【英文短篇小说】The Limited & Breaking and Entering

The Limited
I saw a man swerve 1 his car
And try to hit a stray dog,
But the quick mutt dodged 2
Between two parked cars
And made his escape.
God, I thought, did I just see
What I think I saw?
At the next red light,
I pulled up beside the man
And stared hard at him.
He knew that’d I seen
His murder attempt,
But he didn’t care.
He smiled and yelled loud
Enough for me to hear him
Through our closed windows:
“Don’t give me that face
Unless you’re going to do
Something about it.
Come on, tough guy,
What are you going to do?”
I didn’t do anything.
I turned right on the green.
He turned left against traffic.
I don’t know what happened
To that man or the dog,
But I drove home
And wrote this poem.
Why do poets think
They can change the world?
The only life I can save
Is my own.
 
Breaking and Entering
Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film—how to construct a scene—my professor, Mr. Baron 3, said to me, “You don’t have to show people using a door to walk into a room. If people are already in the room, the audience will understand that they didn’t crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize. The audience understands that a door has been used—the eyes and mind will make the connection—so you can just skip the door.”
Mr. Baron, a full-time 4 visual aid, skipped as he said, “Skip the door.” And I laughed, not knowing that I would always remember his bit of teaching, though of course, when I tell the story now, I turn my emotive professor into the scene-eating lead of a Broadway musical.
“Skip the door, young man!” Mr. Baron sings in my stories—my lies and exaggerations—skipping across the stage with a top hat in one hand and a cane 5 in the other. “Skip the door, old friend! And you will be set free!”
“Skip the door” is a good piece of advice—a maxim 6, if you will—that I’ve applied 7 to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life. To state it in less poetic 8 terms, one would say, “An editor must omit all unnecessary information.” So in telling you this story—with words, not film or video stock—in constructing its scenes, I will attempt to omit all unnecessary information. But oddly enough, in order to skip the door in telling this story, I am forced to begin with a door: the front door of my home on Twenty-seventh Avenue in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
One year ago, there was a knock on that door. I heard it, but I did not rise from my chair to answer. As a freelance editor, I work at home, and I had been struggling with a scene from a locally made film, an independent. Written, directed, and shot by amateurs, the footage was both incomplete and voluminous. Simply stated, there was far too much of nothing. Moreover, it was a love scene—a graphic 9 sex scene, in fact—and the director and the producer had somehow convinced a naive 10 and ambitious local actress to shoot the scene full frontal, graphically 11 so. This was not supposed to be a pornographic movie; this was to be a tender coming-of-age work of art. But it wasn’t artistic 12, or not the kind of art it pretended to be. This young woman had been exploited—with her permission, of course—but I was still going to do my best to protect her.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a prude—I’ve edited and enjoyed sexual and violent films that were far more graphic—but I’d spotted 13 honest transformative vulnerability in that young actress’s performance. Though the director and the producer thought she’d just been acting—had created her fear and shame through technical skill—I knew better. And so, by editing out the more gratuitous 14 nudity and focusing on faces and small pieces of dialogue—and by paying more attention to fingertips than to what those fingertips were touching—I was hoping to turn a sleazy gymnastic sex scene into an exchange that resembled how two people in new love might actually touch each other.
Was I being paternalistic, condescending 15, and hypocritical? Sure. After all, I was being paid to work with exploiters, so didn’t that mean I was also being exploited as I helped exploit the woman? And what about the young man, the actor, in the scene? Was he dumb and vulnerable as well? Though he was allowed—was legally bound—to keep his penis hidden, wasn’t he more exploited than exploiter? These things are hard to define. Still, even in the most compromised of situations, one must find a moral center.
But how could I find any center with that knocking on the door? It had become an evangelical pounding: Bang, bang, bang, bang! It had to be the four/four beat of a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon. Bang, cha, bang, cha! It had to be the iambic pentameter of a Sierra Club shill or a magazine sales kid.
