That’s me, lurking by the elementary school wrought-iron fence, standing with my hands in the pockets of my peacoat. I’m half-Chinese, half-Caucasian, shoulder-length black hair, ovoid face, epicanthic eyes, soft nose, thick lips, still boyish, I like to think, at age thirty-seven. Behind me are the children, my daughters included, a rabbling swirl of high-pitched noise, shouts piercing other shouts, aural confetti, almost impossible to reproduce in a sound studio. Around me are my fellow parents. Dutiful. Concerned about the school. But don’t underestimate them. They will draw and quarter you if they think you might fuck with their kids. God help you if you happen to venture onto the playground at the wrong time. I did it once, trying to record that school-yard din for a project of mine. I walked right into the recess playground through the unlocked gate, wearing headphones, carrying an omnidirectional microphone and a digital recorder. Teachers, attendants, and parent volunteers swarmed me—they came rappelling down walls, climbing from sewer grates, materializing in clouds of smoke—before I could get close to a child. The look in their vigilante eyes, their eagerness, it was almost like they were hoping I was a pervert, some sicko, just so all their dark fears would be justified. They were angry with me when it turned out I was a parent and not a sexual predator. I was sternly warned not to return to the school unless I was accompanying my daughters.
Here’s what’s wrong with us: there’s nothing at stake. That makes us oversensitive to minor transgressions, prone to disproportionate responses, quick to counterattack.
We are a prosperous community. Our lofts and apartments are worth millions. Our wives vestigially beautiful. Our renovations as vast and grand in scale as the construction of ocean liners, yet we regularly assure ourselves that our affluence does not define us. We are better than that. Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs on our iTunes playlists, our children in their secure little school. We live in smug certainty that our taste is impeccable, our politics correct, our sense of outrage at the current regime totally warranted.
Our neighborhood was settled by artists so long ago the story feels apocryphal. For almost as soon as the larger world became aware of Tribeca, in rushed developers and syndicators and builders and realtors and the name turned into a synonym for a kind of urban living: a little edgy, perhaps, but ultimately safer and richer even than Scarsdale. A certain type of family arrived, drawn by that safety and the faux-bohemianism of Downtown, driving out the actual bohemians. And now, we faux-bohemians find ourselves facing the onslaught of those who don’t even pretend to give a shit about books or theater.
We are cosseted, a warm little precinct, connected to the rest of the city, but for all our interaction with it, it feels as if there are drawbridges that keep out the would-be brigands and freebooters. They are among us on these sidewalks, but we don’t notice them, the chubby minority girls in their sweatpants and string-strap day-packs, the boys on their way to the community college with their heavy parkas and earphones, rapping as they strut. They are local color: harmless, we tell ourselves, as unlikely to cause havoc as the pizza-delivery man or the fellow from Guatemala who works at the deli.
So it is a shock when an icy hand reaches in and ruins a life. We wake up to the news and feel that a blade has scraped against our heart. We look at our children and wonder how we let them become so exposed, but then, the sense of safety, the cordoned-off warmth, wasn’t that always the aberration? An island of gentle deceit in a dark, hostile sea of truth, truth, truth?
I SEE MY friends across the street, fellow fathers in their late thirties, prosperous professionals in the arts. There is the sculptor, the playwright, the film producer, the memoirist, the photographer, even the “contractor”—our local thug—most of them ostensibly artists but actually businessmen. They believe their awareness of their own hypocrisies keeps them from being hypocrites. I’m not an artist qua artist, as they are. But most days I join them and we make our way in twos and threes to a steak house recently taken to serving breakfast. We convene in a large round booth, ordering coffee, eggs, toast, Cream of Wheat. We spread out newspapers and discuss films, television, political candidates, sports. You know what this bantering conversation is like. We tell ourselves that our palaver is wittier, cleverer than most, unique somehow. We are artists, writers, professional hipsters of one sort or another, and so we must be funnier than you. But then we would think that, wouldn’t we? We are here, in this privileged canton, in this city, in this gilded era, so why shouldn’t we be confident that our banter surpasses yours?
