by Lev Raphael
Stefan and I met back in the kitchen, and as soon as we sat down, the doorbell rang. I waved my hand at him, “Your turn, babe.” He went to bring in Officer Pickenpack.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t an obvious weightlifter, who was a blond, fortyish junior version of the Hulk. Officer Pickenpack’s legs were so muscular, he almost waddled, and his biceps and triceps were so large his upper arms looked swollen. The black uniform was like sausage casing, and everything else about him was robotic, one-dimensional. His face was square and blank, like one of those Depressionera statues representing some ideal. I’d thought I might be intimidated and even upset to have a representative of the Michiganapolis police in our home, but he was so cartoonishly fit, I felt almost blank.
He stood near the kitchen island, apparently oblivious to the room and to us. He got right to the point after we introduced ourselves and said how long we’d lived here, and he sounded bored stupid.
“Is anything missing? Any valuables? Cash? Electronics? No safe broken into?”
We shook our heads, and I waited for him to take out a note pad, but he just stood there impassively.
“You’ve searched the house thoroughly? Okay. Have you seen any suspicious people in the neighborhood recently?”
I hesitated, but Stefan said, “No. Never.”
Pickenpack blinked, registering something, perhaps.
“There were no signs of forcible entry,” he noted. “Who else has a key?”
I told him that Binnie did. “She’s the neighbor who called you and took your card. She wouldn’t have done this.”
“Right. Okay. Do you have any special concerns?”
Stefan stared at him, and I said, “Yes. Why aren’t you taking what happened more seriously?”
I swear Pickenpack almost yawned. “Sir, this isn’t very serious as a police matter. Nothing’s been vandalized or stolen. Nobody’s been hurt. You just had one laptop damaged.”
I corrected him: “Broken.”
“The case is cracked. Have you tried turning it on?”
“I didn’t think we were allowed to touch it. And aren’t you going to dust it for finger prints first?”
He finally showed some emotion. He smirked as if I’d just said something unbelievably stupid, and his voice took on a surly edge, where before it had been just flat. “People watch too much CSI. You know who probably got into your house? A high school kid. Maybe even a junior high schooler. On a dare. It happens all the time.”
“Not to us.”
“It happens all the time,” he insisted.
“But there aren’t any signs of somebody breaking in, so you’re telling me a teenager picked one of our locks?”
He nodded dourly.
“But how is that even possible?”
“You’d be surprised at what they can do.” That’s when I noticed his wedding band, and I wondered if he was thinking of his own kids. Who’d be more likely to get into trouble than a cop’s children?
“All right, then,” he concluded. “Call us if anything else happens.” He turned slowly and lumbered out to the front door, Stefan following. I heard Stefan thank the officer and let him out.
“You thanked him?” I asked, when Stefan returned with the laptop and set it gingerly on the table. I started putting up a pot of coffee. “You really thanked him? For what? For not giving a shit? He was barely here ten minutes, and I bet he won’t even file a police report.”
“Probably not.” Stefan shrugged, and it made me want to embroil him in one of those searing arguments that leave you exhausted, but purged. Except I knew I wasn’t mad at him, but at the twister that had torn through our lives and left us damaged and lost. Twice now in less than a week, the police had been in our house. That was humiliating, and I was on the verge of losing it with Stefan when the doorbell rang. All I could think of was the satirist Dorothy Parker’s sour reaction in similar situations: “What fresh hell is this?”
But then Stefan said, “Marco’s back,” and we both rushed to the door. Binnie handed off the leash as he jumped up around us, delirious with joy, and she said, “You boys need a pot roast—let’s talk about when some other time,” and she departed. As soon as we let Marco off his leash, instead of heading for the kitchen to his water bowl, he bounded upstairs.
Stefan squinted at me as if to say, “Did you see what I saw?”
“He’s never done that before,” I said, just as we could hear Marco barking frantically, the way he did when he’d see a strange dog in the neighborhood.
