true, I guess, but I’ve been . . .”

I couldn’t think of how to describe it.

She straightened attentively.

“You’ve been what?”

“I’ve been through a hell of a lot.”

“Really?”

She still had that condescending barb in her voice.

“Yeah, really,” I snapped.

She took this in.

“Where were you tonight?” she asked. “Your car was here. I thought I heard a voice outside.”

“I was next door,” I said without thinking.

“At four in the morning?”

“Looks that way.”

“What the hell for?”

“I had the keys,” I said, as if this made sense. I slumped down on the arm of the couch. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Just working something out with my dad, I think.”

“Through Gruber?”

“Sort of. And through stalking around at night.”

She didn’t ask me to explain.

“It’s an incredible feeling,” I said. “Being out in the world when everyone else is asleep. Walking around in people’s private spaces. It makes you feel powerful and privileged, like you’re looking at what the world would be like if you could peel back the cover and see underneath.”

She nodded.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Being able to access that world in different ways is really the only thing that makes life livable. That’s sort of what shoplifting is like for me. That, and living out of a coffee can. The whole soft-criminal life. It keeps it interesting and off center.”

She shuddered and turned the corners of her mouth down.

“If I had to live in the waking, working world all the time, doing what I’m supposed to do—I mean, Jesus, there’s no place more depressing than a mall or a Wal-Mart—but when you’re stealing or casing or you’re there in the middle of the night, everything about it changes.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So then you know what I mean. All that shiny, plastic coating on everything and everyone melts away. And—I don’t know—it feels more honest somehow.” I paused, thinking about the cameras. “But it isn’t, really.”

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t. But it’s how we survive.”

I searched her face for disapproval but found none.

“I can’t,” I said, letting myself fall from the arm into the body of the couch. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“I don’t know. Play this game. Be artificial. Be strategic. Be angry. All of it. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired and I have no explanations for anything. Just more parties to the suffering.”

She came and sat beside me on the couch. She put her arm around me and kissed my temple.

“All these people caught up in an invisible person’s pain,” I said. “Me most of all, and I don’t understand it. I don’t know why we’re all still talking about it and trading pieces of something that happened so long ago. I mean, how does one person cause that much wreckage?”

“You mean Gruber?”

“No—well, yes, actually. Now that I think of it, I mean everyone on this block. It’s the same thing over and over again in every house. But I was talking about the doctor and Mrs. Bloom, and, fuck, even my father.”

She sighed heavily.

“I think the causes and the effects are hard to separate. That’s all. Everybody is somebody’s cause and someone else’s effect. Everybody’s doing harm and being harmed in big ways and small ways. That’s life. Family life. Relationships. Love. Even doctors and priests and accountants get caught up in the tussle. It sounds stupid when people say that we’re all connected. But it’s true. How could it not be? We’re all stuck here together maneuvering in the same small space. Contact is inevitable.”

“And that’s why you live so cut off from the world?” I said.

She thought about this, rolling her lower lip gently between her thumb and index finger.

“Mostly, sure. The less contact I have with other people, the safer, the cleaner it is for all of us.”

She smiled, poking me in the chest. “And you’re not exactly a hub yourself, you know. If you didn’t need to get laid so often, you’d never leave the house.”

“I go to the gym almost every day.”

“Only to get laid.”

I laughed.

“No, to stay in shape.”

She laughed, too, nodding, sewing up the conclusion.

“Right. So that you can get laid.”

“Well, okay, maybe partly, but it’s mostly emotional. It’s mostly because—you’re right—otherwise I wouldn’t leave the house enough, and because it’s the only way I know, other than booze and sex, to manage the pain.”

She pulled a mock serious face.

“What pain?”

“Don’t be an ass. You know what pain.”

“Yes, right, I know. How could I forget? How could anyone forget? But I’m curious to hear you say it. Describe it.”

“No.”

“No, I’m serious. I want to know what it feels like. What it really feels like.”

I shot her a rebuking look, then looked away.

“If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, come on. Enlighten me. Here’s your chance. Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way. I can say, it’s pain, it’s terror, it’s desolation. But what does that mean? Describing it doesn’t get you any closer to the experience. It’s like trying to describe what it feels like to be high. The closest you can come is . . .”

I didn’t want to say this part.

“Oh, forget it,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “You don’t want to know anyway.”

She leaned forward to get the rest, prompting.

“The closest you can come is?”

Is hurting other people as much and as often as you can, I thought but didn’t say. Just so that you can have some company. You know, break hearts occasionally, if you can, even if they’re soppy stupid half hearts and easy marks, and even if the very notion of breaking hearts is just too embarrassingly Harlequin to admit.

