When the boy in the window flicks his bedroom light on and off, it means pay attention. My own bedroom window is maybe sixty feet from his—too far to make out precise facial features, but close enough, hypothetically, to toss a rope of tied-together bedsheets through his window.
He must be a teenager, because he lives with his parents. They spend most of their time in a kitchen, two windows to the left. They are squat and old, and he is taller than them, with a mop of brown hair, thick thighs, and a big nose. It’s the protrusions that stand out the most from this distance.
He’s watching my parents, too. I know because his lights always flicker after they’ve fallen asleep. In the den, David Letterman talks to my snoring dad on the sofa. In my room, it’s the boy’s show: He wears a yellow T-shirt with no pants, and uses one hand to caress himself while the other brushes his hair. He acts like he doesn’t see me watching, but this is just part one of his act. He puts down the hairbrush and picks up a blow-dryer on the bureau. Then he puts down the blow-dryer, walks to the window holding himself with one hand. He waves with the other.
His is the only penis I’ve ever seen, and it appears to be half an arm’s length, rubbery and the color of a blood orange. He is instructional in the way he touches himself—as if he’s teaching a group of students the techniques of a sport. It’s all about form, control, consistency.
I used to watch him from my window seat in the dark so I wouldn’t be seen, but eventually he’d wave to remind me I was there. If I ignore him, he switches his lights on and off and won’t let up. Besides, I want to look, not so much anymore at the thing he’s showing off, but at his face, which from this distance is just the general idea of a face. A face before it’s been properly wired to a brain, an outline of what a face will be before the painter fills in the defining features, a Mr. Potato Head fitted with only a nose and a wig cap.
I have seen this boy’s most intimate body part countless times. I know the layout of his bedroom, where his parents eat dinner, the fogged glass of his bathroom window, the one room in his apartment where the lights are always off, but I’ve never seen him blink. If I squint one eye, I could crush him between two fingers. He is like a tiny rubber doll with all his parts. It’s strange how at a certain distance, people become objects.
“He’s a pervert,” my mother had said the first time we spotted him, months earlier. But first she had covered her mouth with her hand, because the whole thing was hysterical.
I was having a sleepover with two other girls from school when he made himself known. One girl spotted him first: He was brushing his hair, naked from the waist down. We thought we were spying on him until he walked to the window and waved his arm like a windshield wiper. We screamed and flopped on my bed, then dropped to the floor as if we were under attack and got to our knees to make sure he was still there. He waved again. When my mother heard our squealing and came into my room, we pointed to the window. I loved her for laughing, like she was one of us girls. And then she closed the curtain for the night.
When the first girl fell asleep, the rest of us decided to rub Vaseline on a phone cord and place it on her neck. “The penis is attacking you!” we chanted until she woke up. It was hilarious. Euphoric.
But it’s different now, on these nights alone with him. It isn’t funny at all, but instead generates an urgent, disgusting, rage-inducing, oily sensation. Is there a word for a fantasy you don’t enjoy, a waking dream that you didn’t have, but rather it had you? There is this teased-up version of me who wears a short denim skirt and has a nest of wild, curly hair and a gum-smacking painted-on mouth that spews the word fuck into his face as he presses this other me against the brick wall in the alleyway between our buildings. I hate them both. I want to drop an air conditioner on their heads and flatten them out. I want to make him feel as monstrous as I do.
It’s an act of revenge, I think, no more than that, when I flick my own lights. I’ve stuffed a hot pink satin bra from my sister’s drawer with balled-up tissues and tightened the leather strings on my suede hot pants. The tape deck plays recorded air until the first chords of “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” chase a bouncing ball into my room. Now I’m the ball, erratic and buoyant, a slippery hot pink target that shoots up to the bed and back down to the floor, flying, dropping, shooting up again.
I am Jim Morrison dancing around a fire pit. I’m Jim Morrison’s Wiccan reporter girlfriend in the scene in the movie where they chase each other around a candlelit room covered in their own blood.
When the song is over, I drop to the ground, still pulsing. Heavy on the knotted blue carpet, tissues unpacked from my bra in one hand. For a moment, my heart is the only organ in my body, and it’s lodged in my ear canal. But soon it sags back down to my chest, and my brain takes over. What did I just do? Something I couldn’t control, something I won’t be able to back up.
Across the alleyway, the boy flicks his lights fast and furious. A silent applause.