We stayed that way for a moment, four of us sprawled out on various parts of the floor, with Lindsey standing in the center, her stun gun still extended in front of her, as if she was presenting arms. Finally, I rolled out from under Jack and said, “Why is it that whenever we knock Jack out, he always has to land on me? I hate when that happens.” I got up shakily. “Is everyone okay?”
“Not really!” Chuck yelled as he rolled away from the couch and slowly got to his feet. There was a trickle of blood coming from his left nostril, and he was rubbing his chest furiously. “Jesus!”
Alison got to her knees and crawled over to Jack, rolling him onto his back. “Jack!” she cried. “Jack, can you hear me?” If he could, he wasn’t saying. “Come on, Jack, wake up! Chuck, I don’t think he’s breathing!”
Chuck walked over to where Jack was lying, leaned down and placed his fingers on the side of Jack’s neck. “He’s fine,” Chuck said, leaning against the wall, still massaging his chest.
“Jack!” Alison screamed again. She turned and looked up at Lindsey. “What did you do?” she said angrily. “Look at him.”
“Excuse me?” Lindsey asked incredulously.
“You didn’t have to shock him,” Alison said, propping up Jack’s head.
Lindsey looked around the room as if searching for witnesses. “Are you out of your mind, Alison? Look at this room!”
“I don’t care. You used a weapon on him!”
“He was burning your fucking house down!” Lindsey shouted, waving her stun gun in the air, and for one crazy second I thought she was going to zap Alison. Then she spun around, grabbing her hair in her fist. “Someone turn off that goddamn alarm!”
I ran out into the hall, pulling the leather desk chair out behind me. I got up on the chair and after a few tries managed to twist the plastic casing off of the circular unit on the ceiling. I didn’t see any off switch, so I just yanked out the nine-volt battery and jumped to the floor. The instantaneous silence was so tangible, it felt like a whole other noise.
“I think we may have really hurt him,” Alison was saying when I walked back into the room.
“Then we’re even,” Chuck said. The blood from his nostril had dried on his upper lip, and I realized that he might not even be aware that he’d been bleeding.
“He’ll be fine,” Lindsey said wearily. “He’ll sleep it off.” She bent down and pressed her hand to Jack’s face.
“Leave him alone,” Alison snapped, shoving Lindsey’s hand away. Lindsey looked like she’d just been slapped. She stared at Alison in disbelief, her eyes filling with tears.
“I don’t believe this,” she said, her hands shaking. “He could have killed us all!”
“Ben and Chuck had him.”
“Hey!” I said. “We didn’t have him at all.”
“It was more like he had us,” Chuck said.
Alison ignored us, cradling Jack’s head in her hands.
“You’re on your own,” Lindsey muttered, storming out of the room.
Chuck and I lifted Jack off the floor and lay him down on the bed. His body felt sticky with sweat, so we rubbed him down with a towel before wrapping him in a blanket. Chuck pried open each of Jack’s eyelids with his thumb and looked at his pupils, then took his pulse again. I could see that Jack’s breathing was shallow but regular. “He’s okay,” Chuck said softly.
Alison sat down on the floor next to the charred pile of books and began picking through them, crying quietly. Chuck and I looked at each other helplessly, not knowing if we should help her clean up or just leave her alone for a while. There was an abject misery to her silent weeping that made us feel unqualified to approach her. After a few moments Lindsey passed by the doorway, but stopped short when she saw Alison sitting on the floor. Hesitating only for an instant, she came into the room and got down on her knees behind Alison, throwing her arms around Alison’s neck and leaning forward so that their cheeks were pressing. After a few seconds, Alison wordlessly reached up and wrapped her arms around Lindsey’s and they just sat there, softly rocking back and forth as if to some slow, secret song that only they could hear.
I woke up at around 10:30, wondering if the previous night’s entire episode had been just a vivid dream, but the faint smell of smoke still lingered in the air, and when I sniffed my shirt it stank of it. I rolled out of bed and headed down the hall for the shower. I could hear Lindsey and Alison speaking in hushed tones downstairs. I bumped into Chuck in the hallway as he was heading down to join them. “Good morning,” he said.
“How do you feel?” I asked, remembering his collision with the sofa bed. So far, Chuck had taken the brunt of the physical abuse.
“I’ll live,” he said. “I’m just wondering what else he’s got planned for us.”
“You think he can top last night?”
Chuck shrugged. “Who knows? But I’ll tell you this. The next time it’s me standing between him and the open door, I’m just going to stand back and hold it open.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t blame you.” He started down the stairs. “Chuck?”
“Yeah?” he said, stopping.
“Do you think he was trying to burn the house down? I mean, was that an escape attempt, or something more?”
“You mean suicide?”
