The Nightime House Inspectors

This version taken from Jack and Ray.

Dear Rob—Last night I had an adventure dream featuring you and me and your two friends, Alex and George. In the first part, it was just you and I. We had decided to reprise a favorite activity of our teenage years: breaking into houses for a night of wall-climbing. And we thought, what better place than the city where the sport began for us? So we flew to St. Louis and—you can imagine the rest as well as me. But I’ll go ahead and tell it.

For our first session we picked a two-story semi-mansion on a serene block in Clayton. We got inside more easily than people who aren’t in the sport would think possible. Then we picked a wall and began. 

The object, of course, was to move through the house without ever touching the floor. The house we had picked had plenty of wainscoting and ceiling molding for our feet and fingers. And more than enough furniture for stepping stones. And a big kitchen with lots of counter space as an easy place to start. A place to warm up our old skills before advancing to rooms of higher difficulty. We passed from kitchen to living room, and from that room to other rooms, spidering our way around every room of the first floor. We then worked our way to the second story by tightroping up the banister, then inching along a hallway, going into and circumnavigating every upstairs room, our feet never once touching down. We got into the attic and crossed it upside down, using isometric pressure and a rare knowledge of body-torque to work our way from one exposed rafter to the next. 

We exited that house through an attic window, leaping into a tree. Then we jumped from the tree to a high window of the next house, and after doing that house from top to bottom, proceeded to the next, and the next after that, until we had done every room of nearly every house on the street, never once setting foot to floor. And that concluded our first night out, a perfect run despite our many decades out of the game. 

We left the final house by way of a loose cellar door and walked to our car under the streetlights, enjoying the cool darkness and the patchy light, the stillness of night, the atmosphere of sleep and dreaming, savoring the tiredness and ache of our muscles. We shared our observations and feelings about the night’s activity, our voices respectfully low—respectful of all the people of that neighborhood peacefully and vulnerably asleep, including the ones in the houses we had just been in.

We decided to do another night job before heading back to New York. Your friends Alex and George had flown in to join us. They had taken on the form of one person—AlexGeorge—maybe to save on air fare. I drove the three of us out to Washington in the early evening to begin the second night of wall climbing. 

We picked one of the newer, but not brand new, subdivisions of upscale houses. We got inside by our usual arts and again picked the kitchen as our starting place. We had gotten about one third of the way around that room when we heard someone entering the house. 

“The first place they’ll come is the kitchen,” I whispered. “To set things down—groceries, the mail, whatever. We’re done.”

We had started too early, before dark, before people were sleeping. An amateur mistake. Maybe our judgement had been thrown off by the presence of a third climber. Or by that extra person being two people in one. Maybe it was just not caring enough. Maybe we were outgrowing the sport.

We all back-flipped from wall to floor, and as we stood there with arms still uplifted in dismount form, pans and dishes still chattering from the impact of our landing, the woman of the house appeared, holding a bag of groceries.

“We were just checking the telephone wires...” I began. 

“Out!” she commanded. And we obeyed. Out the kitchen door at a quick but respectful pace, but once outside, breaking into a run. As we rounded the house we saw the man of that place going into his home by the front door, also carrying groceries. I calculated we had no more than half a minute before this homeowner, apprised of details, would be after us.

We picked a direction and ran. Everyone but me made good time. I got delayed by something. Some temporary injury or reaction, something that caused my movements to be very difficult and slow. There was no pain. It might have been a failure of will or spirit, not a merely physical one. In any case, it became like running through thick air. But all at once the resistance lifted and I was running at normal speed again, but some distance behind you and AlexGeorge now. We sprinted downhill across big lawns and then another, expecting at every second to hear a voice behind us shouting “stop!” A command we would have to obey—out of courtesy, yes, but also because the rules of our sport demanded it.

Near the bottom of the residential valley was an equipment van and two nocturnal landscapers, pruning bushes and raking leaves. The two of you reached this point, and I saw you talking to one of the workers and gesturing. Then you and AlexGeorge began gathering branches and leaves, making yourselves seem part of the crew, though without the company sweatshirts. Volunteers of night. 

It was a good plan. Not foolproof, but a good calculated risk. To hide in plain sight.

I thought, “The police will be here soon.” I had to find my own, separate pretense. I slowed to a walk and changed direction, now moving a little toward the house we had burglarized, a ruse as crafty in its way as yours. Then I found a place where I could plausibly sit and not be suspicious, and I took on the manner of a person with nothing to do, a person simply sitting and taking in the trees and grass and houses. It took a little acting, to make that look natural in the middle of the night.

In the quiet near-darkness of the sleeping subdivision I could hear you talking. You were skillfully playing the part of a chatty uneducated yard worker, speaking non-stop in a rich St. Louis version of a New York outer-borough accent. We had both gone to high school in this town, imagining together possible careers for ourselves as professional liars—authors or actors or both—but only you had gone on to study and practice acting. And there you were, decades later, back in your hometown, pretending to be some one you weren’t: a true success story.

Some time passed and no homeowner came by asking questions. No squad car arrived. Our luck had held. Never once in all our wall-climbing days had we been arrested.

Communicating by soft, quick whistles we signaled to one another, and by three separate routes we wended nonchalantly back to the car. And we departed. 

We had gotten away without consequence, as we always had before. One of the key metrics of a successful nighttime wall-walk.

We found ourselves driving past the now very old subdivision where you had lived while attending Washington High School. None of us had thought in advance of visiting your teenage home while in town, but we turned sharply now and drove into the subdivision, to show AlexGeorge where you had grown up. 

We drove slowly, to lengthen the time we would have to take in your former home. We felt the normal guilt of driving through someone else’s subdivision at night. But in a moment, the clammy feeling of breaking a suburban law was superseded by the clammier one of breaking a natural law. 

For we saw, through windows, your deceased mother and father, residing again in the old family house, but now as specters. We glimpsed them as we passed the house arriving, then again as we passed it leaving, two silhouettes shuffling in a lit living room, unmistakably your parents. Something about our silence told AlexGeorge what it was we’d seen. We passed through and out of that subdivision in respectful silence.

I had done the driving before, but now it was you at the wheel. In the back seat by myself, looking out the window, I read the street sign of your old subdivision. You had grown up on “Ceciliantha Lane.” I had never made the connection before, never realized you had grown up always almost hearing and saying the name of your future wife.

Then we were back on the main road, leaving that house and that clammy reality, on our way back New York, to nights more ordinary. ~ Jan. 24, 2010