THE CAVE by Debbie Urbanski
Ian and Tricia Vitkus are not particularly bad White parents. They are not particularly good White parents either. Their White children, Jack and Violet, own excessive amounts of toys. Not all the toys are electronic. Sometimes the children’s playthings are made from FSC- certified wood. The entire family is lacto- ovo vegetarian due to environmental and animal- rights concerns. Pigs, sheep, and goats are not necessarily harmed by the family’s lifestyle, although the same cannot be said for the dairy cows and egg chickens trapped in industrial organic farming situations in order to produce the cheap rGBH- free milk and cage- free eggs the Vitkuses purchase dirt cheap from Trader Joe’s every week. The boy, Jack, was only visibly injured once due to their parenting style, which is a pretty good record. Jack’s injury occurred during an incident involving physical guidance that stemmed from the noncompliance of a request and ended with a spectacular contusion also known as a hematoma of tissue across the boy’s face. That’s as specific as I’m getting. “These things happen,” said their White family therapist, who offered to explain, should Child Protective Services become involved, what Trish had attempted, and failed, to do with her son. I’m pretty sure I already used this anecdote in another story. I like pretending it’s something that happened between a fictional mother and a fictional son in a made-up narrative – nothing to do with me! CPS was not called that time though the agency had gotten involved with the Vitkuses years previous, when a White employee at the family print shop, fired recently for incompetency, reported Ian and Tricia for parental negligence. An investigation ensued, the claims were ruled unfounded, case closed, and Jack and Violet continued living with their parents. I don’t know if this was necessarily a good idea. Things happen to children. Not all of the things that happen to a child can be good, as you will see later in this story. Now that I think about it, there are two other times Jack’s parents facilitated his injury. One involved a hill, a pothole, bicycles, an ambulance, White paramedics, and two White police officers. The other injury took place in a parking lot. This is all part of the background noise. The story I want to tell you, the one about the cave, takes place one nice spring day when the plant material of the forest is still brown, though the snow has melted and the red maples are flowering because those tree species flower earlier than other trees. On that nice day in the spring, the Vitkus family decides to trespass on private land and explore a cave, and something happens to them.
The initial drafts of this story included a lot more background on Trish who, like many of the mothers who populate my fictions, had struggled with depression. Struggling, I had written in an early draft, is a funny word to use, as if Tricia’s emotions could be taken down in a wrestling match. Everywhere she looked, she saw a potential, and most likely painful, way to die. I think I used that last sentence in a different story. Personal secrets offer up such rich source material. Trish planned to kill herself a few days after the cave expedition, I had explained. Her preferred method, popular in Japan at the time, used readily available household cleaning supplies. Fine. I’ll tell you. I was depressed myself back then and suicidal and fixated on using that particular Japanese method. A side effect of depression: the inability to get out of your own head. Everything becomes reflective. I’d write a story and in every story there I’d be squatting in the middle of the text, giving myself the finger as I looked for a rope or a blade or a bottle of toilet bowl cleaner to be used as a proton donor when making hydrogen sulfide gas.
Currently my own depression is in remission thanks to a mix of psychotropic medication and a dialectical behavioral therapy skills group, so I’ve started to wonder if not all my female narrators need be depressed. Already I’ve erased several sections from this story including the section where Ian doesn’t want Trish to tell their kids she’s suicidal so she opens the bedroom window and shouts out of the window “I’m SUICIDAL!” and the section where Ian thinks Trish’s diagnosis of depression has become an easy way to win an argument, and the section where Trish insists she is claustrophobic so she can’t go into a cave and her husband says you have never been professionally diagnosed with claustrophobia, is this another thing you are making up – what a lot of arguing! My husband and I must have been fighting often during the writing of these early drafts – and the section where Trish leaves the house with a handgun in her bag – I’m not sure about the gun, I’ll deal with that later – and the section about the suicide notes Trish composes in her head to her daughter and son and husband, and lastly the section that describes, in detail, a recent shopping spree, suicidal planning making Trish stupid with money, where the White cashier at an upmarket outdoors store asks Trish whether she is going on a trip with all these new clothes, and Trish says yes she kind of is.