“That,” I said. “Or maybe some kind of revenge. I guess I’m just wondering if, you know, he would really try to harm us like that.”
Chuck frowned, considering the question. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think that he peaked last night in his withdrawal, and he wasn’t thinking at all. He’s scared, he’s irrationally paranoid, and for all I know he’s hallucinating. He’s not in his right mind.” I remembered Jack’s eyes right before Lindsey zapped him and shivered. “Whatever that was last night,” Chuck said. “He probably wasn’t even aware that he might be endangering us.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Okay then,” I said. “So I won’t take it personally.”
“I did,” Chuck said.
I climbed into the shower and leaned against the cool tiles as the scalding water pounded the back of my neck. After we’d doused the smoldering books with water, Lindsey and Alison had gone to bed, while Chuck and I stayed with Jack until he began to regain consciousness. We’d done a quick but thorough inspection of the study, looking for more matches and anything else that might conceivably inspire Jack to pull a MacGyver. Now, as I shampooed the smoke out of my hair, I wondered how Alison was going to explain all of the destruction to her parents. Between the damaged furniture, ruined books, and burnt carpet, the room was pretty much totaled. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened if we hadn’t caught that fire when we did.
I was walking past Jack’s door, toweling off my hair when I heard a faint, metallic clicking sound. I held my breath and tiptoed up to the door, listening intently. The noise came again, a squeaky scratching sound, barely audible, and I noticed the knob shaking a little. Quietly, I crept back downstairs and joined the others in the living room, where they were flipping around between various morning news programs that were doing stories on Jack.
“Does anyone know if Jack knows how to pick a lock?”
“What?” Alison said.
“I can hear him working on it from outside the door.”
“That’s an antique lock,” Chuck said. “They don’t work the same way as modern locks. There are no tumblers. I don’t think, even if he knew how to pick a lock, that he could pick that one.”
“Well, he’s doing something.”
They got up and we all stood silently at the foot of the stairs. At first we heard nothing, but then the metallic scratching resumed. Chuck went halfway up the stairs and stared intently at the door. “I don’t think he’s working on the lock,” he informed us, coming back down. “I can still see through the keyhole.”
“So then what’s he doing?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should ask him.”
“J
ack,” Alison called to him, walking up the stairs. “What’s wrong? What do you need?”
The scratching noise stopped suddenly.
“Jack?”
Jack didn’t respond, but a moment later the noises resumed. We joined Alison at the door, watching as the door knob rattled around in its casing. A moment later there was a loud, grinding sound, the sound of ratcheted metal being dragged across a wooden surface, and then, with a sudden snap that caused us all to jump, the knob popped off the door and landed on the floor, rolling lazily in an oval before coming to rest by Chuck’s foot.
“What’s he doing?” Alison asked, snatching up the knob as if it might disappear. From the inner center of the knob protruded the rectangular metal rod meant to go through the door and connect to the other knob, which is what Jack had managed to unscrew. “Jack!” Alison shouted, pounding on the door. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t come out,” Jack’s voice came through the door. “Now you can’t come in.”
“That’s just stupid,” Alison said. “What do you want us to do, slide your food under the door?”
“Not my problem,” Jack retorted.
“Jack!”
“Please try to keep it down,” Jack said, sounding hoarse. “I’m going to try to get some sleep. I’ve got a big day today.”
“Alison,” Chuck said quietly, nudging her shoulder. “We can still open the door.” He took the knob from her hands. “We just stick this in and twist.”
But I had a feeling that Chuck wasn’t giving Jack enough credit. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Why don’t you try sticking it in now.” Chuck took the knob and began inserting the metal rod into the door. He got about halfway before he hit the obstruction. “Shit!” he hissed, and began fiddling with the knob, but his attempts were clearly futile. “He jammed up the hole!” Chuck complained. “That stupid prick jammed up the hole.”
“He’s going on a forced hunger strike,” I said. “He knows that if we can’t feed him, we’ll let him out.”
“I say let him go hungry,” Chuck said, tossing the door knob onto the floor in disgust. “You’d think we were doing this for our own health.”
“Well,” Lindsey said wearily as we headed back downstairs, “he has already gotten his breakfast, so I guess we’ll figure something out later.”
“American Cheese,” I said. “Fruit Roll-Ups.”
“What?”
“I’m just thinking of food we can slide under the door.”
“Cold cuts,” Lindsey volunteered.
“Wheat Thins,” Alison said with a grin.
“I think we’ll be able to find representatives of all the major food groups that come in flat packages,” Chuck said, smiling wickedly. His competitive nature wouldn’t allow him to be bested by Jack, even in this screwy situation.
“Of course, we can’t make him eat,” I observed.
“No,” Alison said. “But we couldn’t do that before anyway. It’s like there are these unspoken rules. We’ve put Jack in that room. It’s our job to feed him. If we can’t, we have to let him out. But if we can, I’m pretty sure he’ll eat it.”
