From the elevated vantage of my front porch, I watched on as Caprice and Ernie circulated among the reporters and officers like the hosts of this demented cocktail party. My heart began to hurt for them and the friend they’d lost, for the grief that was stalking them, immense and relentless as hunger, as they talked to all these men and women whose concern was so manufactured and cynical it was practically coming off them in stink lines. By now the broadcast journalists had arrived—the heavies. Their crews had schlepped tripodal cameras around until they’d found the best angle of the scene, which the officers had boxed them out of. Between the officers and the journalists there seemed to be a flirty hostility reminiscent of middle school love affairs.
I stepped off my porch and made for Caprice and Ernie, trying to stay out of the cameras’ sight lines because I couldn’t stomach the thought of appearing on-screen later and being outed for what I was, but another supernumerary ogling on, a needless quidnunc cupping his pud. They were still occupied with reporters, so I hung in the background. Skulking about like this, I got a little spooked. Paranoia needled me. And for a spell there I pretty much just wigged out. Every stranger’s eyeballs issued an indictment: Interloper! Buttinsky! Asshole! And were they not correct, after all, these eyeballs? Was I not a voyeur of a particular American stripe, having been seduced by the suffering of my neighbor? By the trauma he’d endured? How was I any different from the other journalists here? I had a GIF going in my head and that GIF was this: with both hands Peter clasps an absurdly spurting wound and exclaims, “O, I am slain!” before keeling over. Keeling over—Christ. All the language I had available seemed so callous, to lack the reserves of empathy I’d hoped to find in it, and only made me feel more fraudulent. But knowing no better course of action, I doubled down on language, hoping to ground myself by taking notes, hoping something fruitful would come of them. I scribbled in a frenzy, wanting to appear serious and studious, as committed to the story as a courtier, but probably looked a touch, well, touched. Through my thick skull I couldn’t get it, the simple fact of Peter’s murder, couldn’t resolve its peculiar mix of momentousness and mundanity. Among so much else I noted that the fire truck and ambulance were now gone. They must’ve left while I’d been inside with Alexis, and again I had to check my crappy American disappointment, this time at having missed a good part, a climax. Surely a shrouded stretcher had been borne out of the house. My mind teemed with shameful morbid questions. Who’d hoisted Peter’s tremendous body onto the gurney? Had it shown any signs of stress under the weight? How had they negotiated the stairs? Now dead, how much would the body continue to bleed? Had the sheet been stained a lurid incarnadine? Or had the situation demanded a body bag? And oh, what a horrible do-si-do those two words do: body bag, body bag, body bag. . .
Know this: Caprice is a real piston of a woman, a larger-than-life-of-the-party type. An ardent and longtime lover of cigs. When Alexis and I first toured our place, she was out on her back porch, tossing feed down to the chickens that have free range of her big backyard. “I’ll sell you this place for three-fifty,” she called across the alley, her voice as seasoned as cast iron. Once a cheeky blush-pink, their old Foursquare is now the worse for wear—think: sorority girl, out all night. “Chickens come with if you want ’em,” she added, and laughed a laugh that was maybe as much a cough. She sometimes builds ziggurats of cubed white bread in the middle of our intersection to woo gulls over from the river. The commotion around us continued, but when she was free I stood and listened dutifully as she took me through a skeleton key of the incident. The basics. From her brief account, which she already told with the polished ease of multiple tellings, I put it together that Steve had been living with Peter. Apparently it’d been months. And before that, he’d lived with Caprice and Ernie, right behind me. For all that time he, too, had been my neighbor, and here, if asked, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.
We were interrupted by the arrival of the Portland Police Bureau’s Mobile Command Center, a twenty-plus-foot RV painted an official blue and white and emblazoned with the city’s seal. Officers broke the yellow tape and allowed it to pass into the middle of the intersection. The RV had a handful of R2-D2 domes on the roof and I imagined they enabled a direct feed to headquarters downtown, allowing them to do remote forensic work, analyze evidence like fingerprints and DNA and ballistics. Somewhere inside the belly of the beast, a generator kicked on with the borborygmic vigor of a washing machine.
One of the suit-wearing homicide detectives called Caprice over for Official Business and I went and posted up next to a cruiser parked with its doors open in front of my house. Two officers were inside drinking Venti coffees, their job being, it seemed, just to be there. I’m still somewhat new to this, but I can’t imagine I’ll ever get over the astonishment of encountering state authorities who’re younger than me.
All afternoon I’d been ping-ponging between competing thoughts. One was that I knew exactly what was going on here, from all the police procedurals I’d ever watched, and the second was that I didn’t have the first clue. It was uncanny, that peculiar mix of the familiar and the utterly foreign. Hoping to clarify some of my impressions, and undeterred by my earlier failure, I asked these officers a few Qs. They were open and amiable, happy to help, probably because I wasn’t asking about this case in particular.
We talked about violent crime in the neighborhood, how numbers were down here but well up in Gresham, the suburbs, where the gangs had been displaced. Then we got on about all the journalists, one of whom was practicing what he’d say on camera later. He sounded like a Gertrude Stein poem: “A witness witness? witnesses called police to this house house? home? to this home on North Haight Haight? North Haight to say that a man was to say a man had been stabbed. . .”
