Nancy had been good for him—sane, unromantic, cerebral. Easy to laugh, slow to anger. An early music professor. Unsure she wanted to marry at all, but finally consenting on a trip to Chicago when he asked her on the Navy Pier Ferris wheel after a live taping of the NPR show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
If only he still wanted her.
That way.
“You know who I do want that way,” he mumbles into his elbow-crooked reusable Pick & Save grocery bag (plastic is not okay) while he fumbles his key at the lock, “that Russian tea cake who moved into Dragomirov’s place, that’s who.”
The crows yap at him.
He unsacks whole-wheat linguine, alla vodka pasta sauce, cold-pressed olive oil, half a gallon of organic skim milk, and a half dozen other items one might expect a health-and-environment-conscious upper-middle-class intellectual to unsack, smirking at his own bourgeois habits as he cabinets and refrigerates his goods.
“Not my fault,” he tells nobody. “I ate enough beanie wienies and mac and cheese growing up. I get artisanal Tuscan boules if I want them.”
But back to the niece of the unfortunate Mr. Dragomirov.
That mole on her cheek drives him to distraction—a classic beauty mark worthy of Marie Antoinette—and she has the firmest body he’s seen on someone her age who wasn’t a movie star or aerobics instructor. He half imagined she had smiled at him that way, but knows better than to embarrass himself. She’s way out of his bald, myopic, professor-bearded league, no matter how well-stocked his cabernet shelf may be or how close he came to beating her brilliant uncle in chess. All right, he wasn’t actually close to beating him, not once in their half dozen games, but he made him think.
Now that the locust swarm of Russians has dispersed, she seems to be on her own. Good riddance to that horde, too. He actually caught one of them, a man the color of ashy leather wearing socks and sandals, standing in his yard, swaying drunk, blatantly pissing on his basil plants.
But it was a funeral, after all.
Too bad about Dragomirov.
A likable fellow.
With an eminently likable niece.
Who enjoys swimming in the lake.
It has occurred to him to offer his services as guide, maybe take her to the McIntyre Bluffs for one of the world’s second-best sunsets, but he knows that she’ll be laughing inside, even if she treats him politely.
No, he’ll steer wide of that Charybdis, and count himself lucky to return to his pragmatic Penelope and her excellent collection of viola da gamba CDs.
As he muses on these things, he plucks a sweater from the back of a chair.
Cold in here.
Isn’t it July?
He thinks about checking the air conditioner to see if he left it on, remembers that there isn’t one. It’s just cold. This makes him feel a spasm of anxiety—just one cold summer day arms his über-Republican lich of a dad (eighty-eight and still shoots trap) with enough anti-global-warming jokes to last through a whole snowless winter and an Easter in T-shirts.
But it’s warm outside.
Isn’t it?
He walks outside again, and feels sunshine on his face, feels the pleasantly warm lakeside air. A little cool in the shade, but downright cold in his house. He walks around the side of the house now, crows a-caw behind him, and sees that there’s something odd about his bedroom window. It takes him a moment to register what it is.
Condensation?
Water has beaded on the panes, trickles down in rivulets.
His bedroom window is sweating like a Pepsi can on a picnic.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he says, heading back into the dark mouth of the cabin’s front door. He goes to his bedroom, finds the door to that shut. He never shuts interior doors.
He grabs the knob.
Cold.
Ice cold.
And locked.
He never locks interior doors.
It occurs to him to call the police, and then he chuckles at his own cowardice.
Hello, officer? Yes, I’d like to report a suspicious locking and a temperature anomaly. Is there a squad car in the vicinity? With a thermos of hot cocoa and a trauma counselor?
He goes outside again.
The crows are quiet.
He glances at their tree, thinking they’ll be gone, but they aren’t gone. They’re just quiet. And watching him.
He looks at his Toyota.
Just get in it and go—something’s wrong.
Hi, Nancy. I left all my clothes and books and my computer in the cabin because my room was cold and locked and birds were looking at me.
I know, but it’s the WAY they were looking at me.
He looks at the crows again.
Still watching him.
Get stuffed, birds.
Jim gives in to a juvenile impulse and flips the branch gallery off.
He walks across the yard now and looks at the window.
He can’t quite see inside his bedroom for the condensation.
He uses his sweatered elbow to wipe a pane dry, looks in.
Someone’s in there!
His heart skips a beat, then hammers.
A strange man is sitting on his bed, reading something.
A strange, feral man in a filthy T-shirt.
Is that my manuscript?
He calms down a bit—people who read aren’t dangerous.
He knocks on the window.
The young man turns around.
Wild-bearded, black haired. Wild-eyed, too. Probably one of the damned Russians. Not the one who pissed on the basil, though. That one had a potbelly and this one is skinny. Emaciated, even. The front of the T-shirt is visible now.
Pac-Man?
The man smiles at him, but it’s not friendly.
“Excuse me!” he says.
Call the police, this is trespassing and it’s legitimate to call.
Hello, officer? Yes, a badly groomed boy is reading on my bed. Does the National Guard have a spare tank it can send by? This looks dangerous.
He taps again.
“What are you doing in my house?”
Jim shields his eyes against the glare, peering through the dry pane. He watches the man go into the bathroom, fish around in a drawer, come out with a hair dryer. The dryer he uses to dry the henna dye he puts in his beard.
The boy returns with the dryer, points it at the pane the man squints through. Turns it on—he hears it whine.
But he didn’t plug it in.
A patch of fog appears on the glass where it was heated.
No, really, he didn’t plug it in.
Now the boy’s finger traces letters in the fog.
Why didn’t he breathe on the pane?
Because he doesn’t breathe.
Get in the car.
Just get in the car figure it out later you’re hypnotized this is dangerous what about the birds and the dryer HE DIDN’T PLUG THE FUCKING DRYER IN! RUN!
When the youth’s finger dots the bottom of the question mark, the windowpane cracks. The professor backs up, backs straight into his nightstand.