Things Where Things are Not

140 ALEC HERSHMAN THINGS WHERE THINGS ARE NOT There is a slight confusion: a man you’ve never seen entering a neighbor’s window. His beard is well trimmed and conceals none of the smile he offers. Says, “It’s all right I live here.” A rush of wind in the trees. “Okay—” you say before you think how clever you may be, retreating to your kitchen to dip a finger in the rotary phone. The brain is like this: silk pushing silk across a calquey obstruction. The police are nimble and austere. You tally birds on a wire, search the faces for cahoots or for filaments of praise, but the round impatient eyes weigh nothing in the nothing where the man had been and the window’s locked they say, and a turn occurs in the question’s direction. And a turn occurs in the worm within you that the officers sound with the cocked heads of robins. Your palms sweat newsprint, your breath quickens with scenarios. The clever must be made small if embarrassment is to be averted, if a man is to pry a window out and rummage among the needles and trinkets that decorate a stranger, and stranger now the neighbors gather and the trees are still. So you conjure over houses a dark and immaculate mass, a bowling ball bowling toward you, cosmic, indubitable, and you roll the ball right up to the crisis and silence each of three officers with each of three holes. ...