Thy Neighbor (5 page)

Cruel and fucking unusual is what that is. Really.

But that's the id for you when it's unsupervised.

Speaking of which, did I mention that through all this organizational preamble and surgical prep Dave was naked? Yeah. There was that, too. Not such a surprise, considering. There were way too many sartorially unfriendly ingredients going into the devil's roux he was concocting. Purposely so, as it turned out.

Wisest just to work commando and shower afterward, which he (sensibly?) did.

Anyway, first things first. Down to work.

Dave lifted the head on the KitchenAid mixer, revealing its distinctive spade-shaped beater blade. He removed the five-quart bowl, held it to his groin like a bedpan, and pissed into it. A lot. He must have been drinking Mountain Dew all day or taking Kitty's hypertension medication, or both, because he let forth a flood that went on for what seemed like a full minute or more.

He then reached in turn for the containers of fish oil, iodine, and semen and emptied the contents of each into the bowl of piss. He placed the bowl back in position under the mixer head, bent in the beater blade, adjusted the machine's controls to the slowest setting, and left the slop to mix on low while he busied himself with phase two.

He opened the two cartons of eggs, took each egg, and, one at a time, very carefully inserted the syringe into its rounder end. Gently, he guided the syringe in and out of the hole he'd made, puncturing the membrane. He then reversed the plunger setting on the pistol grip and extracted the burst yolk and albumen in a single neat draw. He squirted this glop into the toilet each time, replaced the intact eggshell in the carton, and proceeded to the next egg, until all twenty-four of them were empty and neatly aligned in rows.

This task completed, he reached over and turned off the mixer, removed the bowl from its fixture, peered into it, and sniffed its contents with gagging satisfaction. He then laughed maniacally, holding the bowl aloft in triumph and dancing what I can only describe as some sort of demented Highland fling, until he had to sit on the edge of the bathtub to catch his breath.

When he'd recovered, he stood, a bit unsteadily, brought the bowl back to the cluttered countertop, and proceeded as carefully and meticulously as before with phase three.

Twenty-four separate times—count 'em, twenty-four—Dave filled the syringe with the fetid sepia slop from the mixing bowl and, through the same hole he'd already made, injected it into each empty egg. He then sealed the hole with the glue gun.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that right about here is when any moderately disturbed person, let alone a neighbor driven mad by tinnitus, would have stopped. Am I right? I mean, enough is enough. Dave had more than covered the bases set out in whatever vandal's handbook of down and dirty practical jokes he was working from.

Seriously. If, in the mind of the prepubescent vigilante, stink, slime, and stain are the gold standard of noisome projectiles, Dave had done his worst and then some. Any normal revenge-bent eleven-year-old would have just thrown the eggs as is and left it at that, or gone with the tried-and-true water balloon and considered himself well served.

Not Dave.

He is now standing back, looking at his rows of perfect rejiggered eggs. Sealed. Shut tight. For all intents and purposes done. And I'm guessing he's feeling proud of his work, elated by his inventiveness, and his mind, in celebration, is free-associating, maybe ringing off with Stevie Wonder—“Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours”—and he's thinking, “Yes, yes, of course, I have done something masterful, sealed what is to be delivered. Only one thing remains. I must sign my work.”

Yeah, that must have been it.

I mean, Christ. Your guess is as good as mine.

Fuck if I know what the beasty homunculus wreaking havoc in Dave's right brain was thinking. The deeper wherefores are beyond me. Hell, I defy any alienist to explain it.

One thing's sure. He'd planned his last flourishes from the start. He'd bought the wax and the paintbrush. He had the cat shit warming under the heat lamp. So whatever possessed him had possessed him at the Home Depot and beyond, and now he was just carrying out its orders to the last.

Phase four.

He took the paintbrush, one of the narrow-tipped sort that's meant for gilding or painting model airplanes, dipped it in the magma of cat shit, and proceeded to paint what, given the incarnadine quality of Trajan's stool, looked like a battle-muddied St. George's Cross around the girth and height of each egg. One horizontal band of bloody poo, one vertical. Going all the way around. Cruciform on two sides.

