The Parable of Glass and Old Whiptail
I have all this stuff. I keep it in a big box and I sleep there and eat there so that I can watch over it. I surround my stuff with wood and plaster walls, stone and stucco. I lock the box so that nobody can get to it. And here with my stuff, I am safe.
Every night when I peer out of the box with my stuff in it, there is a face. There are small, black, put-together eyes deep-set in bristle-down fur, and a long, Spy vs. Spy nose with its sharp cone point twitching, noting each tight-woven, tapestried scent. There are ears, a child’s cardboard cutout triangles, pink and bare, exposed. There is a mouth, a sly sliver line closed upon needle teeth and turned at the corners. Whiskers point forward curiously, and bone-thin hands press down in faint fidgets upon the brick.
I’ve watched him amble along the uneven fence posts, my little opossum friend, wobbling on tiny rat feet as the skin rope tail whips around to grapple-hook knotholes and curl dowel posts. He is my little drunken master, the blind samurai who bumbled into my village seeking blueberries while holding tiny swords behind his back. His pert, focused eyes miss no movement. He is a shrewd mask of foolishness, a death pantomime.
Between the hours of eleven and midnight, I sit on my basement steps and wait for him to come home. I watch as he rappels and conquers the chain link fence, suspended like Odin in the last few seconds before taking to the new surface. Sometimes he’ll stand in the wash of the flickering yellow security bulb and blink rapidly at me, his hands moving wildly like a blurry detective searching trench coat pockets for a notepad. He never bares his teeth or utters a sound, never threatens, only makes his way up under the foundation of one of the apartments next door and impossibly squeezes his desaturated-tomato roundness into the tiny concrete passages. One blink and there is nothing but grey on grey and shadow. He is gone.
I’ve only seen him in the daylight twice, the day he arrived with his little suitcases and cancelled bus transfer, and the day he stood next to me on the sidewalk. That day, I looked at him blinking in the harsh sunlight of a Seattle summer late-afternoon, his robe tied tightly around his waist. He only smacked his lips and looked past me as we turned together to study the mess in the parking lot.
Then I pulled my knees up to my chest and sighed.
The green glass was shattered and covered the ground next to my car. Thousands of little squares radiated outward from the impact, and sheets of larger pieces lay half-covered in mud and gravel. Randomly, there lay a tube of sunscreen, a cell phone headset, stickers and receipts. The front passenger door hung open limply, dome light flickering breathes. The trunk yawed open as well. The rain continued to pour down over the carpet lining and seats while the car, violated, sprawled with both legs open.
I walked to it calmly and shut the door, which produced a rain stick shower of material into the window space. I shut the trunk, which latched closed with a wet slurp. And then, meticulously, I began to clean up the glass, causing tiny little pinprick cuts along my finger pads as the rain dripped from my bangs into my eyes.
He turned and shuffled off to bed. I crouched and cursed.
On Lughnasadh night, a week before, I sat naked in the moonlight and listened to the sirens. They seemed to come from all directions at once, rushing over the Aurora highway, careening through neighborhoods, whining from the far distance across the water. They Doppler shifted as they passed, changing their register from shriek to lament with the cold chill of prickling neck hair and shocked, arrested heartbeat. I’ve wondered about the nature of the siren. What a primal instinct it is to retreat back into the safety of the cave when that shrill howling rises. It’s a danger sound in our cellular memories, a warning and a call to gather at the same instant. There is no safety here, it says. Flee. Take shelter with others of your kind for strength. Things with fangs are hunting.
That night, a spate of fires was set in Seattle by the same arsonist. His count to date is fourteen in a line that covers a large section of the north city area in which I live. The latest was a few blocks to the east and a few more to the south. They say that this kind of crime is the hardest to solve and this kind of criminal is the hardest to catch. The last serial arsonist in Washington state set 77 fires before being turned in by family.
At midnight that evening, my opossum came again along the fenceposts, following the same routine path. He carried his life on his back, the rounded spine that gave him a hunched, gallumped slothness to his motions. He sniffed at the faraway smoke and then looked at both the foundation and the rafters of the house in a long, measured glance. The passing headlines brought out the silver spiked hairs in his coat, which glistened like wet straw mats.
I leaned against the wall in a gesture that would imply my next move was to light a cigarette if I had been a smoker. Instead, I cradled my chin in the loop-grasp of thumb and forefinger and looked at him. The sirens became faint moans in the darkness.
He nodded and brought the fleshy mesh of his hand to his face once. Then, unaffected, he turned to walk the jagged, splintered line back to his hollow.
Friday night last, I woke up with a start at around 4am, completely alert and ready for action. But there was silence. Nothing stirred. My senses tingling, I went to the bathroom and returned to bed, listening intently for any small sound, watching for any movement. As I closed my eyes and settled back to sleep, both of my cats leapt off the comforter and rushed down the hall. I heard a police siren getting closer and closer and then stopping a few blocks away. I threw on pajama pants and a robe and peeked around the white plaster corner into the cavernous, seldom-used tiled and windowed kitchen. The microwave clock was blinking the time, and as I inhaled, the refrigerator stopped running with a leaden click.
Suddenly, there were police swarming the walkway next to my apartment. Flashlights were everywhere, penetrating the glass, splitting into shards from the impact against my mirrors. I dove back into the bedroom and crouched down beside the bed, panting. Police were running, chasing somebody a few feet from my bedroom window, a few feet from my head, screaming, “GET DOWN. GET DOWN”. For some reason, planks of wood were falling in the alley. I readied myself for the sound of gunfire or for somebody to crash through the thick plate-glass door into my house.
I heard a cop yell, “GET DOWN AND PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD” and then another one yell, “HE’S IN THE ALLEY! GET HIM!” A police dog barked, deep, gruff and excited, then snarled. I heard the adrenaline breathing of somebody as they raced by.
And then the flashlights faded. Everything grew quiet, the shouts distancing. Nothing but the sound of my heartbeat and my neighbors walking upstairs remained. I exhaled. The night spread on.
The next day, he was waiting for me. He was there with a full belly and an empty lunch pail, sifting acorn shells and pinecones with his pink worm digits, shaded eyes dancing a balance beam along the low twitching snout. We nodded to each other and then he looked past me at the box that holds my stuff. He looked along the glass-covered holes, so easily broken. He looked along the two entrances and their keyholes begging an easy challenge for any tool-using mammal. He looked at the soft wood, looked at the piled dirt around the foundation. And then he looked at me.
When I sleep now, I check my locks and walk the perimeter of the apartment. I mentally record suspicious cars and people and make note of license plates, memorize descriptions. I don’t often go into the parking lot past midnight unless I am coming home from somewhere, and then I arrive conspicuously with radio on and headlights beaming. I’ve been waking up each night at 4 am, listening, waiting. It will all pass one of these days very soon and return to normal, but at the moment I feel naked, and the thinness of the walls is obvious, the vulnerability palpable. I suddenly see those things that are changeable, gained and lost, how nothing is easily held, and it humbles me.
I told my opossum friend this. I told him that I feel revealed and unprotected, impermanent, easily toppled. I tell him that for the moment, I’ve lost the notion of safety.
He nodded and glanced at my apartment complex. The corners of his mouth turned up, parting slightly.
“Very good,” he said. “Very good. That’s one less thing to lock up.”
And as I watched him, he waddled away across the marzipan brick layings and the wood chips towards the hole in the wall and the high brush bushes, his silver swords visible atop his back, his body chuckling as he lowered himself into the darkness.
And I walked back into the house and stood in the doorway, my finger pausing on the deadbolt latch.