So, keep that crap to yourself.

And leave the hearts out of it.

So what, then, if not that?

More often insult, appall, or if all else fails, offend, and then you’ll have something in common with the other crawlers that you seek out every weekend at the Swan. What else can be done? Reducing them to your condition or thereabouts is all you have to comfort you because on some days—don’t all the buzzards know—being broken solo is worse than sitting on a bar stool mean drunk and mindfucking the unsuspecting stranger.

“The closest you can come,” I said at last, “is having it done to you.”

She took this in, unable to suppress a smirk.

“So you’d have to find my parents and kill them,” she said archly, “and then I’d know.”

Reluctantly, I smirked, too.

“Or, ideally, have them kill each other. Yeah, then you might know.”

“Right. I see,” she said. “Well, besides that, what?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice going mean. “What have you got in your grab bag of pain? . . . What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”

That took the tease out of her voice quick enough.

She sat up.

“Unh-unh. Nope,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “I’m not going to share something painful on a dare just so that you can shoot it down as lightweight.”

“Maybe I won’t. Is it lightweight?”

“And what if it wasn’t?” she said, suddenly angry. “Wouldn’t you feel like the biggest self-pitying prick in the world if I could one-up your pain? Wouldn’t you feel pretty foolish if you found out . . . I don’t know . . . What would even count as worse to you? . . . Ah, it doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t think you would feel foolish. I think you just wouldn’t know who the hell you are anymore. I mean, who are you if you’re not the wounded man under the thundercloud?”

“No one,” I said, still partly trying for a joke. “Not a soul.”

She wasn’t buying.

“Right. So I guess you see why a person might not be so eager to share herself with you. You make it pretty impossible on both ends.”

“How’s that?”

“Me and you. Either I’d feel dismissed right at the moment I’m most vulnerable, or you’d disappear.”

“God,” I groaned. “I really am my fucking mother.”

She didn’t reply.

I wish I could hurt you, I thought, and almost laughed at how cheap that sounded, even just in my head. Still, there it was.

“I don’t really have the power to hurt you, though, do I?” I said instead. “I mean, honestly. You don’t respect me enough.”

This fell between us like something wet and foul-smelling spilled on hard ground. We both recoiled.

“It’s not that,” she said, trying to deflect.

“What, then?” I insisted.

There was no lightening this now.

“I don’t have to explain that. There is no explaining it.”

“Can you try? I’d really like to understand.”

“This again.” She groaned dismissively. “Why?”

“Because I care what you think. A lot. Sorry. Believe me, I wish it wasn’t true, but it is, and I know you don’t feel the same way, and I know it’s irritating, but I just want to know why.”

“It’s not a question of why. You know that.”

“No, it is. It is. People say it’s not because they can’t be brutally honest, or they don’t want to take responsibility for what they really think and feel. But there is always a reason—at least one clear, identifiable reason.”

“But even if there were, what difference would it make?”

“It might help me.”

“How could it possibly help you?”

“To use the rejection for something productive, I guess.”

“Productive? That’s got to be one of the most harebrained and self-indulgent things I’ve ever heard you say. Rejection isn’t productive, Nick.”

“You’re wrong. My whole life has run on that principle. Rejection can be made into fuel. You can live on it, and that’s better than letting it kill you.”

“But it is killing you, you idiot, and you know it. And besides, you can live perfectly well—much better—on support and acceptance and good will.” She laughed sarcastically. “Everybody’s doing it.”

“Yeah, everybody’s doing it. Right. Look around. That’s my point exactly. Nobody’s fucking doing it. Nobody that I’ve seen. And I’m no different. I never had acceptance. What I got . . . what I got a lot of was rejection. Over and over again. So I learned to use it. And now acceptance and support wouldn’t even work if I had them. I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

“Oh, for God’s sake . . . so what? What do you want from me?”

“The details.”

She burst out.

“Please. Really, this is just—”

“Come on. It can’t be that hard.”

She was back to rage instantly.

“Hard? What the fuck do you know about hard, you spoiled little brat? God. This is so basic, and you don’t have a clue . . . You really don’t, do you? . . . Well, here’s the truth that would smack you in your arrogant head if you gave it half a chance. It’s the luxury of the loved and whole and privileged person to seek out reasons for pain and make them into food. Real, total devastation isn’t like that. You don’t think about it. You don’t examine it. You don’t convert it. And you don’t get off on it. You get away from it any way you can, if you can, and you stay away. You survive and you thank God that you have, and you look for any hint of happiness or kindness wherever you can find it, and you hold on to it for dear life.”