Eat your heart out, Andres Serrano.

That completed, he took the Bic lighter, held it beneath the stick of sealing wax, dribbled a dime-size dollop onto the top of each egg, and imprinted it with the signet ring he wore on his right middle finger.

The last abstracted fuck-you, perhaps?

Or do I give him too much credit?

I didn't know at the time what was engraved on the ring. I'd never noticed it before and I've never seen it on his finger since, but if it was his initials, I guess you have to give the guy some credit for chutzpah, or just dumb belligerence, because it was like putting his fingerprint on the weapon and saying, “Come get me. I'll be in the bunker out back with my canned goods and my RPGs.”

Fucking lunatic.

And they could have traced him that way, too, if Dave hadn't hidden or dispensed with the ring and, more to the point, if the partygoers at Jack Gordon's that night hadn't been too drunk and generally disreputable to be credible, even as they stood there rankly splattered with the evidence.

The authorities who investigated the scene—the scene being, of course, Jack's two rowdy acres, pool deck, and aghast guests—might well have classified Dave's salvo as a hate crime, if we had had that legislation in this state at the time.

The St. George's Cross, which was found and identified (or interpreted) as such on some of the less fractured eggshells on Jack's lawn, was seen as a clear indication that the perpetrator was affiliated with the British National Front, or some loosely grafted arm thereof, operating in the disgruntled WASP diaspora, and had carried out his act of vandalism in a spirit of virulent, if shockingly puerile, anti-Semitism.

The letters DOA, which were found imprinted on one of the uncracked wax seals, were seen as an especially sinister touch, but were never conclusively linked with our hero Dave Alders, because his birth and other official records had his middle name as Daniel. Besides, even if what had been interpreted as an
O
, and assigned such a chilling import, had actually been a
D
, for Daniel, a true monogram would have read DAD, not DDA, so the case (weak, at best) against the blubbered bandit was dropped.

Dave must have dispensed with the evidence before he stepped out that night with his bag full of bombs, because none of the goodies—the glue gun, the wax, the syringe, the ring, etc.—were ever found. Trajan himself disappeared that night, too, thereby thwarting any link the county crime lab might have made by means of distinctive intestinal flora. I doubt the notion of a fecal smear ever occurred to those cruller-munching Keystones down at the precinct, but Dave wasn't taking any chances.

Of course, I had the whole thing on tape, but that was mine to do with as I liked and when I chose.

And choose I would. Make no mistake about it.

Meanwhile, every last mucky detail of the episode found its way into our town annals, mostly because the local press went wild over it for weeks, coining all the predictable ringers, e.g., “Fabergé Fiend Fouls Ferragamos.” (As if anyone at a Jack Gordon party, except possibly Jack himself, was wearing anything fancier than Frye motorcycle boots. But whatever.)

To this day, that “spiteful prank of partygoer pelting,” as one tabloid described it, is known across the predominately Jewish southeastern portion of our state as Eggnacht.

And there, my friends, you have it.

All set down.

Thus, alas, was my crass and terrible introduction to the bizarre bazaar of clandestine photography. I sat goggle-eyed in my basement control room, glued to the monitor, double- and triple-checking the red record light every few minutes, just to be absolutely sure that it was still illuminated and that I was indeed getting all of this.

Truth be told, this abject entertainment was just the right over-the-top shock-and-awe antidote to all the psychic pain, terror, and confusion I was in because of my parents' deaths. I required hyperstimulation and distraction every bit that strong to shut out all the poltergeists of speculation and memory that came crashing in on me full tilt if given the slightest chance.

And that's, I guess, what got me hooked on spying, and what kept it going so elaborately for so long. The need to abscond from myself, to throw off the hounds of my own conscience.

