Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “You must get some bizarre folks in here, right?” I asked.

  “Not as many as you’d think,” she said. “I think even the crazy people are kind of freaked out that we’re open all night.”

  “Even crazy people have standards,” I said.

  “You’re funny,” she said, also without laughing. Then there was that quiet, charged moment in which a relationship’s romantic possibilities become clear.

  “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

  “I do lighting for stage plays,” I said.

  “For Broadway?” she asked. She was obviously excited by the thought of Broadway. Most people are. But they were thinking of the people in the spotlights, not the guys working in the rafters.

  “I work Broadway sometimes,” I said. “But mostly for off-off-off-Broadway stuff. If it involves naked people dancing with puppets, then I’m probably lighting it.”

  “Does that pay well?” she asked.

  “Not enough to live in New York.”

  “Nobody can afford to live here,” she said.

  “And yet, there are millions of us poor bastards,” I said.

  She pushed back my cuticles. She buffed my nails. She massaged some oil into my fingers.

  “We get actors in here all the time,” she said. “Lot of night people in show business, huh?”

  “There’s a lot of time between jobs,” I said. “So you have to fill it up. And a lot of us fill it with lonely.”

  “Tough to sleep when you’re lonely,” she said.

  “How long have you been insomniac?” I asked.

  “I was a good sleeper until I took this job. And now, it feels like I’m always awake.”

  “Me too.”

  She massaged my hands. Her fingertips on my palms. It felt so good that I closed my eyes and kept them closed.

  “I live in this one-room apartment,” she said. “I grew up there with my parents and three brothers. Six of us in one room. But my parents bought it. They owned it. Amazing, huh?”

  “I’ve got friends who have a bathtub in the middle of their kitchen,” I said. “They throw a thick slab of wood over it and use it as a table.”

  “Crazy. But that place is all mine now. My family moved back to Korea. Even my brothers. They were born here and lived their whole lives here, but they moved back.”

  “Restless,” I said. “Everybody’s restless.”

  “When I can’t sleep, I just walk around the edges of my apartment like I was in solitary confinement, you know? I’ve got this Murphy bed but I never pull it out of the wall. I keep this big couch pushed up against it. And I’ve got two other little couches. Three couches in a studio? I’m crazy, right? I just move from couch to couch. One couch after another. Trying to sleep.”

  “Lucky couches,” I said.

  “You’re a flirt,” she said. “How does your girlfriend feel about that?”

  “How do you know I have a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “All you flirts have girlfriends.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “You’re a flirt, too,” I said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But he hardly ever stays at my place. He sleeps too easy. He can even sleep while I’m pacing around the room. Pisses me off.”

  “Have you ever lived with another insomniac?”

  “No,” she said. “Have you?”

  “If two insomniacs fell in love, you know there’d be a murder-suicide.”

  “That’s sad,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s not going too well with my girlfriend. She falls asleep two seconds after she closes her eyes. I hate it.”

  “My boyfriend ignores me. And I keep auditioning for his attention. Maybe you should come over and light me up all pretty.”

  “Mine teaches community college out on Long Island,” I said. “I never see her. Except when she’s sleeping and I’m not.”

  Saundra rubbed some other kind of moisturizer into my hands.

  “My boyfriend and I haven’t had sex in five years,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said. “Wow.”

  I thought he had to be a gay man hiding in the closet behind the closet. Or maybe he’d been molested as a kid and couldn’t deal with it. Or maybe he was just a drone, one of those strange and lucky people whose engines are not completely powered by various body fluids.

  “My girlfriend and I haven’t done it in six months,” I said. “And it was three months before that. I get sex twice a year, like Catholics who only go to Mass on Christmas and Easter.”

  She laughed and slapped the table. And spilled a bowl of soapy water. As she cleaned up the mess, she blinked back tears.

  “Why don’t you leave her?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you leave yours?” I asked.

  Neither of us had the answer.

  I suppose I stayed with my girlfriend because I hoped we’d fall in love with each other’s bodies again. I wanted her to lust for me again. In bed, I wanted her to crawl on top of me and grind so hard that her sweat fell into my mouth. But I couldn’t say such things to her after so many years of honor and respect. I was too damn polite to tell her what I wanted. She might say no. She might laugh. And I was more afraid of being rejected by her than I was of dying.

  “And now you’re done,” she said.

  She meant that my manicure was finished.

  “I live across the street,” I said

  “Oh, that’s subtle,” she said.

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “Or maybe I did. I don’t know.”

  “You have that creepy doorman, right?” she asked.

  “He’s okay,” I said. “Except when it comes to you. Then he gets creepy.”

  She looked confused.

  “I’ve heard him talking to you,” I said. “I’ve been watching you for months.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So you’re the creepy one.”

  She rolled her chair back.

  “You’re not a stalker, are you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m a night watchman.”