“I got a buddy,” one started. “He drives around getting video of scenes before we tape them off. Sells that to the networks, sometimes more than one. Makes pretty good money, too. More than you’d think, at least.”
Eureka! Tweaker guy and the blondified ectomorph—vigilante videographers.
“In the footage the official media gets, we’re always laughing in the background or something,” the partner said. “But they show up like way later so what do they expect?”
I then inquired as to the forensic appurtenances one might expect to find inside the MCC. What manner of high-tech crime-solving gear was it packing? Could they do 3-D facial recognition? Alternate light photography? Was laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry an option?
“Oh, nah. It’s mostly just a lounge,” the first cop said. “There’s a table and some chairs. Coffee. Snacks. Probably snacks.”
“Well, that’s disappointing,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“We get that all the time,” he said. “People seen too much TV.”
I left them to their coffees and spent much of the rest of the afternoon sitting on my porch, taking in the scriptless drama from a distance. As I watched everyone go about their business, I felt like I was witnessing a holy rite of alien and opaque significance. It reminded me of attending my friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs, when I’d listened to them perform their guttural, glottal passages from the Torah. There was something undeniably ritualistic to all the day’s doings, something with the skin of the sacred. The crisis, the intercession, the working out of innocence or its opposite. The great profane paddle wheel of justice, churning us down the river time. Perhaps crime, and maybe especially violent crime, is the last way we feel comfortable addressing the ancient notion of sin, a notion gone nearly vestigial in us. Not to play loose with etymology here, but it’s neat to note that many of the words we associate with crime—“incident” and “case” and “homicide” and “casualty” and “cadaver”—share a common root, cadere, which means “to fall.” At some point during all this gummy and fruitless ruminating, I started to understand that no amount of journalistic diligence could possibly redress my confusion. Facts would not, really could not, reso
lve for me the primeval mystery of what’d gone down here on the ___00 block of N. Haight Ave. Death had been here. Murder had left its sudden, inexpungible stain on the day.
The sky bruised up as the sun began to set and the journalists took off to meet their deadlines and the cruisers peeled off to pursue other urgencies. The MCC hung around until after it went dark and even from inside the house you could hear the dyspeptic chugging of its generator. Alexis and I missed the initial television reports but watched them online later. The anchors enthused while introducing the news. Their voices pitched, their manicured eyebrows lifted. Little windows floated on-screen beside their statuesque coifs: “Deadly Stabbing,” “Fatal Stabbing,” they read, and were accompanied by clip-art graphics of knives and police tape. Watching these reports, I experienced an almost cosmic echo of the day, like there’d been a hiccup in space-time. I saw my street teeming with life and light—there were my neighbors milling about and there was my car, my house—while out my window the same street was dark, the same houses featureless silhouettes. Sure enough, in a brief establishing shot of the neighborhood two cops stood in the background, laughing. “Witnesses called police to this home. . .” I heard, in a nauseating déjà vu. The night wore on and an eerie stillness bloomed outside and at first I couldn’t place what was different, what’d changed. But then it hit me: the Mobile Command Center must’ve finally taken off. Now at last we were left to contend with the haunting hum of absence that had been at the heart of the day’s noise.
* * *
The letter arrived in an unsealed, unaddressed, and unstamped envelope, a rogue missive slipped in with my other legit mail. I should clarify: a photocopy of the letter arrived thus, along with a copy of its first envelope, addressed to Linda Strauss, Peter’s wife. It’s postmarked 20 August 2012—more than a month before I got it, a year and a half before everything above went down. The return address is for “Percy Perwinkle” (Periwinkle?) at “___00 N. Haight Ave.” No such street number exists and the only results I found online for Percy Per- or Periwinkle led me to a site that showcases amateur erotic fiction.
“Dear Laura,” it begins, bafflingly.
I am a neighbor of yours and I want to bring some things to your attention concerning your husband (?) Peter. On Friday, Peter was outside yelling ‘Woo!’ and spraying water into the air. Inside the house, all people can hear is ‘Woo!’ However, outside of the house is a different story and I would like to let you know what he said. Peter yelled ‘Woo! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you all! Woo!’ He kept this up several times until I heard him say ‘Woo! Fuck you! I will KILL all of you! Woo!’ I have been afraid ever since. This is illegal and I have seen ‘Peter’ do several illegal things over the past few years.
This is the first of eight single-spaced paragraphs that fill two typed pages. The work entire amounts to an impressive jeremiad, an impassioned rant in which the anonymous author (“I will not identify myself out of fear that Peter will kill me. . .”) states the problem over and over: Peter is “terrorizing our neighborhood.” He listens to his music at an “absurd and ILLEGAL level.” He’s lowering property values. He has prevented the author from getting a job and is responsible for untold hours of talk therapy. Among the illegal things he’s been witnessed doing: he once cut a tree “down into the street without a proper permit.” And now he has threatened to visit death upon the entire neighborhood. Quite simply: “He has made my life a living hell.”