I watched that monitor—or later, my many monitors—for hours and hours on end, and drank until I lost consciousness, finding in that blackness a remote-channeled respite from the horror of the too immediately real.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been thirteen years since your last confession.

This is mine.

I make it in the hope of meted penance.

5

I am so afraid.

Can I say that to you? Or to me? Myself. Nick Walsh. Whoever you are/I am. Can I admit that? Can I stand it?

It's true. The truest thing I can express.

I'm afraid.

Afraid that I am my father.

God. How awful. How truly, terrifyingly awful.

And yet I so want to be him. I really do. I have always wanted that. And I know that that probably doesn't make any sense.

But I want it to make sense. I want it to make sense in the telling. Because my father was not a bad man. He really wasn't. That can be true, even while all the rest is true as well.

It can.

It is. It was.

I remember. I remember so much when I let myself. If I can stand the sear of it, like a hot iron on my tongue, the hiss of contact, the rebellion of every sense against the information.

I remember the trips to the Christmas tree farm when I was a boy, the dry, dry cold and the cerulean sky, the blinding sun splash on the powdered snow, feet deep in places, like sifted flour on the untracked ground, and on the boughs of every tree.

I can hear our boots squeaking on the trail, where other trekkers have trampled the snow into trenches deep and narrow. I can feel the tiny hairs in my nostrils tightening, and I can see Dad's yellow leather work-gloved hand toting the rusted handsaw.

I can feel his competence in that hand, his control, and I can relax into the day and be an animal under the sun and in the air, purely alive and without agenda, following behind.

He will decide which tree is best, because he will know, having judged its lean and its symmetry. He will make a show of consulting me and he will note my objections, if I have any and if they are sensibly put forth.

These are the terms of the discourse. You must make an argument, a case, for the thing you want to express. This is what lawyers do, and so it is what the children of lawyers must do also. This much I know, even at eight, or seven, or six. As far back as that, surely. Emotion will get no response, except occasionally more emotion, and the only emotion Dad shows is anger, often channeled to disdain.

Choosing is a matter of dry judgment, even here, where we are looking at the shape and height of trees and wondering if they will look right in the corner of the room when the lights and ornaments are strung on them.

My father has no aesthetic sense. No receptors for that. For him, beauty registers in straight lines, as order, a pleasing logic in the eye that can, for a moment, relax the grip of his mind on the absolute.

To communicate, I must borrow his language, haul it up, copied and memorized for times like these, when the adjustment is so abrupt. I must narrow my eyes against the light, against the bliss of ambience and appetite, sharpen the focus and speak. Say something astute.

He nods.

“Hold it here, son,” he indicates, grasping the midpoint of the trunk where I can reach it, then kneeling to saw at the base.

I watch him do this the way I watch him do everything, like a hospital machine with a pen attached, counting every beat and twitter and recording it. For what? For mimicry. For fascination. I note every dart of his eyes to his fingers, the eyes small and incongruously soft, date brown, the fingers huge, long and thick. Manipulative. Yes. Exactly that. The pull of hands to a task.

My deepest love for him is in that space of intention where he exerts his will on the object and I can see his mind at work, uncluttered by fear or doubt. This is a man. This is a man I want to be. Knowing. Acting. Clear.

I am bursting with silent admiration, bleeding it internally, my chest filled. I am helping to carry the tree, on its side, dragging in the snow on my end, the tip where the angel will go. I am feeling my arms heavy and my shoulders ache. I am watching my boots, which seem big to me, until I look forward at Dad's—huge, punching graves in the snow. I step where he steps and my feet disappear in shadow.

At this age, he is impatient with me, with the things I ask or the things I like and want to do, things he deems frivolous, unintelligent, like taking a ride in the horse-drawn cart filled with hay and other laughing children.

Or this is often how it sounds to me when he replies, a curled lip under his answers. But there is also a firm pedagogy that expects me one day to catch up, say something interesting all on my own.

