A Short Career in Law Enforcement

j jackson

It's an ordinary day, like any other, which means that it's unique. I look out of the dining room window to see a guy in the backyard stealing chili from a pot cooking by the wall in what would be a barbecue pit, if there were anything other than the coal fire there. I know intuitively that he is an itinerate, and I resent him for it. I realize that he is an unconscious part of my own self, that is, I realize in the moment my projection, which is unusual. I usually only see them later on. I go out onto the back porch to tell him to go away, because no one else will do it, all other members of the family are afraid of him. I explain to myself, as if I am my own parents, what the problem is, because everyone else is afraid to confront me with the truth of what I am. I confront the guy directly and tell him to get lost, but he is not about to cooperate. I feel like I know the guy, though I've never seen him before. I feel like his non-cooperation is a personal conflict: I am not about to cooperate with my inner, superego, desire (non-id) to banish the aspect of my inner self that he represents. He stays in the yard and I go back inside. In other words, I retreat from his decided, stalwart, yet passive, stance.

But a few minutes later, the guy follows me into the house. Everyone feels threatened. Jim and I go to the living room closet to get the gun Dad keeps there. I take the gun from Jim, a .22 pistol, and I point it at the guy as he stands in the dining room. I threaten to shoot him. He scoffs, but in a benign manner, telling me that I will not shoot him. I hesitate to shoot, because it's a .22. I feel that if I shoot him with it, it will not kill him, but only irritate and upset him, turning him into a greater threat. I feel the limited power of the weapon in my hand. I understand that it represents my superego, the social interdiction against dereliction. I feel that the tool I would use to thwart my id/ego counterpart is ineffectual. I have always had a demanding, yet weak superego.

Jim stands behind me. I tell him the gun is too small, I need a bigger one. He goes back into the closet and gets a .45 automatic that I didn't know was in there, and he gives it to me. I point it at the guy. Still he scoffs, still in a good natured way. He is humored by what he sees as a blind and empty threat. I never did give much credence to my superego's power to "kill" my ego if I will not conform to "normal" society, i.e., get a job, act like a responsible citizen, stop "stealing" people's food (living off an overly affluent society ala Steal This Book, etc.)

I secretly ask Jim if the gun is loaded, and he whispers that it's not. Irritated, I ask him to get me bullets. He goes upstairs to his bedroom and comes down with two full clips. I pull the clip out of the gun and see that it is, in fact, full, and I tell him so, showing him. Society, it seems to me, has always thought (as I do also) that the weapon they give me is safe, that it is unloaded, but it never is.

The guy begins to walk toward me. I warn him, via my exaggerated stance, but he continues to advance. I shoot him, several times, but the bullets seem to have no effect. I empty the clip into him, remove it, and replace it with a full one. He stops in the middle of the room, still seemingly unaffected. I shoot him several more times. Eventually, the bullets take effect and he falls to the floor. He's a strong and determined individual, possibly pumped up on PCP. I could have ended up liking him, but he was a threat to my family. I think I've been here before and am overcome with a profound sense of deja vu. This could all have happened in the past. Once, I imagine, I tried to kill myself, to kill off the idea I had that I was too much like my parents. Eventually, I think I will one day succeed. But the act is not yet complete. In the present, I must continually reinforce, with words, my desire/attempts to change my personality, repeating conditioning, via words, until it finally begins to take hold.

The guy lies on the floor, dying, and soon he dies. We, all the family, try to decide what we must do. The cops will come, and we will have to claim self-defense. I did what I had to, worked at intimidating the guy first, tried to demean him, worked at intimidating and/or demeaning jobs, in order to survive, and later prosper, to keep him from threatening and attacking me. I worked, throughout my past, to kill my desire, to do what I wanted, in order that I might succeed at what I had to do, my job, which is to defend myself and my family, however internal their representation, against the threat of loss of security and propserity.

But the guy is not yet dead. He stirs in a way that makes me think he's recovering instead of gasping one last breath after a first false death. We take him outside to the front of the house and the fresh air seems to revive him a bit. By the time we get him to the street, he seems fine again, perfectly healthy, not even a sign of any blood or bullet holes. Even the holes in his shirt have healed. We get into the car. He drives. But he is changed. The experience of imminent death has altered him. In the yard and house he was a bit pudgy, not fat, but with a "rounded" form, suggesting affluence. But in the car he is lean, muscular, and quite cosmopolitan-looking. He reminds me now of Juergen Prochnow in The Seventh Sign. Likewise, my old business self has died, replaced by a more sophisticated ego, actually, an older ego, a past one, one from my college days and later (or even, an ancient, "angelic" self), but now having a greater body of experience, a wisdom, and insight I did not have before.

