Steven Millhauser: We Others: New and Selected Stories

COFFEE SHOPS AND RESTAURANTS. We read about it the next morning on the front page of the Daily Observer . We had taken note of the first incident, the one reported by Robert Sutliff, which had seemed to us a misunderstanding of some sort, a bizarre error that would soon be explained. A second attack was far more serious. It seemed to be part of a deliberate plan, though exactly what was at stake remained unclear. All over town, people were talking about it: in coffee shops and restaurants, at gas station pumps, in the post office and the CVS, in high school hallways, on slatted benches beside potted trees in the mall. We wondered who he could possibly be, this stranger who had appeared among us with his angry eyes. Some argued that the man was mentally unstable and was working out some private drama. Others insisted that he knew his victims and had lain in wait for them. Still others, a small group, claimed that the attacks were some form of social statement: it was no accident, they said, that the assailant had chosen the station parking lot during early-evening rush hour, when businessmen carrying laptops were returning from the city to their leafy suburban town. Everyone agreed that the incidents were disturbing and that the station parking lot was in need of twenty-four-hour police surveillance.

TWO DESCRIPTIONS. From the two descriptions, we learned that the assailant was a male Caucasian about five nine or ten or eleven, solid in build, clean-shaven. His hair was short, light brown or dark brown, neatly combed. He had brown or gray or blue eyes, a straight well-shaped nose, and a slightly protruding chin. He might have been thirty or thirty-five years old. Both victims agreed that the man had looked angry. He wore a beige or tan double-breasted trench coat. According to Kraus, the belt had been tied, not buckled. Sutliff, who wasn’t sure about the belt, remembered the coat fairly well. It was the sort of trench coat that anyone on that train between the ages of twenty-five and sixty might have been wearing — an expensive coat, well cut, stylish in a conservative way.

RICHARD EMERICK. At 6:45 the next morning Richard Emerick parked in his space at the station, reached over to the door handle, and stopped. He glanced at his watch: too late to go back. He had made a mistake, but at least he’d caught it in time. Foolishly, without thought, he had thrown on his trench coat; the forecast was for rain in the morning, heavy at times, tapering off toward noon. But ever since the Serial Slapper had appeared, a trench coat was bound to attract suspicious attention. True, Emerick’s hair was blond, and it wasn’t particularly short, though who knew what “short” meant, and besides, people were careless. He slipped off his trench coat, draped it over his arm, and stepped out of the car. That was worse; the coat, on this chilly morning, drew attention to itself, as if he were trying to conceal it in some way, as in fact he was trying to do. He glanced around, folded the coat into a squarish lump, and placed it quickly under his arm. Worse still: he was ruining the coat, and it was no less conspicuous. The sky was darker than before; rain was definitely on its way. Emerick opened the door, popped the trunk, and walked to the back of the car. He shook out his trench coat, folded it twice, and laid it in the trunk on top of two eco-friendly reusable grocery bags decorated with fields of yellow wildflowers. He closed the trunk, pressed the lock button on his key, and set off toward the station as the first drops began to fall.

RAYMOND SORENSEN. That afternoon, a little before one o’clock, Ray Sorensen, a cable repairman at the end of his lunch break, walked out of the Birchwood Avenue branch of the First Puritan Savings Bank, where he had deposited his paycheck and withdrawn eighty dollars from the ATM. The money would get him through the next couple of days, with a lottery ticket thrown in. The Sunday landscaping gig ought to see him through the rest of the week, though he was a month late on his car payment and he might have to cash out his savings account to pay down his credit-card debt. The sky was overcast, a fifty-fifty chance of rain; he had to drive out of town and check a power line at a property up by the lake. As he walked toward his truck, a man stepped from the row of high bushes that grew on the concrete divider, walked between two parked cars, and turned toward the bank. As he drew near Sorensen, he swerved toward him and began to raise an arm. Only then did Sorensen remember the article he had glanced at in the paper that morning. He’d been amused; it had nothing to do with him. The slap was so sudden and so strong that for a moment he didn’t understand what had happened. By the time he shouted “What the fuck!” the man in the trench coat was already walking away. Sorensen started running after him. The man stepped onto the divider and disappeared behind a high bush. Later Sorensen told the police that the stranger just seemed to vanish into thin air — though maybe he’d had time to cross to the other side of the lot and climb the fence separating the bank from the house behind it. Sorensen searched behind every bush on the divider. He walked up and down the lot, circled the bank, then returned to his truck and drove out to his job. Only when he arrived home at 5:45 did he read the paper again. He thought it over and phoned the police.

AT THE RAILROAD STATION. At the moment when Raymond Sorensen noticed a man stepping from behind the bushes on the divider outside the First Puritan Savings Bank, a patrol car was cruising slowly through the lanes of the railroad station parking lot. A few hours later a second policeman appeared on the station platform, where he walked up and down and looked out over the rows of parked cars stretching away. At 5:00, on the street overpass that looked down at the tracks, the gantries, the brick station, the taxis by the curb, and the parking lot that ran along the length of the tracks for several blocks, a third policeman stood leaning his elbows on the cast-iron railing as he surveyed the movement below. The sky was clearing. Men and women walked swiftly to their cars, looking about carefully; many of them stayed in groups, which became smaller as they came to each vehicle in turn. At 6:00 the security lights came on, an hour earlier than usual. Under the pale sky and glowing lights, the roofs and hoods of cars looked glazed, like candy. The last train arrived at 2:57 a.m. A half-moon hung in the dark blue sky, like another security light.

NEXT MORNING. We read about the attack on Raymond Sorensen the next morning in the Daily Observer . We were alarmed that it had taken place in broad daylight, far from the railroad station. Even more disturbing was the violation of a second pattern: this time the victim wasn’t a businessman returning from his high-paying job in the city but a uniformed worker on his lunch break in town. We realized that we’d taken a kind of comfort in thinking of the attacks as confined to the station parking lot after sunset, when commuters in expensive suits were coming home for dinner; suddenly our anger, our anxiety, which had been confined to narrow bounds, burst free with a rush of energy. Where would the stranger strike next? The attack outside the bank seemed to strengthen the argument of those who believed the assaults were random. Others claimed that the opposite was clearly the case: the attacker liked to stage his event in parking lots. Those who had insisted that the assailant was seeking out suit-and-tie commuters as a form of social protest were forced to abandon or modify their argument, while those who had suggested that the attacker knew his victims saw no reason to abandon their explanation. New opinions had it that the stranger’s real interest lay in disrupting order, in spreading fear, in taunting the police.