The Interloper Read online

  The subject at the dinner table had been Calvin Junior, and now Calvin Senior seemed ready to continue it, albeit in a different key. He walked up to the mantle and picked up a picture. Images of CJ were interspersed among early Calvin and Minerva portraits, family vacation shots, and pictures of Patty blooming, awkwardly, in time-lapse. A shrine to CJ would have made me feel more comfortable. What they had up on the mantle did not acknowledge that CJ was gone at all. A burglar would have assumed that he was still a living, breathing member of the family. Over the years, of course, everyone would grow older but him.

  Calvin Senior held up the picture, CJ on the beach with his surfboard, and said to me, as if to explain his thoughts in that moment of silence: “The guy who did this is in jail. When I think of what he did to my son, I think that prison rape is not such a bad thing.” He put the picture back. “I’d kill him with my bare hands if I got the chance. But I won’t get the chance. I don’t want the chance, usually.”

  The door to the kitchen clunked and swung open—my wife and her mother, holding desserts. Calvin Senior looked at me and shook his head almost imperceptibly. I understood. Not a word to anyone, the dissenting opinion is sealed up in its envelope, now try to pretend we were talking about something else. But they would go on talking about CJ, Patty would go on wearing black, Calvin Senior would go on steaming quietly, grumbling inside … the body decays, the memories jumble, the stories evolve, the photographs fade. We’re all hobbled together. Odds and ends. Bric-a-brac. CJ is: a buried body, Stocking talk, newspapers, videos and pictures, Raven’s account, a diary. I can’t put him back together. I can’t put myself back together. The pieces are me but not mine.

  2

  A month prior to that dinner at the Stockings, I had written to Henry Joseph Raven, using the pseudonym John Dark. This was the failure from the ashes of which my new plan would grow.

  I remember that first encounter with Raven the way one remembers meeting one’s sweetheart, with fondness, and with a desire to go back and do it all over again. It was one of those unusually warm nights in Our Little Hamlet by the Sea; the temperature seemed to rise after the sun had gone down, and a fecund breeze perfumed the air. This, after an unremarkable muggy day. Patty was off at work; I had the house to myself. I’d discovered that the state maintained a complete database of prison inmates, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and I had logged on to it. The house was quiet save the cats tumbling in the other room.

  I clicked through some of the other captured convicts before I got to Raven—I knew he would be there and the anticipation was something I felt like drawing out. I saw men and women, White, Black, Latino, Asian, all of them looking poor and poorly rested, defeated—though a few tried on a mask of defiance. Their crimes were listed along with their names and some other information, but the names of the crimes, murder, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, provided little detail of their stories. You could stare at a picture long enough and imagine that plump, rosy-faced woman holding a gun under the counter and asking for all the money in the register, but since her story wasn’t there, you couldn’t be sure that was how it had happened. You were stuck with armed robbery. Shown a few in isolation, you might guess these individuals were victims of human rights violations, women who had just given birth, or men in drug rehab centers. But en masse they were malefactors.

  He was waiting for me by the time I got down to the Rs, and he did not disappoint. He had the appearance of a murderer. Not all the murderers did. You could see in the way his eyes glared at the camera that he had no respect for human life. He looked hungry and tired, like he had been dragged out of bed moments before the picture was taken—it made sense, he had been on the lam for a week before they tracked him down. His eye sockets looked like they’d had billiard balls pushed into them. He had the stubbly, slack-jawed mien of a criminal who has finally been caught.

  I swept aside my papers and cleared a space on my desk. I wrote several letters, each more cruel than the last, in an attempt to express my rage at the man responsible for CJ’s death, for ruining our lives, for replacing my wife with a grim shadow of her former self. After I’d torn up six drafts, I realized that a piece of hate mail was unlikely to wound him or even capture his attention. So without a clear plan, I wrote as neutral a letter as possible, asking Henry Joseph Raven to be my pen-pal.

  Dear Mr. Raven,

  My name is John Dark and I’m looking for someone behind bars to correspond with. I have many different interests and I’m involved with a lot of prisoners’ rights causes. If you’re looking for a friend or just want someone to write to, feel free to respond at your earliest convenience. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  John Dark

  I took out a PO box down the street so he could reply without finding out who I was. Unless you have a fake ID, you have to sign up for a PO box under your own name. However, you are free to list names you want to receive mail under. I put John Dark on the list. Any mail coming to him, I was assured by a pimply faced clerk, would be delivered to my box. Also, he told me, I didn’t have to write “PO Box” or “Box #” as part of the address. I could write “Suite 1492”—giving the impression that I was writing from an actual room in an actual building.

  I waited five days before checking the PO box. That would give my letter two days to get there, Raven a day to reply, and two days for his letter to make its way to me. There is no worse feeling than to open a mailbox and find it empty. Every day I would convince myself that Raven’s response had been slipped into the slot of my mailbox, and that it was waiting there for me. I’d race to the mailbox, practically knocking people out of the way, pop open the box with my shiny little key and find … nothing. Day after day of nothing.

