Are you talking about him or you?

As the ocean creeps back toward the shore it shapes and reshapes, I ping-pong on the questions of choice with the lamest and yet most compelling of reasons being Well, might as well; I came all this way. My body takes advantage of my distracted multiple minds and storms his beach.

About one hundred feet from the high-tide line is Eddie’s obnoxious, none-shall-pass, six-foot-tall, stone-and-mortar seawall. Staked in front of the wall is a large No Trespassing sign with novel-length text that reads, in part, that the private property legally extends to the waterline and if you are walking the beach do not walk on the sand. That fucking guy.

Interesting word choices.

I lift myself over the seawall and land on an incongruent patch of manicured grass. Twenty feet away is an in-ground pool with a slate-stone patio moating at the base of his Tudor-style house of too many gables. If there are security cameras (and I’m sure there are) I don’t see them, which means, I decide, they won’t see me. The motion-detecting floodlights do not turn on, as I move too smoothly for them. I move like I’m supposed to be there, like I’m inevitable. I ford the yard and patio to the house. The glass sliding doors to his white, open-concept kitchen are locked. I expect them to be locked. I walk around the house’s perimeter until I find the open door. Find implies a search, though, when I know it will be there waiting for me. A side exit, a secret hobbit hole to his three-car garage, that’s the door that opens at my command.

I close the door behind me and feel my way between a car and the nearest wall. I could key this car and then leave. Maybe that would be enough, would be a different kind of choice I can live with. Of course, I could key it after I sit with Eddie. I creep and edge forward, and I crouch in a corner used for garden-equipment storage. It’s not the basement, but it will have to do. I don’t close my eyes and I don’t build his house inside my head.

And holy shit! That’s it! The secret to control is loosening, disassociating from the illusion of control. Part of me pulls, stretches, then breaks away and enters the house. The rest of me stays behind.

Part of me flows through the house’s interior as a chill, a draft of cold air, wisping through the antiseptic kitchen and then the vaulted-ceilinged, wainscoted dining room with its expansive baroque table that never once has been fully seated, and then through a maze of other rooms to the black-and-white marble foyer with an avaricious chandelier satelliting above a split staircase that foolishly insists one has a choice of direction.

Back in the garage, my eyes adjust to the light starvation, but I don’t want to see. Within my cluttered nook, I find and quietly unroll a section of landscaping tarp.