Attachment Disorders
alice hatcher
There was a time, not long ago, when I would have replaced everything stolen from my house during a burglary. By restoring the original conditions of my disturbed niche, I thought, I was demonstrating resilience in face of adversity. I now recognize how obsessed I was with futile endeavors, that is, before I started taking Centienix. At risk of sounding like a shill for the psychopharmacological-industrial complex, Centienix helped me see how mired I was in odd attachments. What’s more, it gave my night vision remarkable acuity. Sitting in the crook of this tree, I can see everything going on in the neighborhood, from the drug deals on 22nd to the ski-masked man forcing a deadbolt on Timrod Street. In ways that suggest off-label (sexual) uses for Centienix, I’ve developed a heightened sensitivity to the interfaces between my skin and external objects, including the knife in my grip, which seems more like an extension of my own hand every day. Most importantly, I’ve developed an ability to focus on present conflicts rather than past ‘traumas’ and idle regrets.
Isolated critics of Centienix will point to selective memory loss as one of its dangerous side effects, but anyone whose life has been transformed by the drug will laud its memory-culling properties. Admittedly, increased tolerance can be an issue. Sometimes, my thoughts will still turn to the break-in that prompted my appointment with Dr. B, and I’ll find myself wondering what I might have done to prevent the loss of my grandmother’s jewelry. That said, self-recrimination and sentimentality have become less persistent and paralyzing. It’s a testament to Centienix that, in rare moments of recollection and rumination, I feel like I’m watching a complete stranger, an unarmed woman utterly unprepared for catastrophe, or her own rebirth.
In such moments, I watch myself park a red Camry and enter a brick ranch through to find a shattered vase beneath a forced casement window, drawers yanked from dressers and picked-over clothing tangled on a tossed bed, a bathroom cabinet swept of medications, an antique steamer trunk flipped on its side, and my grandmother’s rifled jewelry box lying on the guest room floor, surrounded by flat wooden trays and tiny drawers. Looking back, it’s difficult to understand the emotions I experienced when I fell to my knees and touched shallow compartments swept of clip-on earrings, sachet pouches, and stick-pin brooches, and handled fragments of the mottled mirror that held my grandmother’s reflection for decades. My grandmother had raised me, and, without her jewelry to trigger my most cherished memories, my identity suddenly seemed unstable. I started wondering how much time would pass before my grandmother’s love, and my own history, vanished from memory. Terrified, I staggered from the house and scanned the alley behind my back wall for anything the thief might have dropped. Fixated on the ground, I didn’t see the man standing in the alley, bat in hand, until I was nearly upon him.
“You’re on my easement,” he said, tightening his grip on the bat.
Staring at the knuckles crowning his massive hands, I explained in a rush of jumbled sentences that I was searching for jewelry after being robbed for the third time.
“Sons of bitches.” He lowered the bat. “I’m a tax attorney. If you make any repairs related to the break-in, make sure you claim the deductions on your next returns.”
As my mind attached itself to practical matters and my thoughts stopped racing, I realized the man before me was my neighbor. On several occasions, I had seen him working in the alley in socks and sandals, raking litter from the weeds or adjusting the surveillance camera mounted above his garage door.
“I’ll need a police report,” I said. “But the police didn’t show up the last two times.”
“Screw the police.” The tax attorney pulled a phone from his pocket. “I’ll see if my camera uploaded anything to the network. Maybe we can ID this guy ourselves.” He nodded and angled his phone toward me. “I got him. My camera picks up the edge of your property.”
His camera picked up much more than the edge of my property, but I didn’t say anything, consumed as I was with grainy footage of a man leaving my house with two duffel bags slung over his shoulders. “It’s like someone called central casting and asked for a meth head.”
“Be careful. If you say ‘meth head,’ people will be looking for some white guy.”
“I think he is white,” I began, and trailed off.
“I’ll start a thread on the neighborhood listserv. If everyone shares their footage on the Sting network, we can map his territory with multiple data points.”
“I never joined the listserv,” I said. “Or got a security system. I never wanted to live that way.” I realized, then, that the tax attorney was looking at me with pity, and that dozens of sirens were wailing in the distance, rising and fading in rapid succession.