Yet this morning there is a rift, as an argument clouds the usual jocularity. A young girl, twelve years old, has been violated just a few blocks north of here, on a street banked by multimillion-dollar lofts. The men around this table are divided as to the threat, the appropriate level of fear, the correct response. Details are scant. She was letting herself into her building and was followed. That much is clear. Yet what happened after that is murky. The defiler joined her in the elevator, took her to the basement, and then . . . what? Nobody is sure. The newspaper accounts make clear she was not sodomized or penetrated. Did he compel her to touch him? What, exactly, happened?
Sumner, the film producer, is the most visibly concerned. He says that this is not the first time he has heard of young women being molested in the neighborhood. Why, there was the day last spring when Sumner himself was part of a group of concerned parents who chased a suspicious man with a camera from a local park.
Sumner, slightly older, graying around a shiny dome, bushy beard, handsome in an avuncular kind of way, looks around the table as if expecting huzzahs for his bravery at keeping the park free of sex offenders. He holds forth in his distinctive voice; it is throaty, almost hoarse. I have a good ear for voices and cadences, and Sumner has stretches during which he speaks in almost perfect 2/2 time. That rhythm makes it very hard to interrupt him.
“Within five hundred yards of where we are sitting right now,” he says sternly, “there are five thousand registered sex offenders.”
“Shut the fuck up, Sumner,” the playwright says.
“What a big man you are, Sumner,” I say, “keeping the neighborhood safe.”
“You can laugh,” Sumner says, “but this is a serious issue. A real issue.”
“She probably knew the guy,” I say. “Aren’t most of these cases like that? The girl knew the guy?”
Sumner claims to know, for certain, that she didn’t know him, that this was a stranger, an outsider who came into our community to molest a young girl.
I tell him he sounds hysterical. He tells me I have daughters, that I should be worried.
“Sumner,” I tell him, “get over it. Not everybody wants to fuck your kids.”
I AM A noisemaker, known professionally as a sound engineer, providing the jiggle and wobble and chirp and boom that accompanies so much of our popular entertainment. Every commercial, television show, and film requires a host of effects to provide verisimilitude: a door opens, a box of cereal is poured, a phone is hung up. Each makes a sound, but if you merely record the actual noise, it won’t be satisfyingly authentic. So I must amplify, distort, manufacture, repeat, substitute. I own a sound studio with a half-dozen edit bays in which filmed images can be projected and a few of us can sit behind mixers and computers to sync up the appropriate effects. I have boxes of different types of shoes, a wide range of sample floor surfaces—wood, stone, tile—a plywood board with two dozen locks and latches on it. I have gained some renown for my ability to discern and manipulate sound. I’m even asked on occasion to testify as an expert witness when prosecutors need to make an identification based on a voice-mail message or recorded conversation.
Of course, I didn’t set out to become a noisemaker. I backed into it. I was a singer, a composer, a producer, a guitar player—I still have expensive electric guitars on stands in my studio; they glisten like museum pieces. I know many musicians from my generation of punk rockers in Los Angeles and New York who went on to some degree of fame in the music business. I produced and engineered albums by a few bands that never quite made it, but doing that I learned to make and control noise. The sound engineering began, in part, because I had the equipment. Friends asked me to help them on various projects; I found the work easy; they paid me well. I bought more equipment, purchased a floor in a vast old building, and became, in effect, a kind of landlord to others who work with noise. The renting of that studio space to filmmakers, sound engineers, and sound editors has turned out to be more lucrative than my own noisemaking; it actually allows me to support my family in this expensive city.
I also married well. Brooke is a tall, strapping, freckled brunette from a vast Connecticut family in which distant relatives turn to corpses at the rate of 1 every 2.5 years, leaving us generous amounts of shares, bonds, and cash.
