Thy Neighbor (18 page)

Back at Facebook, I've been waiting on Iris. Waiting for his information, if he has any.

Over and over, I've kept thinking about what he said.

“You needed to know. You deserve to know.”

Deserve?

“Deserve” was not a word I would have expected from an extortionist, or even a whistle-blower for that matter, unless it was followed by the words “to die” or “to be gang-raped in prison like the rest of your chicken-hawking kind.”

I mean, it's weird. This guy thinks he's got me on child rape, right? So why is he taking care of me, or seeming to? Why take the “kindest way”? And if I'm the author of these notes, then what could he tell me that I don't already know? He doesn't know I'm blocked on the memory. Yet he said, “I think you may be confused.” Confused how? Confused as in, you, wretched pedophile, caught in the grip of your monstrous perversion, aren't thinking straight. You don't know that little girls are not for the taking. You can't see the right way. So now I, equalizer/vigilante therapist, am here to set you straight. Was that it? Or was he using “confused” euphemistically, like some hit man in a gangster movie as the prelude to a really ugly move? As in, let me help you get clear here, pal. The ground rules are these.
Snap
.

And yet he said I could torture
him
in the end if that's what I wanted. So how does that make any sense?

There's nothing to do but wait.

And trust.

I can see the appeal of letting myself fall into someone else's hands, advisedly or not. It doesn't matter. The slipping feeling, the ease of it is intoxicating in a new way. To be led blindly and not to resist. To exercise no choice but this one. To follow. And after that, all the following is done without thinking. It simply proceeds, like water flowing through channels, finding the weak points and carving new ones very slowly, unnoticeably, without pain, until there is a gash of its passage through rock.

I recognize in this the appeal of my sexual past as expressed in my body through sport. There is, of course, the surge of victory, of domination, which we are all supposed to be in it for. The win. But there is something incredibly erotic in a loss, especially a loss that is delivered on the other end, as in tennis, with balletic ease. The volleyer praised for his touch and his soft hands places the ball in the corners, an elegant slice, a curt punch, and the running man on the baseline, all feet, scampering, desperate, outpaced by a sliding, taunting, floating untouchable shot.

Put that way, I accept. Fully now, without caveat, I accept.

I will be led and—laughing now at this next bit—pummeled softly.

How dime-store is that?

16

It's not that I care that Monica's a thief. I don't.

Good for her. She's making a living outside the system, as she would say, but within it. She's solved the modern problem of life. People work to earn to live, but either they work so much that they have no life and no leisure time to spend and enjoy what they earn, or they earn too little to afford anything good in the free time they have.

If they have kids, they have no free time either way, and all monies go toward maintaining the untenable working parent lifestyle. Modern man and woman are enslaved, whether at home or in the office or both. Their entire lives are spent trying to bring about something that never materializes—a gulp of air, a moment of rest—and they die having achieved and enjoyed nothing.

That is, unless they cheat, or are very, very lucky. It used to be said of the underclass that they preferred welfare, because why work at a shit job eight or ten hours a day for bare sustenance? At least on the dole or selling drugs you have a life—or can have one, can spend time alone, can even spend quality time with your kids. Imagine that? But nowadays the same can be and is said of the middle and upper middle classes as well. Everyone is living on the red line of sustenance, and sustenance of what? A crowded, work-suffused, sleep-deprived, leisure-free nonlife in which all desires and personal satisfactions are firmly sublimated until they pop out like hernia, in the form of extramarital affairs and tax evasion, teenage kids in dog crates, fat men in fetish wear, little girls in the crosshairs, and guys watching the whole thing on video.

No, I couldn't judge Monica. I admired her. She had said no to the social contract right up front. She hadn't shaken meekly on the terms and gone about shuffling her feet like the rest of us, just waiting for that secret moment to transgress. Her whole life was a transgression.

Perfectly consistent.

A house of lies.

And yet within that antimatter, something of its opposite managed to exist. There was substance in the core of the illusion, substance created by and dependent on the illusion, but not itself of it.

In this, I could see my mother again so clearly. Exactly this quality, this technique. Substance from absence. A complexity of personality so fine, so delicate, so elusive, eliciting a collector's fascination. Disbelief. How is it made? Reaching in—there is something there, I see it—and grasping nothing.

But Monica was different in one key respect. She was living in the world on her own terms, whereas my mother had capitulated to tradition. To her, the word “wife” was an execration, and “MOM” was exactly what it looked like on the page in caps: a yawning maw between spread legs or, as she so bitterly put it, “the opposite of WOW.”

