Thy Neighbor Read online

  But then, maybe this is simply what bored people do.

  Pry.

  And bored destroyed people pry with vengeance, then justify it by recourse to their pain.

  Or maybe it’s technology that has made us all so prurient, craving more of the real in our reality TV.

  I think the truest reason I do it is to find out all I can about what is findable, even if it’s mostly mundane, because there’s so much I can’t find out about what matters. I’ll never know why my parents died, or any of the details. I’ll never get my mind around it. I’ll never be whole or unharmed or kind again. But I can know everything about my neighbors’ lives, and in so doing, I can ease what is unsatisfied in me.

  The spying started years back, with Dave. It wasn’t long after my parents’ funeral, and just about two years after Dave’s father’s death. Dave was doing his ineffectual best to help me through the worst, having fashioned himself the local expert on filial grief.

  He was on a mission day and night, depositing himself on the couch like some stubborn adjunct caseworker who’s decided that his salvation lies in your own, and that stoned silence and snacking are the strongest forms of sympathy.

  The fucking toad didn’t leave my house for weeks, not even to restock the fridge and cabinets with the purported comfort foods he, and he alone, was consuming with such gusto. He got Mama Kitty to do that. He’d literally call in an order and make it sound like it was for me.

  “Yeah, I know, I know, but the only things I can get him to eat are Cherry Garcia and DiGiorno. I’m tellin’ ya, the guy’s gone. Really bad news. You remember what I was like. It’s a miracle he’s eating at all. Just get a bunch of stuff—the stuff I eat. If I’m eating regular, sooner or later he’s bound to join me. Oh, and bring me some more weed, too, will you? That wheelchair weed you get that’s s’posed to make vegans crave corn dogs even when they’re on chemo. And trust me, that’s how he’s starting to look.”

  There’d be a pause here, with Kitty no doubt duped and mewling on the other end of the line.

  Then Dave would jump in, his greedy instincts getting the better of him, turning his tone desperate but still managing to make his grocery list sound like a call to arms rather than a fat boy’s food panic at full throttle.

  “Please, Ma, just do what I tell you. And hurry.”

  I have to admit, it did help for a while in some hazy diabetic, opium den sort of way. I hardly ate, but I smoked like a five alarm, and when I did eat, the toxic array of carbohydrates we had in stock were so refined and saturated with chemicals that they were a drug in and of themselves, bringing on the kind of insulin shock once dispensed to mental patients. In combination with booze and gargantuan quantities of THC, you could get a jolt almost strong enough to reboot your brain.

  I suppose I should have been grateful for Dave’s intervention, but it just made me hate him more, mostly because he’d managed to make his Samaritan opportunism look like his own personal Via Dolorosa, even though he’d done nothing more strenuous than operate the microwave and nothing more self-sacrificial than crap in the upstairs bathroom. And he only conceded that last bit of unholy ground because I threatened to gouge his eyes out with a potato peeler if he ever again subjected me to the miasma of his outsized ass.

  Living with this prize primate for more than a month, and seeing all the filthy high jinks he was happy to get up to right out in the open in front of another person (albeit a person who had smoked enough ganja to have gone a shade of gangrene around the gills), made me wonder what he did when he thought no one was looking.

  The guy was double-jointed in the knees and would cut and clean his toenails with his teeth, like a baboon. No joke. Totally unconsciously, too, just watching the TV, gnawing away, savoring the Stilton that had been curing there for God only knew how long.

  When he was really bored, he’d sit with my old BB gun in my mom’s reading chair by the window in the living room and try to pick off squirrels and blue jays in the front yard. He rarely hit any. The accuracy on those things is for shit, and he was always too shaky or bleary to aim anyway. But he sent a lot of unsuspecting creatures flapping and scampering for cover while he cackled with delight.

