This is a story about a burglary, although sometimes you fantasize about finding the perps and upgrading to assault and battery. Your son calls. You're in a meeting—the time frame, by the way, is not long before Christmas—so he leaves a spooked, howling voice mail, which you're finally able to decipher as Just got home door open FREAKING OUT! Someone had kicked in the front door—blew the doorjamb clean off. In the middle of the day, too; you can always count on residents of a modern suburb to not notice a thing like that. The thieving punks (statistically, the cop will tell you later, they are almost certainly teenagers; you'll immediately decide that there were two and that they were boys) took your DVD player, your digital videocam, an old company laptop you don't use anymore. They ransacked your master bedroom, upending boxes, throwing family papers, clothes and your life's junk around—keepsakes from your wife's cedar chest turn up in another room. Boxes of family pictures dumped out. You imagine these creeps touching your stuff, and seethe. At least they didn't turn vandal, didn't bash in the TV screen or smear feces on the walls. This is the second time in a year this has happened to you.
You feel upended, violated, trembling with an unaccustomed urge to violence. You want to lay your hands on them, and that is so not you.
Weird as it sounds, all that is the easy part.
From every point of view but one, this is a small story—file it under Shit Happens. It's just a burglary. A few electronic items stolen, a door frame in need of repair, a thrashed bedroom to put back together ... doesn't really compare to whatever wife-beatings, store robberies and assaults with deadly weapons went down that week.
But from the only point of view that matters—yours, inside the damn thing—this little incident seems more like a vast net that you can already feel settling over your life. The kids are upset, their response alternating between flutters of fear and teenage macho. "I've already got people asking around," one says before the cop arrives. Your place no longer seems like a safe house where you can hide from this crazy world.
About the cop: You feel dumb admitting it now, but you consider not calling. You didn't bother the first time this happened, back in July, when you came home from vacation and found a bedroom curtain pulled from the window and $200 missing. This is one of the most purely American things about you—the way you shrink away from bureaucratic contact. Paperwork. Endless questions. Procedures. It seems deadening and pointless. You're acutely attuned to the way the idiosyncratic details that make this something that happened to you will soon disappear into the smooth facade of police process.
You do call the cops, of course, and in due time an officer shows up, and with her blandly nice, routinely sympathetic manner, she confirms all your apprehensions. She hears you out, looks around. "Won't be able to get any prints off of this," she says, kneeling over a cord the culprits had yanked from the DVD player. As for any other surfaces they might have touched ... well, this was a crime worth maybe a thousand bucks, if you strenuously overvalue the laptop, a clunky old IBM Thinkpad. She's a cop with things to do, and so, since this isn't TV, she doesn't conduct the rudimentary investigation, doesn't dust for prints, doesn't ask the neighbors See anything out of the ordinary? In fact, her visit seems more like a therapeutic nicety, a complimentary listening service provided by the police department. You fill out a report, and she leaves you to pick up the mess and sort out your uncertainties. You've been burgled. What does that mean?
One thing it means becomes apparent a few days later, when the nice lady from the check-cashing store calls. Someone's trying to cash hundreds of dollars worth of your personal checks. Checks you didn't realize until now had been taken. The store refuses to cash them. The guy is gone when you arrive.
What does it mean? It means some things aren't over when they should be, which brings us to the somewhat harder part.
And so act two of this small drama begins. You open your mail one day to find a long snarl from some company in Georgia that represents Domino's Pizza, which, goddamnit, wants the $130 worth of your checks it accepted, plus $60 in bounced-check fees, or you'll have legal problems on you like a cheap suit on rice. You're still antsy about being a victim; now you're considered a deadbeat.
Get this: The pizza chain had accepted two checks—one for $60, another for $67—without checking ID thoroughly enough to establish that the check-writer is not, in fact, you. Tough shit to them, you think—those guys deserve whatever losses they suffer because of their failure to check ID on $60 pizza purchases. But it still requires a lot of your time to deal with, and again, your specific experience melts into the bland procedure of commercial bureaucracy. The people in Georgia don't give a shit what happened to you, what it felt like to have these twerps paw your belongings—they just want you to fax them a fistful of documentation it'll take you long hours to get from your bank.