Over the next two days, I bought new speakers for my television and new headphones for my laptop. Most pointlessly, I bought new jewelry, including a pair of silver earrings with jade inlay—my grandmother had owned a pair of jade earrings—only to lie awake at night, worrying I was creating an ersatz history and unstable personality with fragments of altered reality. I spent every morning and afternoon wandering down alleys and streets and gazing into shrubs and ditches, desperately hoping to find even one of my grandmother’s clip-on earrings. In a sleepless state extending over several weeks, I exhibited signs of ‘mania’ and suffered recurring nightmares that finally prompted me to called Dr. B, a psychiatrist specializing (according to Siri) in grief and adult attachment disorders and ready, I assumed, to prescribe a sedative more potent than the pale pink antihistamines I had been ingesting to quiet my brain.
Dr. B immediately impressed me with her calm, unflappable manner. Not once did I feel ‘crazy’ in her presence; I told her, without a single omission or distortion, about the burglary, my daytime wanderings and nocturnal pacing, my neighbor’s advice, and my inability to battle insomnia with the light artillery of OTC antihistamines.
Dr. B tilted her head. “You’ve been obsessed, you say, with recovering your grandmother’s jewelry, even though the odds of doing so are almost non-existent.”
“My grandmother always made me feel loved,” I practically whispered. “No one else noticed me growing up.”
“But don’t you think your grandmother would want you to have your own life? A life without her, and without her jewelry?” Dr. B adjusted the band of a wedding ring. “We tend to conflate sentimental attachments with genuine affection, but there are unhealthy forms of attachment. In your search for sentimental objects, is it possible you’re externalizing your sense of self?”
“Anything’s possible,” I said, looking at a crescent of dirt beneath my fingernail.
“That’s my point. Anything is possible, or can be, once you let go of the past and enter the present.” Dr. B leaned forward. “Have you heard of the medication Centienix?”
I had seen the billboards and commercials promoting Fountainhead Pharmaceuticals’ latest miracle drug, but I wanted to hear Dr. B’s unbiased medical opinion. “No, but I’m open to taking something.”
Dr. B handed me a pamphlet featuring a glossy photo of a woman contemplating a wafer cone heaped with ice cream on the cusp of liquifying. “Centienix inhibits unhealthy attachments to impractical objects and superfluous people. It curbs excess sentimentality and inhibits the desire to inhabit the past, which exists only in our imaginations. Our reconstructions.”
I opened the pamphlet and read: “‘The past, having passed, no longer exists, except in the mind of the suffering person.’” I considered a list of symptoms—including emotional lability—and nearly wept. “‘The present and future begin with Centienix.’”
“Think of Centienix as a psychic expectorant. You wouldn’t hesitate to treat a cold.” Dr. B rose from her chair to signal the end of our appointment. “You might also consider buying a Sting system and joining a neighborhood listserv. You’ll feel more connected. Less alone.”
Four days into the drug regimen, I felt like a new person. I felt disinclined to wander the neighborhood, looking for lost trinkets. I accepted that what’s gone is gone, what’s passed is in the past, and that memories fade over time. I even went to HomeLotz to purchase a Sting System, with four motion-activated security cameras. In the aftermath of previous burglaries, I had wandered the aisles of HomeLotz in a ruminative state, morose over the impossibility of replacing stolen and damaged items with anything but cheap imitations. I had never considered how liberating it would be to shed the pretense of recreating the past and surrender moribund ideas about the ‘uniqueness’ of sentimental things. I had probably muttered (like some crazy woman at a bus stop!) about the shoddy quality of mass-produced items birthed in sweatshops and the “crassness of capitalism’s regurgitates.” Now, freed of paralyzing obsessions with the dust heaps of history, I found myself standing at the terminus of a Twenty-First Century Silk Road. I found joy in African hemp hammocks, rug deodorizers, foot exfoliators, armpit sanitizers, fizzing toilet-bowl disinfectors, and plastic shoes. Consumed by my surroundings (a consumer consumed, I mused), I made my way to Aisle 347 and settled on a Sting 5.2 Home Security Package.