  The day I evicted him, I found him in the kitchen with one of those gallon-size red rubber enema bags they sell in medical supply stores. He’d hung it from one of my mom’s old plant hooks on the low ceiling over the sink, and he was kowtowing beneath it naked on the linoleum floor, poring over one of my old porno magazines. He had the white hose of the enema bag planted in his upturned ass and a plastic bucket next to his hip.

  When I asked him what the fuck he was doing, all he said was:

  “Coffee enema, dude. Great buzz.”

  It might have been a surfeit of weed or it might have been the lack of it—I don’t remember—but this newly blithe and blatant insult threw me into a spiral of shame and disbelief that surprised even me. This could not be happening. Was my grief not enough? Did I deserve this demonic visitation as well?

  Exasperated, I spoke at last.

  “I have cups, you swine. Why didn’t you just drink it?”

  Dave grinned wickedly.

  “Totally different high when you shoot it. Mellowlike. Awesome. Plus it cleans you out like a meat grinder.”

  He said this fitfully, gasping and straining as you do when you’re exerting yourself in ways that other people shouldn’t see.

  Stay calm, said a good voice in my head. Focus. The desired goal is to get him to stop.

  “Great. Thanks for that detail,” I said. “Why are you doing it in here? Did we not discuss this?”

  I pointed upstairs.

  He sighed impatiently.

  “The light’s better.”

  “The light’s better? Jesus, God!”

  I was losing my tenuous cool and starting to sound uncannily like my father berating my teenage self.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I raged.

  “The pictures, moron. I gotta be able to see the tits. Plus there’s instructions.”

  Something in me went slack and fell. This was my mother’s kitchen, full of clean memories and pleasant smells. A hallowed place. I wasn’t going to run and put my head under a pillow while Dave repainted it.

  But what to do? Rubber gloves and possibly a dust mask were under the sink. Hugely inadequate, but it was a start, and it was all I had.

  I mean, who foresees this kind of invasion? In the kitchen.

  Who allows it?

  I was just working up the gumption to make a move when Dave said:

  “Excretasex.”

  He looked up at me, nodding conclusively, as if this newly minted term of art would make the purpose of this shitshow abundantly clear.

  I froze anew, stunned. Staring, but seeing nothing.

  Dave mistook this torpor for rapt attention, and added, “Don’t you know? It’s right here in the mag. I thought you’d read this.”

  He paused to catch his breath, then pecked with his nose at the annotated centerfold in front of him.

  “‘The male’s ultimate release.’ It’s all about prostate stimulation or some shit.” He giggled. “No pun, dude. Anyway, blowing both valves at once, fire hydrant style. Siamese connection. Fuckin’ rocks.”

  And sure enough—I hadn’t noticed this before, coming, as I had, upon this truly sadistic scene from behind—he was wanking like a sport fisherman. Our parlay hadn’t even put him off his stroke. It seemed only to have encouraged him. He was breathing harder and faster, rocking on his knees and grunting.

  He had turned his now grimacing face half away from me again and was eyeballing the magazine sidelong at close range, snorting feverishly as if it were a scratch ’n’ sniff.

  That’s when I snapped, and some mortally, maternally offended part of me rea
red and took over. I dove for the cabinet under the sink and flung it open. Still on my belly, hunkering well clear of Dave’s weapon, I yanked on the rubber gloves and the dust mask and army-crawled to the stove. Thus armed, I stood in a fury and lunged for the nearest cupboard, which contained, ironically enough, an assortment of the unused coffee mugs as well as a pewter pepper grinder and salt cellar, a china gravy boat, and—bingo!—a ceramic mortar and pestle, shaped to look like a concave bowling ball and pin.

  Instrument in hand, I turned to face the nightmare on the floor. I stomped my foot on Dave’s coccyx and ground his slick face into the magazine until its glossy leaves tore and crunched. Then, in one swift motion, I extracted the hose from Dave’s rectum and replaced it with the fat end of the pestle, shoving in the makeshift butt plug all the way to its whimsically indented neck. I threw the hose end into the bucket, grabbed Dave by the hair, heaved him to his feet, and frog-marched him to the backyard, where I tossed him, still naked and frontally engorged, into the hawthorn bushes.

