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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “New Moon” Down in the Dirt (v135) (the March/April 2016 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book A Stormy Beginning the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2016 collection book		get the 318 page Jan. - June 2016 Down in the Dirt issue anthology 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Peeping Tom

Michel Ge

    Perhaps he is lonely. It would be the easiest thing to say if she were to come down for a snack and see him, standing there in the kitchen with the radium-green oven clock, the door unlocked behind him. It is certainly the most obvious explanation, but he does not feel the thickness that lonely people feel; he feels indifferent, and, thinking about his loneliness, he derives a vague sort of pleasure, without knowing why, except that perhaps it is an adaptation.
    He does not know what he will do when, or if, he enters her bedroom. He imagines standing over her bundled catlike body, her room smelling of fruity perfume with brightly painted walls, her covers rising up-up-down, up-up-down with her breath, and then what? What does he do? Rape her? He does not want to rape her. In all likelihood he is going to stand staring in the dark, unable to see her face, yet knowing it is there. The thought is exciting and stressful at the same time, the way one feels before a performance.
    Perhaps that is it—the explanation: how she plays her violin. Each night he is her only spectator, studying her through the gap in her curtains, her buttery skin, her downy hair trailing past her shoulders. The violin has some significance. If she were to play something else—the oboe, for example—he would have stopped watching her long ago. Perhaps, in the hallways, he would stand by his classroom between periods and let his eyes trail her after she passes by, but only on occasion, and mostly he would sit in his chair clicking his pen and playing blitz chess on his computer. He does not think about it, but at one time he played violin, as a young child, in a different school, and he was terrified of it. Not just that he might break one—he treated them like pottery—but also that the violin’s wire-taut strings and the darkness in its hollows held some kind of secret, a secret that it would not surrender to him because of who he was. He was afraid of playing in front of others, alone, so that the slightest hesitance or imprecise fingering would be heard, loudly and painfully, for all to hear, and that they would judge him for who he was. After high school he put the violin away and forgot about it, so if it is the cause for his watching the girl, it is subconscious at best. Perhaps he is simply lonely.
    His eyes are adjusted to the darkness and he sees the shape of a table, of chairs, a darker gap that is the living room. He eases over. Small, shiny pillows lie scattered on the floor. One shelf holds dusty, embroidered books, and small porcelain figure are aligned on another. The house is quiet.
    Step by step, each one probing for floorboard noises, he enters a hallway, coming upon a staircase from the back. He feels his heart in his fingertips. He wonders what he will do as he stands over the girl, and wonders if he is a bad person. He would have been fine watching her from outside, he thinks, but she stopped practicing and he cannot reason why. He decides he is a bad person but starts up the stairs anyway.
    A door opens. A light flicks on.
    His pulse spikes and he retreats, pressing his back to the side of the stairwell. The light is butterscotch. He stands very still. He hears soft feminine footsteps pad down the hall. He is breathing slowly, steadily. Another door opens. After a time a toilet flushes and the light flicks off and it is quiet again.
    He waits, then eases his way back into the living room, the kitchen, and outside.

    He finds her in the store. She stands there on her phone, secretly browsing the desert shelf, even though nobody is watching, except for him.
    “Hello Anna,” he says.
    She does not hear. His voice is too soft.
    “Hello Anna,” he says again, louder, closer.
     “Oh. Hi! Mr. Bernstein.”
    “Are you well?”
    “Yes Mr. Bernstein.”
    “How’s school?”
    “Good, Mr. Bernstein.”
    He smiles, asks the new-school-year questions. What is her favorite class?—Science. (Of course.) Which is giving her the most trouble?—History, although she doesn’t really know yet, and it’s hard to say at this point, but Mr. Cronin—
    “He’s tough,” he says, nodding softly—
    assigned twenty pages of reading on the first night, and she’s worried about the class, and already stressed, though it’s a bit early to make judgments.
    “You’ll do fine,” he says. “Remember your topic sentences,” and she fake-laughs, but does it well. “Are you still playing violin?”
    She makes a drawn-out, strained, conscientious eh, looking off to one side. She looks surprised, as if she’s never told him that she plays violin before (she hasn’t), but the information is well-known by now, ever since Tommy Jones wrote an article in the school newspaper: UNDERCOVER GENIUS? ANNA VAGIN PERFORMS AT WHITE HOUSE. “I mean, I guess,” she says. Her eyes are pale blue and wide, neither afraid nor angry.
    “You guess?”
    She looks uncomfortable.
    “How do you like being famous?” he asks.
    Her dad glances around the corner and sees her. He wears a bowler cap, and is short, with a wizened Stalin face (so Mr. Cronin once remarked, when they were drunk the Friday after parent-teacher conferences). Mr. Vagin looks up at him, grunting. “Hello,” he says. “How are you.”
    “I’m well, thank you,” he says. “I was talking to Anna about her violin.”
    Mr. Vagin stares uncomprehendingly, as if he doesn’t understand English. Then he chuckles. “Hahaha,” he says. His voice is low and raspy. “Thank you.” He puts a hand on Anna’s back and brings her away. He does this with his left hand, the hand that once worked the strings, two fingers now warped sideways from arthritis.
    When they are gone he walks absently through the store. He picks up a few packages of Ramen. There is too much air-conditioning. The tiles are clean like in a hospital, and a generic song mumbles overhead.
    The checkout clerk is a bald pallid man who sanitizes his hands between each checkout. “Paper or plastic today?” he asks. He is gay. He—Anna’s old teacher—indicates he would like neither. He walks out holding his Ramen.