Given how much money I spent, it’s amazing I wasn’t more upset when I reached what had been my parking spot and discovered my car missing. I was clearly benefiting from the ‘ramp-up’ dose of Centienix. Instead of raging and railing and wasting my energy on futile phone calls to the police (I was having trouble remembering my car’s make and color.), I simply walked home and, that afternoon, mounted four cameras; registered with a network of 627 Sting users so I could view footage uploaded from neighbors’ surveillance cameras; and joined the listserv to access discussion threads about suspicious behavior.
The things I saw and read on the network and listserv were beyond anything I had ever imagined. I saw footage of young men stealing bird feeders, old women prying hubcaps off parked cars, and people in ski masks stealing tools from sheds, wind chimes from eaves, and lawn gnomes from gardens. Listserv members reported a group of Bedouin herders in white robes pilfering vegetable peelings from compost piles to feed their undocumented goats. They described young women in sweatpants using strollers to cart stolen goods from ransacked homes, Polish and Lithuanian gangs shattering windows to play ping pong in hijacked rec rooms, and bands of Irish folk musicians raiding garages for unopened paint cans.
As part of the neighborhood network, I felt energized by rapid-fire exchanges of information between people who seemed like neighbors bound in a common cause instead of atomized strangers stealing glances at one another while collecting daily allotments of junk mail. I admit, I was thrilled when the theft of American flags from two porches raised the possibility of a foreign terrorist cell operating in our midst, and listserv members called for the formation of a neighborhood watch. Within days, dozens of people armed with mace, bats, handguns, crossbows, spearguns, poison darts, nunchuks and Chinese stars started patrolling the neighborhood in shifts. To distinguish individuals legally domiciled in the neighborhood from interloping lawbreakers (Most listserv members had never met in person or even left their house in years, having relied on DoorDash, Amazon, and Instacart for everything from condoms to condiments), the moderator circulated an image of a secret sign patrol members could exchange to identify each other: a ring finger raised from an otherwise closed fist.
Since my insomnia had steadily worsened, it seemed only right to turn my affliction to the neighborhood’s advantage, so I armed myself with a dead flashlight—and antique with a long steel handle that could double as a truncheon—and declared myself, via the listserv, available for a regular night watch. I patrolled the streets and alleys around my house from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., varying my routes, so my movements wouldn’t be predictable to anyone casing the neighborhood. Moving in stealth became much easier once an ex-Marine living on Timrod shot out every street light in the neighborhood. The lights’ deterrent effect, he argued, was insignificant compared to the advantages gained by watch members who could now move tactically, under the cover of darkness. His point was moot. By Christmas, complacency had reared its ugly head, and the ranks of the watch had thinned to the point of near-non-existence.
At first, I blamed falling nighttime temperatures, only to be disabused of my notions by a chance encounter with the tax attorney. I was in the alley behind my house, tracking footprints, when a pale figure emerged from the shadows. Encounters with other watch members had become so rare (and my recall so stunted), I might have clubbed him with my flashlight if he hadn’t raised his ring finger. “It’s good to see someone else out here,” I said, noting the bamboo blow gun holstered in the brim of his camouflaged hat. “It’s a rarity, these days.”
“I hate to say it, but I’ve been shortening my routes. I can’t find time to shop for my kids’ presents.”
“You should hate to say it,” I said. “The burglars and Bedouins aren’t taking time off.”
The tax attorney rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what your religious background is, but my wife and I take Christmas very seriously. Most people do.”
I hated the tax attorney in that moment. It wasn’t his self-serving religiosity (I’m sure he was expecting presents!) or blinding sentimentality; it was his refusal to acknowledge that, by adhering to ‘time-honored’ tradition, he was drawing porch pirates right into the neighborhood.
“All these Amazon packages are chum for criminals. It’s like leaving food out for wild animals.’”
“Look, it’s my business what I buy for my children,” he said with a slight snarl. “I’m not going to deprive them of presents on Christmas.”
He had played the trump card! How can one argue against the joy of young children? Checkmated, I decided to scale back my criticisms. It was hardly time to alienate the few individuals still pacing the ramparts.