Trust me, nobody interesting or vital has ever knocked on a front door at three in the afternoon, so I ignored the knocking and kept at my good work. And, sure enough, my potential guest stopped the noise and went away. I could hear feet pounding down the stairs and there was only silence—or, rather, the relative silence of my urban neighborhood.
But then, a few moments later, I heard a window shatter in my basement. Is shatter too strong a verb? I heard my window break. But break seems too weak a verb. As I visualize 16 the moment—as I edit in my mind—I add the sound track, or rather I completely silence the sound track. I cut the sounds of the city—the planes overhead, the cars on the streets, the boats on the lake, the televisions and the voices and the music and the wind through the trees—until one can hear only shards 17 of glass dropping onto a hardwood floor.
And then one hears—feels—the epic 18 thump 19 of two feet landing on that same floor.
Somebody—the same person who had knocked on my front door to ascertain 20 if anybody was home, had just broken and entered my life.
Now please forgive me if my tenses—my past, present, and future—blend, but one must understand that I happen to be one editor who is not afraid of jump cuts—of rapid flashbacks and flash-forwards. In order to be terrified, one must lose all sense of time and place. When I heard those feet hit the floor, I traveled back in time—I de-evolved, I suppose—and became a primitive 21 version of myself. I had been a complex organism—but I’d turned into a two-hundred-and-two pound one-celled amoeba. And that amoeba knew only fear.
Looking back, I suppose I should have just run away. I could have run out the front door into the street, or the back door onto the patio 22, or the side door off the kitchen into the alley 23, or even through the door into the garage—where I could have dived through the dog door cut into the garage and made my caninelike escape.
But here’s the salt of the thing: though I cannot be certain, I believe that I was making my way toward the front door—after all, the front door was the only place in my house where I could be positive that my intruder was not waiting. But in order to get from my office to the front door, I had to walk past the basement door. And as I walked past the basement door, I spotted the baseball bat.
It wasn’t my baseball bat. Now, when one thinks of baseball bats, one conjures 24 images of huge slabs 25 of ash wielded 26 by steroid-fueled freaks. But that particular bat belonged to my ten-year-old son. It was a Little League bat, so it was comically small. I could easily swing it with one hand and had, in fact, often swung it one-handed as I hit practice grounders to the little second baseman of my heart, my son, my Maximilian, my Max. Yes, I am a father. And a husband. That is information you need to know. My wife, Wendy, and my son were not in the house. To give me the space and time I needed to finish editing the film, my wife had taken our son to visit her mother and father in Chicago; they’d been gone for one week and would be gone for another. So, to be truthful 27, I was in no sense being forced to defend my family, and I’d never been the kind of man to defend his home, his property, his shit. In fact, I’d often laughed at the news footage of silly men armed with garden hoses as they tried to defend their homes from wildfires. I always figured those men would die, go to hell, and spend the rest of eternity 28 having squirt-gun fights with demons 29.
So with all that information in mind, why did I grab my son’s baseball bat and open the basement door? Why did I creep down the stairs? Trust me, I’ve spent many long nights awake, asking myself those questions. There are no easy answers. Of course, there are many men—and more than a few women—who believe I was fully 30 within my rights to head down those stairs and confront my intruder. There are laws that define—that frankly 31 encourage—the art of self-defense. But since I wasn’t interested in defending my property, and since my family and I were not being directly threatened, what part of my self could I have possibly been defending?
In the end, I think I wasn’t defending anything at all. I’m an editor—an artist—and I like to make connections; I am paid to make connections. And so I wonder. Did I walk down those stairs because I was curious? Because a question had been asked (Who owned the feet that landed on my basement floor?) and I, the editor, wanted to discover the answer?
So, yes, slowly I made my way down the stairs and through the dark hallway and turned the corner into our downstairs family room—the man cave, really, with the big television and the pool table—and saw a teenaged burglar. I stood still and silent. Standing 32 with his back to me, obsessed 33 with the task—the crime—at hand, he hadn’t yet realized that I was in the room with him.