    In the fall it is chilly Monday night football games. Anna is not there (Mr. Vagin is not that kind of father) but on occasion he sits up in the back with Mr. Cronin, whom he refers to as Bill. He talks to Bill sometimes about Anna. How is she doing, is she well, that sort of thing. Bill is not permitted to disclose her exact grade—“not the exact number, per se”—but one time when he visits Bill’s room for lunch Bill lets slip that “maybe the digits don’t add up to 8,” which can mean a few bad things, and many worse ones. Bill only shrugs in response. “ ‘s why I don’t teach math,” Bill says.
    He sees Anna a few times in the hallway, between classes. Once she is with a boy, not necessarily kissing or hugging or holding hands, and they are not even side by side, only moving at more or less the same pace, and he isn’t jealous, just sees this from his room as they pass by the window, and looks away when she sees him looking. It turns out they were only in the same group for Mr. Cronin’s World War I project. That is why he was never jealous in the first place. Days later she is with another boy.
    Fall entrenches itself into the air, and the trees become skeletal, and pumpkins sprout on porches and lawns like a strange, bulbous fungus. At night through the gap in the curtains slivers of Anna shout at slivers of her parents, who sometimes (her father) stand there, stonily displeased, and other times (her mother) shout back three times louder. He seldom sees her play violin, and when he does, it is hurried and mechanical, though not necessarily careless. Sometimes he hears crying; whose, he does not know. “She’s a tough case,” Mr. Cronin says. “I really don’t know what else to say.” Is it that bad? he asks. Two years ago she had a B in his class, more or less the same in history. “I don’t know,” Bill says, sighing, leaning back in his chair, which exposes the lap of his pants, folded into an erection-like arch, something that his pants always do, that is a running joke maintained by the student body. It is not an actual erection (as Bill frequently rants when he is drunk), and now both consciously ignore it. “It’s not that she isn’t bright,” Bill says after a moment. “It’s not that at all. She’s the smartest damn kid I’ve ever had.”
    —but she’d been held back a grade anyway, which is the unfair thing.
    “I don’t see why they do it,” is all Bill can say. “Girl plays violin, history isn’t her thing—why do this to her?”
    She is with the other boy more and more. They eat lunch together. They walk together to each other’s classes.
    One day he is in his room, his legs up on his desk, playing chess, when he sees them talking by the lockers opposite his room. It is silent except for the scroll and click of the mouse and the water-noise of students in the hallway. The locker-sized window by his door gives him a plain view of them talking. He sips his Sprite. The afternoon announcements beep to an end. It’s a cool autumn afternoon, sunny, a ripe time for being outside. He sips again. They are still talking. He captures a pawn, a satisfying clattering noise. Outside, the trees are silently agitating. He is down a piece but he stalls and his opponent loses on time. He finishes his Sprite and tosses it into the recycling bin. He gets up, stretches, gathers his keys, his phone, and steps out into the hall. He sees Anna when he steps outside, a comfortable day with the autumn chill perfectly balanced by the sun’s heat. She sits on the bike rack, scanning the roads. The buses are gone. So is the boy.
    He goes over. “You look worried,” he says.
    “I missed my bus.”
    “Do you want a ride home?” he asks Anna, and realizes how that sounds, and is about to take it back when she says, “Umm, no thanks.” He goes away a few steps and looks back. “Well check with Mr. Nelson,” he says. The principal. “And call your dad. Do you want to use my phone?”
    She shakes her head. “Thank you,” she says again.
    That night there is the loudest argument they have ever had, loud even from the window, loud even from the sidewalk. She is crying and her mother is crying. Her backpack is slumped by her feet, like a ruptured organ, papers and notebooks spilling over the floor. The violin is there, too, in her father’s hand. He is red in the face. All of a sudden she is angry and she is jabbing fingers at him and she is pushing at his chest and then a roar, a crash, a splintering noise. For a second everything is quiet. From the window he hears the faintest sound of a last, pitiful chord. A scuffle and a door creaks open and Anna runs out into the darkness.

