Ordinary World: Stories from Worlds Wide and Small

The New Normal

           

It was two in the morning and I was still awake. Every noise outside my room gave me jitters. It had been this way for the past three days. I kept myself awake until 4 a.m., and then went to sleep. But my body resisted such unnatural sleeping habits, and so I kept myself awake with lots of coffee. But because I was waiting for someone, I couldn't keep the lights on. I could not even turn on my phone or tablet as doing so would tell him that someone was awake in the house.

I could hear our dog, Mumu, whining right outside my window. She's quite small for a year-old dog and we had gotten her precisely to ward off thieves from our house. She had a dirty white coat, made more dirty by the fact that she loved wallowing in dirt. She had looked like a husky when she was a puppy, but her real nature eventually revealed itself as she grew. Now she was the ghost haunting our lot at night and nibbling our slippers during the day. Her very presence though had most likely deterred our faithful thief from reentering our premises. After all, ever since the dog arrived, there had been no signs of someone trying to break into the house. At least that was the reasoning my seventy-eight year old mother gave me. But I was more skeptical. This man had twice violated the security of our home. He had been emboldened. And his return trip told me that this wasn't simply about theft anymore. This was a show of power. He was telling my family that our walls would not keep us safe. I just had this hunch that he would be back. And I hoped that he would do so while I was still here.

Somewhere inside of me, I was scared. After all, I had never won a fistfight and had avoided being in one since high school. I am a pudgy man, slow to the move, and prone to freezing in my place when faced with surprising events. One time, the fire alarm went off and instead of evacuating the building, I remained frozen by my desk until another office mate took me by the arm and helped me complete what had been a routine fire drill. There was also that time when a man pulled out a knife while I was on the bus and I handed my phone without protest. Such encounters never end the way you imagine it inside the safety of your head. In your head, you play the hero when the man with the knife or lead pipe gets distracted for just a second. You sweep up a crying co-worker just before the fire blocks your escape route. Or you land the knock-out punch even before the fight starts. Or you kiss the girl of your dreams before she manages to dump you. But in the real world, you freeze. You always freeze. Something about this violation, though, boiled my blood, angered me beyond all reason. This was the one confrontation I wanted. In my head, I began drawing up schemes on how to confront this thief. I would subdue him, tackle him, slap the sense into his head. I found myself curling my fist. I was badly shaking.

I relaxed a bit, uncurling my fist, letting my emotions cool down. There were many things on my mind right now, but all I needed was to focus on the task at hand.    

Tonight, sleep was my enemy.

I took a deep breath as I rested my back against the wall which bordered my bed. Three months ago, the same man broke into this house and swiped my niece's cellphone as he escaped. Eleven months earlier, the same man broke into our house, ate the cream puffs in the fridge, and took my sister's bag which contained three thousand pesos. Yes, my family was lucky that nothing else was taken, nor were they hurt in the process. But it was the loss of security that really shook them. Our house had stood in the same place for nearly fifty years. And throughout those years, not a single thief had broken into our home. Even when our gate was still a termite-infested thing, no one had attempted to come in and take whatever few possessions we had. Even when our house started growing in the last two decades as my now-deceased father began pouring his money into it, no one broke in. We knew everyone in the neighborhood and everyone knew us. Even the local drunks were friendly men who crept back to their homes once they ran out of Ginebra. They never made a ruckus, nor did they shout obscenities at even three in the morning.

But this thief was different. Until this day, we still didn't know how he got into the lot in the first place. Our house was surrounded by three walls. The gate was made of iron and had a gap that not even a small dog could pass through. The most vulnerable side, the one beside the gate, housed a full-grown vine filled with thorns. The house itself only had two doors - both of which had several locks from within. He did get in the house using the windows, of that we were sure – as after his last excursion, we discovered that he had patiently removed the jalousies from one of the unoccupied rooms on the ground floor. And ever since then, the remnants of my nuclear family - three women - had lived under a constant state of panic and paranoia.

After the second breach, the police were invited to survey our house so that they could figure out the thief's entry point. One of the officers told my sister that my family was, in fact, lucky that the thief didn't defecate inside our house during his invasions. Those who did so were more likely to return and be violent the next time around. When my sister told me this little snippet, I knew I had no choice but to come home. I filed a leave for two weeks. It was time to get away from the capital, away from the traffic, the work, the betrayal of the woman who simply siphoned off my money and fucked someone else behind my back. But those were no longer important. I was home now. I didn't want to leave the fate of my family to the excretory preferences of a stranger.