Forget everything I just told you about Trish’s mental state. Here is what actually happens: it’s late on a Sunday morning when the Vitkus family buckles into the seats of their hatchback silver Prius. Every Sunday they go on an outing together in order to create a shared experience and reap the documented benefits of outdoor exposure. This Sunday they plan to explore a cave Ian read about on a local adventure forum. Trish, currently a non- depressed mother, remains an undiagnosed claustrophobic. She reminds Ian how she hates the interiors of caves. “Well, I hate not being in a cave,” says Ian. Those two can argue about anything. They drive to an urban county park, highway noise filtering through the woods, wads of used toilet paper in the leaf litter. At the informational kiosk, a spraypainted squid stares out at them from a boulder with one enormous dilated eye. There are trees, buzzards. A mile hike along the undulating Faust trail, past numerous White people and speckled dogs, brings them to a junction. They could have chosen either direction. Ian chooses left. They step through the opening in the hemlocks onto private property.
The trees in the new woods are posted KEEP OUT. Violet wants to read every sign. There are many signs. She reads slowly and haltingly, being behind her classmates in reading comprehension. “Violet, honey, it’s fine. We aren’t going to get in any trouble,” Ian says. Violet says, “Property. Hunting. Fishing. Trapping. Trespassing. Strictly. Forbidden. Violators. Will. Be.” She says the same thing at the next sign. She says the same thing at the next sign and so forth. They follow a herd path west, not a real trail. On the way to the limestone cliffs, the only people they pass are two White teenagers headed back toward the parking lot. The girl’s hair is bleached, her cut- offs frayed, and her faded cropped shirt exposes her stomach. Trish makes judgements based on unconscious biases: the girl looks poor and dumb. The boy’s hair looks dirty. “What a beautiful day!” proclaims Ian to the two teens. He has always talked to strangers as if people cared what he thought, a remnant of a wealthy childhood. “Yeah, really beautiful,” says the girl. Below the bluffs is a trailer park with little loops of gray road branching off from the main road. The people down there are so small they don’t even count. In six more minutes, the teenagers change direction and will begin to follow Trish and her family at a distance. Something like this actually happened to my family. I’ve been trying to write this story for three years now. There are decisions that keep needing to be made for the plot to progress and I still don’t know what are the right decisions.
“Well here we are,” says Ian, dropping his red and blue pack onto the ground and scrambling unencumbered along the rocky outcrop. Violet and Jack follow him like little animals. The drop on the right is 180 feet, I have since read. “You’ll die if you fall off there,” Trish warns. They don’t know where to look for the cave entrance. The internet forums describe this vicinity only in general terms. There had been talk in the forums of “going left on the ridge.” The kids leap over fissures. Trish repeats herself. Ian eventually finds the cave no thanks to anybody: a shadowy crevice of rock leading downward. “That’s only the beginning part,” says Ian, in case anyone considers the entrance unremarkable. Trish considers the entrance to be unremarkable. Near the opening in an aura of damp cold the family enjoys a picnic lunch of hummus, pita, squares of dark chocolate. “Time to go,” says Ian, strapping on his helmet. The children strap on their helmets. The cave swallows up Ian, Violet, and Jack in that order. Trish tidies the ground and bags the garbage.
The two teenagers haven’t gone away. They stand a hundred feet from the cave entrance discussing a plan. The girl laughs. An ugly laugh or is that Trish using her social stereotypes to be judgmental again? Judgy Trish decides to settle down beside a maple tree and read. She removes a book from her bag, a narrative non- fiction account by a White author about the opioid epidemic, specifically about White mothers who lose their White teenagers to overdoses. The boy, the girl drift closer, kicking at the dull green moss. Trish looks up from her book and smiles in their direction. She looks so stupid smiling like that. This behavior of hers has something to do with the recent 2016 presidential election. The anger and fear of that election made Trish determined to understand those who held different opinions from her or came from different backgrounds. Is now the time to bring up with Trish that smiling does not equal understanding? Another White child dies in the book from an overdose, and the teenage boy offers Trish a little wave of his left hand before striding into the woods up a tree- lined slope, a red and blue hiking bag slung over his shoulder OH MY GOD is that Ian’s backpack? Is the teenage boy stealing Ian’s backpack? Is that what this story is about, a fucking backpack that gets taken from some middle- class White hikers who still have three more bags sitting there on the detritus –
People lose much more all the time.
I want to tell this story anyway. Is that okay?
