by Henry Turner
He started to growl.
It was a low rumble, pretty angry-sounding, and I must admit it totally freaked me out.
“Hi, Dobey!” I said in this really chipper voice.
He barked, once, sharply.
I flinched.
“Hey, Dobester!” That’s what Laura had always called him. “Remember me?”
Very slowly I turned the knob. I opened the door an inch. I heard his chain shake.
“Hey, Dobey! I’m here! Remember me?” I was still very chipper.
I saw part of his head through the crack. His eye was dull black. I guess it didn’t look too unfriendly. He was still growling, though.
I put my hand through.
Amazingly, he didn’t bite it off.
I won’t say he was super excited about me petting him, but he let me. Then he sort of got into it, turning his head all over the place and letting me scratch behind his ears. When he started licking my hand, I opened the door the rest of the way.
At first he backed up and sort of checked me out, and his ears went up a little, I’d say halfway, like maybe he was on half alert, but nothing special.
“Come here, Dobester!” I said, chipper as hell. I put my hand out again. He watched me for a few seconds and then came up, his whole body sort of galumphing straight at me. I must say, my need to pee had returned exponentially. He sniffed my hand, then sort of jolted forward, stuffing his snout in my crotch. I stood pretty stiff and just let him. After a few sniffs and wiggles I guess he remembered me, because he pulled his head out again and let me pat him some more.
I looked around. It was the kitchen like I’d thought, with one of those nifty islands in the middle with stools all around it.
I looked in the corners of the ceiling and saw no cameras. I chalked that up to luck.
Over in the corner by the back door was Dobey’s dog dish.
I kept patting his head as I moved toward the dish.
It was on the floor beside a counter. On top of the counter was a bag of dry dog food, and next to that a plastic dispenser full of dog bone treats. As I moved, I bent low, sort of synchronizing all my movements and still petting him, so he’d stay calm. I must admit that when I picked up the treats he got pretty excited.
“Treats, Dobey! Treats!” I felt like a moron.
I held the dispenser high and he got really excited, jumping up and digging his paws with these big black nails pretty hard into my chest. I kind of walked backwards, staring down at Dobey with an idiotic grin.
“Treats! TREATS!”
When I was back at the basement door I tossed the whole dispenser down the steps. The treats exploded all over the place, but I figured ole Dobes would clean up the mess, because sure enough, he charged straight down, his paws slipping and scratching on the stairs, and I shut the door right after him.
Chapter
Ten
For a second I just stood there, kind of getting over it.
Then I looked up through the room.
I must admit I was feeling pretty good. That whole trick-Dobey-down-the-stairs-with-the-treats routine, I thought that was pretty clever. That was fast thinking, for me, at least, though I seemed to remember seeing something similar in an old horror movie where the character tricks the demon-dog into going downstairs the same way, which is probably where I got the idea in the first place.
But don’t think I was feeling good just because I was clever.
The truth is, I was super excited about being in Laura’s house. For the first time in months I felt really close to her. I mean, all my feelings were reactivated like I said, and if you’ve ever really been in love, you’ll know exactly what I mean, so just seeing the sink where she might go to get a drink of water or the table where maybe some days she sits and eats her lunch—I mean, I was really excited to see all that.
But first I checked again for video. There wasn’t any I could see. At least not in the kitchen. I looked all over the place, the ceiling and walls and even on top of the cabinets, too, to see if anything was peeking down at me, but there was nothing.
There sure was a lot of other stuff, though. I mean, Laura’s mom—or maybe her dad, who knows—really loved appliances. Because they had every sort of appliance you can possibly imagine.
For one thing they had this great dishwasher, which was the first thing that caught my eye. It was right under the sink counter, sort of built in, and it had this nifty glass front so you could actually see inside while the water squirted everywhere.
You’ll probably think I’m lying, but the truth is, we’ve never had a dishwasher. I mean at my house.
Well, actually, we did have one.
It was me.
It was always me.
I don’t know why, but my dad and mom, they thought it was somehow good for my soul or something if I spent a half hour every night washing all the dishes by hand.
So you can imagine how much I wanted a real dishwasher, and this one would have been the best. One Christmas I even asked Santa Claus to bring me a dishwasher. I was, like, thirteen at the time and didn’t even believe in Santa Claus, but I thought my parents might think it was cute, my asking and leaving a note and all that, but it didn’t work at all. I think it just pissed them off, and all I got was this stupid video game console I’ve never even played with.
I was happy to see Laura had such a good dishwasher, a really fabulous one, and she didn’t have to wash all those dishes by hand, although when she saw in my house one day that I didn’t have one, I must admit she made some pretty cutting comments about my family’s, you know, financial status that made me feel pretty bad.
But now I understood those comments a little better. I mean, if I had a dishwasher like this, I too would probably be a bit shocked to meet somebody who’d never had one at all.