“Restraint was never his strong suit,” Chuck observed.
Peter Miller’s funeral took place at noon in the Carmelina Lower School’s auditorium, just a few blocks out of the town center. The church had been deemed too small for the event. Peter had been a teacher at the local elementary school, so the place was packed with students and ex-students, parents, and faculty. Alison, Lindsey, and I sat in one of the back rows, feeling slightly out of place in what was clearly a community event. Lindsey had decided to join us at the last minute, leaving Chuck in the house to keep an eye on things.
The hushed din of a few hundred whispers was abruptly silenced as the pallbearers wheeled the brown, lacquered coffin to the front of the auditorium. As soon as the pallbearers had taken their seats, the minister, an angular man whose lips appeared to be fixed in a permanent grin, stood up at the podium. I was surprised by the sudden realization that I’d never attended a funeral before. Jeremy Miller, sitting up front sandwiched between his mother and sister, looking pale and scared, would carry this experience with him into adolescence, his teenage years, and his adulthood. I wondered if it would give him some greater depth, some wisdom or sensitivity that I as yet still lacked, if every thought he formed, every relationship would be in some way tempered by the grief he was now experiencing. I felt a pang of something that might have been a distant cousin to envy, but my subconscious banished it before I could feel ashamed.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the minister began. I couldn’t help noticing that hanging directly above the podium was a large, dark blue banner with a basketball that said “Carmelina Jaguars, 1998 State Champions.” The minister then paused and looked out across the auditorium, as if trying to establish eye contact with everyone in the room individually. “We hear this psalm of David read at every funeral,” the minister continued. “It is a psalm of comfort, maybe because of its imagery, or maybe because of its familiarity. Hearing these familiar words over and over again at funerals, we recognize that death, too, is a familiar occurrence to us. Tragic though it may be, it is still a natural part of life and we recognize it as such.”
He paused again, staring meaningfully at the front row of chairs, where the family members sat. “But when I read this psalm today, I will not read past the first line. Because I believe that right there, in the first sentence, there is a word that tells me all that I need to hear about Peter Miller. The Lord is my shepherd.’ That is true. But it is an anthropomorphism, a personification of the Lord. It is the attribution of a human quality to God. We do this in an attempt to qualify God’s divine actions, to somehow fit them into a category we can understand. And I now submit to you, Peter Miller was a shepherd here in our field, and in calling him a shepherd, I am referring to the exact human virtues and qualities that David was ascribing to the Lord when he wrote this psalm.
“Peter tended to our most valuable flock, our children. As any of his students and their parents can testify, he was so much more than an English teacher. He was a magnet to the students of the Carmelina Lower School, giving of his love, his energy, his enthusiasm, and his time well above and beyond the call of duty. As a substitute teacher here, I was privileged to work alongside Peter, and I cannot remember a time when I saw him walking down the hallways of this school alone. The children flocked to him, their shepherd, for support, for humor, for camaraderie. He made every single child feel special, and I know from experience that the children valued the distinctive nicknames he bestowed upon as many of them as he could.” Here there was a light murmur from the crowd, and I looked around to see a number of people smiling at the reference. “When Peter gave a child a nickname, that child was reassured that he had a place in the school, that he fell safely within the shepherd’s sphere of protection, and parents knew their flock was being tended by the very best.”
I stared at the coffin and tried to develop a mental image of the man being described. Judging from the sniffling and tearing that seemed to be happening everywhere I looked, the minister’s words were striking a true chord. I looked up at Alison, who was crying quietly, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue every few seconds, and at Lindsey, who was staring intently at Jeremy and Melody Miller.
“When I think of shepherds I think of Moses,” the minister continued, “who led the Israelites out of slavery and into the promised land. As a young man, Moses grew up as an Egyptian prince, but he could not find peace living in the bustle of the big city. Instead, he fled Egypt altogether, and became a shepherd in Midyan. Only there, tending to his flock in the fields, was Moses finally able to find God, who appeared before him in the burning bush. Our Peter, who was born and raised in Manhattan, felt the same need to leave the city and find God and peace up here in the country. In Carmelina, Peter tended his flock, just as Moses did in Midyan, and I believe that he was blessed to have found his burning bush. T
o know him was to know a man of absolute contentment, a loving husband and father, a great friend, a Godfearing man whose ample intelligence did not serve to complicate him, as it does so many people. He had the wisdom to simplify his life, so as to better appreciate his world, and better serve his family, friends, and this entire community. And while his passing is tragic, we can take some measure of comfort in the fact that Peter Miller died a happy man. A man with more blessings than he could count, from his loving wife and beautiful children, to the friendship and admiration of every person in this room.”
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