  I locked him out then and there. Later that night, I gathered all his things—including his clothes, his wallet, and his asthma inhalers—and burned them in a wheelbarrow out back, well after I knew he had gone. Or, I should say, well after he’d ceased trying to wheedle his way back into the house, pawing with one bloodied palm on the sliding glass patio door and cupping his scratched and shrunken tackle with the other.

  That was when I resolved to really humiliate the guy with science. Tape him doing something beyond bestial in the privacy of his own garage and post it on the Internet viewable for a fee.

  My hatred boiled over. I was a man possessed, obsessed with the technological opportunities for my revenge, heady with the seeming godliness that secret eyes and ears would bestow on me and the divine justice it could afford. I got a huge thrill imagining it. How I would surveil people’s property, note their comings and goings, learn their schedules, then sneak into their houses while they were out doing the weekly shopping or playing the Wednesday game of bridge and install my micro cameras and audio equipment at will. Cleverly conceal them in lamps or VCRs or, better yet, make presents with these things preinstalled.

  “Hey, Dave. As a thank-you for all you did for me, I got you this top-of-the-line DVD player. Now you can watch pornos in your bedroom undisturbed.”

  And I can tape all your whacked-out sexcapades for public consumption and make a tidy profit on the side.

  You fuck.

  There was life again in that expletive. A plan worth living for. I was in.

  4

  Dave was my first time out, my trial run, so I went with the preinstall rather than the B and E plant. It was safer, easier, and, I convinced myself, not a crime—or not one they were likely to catch me for. Besides, in Dave’s case, it gave me much more pleasure to make a gift of my treachery, even if, or maybe especially if, there was a chance he’d find me out and prosecute. I was able to actually buy the hardware—complete with hypersensitive mini mics for good-quality audio—already rigged at a specialty spy store I found in the Yellow Pages.

  This was years before Dave got his home theater and just at the time when DVDs were newly available, so I gave him his first DVD player, which he duly oohed and aahed over and promptly rigged to the TV in his bedroom.

  I also gave him what I told him was a state-of-the-art ionizer for his bathroom, which, I explained, could neutralize even the most virulent odors in minutes.

  His family would thank me.

  “According to the literature,” I said, “veterinarians use them in their examination rooms when expressing the anal glands of large breed dogs.”

  I went on to add that even a few of the more well-endowed urban zoos had installed them in their enclosed walk-through exhibits so as to minimize public discomfort in the monkey ramble and the reptile pavilion.

  And that was that. I had my eyes and ears in place. My starter kit of remote violation was up and running.

  But it didn’t quite go the way I’d planned.

  The equipment was fine. Perfect, in fact. I could pan around most of the bedroom, except for a couple blind spots behind the DVD player or in the corners, but none of the action was happening there anyway. In the bathroom I had full views of the toilet and sinks, as well as the double-wide mirror over the sinks.

  I’d had to angle the bathroom shot myself, repositioning the ionizer on a social visit to the house. Dave had put it on the counter between the sinks, which meant that the mirror was out of bounds, and that was just too good to pass up. So I moved the Sanizephyr (as I believe it was called) to a shelf against the opposing wall and told Dave that it wouldn’t work properly if it wasn’t at least five feet off the floor.

  “Methane rises, right?” I explained. “Think of cow burps and the ozone. Same principle.”

  So far, so good.

  Clap goes the clapper board—aaaand action . . .

  But Dave’s contribution was less than what I’d hoped for. Well, less and more, actually.

  Dave surprised the hell out of me in this, I have to say, because what he did when he was alone—aside, of course, from the doleful daily wank under the bedclothes—wasn’t sexual. And, trust me, given past experience, I’m using “sexual” here in the broadest possible sense.

  But nothin’ doin’. Nada. Not a hint of his erstwhile perversity.