Everything in Laura’s kitchen was like that. New and the best. The island table I talked about was, like, three inches thick of granite or something. The cabinets all had these sliding drawers that sort of rolled out on these casters, making everything easy to grab. The huge fridge had four doors—four doors—and was full of organic everything; Laura had certainly told the truth about that.
My mom likes organic too. I mean she likes it theoretically. She likes it, and then she buys what’s on sale.
The floor was some kind of tile with little pictures of birds in it, and it looked really pretty.
And everything was incredibly neat.
Everything was in perfect order.
I couldn’t help thinking again of my kitchen, because I swear to god, it’s pretty rough. I mean, it’s not like it looks like a bomb went off in it or anything, but most of the stuff came from my grandmother’s house and is, like, at least fifty years old, and some of the stuff, the table we have and the rickety chairs, they once belonged to my great-grandmother. And so every time I go into the kitchen it is like my mind is literally clouded with my heritage, walking through a collection of musty heirlooms until I feel like I live in a mausoleum, for god sakes, like just when I walk in every morning I’m bombarded with the past.
But it wasn’t like that in Laura’s kitchen at all. It was all just perfect, with none of what you might call the psychology of the past just bombing you, and after checking everything out I stepped back in front of the basement door, thinking and looking around.
The door to another room was about ten feet away, just beyond the table. The door was open, but I couldn’t see much of the room.
I listened for a while to be sure I was alone. And then, just for paranoia’s sake, I checked the ceiling again for cameras, but there was nothing.
So walking really quietly I went over to the doorway and, moving super slow, peeked into the next room.
Wow.
It was a dining room.
At least I think it was a dining room.
To tell you the absolute truth, I’d never really seen a dining room like that before. Well, maybe in a hotel or museum.
The giveaway was the tab
le, of course. It was long and black and mirrored everything in the room, especially this range of windows in the wall, which shone off the table like it was made of glass. And there were these glass things on the table that looked like frozen splashes of water; they caught the light and sort of threw this crazy dazzle everywhere in the room, and these crazy lights hanging over the table looked like they were made of metal coils.
I must admit I was awestruck. I really wondered if I’d even be able to eat my dinner in this room. I didn’t know if I’d be able to digest anything; I thought I’d be too excited.
It was all just so untouched and perfect, and there were these nifty abstract paintings on the walls. I remembered Laura saying how her mom loved to collect stuff like that. One day when we were over at my house, upstairs making out, she told me all about it. We were lying there on my bed and we started talking about art, because Laura said she wanted to go to art school—she’d told me that a bunch of times—and she said that when she went to college she wanted to study to be an interior designer, and now I understood why, after seeing how perfect her house was.
I looked around the ceiling, but to tell the truth, with all that dazzle of light reflected off the table and those glass sculpture thingies, it was pretty hard to spot anything and not just be sort of hypnotized.
But I looked hard, and bingo.
Up in the far corner I saw something, a little dish attached to the ceiling, the same bone-white color as the paint, and it had on it a little blinking red light.
I stepped back into the kitchen.
It might not have been a camera. It didn’t much look like one.
Of course, you can’t be too sure about that, because a camera can really look like anything, especially a sneaky surveillance camera that you aren’t even supposed to notice.
So I felt I couldn’t risk it.
There was another door, not too far from the one I’d peeked through. It was shut. I thought it was a closet. There was also a back door, leading out to a deck; I could see some of that through a window. But I knew I couldn’t open the back door and go outside because of the alarm.
I went to the shut door and opened it just a fraction of an inch.
It wasn’t a closet.
I looked through the crack, and I saw a long hallway with a hardwood floor and a thin red carpet leading all the way to what I thought was the front door. I saw archways along the left wall opening to other rooms, but I couldn’t see inside the rooms at all. The hall was empty except for these glass stands with several levels. Some had old books on them arranged very neatly. Others had these little figurines, kind of like the splashy glass things—or I suppose they were crystal—on the dining room table. I didn’t see any photos.
I stepped back again, but I left the door open an inch.
I knew this was the only exit. There was just no other way.
But what I didn’t say was that there was another one of those cameras—or possible cameras—on the ceiling up by the front door, just over it. I couldn’t actually see it—it was too far away and the same color as the paint, just like in the dining room. But I saw a red light blinking every few seconds.
If it was a smoke detector it didn’t matter.
But what if it wasn’t?
The big thing about hiding—I mean about hiding when everybody can see you—is to just blend into the surroundings. A lot of that has to do with how you dress, how you hold yourself, and the sorts of gestures you make.
You don’t want to be too sharp with anything. Just be dull.
I mean just sort of play it nowhere, and unless the people around you are trained by the FBI, they won’t have a clue that you’re there.
Of course, on video you might not get away with that. You just might need a disguise. I mean to really blend in.
If there really was some guy in an office somewhere actually monitoring these cameras—and I suspected maybe there was—then more precautions were in order. I needed a disguise. I figured this was necessary even if the guy was hardly paying attention, which I did sort of have to factor in, because sitting around in an office with your eyes glued to a video monitor must be the most boring job in the world.