All this has allowed me to maintain my bohemian style, my belief that I am somehow different than the bankers and attorneys who predominate in our community. I am still an artist, I tell myself, a creative person who happens to live among the bourgeoisie. This is not a small American achievement, I must tell you. The mongrel me, born in Hong Kong, raised in San Francisco, a state college graduate, joining with a prize American specimen like my wife. She could have picked anyone, yet she ended up with a half-breed. I have traveled miles raising myself to this station. And it was an effort, a prodigious act of will. That is what those other fathers will never understand. I wasn’t shown to my place. I had to scrap my way here. These were calculated decisions. These other gentlemen, they fell into it: private liberal arts colleges, internships, jobs at galleries, assisting more powerful men. For me, there was no easy path. I had no choice but to be ruthless.
And that is why, in the days that follow, as our little community is consumed by fear of the sexual predator in our midst, I find myself hoping that this man, this savage, is not an interloper but a local, a member of our tribe gone horribly awry, so that these fathers will have to blame themselves rather than simply close ranks.
“DADDY,” SAYS MY eight-year-old daughter, Cooper. “That looks like you!”
We are walking past the cozy lobby entrances, the doormen standing smartly behind their stations, the bulbous fish-eye cameras protruding from above doorbell buzzers. Mornings like this, our neighborhood seems like it is made up entirely of parents taking their children to school and men and women in suits marching up the pavement to their offices.
The legal-size flyers are glued to lampposts, freebie newspaper boxes, work-site barricades. The staring face on them does look like me. He is supposed to be Caucasian, or so says the description beneath the black-and-white composite sketch, but he looks Hispanic, or, actually, as my daughter has pointed out, like me—Amer-Asian.
“Is that you?” asks Penny, our six-year-old.
“No,” I tell them, a little too loudly. I try again. “No. That’s a man who did something wrong.”
“What did he do?” asks Penny.
Cooper, who can read, has no doubt already made out: WANTED: SEX OFFENDER. The word sex, I assume, has tipped her that this is an adult matter. “It’s about sex,” she says.
“What’s sex?” asks Penny.
“When a girl and a boy kiss,” Cooper says.
“Eeewww!” Penny says. “That’s gross.”
“But what did he do wrong?” Cooper asks me.
“He, um, kissed someone he wasn’t supposed to.”
“Who?”
“A girl.” We’re standing at the corner now, waiting for the light. The flyers are tacked up everywhere, that face gazing back dumbly. He could be lurking around every corner, right here, in front of the deli, or having coffee just inside the bakery windows. We must be vigilant, the posters insist—protective. “A young girl.”
Cooper considers this. “But why are they looking for him?”
“Because kissing is bad,” Penny says.
“No, kissing is not bad.” As I say this, a mother and daughter walk past in the opposite direction, the woman in a fur-collared coat, the bespectacled little girl in a wool-and-shearling parka. The mother overhears me, looks at me, considers for a moment where she has seen my face—the flyers are frickin’ everywhere—and seems to be momentarily confused. I feel like shouting, “I’m not him!” but that would be awkward. Instead, I unfasten my ponytail so my long hair hangs loose.
I deposit my children in the yard, standing by Penny and holding her hand until her friends join her and she seems to forget about me. There are no flyers in the school yard, thank god, and in the busy throng of parents and bundled-up children, my resemblance to the suspect is unnoticed.
IN THE RESTAURANT at breakfast, I learn that Sumner is behind the campaign to wrap the neighborhood in flyers. As a member of Community Board 1, a parent deeply involved in the local PTA, a big macher in the Friends of Washington Market Park Association, he ordered that the flyers be printed and he led the team of volunteers that spent six hours last night stapling and pasting and taping them throughout the neighborhood. It is urgent, he stresses, to be hypervigilant.
