Thy Neighbor Read online

  Pretty damn right on the money, no?

  Yeah.

  I thought so.

  Thinkin’ twice now a little? Maybe?

  Damn right.

  Idiot.

  11

  ’Tis the sport to have the engineer

  Hoist with his own petard.

  That’s the line Hamlet says.

  About his college buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  He knows they’re going to fuck him over—and he figures, Ahh, let ’em try. They’re bunglers anyway, and they’ll just blow themselves up with their own bomb.

  ’Course, that was before suicide bombers.

  Time was, you could bank on the fact that the guy planting the bomb wanted to get out before it went off, and that was a kind of defense against it.

  Sometimes.

  But now. Blowing yourself up is the point. And how do you defend against that?

  And do I even want to? Or is it the point? Was it the point all along?

  To catch myself, kill myself, punish myself. That way. Hoist with my own petard. Caught by my own mischief. The subconscious works in circuitous ways.

  * * *

  Yeah, Hamlet.

  Jesus. Mom made me learn that whole fucking play practically by heart in the sixth grade. She’d have me go through every speech and put it in my own words so that I’d really understand what it meant.

  We did it with most of Shakespeare.

  So, for example, when Macbeth says the bit about sound and fury signifying nothing, my version was: “Yeah, life. A lot of shouting and shoving that doesn’t mean jack shit in the end.”

  “Exactly. That’s it,” she’d hoot. “Very good. This is fabulous. Go on.”

  So I would. I did.

  Making Shakespeare into slang for my own edification, and for the ancillary amusement of my mother.

  Or was my edification the ancillary bit?

  Unsure.

  I made her laugh, though. God, I made her laugh.

  She was probably smashed anyway, but who cares? Making her laugh was like winning the trophy or getting laid or falling in love. It was a swooning feeling all through me and an inherent sense of value, like I meant something, was worth having all on my own, just for being and being funny.

  I didn’t have that feeling very often, and even then it was conditional.

  Make me laugh and I’ll love you. Don’t just be. Be a clown.

  Or:

  “As Ovid said,” said Mom, “‘If you would be loved, be lovable.’”

  Ouch.

  Yep.

  There was no being in the Walsh household. Not in the ontological sense. “Being” as a noun. As in, a thing or a state. As in, I, Nick Walsh, am a being. A lump. An entity. A boy with certain qualities and not others. A child that simply is. That exists. Period. And so is loved.

  There was none of that.

  Being was a verb.

  To be. To act. To perform.

  Then came love.

  Maybe.

  If you did it right.

  It’s all there in the Yeats line.

  The other one, along with the Ovid, that Mom said all the time, just for the pleasure of the saying and usually half to herself, but loud enough to hear. The one that hurt like a motherfucker when it got inside you and wormed its mellifluous way around.

  Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned.

  By those that are not entirely beautiful

  Boom.

  Suck on that and see where your esteem goes.

  I wonder if she taught that to Robin Bloom? Or if Robin taught it to Iris? And if so, did Robin interpret it the way I did? As the needle of all insults? Or was that only something a biological child would do, convolute his own inadequacy in the mouth of his mother? Whereas a mere student would simply take it how it was meant, as a world-weary sigh made into song.

  You know, poetry.

  Oh, blow me, how it was meant.

  Who the fuck knows how it was meant. It’s how it was interpreted that counts, and the damage it did as a result. And anyway, it was meant the way I thought it was meant. You can believe that. It had just that whisper-thin edge on it that was Mom to a T. A paper cut that hurt more than a bruise and could never be sewn up or scarred over, but just gaped and ached for the rest of your life.

  Yeah, yeah. I know. I get it. Boo hoo. Your poor hothouse flower of a broken heart bleeds nectar. Your crisis is not compelling.

  And you’re right. Sort of.

  But I ask you this anyway, just as a matter of interest.

  Why does a little learning always make people cruel?

  And pardon me, Mr. Yeats—it is a beautiful line, and I know you were describing the world as it is—but isn’t the whole mythic point and gobsmacking punch of love that it doesn’t have to be earned? That it’s given over, legs in the air, on your back as a fucking gratuity, just ’cuz?

  Otherwise, why not call it lunch, and come right out and say that it ain’t free?

  Or don’t say anything at all, if you’re so clever. Leastways not to your kid, who’s hanging on your every word and etching it all in memory.

  Keep your corrosive asides to yourself.

  Whaddaya say, Ma?

  Mum’s the word?

  No?

  Nice try, but not a chance.

  The sport is hoisting with petards.

  So, bombs away.

  * * *

  The sport.

  It really pisses me off that he called it that.

  Like it was fun. A game, and loss of life was just part of the scrum.

  Fucking Hamlet.

  What a dick.

  I mean, what an absolute arrogant, self-absorbed, grandiose douchebag.

  And lest we forget, a murderer, too.

  Big-time.

  By the end, he’s responsible, whether directly or indirectly, for the deaths of at least seven people, including his girlfriend, his mom, and three of his very close friends, but he’s remembered as the hypersensitive, suicidal flake who couldn’t make up his mind.

