Paul moaned in pain, he was moaning in physical pain from his arm coming through the ceiling, he couldn’t seem to pull his arm back up, it hung there and then twitched as he tried and then hung there again, and moaning in physical pain too from his ankle. He was moaning in physical pain, and there was in his moans the sound of another kind of pain, the pain of defeat, of frustration with the fact that his advanced thinking had been interrupted yet again, that every time he seemed on the verge of a breakthrough events and people conspired against him. Aunt Liz dialed 911. She told the operator that there was an intruder in her home, that someone had broken into her home, which they seemed to understand, but when she tried to explain that the hand, the arm, was coming down through the kitchen ceiling they began to ask questions, she told them to send the police, immediately, and maybe the fire department, she didn’t know how they were going to extract this arm from the ceiling, no she wasn’t on medication, she said, she hadn’t been drinking, this was an emergency. I suggested she ask for an ambulance, but she didn’t. She hung up the phone and grabbed the biggest kitchen knife she could, she stared at the ceiling, ready to defend herself from the arm, she said she would defend herself, she said she would not hesitate to defend herself, she said she had a knife, she said she was not afraid to put it to use. All of this she said toward the ceiling and in spite of Paul’s moans, it was as if she couldn’t hear his moans. She reached into the knife block and pulled out the second-biggest knife in the kitchen, she held it out to me, she said that I should follow her lead, she said she’d dealt with this kind of thing before, well, not exactly like this, but the neighborhood wasn’t what it used to be, someone had come into the backyard once, she said this loudly, and more at the ceiling than at me, and that intruder had paid the price, that intruder had paid for his crimes long before he went in front of a judge, she said, loudly. I didn’t take the knife. Instead I said something that in retrospect seemed like a mistake, but who knows, the unintended consequences are not traceable, there are long patches when everything stays the same, and there are moments when everything changes, this was one of the latter. I said to Aunt Liz that she could put down the knives, that she didn’t need to be scared, that even if Paul wasn’t stuck, and moaning in pain, and mainly above the ceiling, that even if Paul was standing here in this kitchen, he posed no threat, he had dedicated himself to mankind, to saving mankind from itself, he was a humble servant of mankind.
You never know how people are going to react to knowledge, the knowledge in question here being that the man stuck in the ceiling above us was someone I knew, and that I wasn’t shocked to find him there, which meant that I had something to do with his being up there, all of which was bad enough, all of which was making Aunt Liz angry enough, but which was multiplied a hundredfold by the mention of his name, Paul, as if Aunt Liz’s anger had been a small fire burning in a metal trash can and the name Paul was a gallon of gasoline. She pointed the knives at the ceiling, at the arm, and said, Paul? That man is Paul? I said yes, she kept talking. Was this the man Paul I’d met on the bus from Madera? Was this the man Paul whom she’d expressly declared not welcome in her home? I said yes, and yes, and that he needed help, I repeated that we should call an ambulance. Aunt Liz went silent, she went silent and her eyes went wide, her face got redder and redder, her face became a red bridge between her red hair and red lipstick, and she exploded, she screamed at me, she screamed obscenities, I had never heard Aunt Liz use those words before. I have always understood the need to get feelings out, I have always understood how people use certain words as release valves, so to speak, for their feelings, even if that has never been my particular strategy for dealing with emotions. It had begun to dawn on me, I mean besides seeing and hearing Aunt Liz’s anger, it had begun to dawn on me that Aunt Liz had been hurt by my actions, at least in the sense that, her words, she had attempted to make progress where others had not, and that she couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped, but she guessed that, in the end, no good deed goes unpunished, which was her philosophy, which was not mine, which has never been my philosophy. I felt terrible, but since I had already been disappointing Aunt Liz before Paul, or before Paul’s arm, came crashing through the ceiling, since she had already been chronicling the ways in which I had been backsliding, I was more prepared for her harsh words than she was, she seemed shocked at what was coming out of her own mouth.