Voice low, I said, “There’s someone in the bedroom.”
Stefan rushed to get the poker from the fireplace; I grabbed the big emergency flashlight from the console table in the foyer, holding it like a club, and we surged up the stairs. We found Marco at the side of our cherry king sleigh bed, barking up at—at nothing.
“Did you check the closet, or under the bed before?”
“Of course not,” he shot, while Marco growled and tried to climb up the side of the bed.
“What do you mean ‘Of course not’? How does that make any sense?”
Stefan sighed and got on his knees to check under the bed, and I shut up and gingerly opened the closet, but it was clear Marco was being driven mad by the bed itself. We moved closer, and realized something smelled awful, but we couldn’t see anything. Stefan started stripping away the pillows of all sizes, tossing them to the floor. Then he pulled back the blue and gold brocade duvet. The smell was awful now, something oily and noxious, like pond scum, or decayed, rotten food. Marco was practically leaping straight up into the air, trying to get at whatever was responsible for the stench. Stefan set down the poker and yanked back the sheets.
Lying in the middle of the bed was squashed and malodorous road-kill. We both leaped back in disgust from the pink and gray mess that was some unrecognizable animal.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he shouted, and I thought he would go berserk, grab the poker, and destroy the entire room. Paralyzed, revulsed, I stared as he frantically balled up the sheet with the horrible mess at its center, holding the bulky package as far away from himself as possible while Marco danced around as if it were some new intriguing game. Cursing when it got stuck, he yanked off the mattress pad, wrapped it around the sheet inside and rushed downstairs.
“Where are you going?” I called.
I followed him and found him behind the garage, thrusting the mattress pad and sheet into a yard waste bag and then into the large green plastic trash cart. “Get the quilt,” he ordered. “And all the pillows!” Marco was out there now, sitting down, head cocked, watching him, curious. I trooped upstairs, grabbed the rest of the beautiful Dian Austin bed linens, and dragged the lot downstairs. Stefan stuffed the rest of it into the trash cart, and slammed the lid shut, breathing hard, face twisted and red.
I grabbed a can of Lysol from the pantry, headed reluctantly up to the room that our stalker had polluted as badly as the police had violated the whole house. But before I did anything, I opened every drawer, checked every shelf in the closet for more gruesome evidence that we had been targeted by a very sick mind. I didn’t find anything, but wondered if there was a trap somewhere, waiting to be sprung on us, that might take us days to find.
Luckily, the dead critter, whatever it was, had not stained the mattress itself because the mattress pad had a waterproof backing. I sprayed the bed liberally, but what I really wanted was a flamethrower to burn the mattress and bed to ash, sweep it all up and pretend it had never been there. The room reeked of Lysol when I was done. We would have to sleep in the guestroom till it wore off. Maybe every night from now on. It was large enough, and the bed there was fairly new.
“We’re not safe anymore,” Stefan said behind me, from the top of the stairs. “We’ll never be safe.” And he sat down on the top step, covered his face with his hands and howled his despair.
12
Feeling shaky, I left him alone, went down to the kitchen, called Marco and sat outside on
the patio, trying to relax and enjoy the garden. Marco sat by my feet and I closed my eyes, leaned back in the zero gravity recliner I’d come to rely on for stress management. I listened to the breeze stirring the leaves high above us. You couldn’t hear much traffic where we lived, but it was a noisy day in the trees and hedges: chickadees, mourning doves, cardinals, finches, and sparrows. I welcomed the soft cacophony in our half acre of heaven.
But though I was physically comfortable, my mind was tormented by the gross scene of discovering roadkill in our bed, and the dread of further outrages. I kept coming back to the fear that whoever was behind all this had planted subtler little bombs in other rooms. I couldn’t even imagine what they could be, but sensed their menace. I was starting to feel as if I were living in a haunted house. The ordinary had turned threatening, even malevolent.
