Thy Neighbor Read Online Free PDF Page A

watching her or half dozing. And then she would get dressed and go, stopping to put her hand on my shoulder on her way out the door.
    She did this each time. Stopped, placed her palm on me, let it rest there for a beat, consolingly, as if she knew I was grieving and wanted me to know that she knew, even if she didn’t know what for.
    That came to be my favorite part, the part I waited for and needed the most. It meant a thousand times more than anything she could have said, or anything anyone ever had said, about my parents or about me. There was so much care and camaraderie in it, like a curative laying on of hands between the sick and dying.
    I never moved when she touched me. I never looked up at her in recognition. I just stared at the place where she had been near the window, or at the weak reflection of her in the window, framed by the doorway and backlit by the light in the hall: her figure, my darker mass below, her arm between us.
    We looked like we belonged in this house with the other partial residents. Ghosts at the window between worlds, passing across panes of glass as plays of light and shadow that would shatter with a carelessly tossed stone. I looked at our reflections, and in my head I always said something to her, as if I half believed she could read my thoughts, or receive them through her arm in the flesh.
    This time I said, “Tell me,” because I knew she was hiding so much. The hidden things were gaining weight with every contact. Her past would make its way into every acquaintance, as mine had, and it would come, as it always had for me, to a breaking point. Either you shared or you turned away.
    I didn’t want her to turn away, and I knew that this time I couldn’t.
    I had given up.
    When I met Monica I was already too weak with the wear and dissolution of the past thirteen years to do anything but lean passively away and scratch casually at anyone who tried to get under my skin, until they atrophied with neglect and fell off like a scab. But I couldn’t do that with Monica, obviously. Because she’d gotten in. Or, more to the point, because she knew something.
    That’s what infatuation always feels like. Like the other person knows something, or maybe a lot of things that you just have to find out. Things that seem crucial, or meant for you alone, and the whole point of the game is for them to keep the files from you and for you to hack your way in.
    Monica was a skilled enigmatist.
    Actually, that’s not quite right. She was a maze and a puzzle to herself as much as to me. But she made me feel as though I had the encrypted map or the hidden piece that would set it all out in the open and cure her. And the reverse was also true. She seemed to have my missing information, the bit that would finally, mercifully put me down for good.
    And that’s what I was looking for. Something to finish the goddamned endless purgatorial pause of my stopgap junior-grade life. Something sure enough and with a steady hand that could achieve the desired effect with one blow. I kept Monica around for that.
    Whenever, if ever, she got around to it.

3
    I was up all night again with Dave. I woke again on the couch.
    This time, no puke, and no lunatic notes from myself. Just the usual morning sickness that comes of not having been sick the night before.
    My head is like an anvil, and I could swear that my mouth and my asshole have changed places. My entire alimentary canal feels as if it’s been scoured with steel wool, sphincter to sphincter.
    And so it goes.
    Manikin me has stamina if nothing else. We’ll give him that. Dedication to the cause of progressive dehydration, cell death, and episodic amnesia. Self-absorption remains intact and growing. Waking suicidal fantasy robust.
    It must be getting on toward eight. I’ve been lying here for hours. Dusk is settling around the window casements and in the corners of the room. I can see from here that Mrs. Bloom’s kitchen