And so I took another breath, found it to be good, and opened my eyes. The sentence was still there; it still said, “And now I know your name,” and there was still a page of writing under it. But I was very proud to discover that I had yet another calm thought, which was that looking at this page would very quickly prove that the blog had nothing to do with me. All I had to do was read one or two sentences to see that I was being a paranoid idiot, and I could go back to sipping calmly from my cup of vile coffee.
So I moved my eyes down to the second line and began to read.
Since I saw you that night in the foreclosed house your face has been stuck in my head. I have seen it everywhere, awake and asleep, and I can’t shove away that picture of you standing over a heap of raw red meat that had been a human being just a few minutes before. Even you have to know it is so fucking wrong—! And I keep thinking—who the fuck are you? Or maybe what the fuck—are you even human? Can someone that does that really get away with walking around in the real world, buying groceries and talking about the weather?
I ran from you. I ran from just the sight of you doing what you were doing. But that picture ran with me, and I know I should have done something, but I didn’t, and I could not get it out of my head.
And because I ran from you, it seems like I started seeing you everywhere. My whole life I never see you even once, and now you pop up every time I step out the door. I see you with your kids, or out there in the street with your job, and I can’t stand it anymore.
I’m not stupid. I know it’s not an accident, because that kind of coincidence is just impossible. But I didn’t want to think about what it meant, because if I did I would have to do something about it. And I kept thinking I wasn’t ready for that. I mean, my divorce, on top of all the other shitty stuff that keeps happening to me. It seemed like it was all too much, and to have to deal with you, too—forget it.
And then I see your picture, and it has your name and your job. Your job. I’m thinking, Holy Christ, he’s a fucking cop? Talk about brass balls. How does he get away with that? And I know right off, no fucking way can I do anything about a guy like you who’s a cop, too.
But I can’t stop thinking about it, and the more I think the more I keep shoving it away, because I’ve already got way too many problems to have to deal with your kind of shit, too. And it just buzzes around and around in my head until I think I’m going to totally freak and I want to run for it, but there’s no place to run, and I can’t avoid dealing with you anymore because now I know who you are and where you work, and I got no more excuses, and it just piles up and whirls around in my head and it’s making me fucking nuts—
And then all of a sudden it’s almost like a switch going on in my brain. Click. And I can almost hear a voice saying, You are looking at this all wrong. Like the Priest used to say, every stumbling spot is really a stepping-stone if you look at it right. And I think, Yeah.
This is not another problem. This is an answer.
This is a way to make all the other bullshit mean something, to finally bring it all together. And I may not know exactly how to do it just yet, but I know it’s right, and I know I can do this.
And I will do this. Soon.
Because now I know your name.
Somewhere down the hall I heard a door slam shut. Two voices called to each other, but I couldn’t hear the words, and I wouldn’t have understood them if I did, because there was only one thing in the entire world that meant anything:
He knew my name.
He had seen the pictures online, with my name on them, and he had put that together with what he had Witnessed me doing with Valentine. He knew me. He knew who I was and he knew where I worked. I sat there and tried to be calm and think of the right thing to do about this, but I could not get beyond that one wild, world-shattering thought. He knew me. He was out there and he could destroy me at any moment. I didn’t have the faintest notion of who he was, but he knew me and he could expose me whenever he wanted to and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot I could do about it.
And what was that about seeing me with my kids—was he threatening Lily Anne? I could not allow that—I had to find some way to get to him and stop him. But how could I, when I’d been trying to find him for two weeks and failing?
I scanned the blog again, looking for any clue that might tell me who he was, just some tiny hint of a way out of this nightmare, but the words had not changed. Still, on second reading, I saw that he had not written anything that might reveal me to anyone else. I was at least safe from that. So what was he really threatening? A physical attack on me or my fa
mily? He wrote about “dealing with” me, and I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. And there, at the end, he said he didn’t know yet exactly what to do—that could mean anything, and I couldn’t rule out a single thing until I knew more about who he was.
I needed to find a clue the way a drowning man needs air, and I had nothing but this single page of blather. But wait: It wasn’t technically blather; it was a blog. That implied that it was a semiregular thing, and if there were other postings, one of them might reveal something useful.