So many of my memories of him are like this. Snippets. Bits of film clipped out and dominated by imagery and inference, my interpretations of what's happened endlessly branching, like fingers scrabbling for a hold. My experience is dominated by this, my obsession with what was going on in his head, as if it could be read in waves on the air and shield me from his disapproval.

What are you thinking? What do I need to know or presume to get safely through the next five minutes? The next hour? What angers you? I will avoid it. What annoys you? I will slide past. How do I make you proud? What do
you
think is important? I will be that, building the platform of myself out of all the things you admire in other people. Give me the example, and I will make it into something that you can love. More so, something that you can like, or that you can claim as your own without disappointment.

But this business of pleasing is a delicate balance. Dodge and strive. A boy guided not, as he should be, by joy and private inclination, but by what he thinks will get a prize, or some credit from the man above. With fathers, it is every bit this simple, hackneyed, primitive, and stupid. Boys are like savages worshipping stones. “This is God,” they say, “this idol of a man. I will sacrifice anything to please him.”

My need makes him sound mean, but he wasn't. He was solid and blunt and armed with his education. That's all. Honest to a fault. A man who had made his own way on his own terms, working as a waiter at country clubs to pay his way through college and law school, the first member of his family to educate himself past high school.

As a young man just out of the army, he served veal scallops and single-malt scotch to the businessmen in their tailor-made double-breasted suits, and he swore that someday he would be one of them, a professional, a man of taste and reasonable wealth.

He was much older than most fathers of kids my age, and nine years older than my mother. He was forty-one when I was born.

Maybe that was part of the problem. The gap between us was just too big. The world he had known was nothing like my own. James Nicholas Walsh was a child of the Great Depression, and Nicky boy was coming of age with the Internet.

Dad groomed his hair every morning with the five-inch black plastic comb that he carried behind his wallet in the left-hand breast pocket of his suits. He carried a clean handkerchief in the other breast pocket, and he put his change in the pocket within the pocket at his right hip. All of these things could be reliably found in their accustomed places, the change especially, which he did not remove each evening and which I pilfered once a week from his closet, feeling for the hanging weight in each jacket and sliding my fingers in neatly to filch the coins.

The man was his image: a suit, carefully displayed. Hanging on a hanger or on his shoulders, it was much the same either way.

I was the opposite.

I grew my hair long like every rebellious twelve-year-old boy and took pride in my dishevelment. My looks were so foreign to men of my father's world that one of them, when he met me at a party for the first time, said:

“Your daughter would be quite pretty if she didn't have such big feet.”

Another family joke I never lived down.

But who cared? I was an exercise in contrast by design.

Well through my teens, I wore ripped jeans and cutoff T-shirts, especially in summer when I came home from boarding school for three months, randy with the cooped-up flak of the semester and determined to make the most of my freedoms.

I met my friends out back of a neighbor's vacated house most evenings to smoke pot and drink beer and make out with girls in the grass. The cops busted us there one night, having received a report of a possible burglary, and hauled us down to the station for questioning. We'd all been savvy enough to toss our drugs before being tackled by the overzealous third-string SWAT team they sent in, so they couldn't keep us in custody for more than a few hours.

But they did call Dad to have him pick me up at the station, and that was worse than a night in jail. We drove home in a silence that was like a death happening.

When we finally had it out in the kitchen, Dad worked himself into such a fury that he tore the ratty T-shirt off my back. Right off, like wrapping paper. Lifted me clear out of my chair by it, and it gave at the shoulders and pits where I'd trimmed it to show off my pecs.

It was the maddest I'd ever seen him, and the whole time he was ripping into me—chair scraping, cotton shredding—he still managed to sound like an old English barrister taking the wrongdoer down a peg by terms of a gentleman's code.

That was his most effective punishment. Banishment from his good graces. Being thought unworthy, found wanting at the far end of his withering rebuke. He crushed me with slurs I didn't even understand.

Standing there half clothed and sweating out the booze, I was hardly in a position to refute his parting shot.

“You look, you smell like exactly what you are. Uncouth.”