“I didn’t mean to offend you. I hope your children enjoy their presents.” The power of platitudes, I thought, as his chimp-like threat display morphed into a wan smile.
“I can’t break the kids’ hearts,” he said.
“I understand,” I answered through clenched teeth, before wishing him a relaxing holiday and heading down the alley with my dead flashlight.
Over the next few weeks, I maintained my patrol and uploaded evidence of criminal activities: images of empty Amazon boxes lying in ditches; video clips of ski-masked women pushing strollers; and digital recordings of goats’ bleating. Strained by my solitary efforts, I was relieved to see the tax attorney in early January, during a sweep of the alley.
“I owe you an apology,” he stated. “It was wrong to let things lapse. Someone swiped my Kansas City Chiefs flag. Nothing’s sacred. What kills me is that it was a gift from my son. He and his wife bought it off the NFL website.”
I nearly hissed. During our last conversation, I had felt almost guilty, imagining some monstrous part of me wrestling Christmas stockings from toddlers’ chubby fingers. The tax attorney’s children, I realized, were adults. With effort, I steadied my facial expression and focused on the matter at hand: the need to secure the neighborhood’s perimeter.
“No one should have to go through that,” I said.
The tax attorney pulled a plastic bottle from his jacket and tapped four pills onto his palm. “Now, I’ll always associate the playoffs with this loss.”
“Does the flag really matter?” I asked, recognizing the shape of Centienix tablets. “It was just a symbol. It’s the fight on the field that matters.”
“You’re probably right.” He funneled the pills into his mouth.
“Who prescribes your Centienix, if it’s not too personal a question?”
“Her name’s Dr. B. She’s been really helpful. I have relapses, like now, but they’re rare.”
“Dr. B is great. ‘Let go of your crap and live for the present conflict,’” I said, realizing I was almost certainly misquoting Dr. B, and that I could barely remember her face.
“The Centienix is helping with my anxiety as we get close to the Superbowl,” he said. “Everyone’s having new TVs dropped on their porches and drinking beer while we drag our asses up and down the street.”
I nodded, and, for some time, we stood in silence, staring at the twilit sky. Then I wished him a safe and unmolested new year and set off on my route.
For days, I wondered if our couch-potato neighbors hadn’t been right to shirk their responsibilities and gear up for the gladiatorial spectacle of the Superbowl, or to upgrade their televisions to better appreciate the fruits of Tweety Hick’s latest body-sculpting surgeries, sure to be on full display during The Halftime Show. I finally doubled my dose of Centienix and decided there was nothing to be gained by wading into an existential quagmire. Civilization, itself, was at stake. If the criminals won, members of the neighborhood association would be reduced to staring at smoky backyard bonfires, exchanging squirrel stew recipes, and reminiscing about ‘that time, back when we had televisions.’
Reawakened to responsibility, I even worked out at the YCA to prepare myself for any encounter with a ‘meth head,’ Bedouin, or burglar. To compensate for the neighborhood association’s slack and flab-encumbered members, I spent hours pumping weights, swimming the butterfly, and sprinting on treadmills to violent fantasies of chasing burglars with baseball bats, slaughtering goats, and shooting flare guns at shifty-eyed women pushing baby strollers. I felt invincible until the day I entered the dressing room after a four-mile sprint in the pool and found my padlock cut in half and my locker emptied. I stood beside a mirror for several minutes, shivering in a Speedo, and then made my way to the front desk to talk to the only YCA staff member working on Superbowl Sunday, a young woman watching Tweety Hicks’s halftime performance. She barely looked up when I reported the theft of my phone and clothing and asked if she had “seen anyone suspicious pass through the lobby.”
“At this job, every single day,” she said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger.
“I mean, in the past two hours,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above Tweety Hicks’s song Agog.
“I haven’t been at the desk the whole time.” She hunched over her laptop to watch Tweety Hicks dangling from a trapeze in a spangled cape. “I had to grab lunch from the vending machine.”
“I had a bus pass, but it was in my wallet,” I began.