The criminal possibilities for what happened to my family that day are petty theft, grand theft, and perhaps robbery. To determine the correct crime, I first need to find the value of what was taken from us. Then I need to figure out whether violence (or threat of violence) was used on us. That red and blue pack bouncing on the sturdy back of the teenage boy belonged to my husband, a technical hiking bag made by the German brand Deuter, whose CEO is White and whose web site features photographs of White people enjoying the outdoors. Inside the pack had been my son’s pullover, a discontinued style, the only long- sleeve he would wear. Also: the Sunday’s New York Times, a Nalgene bottle, a pricy filter that kills water- borne bacteria with UV light, a first- aid kit, a feeling of security, a cover I had thrown over a memory, four Kind bars, and a deck of cards. They took my daughter’s walking stick. We spent a long and frantic time wandering the woods searching for the missing items. My daughter cried and cried. I am going to call what we experienced grand theft because the act did not feel petty to my daughter or to me. The question of violence or the threat of violence will be addressed later on in this story.
The teenage girl continues to saunter lazily along the rocks in Trish’s direction. Below them, in the cliff’s shadow, a fight ensues at the trailer park: two White girls on the ground on a patch of grass beside a singlewide throw punches, kicks. The girls are play- acting or else they’re getting hurt. Jack’s White second nanny lived in a trailer home. The second nanny prayed a lot, was a know- it- all, eventually needed knee surgery. That’s all Trish knows about these sorts of communities. Then maybe you shouldn’t include trailer homes in your story, Trish, I want to tell her. The problem being that the trailer homes are already there. If she or I pull them out of the story, we can cause a rockslide. Besides, there really is a trailer park beneath the cave. I’m not making this up. 3.3 stars on Google. “A lot of clutter,” says one reviewer. By this point the teenage girl, having reached Trish, is standing close to her, standing over her in fact while chewing on a piece of cheap purple gum. Different societal groups hold different expectations around personal space, Trish reminds herself, pretending to feel comfortable and curious and so friendly there on the cliff. “What are you guys doing out here?” Trish asks, using a casual voice as if the two of them are having a conversation. “We’re trespassing,” the girl replies. “What about you?”
What actually happened: I was sitting outside the cave into which my children and my husband had recently entered when a White girl in her later teens wearing an unflattering half- shirt walked up to me and stood very close to me, and while she was standing there close to me, I made a series of assumptions about her, which is not a really nice thing to do. I did it anyway. I assumed she was lower class and she voted for Trump or her parents did and she didn’t like people from other countries and she was racist and xenophobic and homophobic and ignorant and only spoke one language and had previously gotten into some trouble. She must have made assumptions about me too. Sample assumptions about me: that I am middle-aged, irrelevant, an easy target, a privileged hypocrite, I voted for Clinton and had an easy life. Some of those assumptions would be correct. It felt like she was guarding me but not in a protective way. I think she was guarding me while her boyfriend ran back to the parking lot carrying my husband’s backpack. I wonder what she would have done had I noticed the backpack missing. I didn’t notice the backpack was missing. I noticed she was standing so close to me. Uncomfortable with her nearness, I became uncomfortable with my discomfort and made myself say hello. She said hello. After that, I pretended she wasn’t there. After that, I pretended she was there. While I pretended she was either there or not there, this story idea started playing in my mind about a mother – a depressed mother? – who meets a teenage girl – wearing a half shirt? – in an isolated part of the woods above a trailer park – why do I keep mentioning the trailer park like it’s some shocking yet important detail? – and they have a conversation, the mother pretending to be super relaxed while also aware of the potential violence of their isolation. The mother’s awareness turns out to be prescient as the teenager in the story ends up attacking the mother in the story, and since I am the mother in the story, you know what that means, I, in the story, get brutally attacked, then the girl and her teenage boyfriend who had returned attack my family and we all die or only the mother dies or only one of the children. Does me imagining violence count as actual violence or a threat of violence? Because it certainly felt real. For the rest of that day and several days after, I felt like I had physically been mugged. My husband kept saying to our kids, “Kids, keep an eye on Mom. She thinks she’s been mugged!” Someone once called my imagination “fabulous.” My husband thinks, in addition to depression, I have anxiety. So does my East Indian primary care doctor. I feel like a lot of people are worried these days. Back at the cave, I took out my cell phone in what I hoped was a casual manner. There was no signal. Casually I put my cell phone away. Casually I shouted my husband’s name. “Hey! H.! Time to go!” I leaned into the cave entrance and shouted his name. There wasn’t an answer. I pretended to read and pretended to turn my narrative nonfiction book’s increasingly panicked pages. This teenage girl was reminding me in an unpleasant way of these other two White teenage girls who, years ago, mugged me in the quiet or some might say deserted residential neighborhood beside my undergraduate college campus one spring night. I think the technical term is robbed. Their similarly pudgy stomachs, long hair, not all that pretty, dumb eyes. I shouldn’t describe people that way. Simplifying their characters, I wrote on an earlier draft of this story in aqua lagoon ink. But that’s really how I saw them, and when I saw them like that, that’s really who they became. They had both spent a lot of time on their hair and wore black eyeliner applied thickly.
