“I guess not,” I tell Jo. “I just wanted to show you.”
I start the car and pull away, heading for home. The conversation doesn’t start back up. I slow down a little as I get nearer my street. I head to my house and pull up the driveway.
“I want you to come in with me.”
“What for, Charlie? I thought we were going to sit outside and watch, and watching from the driveway isn’t going to work. We need to be further down the street. Plus we’re still in your car. That’s not really that useful.”
“I just want to check it out. I want to see if he’s been here.”
“Have fun.”
“You’re coming with me.”
“Fine.”
I step outside and circle the car to open her door. She climbs out and I put my hand on her shoulder. I’m expecting her to start screaming, but she doesn’t. I open the gate and the first thing we see is my back door yawning wide open-splintered pieces of wood where the lock once was have twisted away. I think back to Kathy’s door, then to Luciana’s. Neither of theirs were forced or pried open.
“Who did this?” Jo asks.
“Who do you think?”
All the curtains inside are drawn. Did I leave them like this? The air inside isn’t as stagnant as yesterday, thanks to the back door being broken open. Cyris wasn’t thoughtful enough to smash the windows to let the air circulate. Apart from the door nothing seems out of place. The living room is relatively tidy and I can’t see anything damaged.
“We should contact the police,” Jo says, and something in her voice is more convincing than anything else she’s said today, and I realize why that is-up until now she didn’t believe me. “Unless. .” she says, but doesn’t finish it.
“Unless what?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“You were going to say unless I did this myself, weren’t you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“You still don’t believe me,” I say, my voice raising.
“I didn’t say that. You said that.”
“Goddamn it,” I say, shaking my head.
I lead the way into the lounge. I’m expecting to see torn curtains, the TV tipped over, the sofa and chairs shredded, but there’s no evidence he even came in here. I move to the windows. The sun has nearly gone and so has the blue sky. The clouds from this morning are back. They’ve appeared from nowhere and in the distance they look black. Within half an hour it’s going to pour down.
“You have photos of us up on the walls,” Jo says.
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
“Probably not the best thing to do if you’re dating,” she says.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “It’d be stupid if I was dating.”
“You’re still wearing your wedding ring.”
I look down at my hand. Yeah, so I am. I shrug, feeling a little embarrassed.
“Charlie. .”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Just. . just nothing.”
We pass the bathroom and I think back to when I stood outside the bathroom door at Luciana’s. I remember opening it and seeing the most grisly thing I’d ever seen. Of course that scene would almost repeat itself fifteen minutes later.
There are no corpses behind the bathroom door and no damage either. We check the spare bedroom and once again everything’s intact. We double back and check the bedroom on the right, the room I use as a study.
And here is the evidence of vandalism I was thinking I wouldn’t find. Only this is nothing as menacing as the drains blocked with rags and the faucets turned on full so the house is flooded. This is not as vulgar as large body parts drawn on the walls with paintbrushes. This is time-consuming. It has taken effort.
The computer monitor lies on the floor. Several crevices run the length of the plastic casing and there’s a hole in the middle of it. It looks sad down there. The keyboard has fared no better: it has been twisted and bent and several of the keys have popped off from the pressure and are scattered like misshapen dice. My laser printer has been tossed aside. It has gouged out a hole in the wall and a black puddle of toner has spilled onto the carpet. Of the two bookcases the first has been tipped over so that it lies on an angle with books crushed beneath it, their pages and covers bent and torn. The second bookcase is upright, but the books have been removed and the covers ripped away. A pile of loose pages has been stacked next to it.
Straight ahead beneath the window in a black cabinet is a small stereo system. The covers have been removed from the speakers and the cones pushed in and ripped. The front of the stereo has been smashed in, damaged by the computer lying at the foot of the cabinet. The stereo is on and some of the lights work-most of the display doesn’t. Hissing comes from the speakers, but no music, and the CD player is making a soft clicking noise over and over like a metronome. The TV I have in here is lying on its front on the floor. The antenna, twisted on the floor next to it, looks like a tool somebody would break into a car with. The remote control is next to it. Each of the rubber buttons has been stretched and torn out. The batteries have been removed and crushed with what seem to have been teeth. Behind the TV my aluminum garbage bin has had the sides and lid kicked in, denting any reflection it once offered. Its contents, only paper and plastic, have been littered over the rest of this mess. My small collection of die-cast cars, all classics from the fifties and sixties, haven’t been smashed underfoot, but the doors, the bonnets, the wheels, and the trunk lids have all been removed. The cars are still on the shelves, on the drawers, on my desk, but the broken accessories are in individual piles on the floor, one for different parts, down there like confetti.
I realize I’m holding my breath. I begin to let it out as I slowly turn a complete circle in my room, spotting new damage as I do so. The DVD player beneath my TV has had the tray snapped off. The display on it has been broken and the play button pried off. A lamp is on the floor, the framework twisted and bent, the bulb shattered, the prongs on the plug wrenched sideways.
Jo waits in the hallway asking me over and over what I’ve done. All this destruction around me. This is my room. My personal space. If I snapped right now, if I lost my mind and went completely berserk, there’d be nothing left in here for me to break.
But I don’t snap. As much as I love my books, my cars, my toys, they’re nothing to what has already happened this week. In the scheme of things all this is nothing. These are just items, materials, things that can be replaced. It will cost me money, but that’s all. I can move on. I cannot say the same for Kathy. I cannot say the same for Luciana. I lean down and turn off the stereo. The CD stops clicking and the hissing disappears and the room becomes eerily silent. Even Jo stops talking. I walk through the destruction back into the hallway. It’s as if a localized earthquake hit my room.
I close the door on everything.
If only I had taken a different route home the other night.
I tell myself not to think this way. I try not to tell myself that Luciana may have found somebody who wasn’t going to help and then kill them. I try not to tell myself any of this, but it’s true. What would have happened if I hadn’t come along? Would another game-show contestant have succeeded where I failed?
“If you didn’t do this, Charlie, then it’s time to go to the police. There has to be plenty of evidence here.”
I open up the door to my bedroom. The curtains here are closed. Everything appears normal. I start to close the door. “The only evidence here is that the place has been trashed. It doesn’t show by who.”
“What’s in the box?” Jo asks.
I push the door back open and I see it now, sitting in the center of my bed, plainly in view. I can only imagine what’s inside. The box makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t describe. I know that whatever’s inside it will rock my world and shatter what small hope I have left, but if I don’t look then I can still hold on to the hope that it’s empty. It’s the Schrödinger Paradox. Schrödinger’s severed head.