  How stupid is that?

  The expectancy and rose of the fair state, my ass.

  The guy was just a killer with diplomatic immunity and a big mouth.

  But everybody loves the smarty-pants in pain, right?

  I was no different. Any spoiled kid who has a vaguely philosophical bent, serious daddy issues, and a bleak outlook on life has thought of himself as Hamlet and thought himself mighty profound and soulful for doing so.

  But if you’re a guy who went to boarding school and college in the Northeast with a bunch of tribal nimrods, you probably figured out pretty quickly that the only preppy outlets for homicidal teen angst are pisswater beer and team sports, preferably violent team sports.

  You weren’t going around reciting “To be, or not to be” and musing on the cause of Hamlet’s inability to act.

  You played lacrosse, or football.

  Or rugby, if you were in it purely for the hurt.

  Except if you were me, the idea of rubbing groins and grubby shoulders with your frat brothers while doing them grievous bodily harm just didn’t have the right zing to it. Concussive sports are for sadists who like it quick and hard, the kind of people who’d go to a public execution and bring snacks. My frat brothers. Masochists like me, on the other hand, went it solo and called it endurance, because it sounded better than calling it what it was: slow torture on the inside where only you could hear you scream.

  Worked for me.

  Sport, usually endurance sport on my own, is where I put my pain. And where I found it. That’s right. My amateur, low-level, not-a-tragedy pain.

  I put it in the gym, o
n the court, in the pool, on the track. Running so long and hard until I got that burn in my lungs for hours after, lifting weights until my limbs gave out, swimming laps for miles, nose in the blue, eyes rolling, brain afloat, going over a poem or learning the map of Africa by heart just so I wouldn’t obsess about my failures or my ignorance and cringe.

  I practiced my jump shot until I could hit—swish—off the feed pass from every spot on the three-point line, even though I never tried out for the team. On scorching summer days, I stood on the blazing painted hard courts at the country club perfecting my serve at a slow roast until I looked like I’d been in the pool, and the downy felt on every ball in the practice basket had turned matted and gray.

  I still play.

  Tennis that is. With Gruber’s middle son, Jeff, actually, who’s a good player already at sixteen. He plays the second spot on the varsity and he’s only a sophomore. We hit once a week under the lights down at the high school courts or, when the weather’s bad, at the club that his team uses for winter workouts.

  It’s like going back in time.

  When we get a long rally going and all you can hear is the squeak of your shoes and the thwack of the ball, I can almost lose myself in the rhythm of my arms swinging and the loophole of the sweet spot, until it feels as if I’m not exerting any effort at all, or thinking—just fitting, with an audible click, into a preestablished pattern that exists in nature independent of me and is going on all the time.

  For that twenty minutes or hour or however long it lasts, I could swear I’m a teenager again. I have the same feeling I had then, that I’ve joined some cycle, or tide, or silent music and become a passive part of it, like a body being brought in by a wave, catching a ride on an unseen force.

  I forget everything.

  Even—especially—myself.

  It was always that way in sport. The times when it happened, when my heart rate would settle at 150 and my breathing would steady itself faster and I would leave my body, or seem to, and float on the high of physical exertion—those were the times, the few times, when being really was a state of grace, separate from parental expectation and the onus of not knowing who I was.

  But it didn’t happen that often.

  I chased it, pawed for it and the relief it brought me. But it came only when it wanted to, either because I’d eaten the right combination of things at the right time or because I was well rested and in a good mood—or, fuck knows, because the moon was full and Mercury was retrograde.

  There wasn’t any formula.

  It just floated in and blessed me for a while and made me numb to the knife in my mother’s laugh and the stab in her tutelage.

  * * *

  That was Mom.

  A little learning made her cruel, sure, and the drink made her lethal, but until she and Dad did their last, I had it easy.

  When I think about what I’ve seen in the last thirteen years—Miriam, Dorris, Dave, the Grubers—I’d even go so far as to say I had a free pass on the home front.

  If I’ve learned anything from spying on my neighbors, it’s that (to mangle Tolstoy) every family is extravagantly fucked up in its own way, and cruelty has a thousand faces.

  A little learning is only one of them, and a minor one at that.

  Take Gruber. Now there’s a brand of cruel that’s almost subhuman, except that he did the kind of appalling calculated shit that animals are incapable of.

  Eric took the brunt of it.

  Because he was the youngest, because he was the weakest, and because he was a bed wetter, among other verboten things.

  Big deal, you’d think, right?

  Rubber sheets. Extra laundry. No sweat.

  But not to Gruber.

  What did Gruber do in response to this comparatively minor domestic disturbance that afflicts millions of “normal” boys and families at one time or another and passes of its own accord without the use of corporal punishment?

  He reacted like it was a trial sent from God, inflicted maliciously on him alone, the master of dogs and men, for whom when and where you cleared your tubes practically took on the significance of a religious rite.

  Seriously, Eric probably would have been better off if he’d been gay.

  One good whipping and it would have been over.