The writing throughout is unhinged and obsessive, its logic only loosely qualifying as such. For example, property values? The problem isn’t that they’re getting lower, of course, but too high, driving taxes up so that many folks who’ve been here for decades are having trouble paying them. It’s this febrile and half-cocked quality that makes the letter so compelling. Paragraph to paragraph, often sentence to sentence, the tone varies wildly, cycling through concern for the community’s and Linda’s safety to exasperation with Peter’s “antics” to anger of a rarefied sort. The author pleads with Linda to kick him out, to divorce him, and, anticipating the failure of these more reasonable forms of suasion, goes on to suggest menacing and portentous courses of action—e.g.: “I have homicide thoughts against your husband, daily . . . However, I do nothing illegal, but I do know Kerby Blocc Crips and this is their turf. In fact, I used to be one of them . . . And if they heard or knew about this threat, your husband would be put down like a dog.” Threatening to fetch the gang should daunt us, but it doesn’t. It reads as desperate, not to mention that it’s a fundamental misapprehension of how things work now. My imagination can’t get them out of Gresham, this crew of aging thuggards, dully peeved by proxy, arguing over which bus is best for the commute back to their turf. And of course, as all such letters must, this one includes an ultimatum: “I’m giving him a week to stop being a terrorist and respect his neighbors before I send out letters to fellow neighbors informing them of what he said.” And later we get a wicked little addendum: “We may be sharing self-defense videos with our neighbors as well, so everyone knows how to kill him in a snap or at least paralyze him. Then you’d be forced to keep him in your life forever and feed him baby food.” The letter goes on, but continues only to rest its restive case over and over again.
While it’s abundantly clear that the author overreacted (“I don’t care if he means no harm because I think he DOES.”), that he or she got all hootered up on a beastly brew of enmity and pique, I’m sad to say I can sympathize. I’d been in the neighborhood for almost two years and my own patience with Peter had started to chafe. My house was far enough away that his music and hollerin’ were muffled when I was inside, but I could imagine how frustrating it’d be if you lived next door, like Jim. Story goes that Jim and Peter had been tight, best friends, used to spend Thanksgivings and Christmases together, but, according to Caprice, the neighborhood’s recording angel, they’d had a falling-out. Jim could no longer deal with how erratic Peter was, how downright mean he could be at times. Similar in kind, my grievances were fractional by degree. For example, on nice days Peter would often sit out on the corner improvising percussive travesties upon some bongo drums. Imagine an EKG of a cardiac arrest and you will have an idea of the rhythm of his beats. My solution? I’d visited my local Home Depot and splurged on a pair of commercial-grade, noise-canceling earmuffs—with them on, the only beat I could hear was the soothingly metronomic shloomp-shloomp of my heart. But on an afternoon when Peter was thus inspirited, sometime after I got the letter, Alexis had a migraine and was laid up downstairs with packages of frozen veggies over her eyes. Every high-pitched plinky-twongy thwack was for her a violent trepanation. I knew it was my husbandly duty to go out there and politely ask him to cool it awhile, but I kept putting it off. Instead I whipped myself into a rich and furious lather. The fuck are you thinking, carrying on like that? Don’t you have a thought or care for anyone but yourself? And if play you must, couldn’t you at least avail yourself of a recognizable rhythm? By the time I’d wound myself to a critical point and was about to go out there and further the ruckus, Peter stopped playing and went back inside his house. Alexis could’ve cried, so soothed was she by the relative quiet. And I was relieved, too, having dodged a confrontation with Peter.
But why? What had happened to make me want to avoid him?
The story had changed. I’d let it. As I settled in after the move, I started to collect fresh habits. Repetition tamed and automated my perception. The new route to work became my everyday commute and our new grocery store became just where we had to go to procure grub and bit by bit we filled our new old house with the warm safe security blanket of the Familiar and sure enough, as it happened, dailiness of this sort dulled me to Peter’s charms. His wonderful whacked-out madness-genius modus came to seem a perpetual psychology experiment without a control. He’d become a burden, someone to deal with—by which I mean that he now sat on the same psychic shelf as Dad. Another quondam example turned cautionary tale. Soon enough Alexis and I had been in the house a y
ear and it’d been months since Peter and I had taken the dogs to Peninsula and talked Auden, Benjamin, Caravaggio, et al. And with alarming ease those months became years. It was happening: I was aging. Linda left. Linda returned. They got a second silken windhound puppy and named it Pippin. Then Pippin was a dog and it was night and he and Apollo had together leapt the fence and fled the yard and were tear-assing around the neighborhood without a chaperone. I was coming home from the murder mart when I saw them on the corner across the street, smoky and apparitional. They came at me then, appearing to emanate more than properly move, closing the distance between us with frightening ease. Quick as pickpockets they were circling me, nipping at my ankles, and I started goose-stepping down the sidewalk, yelling “Peter! For fuck’s sake! Peter!” as I went. Again Linda left with the dogs, but for good this time. And soon thereafter began the relative chaos of the late nights and the excruciating howls that no one could’ve imagined would end in his murder. Now on walks with Percy I stuck to my side of the street. If Peter happened to be out on his porch as I passed, I’d raise a hand across the way, a hand that said both “hi” and “stay.”
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