Free The Interloper by Antoine Wilson Page A

seemed preoccupied by something, probably the hangover of ditch day, and I too was preoccupied, by the low-level but persistent fear that the Cartoon GI would emerge from behind some pillar and call me out. I couldn’t get my mind off the panties. I was going to have to retrieve them soon. I was most concerned with what I was going to do with them. My latest ploy, after dismissing the possibility of just washing them (they would be stretched out), was to make it look as though the cats had pulled them from the drawer (“they were protruding, I guess”) and stretched and damaged them in the course of their feline play, discovered by me too late to save the underwear from ruin. Far from foolproof, this plan seemed downright stupid in the light of day, thus my lingering anxiety, preventing me from being attentive to my wife.
    “That was fun last night,” I said.
    “Yes it was.” She spoke matter-of-factly, not disagreeing, but also not engaging me.
    “Is something the matter?”
    She placed her hand on mine, and I knew instantly it was nothing I had done. After a moment she spoke. “I was up really late last night. Couldn’t sleep. I probably should have gone in to work or something. I don’t know, that’s not it exactly. It’s always his birthday or a holiday or the week he died. I forget, you know, for a while, and then it all comes back the same as ever.”
    “Talking about it is healthy.”
    “Talking about it
is
healthy.” She nodded. “But nothing changes.”
    “Nothing changes.”
    I moved my hand on top of hers. We sipped at our coffees.
    “I need some sleep.” She looked far away, then smiled. “Do you want me to drive you back?”
    “I’ve got some errands to run down here. I think I’m going to hit the bookstore or something.”
    “In this fog? What if you get lost?” Her eyes sparkled. She seemed fine now. This was a remarkable capacity of hers—she could shrug things off by sheer force of will, could take something that was bothering her and force it not to bother her any more.
    She went home, leaving me in the coffee shop parking lot, and I walked toward the park in the fog. The streets were humming with commuters, some of whom gave me questioning looks—why isn’t
he
on the way to work? It’s funny. When I was working at the office every day, our neighborhood didn’t seem so full of 9-to-5ers, but once I began working more at home,walking the streets to stimulate my mind (a block for a block), I noticed how crowded the streets got when people left for work or returned home from it.
    The park was deserted, save a few moms arriving at the playground near the north end of the park, pre-K kids in tow. I felt self-conscious walking alone in that park, as if a sign were flashing above my head (with a glowing nimbus, now, in the fog): PERVERT . I made my way to the restrooms and went in. Empty. I found my stall, which someone had defiled in the meanwhile, climbed up the stall walls, and reached my hand up to the ledge under the roof. Nothing but cool air coming in from outside—the roof was raised above the wall. I moved my hand from side to side. I couldn’t actually see up there, but I could feel the entire thickness of the wall, to the outside edge, and the panties weren’t there. I climbed down. I had picked the right stall, yes. I scanned the floor. Nothing resembling panties. I went outside, retrieved a stick from under a dying tree, and poked through the trash can inside the restroom. I managed to scatter paper towels all over the floor but found no underwear. Standing there in an ankle-high swamp of crumpled paper, I realized the underwear might have fallen off the wall to the other side. I experienced the epiphany of having found something mentally before going to confirm its location physically. I had obviously pushed the panties too far and they had gone all the way across the top of the wall, falling from the eaves on the outside of the building. I left the restroom and walked