On the campus of The Pennsylvania State University at College Park, Tom, a schoolmate of mine since the first grade, who wanted to be my friend in high school, but I would never allow it because I thought he was too effeminate, finally broke through that barrier in college and convinced me, in his inimitable endearing way that I had never before attended to, to get him a date, because Tom had always been too shy and had never developed the technique of approaching girls in that way, even though he related to them socially very well.

My ego, my present self, understands Tom, whereas my ego in High School hated him, projecting. In college, I was just beginning to understand my inner self and so could afford a small amount of condescension toward Tom. (My Tom-Self is still with me to this day, subjugated. It's still an aspect of my nature, deeply hidden from others, but not repressed.) I'm helping out my high school self here by getting him a date, although at this point I don't necessarily go so far out of my way to do it. It just happens as a matter of course, because I was far more unconsciously insistent in my past and nature seemed to conform to my desires more readily than it does now.

It's night. Tom stands in the shadows of a building across from the dorm that I'm going to go into. He's half-facing toward a set of back doors, the service entry kind. His shyness and embarrassment demand that he take this stance, half-turned away. He says after me as I depart, "I can't believe I actually might have a chance of getting laid." That's what I'd told him, that I'd get him laid. I didn't really mean it. I was just encouraging him. But, hey, you never know.

I go into the dormitory and tell the matron sitting at the desk in the lobby that I'm here to pick up Debbie D___ and her roommate, Trish. She calls upstairs and Debbie comes down, ready to go on a date with me. But her roommate isn't ready because she wasn't expecting to go along, since I didn't tell anyone my plans until only a short time before I arrived, mainly because I was making them up at the time in response to Tom's request.

Debbie says that Trish says that's it's going to take her roommate a while to get ready and maybe we should leave without her. This feels like a defeat to my ego. I tell her, no, we'll wait. She says she thinks we shouldn't. I say, no, it's okay. Finally, she admits that she doesn't think Trish wants to go along and she's just using not being ready as an excuse.

I talk Debbie into going back upstairs and convincing her roommate to come along. Meanwhile, Tom waits outside, feeling very awkward, I know, standing in the dark alone, not knowing whether to leave or not, because it's been a long time since I'd left him there. It takes at least fifteen minutes for Trish to get ready, in addition to the time it took me to convince Debbie to convince her. As I wait alone downstairs, I can feel Tom waiting nervously, just wanting to bolt out of there and forget the whole thing, but knowing he must, at some point in his life, take this stand. It's as if I am he and myself, both, experienced and naive. I remember this incident as I get into the car and observe the change in the former derelict's appearance and behavior, as if he were this person all along, but I couldn't before see him in that way.

The guy pulls a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and gives it to us. On it is written the address of a place that has something to do with a conversation we had back at home before he entered the house, something about Katy. We direct him as to how to get there, up Verona Road from Verona toward Rosedale. At the top of the hill we turn onto Bathe St. and head toward the address, but we can't find it. It's 9200-something and the addresses are only in the low three figures. We go on, even though we know that the street is only one block long. But it isn't. It goes on into a neighborhood that never before existed, or that none of us knew of, and then eventually it transitions into a business district with more apartment and office buildings than stores, with exclusive-type stores on the first floors of the buildings. It looks like Mount Lebanon, but we are definitely still in Penn Hills.

The street is not much more than a paved alley, narrow and unevenly surfaced. We continue to look for the address, but the numbers begin to jump around. I see 9000 numbers, but then, immediately I see 9400s, and then 4000s and 2000s. We drive into a mall-like area, onto walkways between the stores and offices, but the numbers drop back down to three figures. I notice that the numbers are referencing the perpendicular avenues, so we decide to go back to the road, because I mention that I thought I saw a 9200 address back there.