Sumner is between projects, temporarily supported by his wife, a gallery owner and truffler of young men and women who make expensive art. She has been profiled in glossy magazines and Sumner, embarrassingly, always brings along those issues and shares them with us. His own credits, or what I can gather from Googling him and typing his name into IMDb, consist of a minor picture starring a major actor, and a television movie, both over a decade old.
“Sumner,” I tell him, “if the guy is supposed to be white—”
The playwright cuts me off, smiling. “Then how come he looks like you?”
“Well,” I say, “yeah.”
Sumner says the police gave him that sketch, and in the photocopying the image darkened. “Why do you care?”
“It’s just that, if you’re looking for a white guy, why have a picture where the guy clearly doesn’t look white?”
Sumner waves me off and shakes his head. “We are doing whatever we have to do, as a community.”
“I’m imagining guys with pitchforks and torches marching up and down Hudson Street,” says the playwright.
“If that’s what it takes,” Sumner says.
LATER, I AM at one of my studios going through the bookings with the manager when I look up and see two men in bubble parkas smiling at me through the sliding-glass window. They are doing postproduction on a pilot for a hip-hop version of American Idol in Studio C, which now smells strongly of marijuana smoke.
“Yo, it’s fuckin’ Chester the Molester.” They are holding the flyer up and pointing to me.
I shake my head, smiling. “Read the fine print. It says ‘Caucasian,’ okay?”
They squint. “This shit’s almost too small to read, but, yo, it don’t say nothing about Caucasian.”
They saunter down the hall, laughing.
I decide to head home. On my way back to the loft, I stop at a construction site where about three dozen of the flyers have been pasted. I notice that the line about the perpetrator’s race has vanished. Now, beneath the bold WANTED: SEX OFFENDER, it only describes the whereabouts and time of the alleged attack. Below that is the sketch that might as well be of me.
I tell myself that no one is going to think I am the sex offender. Why would they? We’ve been living here since before Cooper was born. We are pillars of the community. I should just ignore it.
But I can’t. When I go to the bank, the FedEx office, the coffee shop, I feel like I am the subject of intense scrutiny. Everyone who lives or works in the neighborhood must have seen the flyer, Sumner and his minions apparently having nothing to do but work on their campaign. The local freebie newspaper has even run a story about the effort to keep our community safe from sexual predators. The community board, according to the article, is considering hiring a guard for the local playground, additional security at the school. The tone of the article is of barely contained hysteria: quotes from mothers about spotting suspicious characters lurking near the school; a secondhand account of the man chased from the park last year (no mention of whether he was actually dangerous); and even a story about someone attempting an unauthorized recording in the playground at our elementary school. The description of this last incident is so sinister and compelling that I read the entire paragraph before realizing they are talking about me.
Then, that evening, while I’m looking through my daughters’ homework folders, I find they have a sheaf of the flyers in the pocket where there is usually a list of assignments and returned classwork.
“Why do you guys have these?” I ask Cooper, who is sitting at the computer in her room, playing a game with one of her virtual pets.
Penny sits in a seat beside her, watching.
“We’re supposed to take them home.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” Cooper says. “To give to people?”
When I ask who told them to do this, they explain that there was an assembly at school and a woman from the police department told them to report any suspicious-looking men and then handed out these flyers.
“Why do you have so many?”
“I took a lot because they look like you,” Cooper says.
“We’re gonna draw on them,” Penny adds.
I say that they shouldn’t have them and that I am throwing them away. The suddenly angry tone of my voice shocks them and Penny starts crying, running into the dining room, where Brooke is flipping through a Pottery Barn catalog. I can hear Penny sobbing, “Daddy yelled at me in a mean voice.”
As she consoles our daughter, Brooke looks at me sternly. Her eyes are red, veiny; she’s already had her late-afternoon/early-evening toke.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks me later.
I show her the flyer, not bothering to point out the similarity.
“Who cares?”
