Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

NOT GUILTY. Although the details of the attack on Matthew Dennis drew our fascinated attention, our reading of the article resulted, for the most part, in impatience and resentment. Matthew Dennis, we felt, had a twisted sympathy for his attacker; we distrusted his analysis of the man’s motives and, in rereading the article, we began to distrust certain details of the attack itself. Most of us would not have felt “intense curiosity” at the sight of an angry man in a parking lot at night, raising his hand to strike us in the face. We were baffled, we were exasperated, by Matthew Dennis’s lack of outrage. The same absence of anger was all too evident in his analysis, which seemed less sympathetic to us than to the man who had attacked our neighbors, disrupted our peace, and frightened our children. The next morning, angry letters appeared in the Daily Observer , denouncing Matthew Dennis and questioning the judgment of the editors in running the story. What particularly galled us was the suggestion that all of us might be guilty and deserving of punishment. After all, we were not members of some revolutionary gang who had raided an enemy town and committed rape and murder, we were not passive citizens turning our heads away as smoke rose from the concentration camp chimneys. No, we were peaceful, law-abiding inhabitants of a suburban town, trying to raise our kids in a difficult world, while keeping our lawns mowed and our roof gutters free of leaves. The man was a criminal and needed to be put away. The next morning, an editorial acknowledged the storm of protest and stated that the opinions of the article were not necessarily those of the Daily Observer . The more we thought about it, the more offended we were by Matthew Dennis’s report, so that we almost forgot, in our indignation, that the stranger had struck another blow.

WAITING. Again we waited, like people looking up at the sky for a storm. This time we sensed a difference. Now there was anger in our town — you could feel it like a wind. We were angry at the presence of danger in our streets, angry at the police department, angry at being put on the defensive by reporters whose job it was to give us the facts and keep their cracked ideas to themselves. You could feel a tension in public places, an uneasiness at the dinner table. On the streetcorner across from the post office in the center of town, a dozen people stood with signs that read KEEP OUR STREETS SAFE and MORE POLICE. A bearded man with a ponytail held a sign printed in large red letters: THE JUDGMENT IS COMING. Tempers were short. In the library parking lot, a fight broke out when one car backed into another. We went to bed early and lay there listening. Waking in the dark, we pushed aside the blinds and looked out our bedroom windows at houses glowing with light: the front porch lights, the living room lights, floodlights over garage doors, lanterns on lawns — as if our town were having a party all through the night.

DIVINE PUNISHMENT. One of the more bizarre developments of the lull was the emergence of certain shrill, fanatical voices, which saw the stranger as a messenger of the divine will. A letter in the opinions section of the Daily Observer , signed Beverly Olshan, stated that our town was being punished for its sins. We became aware of small groups, which perhaps had always been there, with names like Daughters of Jericho and Prophets of the Heavenly Host; members of the latter proclaimed that the stranger had been sent by the Lord to warn us of his wrath unless we mended our ways. Even those of us who dismissed such ideas as ignorant or childish could not escape the thought that the stranger was punishing us, like an angry father, for something we had done, or for something we had failed to do, or for something else, which we ought to have known but did not.

THE PACKAGE. Seven days after the attack on Matthew Dennis, a package addressed to the police department was deposited on the top step of the post office at some time between midnight and 5:00 a.m. At 5:00 a.m. a mail carrier starting his shift noticed it from his truck. Later that morning, post office officials met for a brief consultation and decided to summon the police. Rumors about the incident first appeared on Matthew Dennis’s new website, but we had to wait for the morning paper before we could read a definitive report. The package, wrapped in brown paper, bore no return address. The police determined that the suspicious-looking parcel posed no danger. Back at the department they carefully removed the brown paper and found a plain cardboard box, tied with white string. In the box lay a tan trench coat, neatly folded. No note had been enclosed. There was little doubt, though no proof, that it was the coat of the stranger. Apparel experts had been called in, lab tests were being conducted, a thorough investigation was under way. Meanwhile we wondered what the stranger wanted us to think. Was he announcing that his attacks had come to an end, or was he warning us that we should expect a new attack in a different disguise? For a week, for two weeks, we led anxious lives, alert to the minutest signs. Toward the end of the third week, as leaves turned yellow and red and the sun shone from a cold blue sky, we began to have the sense of a burden slowly lifting.

DISSATISFACTION. Although we could feel ourselves moving toward the normal course of our lives, with all the familiar pleasures and worries, at the same time we couldn’t escape a sense of incompletion. The proper ending, we felt, should have been the capture of the stranger, who would have given us the explanation we desperately needed to hear. We would have listened carefully, nodded our heads thoughtfully, and punished him to the full extent of the law. Then we would have forgotten him. Instead we’d been left with an improper ending, an ending heavy with uncertainties, which was to say, no ending at all. The police investigation had come to nothing. We asked ourselves whether the stranger had left because he found it impossible to continue his attacks without serious risk of being caught, or whether he’d left because he had completed a careful plan to attack seven people. Even if we had known the reason for his departure, we still wouldn’t have known why he had come in the first place. What had he wanted from us? What had we done? In certain respects, the end of the attacks was more disturbing than the attacks themselves, since the attacks held a continual promise of capture and revelation, whereas the end of the attacks was also an end of the hope that had always accompanied them. In this sense, the end of the attacks was simply another way of continuing them — a way that could not be stopped.

THE SEVEN WHO WERE SLAPPED. It was at this time, when we were returning uneasily to our former sense of things, that meetings began to spring up all over town, for the purpose of discussing and analyzing recent events. There were large public meetings at the town hall and in the auditorium of one of our two high schools, gatherings at businessmen’s associations and fraternal organizations, at the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, at the Ethical Culture Society and the Jewish Community Center, at the First Congregational Church and the Church of the Immaculate Conception, to say nothing of private get-togethers in living rooms, dens, and finished basements. Often, at these meetings, one of the seven who were slapped appeared as a special guest, with the exception of Walter Lasher, who never accepted such invitations or even acknowledged them. The guest spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes and then answered questions from the audience. What did it feel like when the stranger appeared? How much did the slap hurt? Did you fear he might kill you? What was he trying to prove? Even Valerie Kozlowski, once she overcame her reticence, took to the podium with surprising vigor. The most popular speakers proved to be Sharon Hands, whose long blond hair came sweeping down over her shoulders and lay against silky blouses of cerise, emerald, and brilliant white, and the controversial Matthew Dennis, who wore an old sport coat, a black shirt open at the neck, jeans without a belt, and white running shoes, and who liked to walk back and forth in front of us, punctuating his remarks with slashing movements of his hands and turning suddenly to face the audience. Now and then a speaker appeared even at one of the fringe groups, such as Prophets of the Heavenly Host, that had begun to attract a wider membership and now held public meetings in rented halls. As we sat in the audience and watched a speaker, we sometimes experienced an odd kind of envy, as if, by not being slapped, we had failed to be part of a profound moment, had somehow, by our caution, evaded a call to adventure. At the same time we understood that we were already forgetting the precise feel of those troubled days, which were slipping away into history and taking on the warm, soft colors of a sentimental rural painting (“Red Barn and Clouds,” “Morning Sleigh Ride”) suitable for the walls of banks, hospital waiting rooms, and the lobbies of office buildings.