The Broken Window

October, eleven years old. Lydia’s gone. No note. She doesn’t take the doll. Fourteen-year-old Jason comes to live with us from Juvenile. He pushes into my room one night. He wants my bed (mine’s dry and his isn’t). I sleep in his wet one. Every night for a month. I complain to Father. He tells me to shut up. They need the money and they get a bonus for ED kids like Jason and…He stops talking. Does he mean me too? I don’t know what ED means. Not then.

January, twelve years old. Flashing red lights. Mother sobbing, the other foster children sobbing. The burn on Father’s arm was painful but fortunately, the fireman says, the lighter fluid on the mattress didn’t ignite fast. If it was gasoline he’d be dead. As they take Jason away, dark eyes under dark brows, he screams he didn’t know how the lighter fluid and matches got into his book bag. He didn’t do it, he didn’t! And he didn’t pin up those pictures of people burned alive in his classroom at school.

Father screams at mother, Look at what you did!

You wanted the bonus! she screams back.

The ED bonus.

Emotionally disturbed, I found out.

Memories, memories…Ah, some collections I would gladly give away, leave in a Dumpster if I could.

I smile up at my silent family, the Prescotts. Then I turn back to the problem at hand-Them.

I’m calmer now, the edginess dulled. And I’m confident that like my lying father, like panicked Jason Stringfellow led off by the police, like the sixteens screaming at the climax of a transaction, those pursuing me-They-will soon be dead and dust. And I’ll be living out my days happily with my two-dimensional family and my treasures here in the Closet.

My soldiers, the data, are about to march into battle. I’m like Hitler in his Berlin bunker, ordering his Waffen-SS troops to meet the invaders. Data are invincible.

I see now that it’s nearly 11:00 P.M. Time for the news. I need to see what They know about the death at the cemetery and what They don’t. On goes the TV.

The station has “gone live” to City Hall. Now the deputy mayor, Ron Scott, a distinguished-looking man, is explaining that the police have put together a task force to investigate a recent murder and rape, and a murder this evening in a Queens cemetery, which seems related to the earlier crime.

Scott introduces an NYPD inspector, Joseph Malloy, who “will discuss the case more specifically.”

Though he doesn’t, not really. He shows a composite of the perpetrator that resembles me only in the way it resembles about 200,000 other men in the city.

White or light-skinned? Oh, please.

He tells people to be cautious. “We think the perpetrator has used techniques of identity theft to get close to his victims. Lower their defenses.”

Be wary, he goes on to say, of anyone you don’t know but who has knowledge of your purchases, bank accounts, vacation plans, traffic violations. “Even little things you wouldn’t normally pay attention to.”

In fact, the city has just flown in an expert in information management and security from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Carlton Soames will spend the next few days assisting the investigators and advising them on the issue of identity theft, which they believe is the best way to find the perpetrator.

Soames looks like a typical ruffled-haired small-town Midwest boy gone smart. An awkward grin. Suit a little off center, glasses a bit smudged, the asymmetrical glare tells me. And how much wear would that wedding ring show? Plenty, I’ll bet. He looks like the sort who married early.

He doesn’t say anything but gazes out like a nervous animal at the press and the camera. Captain Malloy continues, “In an age when identity theft is increasing, and the consequences are increasingly grave-”

The pun, obviously unintentional, is unfortunate.

“-we take seriously our responsibility to protect the citizens of this city.”