by Rick Moody
Therefore on the night in question, dead on my feet, I noticed that the garage door was open, and I made a mental note to do something about the garage door, though apparently I had made that mental note before without following up. The list of things I had done nothing about (the lightbulb at the top of the second-floor stairs, the mice in the mailbox, the roof tiles on the shed, the rusty metal pipe that protruded in the backyard, the dribbling outdoor faucet whose shut-off valve I could not ascertain) was very long.
Laurel was still in the car when I reached the door that led into her office from the garage (it was the mud room, in effect, but also her office, which was sort of a sore spot as far as she was concerned), and noticed that, oddly enough, there was the male end of an extension cord protruding through the very slightly opened door into the house.
All of this next moment is slowed down with the retrospection that one brings to bear at these critical junctures. The next moment is like one of those dreams that mix up cause and effect. Interminably, then, I was having that instant of recognition: There’s no way I left that extension cord like that, hanging out of the door. I am capable of any number of completely stupid and vacuous episodes of being in my daily life, as you no doubt know by now. Nevertheless, I have a bunch of rote activities that are performed with a stolid sameness, and one of these is closing the door carefully on the way out.
I looked at the male end of the extension cord, which I think was yellow.
I looked at the slightly open door, which had that quality that I associate in memory now with that famous Samuel Beckett stage direction: door imperceptibly ajar.
I pushed the door open slightly.
I pushed the door open slightly some more. Whereupon I reached up and turned on the light switch on the wall, and the room, Laurel’s office, was illuminated.
The next garbled thought that occurred to me was something along the lines of: A hurricane has blown through the house. And when that seemed improbable I tried on the following: A wild animal has gotten into the house.
Because I could see through Laurel’s office down the hall past the bathroom and into the kitchen, these things being in a straight line from where I was standing, I could see that everything that had been on a shelf or in a closet between myself and the kitchen had been liberated from these spots of stowage, and was now strewn onto the floor of the house. The technical term forming in my mind was: ransacked.
And that was when I called to Laurel, who was just emerging from the car:
“We’ve been robbed.”
She said, “What?”
I said, “We’ve had a break-in.”
I pushed the door open farther and started up the steps. Laurel, who was now behind me, said: “Where are you going?”
I said, “I’m going in to look.”
And I can’t tell you exactly what I thought that meant, because I sort of depersonalized at that moment. I stopped having any terribly rational motive, and instead I was having that very writerly thought, which was something like: Wow, this is kind of exciting, I get to see what a robbery looks like, as though the robbery had not taken place in my own home, nor involved my own personal effects.
Laurel said, “Get back in the car, we’re calling the police.”
I paused over this for a long time, because I guessed that the robbery was not taking place in the present instant—the perpetrators had already made off with whatever they had wanted—and I couldn’t see, really, why we should call the police. I wanted to sort of think about it, and maybe go to bed and call the police in the morning, and, because I try to avoid using the phone, I didn’t really want to call the police at all. But all of these perceptions were happening at once, were contradictory, irrational, and were an attempt, on my part, to deny or otherwise obfuscate what had clearly taken place, even in this preliminary view, namely that it was not a minor case of someone sneaking in and taking a couple of pieces of electronics before leaving discreetly.
I said to Laurel, “How are we going to do that exactly?”
“You just call the police. That’s what we have cell phones for. Get back in the car.”
So we got into the car, and locked it, and called the police. It was a sort of homey, rural state police troop two miles down the road that we’d had occasion to enter once, not too many weeks before, when trying to figure out if it was okay to shoot—using firearms—some of Laurel’s monographs of her photos out in the backyard (though we had no guns with which to do this), and, well, we had been there just eleven months before to find out if it was okay, during our wedding, to park out on the street. On this occasion, we called that very same police station, and then we waited in the car. Within five minutes, because we could see Route 22 from the house, we watched the flashing lights of the police race, at a high speed, in our direction.
Those were moments in which our lives truly changed, in ways never entirely to be undone. Some last bits of trust emptied out of the car into the chilly autumnal night, some ideas of the rural, like that the rural was a welcoming place where life was simpler, these ideas vanished clean away, as we watched the cops barreling up the hill toward our house. Our sense of peace in the house was in the process of being violently obliterated, though we didn’t yet know the scale.
A second police car from some other jurisdiction also converged on the scene, and followed the first into our driveway, and then the authorities got out of their cars, and the first thing they needed to do, they told us, was to secure the premises, and they were going to do this by going around the perimeter. So they walked around the perimeter. I don’t think any weapons were drawn. Although I remember wondering whether they put their hands on the outside of the holster at a moment like this. How did they know the perpetrators were not still there? The one guy with the flashlight walked the perimeter, and I think he presumed that they were gone, but he didn’t really know. And then he had to go up to the studio, about thirty yards farther up the hill, to make sure they weren’t up there, and it was sort of a long, silent wait while he was off in the woods.