Let me get something straight. Up until that point I hadn’t made any guesses as to the identity of my intruder. I mean, yes, I live in a black neighborhood—and I’m not black—and there had been news of a series of local burglaries perpetrated by black teenagers, but I swear none of that entered my mind. And when I saw him, the burglar, rifling through my DVD collection and shoving selected titles into his backpack—he was a felon 34 with cinematic taste, I guess, and that was a strangely pleasing observation—I didn’t think, There’s a black teenager stealing from me. I only remembering being afraid and wanting to make my fear go away.
“Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed. “You fucking fucker!”
The black kid was so startled that he staggered into my television—cracking the screen—and nearly fell before he caught his balance and ran for the broken window. I could have—would have—let him make his escape, but he stopped and turned back toward me. Why did he do that? I don’t know. He was young and scared and made an irrational 35 decision. Or maybe it wasn’t irrational at all. He’d slashed 36 his right hand when he crawled through the broken window, so he must have decided 37 the opening with its jagged glass edges was not a valid 38 or safe exit—who’d ever think a broken window was a proper entry or exit—so he searched for a door. But the door was behind me. He paused, weighed his options, and sprinted 39 toward me. He was going to bulldoze me. Once again, I could have made the decision to avoid conflict and step aside. But I didn’t. As that kid ran toward me I swung the baseball bat with one hand.
I often wonder what would have happened if that bat had been made of wood. When Max and I had gone shopping for bats, I’d tried to convince him to let me buy him a wooden one, an old-fashioned slugger, the type I’d used when I was a Little Leaguer. I’ve always been a nostalgic guy. But my son recognized that a ten-dollar wooden bat purchased at Target was not a good investment.
“That wood one will break easy,” Max had said. “I want the lum-a-lum one.”
Of course, he’d meant to say aluminum 40; we’d both laughed at his mispronunciation. And I’d purchased the lum-a-lum bat.
So it was a metal bat that I swung one-handed at the black teenager’s head. If it had been cheap and wooden, perhaps the bat would have snapped upon contact and dissipated the force. Perhaps. But this bat did not snap. It was strong and sure, so when it made full contact with the kid’s temple, he dropped to the floor and did not move.
He was dead. I had killed him.
I fell to my knees next to the kid, dropped my head onto his chest, and wept.
I don’t remember much else about the next few hours, but I called 911, opened the door for the police, and led them to the body. And I answered and asked questions.
“Did he have a gun or knife?”
“I don’t know. No. Well, I didn’t see one.”
“He attacked you first?”
“He ran at me. He was going to run me over.”
“And that’s when you hit him with the bat?”
“Yes. It’s my son’s bat. It’s so small. I can’t believe it’s strong enough to—is he really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“We don’t know yet.”
His name was Elder Briggs. Elder: such an unusual name for anybody, especially a sixteen-year-old kid. He was a junior at Garfield High School, a B student and backup point guard for the basketball team, an average kid. A good kid, by all accounts. He had no criminal record—had never committed even a minor 41 infraction 42 in school, at home, or in the community—so why had this good kid broken into my house? Why had he decided to steal from me? Why had he made all the bad decisions that had led to his death?
The investigation 43 was quick but thorough, and I was not charged with any crime. It was self-defense. But then nothing is ever clear, is it? I was legally innocent, that much is true, but was I morally innocent? I wasn’t sure, and neither were a significant percentage of my fellow citizens. Shortly after the police held the press conference that exonerated 44 me, Elder’s family—his mother, father, older brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and priest—organized a protest. It was small, only forty or fifty people, but how truly small can a protest feel when you are the subject—the object—of that protest?
I watched the live coverage 45 of the event. My wife and son, after briefly 46 returning from Chicago, had only spent a few days with me before they fled back to her parents. We wanted to protect our child from the media. An ironic 47 wish, considering that the media were only interested in me because I’d killed somebody else’s child.