The desk attendant reached into a drawer and, without looking away from Tweety Hicks, handed me a single-transfer city bus ticket. “It’s all I can do. The police—”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
Anyone who has ridden a public bus wearing nothing but a damp Speedo will know how naked I felt sitting beside a pneumatic door, opposite a grizzled man cradling a bottle of Wild Irish Rose. I ended up exiting the bus three stops early and walking home in bare feet, tiptoeing around broken glass and cursing a house alarm growing louder every second. Only when I neared my house and saw my laundry room door hanging open like a slack jaw did I realize it was my own alarm shrieking. My vision sharpened as I reached the car port and saw the splintered wood above my door, where one of my security cameras (all four had been stolen) had been pried from my eaves. Inside, I encountered a familiar scene: overturned chairs, scattered utensils, strewn pillowcases, and cardboard boxes yanked from closets. I silenced the alarm and considered the dust motes hovering in a band of sunlight.
“I’ve been housebroken,” I repeated, sensing from a dullness in my nerve endings, that the burglar had already left, and that I was talking to myself.
Walking through my house, I had the eerie feeling of encroaching upon another animal’s abandoned lair. I smelled traces of a stranger’s musk and saw his oily fingerprints on every surface. (Why did I imagine a man? Centienix, I suppose, had activated some latent sensitivity to the chemical composition of male pheromones.) I realized the burglar had not simply passed through the house; he had marked it with his sweat and sebum.
With bared teeth, I wandered from room to room, touching things the burglar had touched, trailing my fingertips over furniture and countertops to smudge his presence with oil from my skin. When I reached my study and saw my rifled desk, I realized my laptop was gone, and with it, my last connection to the network and listserv. Strangely, the computer’s disappearance didn’t bother me nearly as much as the overpowering smell of blood scattered in droplets across the floor and edging the glass still in a shattered window, where the burglar had cut himself entering my house. The droplets led straight to the burglar’s dropped knife.
I crouched down and, with a racing heart, drew it from its nylon sheath. I had seen black steel knives in tactical gear discount outlets, and in television ads featuring flak-jacketed men engaged in hand-to-hand combat with crack-addled criminals, but I had never possessed one of my own. I examined its serrated edge, the deep groove of its blood gutter, its notched finger guard, and the paracord looped around its hilt. I pressed my fingertip to its blade and imagined the callused fingers that had touched it before mine. The longer I held the knife, the more I understood the burglar, if only by knowing the primal urges the knife could inspire. Knowing the intruder’s potential for violence, I knew I needed to secure the house before sunset.
Quickly, I retrieved a hammer and box of nails from the garden shed, closed the door to my study, and pounded thirty nails through the jamb to seal off the room. Then I pulled down my swimsuit and crouched down, dipped my fingers into the warm puddle spreading between my feet, and traced an X on the door. Thinking that, if I cordoned off as much space as possible, I could concentrate my energies on defending a reduced territory, I spent the late afternoon moving my most practical possessions into the kitchen and nailing doors shut. I debated whether to surrender the bathroom until I saw blood droplets on the sink and imagined the burglar dragging my licorice soap across his skin. Repulsed, I gathered a bottle of Tweety Hicks’s Insouciance from a shelf and smashed it on the tiles to mark the bathroom with my (or Tweety Hicks’s) scent. Then I left the bathroom and nailed its door shut behind me.
That night, I stretched out beneath the dining room table. At one point, I regretted nailing the bathroom door shut, but then decided I could urinate in the garden, thereby serving the double purpose of relieving my bladder and marking my territory. Resolved, I swallowed four Centienix and curled up with my hand resting on the knife. Assuming the burglar missed his knife as an amputee would miss a limb, I stroked the paracord around its hilt, as if I might wield some sympathetic influence over the man who had left his scent all over my house. My fingers tingled, and I envisioned the burglar, in a hyper-aroused state, sensing my touch and recoiling. For the first time in years, I had a clear purpose: to defend my territory. I slept undisturbed.