She glared at me.

“And if you want your ridiculous detail, there it is. I don’t love you—whatever the hell that means to you—because you’re a baby. You’re a self-satisfied, lucky baby who thinks he’s a tragic hero because he’s joined the vast majority of the rest of the human race in finding out that life is hell.”

She laughed nastily.

“You wish you had the power to hurt me? My God, do you have even the smallest inkling of how . . . luxurious and oblivious to actual suffering that is? Like the richest man in the world looking down on the bloody writhing pile of human misery and wondering why—O great sadness—he can’t have his fresh figs today . . . It’s unbelievable.”

She stopped as abruptly as she had begun, turning her head to the side away from me and staring blankly at the floor.

I was looking around the room absently, watching, out of habit, the glow of the hall light reflected in the windows across from us. The black of the nighttime windows was just barely beginning to fade. The sun would be up soon.

“I guess your story must be pretty damn bad,” I said, wearily.

She shrugged.

“No worse than anyone else’s.”

“When you think about the ragpickers in India,” I agreed.

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Jeez, Mon. That’s got to be four ‘fucks’ for you tonight alone. And there I was thinking I had the foulest mouth.”

She turned up the edges of her lips derisively.

“Foulest mouth. Biggest pain. Deepest soul.”

“Okay, okay. Let up a little, will you? Jesus.”

“You wanted to know.”

“I know, I know . . . So I got it. Honest, I got it. You don’t have to elaborate any more.”

“I won’t.”

“Of course.”

“Right,” she murmured.

“For what it’s worth,” I offered, “everything you said was true. I can’t deny that.”

She sighed impatiently, but I went on.

“And I’m really sorry for it. Sorry because it’s so shameful and exposing and petty—you’re right about that—but sorriest because it’s cut me off from you. Maybe it’s cut me off from everyone . . . No—of course it has. You can’t go around hurting and offending everyone as a matter of course and expect anything but solitary confinement. Or a good, hard slap in the face.”

“I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I lost my temper. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, no. It’s good. I’m glad you did. You told me what I wanted to know. It’s what I’ve always wanted to know, and I feel like I’ve been asking you to tell me this in a hundred ways since we met. That’s what was always behind your moods, and I knew it.” I put up an appeasing hand. “Sorry, more self-pity.”

“Oh, forget it,” she said, batting my hand away. “Just forget it. Who am I to say anything to anyone?”

“Someone who’s been through a lot, I think.”

She smiled sadly.

“Maybe I just read all that in a book.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s true and you were right.”

“All right. If you think so.” She put a heavy hand on my back. “Now maybe we should just leave it at that.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, forcing a squelched laugh. “Just give me a sec.”

She smiled again, and moved her hand along my spine.

“Sure.”

It wasn’t very long before I had the impulse to move, or maybe I was just lost in the echo of all that she’d said. Replaying. I was sitting on top of the pit, she’d said, watching it all obscenely.

So I was, I thought, so I was. So come and see.

“Come on,” I said, standing awkwardly. “I want to show you something.”

I led her to the basement steps.

“You want to see something really criminal?”

I turned and barreled down the stairs without waiting for a reply. Monica followed slowly. By the time she had gotten down the stairs, I had the locks and the door to the control room open and I was powering up the system. The screens blinked into life, revealing mostly empty or darkened rooms. A light had been left on in Dorris’s bathroom, but nobody was there.

I pointed to that monitor.

“This is Dorris Katz’s master bath.”

I pointed again.

“And this is her bedroom.”

Monica squinted and leaned closer.

“And these two,” I said, indicating, “are Dave Alders’s bedroom and bath. Too dark to see much.”

I moved to Gruber’s basement, where the light was on as usual, even though Eric wasn’t in the crate.

“This is Gruber’s basement,” I said. “His youngest son’s a bed wetter, and every time he has an accident, he has to sleep in that crate for a month straight without incident before he can go back upstairs.”

Monica’s brow furrowed.

“Man,” she said, shaking her head.

I pointed to the next monitor.

“This is Gruber’s living room—also dark at the moment, unfortunately—where his wife spends her life watching TV. And this is . . .”

The light was on in the study.

Jeff was sitting in Gruber’s chair.

“What is he . . . ?” I blinked and touched the screen. “Uh . . . and this is Gruber’s middle son, Jeff.”

I tapped the screen gently with the nail of my index finger.