We come to a huge building, an old church, which is the address. It's separated from the road by high hedges, which may be why we didn't see it earlier, although it seems to me that we hadn't passed by it before, or noticed it, even though it's on the same road. We get out of the car and walk around the hedges and up a few steps onto a wide open area covered with paving stones in front of the church, whose entrance doesn't face the road, but opens to the left (west) parallel to it.

Kids come out of the church. They are strange-looking kids, not really kids at all, although they appear to be kids from afar. They look like retarded hippies, as if this were an old church converted into a school/social organization/institution for casualties of the sixties. They are, perhaps, brain-damaged from overuse of drugs, yet very intelligent, both at the same time. The others seem intimidated by them, but I find them charming and attractive. I like them, and I understand them, in an esoteric way. Yet I stand off away, observing, while the others go on ahead toward the church.

I continue to watch the hippies. It's as if I know them and like them, but still I am wary, yet I do not let the wariness register, I do not feel it, but only see it later as I analyze my behavior. I think back to the experience at home, but I don't know why. Later, I understand that I stood off from the guy in the house in the same way. I feel this is a parallel, although I can't rationally pinpoint it. The hippies feel like aspects of my artistic self, which in a sense I fear, or am wary of, yet unconsciously. Consciously, I appreciate them.

Eventually, I follow the others. I don't feel intimidated in the same way I don't feel depressed, although I think I must be, based on the classic symptomatology. The intimidation must be there, because the others feel it, and I am ultimately my family. There is no separation, really, between us. We have been too close, although we may not have so much known it--another parallel. How do I know that the others feel the intimidation too? Because we have been so close, unknown. They don't state their feelings, nor is there any objective evidence that indicates their intimidation, except what I myself am feeling. And yet I know that I do not project this onto them. This is the point. If there is no overt indication to let me know how they are feeling, then I must be directly accessing their feelings--because they are my own, of my own heritage, yet dissociated. And so, if I am intimidated (the cause of my anxiety), then, in the same way, by the same logic, I could actually be depressed and not allowing myself to feel it. But then, if I don't feel it, can it really be depression, or intimidation? After all, although not completely satisfied with a few aspects of my life, nevertheless I am overall quite happy and content. I do what I do out of a necessity to avoid certain pitfalls and consequences that I have learned via experience to perceive. I could have a "fuller" life, but not without certain problems that I can quite easily avoid by living the way I now live. Maybe "growth" can overcome these problems, maybe not. But I am careful. If I see an opportunity, if one "comes to" me, I may take it, self-advisedly very cautiously, but I will not go looking for trouble being less than adequately prepared. When things come to you and you act on them, it is because you have, via waiting for and anticipating them, prepared yourself; otherwise you would not so readily notice their arrival, interpreting them instead not as opportunities but as situations to be avoided.

Later, in the church, I come to understand these things, but not before. By the time I get into the church, a very traditional basilica, but run-down, having seen better days, the guy has walked up to altar, while everyone else has hung back near the entrance. When I enter, they follow me up the aisle. But before we can get even half way to the front, the guy begins to disappear. By the time we arrive before the altar, he is gone.

We all need time for prayer, and so we take a few moments to kneel before the altar, where a kind of rational enlightenment passes over me. I've never really prayed in a church before. I've pretended to pray, when I was a kid, i.e., I've prayed, ineffectively, using words; but that doesn't count. My real church has previously been the natural world, the woods, the mountains, great cathedrals of tall trees--and, of course, intimate relationships. But they have been far less effective, being far more temporary solutions.

"You're not living in a real world."

"Neither are you."

"Yes I am. I live in a real world. You live in a fantasy."

"What you mean when you say I'm not living in a real world is I'm not living in a consensual world. And who wants to? Only consensual people. I tend not to be consensual."

"I know."

When I was married, I took a shower with my wife. She saw me take a bar of soap and watched it as it disappeared behind me as I washed my butt. She said "You're not sticking that thing in your bum, are you?"

I said yeah, even though I was not. She acted disgusted and hurried to get out of the shower. That was only days before she left. Not that that was the reason she left--at all. There were a lot more serious reasons.

I told her yeah out of the motivation I'd had (still have) to "jack people off," as she used to call it, to tease them, to provoke them, to say things that disturb and upset them. Usually, when I do this, quite intentionally, I make mental notes to correct erroneous impressions later on. But in this instance, the plot backfired. I didn't know she would be gone. I never corrected the lie. To this day she must still think, if she ever thinks of me at all, that I stick the bar of soap up my butt when I wash it, instead of soaping up my fingers and using them, which would hardly be much better, in her mind, I guess--except that she didn't have to use the fingers like she had to use the cake of soap. Wait a minute. Yes she did.