    He knows the creek she runs to. The soil is soft and moonlight glitters off the black water.
    “Anna?” he says.
    She stands up quickly. She does not recognize him.
    “It’s I. Mr. Bernstein.”
    “What are you—” she says. She does not sound like she has been crying. “What are you doing?”
    “I saw you running.”
    “I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to go. Thank you.”
    “Anna,” he says. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
    She watches him. He realizes how he must look—tall, backlit, standing. He crouches down. “Your father tells me you’ve been arguing.”
    She sighs.
    “Is it about the violin?”
    “I need to go. Yes. I have to go Mr. Bernstein.”
    “Anna, it’s alright.”
    “Please. I need to go.”
    “Anna,” he says. “Do you want to talk about something?”
    She tries to step around him but he moves to block her.
    “Is it the violin?”
    “Yes,” she says with stale courtesy. “Please, Mr. Bernstein.”
    “I played violin once,” he says, compulsively. “I regret ever letting it go.”
    “Thank you. I enjoy playing my violin.” She is breathing heavily. He sees the shape of her head swell up and down.
    “Your dad—”
    “Don’t talk about my dad!” she shrieks. “Why are you always around me? You fucking pervert!”
    He recoils and she flies off. To where he does not know. He suddenly feels very clumsy, and hurt. Standing there looking down on her, he was not a pervert. He felt nothing stir inside him but grief. But now that she scatters dovelike away, he starts to feel what he feels when she plays violin; he looks after her almost with malice. It is only for an instant and he recognizes the malice and abolishes it. Then he feels like his stomach has clenched shut and will not open, like the world is gray even in the colorless dark.

    In health class videos it is quoted as “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” When Anna suicides, few notice, including him. Her once-lover, weeks later, walks around with another girl. As for him, he thinks she is merely going through a stage, much like puberty, a mood swing that will pass. And in anticipation of when it does, he buys a violin and takes it to her house.
    Mr. Vagin opens the door, disgruntled.
    “Yes?”
    “Good morning.” He speaks with a lowered face. “I heard Anna needs a new violin,” he says. “I want to give this to her.”
    “She does not need your gift.”
    “Will you please take it?”
    Mrs. Vagin watches behind. She is paler than normal, stricken, like something that haunts the house.
    “Thank you.” Mr. Vagin starts to close the door. “No.”
    “May I please see her?”
    “No. She is not here.” The door slams shut. There is no rattling chain, no deadbolt clunking shut. That is it.

    When he hears she has been found on her bedroom floor with a scarf around her neck, some part of him is relieved that there will be no investigations, no Mr. Nelson (whom he refers to as Dave) coming down to his room to inquire about a report of sexual harassment. For the most part, he sits at his kitchen table late at night, after grading his papers, with a cold diminished mug of tea, and listens to the silence. He sends the Vagins flowers, but he does not think it makes much difference, and he apologizes to them in person for having mistakenly tried to give dead Anna a new violin—he apologizes frankly, flatly, refusing to act tragic. He attends her funeral, standing in the back, at times envying the eulogist. He visits Mr. Vagin again and sits in the study while the wan light of Sunday afternoon filters inside, talking about little in particular. Their conversation lulls often and he hears the silence everywhere. It is a silence he has never heard before. At home he pulls bow across string of the new violin, letting it screech, his fingers cold and numb and forgetful shambling over the fingerboard, trying to remember songs he once knew, all in an effort to drive the silence away. But when he straps the violin back into its case, there it comes again, seeping back in around him. During class in the mornings—some students sit solemnly, having heard of the tragic death of Anna Vagin, but most are simply tired, and are not thinking about her, not that they would have cared anyway—he awakens his computer and plays cheap music, radio music. As it plays they sit hunched over their morning writing assignment, and the classroom is filled with the sound of pencils scratching and the music, and there is no silence. During these moments he sits, his hands folded in his lap, his expression blank. He loves to watch things grow.

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