Monica pulled my hand away to get a better look.

“What is he doing?” she said, squinting again.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I replied.

“You were just there, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t.”

“He wasn’t home?”

“He wasn’t awa—” I stopped and corrected myself. “I didn’t see him.”

She turned back to the screen.

“He wasn’t awake?” she said.

“Well, he sure as shit wasn’t in that chair.”

“Do you think he could have seen you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. If he was hiding.”

She grasped my shoulder and shook it, turning me toward her.

“Nick, what did you do over there?” Her eyes were wide and piercing. “Tell me.”

“Nothing,” I said testily, wrenching free of her grasp and turning sharply back toward the screen.

“You went into the house and did nothing?” she said flatly. “Riiight.”

I didn’t reply.

I was looking at Jeff. He had something lying on the desk in front of him, but the angle of the camera made it impossible for me to tell what it was. It was a blurry mass in the foreground, the focus of his gaze. His face was blank, without expression, as serene as I had ever seen it.

Gruber’s voice came booming from behind the camera. He must have been in the doorway.

I jumped.

“What in God’s holy name are you doing in my study, boy?” Gruber shouted.

Jeff looked up calmly, but said nothing. His eyes fell again to whatever was on the desk.

Gruber must have looked, too.

“What—?” Gruber said, panicked.

His hands came into view from the top of the picture, reaching across the desk, taking up the thing that was lying there, and raising it closer to his face to get a better look.

“I told you never, ever to go near—”

Jeff’s eyes were locked on Gruber’s face.

“What?” he cut in, curiously.

“I said,” Gruber began, but Jeff interrupted triumphantly.

“I heard what you said.” Then, acidly, he added: “It’s too late. You’re too late.”

Gruber said nothing. Jeff was still watching him intently.

“What did you really think was going to happen?” Jeff said. “Something had to. Eventually.”

This was already beyond what Gruber could do. This wasn’t going to be a conversation. But then, it was clear that Jeff had never intended it to be.

This was bolder than Jeff had ever been, something planned and reckless at the same time, and I wondered if I had pushed him to it. Maybe after all the beatings and humiliations and hard treatment, a kiss had finally ruptured the torpor that had held him in check for so long. He’d chosen his mother’s way, fitting oblivion around him like a drug and taking the bruises less brutally as a result. But now he was wide open, and everything inside was coming out.

Monica was standing beside me as shocked as I was and feeling the same mute tension of something terrible impending. But she seemed more thrilled than concerned, hunched and greedy for the reveal, as if this really were just happening on television as entertainment and she was the riveted audience, willing the plot to resolve.

I started to ask if she was all right, but she waved me away impatiently.

“Shhhh.”

Gruber was still looking at the thing in his hands.

Jeff saw this with satisfaction, then dropped his eyes thoughtfully and began to speak.

“All this time . . .” he said calmly. “All this time I thought so much about how to be your son.”

His voice broke slightly, and he paused to gather himself, swallowing and breathing through his nose.

“I tried so hard for so long to figure out how to please you . . . And, you know, all I ever did was fail. Always—fail. And you hated me. You hated us all. Still. The same as ever.”

His face took on the puzzled expression of a person saying something aloud for the first time and experiencing his own words as a revelation.

“So then I thought, okay, this is never going to change. This is the sentence. Do the time. Just survive . . . And, you know, I thought that would be enough. I’d make it through, leave, and never come back—start again somewhere else and spend the rest of my life free. There has to be a better life out there, I thought. I’ll find it. And this place—you, all of it—will just go away.

“But then somewhere along the way I realized that that wasn’t true. The world isn’t really a better place at all, and just surviving isn’t enough.”

He sighed heavily.

“Because you take it all with you. No matter where you go, or who you’re with, the world you walk into always has you in it, and you’re not just some easy guy who did his time and shook it off and kept on going. You’re the kid who grew up in your dad’s house.”

He looked up accusingly at Gruber, his brow contorting fiercely.

“And you know who that guy is? That guy’s a really pissed-off, broken-up son of a bitch who takes after the old man.”

He stopped, checking Gruber’s face again for recognition, or the progress of an emotion he had sought to provoke.

“And that’s why, if you want to know,” he said, nodding at what Gruber still had in his hands. “Because I can’t have a better life. I can’t get out. I’m stuck here with you no matter what I do . . . and while I am . . .”

He was struggling through a sob.

“I’m going to get you back, you rotten scumbag piece of shit, and I’m going to keep on getting until you die of it or you kill me . . . Yeah, that’s right—until you kill me, if you even have the balls. I’m not afraid of that anymore. Go ahead.”