  She didn’t say anything. She studied me, looking for signs of real danger, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t dangerous. And I think she knew it, too.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can pay the receptionist. Tips are happily accepted.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t come back. And I’ll stop watching you.”

  She just nodded her head.

  I wanted to say something profound to her—give a name to our separate loneliness, a metaphor that described the abysses that can grow between people in love. But I had only my most basic desire.

  “If I could only sleep,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Saundra said. “I know.”

  I paid for my manicure and walked back toward my building. As I noticed that my doorman was absent, I also realized that I’d forgotten my keys in the apartment. I’d have to wake my girlfriend. And she’d be angry that I’d gone missing and jealous that I’d been talking to another woman. My girlfriend wouldn’t fuck me but she didn’t want anybody else fucking me, either. After the inevitable argument, she and I would lie in the dark, with her worried that she’d be too tired to teach well later that day and me too terrified to reach across the bed and touch her.

  I wanted none of that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen. So I stopped in the middle of the street. Amazing how quiet eight million people can be. I wondered if I should just walk over to that twenty-four-hour deli on Canal and wait for sunrise. But then I looked up toward my apartment and saw my girlfriend standing on our little terrace. I could see her through the dark. I wondered how long she’d been watching me. I wondered if she wanted me to walk toward her or to walk away.

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film—how to construct a scene—my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, “You don’t have to show people using a door to walk into a room. If peopl
e are already in the room, the audience will understand that they didn’t crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize. The audience understands that a door has been used—the eyes and mind will make the connection—so you can just skip the door.”

  Mr. Baron, a full-time visual aid, skipped as he said, “Skip the door.” And I laughed, not knowing that I would always remember his bit of teaching, though of course, when I tell the story now, I turn my emotive professor into the scene-eating lead of a Broadway musical.

  “Skip the door, young man!” Mr. Baron sings in my stories —my lies and exaggerations—skipping across the stage with a top hat in one hand and a cane in the other. “Skip the door, old friend! And you will be set free!”

  “Skip the door” is a good piece of advice—a maxim, if you will—that I’ve applied to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life. To state it in less poetic terms, one would say, “An editor must omit all unnecessary information.” So in telling you this story—with words, not film or video stock—in constructing its scenes, I will attempt to omit all unnecessary information. But oddly enough, in order to skip the door in telling this story, I am forced to begin with a door: the front door of my home on Twenty-seventh Avenue in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.

  One year ago, there was a knock on that door. I heard it, but I did not rise from my chair to answer. As a freelance editor, I work at home, and I had been struggling with a scene from a locally made film, an independent. Written, directed, and shot by amateurs, the footage was both incomplete and voluminous. Simply stated, there was far too much of nothing. Moreover, it was a love scene—a graphic sex scene, in fact—and the director and the producer had somehow convinced a naive and ambitious local actress to shoot the scene full frontal, graphically so. This was not supposed to be a pornographic movie; this was to be a tender coming-of-age work of art. But it wasn’t artistic, or not the kind of art it pretended to be. This young woman had been exploited—with her permission, of course—but I was still going to do my best to protect her.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a prude—I’ve edited and enjoyed sexual and violent films that were far more graphic—but I’d spotted honest transformative vulnerability in that young actress’s performance. Though the director and the producer thought she’d just been acting—had created her fear and shame through technical skill—I knew better. And so, by editing out the more gratuitous nudity and focusing on faces and small pieces of dialogue—and by paying more attention to fingertips than to what those fingertips were touching—I was hoping to turn a sleazy gymnastic sex scene into an exchange that resembled how two people in new love might actually touch each other.

  Was I being paternalistic, condescending, and hypocritical? Sure. After all, I was being paid to work with exploiters, so didn’t that mean I was also being exploited as I helped exploit the woman? And what about the young man, the actor, in the scene? Was he dumb and vulnerable as well? Though he was allowed—was legally bound—to keep his penis hidden, wasn’t he more exploited than exploiter? These things are hard to define. Still, even in the most compromised of situations, one must find a moral center.

  But how could I find any center with that knocking on the door? It had become an evangelical pounding: Bang, bang, bang, bang! It had to be the four/four beat of a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon. Bang, cha, bang, cha! It had to be the iambic pentameter of a Sierra Club shill or a magazine sales kid.

  Trust me, nobody interesting or vital has ever knocked on a front door at three in the afternoon, so I ignored the knocking and kept at my good work. And, sure enough, my potential guest stopped the noise and went away. I could hear feet pounding down the stairs and there was only silence—or, rather, the relative silence of my urban neighborhood.

  But then, a few moments later, I heard a window shatter in my basement. Is shatter too strong a verb? I heard my window break. But break seems too weak a verb. As I visualize the moment—as I edit in my mind—I add the sound track, or rather I completely silence the sound track. I cut the sounds of the city—the planes overhead, the cars on the streets, the boats on the lake, the televisions and the voices and the music and the wind through the trees—until one can hear only shards of glass dropping onto a hardwood floor.