Paul’s moans subsided, his moans decreased in volume and frequency, he was calling for help, he was sobbing and calling for help, I told Aunt Liz I was going to go up to help him. She didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, she followed me into my room, still holding the knives. I pulled the chair out from under the desk and rolled it into the closet, where I opened the access panel to the ceiling, the whole time Aunt Liz was telling me I couldn’t do this, and the whole time I was telling her that Paul was injured up there, that my friend Paul needed my help. She said that that man Paul was an intruder, he had intruded into her home, he was a criminal, we should let the police handle it, I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. I asked her something that had been a popular question at the Lighthouse Fellowship, which was What Would Jesus Do? People at the Lighthouse liked to say it, some even wore little bracelets with the initials on them, but I never did, especially after I’d listened to the Bible on tape. You see, Jesus did a limited number of things, he healed the sick, turned water to wine, organized fishermen, overturned tables, gave to Caesar what was Caesar’s, walked, told stories, shared meals with prostitutes and tax collectors, washed people’s feet, asked God why have you forsaken me, and rose from the dead. So unless you were doing one of those things, asking What Would Jesus Do? was a way of engaging in speculation as to God’s mind, and whether you believed or not it seemed wrong to me to try to guess what Jesus would do in other situations, it seemed to go directly against the idea that we couldn’t know the mind of God. By the time Paul moved into the ceiling I had gotten past all that, of course, but Aunt Liz remained the good Christian woman she’d always been, and I thought a good way to convince her that Paul should be helped, at least until the authorities arrived, was to appeal, as they say, to her sense of Christian charity, and so I asked her, I asked Aunt Liz what Jesus would do in this situation. You are not Jesus, she said, you are Oppen, you are my nephew, and you are a guest in this house, and I forbid you, she said, to climb into that ceiling, I forbid you, she repeated, to climb up there. I said that I was sincerely sorry for any trouble I might have caused her, I said that I appreciated her hospitality very much, and her point of view, for she had one, a clear one, despite whatever Paul Renfro might say, I said that I understood exactly what she was saying, but despite all that I had to help my friend.
Aunt Liz did not try to follow me. I crossed the beams and ducked through passages to reach Paul, to reach the area over the kitchen where Paul had been pacing and where he had fallen. He was there, he remained there, prone and moaning, his arm stuck into the ceiling below, his injured ankle sticking up at an angle, he looked like he was swimming, like he’d been frozen in the act of swimming. When he became aware of my arrival he said, Thank God it’s you. Help me, he said after that, help me get my arm out. He was stuck, his arm was stuck almost all the way up to his shoulder. I tried to dig away at the plaster and wood surrounding his arm but my fingers alone couldn’t do the job. I went back into the crawl space, I dug through Paul’s papers, which were no longer hanging everywhere but stacked in a messy pile, and I found a mechanical pencil, Aunt Liz must have heard me, she was still in the closet, she asked me if I’d come to my senses, she asked me to get down, I told her Paul was stuck, she said that was good, he should be stuck, keep him stuck until the police arrive, she said. I returned to Paul. I discovered I could peel away some of the wood above the plaster, I peeled it back in a way Paul couldn’t because of how he was stuck, and then I used the mechanical pencil to chip away at the plaster, bit by bit, until the hole was big enough for Paul’s arm to come up out o
f it. The whole time I did this, Paul lamented, his word, he lamented what was happening, he said what was happening was what always happened, he said that there seemed to be no exit from this endless loop, he had inherited it from his parents, who were perversely still alive. Aunt Liz was in the kitchen, I could see her through the hole, she was looking up at me with terror in her eyes, she was still holding the knives. The police took a surprisingly long time to arrive, which Aunt Liz would later say was typical of Panorama City, nobody cared about Panorama City anymore, Panorama City had succumbed to various elements, various human elements that naturally compromised the police’s ability to respond in a timely manner, and she wasn’t talking about the tax base, or not only about the tax base, but also the lack of motivation, on the part of the police, the understandable lack of motivation to help what she called these people, these people who come here and expect, expect the rest of us to take care of them, Aunt Liz’s words.
Now, Juan-George, I have not spent much time in the company of the police, it might seem otherwise based on what I’ve put onto these tapes, it might seem like I deal with the police on average of once a month, but these two encounters, the first after your grandfather, my father, Aunt Liz’s brother, died and the second in Panorama City, the one I’m telling you about, these two encounters pretty much make up all of my involvement with the police, if you don’t count further encounters with Madera Community Service Officer Mary, which you shouldn’t, she didn’t have a gun. And so in terms of advice my knowledge is limited, but I should say, I should mention as I don’t think I have already, something that Paul Renfro pointed out to me once, which is that Justice, contrary to public belief, is not blind. Love is blind, but Justice? Look at any statue, at any depiction. She is blindfolded.