Here is what happened: the two girls had been following me for several blocks in the irregularly lit dark. They were behind me and ran toward me. I heard the increase of their footfalls. I turned around. They stopped running. I turned back around and started walking. They ran toward me. I turned around. They stopped running. I didn’t want to offend them by asking them, “Why are you following me?” So I said, “Hi.” They said, “Hi.” I turned around and started walking. One of the girls pushed me down and demanded my money. The girl’s dialogue sounded like a bad line from a play. I got up and started walking. The girl grabbed me, the other girl punched me in the face. A blank space of time exists between the girl drawing back her arm, her face so focused and intent, and I see her fist then nothing then all the blood. I was so surprised. In my wallet, a $20 bill. I was a college student on work study with federally subsidized loans and Pell grants and no disposable income. They took my $20 and ran away like someone was going to chase them down. For a long time after, I was always crossing to the other side of the street, like my mother had taught me, only in her examples, it was a lone man walking toward me dangerously. She also told me to lock the car doors and roll up the windows when driving through a Black neighborhood. I don’t tell a lot of people this story. There is still residual embarrassment. “Girls?” I was asked with a giggle.
What actually happened: Trish is certain the girl is watching her. Yet whenever she glances up from her non- fiction narrative book about the opioid crisis, the girl pretends to be so busy digging the dirt out from her fingernails or kicking tiny pebbles over the cliff edge. Enough, Trish finally decides. She checks her watch. She makes a big deal about her watch checking, using wide gestures, audibly murmuring about the impermanence of time, where did the day go. “Hey Ian!” Trish shouts. She leans over the opening to the cave shouting Ian’s name again. No response. The girl besides Trish laughs. “What are you laughing at?” Trish asks, scooting closer to her bag, which is vibrating with a bright and wary, or waxy?, energy – okay, excuse me, but before the story progresses any further, I need to figure out whether there is a gun in Trish’s bag.
The benefits of adding a gun to Trish’s bag includes variation and uncertainty: who will shoot whom, will it be a hit or a miss, will it be a fatal or superficial injury, are the police involved, does an ambulance arrive. On the other hand, I know very little about guns myself other than what I learned online when I was depressed and researching how to shoot myself in the right temple or the rear base of my head which is a more reliable spot but also less specific. On the other hand, I could research guns on Google and visit a local gun shop. If Trish owned a gun, I could weave issues of gun violence and ownership throughout the plot. I am aware these days how it’s easier to publish a story when the story touches upon larger societal issues. Gun violence is a larger societal issue. Motherhood is not, I need to keep reminding myself. But a mother with a gun –
The girl laughs again. “I don’t think you should be laughing right now,” says Trish toughly. She reaches for her bag and inside her bag she grips the gun that Ian made her buy after she got mugged by a pack of teenage girls. Ian had driven her to the local gun shop the day after the mugging. They brought the children. They did not bring the children. The children were either there or not there. “I’m not going to shoot a high school girl,” Trish had argued with Ian at the time. “I’m not saying you shoot the girl in the head,” Ian had said. “Do you want something that will fit in your purse?” asked the White gun salesman. “I consider purses to be stupid,” said Trish. “What do you carry then?” asked the salesman. “A small tote,” said Trish. Her face was still swollen and distorted. One of the girls had punched her in the nose then again in the side of her head. “I think you would do well with this model,” said the salesman, removing a handgun from the glass display case. He cupped the gun in his hands and explained, “This solid lightweight pistol features a high- strength polymer frame with an ergonomic grip, plus a double action fire control, manual thumb safety, two magazines, stainless steel drift adjustable sights, external takedown lever and slide stop. Backed by a lifetime service policy – ”
I’m not sure this is working. Let me try a different approach.