Diana Walsh did what was expected of her. She followed the rules, and then she cheated with booze. And in so doing, I ask you: Did she do more or less damage than Monica?

Stupid question.

I mean, who is the real anarchist here? The petty thief siphoning a pittance off the system? Or the wife and mother knocking the knees out from under the next generation?

Monica wasn't belittling a toddler somewhere, or beating or raping or stabbing one of her own at home with the very hands that were supposed to be caring for it. She wasn't warping minds irreparably with the unmatched omnipotence of a mommy or a daddy in those first five years of life. She was nothing. Not even a threat.

You want to destroy a civilization? You don't do it by taking to the streets and banging down doors, or by living outside the system and making balaclavaed forays in.

You do it in the living room and at the kitchen table. You do it in all those irretrievable moments when a person is made, when all manner of freaks are coached into their freaky being by people who are doing only what is expected of them.

Nothing is as radical as normal. I'm telling you. Fucking nothing.

Which, I guess, is why Monica made me feel safe, and why her association with Damian or any other underworld characters wasn't much cause for concern. It was just one more thing we had in common, and maybe one more thing that would make it easier for Monica to accept me once she knew everything. When she found out about the spying and this journal, if she hadn't already, she would have to see it as my cheat, and so, presumably, she would understand it.

Maybe she would take or was already taking refuge in my transgressions, just as I was taking a paradoxical kind of refuge in hers. She was a floating tent to me, and so maybe to her I was a cozy cesspool. I would have put that description on Facebook if I'd had the balls. It was the truest thing you could say about me, but it would take a person as untethered as Monica to accept it.

Would she ask me to change? Would I ask her? Wasn't that always the mistake?

Stop thinking, Nick, and it will fall into place.

No. That's wrong.

Something else.

The program is all upside down and backward.

So let it be.

Let her know everything.

And then what?

Then see.

Just sit back and see what happens.

At our tennis game Jeff was his usual self. Reticent but pliable if you cared to work at it. And this time I did. I felt like kicking him in the head, not so much because of what I thought he was probably doing to me, but because I wanted to see him surprised by pain.

He was far too controlled and prepared. I wanted to get something spontaneous.

With most people, this would have worked. Problem was, pain was too much a regular part of Jeff's life in his father's house. A random boot to the bean wouldn't have surprised him at all. He had a mask for that, too.

But this was a changed world for me. The world of everything upside down and backward. I was thinking in a whole new way.

We were sitting side by side in the lounge at the club, sprawled across a couple of those shapeless low-slung armchairs off in a corner away from the TV. I'd brought some beer and coaxed Jeff into having a couple. In this, he was unusually amenable, seeming not to mind or much resist, for once, my insistence that he join me.

“How's life at home?” I asked.

“The same,” he murmured.

“Meaning what?” I prodded. I wasn't going to let him retreat into monosyllables again. “Your older brother's still a psycho, your younger brother's still on death row, and you're doing your best to make yourself invisible, just like your mom?”

He looked at me, surprised, then returned to peeling the label off his bottle of beer.

“Pretty much,” he said.

“Yeah, well, guess what?” I continued. “Life's about to change.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean you and I are going to talk for once, maybe even act if we really get crazy.”

“Act how?”

“I don't know. You tell me. How do you act?”

“Like this,” he said, throwing up his hands. “You know. I don't.”

“No, I'm not sure I do know. I know that you mope around and you look moody like every teenage guy who can get his dick sucked, but beyond that you're a blank, and that's starting to worry me, frankly. Nobody's
that
blank, and it's always the quiet ones who're the worst. They're always the ones who turn out to be conducting experiments on small animals and homeless people in abandoned warehouses. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he replied, too knowingly.

“So?”

“So?”

“So what's your sideline? Are you doing dental work on house cats, or dropping burning bags of shit into the pretty royal blue mail collection box outside Kroger's?”

“Someone did that?” he said.

“Yeah, a few weeks back,” I lied. “It was in the papers. Didn't you hear?”

“No.”

“Some kids, they think, on a dare. Lit all the mail on fire, blew open the swinging door with all the gas buildup, and blew the shit with it. Talk about a dirty bomb.”

I laughed.

Jeff didn't.

“Come on,” I said. “You've never done anything like that?”

“Hell, no. You know what my dad's like.”

“Yeah, I do. And the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means your dad is unhinged, and your oldest brother is, too. Your little brother's well on his way to certifiable. Christ, it's like pattern baldness with you people, except it comes through the dad. Fucking congenital. And then, well, life in the compound just makes it a sure thing, doesn't it? Nature-nurture one-two punch?”