I woke up refreshed, with a clarity of vision that allowed me to see just how ill-prepared I was to protect my house. My living space was so cluttered that I had no clear line of vision between the kitchen and living room. Though I had no recollection of eating the night before, an empty cereal box was lying on its side beneath the table, and the floor was covered in pomegranate-chia clusters and puddled milk. The spilled cereal and strewn clothes, the souring milk, and the ad hoc arrangement of furniture all suggested a dangerous lack of discipline. Sobered, I pushed my clothes into a corner of the room, broke down several pieces of furniture with a hammer claw, and, using caulk and nails, created makeshift barricades over every window. Just before I nailed the top of a coffee table over the front door, it occurred to me that the fewer objects I had to protect, the more I could focus on marking my yard and wall.
I spent the morning packing cardboard boxes with picture frames, candle holders, cracked pottery, yearbooks, photo albums, an old radio, cooking appliances unsuited to my pared-down existence, diaries, tattered paperbacks, and an assemblage of shells collected from beaches on various vacations—so much crap accumulated throughout a life misspent fostering sentimental attachments. “Kick it to the curb,” I was muttering, as I rubbed my cheek against a giant agave and entered my house through my front door for the last time.
Having taken an unofficial leave of absence from work, I settled into new routines. I spent every morning collecting my urine in old yogurt containers and sprinkling it in my garden, on my gate, and on the trunk of my mesquite tree. I spent hours shadow-knifing along my dining room wall, imagining how I would disembowel an intruder. As my body gained strength and my mind regained focus, I became more attuned to the knife than ever, intimately acquainting myself with its precise contours, heft, and aerodynamic qualities. I maintained strict exercise regimens, using an extension cord as a jump rope and rocks as free weights, and doing abdominal crunches on the kitchen floor. Every afternoon, I inventoried my canned goods and calculated how long my food supply would meet my caloric needs. Until replenishing supplies became absolutely necessary, I had no intention of leaving my property.
I might have remained at ground level, in a purely defensive position, had I not begun to hear strange noises: low growls, guttural laughs, unearthly moans, strains of Irish folk music, and the braying of either large animals or an intoxicated human thrashing about in the alley. One night, I smelled a familiar musk. My eyes dilated, my nostrils flared, and I felt a heightened sensitivity to the knife’s hilt. From that night on, I slept with my eyes open, marked my bushes with greater regularity, and perched on my wall, so I could survey the alley. From my perch, it was a short evolutionary step to scaling the trunk of my mesquite. In the tree’s highest branches, I could command a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood, memorize traffic patterns, observe cats and dogs spraying (tagging!) mailboxes, and surveil scrawny men coasting about on stolen bicycles. I could monitor the curb in front of my house, where my photo albums and diaries—all that remained of my jettisoned belongings—were moldering after a rainstorm.
A seasoned insomniac, I quickly accustomed myself to sleeping in short spurts and nibbling on leaves to quell my hunger. I saw things I had never before noticed: neighbors trash-picking from each other’s bins; breathtaking perversions in the bushes edging traffic roundabouts; drug deals at bus stops; and dozens of smash-and-grabs and break-ins. I saw a neighbor with a silencer shooting at photos of politicians and posters of Tweety Hicks. I watched vestigial members of the neighborhood watch wandering the streets with drawn faces and half-dead flashlights. Of these, the tax attorney was, by far, the most dedicated.
He had given up his bamboo blow gun and taken to carrying a tactical hatchet affixed to his belt with a carabiner. I thought the arrangement clumsy, given the inevitable fumbling that would occur if he required the weapon, but I was gratified to see him lifting lids off garbage cans to search for burner phones and sniffing trees and hedges. He often blackened his face with charcoal and crawled through the tall grass fringing the alley, keeping his nose to the ground and, as I was disappointed to see, his hindquarters in the air. (Any criminal with night-vision goggles would have spotted him in an instant.) Whatever his shortcomings, I admired his diligence. Only once, after dropping from the tree to mark my recycling bin, did I interrupt his work.
“See anything suspicious tonight?” I asked.
Startled, he lifted his ring finger. I lowered my own finger and recoiled, struck by the hollowness of his cheeks and the number of twigs clinging to his matted beard.
“Women in Vikings’ jerseys burning a Seahawks flag. Porch pirates recycling boxes.” He rubbed his temples. “Three nights ago, I saw a goat near Circle K. It took off before I could get close. It’s too bad. I’ve never seen one up close.”