The manager of the check-cashing place can't release much information until the police ask. So you go to the police to ask them to ask. You're thinking, security video! You're thinking, check-cashing info! Because you really want to find out who did it, at least to put a period on this episode, but also in case you get to stand in front of their jail cell and gloat over their captivity. Fortunately for the culprits, the cops aren't any more interested now than they were the day the break-in happened—or, to be fair, any less busy with more important problems, or whatever the reason is that property crimes are such a low priority.
But: security video!
Doesn't matter.
A few days later, another bitchy note from Georgia, and a few days after that, more information about the bastards who did this to you. Turns out they must like Chinese food, having bought $70 worth of it with your stolen checks.
So now Christmas vacation is over and the family has to return to school. The house will be empty.
Actual conversation:
You: "Should we take the [electronic equipment that we won't specify but which—note to thieves—is quite cheap and insubstantial] to work with us? Keep it in the trunk?"
Wife: [long pause as she thinks it over.]
You don't, ultimately, but a heavy thought parks there in your frontal lobe. The house is empty. You envision those kids coming back, and so you go home for lunch a couple of days. Sometimes, late at night, maybe 75 o'clock, Pacific Exhaustion Time, when you're not particularly rational, you daydream about an aha moment: finding a strange car in your driveway, parking behind it so the punks can't flee, calling the cops, then wading in with an old golf club you've quietly grabbed from the garage, laying waste to the little bastards. Officer, I felt my life was in danger, so I hit this home-invading criminal 37 times with this left-handed 5-iron. It happened so fast ...
That's just your sense of incompleteness talking—the hardest part about the affair is that it ends in an ellipsis, unresolved, so a certain amount of anxiety just sort of hangs around. You're not unaware that, given the world's larger context of poverty and homelessness, fretting over a two-bit burglary amounts to a strange kind of privilege—at least you have a home to burgle, possessions to be taken. Nonetheless, from your viewpoint, inside the thing, you can't stop marvelling eerily at how easily complete strangers—just kids!—can stir up your life, go joyriding on you bank account, make you feel wary about your own home.
But hey, the cops are on it, right? It's been referred to the detective bureau! That sounds like some serious business. Any day now, you'll hear something.
A little while later, you get another letter from Georgia. Domino's wants its money for a third big check it accepted.
Screw them. You never liked their pizza anyway.
A break! A lead! Evidence! The laptop is returned. A nice guy brings it to your office after confiscating it from his girlfriend's daughter's boyfriend. A decrepit IBM Thinkpad, the thing is best used as a boat anchor, but it's still quite a trophy for a teenager of no real means. The man notices the company sticker on the bottom and calls. You meet him. He tells you the boy claims to have bought it for a cool hundred from some other kid. Here, the man says, is the phone number for the kid—the buyer, not the seller. But maybe he can tell you something about the seller ...?
The cops look thoughtful when you present this information to them. Thanks, they say, and that's the last you'll ever hear about the matter from them. This small incident has now completed its smooth assimilation from thing that happened to you to Henderson crime statistic.
It's been six months. A little while ago, you hear from someone at the Dominos store that accepted the bogus checks. They have a possible phone number for the person who cashed them. Evidence! You plan to take it to the cops.
But, you know, you don't. Life catches up—the rat-swarm of daily existence overruns you; you have a couple of other personal and professional problems that register high enough on the Richter scale to rattle your priorities. And the burglary begins fading into the blur of memory.
And, really, what's the sense in driving to the police department to add another useless piece of paper to an unattended file?
That's not to say you're over the burglary. No, not really. We carry our experiences with us, sometimes in cripplingly large chunks, more often in subatomic particles, and in this case, the burglary has left a thin residue of unease. Every day, your kids call when they get home from school, and every day you ask them, "Everything OK?" Which really means, Did anyone break in today?
So far, the answer is no.