Jeff took a long swig of beer, but said nothing.

I took a long swig, too, for lubrication of the mood. I could feel the flow of meanness rising in my throat and the splash in the back of my brain.

“Or are you gonna tell me that you're the anomaly? You'll break the mold?”

“I will never be like my father,” he said, “if that's what you mean. Never.”

“Why's that? Because you study hard and you're athlete of the year? You think you can work your way out of your genes?”

I knew as soon as I said it that this was the wrong thing to say. I doubt he even knew what I meant. His mind was like a maze, full of walls and dead ends. He would simply stop if the stimulus was off, if he was too frightened, or bored, or confused. I was going to have to thread my way through blind, by feel.

The heat in my thoughts had fallen, too, the rush of cruelty having slackened with the miss.

That would be my guide. Could I feel myself hurting him, feel my progress inside his head, hand over hand? I would know by my own measure the correlation, proportionally direct, of my pleasure to his weakness: one to one.

We sat in silence for a while and I knew I was losing him, but I couldn't see where to strike. Where was the way in? How would I get him to show me what he was hiding, if anything? Or was he really that blank after all? I was watching him closely, staring in a hostile, predatory way, but he was too shy to look up, too accustomed to shutting down, and too blunted by brute force to notice the subtlety of another person's need to violate in thought.

The idea of scanning for a person's emotional vulnerability—seeking it out in the armature of their defenses, finding it, and sticking it, just there, like a beetle on a board, and watching with almost sexual pleasure as the legs curled and squirmed around the insult—that would probably never occur to someone like Jeff. Unless? Unless he was that rarest of breeds, the seamless sociopath, a machine of damage, all brushed stainless steel on the outside and all ripping rapier blades on the inside, dicing livers, hearts, and souls without spilling a drop.

A chilling thought, but a useful one. I was thinking about surfaces. Perfect surfaces. And I was looking at Jeff's face.

And that's when I saw it. Right there. So obvious. So bare. Of course. The thing they all had in common, all three boys, the thing that was so blindingly apparent in them and, for that reason, almost always overlooked. You had to be a stranger to see it. If you'd known them all their lives, you took it as much for granted as they did. But if you knew them the way I knew them, if you knew Gruber, you knew that it was the only untried point of attack, the blindside all out in the open where even the old man had never thought to hit.

It was the one blow that Jeff—that any Gruber—wouldn't see coming. He'd fold into it like dough around a baker's fist, because he wouldn't know that it was violence until it was too late.

I was looking at Jeff's head. His blunt, bent, blond head, straight nose, full lips, cut jaw, loose curls, like something on a Roman coin, the coloration gold and rose and cameo—absurd—and the russet framing stubble around the mouth and chin. Ridiculous. You gorgeous motherfucker, I thought. Right there. Right fucking there.

And it was true. I haven't even said it here. In all this time, I haven't even thought to mention it, but they were all like that. All three of them. Gorgeous motherfuckers. Blond, blue-eyed, bold-featured, lean, and strong: a goddamned gift basket of dick. Just the gang of choirboys you'd pay to pull a train on you. They were that unreal. You'd see them running up the street beside Gruber at six in the morning like flanking cherubim with the sun coming up in their hair and their long, limber legs striding, and you'd think that the apocalypse was upon you, and hallelujah, it was hung like a horse.

You thought it, and you didn't. And then they were just those kids across the street again, taking their arresting beauty in stride.

The Grubers had a black housekeeper for a while, who had a less reverent way of putting it. She called them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. If Mom could have seen them like this, all grown up and shining, she'd have had a snide one for it, too, like: “Ah, twice blessed, it's the three graces in drag.”

Yes, you're beautiful, I thought, and that's it. That's exactly it.

Had I said it out loud?

I must have, because Jeff put down his beer and made a move to get up.

“Where you going, big guy?” I said, grabbing hold of his knee.

“Somewhere else,” he said. “This is the wrong place for this conversation.”

His tone was stern but strangely intimate as well. The flattery had penetrated. The target pinged.

Hang on, I thought. You have him.

Hang on. Just a little longer.

Carefully, gently, I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Jeff,” I said. “Jeff, don't go.”

A pause.

“Talk to me,” I pleaded.

Would he recognize the phrase?

Talk to me.

So girlish.

You fucking little bitch.

He coughed, embarrassed, and covered his mouth with his hand. I felt him tense and then release beneath my fingers.

Move now, I thought. Quickly.

I slid my hand to the back of his neck, my thumb pressing around the side, over the rope of muscle, and past to the soft, pulsing groove of skin and vein where the life would let out if you sliced it.