No matter how you put it together, you're never sure if it's right.
The little pieces, the cupolas and chimneys, they twitch with each beat of noise coming through the floor.
These music-oholics. These calm-ophobics.
No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted.
We could turn it off anytime we wanted.
I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.
The pattern of the bricks on the wall is as fine as your fingerprint.
Another window fits in place, and I brush on more glue.
The sound shivers through the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger.
These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.
Old George Orwell got it backward.
Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.
He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
I finger open a button on my white shirt and stuff my tie inside. With my chin tucked down tight against the knot of my tie, I tweezer a tiny pane of glass into each window. Using a razor blade, I cut plastic curtains smaller than a postage stamp, blue curtains for the upstairs, yellow for the downstairs. Some curtains left open, some drawn shut, I glue them down.
There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.
These people with a dead child, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself.
There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.
The music and laughter eat away at your thoughts. The noise blots them out. All the sound distracts. Your head aches from the glue.
Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion.
Someone's always spraying the air with their mood.
Their car stereo, broadcasting their grief or joy or anger all over the neighborhood.
One Dutch Colonial mansion, I installed fifty-six windows upside down and had to throw it out. One twelve-bedroom Tudor castle, I glued the downspouts on the wrong gable ends and melted everything by trying to fix it with a chemical solvent.
This isn't anything new.
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
The truth is, even if you read to your wife and child some night. You read them a lullaby. And the next morning, you wake up but your family doesn't. You lie in bed, still curled against your wife. She's still warm but not breathing. Your daughter's not crying. The house is already hectic with traffic and talk radio and steam pounding through the pipes inside the wall. The truth is, you can forget even that day for the moment it takes to make a perfect knot in your tie.
This I know. This is my life.
You might move away, but that's not enough. You'll take up a hobby. You'll bury yourself in work. Change your name. You'll cobble things together. Make order out of chaos. You'll do this each time your foot is healed enough, and you have the money. Organize every detail.
This isn't what a therapist will tell you to do, but it works.
You glue the doors into the walls next. You glue the walls into the foundation. You tweezer together the tiny bits of each chimney and let the glue dry while you build the roof. You hang the tiny gutters. Every detail exact. You set the tiny dormers. Hang the shutters. Frame the porch. Seed the lawn. Plant the trees.
Inhale the taste of oranges and gasoline. The smell of hair spray. Lose yourself in each complication. Glue a thread of ivy up one side of the chimney. Your fingers webbed with threads of glue, your fingertips crusted and sticking together.
You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.
With tweezers, you plant flowers along the foundation.
Your back and neck curve forward over the table. With your ass clenched, your spine's hunched, arching up to a headache at the base of your skull.
You glue the tiny Welcome mat outside the front door. You hook up the tiny lights inside. You glue the mailbox beside the front door. You glue the tiny, tiny milk bottles on the front porch. The tiny folded newspaper.
With everything perfect, exact, meticulous, it must be three or four in the morning, because by now it's quiet. The floor, the ceiling, the walls, are still. The compressor on the refrigerator shuts off, and you can hear the filament buzzing in each lightbulb. You can hear my watch tick. A moth knocks against the kitchen window. You can see your breath, the room is that cold.
You put the batteries in place and flip a little switch, and the tiny windows glow. You set the house on the floor and turn out the kitchen light.
Stand over the house in the dark. From this far away it looks perfect. Perfect and safe and happy. A neat red-brick home. The tiny windows of light shine out on the lawn and trees. The curtains glow, yellow in the baby's room. Blue in your own bedroom.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God.
As if everything's just fine.
Now take off your shoe, and with your bare foot, stomp. Stomp and keep stomping. No matter how much it hurts, the brittle broken plastic and wood and glass, keep stomping until the downstairs neighbor pounds the ceiling with his fist.
Chapter 4
My second crib death assignment is in a concrete-block housing project on the edge of downtown, the deceased slumped in a high chair in the middle of the afternoon while the baby-sitter cried in the bedroom. The high chair was in the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink.
Back in the City Room, Duncan, my editor, asks, "Single or double sink?"
Another detail about Duncan is, when he talks, he spits.
Double, I tell him. Stainless steel. Separate hot and cold knobs, pistol-grip-style with porcelain handles. No spray nozzle.
And Duncan says, "The model of refrigerator?" Little spits of his saliva flash in the office lights.
Amana, I say.
"They have a calendar?" Little touches of Duncan's spit spray my hand, my arm, the side of my face. The spit's cold from the air-conditioning.
The calendar had a painting of an o[misprint for 30 letters] mill, I tell him, the waterwheel kind. Sent out by an insurance agent. Written on it was the baby's next appointment at the pediatrician. And the mother's upcoming GED exam. These dates and times and the pediatrician's name are all in my notes.
And Duncan says, "Damn, you're good."
His spit's drying on my skin and lips.
The kitchen floor was gray linoleum. The countertops were pink with black cigarette burns creeping in from the edge. On the counter next to the sink was a library book. Poems and Rhymes from Around the World.
The book was shut, and when I set it on its spine, when I let it fall open by itself, hoping it would show how far the reader had cracked the binding, the pages fluttered open to page 27. And I make a pencil mark in the margin.
My editor closes one eye and tilts his head at me. "What," he says, "kind of food dried on the dishes?"
Spaghetti, I say. Canned sauce. The kind with extra mushrooms and garlic. I inventoried the garbage in the bag under the sink.
Two hundred milligrams of salt per serving. One hundred fifty calories of fat. I don't know what I ever expect to find, but like everybody at the scene, it pays to look for a pattern.
Duncan says, "You see this?" and hands me a proof sheet from today's restaurant section. Above the fold, there's an advertisement. It's three columns wide by six inches deep. The top line says:
Attention Patrons of the Treeline Dining Club
The body copy says: "Have you contracted a treatment-resistant form of chronic fatigue syndrome after eating in this establishment? Has this food-borne virus left you unable to work and live a normal life? If so, please call the following number to be part of a classaction lawsuit."
Then there's a phone number with a weird prefix, maybe a cell phone.
Duncan says, "You think there's a story here?" and the page is dotted with his spit.
Here in the City Room, my pager starts to beep. It's the paramedics.
In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant.
They want you to believe that the news and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you.
My third baby is in a farmhouse two hours downstate.
My fourth baby is in a condo near a shopping mall.
One paramedic leads me to a back bedroom, saying, "Sorry we called you out on this one." His name is John Nash, and he pulls the sheet off a child in bed, a little boy too perfect, too peaceful, too white to be asleep. Nash says, "This one's almost six years old."
The details about Nash are, he's a big guy in a white uniform. He wears high-top white track shoes and gathers his hair into a little palm tree at the crown of his head.
"We could be working in Hollywood," Nash says. With this kind of clean bloodless death, there's no death agonies, no reverse peristalsis—the death throes where your digestive system works backward and you vomit fecal matter. "You start puking shit," Nash says, "and that's a realistic-type death scene."
What he tells me about crib death is that it occurs most between two and four months after birth. Over 90 percent of deaths occur before six months. Most researchers say that beyond ten months, it's almost impossible. Beyond a year old, the medical examiner calls the cause of death "undetermined." A second death of this nature in a family is considered homicide until proven otherwise.