A month or so before that, early one morning, before we'd left for work, after she had taken a shower while I was sleeping, she asked me if I'd heard that noise while she was in the bathroom. I said no. She then accused me of not paying attention to her, that she'd slipped in the shower and could have hurt herself, and I couldn't have cared less. I asked her if she was hurt and she said she was not. I explained that I was sleeping. How could she expect me to hear her slip in the shower when I was asleep? Months later, after she was gone, I realized that this had been a test--and not a fair one. She must have slipped in the shower once when she was seeing the guy she eventually ran off with and, not having been asleep, he heard it and came running to make sure she was okay. It's a fair assumption.

Another unfair test, a similar way that I was unwittingly set up, occurred years later when, while working undercover, I was with a different woman one afternoon and she complained that my beard was scratching her neck and making it red. I tried to see the redness, but there was none. I set aside her complaints until several days later when I began to put things together. Several weeks earlier she had asked me if I would shave off my beard if she asked me to and I told her absolutely not. Then, I remembered that she had rented the tape Jeremiah Johnson. She had never seen the film before and she had been very impressed with it. In that film, Redford noticed that his beard irritated his new Native American wife's neck, and so he shaved it off.

I passed these tests, not to these women's satisfaction, but to mine. I responded correctly, that is, logically, though unconsciously, but as if I knew what they were up to. I've always had this propensity toward unconscious wisdom. It's innate. I see what people are up to without consciously realizing it and I act, verbally or otherwise, to negate their games, usually by stonewalling them. It's a talent I have, which inevitably others think is a fault, that I do not care so much for them, when what I do not care so much for is their machinations.

I had a girlfriend once who told me that I lectured her. The problem was that I defined lecturing as that which a college professor does. She defined lecturing as that which her father did. Alternate definitions are a major source of discord and misinterpretation.

In This Boy's Life, Ellen Barkin, desperate for domestic security, goes with her son to live with Robert DeNiro, whom she discovers is not so perfect a man as he appeared to be when he was dating her. (So who is? Not even women.) When they have sex, he turns her over and does it from behind, and when she complains and says she'd like to face him, he tells her that this is the way he likes it.

In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts escapes from her husband, who turns out to be a domineering asshole after they are married a while. He controls every aspect of her life, and when she tries to leave him, he won't let her.

Women like to take their cues from movies. They verify their sense of importance. But movies can be as misleading as they can be an affirmation of self-esteem.

"You made us use towels twice before we washed them. You made us hang them up to dry and use them again, you were so cheap."

"No I didn't."

"Yes you did. You always tried to control me that way."

"You're not remembering right. You were complaining about doing the laundry, especially about having to do so many towels, because you always had to have two of them, one for your body and one for your long hair, so I suggested we use them twice before we washed them--to save you work."

"Well, maybe, but there were other things. Like the laundry. You could have helped to do it."

I could have, and I did, when I needed stuff washed. But that wasn't what I was about."

"I know."

Women collect these kinds of incidents and save them up so that when they're ready to leave you, they can bring them up to justify their departure, solidifying in their own mind that the guy they've been living with is an asshole. Well, yeah. I tease people, especially women. And I don't like to do laundry. I know these are terrible sins. But I never avoid intimacy with a woman during sex, and I never prevented a woman from leaving when she decided to go. So, in this respect, I guess I prove them all wrong. Every time they want to leave me, I just let them. Who would want to be with a woman who doesn't want to be with you? Only a sadist or a masochist. I may be a lot of crazy things, but I'm neither of those. Actually, when it comes down to it, I don't really know what I am.

I feel like a character in a dream-movie, not me. This is a true story, a living nightmare I have from time to time. I'm sitting in traffic on the parkway, crawling along, wired, worried that I'm not going to get to the precinct on time, weaving in and out of traffic, switching lanes to take every advantage, cutting people off, forcing my way in and out, advancing my way first in one lane then another, out at the edge of my personality.

This is the way I used to be, before I saw the light, hovering.

But I am not, this person, I am, someone else, still, hovering.

