THIRTY

BETWEEN 1998 and 2003, I was spending lots of time in China and elsewhere in Asia, following the fortunes of the Chinese women’s national soccer team and one of its players, Liu Ying, a principal character in the book I was working on, A Writer’s Life.

During this time, and through the following decade, I had more or less forgotten about my voyeur pen pal in Aurora, a city I had never heard of before receiving his first letter in 1980; and after he had sold his motels, my interest in Aurora had entirely vanished—until I surprisingly saw it mentioned on the front page of the New York Times, on July 21, 2012.

Under the main headline was a report that a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in neuroscience from the University of Colorado in Denver had fatally shot twelve people, and wounded seventy others, in an Aurora movie theater prior to the midnight screening of a Batman sequel called The Dark Knight Rises. The shooter was identified as James E. Holmes, a product of a middle-class community in San Diego, whose parents were described in the Times as “really, really nice people” and whose mother was a registered nurse.

The Aurora police said that Holmes, dressed in black and with his hair dyed orange and red, fired randomly at audience members while using an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington shotgun, and a .40-caliber Glock handgun. Many 911 calls from the theater alerted the police, who soon caught Holmes near his parked car and took him into custody. He later admitted that he had installed incendiary and chemical devices and trip wires in his unit within an Aurora apartment building.

After quickly reviewing the Times’s article and seeing that Gerald Foos’s name was not listed among those who had been killed or injured, I finally contacted him by phone after a patient operator had tracked him down at a new address. Foos agreed that he and Anita were fortunate in not attending the screening of The Dark Knight Rises, but they had attended movies at the theater many times, and he said that he knew what the shooter’s apartment looked like.

“It’s the same third-floor apartment on Seventeenth and Paris Street that I’d rented a few years ago for my son, Mark,” Foos said. “We’d had many heart-to-heart talks there. After I moved my son into another neighborhood, this guy apparently replaced him, although we don’t ever recall running into this guy whose picture is now all over the news.”

A week or so after the call, Gerald Foos was again corresponding with me, and in one of his first letters he described exploring Aurora in the aftermath of the tragedy.

As I drove past the Aurora Mall and the 16 Cinema multiplex, where the shooting took place, and is still under police investigation, I noticed the cluster of flowers and teddy bears that people had placed along the ground in memory of the victims. This is a new area of the city—lots of shining windows and beautiful buildings: the county courthouse is here, the police station is here, the library is here. Why the killings here?

Haven’t the people of Aurora treated their fellow men with enough kindness and consideration, so that the sword of Damocles was lowered on us? Or were the killings just a natural occurrence in our society, which we tolerate?

In another letter, he wrote:

I feel terribly uncomfortable in today’s world and society. As the Voyeur I felt particularly overpowering on the observation platform, but now, as Gerald, I do not feel that way anymore. Gerald feels restless in his expansive home, and the feelings of his disappearing youth are present in his mind. As he looks in the mirror above his bathroom vanity, he notices the age in his eyes, and the grey hair on his head and beard. He plans to dye his hair, and after he does he sees it as a sham, an untruth that he is attempting to permeate on anyone that he may meet today. In applying the dye he is doing what the Voyeur always stood against—any attempt to subvert reality, substance, the truth, and instead Gerald is resorting to an artificial illusion that his fellow men may accept as the truth.

In his car Gerald drives through Aurora, and as he approaches East Colfax Avenue he notices the Mexican development that exists just east and west of the Manor House Motel. East of the Riviera Motel, there is now mostly Asian businesses, which took the place of the businesses he used to know. This disturbs him, the knowledge that the people he used to know have either moved away or died. He knows no one on the street or business here. He feels lost and without a city anymore. The barbershop is gone. The gas station is gone. And now the Voyeur and Gerald are separate entities, completely disconnected since their tenure in the observation platform has ended.

At a street corner, Gerald stops his car as the traffic light turns red. While pausing, he looks up through the windshield and sees a camera overlooking the intersection. He knows that his picture has just been taken, and so has the license plate of his car.

Proceeding on to the local bank, where he stops to make a deposit, he passes under another camera that scans the parking lot, and another camera hangs over the entranceway. Inside the bank, as he stands in front of the teller and makes his deposit, he is photographed once more by a camera posted in the ceiling.

Later, while visiting a grocery store, one of the few stores that Gerald has known from previous years and where the manager is a friend, he asks his friend, while pointing up to a camera: “What do you do with those tapes that are changed every day?” The manager says, “They’re for our security, as you know, but the police, the FBI and the IRS also make use of them, and we never know why. All we know is that almost everything we do is on record.”

Gerald gets back in his car, and while returning home he thinks about all the changes that he and the Voyeur have lived through since opening the Manor House Motel more than thirty years ago. Now the private lives of public figures are exposed in the media almost every day, and even the head of the CIA, General David Petraeus, can’t keep his secret sex life out of the headlines. The media is now in the Peeping Tom business, but the biggest Peeping Tom of all is the U.S. Government, which keeps an eye on our daily lives through its use of security cameras, the internet, our credit cards, our bank records, our cell phones, I-phones, GPS info, our airline passenger tickets, the wire taps, and whatever else.

Perhaps you may be thinking, why is this of interest to Gerald Foos?

Because it is possible that someday the FBI will show up and say, “Gerald Foos, we have evidence that you’ve been watching people from your observation platform. What are you, some kind of pervert?”

And then Gerald Foos will respond: “And what about you, Big Brother? For years you’ve been watching me every­where I go.”