  After all, cock is something you could swear off.

  But the soiling?

  That was beyond Eric’s control, and thus beyond Gruber’s, so it just brought out the brownshirt in the old bastard.

  He broke the boy like a dog, or tried to, mostly because he persisted in believing that this involuntary nocturnal emission was a bad habit or a defiant act for which, as with so many other things, iron discipline was the indisputable cure.

  It must have been going on for years by the time I got my cameras in there, because Eric was already twelve by then and onset for this sort of thing is usually a lot earlier than that. Besides, as much of a dirtbag as I knew Gruber to be, I don’t think even he would have resorted right off the bat to the extreme measures he was using by the time I got online.

  At night, all night, he made Eric sleep in an extralarge dog crate down in the basement. He had it set up by the sectional couch down there with the overhead light on for Eric’s added discomfort. The cage was within range of the cameras that Damian had put in the gaming system, so I got to see the whole gulag rigged up in detail—not that there was much to it. It had a padlock on the outside—to which, of course, only Gruber himself had the key—and no blankets or bedding of any kind on the inside. Just Eric, naked and white as new, curled on the removable plastic floor pan.

  Gruber had clearly once used the crate to train his Rotties, though now, apparently, having become masters of their own micturition, they enjoyed the privilege of sleeping on luxury plush Fatboys upstairs.

  But Eric, he was looking through crossed bars at the couch that was within groping distance. The comfy, sprawling, cloudlike couch that he knew the swaddling potential of because he sat or lay or sprawled on it playing Xbox for hours most afternoons.

  Ah, afternoons, and evenings and mornings, too. How sweet they must have seemed. The waking times of day when his bladder was not a liability.

  That poor kid. Tortured by his bodily functions. Imprisoned by something he couldn’t help or stop.

  Now that is malicious punishment from God.

  Occasionally, for a good portion of the night, if I wasn’t with Monica or Dave, I’d sit in front of the monitors and watch Eric sleep. I’d zoom the camera in as far as I could so that the cage and Eric in it took up the whole screen, and I could see every move he made. Sometimes, depending on his position, I could even see the expression on his face.

  There was something strangely mesmerizing and calming about it, like watching a fire lick and crackle in a grate.

  Often, he had bad dreams, or fitful ones, where he cried out and moaned unintelligible words or nonsensical combinations of real words. Sometimes he woke many times a night, usually with a jerk and a panicked search beneath and around him, as if he thought that rousing himself prematurely would forestall the dreaded leak.

  He didn’t wet himself every night. Not at all. In fact, he’d go weeks without an incident and come tantalizingly close to release—a month clean was the marker—but then, heartbreakingly, he’d lose it, and the cycle would start all over again.

  I got so invested, I’d count the clean nights with him. He said the tally aloud to himself every night before he went to sleep.

  “Fifteen days, Eric. Fifteen days. C’mon. You can do it. Stay tight.”

  The longest he went was twenty-five days, and on that night, the twenty-fifth night, he woke at three a.m. to a puddle. He wept bitterly for an hour or more, interspersing curses with prayers.

  “Please, God. Help me . . . fucking goddamn shitty bastard as
shole fuck. PLEEEEEEAAASE.”

  He slapped at his crotch and his face and banged his head against the cage, pleading and swearing all the while like some medieval monk stuck squarely in the dark night of the soul and madly flagellating his way out.

  By the time four forty-five rolled around—Gruber always woke his whole family at five and made the boys go with him for a six-mile run—Eric was so desperate to hide the evidence that he tried to lick it up. Of course, he disgorged it almost immediately, and then the puddle was bigger and more obvious.

  Gruber came in at five as usual, pounding two pans together like a drill sergeant.

  He stopped short as soon as he looked down into the cage.

  Given the teasing evidence before him, newly yucked and flaunting right there in the plastic pan, he didn’t even have to do his customary white-gloved swipe to know what was what. He realized immediately, and he flew into a rage far worse than the usual tirade he delivered when Eric messed.

  He unlocked the crate hurriedly, panting with rage, and pulled Eric out by his hair.

  “You conniving little bastard. How dare you try to deceive me.”

  Eric hung from his father’s fists, limp and gangly. There was barely life in him, and no resistance.

  I cried like a little girl watching this, raking at my face in disgust, terror, and futile sympathy. Is there any other kind? As he hung there letting himself be hit, I swear I felt I could hear Eric’s thoughts in my own.

  Just let it happen and it will all be over sooner.

  But when? When would it be over? How long had this been going on? How many years of confinement and pain and humiliation?

  Here was a boy wanting nothing more than to wrench out his own plumbing or gum it up for good. Here he was hating his poor penis at the very time when most boys were rapturous with the pleasure it gave them, convulsed with self-imposed ecstasy every chance they got.

  Not Eric. Never Eric. It’d be a miracle if he didn’t lop the thing off before he passed puberty. He’d never be free with it. He’d never love it. Probably never even enjoy it. That, too, would be denied him along with so much else in the wake of this nightmare. Discharges of whatever kind would happen, as they did now, against his will.