“How would you feel if everywhere you went there was a picture of you beneath the words sex offender?”
“But it’s not you.”
“It looks like me. Even the kids thought it was me.”
Last year, when Brooke found out about my walking into the yard with the microphone and headphones, she was furious, asking me what the hell I had been thinking. Actually, I hadn’t been thinking. There was a crowd scene at a park in a television show I was working on and I thought I could grab the sounds in the playground. Brooke said I had embarrassed her, but I never really understood what the big deal was.
Now, unspoken in our conversation, I can sense her belief that I am guilty—not of attacking a young girl but of naive stupidity. She says, “If you didn’t do anything then why would you care?”
I don’t want to answer her. “I don’t know; it’s embarrassing.”
“Are you hiding something?” she says, half-joking, eyebrows arched.
“Of course not.”
I try to remember where I was on the night in question. I have no idea. But why am I trying to come up with an alibi? In case I need it, I suppose, in case the uncanny resemblance between the perpetrator and myself leads to my being officially accused.
The next morning outside the school, after drop-off, I tap Sumner on the shoulder. He stands with a group of mothers bundled up in their parkas and wool coats. Sumner flirts shamelessly with the mothers.
“Why doesn’t the flyer say the guy is white?” I ask.
“What are you talking about?”
“The flyer, of the sex offender, it doesn’t mention his race anymore.”
Sumner shrugs. “It got too blurry from all the copying, so we whited it out.”
“But then how does anyone know who they’re looking for?”
“What? It’s a guy who—who looks like that. It’s not confusing.” Sumner shakes his head. The women behind him are all monitoring our conversation. Sumner’s metronomic 2/2 cadence is clearly audible all around us. “Why are you always questioning this project?”
“Because it seems a little hysterical.”
“This is very real,” Sumner says. “You have to look at your own motives here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was the incident last year, with the microphone.”
The women behind him all nod.
“Are you accusing me of something?”
“No, I’m just saying, there is the resemblance, so . . . .” He stops.
“Where were you that night?” a brunette with a short, puggish nose behind him suddenly asks. I know who she is. She is married to a guitar player in an important though not commercially successful group.
I walk away.
THE COMMUNITY HAS turned against me. I was an impostor all along, they seem to have realized, ersatz, and my counterfeit composition has now been deduced. I am a fraud. A half-breed passing in this privileged sanctum for wealthy pseudo-bohemians, artists, and artist manqués. I never really belonged, and this is their way of rooting me out. But then, don’t we all feel like we are on borrowed time? Like sooner or later the truth about our base natures will be revealed and we will be shown for who we really are?
I begin to run through the possibilities. What if I am arrested? What if I am found guilty? Imprisoned? We’ve all heard the stories: they castrate sexual offenders in prison, sodomize them, torture them, the guards condone it. Is that to be my punishment?
I am not surprised when the police arrive. They are detectives, dressed in warm-looking parkas, wearing jeans and sneakers. The taller of the two nods and looks around my office. “First Precinct,” he says.
I am suddenly acutely aware of my environs. There are file cabinets behind me, an antique wooden desk in front of me, and a television next to the door. Boxes containing noise-creating artifacts are labeled and stacked along the wall beside me—SCRAPING; BANGING; RIPPING & TEARING; LEAKING & BLEEDING. There are piles of children’s shoes in an opened box beside the desk, labeled CHILD & BABY STEPS. A few dozen gloves of varying sizes are piled up on a table next to me, where I have been trying them on and removing them, listening for any variation. I slide off a long, slender, up-to-the-elbow white leather woman’s glove and set it down on the desk.
“Yes?”
I had been expecting men in uniform or perhaps suits and ties, like cops on television. These two gentlemen, both Hispanic, mid-thirties, look like guys who might work at the deli. They don’t show me any badges. They just ask me my name, if this is my studio, if I am a sound engineer. I answer affirmatively.