  Then, one evening, an envelope. My heart was racing as I reached into the box and retrieved my paper quarry. Disappointment. A packet of coupons. Herald of the junk to come: Have You Seen This Child?, Amazing Grace Realty Wants to Sell You a Dream Home, Join our CD Club, Save the Children, Save the Animals, Save the Trees, Save the Earth, Save the Air. Addressed to Resident! The mail was coming in fine, just not from Henry Joseph Raven. I should reiterate that I had no actual plan as to how to respond to his response, if I were to get one. I trusted that I could improvise a way to make him pay for the suffering he had caused the Stockings. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to get a response, because I could not devise any way other than venting my anger, which was unlikely to affect him.

  After three weeks, I closed down the PO box. My anxiety about Raven’s not writing back to John Dark was displaced by a need to figure out how to tell Patty what I had done. I had never kept secrets from her, and I felt that somehow, in my failure, I needed to unburden myself. I took the day off from work to coincide with one of Patty’s “weekends”—she had Wednesdays and Thursdays off. We walked down to our local park. The marine layer hadn’t quite come in as far as our part of town, resulting in cool afternoon sunshine with half-clear skies. The park was full of kids, most of them in the playground section—“No Adults Admitted Without Company of Children”—or by the dried-out fish pond. The empty concrete oval was full of young skateboarders trying their tricks.

  The fish pond used to be full of water. I saw it once, as a teenager. I had spent the night in the park, after having taken the bus as far as it would take me away from my aunt and uncle’s house. I remember wondering, before the police found me, how long I could survive eating the fish that swam around in there.

  We made our way toward the middle of the diminutive park, to a patch of grass on which we could play Frisbee. Patty wore black sweatpants and a black t-shirt. We had just started playing. She was not very good at throwing, and I was not very good at catching; in the other direction, we achieved marvelous things. We had begun playing Frisbee because we were looking for an outdoor activity that didn’t require much talking. We hated to sit around the house, and we’d grown tired of buying somethi
ng every time we went out. We weren’t joggers, golfers, cyclists, rollerbladers, surfers, volleyballers, softballers, basketballers, footballers, or any other kind of ballers, and—despite its aesthetic appeal—I hated tennis. I hated tennis because you could never know ahead of time whether courts would be available. We had tried target shooting for a while, with a Glock we bought for protection. I am a crack shot. I thought shooting would be good for Patty, but aside from the momentary thrill, it had no effect on her. Eventually, the local gun club was shut down because some depressed person decided to shoot himself instead of the target.

  Frisbee was freedom. And aesthetically, Frisbee was pleasing, especially when I was throwing and she was catching. The other way around, aesthetics was lost in the dirt. There was something undeniably pleasurable about playing Frisbee with Patty, at a time when pleasure seemed in short supply. The combination of tranquility and exertion, the physicality of the exchange, the fact that we faced each other as we played.

  I threw a long coasting shot that cleared her head and hovered there. She turned and plucked it from the air and faced me, all in one fluid motion. It’s difficult to forget, more difficult to remember. She threw back, less gracefully.

  I had decided that I would tell her that evening, over dinner, how I had rented the PO box and written to Henry Joseph Raven. I knew it would take a long time for her to understand what I had done. I would have to confess how misguided I’d been in trying to pursue correspondence with Raven. Digging the Frisbee from a hedge, I considered the possibility of never telling her what I had done. No, I had to come clean. Otherwise I would be able to think of little else. I was not well-suited to deception. I decided again that I would tell her over dinner, and I threw the Frisbee.

  She caught it magnificently and returned it to me with a fluid and direct shot. The Frisbee drifted on the air as if in slow-motion. I skipped to the side and lined myself up to catch it. I crouched, raised my hands. Then the Frisbee, cruising directly through the frame of my outstretched fingers, hit me squarely on the forehead, and I had the idea. A plan to eclipse all plans dropped egg-like into my brain, whole, and it began with this realization: my pseudonym had been of the wrong gender. Why would Raven have any interest whatsoever in corresponding with John Dark? He was a lonely man, locked up with a bunch of other lonely men. He didn’t need letters from another lonely man, on the outside, to add to his pile of loneliness and maleness. He needed a lonely woman.

  The plan unfolded with crystal clarity in my mind even as I bent down to retrieve the Frisbee and throw it back to my wife. I would rent a new PO box under a female pseudonym. Henry Joseph Raven would fall in love with his correspondent and then, when she had wholly gained his affection, when she had come to inhabit every fiber of his being, she would break his heart. Raven would suffer the wrenching removal of someone from his life.

  I resolved then and there not to tell Patty about my plan until I had reaped its fruits. The idea of hiding something from her, as I mentioned above, made me uncomfortable, but what I was doing I was doing for her, and when the opportunity came to reveal what I had done, that is, when my plan was successful, I’d tell her. All my duplicity would turn out for the best, like planning a surprise party. This was the only way I could unpoison the soil, restore a sense of justice and balance to our world, bring the old Patty back. Then we could begin building our normal lives again.