  I really couldn’t believe it. He’d been more than happy to blow out his Siamese connection on my kitchen floor in the good light, but in the darkness of his own private-man hovel he did nothing of the kind.

  Turned out he was an exhibitionist, a true performance artist, and they’re a real snore when they’re at home. No shock, no show, apparently.

  Actually, that’s not entirely true. They’re a snore to the general public. From a sales perspective, they’re not, as they say in the trade, money-shot material, but they do have an art house audience, and, as I think we’ve all learned in the past fifteen years, mostly to our chagrin and peril, the Internet is chock-full of ferrety, owl-eyed freakazoids on the prowl for their own viral brand of strange.

  Dave was that for sure. Strange, strange, strange.

  And juvenile as hell. Not that that’s a shocker. But I don’t mean juvenile in the blowing raspberries or making fart noises in your armpit sense. I mean it in the savage imagination unleashed, pulling the wings off Tinkerbell sense.

  People say kids are cruel. But kids are actually just wild. Wild as hyenas, except endowed with a hell of a lot more license and imagination. Biologically endowed, not just with cleverness but with tool-wielding capabilities and no moral or empathic sense. They live in a suspended state of mind where anything’s possible, or seems so, and the pain of other creatures doesn’t register.

  When you believe you have that kind of freedom, your first, middle, and last instinct is always to say, “I wonder what will happen if I do this?”

  And then all kinds of crazy, convoluted shit unfolds that’s impossible to unwind and make sense of after the fact. Even if you watch it happening, as I did, you can’t really work out how you, or the artist formerly known as Dave, got there, or what methodic madness made one step follow from the next.

  Watching Dave act out in front of my cameras was like having a peephole into someone else’s subconscious with said subconscious in the driver’s seat on a joyride in the real world, tearing it up as if the whole creation were its own virtual demolition derby. I say virtual because it was as if this creature that had popped out of Dave’s pituitary gland and taken the wheel, this surreal ruler of dreams and nightmares, still thought it was in Dave’s head, where cause and effect are rubbery and whim is without consequence. This thing was pure id, as ignorant of the rules of human conduct as any sociopath, but more eccentric.

  If you could have spoken to it, its only response to anything would have been, “Huh?”

  It wa
s all impulse, and its only mode was melee, like entropy’s minion on a tight schedule. Busy, busy, busy, and as random as Russian roulette. Without conscience or self-awareness or intelligence of any kind. The terrorist’s apprentice, bumbling around in the bomb silo.

  Be careful what you wish for, I said to myself aloud, as I watched, slack-jawed, while Dave, real and uncut, slowly revealed himself to me. You wanted to see, Nick? Well, see. See well. And weep.

  At the time, Dave was living (and still is) about a mile down the road from me in the famously nouveau riche development called Twin Pines. All suburbs of major Midwestern cities have their Twin Pines. You’ve probably driven through a half dozen of them in as many states, either out of sheer desperation for something to do when you were trapped in town for the company convention or because you wanted to see for yourself if the American dream really is as tawdry as it looks on TV.

  The Twin Pines of the intracoastal hinterlands all look the same, of course. Steroidal lawns, topiary and flower beds landscaped to a fare-thee-well, circular driveways dwarfed by Sheetrock mansions that all look like spacecraft or wedding cakes, or some appalling combination of the two. Here is every status seeker’s emerald isle, picked out and placed high on the hills above the more modest, middle-class dwellings on the far side of the wrought-iron fencing. Ever tidy, ever tasteless, coruscating asphalt and concrete, these are the havens of mindless American prosperity where all the local anesthesiologists and mandarins of industry, stranded pro athletes, local-hailing pop stars, and anyone else deeply invested in the symbolic value of lawn statuary has a house. A great, hulking, gauche house to outdo the Joneses.

  This, naturally, is also where Dave, the vending machine king, sister Sylvia, and the lovely widowette Mama Kitty make their home. Or did. A few years ago, in an unprecedented show of normalcy, the newly wedded Sylvia moved in with her husband. Next door.