The stranger in my house is a nice thief. He giggles and skips, face split with a smile. He wanders through the three rooms of our small apartment and heads for the bedroom, begins to look through the boxes atop Rachel’s wooden shelves. He finds a gold ring, another gold ring with an emerald, sixty dollars in cash. He sits on the edge of our futon after pocketing the finds. Looks up at the framed Rothko prints, touches the stacks of Harpers and New Yorkers beside the bed. He opens a small box below our night table and smiles at the bright blue condom packages. His hands are thin, pasty. Pianist fingers. With a finger and a thumb he picks up a bra from on top of the bed. He stands up, kicks a pair of boxers that I’d left on the ground. He strolls into the kitchen. Opens the fridge. Looks at the beers and condiments, closes the heavy fridge door. He walks back through the house. Checks for more small items of value, trails his fingertips across the white walls. With fingertips he brushes objects lightly: the couch, the stereo, the bottle of dish-soap on the sink counter.

***

The first time our apartment was broken into we didn't realize it for a couple of days. The intruder had been subtle. He'd stolen some cash out of Rachel's bag, but our house had been full of guests that weekend and we'd been boozing it up and going out to dinners and lunches. I figured that during a haze of alcohol Rachel had grabbed the cash and forgotten. I figured it would turn up.

The next day Rachel discovered that the three rolls of laundry quarters were gone from the wicker basket on her shelf. Again, I thought that we might have misplaced the rolls. I thought that maybe one of our friends might have swiped the money in some guilty kleptomaniacal fit. It seemed more unlikely to me that someone had broken in, not touched anything except for the money and left the house untouched. I pictured break-ins like KGB ransackings in spy movies, pillows torn apart, shelves knocked down, books ripped open and letters strewn, a pillow feather still dangling in an odd updraft as the owners walked back in.

When Rachel realized that her rings were missing from a box on the top of her shelves, I was convinced. It took me three days of distrust, of my sparse logic over her concrete observations. She showed me the empty ring boxes, the misplaced scarf that had been under them. The slips of white cotton. I felt distinctly male.

We decided to not call the police. Made sense at the time. It had been a mysterious number of days since the break-in. We had no idea whether we might have left the back door open accidentally, as we had once or twice before in the morning rush of heading off to work and school. I think we wanted to be in control of the situation. If we called the police we would have mustachioed men with guns in our house, it would be real. It would be a crime and we would be victims. If we kept quiet then we could invent the intruder.

We decided that he was a nice intruder. He didn't mess anything up; he was polite. He only took some cash and some rings that Rachel didn't wear. It could have been much worse. We felt lucky. A year earlier in DC, I fell on a bottle and gouged my hand open. The doctors in the emergency room told me that it was a lucky cut, missing the arteries. The blood that ran down my hand that afternoon was thick and dark, like hot blackberry preserves. There is a power in belief. Rachel and I had pictured our little criminal noticing from the alley that our back door was ajar and stepping into the house. He figured out a few quick places where valuables might be and searched through them, thereafter leaving the house in order, forgetting about us as soon as he’d pawned the rings. Or maybe thinking fondly of us, our messy shelves stacked with books, the makeshift closets dangling clothes in our bedroom.

Rachel and I told people about the intruder. Don't you feel violated, they would ask. We smiled. He was our little criminal. So cute. Like a stuffed animal version of a wolf.

***

The second break-in was mystifying. Rachel and I had clopped the stairs up to our apartment. We stepped loudly past our messy bookshelves of cinderblocks and spruce planks. I held a video and a six-pack of cheap beer. It was balmy for October, Richmond's Southern cement and bricks still holding onto the last of summer's warmth as the leaves outside crackled into orange and yellow whispers over the cement sidewalks.

We sat down on the low futon. My big legs angled up like an enormous cricket. We cracked open our beers separately as I finished making a mixtape, a tape full of the songs that I used to listen to over and over again on a walkman as I walked around town. Just this last one, I told Rachel, paging through the CD books. I had three of them double stuffed to hold six hundred or so CDs; the books were lined up next to stacks of about another five hundred CDs. Each one tied to some memory of seeing a band and sweating and feeling perfect for at least a single moment, or of late nights of coffee with friends in some kitchen as Sarah Vaughn sang in her blues-laced opera voice. These songs that define my personal identity, that create windows for me to see the outside world through.

The song ended. OK, no more, she said. Let’s watch the movie. I picked up the video, pried open the plastic case and looked up to the TV. But I stopped. No thoughts. If I were a dog I would have crooked my head sideways. Where our VCR goes, on a block and plank shelf next to the TV, there was a void. A confusion. The breeze slipped in through our open windows, shimmying the curtains into dance. I stared, agape. Stillness seemed to suck into that empty space. Oh shit, Rachel said. We knew. It was stolen. He was back.

***

The cop huffed heavily after climbing the single flight of stairs into our apartment. He sat down immediately on the loveseat and began filling out a form. He fit every physical stereotype for Southern white male cops: brown hair cut short, mustache hanging unevenly over his top lip, a little too portly, a few too many red veins spidering his nose and face. Rachel and I stood fidgeting as he penciled our information into the proper slots of the photocopied form with deliberate letters.

