THE TRAUMA WORD

A few days after my apartment was broken into my dad called and asked me if I felt violated. “No,” I said.  “I don’t. Really. To tell you truth, I’m more confused than anything else.” Of course, he took this to mean that I was traumatized. That’s his job as a parent: to assume his children are lying to him. Just in case.

“Has this ever happened to you before?” he asked.

I had to think about it. “No. Never. I had my wallet stolen once. But I turned around and got it back from the guy right after.”

“Huh,” he said. “Most people usually feel violated when that happens.”

I’d been out of town for four days. If I’m ever gone for longer than that, I have someone poke their head in halfway through to make sure the cat is doing well. You know, sit with him and pet him and sign Edelweiss. Otherwise, I set out three big bowls of dry food and a couple big plastic water troughs, clean the place up so that he can destroy it while I’m gone, turn everything off, and go.

I’ve never had a problem with this before. I’ve been doing it for two years now. One year in New York, one in Los Angeles. I’ve never considered that I was leaving a valuable out to be taken. I figured most robbers went into identity theft after Home Alone 2. That shit was brutal.

I immediately knew something was wrong the minute I opened the door. The cat, left to his own devices for longer than two days, is understandably sensitive to my arrival. He always pokes his little black head through the crack the minute I pry the door open, like a prisoner in solitary feeling for the sunlight on his face. Hose me down, Christopher. I imagine him saying. I want to remember what rain feels like.

This time, nothing. And when I looked straight ahead, through the darkness of my place and into my kitchen, I saw that both the kitchen window and back door were wide open. The cool night air circulated through my apartment. I stood in slack-jawed amazement for a moment.

My head played a little movie for me: close up on door, close up on window, tighter close up on door, tighter close up on window. Dun. Dun. Dun dun dun.

I dropped everything and ran into the kitchen, yelling out my cat’s name. Man I must have sounded pathetic, but you don’t think of these things when you’re in the midst of a domestic tragedy. I looked in every room, slowly coming to terms with the idea that the burglars had stolen absolutely nothing. The only difference in my apartment from then and when I had left four days earlier was that my bed was slightly untucked at the foot and my checkbooks had been taken out and sorted through. My guitar was still there, my computer, my record player.

I catalogued in my head all the valuables I could have been missing and came up with nothing. I’ve never been happier that I didn’t get into collecting antique watches.

I sprinted out into the apartment complex and shouted the cat’s name at the moon. In the back of my head I was thinking, Maybe this is for the better. He was born on the streets. All I’m doing is holding him back, with all this love and free food. And what if I meet my dream woman and she’s allergic to cat dander? Yes. This is for the best.

But the front of my head responded with, You irresponsible fuck! You let some hobo steal your cat and cook him on a spit! If you don’t start wailing like a marine’s widow right now, you’re a fucking robot!

Before my night could devolve into a pitiful weepfest, the cat jumped out of the bushes and attacked my pants. He was displeased, a little cold, but, upon inspected, unharmed. Together we sat on my bed in front of a borrowed space heater and sorted out what had just happened.

I was a wreck, but I didn’t feel violated. And I think that’s part of a problem that I’m only recently coming to terms with. If someone walked into your home right now and broke everything and set your couch on fire, you’d be right to feel violated. But the difference between you and me is that I have very little personal attachment to my apartment, or the stuff in it. Why?

Because I can’t relate to my own life.

It’s as if someone had come in and torn up my hotel room. I couldn’t weep for my endangered belongings. I best I could do is put my hands on my hips and say, Aw, shucks! This is going to take forever to sort out!

Now, I have a lot of shit. When I moved to Los Angeles a year ago, I petitioned my parents for the funds to secure enough crap to comfortably surround myself. It was the only legal coping mechanism I could think of that didn’t involve buying a plane ticket for an ex-girlfriend. It took me ten months to get the place looking like it belong to me, so, logically, I should have some attachment to the paintings that I picked out from Etsy and got framed at Aaron Brothers, or the rug I debated for hours over at Pier 1, or the piano that I found on Craiglist that I’m composing the latest incarnation of my impossible musical on. I don’t. I don’t feel sentimental about much of anything on this side of the country, with the exception of a few scrap books and irreplaceable artifacts that I’ve had since I was a kid. The funny thing is, to took some stranger to crack open my kitchen window for me to see it. I just don’t care.

I’m not trying to be cool here. I know it sounds like I’m dealing with a very serious situation in a blasé manner. I’m not. I’m only saying that my gut reaction was far from gutting, and that my response was tragically intellectual. That’s what gives me pause.

That’s not to say I wasn’t scared. I was. I called Liz a few minutes after rescuing the cat and told her what had happened. “I don’t like this,” she said. It sounded like she meant it. “That’s too scary. I could call Victoria and have you go stay at my place.”

“Why? Because you think they’ll come back?”

“Maybe.”

“Really?”

“Why not?”

“I figured it was one of those ‘lightning strikes twice’ situations.”

There was a long pause. “No.”

I spent the night propped up in bed, facing the window and door that the invaders had used to breach my home. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep, but enough to be sluggish the next day. It was something I hadn’t done since I was twelve, when I stayed up all night at my grandpa’s cabin,  searching for ‘true life ghost stories’ on Yahoo.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of movies where people have been assaulted or raped or kidnapped and forced to do crystal meth, and, if these people survive their encounter, the stories inevitably become about how their lives just aren’t the same anymore. They’re scared. They can’t go outside. They can’t go down dark alleys anymore. And I always thought to myself, Why? You were mugged. You got your mugging out of the way. Statistically, you’re set. Go about your life.

But it doesn’t work that way. When the reality of the moment sinks in, you’ve got that reality hardwired into you for the rest of your life, and all you want to do is keep that feeling of terror from ever touching ground again. I suppose that’s what we’d call in the humanity business “vulnerability”.

The next morning I rattled every window in my apartment to see what it would take for someone to get in. In my bedroom, there’s a window right next to my bed that’s in a permanent unlocked state. There’s not much I can do about it besides install a new lock. The thing is impossible to open anyway, and the other side is covered with iron bars. I looked around my bedroom anyway, surveying the room like I thought a thief would.

What in here do I really care about? Not much. My life. That’s the most valuable valuable I’ve got, and the only thing I feel I have a duty to protect. The only question now is: where do I intend to keep it?