Here is what actually happens: Jack is sitting on the rock and watching as his father and sister and eventually even his anxiety- prone mother descend into the cave. “Don’t worry. We will all be fine,” murmurs Trish before dropping out of view, never mind she is too middle- aged to be dropping in and out of caves, never mind the questionable ethics of trespassing or the teenagers lurking in the periphery. Jack is staying behind because I have no idea actually. Probably he wanted to go in the cave too. He was like, “Why the heck am I not going in the cave?” I’m sorry, Jack, I need someone to stay above ground. I already tried the mother; there wasn’t enough tension. “It’s not a real cave anyway,” Jack tells himself, as real caves have gift shops and restrooms. He pulls a book from his bag and begins to read a graphic novel about a boy who lives in a small city. Around Jack there are the bare trees, the vultures, the teenagers admiring the elevated view of the interstate, a pile of the Vitkus family bags. Ian’s bag is already missing. Trish’s tote on the top of the pile contains a gun. The teenage girl moves closer as the steep angles of the rock signify foreboding.
“Your parents sure are stupid to leave you here,” says the girl. Jack turns the page of the book. It is a book in which nothing much happens. The boy, the city – he turns the page again. He turns the page again. The girl snatches his book away and holds it out of reach. “What’d they do, did they leave you here? Some parents.”
“They didn’t leave me,” says Jack. “They’re in the cave.”
“They didn’t leave me here,” repeats the girl mimicking Jack’s little voice. I was going to say she tosses Jack’s book off the cliff but this seems an overly aggressive action so early in the scene. Instead let’s have the girl return the book to Jack by throwing it hard at his chest. Actually the girl likes to read. That’s irrelevant. During this interaction, the girl’s companion, her boyfriend, can be seen jogging up a wooded hill in the distance toward the parking lot. On the boy’s back: the missing red and blue backpack.
“That’s my dad’s bag,” says Jack, pointing.
“I don’t think so,” says the girl.
Jack looks around. “Then where did my dad’s bag go?”
“Your dad never had a bag, silly,” says the girl. “Anyway, you still have your own bag, right? Don’t be a greedy reedy.” She leans against the tree and stretches her neck to the left, to the right. I was about to say that next, in a series of rapid movements, this girl grabs Jack by the arms and hurls him off the cliff to increase the story’s tension, but on further examination, it is less a cliff and more a series of ledges. Anyway, she doesn’t yank Jack by the arms. Her hair falls into her eyes. She jerks her hair out of her eyes and stretches her neck again. She isn’t that flexible. “What’s your name anyway?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Well my name’s Mindy. That’s not my real name but you have to call me that from now on.”
”Okay.”
“Okay, Mindy. Now you say it.” The rocks they sit on are hard and uneven. In the cracks of the rocks, thin layers of dirt accumulate slowly over a period of years. In particularly fertile cracks, there are maple seedlings. None of the seedlings are going to make it. The girl selects a pointed rock from the ground and aims the rock at Jack’s forehead. Jack says the girl’s fake name. “Good job. What’s inside your dad’s bag anyway?”
“My hoodie. I’m cold.” Mindy removes her sweatshirt from around her waist and gives it to Jack, who won’t take it. “Take it,” she orders. “It’s a girl’s shirt,” Jack says. She throws her shirt at the boy. It smells like a fire. “You put that on,” Mindy says. “It gets cold up here and you don’t want to get cold. Once you get cold, it’s hard to warm up again.” She nudges Jack with the tip of her dirty white athletic shoe. Jack puts on the sweatshirt. It looks like he is wearing a girl’s sweatshirt. “So do you want to go in the cave?” she asks. “No,” says Jack. “What if I made you? What if I pushed you down that hole?” she asks. Jack leans over his book until his forehead nearly touches the pages. Large birds circle above them in uneven circles. I used to say “large black birds,” but that description felt ethically suspect in a story with no Black people as of yet. More about that later. Jack is close to crying. “Hey, I’m joking. Come on. It’s just talk. We’re just talking.” Mindy jokingly grabs the book out of Jack’s hands again. This time she reads the book out loud to him, giving each character a different funny voice. Soon Jack is laughing at the appropriate parts and the sun produces wider fatter shadows of the trees. On the interstate, a semi hauls an unmarked trailer south. Mindy has completed the reading of two chapters and is halfway through a third when her boyfriend returns. He carries a stick over his shoulder. “About time,” says the girl and she tosses the book to the ground and gets up to leave.
“We’re not leaving yet,” says the boy, smiling, his hands wrapped loosely around the stick. “I have to meet this kid’s family first.”
“I don’t think you need to meet his family,” says the girl.
“In fact, I think this boy should come with me to meet his family. You come with me,” he says, pointing to Jack. A plane flies overhead, gaining altitude. The white contrails dissipate. Jack tips his head back and watches the plane.