“A goat?”
“A Bedouin. There must have been one nearby.”
“Where are they from, anyway? No one seems to know.”
He shrugged. “Mesopotamia, or someplace like that. Doesn’t matter. They’re here, now.”
He seemed unsteady on his feet, and I thought to offer him a drink of water from the thermos hanging from a branch above my head, but, before I could speak, he shuffled off. Alone, I had the odd sensation of missing an old friend. Seconds later, when the feeling passed, I climbed back into the tree and watched a vandal tagging a mailbox two blocks away.
With Bedouins’ goats roaming freely, and vandals, thieves, and drug dealers flagrantly plying their trade, I found it difficult to justify leaving my post. Fortunately, a constant parade of ants trailing over the mesquite’s bark kept me well-nourished. Between my thermos and my inexhaustible source of protein, I hardly ever touched the ground. The situation, at first, seemed ideal, but as weeks dragged on, I grew frustrated. Just when I had achieved peak fitness and adapted to an arboreal existence, the criminals (possibly deterred by my diligent marking) started avoiding my house. Clearly, if I was going to exorcise the criminal elements from the neighborhood, I needed, first, to lure them onto my property and ambush them.
By a stroke of good fortune, I had this realization the afternoon a couple living across the street loaded seven suitcases into a Range Rover, while talking loudly—well within earshot of every ‘meth head’ casing the neighborhood—about “catching the 7:05 flight to Cabo.” They had barely pulled out of their driveway when a young man pedaled up to their house, propped his five-speed Schwinn against their fence, and used the tip of a screwdriver to pry open a casement window. Seconds later, he broke the window’s lock and hoisted himself into the house.
I quickly dropped from the tree and crawled across the road. The bike was exactly as one would imagine a stolen five-speed Schwinn retained for in-town use. It had already been disguised with strips of duct tape and stripped of identifying bells, baskets, and racks. It was the perfect bait for any small-time criminal. Without hesitation, I wheeled it into the alley behind my house and propped it against my wall, just beneath the mesquite tree. Fifteen minutes later, the young man appeared with two pillowcases slung over his shoulder. For a moment, he stood where his bike had been, staring at the ground with a furrowed brow. Then he shrugged and walked at a leisurely pace to the bus stop on Broadway.
Satisfied, I buried the tip of the knife in mesquite bark and allowed myself a short nap, dangling upside-down with my legs hooked over a branch to increase blood flow to my head. I awoke hours later, entirely refreshed, to a world bathed in the bloody red of a gorgeous sunset. Alive to the sound of every barking dog and bleating goat within miles, I unsheathed the knife and started pruning the small branches obstructing my view of the bike. Every time I pressed the blade into a branch, I had the sense of my own fingers passing through fibrous wood. Each time I nicked a leaf, I had the sensation of chlorophyll coating my skin when, in fact, the tree’s viscous fluids were snaking down its blade. Years ago, I might have found my sympathetic connection to the knife unnerving, and the knife, itself, diabolical, but, that evening, I was comforted by the resonance between my skin and animated steel. I cradled the knife against my chest and felt the nerves in my hand threading into the black paracord looped around the hilt.
I kept the knife unsheathed all night. I, or the knife, sensed something afoot. Shortly after midnight, judging by the moon’s position, I heard grunts and what might have been barking or bleating—and the sounds of some creature moving through the weeds. I tightened my grip on the knife, flattened myself against the mesquite, and observed the narrow dirt path running down the center of the alley. Momentarily, I saw what seemed to be a goat sniffing the ground beside the road and disturbing the dirt with its hoof, and then a robed figure enter the alley and waved his hand to send the undocumented goat skittering down the street, presumably so the animal’s snorting would not draw attention to his crimes. When the goat vanished, the Bedouin paused to examine my bike, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the bike formerly ridden by a young man now condemned to public transportation! The criminals have won, I thought, struck by something insidiously familiar in the Bedouin’s bearing as he gripped the Schwinn’s handlebars with his free hand; they will soon move among us, indistinguishable from law-abiding citizens.
