Thy Neighbor Read Online Free PDF

light is on across the street, and her weak porch light, too. She always turns that on at dusk, and then the kitchen light after, fortifying the house for the long night alone.
    In recent years, on winter afternoons, when it got dark early and I would be lying here, as usual, in state, half waking, it became a ritual to look across the street and watch Mrs. Bloom moving around her house turning on lights. Now I wait for it in summer, too, as I have tonight, even if I’ve been awake for some time.
    She turns on a lamp in the upstairs window, a single candle bulb like the ones people put up at Christmas. But she puts it only in that one corner window upstairs, and she keeps it there all year long. Every night it’s the last light she puts on, and every morning it’s the last light she turns off. On the nights when I haven’t passed out, usually when I’m with Monica or I haven’t been with Dave, I see her do this just before I go to bed, just as the light is coming up.
    I find it calming and reassuring, as if the night watchman has been on duty. The last light going out is his signal that it’s safe to sleep.
    As a kid, on summer nights around this time, in early June, when my parents put me to bed, I would lie in my room and look out across the street at the line of trees behind the Blooms’ house, bulbous black silhouettes against a lilac sky. In their shapes I traced the profile of a sleeping giant lying on his back: Afro hair, short forehead, long nose, chin, chest—even legs that disappeared behind the houses next door and reemerged down the block as upturned feet. In a breeze it looked as if the giant’s hair was rustling or his chest was moving up and down, breathing. I imagined that he was there to protect me, and so long as he was asleep, all was well with the world and our piece of it.
    The Blooms still lived there then. They’ve lived here since the development was built nearly fifty years ago. Mr. Bloom died a few years back, and since then Mrs. Bloom has been making her night and morning rounds.
    But the candle bulb has been in the window for a lot longer than that. It’s been there at least as long as I’ve been back. I remember seeing it the night of my parents’ funeral. For thirteen years or more that bulb has been lit every night and extinguished every morning at dawn.
    As for the other lights staying on all night, that started only after Mr. Bloom’s death. She must be afraid to sleep in a dark house alone, or she thinks the lights will deter burglars. Then again, maybe she’s like me and stays up all night for other reasons, except instead of throwing herself blindly into the bull run of human debauchery, as if she thinks the angel of mercy is in the oncoming traffic, she’s reading calmly by lamplight, sipping a glass of sherry and waiting patiently to die with some dignity.
    That’s how I feel, anyway, dignity or not. And I had my parents for only twenty-one years, a quarter of which I was too young to process or intelligibly record, and another third of which I spent away at school. But the Blooms were married for fifty years, or thereabouts. Maybe more. Fifty fuckin’ years. And they were there for all of it.
    Ten years in, they had one daughter, Karen, who grew up way too fast and took off pregnant at seventeen or eighteen. Dropped out of high school in her senior year, hooked up with a bad crowd, left, and never came back. Except once, about a year later, to dump the kid she didn’t want and couldn’t rear. A girl. The Blooms named her Robin and raised her as their daughter. Karen fell off the map until a few years later, when the Blooms got word that she’d died of an overdose in a squat somewhere out east, Baltimore or Philly.
    It seems that running away runs in their family, because the Blooms kept Robin only until she was twelve, and then she, too, just disappeared.
Poof
. Gone. Maybe she didn’t believe her