BERG CRACKED THE WINDOW and squeezed his way into the farmhouse. He had first seen this farmhouse while walking the dog on the hiking trail that circumnavigated the bay. In the morning the house seemed to be occupied, but during the day it was empty and often some of the windows were left open. People in Talinas always left their windows open. They were not used to thieves breaking and entering. Berg was not used to breaking and entering.
He went to the medicine cabinet first because that was the most likely place to find what he was looking for, but there was nothing of interest. Heart pills, vitamin supplements, deodorant, foot creams, and, strangely, Scotch tape. He moved back to the main room and began rifling through the drawers of a dresser. A seed catalogue, lots of photos of boats, two pairs of scissors, a dead black fly.
The next room appeared to be a study. There was an oilskin map and a large bookshelf and an old iMac, its case bright blue like some kind of tropical drink. Are you kidding me? he thought. The last time he had seen one of these computers was in elementary school, in the computer lab, and he had used it to play Oregon Trail. He had never been very good at Oregon Trail, too reckless with his decision-making. His oxen always died fording the river and the members of his party often ended up suffering from some kind of bowel-related disease.
It was a cold day, the day he entered the farmhouse, with a searching wind from the west and a layer of fog, low-slung and thick, covering the bay like marshmallow topping. But inside the house was warm and full of clear light. It smelled like cedar and coffee and salty air. If he hadn’t been robbing the house, he would have liked to sit quietly in its living room and pass several hours reading a book. Whoever owned this place had a lot of beautiful furniture, including a dining table built from barn siding and a desk that seemed to have been carved out of the base of an oak tree.
Finding nothing useful in the living room, Berg made his way to the bedroom. A king-size bed and a window looking out on a grove of laurels and cedars. He thought he should be looking at the bay through this window but he couldn’t see it. He felt a bit turned around. He was sweating now, a cold sweat that he felt primarily in his hands and feet. In the upper drawer of the bedroom closet he found what he was looking for: a bottle of Lortab 7.5s. There was also a set of keys and a book of poems and some sort of amulet with an inscription in a foreign language. It seemed like the type of thing that would give him +2 dexterity.
Berg had spent the vast majority of seventh and eighth grade playing an online role-playing game called Quest. Every day, from the carpeted basement of his parents’ suburban home, he battled orcs and traveled to foreign lands. His mother had to wrench him away from the computer to go to soccer practice or Hebrew school and, over time, she grew tired of this, and banned the game. She insisted that he read instead. Her father, Rabbi Joel Rothman, had been a genius Talmudic scholar and she often expressed, in overt and covert fashion, the hope that Berg would follow in his learned path.
“Such a sweet, wise man,” she would say. And then always: “May he rest in peace.”
Berg grabbed the Lortabs and went back to the main room, where he continued to open and close drawers. Suddenly, in the middle of his sifting, he felt compelled to go to the bathroom. Percocet made him constipated so these days he was often constipated. The constipation moved in bizarre cycles, an astrology he couldn’t decipher. He would go days without being able to shit and then, all of a sudden, he’d have to shit very badly, which was what was happening to him right now, as he opened and closed drawers, looking for prescription medicine inside the farmhouse of a person he did not know.
He went to the bathroom because there was no other choice really. Well, there were other choices but they eluded him at the moment. It was a high-speed moment.
Things progressed well on the toilet but not as quickly as he’d hoped. In the middle of the process he heard a shuffle outside the door. He held still, which was not easy in that instant, and he listened closely. It was just house noises, he assured himself. When he was finished on the toilet he thought, for a second, about whether or not he should flush. If he flushed someone might hear him, but if he didn’t there would be clear evidence of a break-in. He knew this was a thing that robbers did, break in and shit in the toilet and leave the shit there. Some kind of malevolent, scent-marking ritual.
He poured a glass of water and took four Lortabs. Then he flushed and left the house. Once outside, he found the trail on the ridge, and began walking home. The sun was setting now and the bay spread out before him, brown and ebbing, the color of pinto beans. Cows stood sedately in the fields and, every once in a while, a flock of cowbirds burst from the wet earth like black confetti. He could feel the Lortabs brimming inside him, warmth flooding his whole body, and soon, he knew, he would be in love with everything.