I wonder what I was thinking in that fateful moment the Bedouin stooped over to examine the bike’s rusted chain. I hardly remember what transpired from the moment I dropped from the tree to the moment he fell to the ground, his robes darkened by the blood welling from an abdominal wound. I don’t remember what I felt when I recognized the tax attorney’s familiar socks and sandals and saw that his robes were white sheets stitched together with cheap purple thread. I know my hand felt warm and wet, as if I had pierced his side with my own fingertip; the paracord was tingling, the hilt was throbbing, and the blood gutter was choking as my breath grew shallow. But I can’t say, for sure, what I was thinking or feeling. I could barely draw the tax attorney’s name from my shallow reservoir of memory.
“What are you—”
“I’m an American.” He feebly lifted his hand and raised his ring finger.
“—doing dressed up like a Bedouin?”
The tax attorney pressed his hand to his abdomen, and blood welled between his fingers. “I thought I’d pass for one to get close to them,” he whispered.
Only then did I grasp the fact that I had fatally wounded one of the last active members of the neighborhood watch. “The bike,” I began. It had tipped over, and its back wheel was spinning lazily, brushing the weeds with its spokes. “I thought you were stealing it.”
The tax attorney coughed, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “I should have minded my own business. Stood my own ground.”
He struggled to sit up and collapsed on his back, moaning. I knelt on the ground beside him, then, so he wouldn’t die alone. It was the least I could do.
“My wife,” he rasped. His voice was almost inaudible. “She left me. Two months ago. Said the neighborhood was too dangerous. Too many flags disappearing. Packages missing. Tell her I’m sorry I didn’t listen. She’s probably still on the listserv. She goes by Tweety3927.”
The strain of speaking had worsened his bleeding. I drew the bloody sheet from his body, so that he might die as he had been born, as an American, and as he had lived, as a tax attorney licensed in the State of Arizona. I offered to get him some water, but he shook his head and closed his eyes. There was nothing more to say, and no reason to say anything, so I knelt quietly beside him and cradled his wrist until his pulse vanished beneath my thumb. Glancing at the camera mounted on the tax attorney’s garage, or what had been his garage, I reached into the pocket of his camouflage pants to retrieve his bottle of Centienix. Then, with a nagging sense I owed something to the dim memory of the man who had bequeathed his drugs to me, I spent three hours digging a shallow grave. The sun was rising when I rolled what had been the tax attorney’s body into the pit and used my bloody hands to rake dirt into the hole.
That was five days ago, and no one has come looking for the tax attorney, though come April, he will be sorely missed. At times, I think I miss him, only to realize I hardly knew him and can barely remember his face. If it weren’t for the pill bottle I took from his pocket, I might doubt he ever existed. The knife, now, is the only thing that seems real, or reliable. The skin of my palm has grafted to its hilt, and my nerves have threaded through its paracord. My fingers are on their way to becoming vestigial, for I inhale ants off the knife’s blade and use its point for purchase when I scale the tree. The knife, really, is all I need.
Now that the tax attorney is gone, the neighborhood association is more or less defunct. I occasionally see someone shuffling about in a tattered bathrobe, casting a dim flashlight beam into a hedge, as if they might yet find some missing item, a dusty artifact of life long gone. One evening, I observed a woman staggering down the street, peering into garbage cans and crying over a lost wedding ring; I saw a ghost of my former self and pitied her. I felt afraid, too, knowing the world is filled with sick and suffering people. Someday, perhaps, I’ll find a mate and sit indoors on an upholstered couch, drizzle honey on slices of toast, and even amputate the knife from my hand, though I can’t allow myself to dream of that day and, dreaming, grow complacent. There’s a perfectly functional five-speed Schwinn in the weeds below me, and it will be stolen if my attention lapses for even a moment. Civilization depends on constant surveillance, and only when every criminal retreats from the neighborhood, will I allow myself to go back inside, dab my neck with Insouciance, and start all over again.
alice hatcher
is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc, 2018), which appeared on the long listed for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, LitMag, Pleiades, and The Mississippi Review. She teaches workshops at the Tucson branch of The Writers Studio. More can be found at www.alice-hatcher.com.