House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  I said, “He did, did he?” and I thanked him for telling me.

  David is the only person who has ever punched me in the face. I’d always been afraid of being punched someday, the way you are afraid if you’ve never broken a bone, because it’s a common thing, and you feel eventually your number is going to be up.

  When it finally happened, I felt both relief and grief. Relief, because now I’d been hit and it wasn’t so bad. Grief, because it still hurt—it was still a shock.

  I learned to be on my guard with him, because that punch came right out of the blue. It was the morning. He was standing at the top of the stairs, and I was at the bottom. He’d just finished faking his fourth shower that week, and I said, “David, why don’t you take a real one?” The next thing I knew, he’d thrown his bottle of shampoo at my head. He must have felt as long as he was in it this far, he should make the most of it, because he bounded down the stairs and punched me once in the eye and once in the cheek.

  The psychologist said it was a matter of poor impulse control. But that was only the beginning.

  I’ve wondered whether I could have handled the situation better with David if I had had more experience at the time. He was up and down for a while, and then he was mostly down—mostly hard to understand. He would visit me in the kitchen some nights the way Ajax does, the way a lot of the guys do. He had this thing with me, where he said, “You’re an Earthling, and I’m a Martian.” I just thought it was one of his ways of being playful, the way it was with Peter. He’d say, “You live in a house, have a car, and eat regular earth food. I live on Mars and don’t eat and don’t have a house or anything.”

  “Why don’t you be an Earthling for a change?” I would say.

  “No, it could never be that way,” he’d say.

  Some nights he wouldn’t come down, but he’d shout from his room upstairs, “Laura Wold!” And he had this deep, baritone way of shouting Wold so that it sounded like a fog horn.

  Insidious things began to happen—like my time card would be missing when I came in, or notes to the other counselors that I had left taped to the wall would disappear. When I’d ask him, he’d say, “Why do you always blame me?” I began to sleep on the couch downstairs because otherwise he would steal too much food from the kitchen at night. He didn’t eat half of it. I would find a moldy package of hot dogs he had abandoned in the basement, or a cake on the counter that he had gouged into the middle of, not because he was hungry, it seemed, but because he wanted to have it, somehow stake his claim to it.

  Things got worse. We’d find obscenities written on the walls, on our books, even on a jar of mayonnaise in the refrigerator, or a can of tomato sauce in the pantry.

  After a long time of not coming down to visit, he did one night. He understood things were getting worse. He even said so. He said, “It’s getting bad, Laura.” I remember that I was boiling a big pot of water on the stove and that it made me nervous, because every once in a while he’d hold his hand over the steam.

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “I probably shouldn’t,” he said.

  “Well, that’s up to you.”

  “It’s getting to be that time,” he said after a few moments.

  “What time?”

  “You know,” he said. “Forced Vengeance time.”

  Forced Vengeance was a movie that he’d seen not too long ago, about a man who goes on a killing rampage because of the wrong that has been done to him. He’d liked it and would talk about it now and then.

  Then he seemed to get off the track, and he said, “How come I can’t trust you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “because I’m a trustworthy person, David.”

  “I don’t know either,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be okay.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “But this is a bad one, Laura. This is the ultimate.”

  “Which is?” I said.

  “You know, death.”

  “David?”

  “It’s my duty. People have tried to hurt me.”

  “Who’s hurt you, David?” But he wouldn’t say.

  I notified the psychologist about the conversation. He said that David had brought up similar issues with him in their recent sessions. He said it was good that David was bringing it out in the open. I told the director, and he said we’d need to watch and wait.

  A week later it was a stifling hot summer night. The humidity in the air was like tapioca. Just moving seemed an effort, and sleeping was a kind of fitful delirium. Even sleeping on the sofa seemed too lumpy and hot, so I ended up putting my pillow on the living room floor. I would hear the guys get up to take showers, trying to keep cool, and a couple of times some of them went down to the laundry room to get more towels. I was in and out of sleep, not just because of the heat, but because I was a little sick with fear. At one point I could feel someone’s footsteps on the floor close to where I was lying, and I felt trapped, the way you do when sleep has a hold of you and you can’t break out of it, even though you feel sure there is something you have to do. I heard myself say, “David!” Then I opened my eyes, and he was standing there. It was so dark, but I could see it was his profile, tall, with narrow shoulders, and long arms.

  “Do me a favor and turn the light on.” I said this for two reasons: one, because I wanted the light on; and two, because sometimes when one of the guys is ready to have a fit, I ask them to do something completely normal and it steers them off course.

  It didn’t work. But at least it bought me enough time to get to my feet. “What time is it, anyway?” I’d gotten past him. I was almost to the light switch at the foot of the stairs when he got behind me and grabbed me around the neck. He was choking me. I guess that was better than stabbing me or hitting me with something.

  When I started working here, I took a course called “Aggression Management.” There are all kinds of steps you learn to follow in order to prevent something like this from escalating. So first I said, “David you don’t want to be doing this.” Then I said, “This hurts, I want you to stop.” I wedged my hand underneath the arm that was against my throat to relieve the pressure. He was excited, and his breathing was irregular. He smelled like old cigarettes and perspiration. He would squeeze my neck really hard, then he’d let up, like he was building up his strength to go to it again. And then sure enough, the next time was harder. I wedged my hand in better and shouted, “Stop it! Stop choking me!”