Eventually, the perimeter was secured, to use the procedural terminology, and we were told that the door to the back deck, a French door manufactured by a certain extremely popular maker of such things, was swinging wide, and that this was either the way in or the way out. But we ourselves ingressed through the door from the garage, where the male end of the extension cord was propping open the door imperceptibly ajar, and from there it was into the maelstrom of our unpawnable possessions, which were now floor items.
It was frankly impossible to take in the scale of the destruction in a single tour. It was impossible to determine, even, what the motive was, whether it was sheer mayhem, or something more picayune and explicable. It was impossible to determine because shit was everywhere. Laurel had a lot of clothes in the closet in her office, for example, because she has a lot of clothes. The closet in question was completely emptied, and all of these clothes were now on the floor. We had to get over those clothes just to get to the kitchen. And one of these items, to bring close the heavy reverberations of irony in this moment, was Laurel’s wedding dress. It was on the floor in her office.
And the kitchen, once we reached it, was especially appalling. There was an obvious conclusion to be reached upon entering the kitchen, namely that the perpetrators had used the kitchen to make some food for themselves. While visiting. They had cooked a lunch or an early supper for themselves consisting of chicken nuggets. They had gone into the freezer, taken out the chicken nuggets (a food, let me hasten to point out, that neither Laurel nor I ate, as we were both vegetarians, so finding the nuggets must have been hard work), located a frying pan, and then put the nuggets in the pan (instead of microwaving) and heated them conventionally (despite the nearby presence of a microwave oven). The frying pan was still out. They burned something on the electric range, some portion of their not hastily assembled meal, and it had cooked on there, never to be completely erased, and then they threw a bunch of leftovers
, leftover nuggets both cooked and uncooked, on the floor, as though, having cooked the nuggets (on the range, not in the microwave) the meal had not satisfied them, and only a childlike tantrum would do. And then they just swept a bunch of things from the freezer, the refrigerator, and various cabinets onto the floor, in a jumble of the perishable and the canned.
The corridor that was visible from garage to kitchen was a welter of these ransacked items, and to step into the corridor was to step into the chaos. The police led us in as though they were the tour guides, wordless docents, just sort of taking it in, waiting for us to say: No, we don’t live like this, this is different.
And so it went on the basement floor, and on the second floor, where the bedrooms were. They spared exactly one room: my daughter’s room. It was sprawling with brightly colored gewgaws of the sort that would appeal to any five-year-old, and it was arrayed as usual, therefore. Was it merciful that she had been spared? This was the sort of thing we brooded about later on. It’s worth noting that there was nothing to pawn in my daughter’s room. They did, however, take the baby car seat out of the garage. And they left the bikes.
In our bedroom, the thieves went straight for the dressers, and they upended the dressers like they were Cold War–era operatives attempting to locate and pry loose any miniature recording devices. Laurel’s underwear was catastrophically strewn about the bedroom floor, for example. There’s no shock quite like the shock of seeing that someone has been through your underwear drawer, and that it is now strewn around the bedroom for the local police to witness. And the bathroom came in for a lot of interest too. Both bathrooms, on the first and second floors, were upended and all the contents spread wide across the floor. Probably, the perpetrators were looking for prescription drugs.
Our tour was completed with a trip down to my office in the basement. It occurred to me about the time we came to linger in the basement level to wonder what exactly was missing. To commence to wonder. This was easier to do in the basement because what was missing was large enough to be obviously absent—for example, all of my musical equipment. There was a lot of stuff strewn on the floor, in the basement as elsewhere, but the corners of the room where my guitars had formerly sat—some in cases, some on stands—were now free of clutter. I had an amp, too, and a wide variety of cheap electronic keyboards, and a violin, and a bunch of percussion instruments, and a melodica, and all of this was gone. I stood there like an idiot with the police, scratching my head, halfheartedly totaling up in my mind what was gone, but without doing anything like a rigorous examination of my remaining possessions. A lot was gone.