“The police don’t care about my son because he’s black,” Elder’s mother, Althea, said to a dozen different microphones and as many cameras. “He’s just another black boy killed by a white man. And none of these white men care.”
As Althea continued to rant 48 about my whiteness, some clever producer—and his editor—cut into footage of me, the white man who owned a baseball bat, walking out of the police station as a free man. It was a powerful piece of editing. It made me look pale and guilty. But all of them—Althea, the other protesters, the reporters, producers, and editors—were unaware 49 of one crucial piece of information: I am not a white man.
I am an enrolled 50 member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. Oh, I don’t look Indian, or at least not typically Indian. Some folks assume I’m a little bit Italian or Spanish or perhaps Middle Eastern. Most folks think I’m just another white guy who tans well. And since I’d just spent months in a dark editing room, I was at my palest. But I grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the only son of a mother and father who were also Spokane Indians who grew up on our reservation. Yes, both of my grandfathers had been half-white, but they’d both died before I was born.
I’m not trying to be holy here. I wasn’t a traditional Indian. I didn’t dance or sing powwow or speak my language or spend my free time marching for Indian sovereignty. And I’d married a white woman. One could easily mock my lack of cultural connection, but one could not question my race. That’s not true, of course. People, especially other Indians, always doubted my race. And I’d always tried to pretend it didn’t matter—I was confident about my identity—but it did hurt my feelings. So when I heard Althea Riggs misidentify my race—and watched the media covertly 51 use editing techniques to confirm her misdiagnosis—I picked up my cell phone and dialed the news station.
“Hello,” I said to the receptionist. “This is George Wilson. I’m watching your coverage of the protests and I must issue a correction.”
“Wait, what?” the receptionist asked. “Are you really George Wilson?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Hold on,” she said. “Let me put you straight through to the producer.”
So the producer took the call and, after asking a few questions to further confirm my identity, he put me on live. So my voice played over images of Althea Riggs weeping and wailing 52, of her screaming at the sky, at God. How could I have allowed myself to be placed into such a compromising position? How could I have been such an idiot? How could I have been so goddamn callous 53 and self-centered?
“Hello, Mr. Wilson,” the evening news anchor said. “I understand you have something you’d like to say.”
“Yes.” My voice carried into tens of thousands of Seattle homes. “I am watching the coverage of the protest, and I insist on a correction. I am not a white man. I am an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians.”
Yes, that was my first official public statement about the death of Elder Briggs. It didn’t take clever editing to make me look evil; I had accomplished 54 this in one take, live and uncut.
I was suddenly the most hated man in Seattle. And the most beloved. My fellow liberals spoke 55 of my lateral 56 violence and the destructive influence of colonialism on the indigenous 57, while conservatives lauded 58 my defensive 59 stand and lonely struggle against urban crime. Local bloggers posted hijacked 60 footage of the most graphically violent films I’d edited.
And finally, a local news program obtained rough footage of the film I’d been working on when Elder Briggs broke into my house. Though I had, through judicious 61 editing, been trying to protect the young actress, a black actress, the news only played the uncut footage of the obviously frightened and confused woman. And when the reporters ambushed 62 her—her name was Tracy—she, of course, could only respond that, yes, she felt as if she’d been violated. I didn’t blame her for that; I agreed with her. But none of that mattered. I could in no way dispute the story—the cleverly edited series of short films—that had been made about me. Yes, I was a victim, but I didn’t for one second forget that Elder Briggs was dead. I was ashamed and vilified 63, but I was alive.
I spent most of that time alone in my basement, in the room where I had killed Elder Briggs. When one spends that much time alone, one ponders. And when one ponders, one creates theories—hypotheses, to explain the world. Oh, hell, forget rationalization; I was pissed, mostly at myself for failing to walk away from a dangerous situation. And I was certainly pissed at the local media, who had become as exploitative as any pornographic moviemaker. But I was also pissed at Althea and Elder Briggs.