  Jackie was upstairs in his bed, behind his bedroom door. But I’d awakened him, and he shouted through his door, “What’s going on?” Not like he had any idea, but like he was hot and tired and exasperated and wanted to go back to sleep.

  But it was enough to break into David’s craziness. He backed off. Then he slammed me on the back of the head with his fist and ran up the stairs to his room. I don’t know why he did that. Except maybe it was like the last time, when he’d thrown the shampoo bottle—he’d gone this far; it made sense for him to get in his licks. Or maybe he thought it should be like the movies, where guys are always whopping people on the back of the head, and the people, of course, get knocked out, fall to the floor, and that is the end of the scene.

  It was the end of the scene. I’ve wondered about how I went about things afterward. I mean, it was 4 in the morning, too early to call my supervisor. And I didn’t call the police, because I had this idea that bringing them in when it was over would be like overreacting. I remember just thinking, He will not do this again, not to me.

  I went into the kitchen and turned on all the lights. I put all the knives back in a corner of one of the cupboards. I took off the top of the pepper shaker, because my mother had once told me that’s what I should do. It worked like Mace. Then I made banana bread with some overripe bananas I found on the counter. I remember that I was trembling all over, so that when I measured the baking soda out, it literally bounced off the spoon into the bowl. This made me kind of laugh/cry, and I thought about how this was just a little like being h
ysterical, but not the full-blown thing, which I was thankful for.

  I decided to make pancake batter and homemade applesauce too, as long as I was up so early. And when Jackie came downstairs at 5:45, their places were all set, the juices all poured, and I was sitting at the table, writing in the notes about what had happened with David.

  I loved Jackie so much that morning, because I needed him to be good, and he was. He said, “Howdy.” His eyes are kind of close-set and his body round-shouldered and bearlike.

  I said “Hi,” and then he said “Howdy” again. He always says it two or more times. I’m not sure why.

  I said, “Jackie, I need your help.” He kind of jutted his lips out like, It better be good—but he always does this at first. I said, “David tried to hurt me a couple of hours ago. Now, I have to go up and wake the others, and I don’t want him to hurt me again.” I said, “I don’t want you to do anything, or for David really to even see you. I just want you to be behind me in the hall.”

  Jackie is not a bright individual, but he understands things even if he’s not able to explain them. He was quiet for a minute, looking down at the rug, like he was embarrassed or hurt or something, then he said, “Okay.”

  David was taken to a psyche lockup that afternoon, but it wasn’t over. It was how I felt afterward that was the hardest. My landlady was old and close to deaf, and she’d usually be watering the lawn or sweeping the sidewalk when I came back to my apartment in the morning. She’d always ask me about my night. She thought it was a strange job to have and acted as though it was only a matter of time before I would get a new one. Invariably she’d say, “Did you get some sleep?” and, “Did they give you much trouble?”

  And invariably I’d answer, “Yes,” and “No.”

  But that morning, as she turned away to continue watering the lawn, I touched her arm, which was sticky from the heat, so that she would turn back to me and listen. I said loudly and clearly, “One of them tried to choke me last night.” She looked at me puzzled, like she wasn’t hearing me. It’s nearly impossible when she’s outside and you have to compete with the noise of traffic. I said it again, and then I pointed to the light brown bruises in the shapes of fingers that marked my neck. Maybe she’s a little blind, too, because she just didn’t get it.

  She’s an old Czech woman and a survivor of a concentration camp, which she has never talked about, except once when I asked, to say, “It’s over. I lost my life and my soul there, but now I’m here, and I have a new life and a new soul.” I didn’t try to tell my story again. It was really nothing compared to that, was it?

  I was so tired that I slept for a long time, and I didn’t feel like going into the film co-op, or doing anything, really. The next day, while cleaning his room out, I found porno magazines in his drawers. The kind that favored the wide close-up shots of women’s vulvas. Luscious and open and inviting images. Under the magazines I found some ripped snapshots of the staff and residents at Gateway. He’d torn off the part of the photos that I was in, so that all the scraps he’d saved were pictures of me. There were little pen marks on my face, and on the back of the pictures he’d written things like, “This is a fucking dead Earthling” and “Beware men, Laura is in you’re penises,” and some things I couldn’t even understand, like, “No more danger.” Was I dangerous? Why was I dangerous?

  I showed them to my supervisor, and for a while they were in a cigar box on his desk where we kept pens, paperclips and odds and ends. But I was afraid they’d get lost, so I took them home and put them in an envelope to save for the hearing that was coming up. I wanted something to prove that it wasn’t just poor impulse control, that it was part of his whole vision and needed to be taken seriously.