I want to tell them that I have an alibi. I am almost sure I was here at the studio that night, working late. I’ve looked at the logs to see who was renting space that evening and have their phone numbers ready. They will remember that I was working on a series for the Military Channel. They will have seen me in Studio B. Or in the hallway. Or perhaps here, digging through the props. I can prove my innocence.
The detectives are stoic and patient. They are not in a hurry.
“We have something for you,” the taller officer says.
I am wondering if I should accept anything from them without an attorney’s advice.
“We have a job for you,” his partner says.
Is this how they arrest people? By toying with them?
“Is that a euphemism?” I say.
“A what?” the taller officer says. “No, it’s a tape. Or whatever you call these things.”
He hands me a flash memory stick.
In the midst of her struggle in that basement, as she was being groped and wrestled, the violated girl accidentally made a phone call to a random stranger’s voice mail.
“Some Mormon in Utah listened to this and we’re lucky she didn’t think it was an obscene phone call.”
His partner cuts him off. “Heavy breathing, panting, some guy’s voice.”
They want me to work with the file, to bring up the man’s voice and tamp down the rest of the sound, so that they might more easily identify the perpetrator.
“Isn’t that what you do,” the tall gent says, “work with sound?”
I shrug. “I can try.”
I SIT DOWN in Studio B and slide on a pair of headphones. The recording is awash with white noise, hisses, a banging like a radiator clanging. There is the soft hum of an elevator motor. The mechanical clunk of an elevator door sliding open. They must be near the elevator. They are in a basement. Every sound is exaggerated and faintly doubled by the echo. I can clearly make out a man’s voice, urging, insistent. Is the girl sobbing? It’s an awful scene and I am able to project myself there all too easily. I can visualize the location. The girl is pushed against the wall. The man is facing her, his voice more clear and cutting because the sound waves are bouncing off the concrete into her phone’s mouthpiece. I know how to reduce the levels of extraneous noise. The man’s voice is a lower mid-register, clear when it emerges from its throaty beginning. I am stripping away the bass and treble, reducing the hiss, finding and eliminating those parts of the file containing the radiator clangs. I keep removing and excising and soon all I am left with is the man’s voice, a strangely familiar voice.
No one ever comes to retrieve the file.
When I call the precinct a few weeks later, I am given a case number and passed along to a detective’s voice mail. He doesn’t call back. I finally e-mail an MP3 to one of the detectives who visited me.
The flyers have been replaced by other, less insistent notices: a poster for a new release by a rock band, a missing dog, Cirque du Soleil is coming back to town.
It is warmer now. The children walking to school must skirt between alfresco tables and the curb; the boys in aprons hosing down the sidewalks direct their spray away from them as they pass. After school, the parks are crowded, the nannies on benches, the less dutiful of them talking on cell phones in their native patois. I like to take my daughters there, and if I have a free afternoon, I pick them up at school and walk them over, past the ice-cream truck where the long line is no deterrent. They ask for bright red or purple confections with names like Twoball Screwball or VeryBerryBlast, which taste like frozen, crushed-up Lifesavers and have gumballs or jawbreakers at their cores. With our ice-cream novelties in hand, we find a spot among the nannies. Penny and Cooper seldom finish their treats; they dig out their gumballs and leave me to dispose of soggy cardboard cups bleeding garish red.
I have stopped joining the other fathers for coffee in the morning. And when I see Sumner now, standing by the swing with his daughters, I don’t acknowledge him. He sees me and walks over, smiling, as if unaware of any change in our relationship.
He tells me he’s been producing a reality show for a pay-cable station and has just returned from shooting in Vancouver.
I tell him I’ve been busy too.
I ask what happened to the molester. Did they ever find him? Do they have any leads?
He shakes his head. But the community, he tells me, the community learned a valuable lesson.
When I ask what that lesson is, he shrugs, suddenly uninterested, and trots after his daughter, who is shouting for him.