The invaders seemed quite familiar with the modality of the roust, knew the best ways to terrorize, corral. Later we learned at least one of them had been in the non-salvation army.
They wore ski masks, but we could tell by their hands that one was black and two were white. We could tell by their accents they were local. The largest invader, the apparent leader, the bat guy, as I later dubbed him, drifted about the room with his Easton aluminum, tapped our shoulders, our knees, lightly, with humorless threat, while the others drew the shades.
I shivered on the sofa in my boxer shorts. Christmas break was not far off and the house was always cold. Constance and Charles Goldfarb sat beside me and through my grogginess I felt my arm brush Constance's warm shoulder. Two things occurred to me simultaneously: that she must have been in bed with Charles, and that I missed her. Then the bat guy smashed his bat on the coffee table. Maurice Gunderson squealed from his camp chair.
"Shit, just take what you need and get out," he said.
Glass twinkled in his scalp.
"What was that?" said the bat guy.
"I said just take what you need."
"What do I need, faggot? Tell me what I need!"
He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a small pistol. Its diminutive aspect did not offer comfort.
"Calm down, dude," said another invader.
"I'll keep these fairies here," said the bat guy. "You two go upstairs."
"You sure?" said the third invader.
"Just fucking go!" said the bat guy. "I don't have all night."
If he was the leader, he was not a natural one. He seemed more disturbed than the others, twitchier, less clinical in his approach to the burglarious. That they figured we'd have cash and valuables stashed away here on Staley Street was not an indictment of their intelligence, but it did point to a knowledge deficit with regard to the various striations and flavors of capital accumulation at a private university. There were some varsity golfers down the block they would have done much better to rob. Maybe they already had.
I could hear the other two invaders smash around upstairs, pictured them in the blue light of my tiny room. What would they make of the sketches tacked to the wall, the condoms under the futon, the cracked, unstrung Telecaster in the corner (in case the band idea ever blossomed), the scratched record on the Fold 'N Play? Would they see through the pose?
It did not seem odd that I was thinking about this while the bat guy lurched around us and his accomplices tore through our drawers and our duffels full of dirty jeans and jerk-off socks and plastic bongs and mint cookies and Foucault Readers. I was still a little stoned and very tired but I wasn't that frightened. I did not believe that we were in mortal danger, though I sensed some of us could get hurt. The bat scared me more than the gun. I saw it caving a skull, maybe that of Raskov, who sat on the sofa arm near Goldfarb. There was something melon-y and inviting about Raskov's head, I understood that objectively, and despite our frictions the prospect of its stoving did not please me. But the downside of this muted state was that I maybe appeared too comfortable, too fragmented, dreamy, and I suddenly paid for this with a sharp chop to the ribs. I squinted up from the floor into the wool-ringed eyes of the bat guy.
"What!" he said. "What are you staring at!"
"He's not staring at anything, man," said Maurice, his voice high, airless. "Everything's cool. I have morphine. You want that?"
"Fuck your morphine," said the bat guy. "Yeah, give it to me."
"It's in my room."
"Where's your room?"
"End of the hall."
"Go get it. Just fucking stay where you are."
"I am," said Maurice.
"Get back on the couch."
The bat guy turned just as Constance put out her hand for me.
"Don't touch him!" he said. "Shit, you're a chick. Let me see you. You fuck him?"
It's complicated, I wanted to say.
"He's my friend," she said.
"You fuck him. I can tell. You blow him and tell him how smart he is. But he's a dumbshit. Take it from me."
"I can vouch for that," said Billy Raskov.
I didn't take it personally, knew it for some kind of play, a ridiculous one.
"You can vouch for what, potato head?"
"Jesus, Billy," Goldfarb whispered.
The bat guy stuck his bat in the cushions of an armchair behind him, far from our reach, though I noticed Gunderson eye it. Now he snatched a handful of Billy's lank hair, cranked his head back.
"What do you vouch for?"
"Nothing," said Raskov.
"Nothing?"
Raskov snarled as the bat guy bent his head. Constance leaned in and stroked Raskov's knuckles, as though what he needed most now was moral support, the structural integrity of his spinal column a minor matter.
"No," said Raskov. "Just that I can vouch for what you said about the guy over here. Milo. He is a dumbshit."
"Oh, is he?"
"Yeah."
The bat guy slammed Raskov's head down on a spindly wooden end table. A leg splintered.
Billy slumped, clutched his skull.
The bat guy turned to me, waved his gun.
"Nice friend you got there. Calls you a dumbshit. He's fucking the chick, isn't he? Or maybe you all are. Maybe I will. What do you think of that?"
I could see Constance out of the corner of my eye. Her lips twittered, as though moving briskly through a sequence of calculations.
"Been a while since I got my wick dipped."
I could tell the bat guy was about to do something ugly with his penis. His pistol would authorize the ugliness. His pistol would have his penis's back. He started to rub himself. We froze, Billy and Maurice and Charles and I, or else we watched the scene as though it were precisely that, a scene, unfurling in the present but with a structure, a destination, already in place. Like a TV show, if TV made you too scared to move. I guess in a sense it does, but this was also something else. I was waiting for some instinct to take over. Fight or flight, I remember thinking. I suppose just sitting there on the sofa was, technically, flight.
The bat guy made an experiment of bobbing his crotch near Constance's face.
Something scraped on the hardwood behind us.
Purdy and Michael Florida squatted behind the armchair. Had they been here all along? Wandered in from the kitchen? Purdy put his finger to his lips. Michael Florida's eyes blazed, flicked around the room. They each crept around a side of the chair. Purdy slipped the Easton from the cushions.
The bat guy cocked his head but did not look back.
"What the fuck took you so long?" he said. "Did you find the morphine? This kid says he got morphine."
"Hey," he said again, "I want to get out of here. You see this chick here? Let's take her with us. She'll have a better time than with these queers."
Then we all heard footfalls from the hallway, the boots of his fellow invaders. I saw fear in the bat guy's eyes and he had every right to feel it, because as he wheeled to see what forms he had mistaken for his friends, Purdy and Michael Florida vaulted over the wrecked coffee table. Purdy smashed the pistol from the bat guy's hand. Michael Florida dove, speared the bat guy in the chest. Together they crashed to the floor. The bat guy rolled on top of Michael Florida, choked him, both men dusted with glass. Michael Florida clawed back and the bat guy's mask peeled off and we saw his face, his brown hair and rosy cheeks. He looked like a thousand young men in this city. But this one was throttling brave, meth-carved Michael Florida.
Purdy picked up the pistol, pointed it at the other two men.
"He's a fucking nut," said one of them. "We didn't even want him with us."
"He's my cousin," said the other. "But I don't care. We just came for the cash."
It was an odd moment, as though the narrative had somehow forked and we were witnessing two possible outcomes, the intruders subdued at one end of the room, our friend strangled at the other. The story had to decide. Or Purdy had to decide, because the rest of us just sat there, and he did, tossed the Easton, shouted, "Constance!"