  David called the group home from the hospital several times in the next couple of weeks. He seemed to want to talk to me especially, because he would call at 11:10 on the dot and ask for me. He was worried about what was going to happen to him. Sometimes he would say he was sorry, and he hoped I wasn’t mad at him; sometimes he would remind me that I had been sarcastic, and sometimes it would be as if he’d forgotten the whole thing completely. I don’t know why I felt I had to talk to him, as if I were concerned about being impolite. Maybe I just wanted to change my mind about him, have him change his mind about me.

  The assistant county attorney rushed in just before the hearing. He hadn’t looked at the case very well, because he didn’t know my name and he didn’t know David’s. I brought my envelope of pictures up to the stand, but he forgot to ask about them. The psychiatrist hired by the county attorney said that David thought of me as his girlfriend—he was ambivalent, on the one hand saying he loved me, and on the other talking about how he had planned to kill me. Yes, he felt he was dangerous, which was the main issue of the hearing. The psychiatrist appointed by David’s public defender thought David had some difficulty controlling his impulses, but that he wasn’t a significant danger to society.

  David, I could tell, was on a lot of medication. When another counselor and I first walked into the back of the courtroom, he turned and waved. It was a kind of geeky wave, the kind where he just held his hand up and fluttered his fingers. When I got up to the stand, he gave me another sort of tentative wave. He was sitting at a table across from me. His eyes were glazed over, and when I got to the choking part, he looked at the table with a far-off smile. That was because he was letting himself think of something else; Peter and Ajax space out like this too. I didn’t feel sorry for him then, but I do a little now. At the time, I wanted the judge to recommend the harshest thing, which was to send him to a hospital for the violently mentally ill. Now I’m glad he just sent him upstate to a strict but not end-of-the-road place.

  After the whole thing, I got depressed. I could only compare it to the way I’d felt once after a car accident. I’d been in the backseat, reading a story out loud to some of my college friends. We were all laughing while we drove through an underpass, hit a patch of water, and began to hydroplane. My girlfriend, who was driving, could do nothing to control the car. She turned the wheel back and forth, but we were in the air, and it didn’t make any difference. I remember holding the magazine in one hand and reaching forward to lay my other hand on her shoulder, as if I could help her set us down again, put us back in control. We hit a concrete embankment at about fifty, and miraculously none of us was injured.

  All night we were at a garage not far off the highway, trying to get the car repaired. We kept saying things to each other like, “Thank God it was a Volvo,” and “I usually don’t even wear seat belts.” I remember the glare of the utility lights and the gray cement and an incredible sense of defeat. People always say brushes with death make our lives more precious to us. I think they can make them seem very small and worthless.

  My feelings after the incident with David were like that night in the garage, only they lasted for a few months instead of a few hours. When you almost die of an accident or an illness, you get shaken up, you’re reminded that these things happen, that you’re vulnerable. But when you find out someone has wanted to kill you, probably still does, then you feel like you’ve been dreaming, that you’ve really been stupid not to understand such a thing.

  I’d always believed that how you acted in life is what made all the difference—that being good somehow protected you. This was my worldview. But that changed the night David put his hands around my neck. It struck home that even I could be marked from the beginning simply because I was female. It didn’t matter who I was; it only mattered what he thought I was. And so I couldn’t trust my worldview anymore. But you know, you can’t just instantly trade your worldview in for a new one. For a while, you don’t trust enough to have one at all. That’s depression, that’s like not living.

  I almost quit the film cooperative at the time, even when the others were really counting on me. We’d finally gotten a big grant, one that would fund a real film. We were on to bigger things. I’d even been the one to write the proposal that had brought in the
grant. I had finally taken the old Scottish woman’s advice—used the classics. The idea was to bring an ancient hero into the present and see how he handled himself. I’d done a lot of research, and I ended up picking the oldest hero from the oldest story back in ancient Sumer. It’s not like this sort of thing hasn’t been done a lot already. But I didn’t think anyone had used this hero, Gilgamesh, before. I liked to think of him as the first hero. His story was passed on from campfire to campfire before writing was invented, way before we had even a few of the ideas that we have now. He was like a lot of other heroes, on a quest, killing monsters along the way, and ending up in the underworld, where he finally came to accept that he could not live forever, that all this time maybe he’d been expecting too much for himself. But because it was the first story, there’s a special deep feeling, that this man was really only learning these truths for the very first time.

  I had started to write a script, and we’d begun to cast people for parts when I got depressed—when I lost my worldview. My friend Hank and I were in charge of choosing the lead. These handsome men would come through, one after another, and I felt nothing about them.

  Hank would say, “I like him, what do you think?”

  “No,” I would say, or, “He’s not what I picture. He’s not right. He isn’t it. No, I don’t know. Let me think about it….”

  After this had gone on just about forever, Hank said, “Perhaps we should start auditioning women. I don’t think there’s another male actor left in the region.”

  “Maybe I’m just beginning to think this whole hero idea sucks,” I said.

  “You’re taking this project very personally.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? What’s the point otherwise?”

  And Hank, who’s my friend, said, “That kid who hurt you, Laura, was crazy.”

  “It’s bigger than that,” I said.

  “It just seems that way,” he said, “because you’re in the middle of it, because you’re working in your own little house of heroes, because you’re vulnerable to them everyday. It’s that job of yours. Quit the damn place.”