Michael Marshall - The Intruders

I unloaded the backpack’s contents into their pre-determined slots in the kitchen. The answering machine was on the far end of the counter. The light was flashing.

‘About time,’ I said, the first words the house had heard since Fisher left.

But it wasn’t. Two people had called, or one person twice, but left no message. I sent beats of ill-will to the perpetrator/s and another to myself for not getting Caller ID working yet. The box claimed it was possible but the manual had been translated from Japanese by a halfwit prairie dog. Just changing the outgoing message had required technical support from NASA. I knew the caller/s couldn’t have been Amy, who knew how much non-messages piss me off, and would at least have intoned ‘No message, master’ in a gravely tone.

I got out my cell and pressed her speed dial number, hooking it under my ear while I got a beer from the fridge. After five rings I was diverted to the answering service, yet again. Her business voice warmly thanked whomever for calling and promised she’d get back to them. I left a message asking her to do just that. Again.

‘Soon would be nice,’ I muttered, when the phone had been replaced in my pocket.

I took the drink through to my study. As the person earning actual money Amy had a grander lair on the floor below. Mine had nothing in it but a file box of reference material, the expensively distressed table from the store in town and a cheaply distressed chair I’d found in the garage. The only thing on the table was my laptop. It was not dusty because I made a point of wiping it with my sleeve every morning. It was not nailed shut because we didn’t have any nails. I dimmed the lights and sat. When I opened the lid the machine sprang into life, not learning from experience. It presented me with a word processing document in which not many words had yet been processed. This was partly because of the panoramic view of bitterbrush and Douglas firs from the window, which I’d found myself able to stare at for hours. When the snows did come I knew I might just as well leave the computer shut. It was harder to be distracted in the room at night, however, because aside from a few branches picked out by the light from the window, you couldn’t see anything at all. So maybe now my fingers and mind would unlock and start working together. Maybe I’d think of something to say and fall into it for a while.

Maybe I’d be able to ignore the fact that after only a month I was bored out of my tiny mind.

I was sitting at the table because two years ago I wrote a book about certain places in LA. I say ‘wrote’ but mainly it was photographs, and even that word stretches the truth. I took the pictures with the camera in my cell phone: one day I happened to be somewhere with my phone in my hand, and I clicked a picture off. When I transferred it to the computer later, I realised it was actually okay. The technical quality was so low that you saw through the image to the place, caught in a moment, blurred and ephemeral. After that it became a habit, and when I had enough I threw them into a document, jotting a comment about each. Over time these annotations grew until there was a page or two of text accompanying each photograph, sometimes more. Amy came in one evening when I was doing this, asked to read it. I let her. I felt no anxiety while it was in her hands, knowing she would be kind, and had only mild interest in what she’d say. A couple days later she handed me the name and phone number of someone who worked at an art house publisher. I laughed hard, but she said try it, and so I mailed the file to this guy without thinking much more about it.

Three weeks after that he called me one afternoon and offered me twenty thousand dollars. Mainly out of bafflement, I said sure, knock yourself out. Amy squealed when she heard, and took me out to dinner.

It was published eight months later, a square hardcover with a grainy photograph of a nondescript Santa Monica house on the front. It looked to me like the kind of book you’d have to be out of your mind even to pick up, let alone buy, but the LA Times noticed it, and it got a couple other good reviews, and weirdly it became something that sold a little, for a while.

The world rolled on, and so did we. Stuff happened. I quit my job, we moved. If I was anything now, I was the guy who’d written that book. Which meant, presumably, I now needed to become a guy who’d written some other book. Nothing had come to mind. It kept continuing to fail to come to mind, with a steady resolve that suggested not coming to mind was what it was all about, that failing to come to mind was its chief skill and purpose in life.

A couple hours later I was in the living room. I’d drunk more beer but this hadn’t seemed to help. I was adrift in the middle of the couch, mired in the restless fugue state characteristic of those who’ve failed to conjure something out of thin air. I knew I should unpack the box of web ‘research’ I’d half-heartedly accumulated. But I also knew if I hit the clippings and nothing shook out of it, then walking back into town and buying some good, long nails would move up to Plan A. The laptop had done me little deliberate harm. I wasn’t ready to kill it yet.

I took an unearned work’s-done cigarette from the pack on the table and headed out to the deck. I stopped smoking indoors the year Amy and I got married. She’d tolerated it at first because she’d done a little tobacco herself, back in the day and long before I’d known her, but had taken to using air freshening devices and raising an eyebrow whenever I lit up. Subtly, and sweetly, and for my own good. I didn’t especially mind the new regime. I could smoke all I wanted at work, and now house guests couldn’t accuse me of attempted manslaughter by passive smoking, and it just made life easier all round.

I leaned against the rail. The world was silent but for the confidential whispering of trees. The sky was clear and cold above and midnight blue. I could smell firs and faint wood smoke from a distant hearth fire – likely our neighbours, the Zimmermans. It was good here, I knew that. We had a fancy house. The landscape was rugged and not much had changed for it in a long time. Birch Crossing was real without being an ass about it: pickups and SUVs were equally represented and you could buy a very fancy spatula if you wanted. The Zimmermans were a five-minute drive away but we’d already had dinner at their house twice. They were a brace of retired history professors from Berkeley and conversation had not exactly flowed the first time, but the gift of a single malt on our second visit had oiled the wheels. Both were sprightly for people in their early seventies – Bobbi filled the CD player with everything from Mozart to Sparklehorse, and Ben’s black hair was barely flecked with grey. He and I now chatted affably enough on the street when we met, though I suspected his wife had the measure of me.

And yet a week ago I had been standing right there on the deck, when something had happened.

I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only mid-afternoon and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both sides and front and back too. I’d even got an idea down that morning, and halfway believed that I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.

Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town, I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d got to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.