Back up in the living room, where the French door was wide open, a discussion ensued about how the perpetrators had gotten into the house. The French door had a finicky lock, this was true, but I was highly doubtful that I had left it unlocked. Because, at any rate, if it was unlocked they would have had to have tried all the other doors first, and to have done so repeatedly, in order to be well enough versed in the specifics of our coming and going to spend the afternoon in the house pawing through our things. The police sort of insisted that I had left the door open, though I didn’t think so, and there we left off the discussion. The door swung wide, as they went through the house taking pictures, looking at items they might dust for fingerprints, and so on, and in my recollection this period went on for a long time, more than an hour, in the autumn chill of night that had now come to impress itself on the interior of our residence. The shell shock, the sense of trauma that was only beginning to be perceptible, caused me to feel terribly exhausted. I wanted to get the cops out of the house and go to sleep, which was utterly ridiculous and contraindicated. Who knew what further traces of the perps were spread wide, disseminated, upon our belongings, which no longer felt like our belongings.
After a while, the cops fell into small talk. One guy said he’d almost hit a buck with some spectacular antlers on the way to the house. I remember one guy saying to another, “I’d bet you anything it’s our client down the hill. No doubt about it.” They were obviously concealing the particulars, but they already had ideas about who might be responsible.
The mind, in these moments, falls into theorizing, filling in the gaps.
The police asked me to sign a brace of forms, and to sketch out some preliminary narratives about what I thought had taken place, and then, about 2:00 a.m., they readied themselves to do what seemed almost cruel: leave the rest of the story to us. If I had known then how long-standing would be the echoing outward of that night, for Laurel especially, I would have asked for grief counseling or some local specialist in posttraumatic stress disorder. It was Laurel who knew what was obvious—that we couldn’t stay in the house that night. I had to teach the next day in New York City in any event. I suppose some college professors would have very reasonably missed class the next day, but I felt (and feel still) like showing up for class keeps me tethered to the world.
We got in the car, therefore, to drive back to Brooklyn, to which we arrived sometime after 4:00 a.m. With just what we had on our persons when we’d left for Pennsylvania, a couple of days before. What a weekend.
The project of itemizing our losses, and trying to figure out how to react, and what to do about our reactions to the burglary, which I had started thinking of as a “home invasion” because of the violence and intensity of the destruction, remained to be worked out. We had a few hours’ sleep, to the extent that we could sleep, and I called the insurance company, and agreed to meet them back in Amenia on Tuesday, and then I went off to class. I have probably taught more effectively than I did that day.
The claims adjustor agreed to meet us around 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday. I remember it being a particularly crisp day, and clear, and Laurel and I made the drive back up sort of the way you go to visit the oncologist for the first time after the confirmation of your diagnosis, with a dread and a grief and a clarity about the circumstances. We were going to be there in the daylight, and then we were going to get the heck out of Amenia, and that was that for the time being.
If you thought that we had already seen the worst of the break-in, you would be thinking how we thought about it, that we had already seen the worst, in which the violation was of a scale we could now begin, in some fashion, to narrate, to control. But in thinking this way, the most logical way, we were wrong.
When the police left, two nights before, I had, with their assistance, closed the French door on the deck and made sure that it was dead-bolted. They had done so because they were trying to figure out whether the door could be pried open from the outside. This was because they believed I had left the door open. But when, at Laurel’s suggestion, we went around the perimeter of the house upon arriving again on Tuesday, we found, again, that the porch door was open. Which meant not only that it could be opened from the outside (with a crowbar or similar tool), but also that the perpetrators had returned. They had broken in a second time.
We called the police, and the police came again, this time in daylight, and we got busy with all the same rounds that we had made before, except that this time in addition to the chicken nuggets on the floor, and Laurel’s underwear strewn wide, we went down to the basement and found that every piece of copper piping in the basement had since been removed, with a hacksaw, from the boiler room, with the result that the water tank had sprung a leak and flooded the basement with water, the basement that had all my papers and books (and formerly my musical instruments), etc. There was even a bootprint on the wall of the boiler room, where someone had leaped up to grab some pipes on the ceiling to haul them down. So, in addition to the losses from theft, there were now losses from vandalism.
The second visit from the police had its own theme, different from the first visit, and the theme of the second visit was: Is there someone who has a vendetta against you? The destruction was so immense now that it was hard to imagine, for the police, whether mere methamphetamine addicts or heroin addicts or opioid abusers, on the lookout for the quick buck, would possibly van
dalize a house on this scale, just for the purpose of funding the next dose. The copper pipes were only worth a couple hundred bucks.
It is a real occasion for reflection in life when you are invited to look back and see if there is someone who might be willing to do you harm. When the police ask you this question it has a bright, menacing aspect that it doesn’t have in your own depressive musings. I had to look back, as I had done at various points in my recovery from addiction, to attempt to see all that I had done wrong in my life, and who, of those done wrong, might still be hanging onto it. Or, to put it another way, once you begin this process, you can uncover a great many instances in which you have done things you wish you had not done. The stories spool out in front of you, on a loop.