I copied the URL at the top of the page, pasted it into my browser’s window, and went to the Web address. It was one of the sites that allowed anybody to post a blog for free, and Shadowblog was just one of thousands. But at least there were other entries, one every few days, and I scanned them all as quickly as I could. The very first one opened with, “Why does everything always turn to shit?” It was a fair question, and it showed a little more insight into life than I expected. But that still told me nothing about him.
I read on: Most of it was a rambling, unfocused whine about how nobody appreciated him, ending with his decision to start this blog to help him figure out why. It ended with, I mean, I don’t get it. I walk into a room and it’s like they can’t even see me, like I’m not real to anyone else, no more than a fucking shadow. So I’m calling this the Shadowblog.… Very touching and sensitive, a true existential call for human contact, and I very much wanted to make contact as quickly as possible. But first I needed to know who this was.
I read more postings. They covered a period of over a year, and they seemed increasingly angry, but they were all anonymous, even the ones that mentioned the writer’s divorce from someone he referred to only as “A.” He wrote very bitterly about the fact that she wouldn’t get off her ass and get a job and still expected him to give her alimony to pay for everything, and he couldn’t afford two places so even though they were divorced now, he had to live under the same roof with her. It was a very touching portrait of lower-middle-class anguish, and I’m sure it would have melted my heart, if only I had one.
A’s refusal to work seemed to make him madder than anything else; he wrote passionately about responsibility and the fact that not doing your Fair Share was just plain Evil. That led him to a series of observations about Society in general and the “assholes” who refused to “follow the rules like the rest of us have to.” From there he rambled on into several tedious rants about Justice, and people getting what they deserved, and his apparent belief that the world would be a much better place if only everyone in it was more like him. Altogether, it was a portrait of someone with anger-management issues, low self-esteem, and a growing frustration with a world that refused to acknowledge his sterling qualities.
I read more. I hit a section of a half dozen entries in which he went on at great length about growing problems with “A”—and I really did sympathize, but why couldn’t he use real names? It would make things so much easier. But, of course, then he would have used my name, too, so I guess it balanced out. I worked forward through the blogs. They were all the same sort of grouchy, self-involved drivel, until I came to an entry headed, “Snap!” I recognized the date at the top; it was the day after my rendezvous with Valentine. I stopped scanning and began to read.
So it was just too much with “A,” just one bitchy crack too many about how I couldn’t even make decent money, which is a laugh since she can’t make ANY. But it’s like, no, you’re the man, you’re supposed to. And I look at her sitting there in a house where I pay the bills, and I buy the groceries, and she doesn’t do shit! She won’t even clean up properly! And I look at her and I don’t see lazy and bitchy anymore, I see Evil with a capital E, and I know I can’t take any more of this shit without doing something about it and I have to get out before I do it. So I take her Honda, just to piss her off, and I drive around for a while, just chewing on my teeth and trying to think. And after maybe an hour, I’m up in the Grove and all I got is a sore jaw and a nearly empty gas tank. I really need to just sit somewhere and think what to do, like maybe Peacock Park or someplace, but it’s raining, so I circle back south. The closer I get to home, the madder I get, and when I turn on Old Cutler some asshole in a new Beemer cuts me off. And I think, That’s it, that fucking does it, and I can almost hear something go snap inside. And I put the pedal down and go after him, and it’s like, Dude, wake up: He’s in a new Beemer and you’re in a beat-to-shit old Honda. And he’s totally gone in about three seconds, and I’m even madder. I turn down the street where I thought he went, and there’s no sign. And I cruise for a few minutes, thinking, What the hell, maybe I’ll get lucky. But there’s nothing. He’s totally gone.
And then I see this house. It’s totally trashed, another foreclosed place. Some dumb asshole ripping off the bank and raising the rates for the rest of us. I slow down and look, because there’s an old Chevy kind of hidden in the carport, like he’s still in there, living for free, while I bust my ass making payments.
I park the car, and I go around to the side door by the carport, and I slip inside. I don’t know what I was thinking or what I would have done, but I know I was pissed off. And I hear something in the next room, and I sneak to the doorway and peek—
The counter. There’s a hand lying there. A human hand.
But it’s not attached to anything. This doesn’t make sense.