“He’s, what, eight years old. He doesn’t have to come with you,” Mindy says. She steps between the boy and Jack and sticks out her wet pink tongue at the boy and wags her tongue around.
The boy laughs, shrugs. “Ready or not,” he says but not loudly. Scrambling down the crevice by himself, he is underground for a long time. Mindy picks up the book again. She grows tired of the book, of the view, the boy.
“What’s taking that asshole so long?” She glances at Jack. “Do you know what asshole means?” Jack says yes, he knows. “Good. I don’t want to have to explain it to you.” There isn’t a breeze. Her hair hangs limply past her shoulders. “Can I have my book?” Jack asks. Mindy hands him his book. Jack turns the pages. He turns another page. “You don’t want to be here after dark,” says Mindy. “This place is haunted. Weird shit comes out of the rocks after dark. Not ghosts,” she explains. “Ghosts are stupid. This shit coming out from the rocks is real. It feels your neck and the inside of your mouth. Plus something’s living in the cave so you have to be careful.” Jack isn’t listening to her. She wiggles her fingers and jabs her hand into his neck. He squeals. She didn’t mean to do it so hard. I had meant earlier in the scene to describe some black ants – should I change the ants to red? Remove the color altogether? Keep the color but note my hesitation? – emerging from their winter dormancy, crawling languidly across the rocks, but before I can go ahead and do this the older boy emerges from the cave, huffing from the climb. He doesn’t have the stick anymore. “Some parents you have,” laughs the boy, shaking his head.
“We have to go now.” Mindy tugs the older boy’s arm.
“Where’s my dad’s backpack?” asks Jack.
“What are you talking about? Are you talking about my backpack?” says the older boy.
“I thought we went over this already,” says Mindy.
“I put my backpack in my car,” the boy says.
Mindy starts clapping. “Your car,” she says, clapping some more. She leans in toward Jack. “Don’t you be stupid too,” she whispers. Her breath smells. The teenagers go off running and laughing into the woods. The boyfriend falls. Mindy helps him up. They keep running.
When Jack can’t see them anymore, he removes the girl’s sweatshirt though he keeps it on his lap in case she comes back. She doesn’t come back and he throws the sweatshirt off the cliff. He had hoped the wind would catch the terrycloth material, that the shirt would sail off in a northern direction like a migratory bird. The sweatshirt behaves in a realistic manner. A handgun remains in Trish’s bag but nobody bothered in the previous scene to look in the bag which has toppled over into the invasive underbrush etc. This gun plotline still seems very silly. Unless Jack goes over to the bag now and gets the gun out of the bag and shoots – himself? Now that would be a bleak story. He shoots a bird. He shoots at me? I should just take away the gun. I remove the gun from Trish’s bag and return it to the display case at the gun shop. Now in the tote: a bag of unsalted nuts, a pocket pack of Kleenex, a pad of paper, a ballpoint pen, a deck of cards, Chapstick, bottled water, a change purse, an empty wrapper, children’s chewable ibuprofen – essentially everything that was in Trish’s bag before is there now other than the gun. The contents of the remaining bags remain unchanged.
I’m supposed to be working on this story again. It’s a new decade. Instead of working on this story, I’m texting with my White friends and my one East Indian friend. We want to talk about the civil unrest. One friend says she plans to attend a local protest. Another friend says she purchased a book on anti- racism for her children. She tossed the book onto the sofa so her kids can discover it themselves. Another friend is crying and can’t stop crying. I don’t have any Black friends. I haven’t cried much since I started taking the fluoxetine and bupropion prescribed by my East Indian psychiatrist in 2017. Before the meds, I cried every day for years. I wish I could say I had been crying all that time for racial injustice. That’s not why I was crying. There has been an increase in both fireworks and gunshots in the city.
I live in a mostly White area. By “mostly” I mean one Black family resides on this three- block street. For years we had frequent breakins in the neighborhood, the police force called them “crimes of opportunity,” high schoolers taking advantage of windows or doors left unlocked. For us, it was a broken lock on our back door. My husband had planned to fix the lock someday but he had other priorities hence the teenager who broke into our house. The teenager opened every kitchen drawer while my children and my husband and I were asleep upstairs. When I entered the kitchen the next morning, every drawer hung open. I wish he would have shut the drawers. Technically this was a burglary. He broke into several other homes that night as well. According to another homeowner’s security footage, he removed his shoes before walking inside. I am uncomfortable that this kid who broke into our house was Black. I am uncomfortable that his parents are war refugees. Previously he had been in trouble but at a younger age. The police asked my husband if he wanted to press charges. If we pressed charges – or my neighbors pressed charges – he, now 16 years old, would be tried as an adult. That was the law back then. I realize he is the first Black individual to enter my story. I feel self- conscious about this fact, anxious. I am not supposed to Google things when writing to maintain my focus but, in light of the recent protests, I allow myself to Google how a White author can write about race. Options: don’t identify any character’s race. Identify every character’s race. Do not assume, or think a reader should assume, that characters with undefined races are automatically White.