Marco suddenly bolted for the far side of the yard and I hurried after him. I wasn’t in the mood to clean up after him if he caught a rabbit; he thankfully didn’t chew on them, just broke their necks, but sometimes there was blood. Luckily, when I caught up to him, he was just sniffing idly along the fence; whatever he’d seen or thought he’d seen was gone. Mr. Kurtz was digging on the other side (of course!), and now he stood up and glared at me, looking like the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.
“What the hell is going on at your place? The police are there every single day,” he snarled. “I don’t like it. Nobody likes it. People like you don’t belong here. This is a decent neighborhood.”
I was gobsmacked, since he almost never spoke to me or Stefan.
“What the hell are you doing over there, running some kind of meth lab?” he asked, and since the fence was only four feet high, I could have easily reached across and belted him. But I turned, clapped my hands for Marco, who followed me back inside.
“My son-in-law is a cop!” he called. As if that meant anything.
In the kitchen I felt as angry and frustrated as a bullied, fat adolescent, and I wanted to stuff my face and stuff down every last feeling, but I couldn’t figure out what to eat, so I just stood there, helpless. And then the image of the polluted bed upstairs triggered another image: a larger bed in a far more magnificent room. From a movie: The Godfather. There was a studio executive in that film who didn’t want to give an Italian singer a big part, so the singer asked the Godfather for help, and the exec was punished by finding the head of his prize horse in his king-size bed.
Lucky Bitterman, I thought. He was steeped in films; someone like that would be bound to recreate moments from movies, whether he was conscious of it or not. No, roadkill wasn’t a horse’s head, but then Michiganapolis wasn’t Hollywood, either. Stone had filled my mind ever since I’d discovered he was in Michigan, but the first person I’d suspected was Lucky, and now he loomed larger than ever. It was time to do something about him, to find out if he was persecuting us, and to make him stop if he was.
As if someone were tugging at my shoulder, I remembered Officer Pickenpack telling us to call if anything else happened. But calling him at this moment seemed pointless. I pictured myself facing that big blank face of his again, imagined his suspicious questions. Wouldn’t he wonder why we hadn’t found the mess upstairs sooner? And what would he do about this, given how trivial our situation seemed to him? Besides, even if he did return to investigate the room and the mess in our trash cart, anybody smart enough to pick our lock wouldn’t have left clues to their identity.
But there was another reason for my reluctance: I felt ashamed. It was the shame of someone being victimized who feels doubly exposed talking about the violation. None of this was my fault, and yet the escalation was making me feel more and more that I wanted to hide. If one set of neighbors was angry at us, what about everyone else on our street aside from Binnie and Vanessa? Were we going to be pariahs? Berated while out for a walk? Shunned at local stores and movie theaters? Avoided at neighborhood association meetings?
The next morning, Stefan wandered into the kitchen, looking as pale and listless as the knight in Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Not feeling much like eating, I told him I was going to campus to check my mail, and he barely registered what I said. Good. Because he would have reminded me that there wasn’t much mail in the summer months.
At Parker Hall, I stopped on the second floor for my mail, still disoriented by how cheaply done the renovations were here. The permanent faculty a floor above might hate their little cubicles, but at least they didn’t look this flimsy. There also wasn’t any welcome desk on this floor or anyone to ask for what you needed, just brooding silence and a smog of resentment. It was the kind of grim, characterless environment that could drain anyone’s hope and enthusiasm, and I disliked being on this floor any longer than necessary.
Stepping off the elevator one floor above moments later after I’d sorted the handful of mail I’d received, I felt again how cold and impersonal the environment was, down to the new strange “ding” of the elevator. I said hello to Estella, our tattooed and pierced greeter, as I was beginning to think of her. Today she was actually wearing a spikey crimson wig, and she sported glittery red and white fingernails. I flinched when the flashing sign hanging above her welcomed me, hoped I was having a good summer, and told me the temperature outside.
