When I’m done, I don’t get up. I stare at my boxes, tempted to start opening things up. I could just sit here for a while, rummaging through years gone by, digging up scraps of the past for consideration. People do it. I have done it. Sort through the past, seek out certain incidents, key days, fragments of memory, spread them out on the ground and then sweep them all together and put them all back, stamp the bags “Unsealed and resealed,” waste hours in reflection, self-abasement, and recrimination. There are people who fall down that rabbit hole and never come up.
Not me. Not tonight.
I rise stiffly, keeping my body very still, wriggle back out of the crawl space, and walk slowly back up the stairs.
“Fuck.”
I find my face in the mirror, in the darkness of my empty house. Silvie took a lot of the furniture when she left, but this standing mirror is still here, by the front door, leaning against the wall. “It might be fun to look at yourself in the morning sometimes,” she used to say. “Before you leave the house.”
There is blood still on my forehead, up by my hairline, at the level of the roots. Blood still in my eyebrows, small flecks like red dust.
I pass through the kitchen into the bedroom, peeling off the rest of my clothes as I go. Coat and pants, shirt and tie.
I knew a one-legged policeman once. When I was still on the regular force, before I followed my brother’s lead and drifted into Service. His name was Rafael, and we used to drink together, after shift, at a bar on Grand Avenue north of downtown. He lost the leg, he told me, when he was a teenager, but he could still feel it. “Sometimes I swear I could touch it. Sometimes I swear if I look away, and look back—” He was pretty drunk. I was drunk too. He never told anyone, he said, about how he still felt like the leg was there. “Please, Laz, please don’t tell anyone. They’ll jack me up on that shit,” he whispered, beery breath in my ear. It was late at night, just taxis on the street outside. “On that Clarify. They’ll kick me the fuck over the wall.”
He still felt the leg and he liked to feel it. He liked to believe that it was real.
I will miss my case but my case is gone.
I stumble into the bathroom and piss and splash water on my face.
I come out into the bedroom and see a dark shape in the greater darkness of my unmade bed. Nested like a dead animal in the mass of rumpled sheets.
A book. The book. Still in the cover that calls it The Everyday Citizens Dictionary, but I know what it is, I can see its true face through the mask. The Prisoner: A Novel. By Benjamin Wish. It’s on my bed.
What the fuck?
It is open, facedown, spine bent, pages riffled, like a bird shot out of the sky.
It’s impossible, of course. It’s fucking impossible.
Because I jammed the book into the dresser this morning. Didn’t I? I did. I think back, throw my mind out backward, like feeling behind you in the darkness. This morning. To the diner, to the office, Kelly Tarjin begging me for help, Silvie at the Record, the day replaying itself, but I know—I know—I know that book was in the dresser when I left.
It sings to me.
From the bed, it is singing.
I can hear it singing.
I left it in a drawer. Didn’t I? I did. I know that I—
“No,” the voice sings, the visiting voice. “You—”
I clutch at the side of my head. I’m in my T-shirt and underpants, alone in this room except that I’m on the Record. In this room there are three captures: above the door, on the floor lamp, on the ceiling fan. It’s just lucky the jacket is still on the book, but if someone was in here—if someone came in—
No one came in.
I am staring at the book, and I take a step toward it.
I want you. The thought dances to life. Like a stranger, a visitor, a visiting voice.
I turn my back on it.
I take my weapon out of the bedside table and perform a careful circuit, room by room. I am seeking an intruder, but as I move slowly through the house, I begin to feel like I am the intruder myself, stalking through the handful of rooms in my little house and seeing each one anew. I can picture myself, as if from above, a dark figure, moving in shadow.
I don’t find anything. In the kitchen, my juice glass is still on the kitchen counter, lightly stuck in the place where I left it, and my plate is in the sink. The light is on in the bathroom. My pile of last night’s dirty clothes is still in the laundry room. I peer out each of the house’s handful of windows, checking for signs of entry. I crane my head up and down the street. Across the street is a wide field planted with lima beans and lettuces. Down the slope from my backyard is a four-lane road, and across the road is a vast field planted with avocado.
It doesn’t matter how long I look: I won’t find anything. Nobody’s been here. The front door was undisturbed and no one has a key, and who would break in and take nothing, disturb nothing, only take out a book and not even take it—just take it out and leave it open on the bed?
No one. No one would do that.
So I return to the bedroom living in two realities at once—We always are, aren’t we, despite all our efforts we are—believing and not believing that someone was or is in the house with me, knowing and not knowing that I am alone with The Prisoner: A Novel.
I know exactly what it wants. It wants me to read it. That can’t be so, of course, because it is an inanimate object, possessing no impulses or desires of its own. The book does not carry intentionality. It simply is, but there it is, having somehow crawled from my drawer and thrown itself open on the bed, willful and desperate for attention.
I grab my head with both hands, press my flattened palms to my temples like I am trying to keep my head from toppling off, and growl.
What the book wants is for me to read it, and I want that too. I want it very badly.
I should go to the fridge and find a beer and drink it, maybe drink another one. I should turn on my wall-mounted and watch some stream, any stream, fucking “Slipping on Sidewalk Cracks” or “Old Men Walking Dogs.” Anything. I should brush my teeth and wash the blood from my hair, and fall into bed like a tree, get up in the morning, and see what Alvaro has written on the board for me to pursue.
Yes, there was a case at 3737 Vermont Avenue, there was a dead man on the ground at that address, there were certain associated anomalies, but all of that is gone now. That matter is unknown and unknowable, and that is a part of the job—it is part of living in the world. There are certain things that cannot be known and can never be known, and this must be accepted, our safety and our future depend upon it, and I am trying to bear it and depend upon it, and it is like knives, it is like holding the blades of knives.
Charlie could have done it. Charlie would have outsmarted them before he could be outsmarted, Charlie would have sensed the maneuverings of the gray man in the corner, seen the wall the Expert was building and tunneled under it, flown over it. Charlie would have come back laughing with the whole truth and nothing but, dangling from his clenched fist like a monster’s severed head.
Every time I close my eyes my body hums for solace, and every time I open them I see the novel lying on the bed.
I put down my weapon. I pick up the book. I need it.
I start at page one.
“Listen, lady,” said Shenk very slowly, shaking his head. “You’re in the wrong place. Okay? You need to find yourself a lawyer.”