My partner, Bob, thinks I'm crazy. He wants me to see a shrink.

If we're late one more time, the captain is going to get pissed.

From time to time my vision becomes distorted, but I never tell anyone. I'm afraid I'll be put on medical leave, or worse, I'll be discharged. I drive nearly blind, almost as if by sound, only the least amount of light visible in a fuzzy highway lane before me, in the fast lane. I feel the car scrape slightly, almost gently, along the guardrail on my left, which serves to guide me in my blindness. Traffic speeds up. I feel my way along, unable to slow down for fear of initiating a chain reaction of multiple car crashes. I feel as if the windshield is so dirty I can't see, like I feel inside my helmet when I ride my Yamaha off road. Or I feel like I have a thin towel over my head/face and am sitting in a barber's chair waiting for my beard to soften.

I tell Bob, my dream-film co-star, to look out the window and direct me as I try to pull over through traffic to the right side of the road. I think I'm finally losing it altogether, because the windshield is dirty, clouded with the winter road film of slush and salt and the windshield wiper fluid has been empty for three years. My imagination sometimes gets the better of me, takes over, and determines my reality. Bob directs me from the passenger's window. Cutting off a car that nearly hits us, we finally manage, working together, to make it off the exit, where we stop and smear the windshield residue around enough for me to see well enough to get us to the station house.

That night, after our shift, after a few hours at the bar, we arrive at my house. Bob is too drunk to drive himself home. Proof of this is the fact that he thought I was sober enough to drive us from the bar. I moved back into this house after the academy. Dad never sold the place after he moved the family to the suburbs. It's still furnished with the same old furniture I grew up with, except for the stuff we took to the new house and the stuff I threw out because it was rotting away. I worry that the house is slowly deteriorating, because I told Dad that I'd keep it up. But I never have the time. It looks and feels different here than what I remember as a child.

I turn on the TV and Bob and I collapse into chairs. Bob asks me where the remote is. I can't find it. Finally, I locate it under the edge of the chair. I fiddle with it, but I can't make it work. I can't get it to change channels. Bob takes it from me, but he can't get it to work either. I take it back. It reminds me of some kind of esoteric device from a sci-fi movie. The buttons look complicated, as if they could dial up another time and place, a hand-held time machine. I try to explain how it works to Bob, but he stares blankly at me. He's about to nod off.

My back is hurting me terribly and I resist getting up and going into the kitchen to get my pain pills. I absently push one of the buttons on the remote and the channel changes. I look over at Bob, but he has passed out and is leaning sideways in the chair. I push another button, but this time it will not work. I sit staring at the television at a program I don't care for. I'm half-awake, and in a lot of pain. Bob stirs. I intentionally awaken him by talking loudly to him. I tell him to get up and walk behind my chair and take my arms by the wrists and pull them back over my head. He stares at me in an uncomprehending manner until I tell him I'm in pain, and then he understands. He stumbles to his feet and bumbles around at first, not quite knowing how to grab me, but I explain it to him, how to grasp my wrists. I imagine that he was Robert DeNiro in his previous life, and Tom Selleck in the one before that. Or maybe I don't imagine that. Maybe that's true.

Bob stretches my arms backwards over my head, and the pain instantly disappears, but when he releases the pressure, the pain returns. He tells me that I need my spine permanently stretched, and I agree. But how to do it? He tells me to go to a chiropractor. I ask him if he's ever been to one. He tells me he hasn't. I don't remember anything else. I don't remember falling asleep. Usually, I remember falling asleep, even when I've been drinking. I awake in pain the next morning sitting upright in the chair. Bob is sleeping on the floor.

After coffee, we walk across the backyard to the hill above the parkway. My house is in the woods across the parkway from Swisshelm Park. We stand above the roadway, contemplating getting back into the daily traffic that is slowing, nearly stopped on the roadway below. Bob suggests we walk across to his house, a distance of about two miles, and get his car, because he wonders if mine is going to make it into the city. I feel offended, but I have to agree with him. It needs a lot of work. I was going to put it in the shop, but I'm a great procrastinator. Dad would be disappointed in me if he knew.