Any of this is reasonable.
Excuse me while I return to the beginning of this story and label the race of every one of my characters.
I don’t know what to do with the color of the ants, the birds.
My husband told the cops he wanted to press charges. I thought it would be more of a discussion topic, like what is our responsibility as White people to this child of war refugees who broke into our house? Eventually we got our iPads back though it took a long time as the iPads were considered evidence. I remember finding items belonging to my family scattered around the block that day. I think the teenage boy may have taken an expensive waterproof running jacket of mine with revolutionary membrane construction. There is the chance that I lost the jacket myself. More advice: do not have the only Black characters in your story be criminals. This seems like common sense yet look what I’m doing. Should I go back and make my psychiatrist Black or my family therapist Black? The problem being my psychiatrist and family therapist are not Black. The problem being I know very few Black people personally. It was a different situation in Minneapolis where I used to live. My boss in Minneapolis had been Black, and her boss was Black, and my other boss was Black along with many of my coworkers. Please tell me this makes me a better person. Plus my daughter did once have a Black friend before she moved away. Part of me was glad she moved away. I was so uncomfortable talking to the Black girl’s Black mother. Everything I said contained multiple and unintentional meanings.
Since our break- in, our cars have been rummaged through multiple times, most recently last week. We’re becoming used to it, part of the city living experience. People who lock their car doors get their windows smashed. Certain neighbors installed private exterior cameras to record everyone who approaches. I want one of those cameras. My husband says now don’t be ridiculous. Let me tell you a story. One morning several months after the 2016 election my doorbell rang. The ringing continued for a full minute which does not sound like a long time now but it felt like a long time in that moment. I ignored the ringing. Nobody rings the doorbell anymore unless they are selling something. There was nothing I wanted to buy right then. The ringing changed to knocking. More like pounding. The pounding on the front door went on for a longer time. I was in the attic working. I crept to the half- moon windows to peer outside. The angle was unfortunate: I had no way to view the front doorway. There had been additional break- ins in my neighborhood and reported incidents of house casings. The suspects were generally late teens, generally Black, often male though not always, wearing outfits such as “a black hooded jacket with white writing on the left chest area.” One possibility is racial paranoia. But those private security cameras recorded the suspects breaking into a house, so it’s not like this was entirely made up. The community was asked to report suspicious activity to their neighborhood police. I realize how this sounds. White people calling the police on Black people. What a bad idea. I am not being sarcastic. I just have never seen this person in the neighborhood before, someone wrote on our neighborhood watchlist describing a tall thin Black male wearing one of those black skull caps who potentially was casing her house or else looking to pick up a sink discarded at the curb. Or else both casing and wanting the sink. Had I remembered to lock the door this morning? Another incident from the watchlist: Early this afternoon, our front doorbell rang. A Black female, about 15 years old, asked for a “Samantha Lynn.” I told her that that person does not live here and peppered her with questions. In short, Samantha Lynn is supposedly her stepsister, yet her home address is unknown. Clearly, she was casing our house. I called 911 to report a suspicious person and the girl, seeing me on the phone through a front window, walked quickly away, turning east on M – Drive. I drove up and down R – Avenue, but did not see her. When I returned home, a police officer was waiting to take a statement. He said that other officers were searching the neighborhood, but I doubt she was found. If we hear actual intruders enter our houses, we have been told not to confront them. We have been told to call 911 and vacate the premises. From my attic the only way out is through the skylight windows onto the roof or down a flight of stairs then another flight of stairs which leads to the front door. I made a point of saying hello whenever one of the Black kids from the public high school who didn’t live on my block walked down my block. I wanted them to feel welcome walking down my block. At the same time, I had begun to look at people I didn’t know with suspicion. The pounding on my front door continued long after it was appropriate. I switched off the lights and, in the natural dimness, remained very still. When I was a child, my father slept with a gun under his pillow in order to protect us. That’s how the story goes anyway. We lived in the glossy Chicago suburbs then. We had moved out of the city in the early ’80s, my parents charmed by pictures of the new suburban developments with names like Pinewood East and Heritage Estates. Black people had begun to move into our city neighborhood on the South Side anyway, which was lowering the housing values. My mother says it was more the good suburban schools that made her want to leave. Our new suburban development happened to not have any Black people in it or around it. In middle school my father purchased my family’s first alarm system also for our own protection. The alarm system felt excessive in that setting. No one unknown had ever walked down our suburban street. I should have felt safe in my childhood, with the gun, with the alarm system. In high school, my dad gifted me a pocket- size container of mace. Also in high school, my mother took me to a self- defense seminar where we made weapons out of our car keys and practiced poking out a male assailant’s eye. The pounding on the front door stopped. The doorbell started up again. Can you remember, in the months after the election, the political violence in the air around this time? The suggestion that people we didn’t recognize had the hearts of criminals. I didn’t believe it all. On my knees I crawled to the windows again. Nobody was on my street. That’s the end of the story. I wonder if I should go back and change the races of my characters. Am I still allowed to do that? If I am allowed to do that, who should be Black and who should be White? There are a lot of new rules. Of course there are.