I slouched around him like Caliban for weeks after that—
this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine
—doing chores and strewing around copies of Rousseau and Gibbon and even my Signet Classic of
The Tempest
from school, all as a kind of wearying jest, but really just a dash to redeem myself in his eyes, if only by the badge of summer reading.

Dad was such an intellectual climber (and through him, so was, so
am
I) that this Great Books ploy often worked to set things right again between us, or at least give us something to talk about.

He had the autodidact's tic of deep-set insecurity incurable. He was always a sucker for the Western canon, or what a man of good breeding would supposedly just have lying around on his bedside table or on the back of the toilet.

Fuck me, but I loved the old bastard for his love of learning, even if it was put on. How else? I learned quick enough (or is it quickly?) that learning is putting on, or taking on and then keeping for the times when you find yourself alone in your haunted prison, reciting poetry for comfort.

He gave me that, the valuation of knowledge for its own sake. I stole a line for every mood to shore me up against the philistine inside me who wanted nothing more than just to
be
in his own gruff body, hanging from tree limbs and raking his toes in the dirt, running wild all day long on a cocktail of breakfast and testosterone.

That was natural me, and that me took some breaking in the earliest years. But acclimatize the bear to the circus, and he will dance, eventually.

At first I hated to read, when I was a young boy and Dad and Mom made me do it for an hour each day. Hated it. But then, over time, I came to really love it—slowly, in and after college, when I first learned to savor the pleasure of an idea, rolling it around in my brain, feeling for the first time that you could actually get high, really pleasurably high on thinking.

But by then, of course, it was too late. The best of me, done for him and courtesy of him, was all dressed up with no place to go. No place to go but a funeral. Oh, well. At least he saw me graduate. At least I made it partway to what he wanted for me.

That was Dad's greatest gift. He had worked his way into an education. Earned it for himself. But it was given to me as my birthright from day one, not just in the schooling he paid for but in extras as well. By mandate, he gave me the leisure time and space to learn if I wanted to, and I took it. I came home from school every summer, and Dad said, “Study or get a job.”

And so, while my friends made cinnamon rolls all day at the mall or mowed lawns for spending money, I chose to study. I took summer school courses, or read on my own from a list that Mom, Dad, or a teacher had given me. I sat by the pool, the pretend gentleman amateur, working on my tan and turning the pages of
The Myth of Sisyphus
, getting maybe every tenth word but feeling really deep all the same for even trying to roll my boulder of a brain up that hill, and then watching it roll back down again.

Mom assigned me most of the literature, Dad the history, philosophy, and poli sci. True to form, he was big on dates and facts and memorization, she on nuance. All the art genes came from her. She could teach you to feel a sonnet down to the roots of your teeth by way of your broken heart, whereas Dad went at your grammar, hammer and tongs.

“Today, you lay the book on the table and you lie on the couch. Yesterday, you laid the book on the table and you lay on the couch.”

Right. Got it. First and last lesson learned. A book on the table and a body on the couch. Right here. In this room. Did I say that before? It—the crime—happened here, in Dad's study, which is now mine.

Study.

Study well, boy, and learn.

And with that, the memories snap shut. The pictures cease.

I am in the present again, circled back and caught blank.

Today, which is still so much of yesterday, I lie on the couch beside Monica and I lay what I can of my past out in front of her, telling her all of these things about my parents, my father especially, because she listens, and because lately she asks. It is her asking that helps me to remember, and her listening that helps me to withstand the memory.

Just barely.

“Tell me about your Dad,” she says, whispering, close. And she does it in such a smooth, unassuming way that I am able somehow to answer, even though the same question from anyone else would be grounds for dismissal on the spot.

She gets away with it, as with so much else, and I let her, because she is my executioner, chosen especially for this. Standing on the scaffold—for what crime? the crime of omission, I think—I give her the token ring or piece of gold or silver. I put it in her palm and say, “I forgive you,” and then she chops off my head.