  And then one hears—feels—the epic thump of two feet landing on that same floor.

  Somebody—the same person who had knocked on my front door to ascertain if anybody was home, had just broken and entered my life.

  Now please forgive me if my tenses—my past, present, and future—blend, but one must understand that I happen to be one editor who is not afraid of jump cuts—of rapid flashbacks and flash-forwards. In order to be terrified, one must lose all sense of time and place. When I heard those feet hit the floor, I traveled back in time—I de-evolved, I suppose—and became a primitive version of myself. I had been a complex organism—but I’d turned into a two-hundred-and-two pound one-celled amoeba. And that amoeba knew only fear.

  Looking back, I suppose I should have just run away. I could have run out the front door into the street, or the back door onto the patio, or the side door off the kitchen into the alley, or even through the door into the garage—where I could have dived through the dog door cut into the garage and made my caninelike escape.

  But here’s the salt of the thing: though I cannot be certain, I believe that I was making my way toward the front door—after all, the front door was the only place in my house where I could be positive that my intruder was not waiting. But in order to get from my office to the front door, I had to walk past the basement door. And as I walked past the basement door, I spotted the baseball bat.

  It wasn’t my baseball bat. Now, when one thinks of baseball bats, one conjures images of huge slabs of ash wielded by steroid-fueled freaks. But that particular bat belonged to my ten-year-old son. It was a Little League bat, so it was comically small. I could easily swing it with one hand and had, in fact, often swung it one-handed as I hit practice grounders to the little second baseman of my heart, my son, my Maximilian, my Max. Yes, I am a father. And a husband. That is information you need to know. My wife, Wendy, and my son were not in the house. To give me the space and time I needed to finish editing the film, my wife had taken our son to visit her mother and father in Chicago; they’d been gone for one week and would be gone for another. So, to be truthful, I was in no sense being forced to defend my family, and I’d never been the kind of man to defend his home, his property, his shit. In fact, I’d often laughed at the news footage of silly men armed with garden hoses as they tried to defend their homes from wildfires. I always figured those men would die, go to hell, and spend the rest of eternity having squirt-gun fights with demons.

  So with all that information in mind, why did I grab my son’s baseball bat and open the basement door? Why did I creep down the stairs? Trust me, I’ve spent many long nights awake, asking myself those questions. There are no easy answers. Of course, there are many men—and more than a few women—who believe I was fully within my rights to head down those stairs and confront my intruder. There are laws that define—that frankly encourage—the art of self-defense. But since I wasn’t interested in defending my property, and since my family and I were not being directly threatened, what part of my self could I have possibly been defending?

  In the end, I think I wasn’t defending anything at all. I’m an editor—an artist—and I like to make connections; I am paid to make connections. And so I wonder. Did I walk down those stairs because I was curious? Because a question had been asked (Who owned the feet that landed on my basement floor?) and I, the editor, wanted to discover the answer?

  So, yes, slowly I made my way down the stairs and through the dark hallway and turned the corner into our downstairs family room—the man cave, really, with the big television and the pool table—and saw a teenaged burglar. I stood still and silent. Standing with his back to me, obsessed with the task—the crime—at hand, he hadn’t yet real
ized that I was in the room with him.

  Let me get something straight. Up until that point I hadn’t made any guesses as to the identity of my intruder. I mean, yes, I live in a black neighborhood—and I’m not black—and there had been news of a series of local burglaries perpetrated by black teenagers, but I swear none of that entered my mind. And when I saw him, the burglar, rifling through my DVD collection and shoving selected titles into his backpack—he was a felon with cinematic taste, I guess, and that was a strangely pleasing observation—I didn’t think, There’s a black teenager stealing from me. I only remember being afraid and wanting to make my fear go away.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed. “You fucking fucker!”

  The black kid was so startled that he staggered into my television—cracking the screen—and nearly fell before he caught his balance and ran for the broken window. I could have—would have—let him make his escape, but he stopped and turned back toward me. Why did he do that? I don’t know. He was young and scared and made an irrational decision. Or maybe it wasn’t irrational at all. He’d slashed his right hand when he crawled through the broken window, so he must have decided the opening with its jagged glass edges was not a valid or safe exit—who’d ever think a broken window was a proper entry or exit—so he searched for a door. But the door was behind me. He paused, weighed his options, and sprinted toward me. He was going to bulldoze me. Once again, I could have made the decision to avoid conflict and step aside. But I didn’t. As that kid ran toward me I swung the baseball bat with one hand.

  I often wonder what would have happened if that bat had been made of wood. When Max and I had gone shopping for bats, I’d tried to convince him to let me buy him a wooden one, an old-fashioned slugger, the type I’d used when I was a Little Leaguer. I’ve always been a nostalgic guy. But my son recognized that a ten-dollar wooden bat purchased at Target was not a good investment.