Question: Is it possible for me to say anymore, I am not going to bring race into a story?
Answer: No.
Question: Is not mentioning the race of the characters a racial decision?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Can I just tell the truth, how it happened?
Answer: No.
We walk back and forth for a long time in the woods looking for what we are afraid of. The problem being that we are not all afraid of the same thing. I worry I am writing this story in the wrong genre. Let me try again. Apologies for the sudden transition in literary style but I do want to tell you what really happened at the cave.
Trish: Hi.
Teenage girl: Hi.
Trish: Hey, that’s my husband’s hiking bag.
Teenage girl: Yeah, it is.
Trish: Give me back the bag.
Teenage girl: No.
Trish: I’m going to call the police. [pulls out her phone from her pocket]
Teenage girl: Yeah, right. There’s no signal here.
Trish: Ian! Ian? IAN!
Teenage girl: Shut up. [leaning in toward the cave.] What the fuck is that noise?
Here is what happens. There’s this glutinous monster in the cave. A monster with no eyes, a ragged mouth, large, that captures scent molecules by waving around coarse hairs on its roughened translucent skin. This monster is not a metaphor for depression or racial injustice or climate change or right- wing authoritarianism. This monster is a monster and what everybody, all along, should have been afraid of. Possessive, cranky, ferocious, sensitive, ignored, the monster first eats Ian and Violet entirely but it only eats a part of Jack, a small part, so Jack crawls out of the cave missing a portion of his left foot. This is so scary! He emerges from the cave in pain and shock, his foot spurting blood. Squinting into the sunlight, he sees his mother and a teenage girl wrestling at the bluff’s edge. He says there is a monster coming. Trish says if there’s a monster coming, what are they going to do about that. The monster emerges. The girl lets go of Trish’s arms. “Shit,” says the girl. Jack dies after the monster eats more of him. The girl dies. Trish dies. They probably deserved it. I’m thinking of the food chain, the efficient transfer of energy, the tertiary consumers. When the teenage boy returns, monster and bodies and body parts have retreated into the cave. Though there are still remnants on the ground. The heel of a shoe. An ear. Innards. The boy gets out of there, sprints back to the parking lot, screeches into town in Ian’s silver Prius which has such lousy acceleration. He goes to the bagel shop where his friends work and tells some story about a monster who lives in the cave and eats people. I’d be lying if I said nobody went into the cave again after hearing such a story. People go into the cave. They think it’s fun to be scared. The monster eats those people up. The county seals off the cave’s entrance with sturdy wooden boards. People remove the wooden boards, wanting to prove they aren’t scared, that there is no such thing as a monster. The problem being there is such a thing as a monster. These people get eaten up too. It’s popular these days to tell a story from the monster’s point of view, to explain its personal history and motivations, to show that “bad” and “good” are value judgements we make based on our own biases. That’s a different story than the story I’m telling. A foul smell lingers near the opening. “Oh, it’s only a smell,” someone says. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Debbie Urbanski’s creative non- fiction has appeared in Granta, The Sun, Gargoyle, Orion, and Terrain.org. She is also the author of the novel What Comes After the End (Pantheon Books, 2022) and many uncollected stories, including several which appeared in AQR.