As soon as we heard sirens Aunt Liz disappeared from sight, I could hear her telling the police that I was up in the ceiling, too, that she was worried for my safety, that I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into, that I was the tall one, it was the old man who had intruded, the old man was the intruder, not the tall young man, she didn’t know if he was armed or not, there was an access in the closet. Paul yelled through the hole in the kitchen ceiling, he yelled down that he was unarmed, that he was surrendering willingly, that no crime had been committed, that he could clear everything up, and that he would happily meet the police in the closet to discuss the situation, it would take him but a moment, his words, his ankle and arm were injured, he needed my help to get there. It would have been reasonable to meet Paul in the closet, but the Panorama City police turned out to be unreasonable types, they had been very slow in coming and now seemed to be in quite a hurry, and so they sent two officers up through the closet access panel and another two officers up through another access panel located toward the front of the house, above the entryway closet, each officer moving forward as quickly as possible despite having a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other, the bouncing flashlight beams only blinding the officers coming from the other side. Paul and I were halfway to the closet by then, the police bumped me out of the way and tackled Paul with such force the plaster cracked, Aunt Liz’s ceiling was cracked by the weight of the police tackling and handcuffing Paul Renfro. At which point Paul screamed, one of the officers told him he had the right to remain silent, Paul kept screaming, he was in pain, they were on his ankle. Once they were off, Paul told the officers that they had no right restraining him in this way, that he was a guest in this house, that he had been invited here to pursue various advanced ideas, ideas they couldn’t be expected to understand but would only benefit from unknowingly, he had been invited here to pursue those ideas to their logical conclusions, as a guest he couldn’t understand what he had done wrong, he had been expecting medical attention, not a paramilitary force. The officers didn’t appear to hear, except one who yelled down to another, I couldn’t believe there were more downstairs, who yelled that an ambulance should probably be called, which was what I was trying to tell everyone all along.
They got Paul down, they got him through the access and down into the closet despite the handcuffs, and I tried to explain to them that what Paul had said was true, that I had indeed invited him to stay in the space above the ceiling so that he could pursue his ideas in peace, that he had been an invited guest of mine, but the police were more inclined to believe Aunt Liz’s version. At first I thought it was because she could prove she was the owner of the home, I attempted to explain that it didn’t matter who owned the home, technically, I had invited Paul in, how could he have known who owned the home, I said, but Aunt Liz had talked to the police when they had first arrived, while I was upstairs giving what she later called aid and comfort to the enemy, she had talked to the police and she had told them that I was someone who was not aware of the dangers inherent in living in the big city, that I had recently lost my father, and furthermore that despite her best efforts she was having some difficulty introducing me to the mainstream, her words, thereby without my knowledge destroying ahead of time whatever credibility I might have otherwise established with the police, meaning it didn’t matter what I said on Paul’s behalf, the police had come to arrest him and take him away. An argument rendered moot, Aunt Liz’s later words, after a visit from Detective Woodward, an argument rendered moot by Detective Woodward notifying us that a warrant was already out for Paul Renfro’s arrest, that Paul Renfro had recently escaped from a so-called minimum security facility elsewhere in California, where he had been serving time for various offenses. Lucky, said Detective Woodward, as reported to me by Aunt Liz, lucky his ankle was broken or we might have had a pursuit on our hands. And lucky, too, said Aunt Liz, that the police hadn’t arrested me for harboring a fugitive in her home. I tried to explain to Aunt Liz that Justice was not blind but blindfolded, that the right thing to do would be to extract Paul Renfro from this legal bramble so that he could pursue, unfettered, a Paul Renfro word, the advanced ideas he’d been pursuing all these years, but I couldn’t convince her on any point.
Detective Woodward and another officer went up into the crawl space and shot photographs for their files, then they took everything that belonged to Paul, all of his papers, all of his ideas, his cardboard briefcase, everything, they took it all away, they wouldn’t say what was going to happen to it, they said it was evidence, some of it would be used as evidence, the rest would go into storage somewhere. Aunt Liz couldn’t understand why I was so concerned about the illegible scrawlings of a criminal madman, her words, perhaps I should consider instead the fate of the woman who had tried to help me in every way, or consider how much danger I had put her in, how much danger we’d all been in while this creature, this termite, was living under our roof, unbeknownst to her. Which is only one tiny fraction of the extended discussion Aunt Liz and I had at the kitchen table, under the hole in the ceiling, for most of the night and resuming first thing in the morning. As you can imagine, I did not say much, most of the speech came from Aunt Liz’s mouth, most of what she said she had already said a few times before, she kept repeating things, she kept saying that she remained in a state of disbelief as to what had happened, and that she was going to have to come to a decision, but every time she began to get close to that decision she retreated, it was clear to me what the decision was, she wanted me to leave, but despite her depending on professionals for everything, despite her adherence to common sense nonsense, despite whatever flaws I might be able to list here, she wanted me to leave but she couldn’t say so, every time her giant circles of speech led her back to that inescapable decision point she pulled back, so to speak, she was my protector, she couldn’t kick me out.
Panorama City Page 19
