Sara took him to the same mall where he and his wife used to go with the girls on Saturdays. Usually they separated into pairs, which meant he and Celia went to the food court to eat apple slices and wait for a text saying the shopping was done. It occurred to him that they could still do that. He wondered if it would be the same if they weren’t waiting, just eating apples because that was something you could do at a mall.
“Celia would like that,” Sara said. “She’s so timid.” The computer store was filled with flat wooden tables and sleek devices. There were no cash registers, just young people with fashionable shoes and card-swiping cell phone attachments.
“It’s important to re-think our workspaces,” said a woman with a tattoo of a rose across one cheekbone. He was not cool enough for this store.
“He’ll take this one.” Sara said.
The metal laptop was cold. It was also too cool for him.
Back home, his new computer gleamed empty and lifeless. No one had any interest in his A15 forms. He typed to a few SWFs on the anonymous chat site, but they were only what they pretended to be.
He came home from work on Wednesday night to find the front window smashed, the porch a wasteland of broken glass. The police came right away, made a show of unholstering their handguns and searching the house.
“If anyone is here,” one officer called, “announce yourselves or face the consequences.”
They led with their guns, like it was a television show. William remembered reading a report about government interrogators intensifying their torture techniques after seeing fictional cross-examinations on television. He stood at the edge of the forest and waited for the tromping to be over. The dead trees swayed as if it were summer, and they were a part of a different story.
“Anything missing?” the police asked, but William couldn’t tell. He’d taken the new laptop to work, and the old computer was still on the desk, surrounded by a constellation of scattered pencils.
“Maybe the vacuum cleaner?” he said, but later he found it in the girls’ room when he was cleaning up the glass. Pieces of the broken window were strewn everywhere. He thought he could read the story of the intruder’s path through the house in the way the shards were scattered—the fragments on the stairs, the large sliver in the girls’ room, the smaller one in his own. The beer from the refrigerator was gone, and there were strange voids in the house, empty spaces that might have once been occupied by objects he couldn’t remember.
“The city’s going through an opioid crisis,” the landlord said on the phone. “It won’t be too much longer.”
William considered the dead forest, the scrubby bushes. His violated house was filled with leaves. Brittle, brown husks rustled in the kitchen sink, crackled on the dining table. He’d only been gone ten hours, but the house felt feral. It smelled like earth and rot.
He hammered a board over the broken window, drove the nails directly into the window frame and thought how lovely it was to deface something that did not belong to him.
“You okay by yourself?” Sara asked on the phone. “Stay at my place if you want.”
William had already baked a frozen pizza. In the bathroom he discovered blood, splattered dark on the edge of the sink. He started to clean, but he liked the intimacy, liked imagining the stranger running the faucet. Somewhere another person knew the squeaking handle, the subtle bloom of mildew around the drain.
The blood had something strange about it, a lightness and thickness, the consistency of sap.
After the spectacle of the police visit, he felt on display, as if the neighbors were evaluating him. He stood at the kitchen door and considered the lights beyond the forest, the crooked houses and cluttered lawns. Elsewhere in the city, a person who had bled in his bathroom was drinking his beer. The refrigerator hummed and purred. When the landlord came to fix the window, William would have to admit that, yes, the refrigerator was actually working fine.
Strange filaments, splinters, lay scattered around the sink, and a film, like sawdust, coated everything.