We abandon the idea of climbing the chain link fence and crossing the busy parkway on foot, even though Bob's house is only a short distance if we'd go that way, and we decide instead to hike down through Frick Park, under the overpass, and up the other side, circumventing the traffic. It's an easy journey down as we half-slide our way over loose rubble and sandstone hillsides. But the way up the other side is far more difficult, with a few treacherous cliffs we must climb up and over. That's when things start to get a little crazy. That was the day when history began to overtake me. From this point on, I can't determine what is actually true and what is only in my mind. But, then again, maybe that's true of my whole life. I'm just not sure.

We can't get up the hillside into Bob's neighborhood. The cliff face is steeper than we thought it was. But we're on the other side of the highway, so we climb up toward the road surface. We end up at the edge of the bridge just outside the tunnel. Near the top of the hillside, we see a side extension of the tunnel, a workman's entrance. Instead of climbing the final distance to the roadway, we go in here, thinking there might be stairs. Traffic has backed to a stop on the highway. Just inside the tunnel we find workman's overalls hanging on hooks. We put them on, thinking we'll blend in better. I'm aware that even with police credentials it's difficult to get into places that the Highway Department controls. Everyone always checks your legitimacy, even during normal times.

Some guys working in the tunnel farther in see us, but since we're wearing workmen's uniforms, they think we're a part of the tunnel's work crew. They think we're leftovers from the emergency night crew that was brought in. They talk to us about the pending catastrophe. They act as if we know what's going on, and we know intuitively not to question them too closely for fear they will discover we do not belong. It seems that traffic is being closed off into the city because of a release of some toxic substance.

I try to collate their words with a news report I'd half-heard on the television as I was awakening. It made no sense then and I turned off the set before I could understand, unconsciously thinking it was a continuation of the dream I'd had, something about my brain being poisoned by a chemical catastrophe. Apparently, someone either intentionally or accidentally released something stored inside the tunnel into the environment, and everyone on the suburbs side of the tunnel has been exposed. It's a heavier than air substance that cannot rise above the mountain. Authorities are trying to keep all affected people out of the city. It's a mildly contagious situation and there are fears of an epidemic.

The men wear masks hanging down around they're necks and I wonder why they do not put them over their faces. Later, researching the event, or running through the records I have stored away in my mind, I learn that the positive pressure inside the tunnel, created by huge fans deep in the mountain and the exit fans above the tunnel entrances, prevent the pollutants from seeping in. It's a great place to be in the event of a disaster. I'm going to remember that. It's convenient that I live right next to it.

We make our way up into tunnel passages via large circular airs ducts about five feet in diameter, and we walk to the city side through ducts and corridors above the main passage. At several points we have to make choices as to which way we will go. Near the other side, passageways begin to narrow and I can see an opening ahead. But the duct toward it slopes upward, and I realize that it opens onto a hillside cliff that we will not be able to descend, so we backtrack to a set of stairs off to the left and go down into the tunnel proper and exit to the city side. No one challenges us as we walk along the parkway to the city. Once we are through and since we are wearing the overalls, everyone assumes that we belong.

After about a mile, we climb the hillside into Schenley Park and we stand on the hill above Panther Hollow surveying the situation. The last remnants of people trying to get into the city are walking down the parkway. These are people who got through before they shut the tunnel down. We meet a guy and a girl in the park and discuss the situation with them. They don't know we're cops and so they feel free to complain about the authorities in general and the 'pigs' in particular. I can see Bob beginning to get pissed. I can tell by the way the muscles in his neck begin to tighten. I nudge him to try to call his attention to his attitude, to try to lighten his mood by bringing him to an awareness that we are undercover. He never did take to undercover work so well as I did.

The four of us make our way down the hillside to join the immigration to the city. Checkpoints are set up at multiple locations on the highway and I can see troops of officers roaming through the woods below the park. But here our credentials are honored, as we knew they would be, the checkpoints manned by our own, and we pass through, leaving the couple we were with dumbfounded and detained.

That was the final straw for management, and for Bob, who co-operated with the Captain to have me put on medical leave. When I was returned to duty, I was a different person. I see the light now, often. I am enlightened. But I am still not me.

Later, I got married and divorced, hooked up with a number of women, always without success, and always because they thought I was someone I was not. I don't know who they thought I was. How could I?