So I looked around the kitchen. I was thinking about the red carpet out there.
Scratch that.
Actually I was thinking about a gorilla.
I don’t mean a gorilla somehow popped into my head—I mean this video with a gorilla in it, that really is the best hiding video in the world. It’s this video on YouTube, and if you ever want to learn to hide, you’ve just got to watch it.
I don’t know who made it. I think it was probably made by a bunch of top-notch behavioral psychology types at MIT, or maybe Stanford. Anyways, it tells you at first in this title that you’re going to be seeing a bunch of guys playing basketball, and you have to count how many baskets they make.
No, how many passes they make.
There are two teams, you see, and one’s dressed in black jerseys, and the other is in white, I think. And I can’t remember whether you’re supposed to count the guys playing or just how many passes they make, but if you pay really close attention, you come up with a number like eleven—eleven players or eleven baskets or passes, one or the other—and then a title comes up and says something like “The answer’s eleven—did you get it?” And you nod and sort of smile and say yes, you did, and you’re really thinking that this whole video was totally pointless and stupid and made by a bunch of total morons who had no other ambition but to waste your time, until another title comes up that asks you something like “Did you see the gorilla?”
And the point is that you never did.
Now, I know that because I just told you about it, the first thing you’ll do if you go on YouTube and look this up—which you can find just by entering “gorilla/basketball,” I think—is that you’ll of course now just look for the gorilla and the whole thing will seem obvious and totally stupid. But had I not told you anything, you wouldn’t have seen the gorilla in a million years, though of course now if you go look it up all you’ll do is wait for the gorilla to arrive and not count the passes at all.
And let me tell you, it’s not just some gorilla way in the background who peeks out behind a wall or something. It’s this guy in a gorilla suit, and about thirty seconds into this video he sort of shuffles out and turns and looks right at you and even bangs his chest—literally bangs his chest right at you for god sakes—and you never even knew he was there. It’s a complete surprise, because what these guys at MIT or Stanford know is that if you pay attention solely to one thing, all your attention is sort of hogged by it, and you won’t notice something else that in retrospect looks so blatant and obvious that you feel like an idiot for not having seen it.
And these MIT guys—or maybe it was Stanford, and if it was, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack worked on the video or was even in it, because like Laura said, he’s a Stanford man and very involved with what goes on there. Laura always told me that Jack was very, very involved, even though I don’t really think old Jack was bright enough to have actually thought up the video, or even to have been the guy in the gorilla suit, but was probably, most likely, one of the jocky guys making the passes. Anyway, these guys brilliantly demonstrate one of the best ways of hiding, which is to make the person you’re hiding from completely interested in something other than you.
I swear, I could have made that video.
I could have even been in it.
I bet I’d have made a great gorilla.
I dug in the lower cabinets to see what I could find, and pretty soon I came up with this red towel. I won’t say it was the exact same red as the carpet out there, but it was close enough, considering the cheesy color reproduction on most video monitors, because I figured the security system monitors I had to beat would be no better than the sort I’d seen in convenience stores, and they always looked pretty fuzzy.
Actually it was a tablecloth, a sort of vinyl picnic tablecloth that Laura�
�s family must use when they had dinner out on the deck, because I saw a long redwood table out there and a big chromium barbecue grill that looked like a spaceship, and I figured they had dinner out there a lot, or at least as much as possible, so as never to mar the perfection of the incredible dining room by actually eating dinner in it.
What I did now was unwrap this tablecloth—it was zippered in this sort of plastic bag—and unfold it, and then put it over my face and shoulders, so it hung straight down in front of me, all the way to the floor.
That was it.
That was my big disguise.
If anybody saw me—I mean any guy in an office downtown watching a monitor while he was half-asleep—all he would see as soon as I came onto the screen was a sort of big red rectangle moving slowly up the red carpet, and he wouldn’t notice it at all.
At least that was the plan.
I went back to the door, reached for the knob, and pulled it open just far enough for me to slip through.
Chapter
Eleven
I must admit that while all this was going on I was sort of thinking a lot about my dad—I mean, even as I was walking across the carpet down the hallway.
I was going very slow, holding the tablecloth straight out in front of me, stretched pretty tight between both my hands, and taking just one short step after the next.
I figured the less motion I made the better, and I was super careful about not hitting the tablecloth with my knees as I raised them, so I wouldn’t, like, dent the cloth and make it easier to see.
But even while I was doing all that—and also looking behind myself once in a while, to make sure my shadow was in line with the carpet, because light was coming in from the window on the front door, and the shadow of the tablecloth was like a big rectangle behind me—I had this nagging thought in my mind about my dad, because as you know, I’d left the house pretty late the night before, and since I wasn’t there in the morning, he might have wondered if I ever came back.
Of course, it wasn’t that bad a problem.