Yes, the kid was a decent athlete; yes, the kid was a decent student; yes, the kid was a decent person. But he had broken into my house. He had smashed my window and was stealing my DVDs and, if I had not been home, would have stolen my computer and television and stereo and every other valuable thing in my house. And his mother, Althea, instead of explaining why her good and decent son had broken and entered a stranger’s house, committing a felony, had instead decided to blame me and accuse me of being yet another white man who was always looking to maim 64 another black kid—had already maimed generations of black kids—when in fact I was a reservation Indian who had been plenty fucked myself by generations of white men. So, Althea, do you want to get into a pain contest? Do you want to participate in the Genocidal Olympics? Whose tragic 65 history has more breadth and depth and length?
Oh, Althea, why the hell was your son in my house? And oh, my God, it was a Little League baseball bat! It was only twenty inches long and weighed less than three pounds. I could have hit one hundred men in the head—maybe one thousand or one million—and not done anything more than given them a headache. But on that one day, on that one bitter afternoon, I took a swing—a stupid, one-handed, unlucky cut—and killed a kid, a son, a young man who was making a bad decision but who maybe had brains and heart and soul enough to stop making bad decisions.
Oh, Jesus, I murdered somebody’s potential.
Oh, Mary, it was self-defense, but it was still murder. I confess: I am a killer 66.
How does one survive these revelations? One just lives. Or, rather, one just finally walks out of his basement and realizes that the story is over. It’s old news. There are new villains 67 and heroes, criminals and victims, to be defined and examined and tossed aside.
Elder Briggs and I were suddenly and equally unimportant.
My life became quiet again. I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It’s not oil that runs the world, it’s shame. My Max was always going to love me, even when he began to understand my limitations, I didn’t know what my wife thought of my weaknesses.
Weeks later, in bed, after lovemaking, she interrogated 68 me.
“Honey,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“With that kid, did you lose your temper?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, you have lost your temper before.”
“Just one time.”
“Yes, but you broke your hand when you punched the wall.”
“Do you think I lost my temper with Elder Briggs?” I asked.
My wife paused before answering, and in that pause I heard all her doubt and fear. So I got out of bed, dressed, and left the house. I decided to drive to see a hot new independent film—a gory 69 war flick 70 that pretended to be antiwar—but first stepped into a mini-mart to buy candy I could smuggle 71 into the theater.
I was standing in the candy aisle 72, trying to decide between a PayDay and a Snickers, when a group of young black men walked into the store. They were drunk or high and they were cursing the world, but in a strangely friendly way. How is it that black men can make a word like motherfucker sound jovial 73?
There are people—white folks, mostly—who are extremely uncomfortable in the presence of black people. And I know plenty of Indians—my parents, for example—who are also uncomfortable around black folks. As for me? I suppose I’d always been the kind of nonblack person who celebrated 74 himself for not being uncomfortable around blacks. But now, as I watched those black men jostle one another up and down the aisles 75, I was afraid—no, I was nervous. What if they recognized me? What if they were friends of Elder Briggs? What if they attacked me?
Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental 76 and inconsequential. Those young black men paid for their energy drinks and left the store. I paid for my candy bar, walked out to my car, and drove toward the movie theater.
One block later, I had to hit my brakes when those same black guys jaywalked across the street in front of me. All of them stared me down and walked as slowly as possible through the crosswalk. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years and I’d often had this same encounter with young black men. It was some remnant of the warrior 77 culture, I suppose.
When it had happened before, I had always made it a point to smile goofily and wave to the black men who were challenging me. Since they thought I was a dorky white guy, I’d behave like one. I’d be what they wanted me to be.
But this time, when those black men walked in slow motion in front of me, I did not smile or laugh. I just stared back at them. I knew I could hit the gas and slam into them and hurt them, maybe even kill them. I knew I had that power. And I knew that I would not use that power. But what about these black guys? What power did they have? They could only make me wait at an intersection 78. And so I waited. I waited until they walked around the corner and out of my vision. I waited until another driver pulled up behind me and honked 79 his horn. I was supposed to move, and so I went.