The department chair, Juno Dromgoole, stepped briskly out of her office far off to the right and beckoned me with her raised index and middle fingers. “Nick? A word, please.” I swear I’d seen that gesture on some TV show where it was used by an imperious boss.
I threaded my way around the outside of the mass of cubicles to answer what was clearly a summons, not an invitation. Since being elevated to the position of chair, Juno had changed her style as dramatically as our office space had been changed. She was now frigid and dictatorial. She still wore Manolo Blahnik or Badgley Mischka shoes, but her leopard print skirts were gone, ditto the clouds of expensive, attention-getting perfume. She almost always wore conservatively cut suits, looking like Demi Moore in Margin Call: controlled, powerful, remote. Stefan and I had speculated that just this small taste of authority had made her hungry to rise much higher at SUM.
Weirdly, her office was decorated with blue-gray French Provincial furniture and Watteau prints, as if to take the edge off her iciness. I sat opposite her desk in a pretty but very uncomfortable chair (the latter was probably deliberate). She closed the door and sat down behind her curlicued desk, tented her hands together under her chin, surveying me. I didn’t squirm, because I remembered all the rowdy times we’d had together years before, and I remembered her swimming in the pool at our health club in a sexy gold one-piece that could turn anyone on. It wasn’t the same as the public speaking tip to imagine your audience naked so as to feel less intimidated, but close enough.
I was past intimidation by administrators, anyway. In fact, I was tempted to mimic her pose and fold my hands as she was doing, but decided not to be inflammatory. Studying her in turn, I realized that since the last time I’d seen her in the spring, she’d had one of those plastic surgery makeovers like Madonna and other celebrities, the kind that’s partly done from the inside of the mouth and turns your face heart-shaped, with wider eyes, more prominent cheekbones, and a pointier chin. It was a bit creepy because it looked mass-produced.
“You seem to have a problem with the police,” she said flatly.
“Do I?”
“The police have been to your house. What kind of example is that to set for students, and how does that make our department look?”
“The students aren’t here, or most of them, and I haven’t done anything.”
“But it looks bad,” she insisted, mouth rigid. “I’m telling you this not as your chair, but as your friend.”
Did department chairs have friends? Allies, maybe—at the most.
“Bullerschmidt told you, didn’t he?” I asked. Who else could it have been?
“I won’t be interrogated about my contacts with anyone.”
Well, that was
as good as a confession, and I must have rattled her a bit because she went on to say, “Really, Nick, twice in one week is—”
“What do you mean twice?”
She flushed under all that makeup and blush.
“We had a break-in yesterday and you know already? How is that even possible? Wait, don’t tell me, Bullerschmidt again. Unless you have your own spies.”
She folded her arms and glared at me, clearly annoyed at having revealed too much. “I need to know what my faculty are doing at all times. They represent the department, and the university. They represent me.”
It amazed me that the woman I used to know—who’d been so edgy, contentious, foul-mouthed, a real gadfly—had turned into such a dictatorial robot. Could she really believe that line of bullshit? And how could she not even ask if I was okay, if I needed help? I wasn’t a person to her anymore, not even a colleague. I was a PR problem. If she could press a delete key on her laptop and make me disappear, I’m sure she would have done that. I briefly thought of appealing to her better side, but I doubted anything could penetrate that new carapace of inhuman efficiency.
Then something hit me, something disturbing. It hadn’t felt like pure coincidence that I got off the elevator and she called me to her office. She had been waiting for me, I was sure of it.
“When they remodeled last summer, did they install surveillance cameras? Did you know I was already in the building?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss campus security.”
“Take the stick out of your butt and tell me the truth.” It was the kind of thing she might have said in the old days, and I swear she almost smiled. Well, her lips twitched.
“It’s important for all of us to be safe,” she said primly. “Whatever it takes.”
“Does the faculty know? Is this even public?”
“Is what public? I haven’t told you anything.”
She was born to be an administrator; she’d gone into cover-your-ass mode as quickly as a reef polyp retreating into its tiny coral fortress.