He gestured at the guns on the wall.

“Take your pick.”

Gruber didn’t move or say anything.

Jeff swiveled in the chair, raised his right leg, and kicked his foot through the glass display case. He kicked three more times around the edge of the first point of impact, and the whole of the left pane came down in pieces to the floor. He reached in, picked out one of the pistols, and sat back in the chair, holding the gun loosely in his lap. He lifted it limply.

“I thought about using one of these to do it,” he said, glaring into Gruber’s face. “But I wanted—I wanted to feel it, you know? I wanted to feel the life going out of her . . . I wanted to feel her heart stop beating and her whole body go slack. I wanted to squeeze and see if she would fight or if she would know what was coming. I wanted to look into her eyes and see if she was afraid, or if something there would go blank when her neck snapped.”

Gruber roared, “Noooooo.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, moving to flip the switch. “I’m turning this off.”

Monica grabbed my wrist. “Don’t touch it,” she snapped.

Her eyes were hard on the monitor.

Jeff was smiling thinly, his eyes shadowed with satisfaction.

“Does it hurt?” he said. He seemed to be asking Gruber, but then he answered as if to himself.

“I don’t think so. Maybe I should have done something that hurt. Slowly. Maybe the vice in the woodshop? Would that have worked?”

Gruber made a lunge forward with one arm, but Jeff pointed the gun toward him.

“Ah, ah. Take it easy, old man. Back off.”

Gruber pulled back slowly. Still cradling Iris in his left hand, he brought her body to his cheek, held it there, and closed his eyes.

“Oh . . .” He moaned. “She was inno—”

Jeff reared up out of the chair.

“Innocent?” he screamed. “Is that what you meant to say? Fucking innocent? Well, guess what. So was I. So was Mom. So were all of us, father . . . But somehow you couldn’t feel for us what you felt for her, could you? You couldn’t protect us and pet us and baby talk to us, could you? You couldn’t bathe us and feed us by hand? You could hardly bear to be in the same room. Why was that?”

He paused, rhetorically, reading Gruber’s face and the truer signal of his hands, which had begun shaking violently.

“You know, I thought about that, too, when I was killing her.”

Gruber moaned again, and pressed Iris closer.

“Well, right before, actually. I thought, what is it about her that he loves so much? That he can love? So damned much. And I couldn’t get an answer. I couldn’t figure it out.”

“You have no idea what you’ve done,” Gruber said, his voice now shaking, too. “You have no idea.”

“I’ve done what I meant to do,” Jeff hissed ecstatically. “And maybe a lot more, which as far as I’m concerned is a bonus.”

“You—” Gruber began, but Jeff cut him off, screaming again, his voice breaking hoarsely with the effort.

“No, you. It’s on you. All of this is on you. Every part of it. And me? I know exactly what I’ve done. And the only thing I regret is having to watch you snivel over a bird. A fucking talking bird.”

He still had the gun pointed at Gruber, but he had loosened his grip on the butt. Now he let it slip from his fingers onto the desk. He placed his hand over it.

Monica turned to me, her eyes frightening.

“Which door did you use to get in?”

“What?”

“Over there.” She pointed at the monitor. “Which door did you use? Back or front?”

“Back,” I said. “Through the garage. Why?”

She turned and bolted out of the room. I could hear her stomping up the stairs and across the foyer. I heard the front door slam open wildly against the coat closet wall. I lurched to follow her, tossing my body up the stairs as fast as it would go. I came out the front door just in time to see Monica disappearing around the back of Gruber’s house.

I slowed, as if momentarily confused about which way to go, except that that wasn’t the confusion. The dawn was coming up, soft and gray, but yet strangely sharp as well, picking out the edges of things, layering the contours of depth and width and breadth contiguously. The space before me seemed to stretch by halves again as long, and bend into looping pools of light and shadow. I had been staring at the monitors so closely—the flat, square, flickering view—and now I was running in round dimensions.

I was moving as fast as I could, and yet it felt as though I was running in deep sand. I shouted aloud in frustration, growling to push myself on, yet Gruber’s house seemed to be receding atop a scrolling belt of grass. There was a loud, dizzy shushing in my ears and a cool weightlessness in the back of my head, as if someone had left open a door to my skull. As I ran, seemingly in place, I heard again those freeing words that I had heard in Gruber’s kitchen an hour before, words that now came down on me like a trap: What you do or do not do now will make no difference.

I heard the shot as I rounded the side of the house and I fell into the cool wet receiving grass.