This actually did chasten me, somewhat. I grew quiet. She was not, or not only, the antagonist of my personal story. She had a past of her own, pockmarked with loss; she was a human being. Yet as quickly as this empathy rose in me, I stifled it—I swallowed it back like bile. Now would be the perfect time to try rocking the bookcase again, I realized. She would not be expecting it. So, gripping either end, I careened it left and right as forcefully as I could. While the memory of her dead son was still fogging her mind, I tried to heave her onto the floor.

It was then that Fredricka’s hand darted into her nightgown pocket. I watched with dread as she fumbled—I felt sure of this—for a pistol. But what she withdrew instead was a cell phone. Still huddled inside the bookcase, she dialed a recognizable three-tone number. She just wanted me to know, she announced, she was calling the police. Excellent, I said, wonderful. What was she going to tell them? ‘The truth. That you’re abusing me.’ So, I thought. She would portray me as the Violent Criminal, with her as the superannuated Damsel. I heard only her end of the conversation, which she conducted in a screechy, beleaguered voice: ‘Yes, physically… No, not hitting me… He’s been rocking and dragging the bookcase… Yes, I’m inside the bookcase…’ Et cetera. You can imagine how it sounded. When the officers arrived, I went downstairs to meet them. They were two guys, not much older than I was, and from the moment I began recounting the conflict—delivering, as it were, a first draft of my monologue—they asked the same kinds of sympathetic, incredulous questions that I have since come to expect: ‘You brought it in off the street all by yourself?’; ‘She broke into your room and just took it from you?’ I corkscrewed an index finger around my temple, signaling dementia, and they nodded in understanding. Poor college kid, senile landlady—what were you gonna do? The officers assured me that the bookcase was rightfully mine. The shorter one asked whether she was still inside it, like at this very moment, and when I nodded he bounded up the stairs with a boyish grin on his face, exclaiming, ‘This I gotta see!’

You know how this ends. Here’s the bookcase. The officers made Fredricka agree to relinquish it, and I took it with me when I moved. It’s funny: at this point it doesn’t even seem like ‘lawful property’ anymore—more like some big white trophy, a laurel the police awarded me. If you’ll direct your attention now to the bookcase, between those middle shelves, you can see where she was huddled. Picture a crone cramped inside that space. Hugging her knees, glaring out at us. I’d do it all over again, if I had to.

4.

Ira Glass arrived at the apartment that Saturday. The interview took place in the living room, with Michelle and me on the sofa, and Ira on the ottoman opposite. Across the coffee table he aimed a silver baton-sized recording device at us: a shotgun microphone. Its sides were grooved with slots, and near the battery pack at the base was a blinking green light.