What The Hell America!

This is what it feels like when your safety is questioned, your fear dismissed and your home no longer feels like yours.

The following is an excerpt from Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (out April 22 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press), Chapter 5: “On Catching and Being Caught.”

On Catching and Being Caught

(to dog/to bat/to fly/to peacock/to gander/to squirrel)

Sometime in late autumn 2014, I went to the police station and walked up to the plexiglass window that separates the officers from the civilians. The tall white man with a buzz cut who came out to talk to me was dismissive. What do you want us to do, ma’am?

I wanted a restraining order. Unless our neighbors were caught in the act of trespassing, unless we could prove without a doubt that we were being followed, there wasn’t anything they would do.

“The law meted out by cops is the law created by men,” Virginie Despentes writes.

I left the station angry and went straight home. In the driveway, I wondered if we should move.

I did not call the police every time Wes and Jim were in the yard, in our driveway, in our trash. But I did call them several times, more than a few. Since police only arrive after a crime occurs, they were never caught.

If I needed evidence to get official protection, then I was willing to try, even if there was part of me that understood a piece of paper was only that. I knew enough stories of violence to know that if I did not try and something happened, I would be to blame.

We bought a security camera, even though we were wary about surveillance, both as a practice and as an expense. It came with complicated directions and endless lengths of wire. I drilled holes through the exterior walls of our house and through the hardwood floors, then Matt threaded the wires through those holes and into a recording device that connected to our television. There was an app that allowed us to log in and watch from our phones.

Dog: v. To follow at the heels of, to track (a person, or their trail, footsteps, etc.) closely and persistently. As is seen in ‘Twelfth Night‘: “I haue dogg’d him like his murtherer.” (How close murderer is to mother.)

There is an obsolete usage, from the early “600s, where to dog meant ‘to haunt‘. An invisible threat. More recently, it is used to mean to shirk, or to avoid. But ‘to dog’ can also imply one is being a persistent source of distress to someone.

We also say, “to hound.”

The daily anticipation of their presence had, up until we put the camera in, felt like a gloved hand around my neck. With it installed, a different kind of anticipation set in. No longer a choking, itching dread—instead, I wanted them to pull up. I wanted them to see what we had done, to know what we were prepared to do. I wanted to record them and then bring the footage down to the poorly lit police station, show our proof to the dismissive cop, be granted the restraining order. Fear transformed to vengeance masks itself as relief.

I no longer remember how many days passed before Jim and Wes appeared. It could not have been long. It never was. I do know the camera was visible from where they parked their car, no branches or shrubs hiding its location, its lens pointed directly at where they stood. The wariness I’d always held about surveillance, its power and invasiveness, disappeared. How far would I go to stop them?

On their side of the driveway, they opened their car doors and then slammed them, opened and then slammed again.

It was fall, but not yet cold. The windows were open. I turned on our television as soon as I heard them pull in. And then there they were, standing side by side on the TV screen in our living room, their images grainy and over-exposed. For several minutes they only stared up at it, their heads tilted, Jim’s mouth slightly open, Wes’ tightly shut, until he began repeating, We see your camera. We see it.

I see what you did.

They turned back to their car, resumed opening and closing the doors, and then stopped. Facing the camera again with their fingers pointing toward it, Wes said, You can’t fool us. Joke’s on you. Joke’s on you. You’re not going to catch us.

To say the joke is on me implies I am trying to make them look foolish but am only succeeding in being foolish myself. To say I cannot catch them means there must be something that can be caught. One of these feels truer than the other.

Their yelling entered through our living room window and took up all the air in the room. Since the camera only recorded image, I felt I was watching a terrible movie with surround sound, their voices not coming out of the television, but through the windows, bouncing off the plaster walls.

How long did they yell before Matt, who was at the grocery store or the home improvement store or out helping his parents, came home? How strange, to see our car cut through the scene on the TV. If it had been me coming home to see them standing next to each other in the driveway, their silhouette shaped like an open pair of scissors, I would have driven past. But Matt parked, got out of the car. Wes walked toward him with loping steps. Finger in my husband’s face, he spit as he yelled. You can’t fool me. I didn’t want to watch them anymore. I could not stop watching them. I know you have a crush on me. You want to watch me. You want to look at me. I know it.

Bat: v. To hit away, to strike or hit a ball with a bat. There is also the U.S. expression ‘to bat the eyes‘, which is a fluttering of eyelashes seen as a way of flirting. ‘To bat,’, then, can be an act of violence or an act of sex.

I’d almost forgotten this conversation in the driveway had happened. Much of what Wes said to us was baffling, so specifics become blurry. Untangling the knot of another’s thinking requires the knotting of one’s own thoughts. I know you have a crush on me. You want to watch me. You want to look at me.

This sounds familiar. When children are teased, especially when it’s boys teasing girls, adults will often use crushes to explain away the trouble. He is pestering you (or worse) because he likes you. But Wes was the bully, not the bullied. Right? His taunting, sing-song tone about an invented crush drags me back to the ’90s, to the too-bright, too-loud hallways of my high school, expressions like that’s so gay and no homo thrown around recklessly and with the intention of harm.

Jim stood behind Wes as he confronted my husband. The camera above them, red light blinking as it steadily recorded the action. I continued to watch from our living room, my gaze realizing them not as objects of desire, but more like characters in a television drama. Onscreen they became small, less villainous, less real.

Out in the driveway, Wes’ presumption that my husband is a cisgendered straight man led to a belief that he could wield power over him by jeopardizing that identity with a homophobic taunt. I know you have a crush on me is a threat of exposure, recontextualizing the camera not as a security device but a sexual one. Although that part of Wes’ mocking rant was incorrect, he was right about the second part. You want to watch me. You want to look at me. He did want to. We both did. I wanted to catch them in the act of trespass so that someone might hold them responsible and make them stop.

I watched my husband and the two brothers who tormented us on our television screen—which is not actually a screen but a mixture of glass, color filters, and a liquid crystal polymer. I could have, and had up until the camera went up, been watching them through the window. Even when Wes accosted me in the car there was glass between us. I hadn’t stopped to think before about the fragility of what separated me from them.