  3

  I got a new PO box, at the Mailboxes Store in Second City, a neighboring town, so Raven wouldn’t suspect that John Dark and his new female correspondent were the same person. Composing the letter was simple enough. Naming her was the hard part. I went through hundreds of options before landing on lonely, lethal Lily Hazelton. Hazel-eyed Hazelton, Lily the lily, a trumpet on a slender stem. An invitation for Raven to tend or pluck. Then a haze, the magician’s puff of smoke, and she’s gone. Finally, a ton of bricks falls on his head. I’d woven the whole plan into the name—there was no way to lose sight of it.

  I typed the letter on our old Olivetti and signed it in the most feminine way possible.

  Dear Mr. Raven,

  Are you looking for a pen-pal? My name is Lily Hazelton and I am interested in writing back-and-forth with an incarcerated man.

  Sincerely,

  Lily Hazelton

  The slight scraping sound the envelope made as it slid into the mailbox, the almost inaudible paper-on-paper kiss as it joined the other letters inside—I remember exactly dropping that first letter into the slot, remember thinking that I was, for the first time in a long time, for the first time ever, I should say, embarking on something truly important, not just a job, or a task, or a lark, but a mission. Few are lucky enough to find themselves a mission in our precious little time between womb and tomb. Now I have nothing but time and no courage to end time. They won’t let me have my papers, but I can remember everything.

  Patty and I were set up by a college friend of mine, Lennon Kwan. The pellucid waters of Lake Tahoe, the pellucid intentions of Lennon Kwan. Though Lennon and I took classes on opposite sides of campus—I majored in English, he in molecular biology—we spent a great deal of extracurricular time together. After college, he moved to San Francisco and I stayed in Los Angeles. We kept in touch as best we could.

  I had a job but otherwise my life was a disaster. My friends in Los Angeles had long given up on me. I lived in a squalid 1950s apartment down by the beach. I drank myself to sleep most nights. The bright sunny weather was an affront. The outside world refused to reflect my inner world. I came to realize that not everyone had this problem. I considered daily the ways in which I might stitch myself back onto society. Everyone around me built lives with blithe unconcern for the fact that these same lives would crumble to bits one day. Some nights I slept outdoors, on the roof of my building. I highly recommend sleeping outdoors as a means of building one’s character. It reminds one how the simple act of sitting inside an apartment watching daytime television actually reflects man’s victory over the forces of nature.

  Around this time, Lennon called me and asked if I was interested in joining him and a few friends on a Lake Tahoe ski trip. He had called me in the past, asking me to go on trips like this, and I had always refused. The Owen he was asking was not the Owen I had become. This time I decided to accept the invitation.

  Upon my arrival in Tahoe I realized that the trip was not only about old friends getting back together. Everyone was a couple. Even Lennon had brought a date. The only exception, besides myself, was a large-eyed young woman with pale skin, the kind of skin that, with dark hair, looks translucent. She seemed unenthusiastic about me. I expected her to progress from lack of enthusiasm to disgust when she realized that I was the man with whom she was being set up in a sort of mutual-friend ambush. But shaking my hand, she smiled and said that she’d heard so much about me. How had she heard so much about me? I had heard nothing about her. I repressed the urge to mumble “likewise” and smiled back. Her name was Patricia Stocking. Patty. P. S. Like the Palm Springs bumper sticker: P.S. I Love You, and the license plate I saw once on Palm Canyon Drive: PSIH8U. We would love or hate each other.

  New love should blossom under blue skies among explosive S-turns of fresh white powder, and maybe it does. But that week the weather seemed more conducive to no love. The first days alternated between gray gloom and blizzard, and the second half of the week brought a patchy cloudiness that melted snow only to reconstitute it as ice a half hour later.

  She and I teamed up from the start. It was as straightforward as yelling “single!” in the line for the chairlift. She was a poor skier, unsteady on her legs, and could manage, at best, a wide sweeping snowplow down the bunny slope, knees bent enough so one couldn’t say she wasn’t bending her knees. I was an above average skier, and having had advance warning of her inexperience, I rented a snowboard to place myself further back on the learning curve. She wore a puffy lavender ski suit and white-framed mirror sunglasses. I wore jeans—my idea of fashion on the slopes—and
by noon the seat of my pants was a frozen plate.

  On the chairlift, she was a scientist. She pointed out dying trees and speculated about what had happened to them. She remarked on detail after detail of our surroundings, then hypothesized about why things were the way they were. While we glided smoothly above the trees—with a punctuating pah-rump each time we passed a tower—she talked about what she wanted to research when she got home. She had a pencil and notepad in her ski suit. She couldn’t resist writing things down to look up later. That curiosity, her need to categorize and figure things out, belonged only to the old Patty. It would not last. When she pulled her hand out of her glove, it looked wrinkled and red, the skin of a newborn.

  On the day of the blizzard, she wanted to keep skiing, even after I thought inclement weather might force us to cut the day short. The air was snow. Her technique never improved, her speed never increased, but she was having the time of her life, and while howling winds caused the chairlift to shut down periodically, she displayed no fear whatsoever. It was an amazing combination, this fearlessness coupled with a total inability to improve her skills. It would not last.