Back at home, before I became a cop, I am in the living room, alone. It's morning and everyone has gone to work or off to be somewhere else for the day. I look outside. There are no cars in the driveway. The street in the distance down through the trees is empty too. I walk outside onto the porch to look over into the carport. There are no cars there either. I am left without transportation. In our family, cars do not belonged to anyone in particular. If someone buys a car, it's added to the car pool by tacit agreement. No one ever said that this was the way it would be. It's just what we did, how things evolved, because each car arriving home got blocked in by subsequently arriving cars, so the first one to leave took the first available car, rather than rousing family members to juggle cars down the very long and narrow driveway. Keys were dropped on a small table by the door upon entering the house, and extra keys were kept in a cupboard in the kitchen, in case any one forgot to leave the keys. (It usually turned out to be me.) My father took care of maintenance for all the cars, because he liked to do it and had a special friendship with a guy who owned a repair shop.

I go back into the house and stand in the doorway, looking out at the deserted neighborhood. It looks like an empty movie set. I feel left alone, abandoned. The house is kind of run-down, as if people haven't lived here for a long time. I wonder if it's not really when I think it is, I wonder if time has passed while I slept, like maybe years, and no one is really living here at all, no one except me. I have been left alone, forever.

I see dirt and debris along the baseboard next to the door. Mom would never have left the house in this condition. A mood has settled over the place. What is going on? I walk along the wall picking up dead and crumbling leaves and raking the carpet with my fingers to form and gather up hairballs laden with grimy floor residue. I take my gatherings out to the kitchen and throw them in the trash, but the bin falls over as I do and the garbage that's in it drops out onto the floor. The plastic bin is deteriorating and is useless. Behind the bin, there is a stack of brown paper bags. I grab one of them and shuffle all of the trash and garbage into it and I stand it up next to the door, intending to take it outside later. Mom would die of apoplexy is she came home and saw the way this place looked. I stand at the back door looking out at the yard. The grass hasn't been cut in months and the trees and bushes are overgrown. That was my job, when I lived at home.

I don't work any more, not since I abandoned my career as a police officer, not since I quit to avoid being dismissed from the force and changed my personality back away from being a crazy authoritarian asshole. I'm working on my house, slowly remodeling it. I stand in the doorway looking out at the back yard. The grass is all but dead. Tufts of it grow out of a bare dirt lawn. But it's mowed. I mowed it yesterday amid clouds of dust kicked up by the mower. It's been a very dry summer. I'm having a lot of trouble making repairs to the house faster than it's deteriorating.

When I went back to work after the tunnel incident, no one treated me the same as before. I had a problem keeping partners. No one wanted to work with me. I didn't care. I liked to work alone. One day I'm speeding along the main drag in the city, the avenue that's twice as wide as any other, four lanes of traffic in each direction. My new partner is with me, a woman. I didn't want her, but I had no choice. Times are changing. But, as I've gotten to know her, I decide that she's all right. She's tough. She's no pushover. We're chasing two petty criminals in an old '72 Buick. But it's got a big engine and we can't catch it on the straightaway in our little rent-a-cop-car. I'm pissed. The department has really gotten cheap. I really wanted to bust those guys. But we never called for backup because we wanted the bust for ourselves, and now it's too late. They're gone.

The day that we chased that Buick was the day I quit. I was too stressed out and had been for a long time. I walked fast along the gradual slope to the bridge, the continuation of that same long wide main drag where it left the city and crossed the river to the North Side, trailed by my soon-to-be ex-partner. She had been trying to talk me out of quitting, but had given up and concentrated on just trying to keep up. I'd stopped replying to her and walked on ahead alone.

Just before the bridge, two boys came out of a side street bouncing a basketball. It got away from them and rolled toward her. She scooped it up. I saw her in short glances behind me. She faked a toss to the boys and then, as I turned my head away, she powered the basketball at my back. But I'd caught just the slightest glimpse of what she was about to do as I turned away and I quickly wheeled and caught the ball, turned away again and walked on, bouncing the ball onto the bridge sidewalk.

Both boys shouted "Hey" as they ran after us. Just before the bridge, a path led off down the steep hillside. It looked dangerous and I wondered why the Parks Department would allow it to exist. It looked like it should be fenced off. On the bridge, as I walked along, the height began to overwhelm me. I felt dizzy. I tucked the ball under my arm and worked at being steady. I was afraid I'd drop the ball over the railing. The boys came running up, and I gently tossed the ball to them. They ran on ahead. My partner caught up and took my arm. We walked across the bridge together.

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