These apartments around here, he said, sometimes the landlords don't even bother changing the locks. He could be coming right in the front door.

You know, he said, I don't want to scare you or nothing, but this guy is probably watching you all the time. He probably knows when you're home alone, ma'am. He might be out there right now. So just keep that in mind and watch out. People think that this is a nice neighborhood, but some bad things happen here. I don't want to scare you.  I just want you to know.

He rose from the couch after the form was done and headed back out the door. His heavy-soled shoes clopped loudly on the wooden stairs as he exited. I don't want to scare you, I said mockingly to Rachel. We laughed. We could have done that over the phone, she laughed dryly. I expected him to at least dust for prints.

I began to think about our neighbor. He's a scrawny kid with bleach-blonde hair and eyes bleached of emotion. His mother told us that he'd just gotten out of juvenile hall. He would sit on the porch all day and follow by-passers with his eyes. What about, I started, and then stopped thinking that it was wrong to assume it’s him just because he was in Juvie.

The neighbor kid?

Yeah.

That’s what I was thinking. Who knows? Could be him, could be anybody. Rachel rolled her blue eyes and puffed an exasperated sigh. I don't want to scare you or nothing.

***

I see him unlock the door and quickly enter the apartment. He wanders through the three rooms of our small apartment. He's nervous, jittery. Not for fear of being caught, he knows we'll be at work for another four hours. He needs something right now to sell. Something that will get him enough to buy his fix, satisfy the need clenching at his stomach, awakening the opiate-deadened nerves that haven't felt pain in months. He sees the VCR, the stereo, the stacks of CDs, all the things he could sell quickly. His hands are thin, dirty. They leave a spot of warmth on everything he touches that dissipates into the air like his breath. He knows he can return whenever he wants to. He catalogues our valuables. He notes where he could hide and wait.

***

A few days later a friend of ours came over and changed the locks. I had already screwed shut the windows, because they didn't have locks on them. The landlords were being unhelpful. We figured that it was worth our loss of another sixty bucks on new locks in trade for the assurance that the intruder wasn't walking in the front door. That idea killed me. It was as if he were on equal ground to the two of us who lived there. Rachel was so happy about the new locks.

She said it was the first time since the break-in that she felt safe. She told me how a client at her social work job had once killed two cleaning ladies who surprised him during a break-in, only because he panicked and didn’t know what else to do. Or worse, to walk in to find him poised and waiting inside.

She couldn't go home unless I was there. She'd been having nightmares and I'd been sleeping with my left hand around the warm metal neck of an aluminum baseball bat. The fresh, shining keys to the new lock became an instant symbol of progress, of taking control of the situation. She gave me one for my key ring and it reflected the lamplight like a jewel.

That night Rachel and I were heading out to a dinner party. We were late and rushing down the stairs to the street. There was a small ring of metal hitting cement. A key. One of the extra keys to our new locks. Rachel checked her jacket pocket and found a hole and four missing keys. They had fallen somewhere in front of the house as we had walked back and forth to the car.

We both began tracing our steps on the street, scanning the ground in the dark for a small speck of shining metal. The darkness seemed complicit with the silence that had built itself inside our apartment. We wandered over the same hundred feet of cement and asphalt, our heads hung like penitent monks. We found one key, but the other three were still missing.

We didn't have a flashlight and I wanted to run up to the store to buy one. No, Rachel said, that'll only draw attention. They know we dropped them here.

Christ, Rachel, I snapped, no one is watching us.

I reached to hold her shoulder but she pulled away. My thumbnail scratched the fabric of her jacket. Sure, she said, just like you said no one had broken into our apartment.

I sat on the concrete of the cement and wrapped my hands behind my neck. There was the sound of the streetlight buzzing above me, the sound of TV noise coming from inside the house behind me, a passing car the next street over, Rachel's footsteps away from me and back into the house. My face frozen, iron.

***

Security is like the constant hum of white noise from air conditioners and refrigerators. You only notice it when something happens to disrupt the sound. Rachel was in tears and there was nothing I could do but hold her until the shoulder of my shirtsleeve grew wet.

All I could think to say in response to her fears was yes there could be someone waiting for you in here when you unlock the door every day. Yes the intruder could be bragging to all of his friends about how easy it is to get into our apartment. Anyone could get in here at any moment. There is no true sense of safety. I kept my mouth shut and held her close to my body.

When you crack the humming static of security you see that below the sound is nothing. No structure. I realized that the idea of safety is only a way to forget that a single stab wound to the belly ends everything, that there is no reason why someone shouldn't come into our house, kill us, and depart with some of our more valuable possessions. It makes more sense to do that, even.

Neither of us cared too much about the VCR. It was only an object. But the empty hole on the shelf where the VCR had been was growing, expanding out from that empty space. It was enveloping us both with the true sound of fear: silence.

***

I measure my life in songs and records that I can't imagine having lived without. They were the only consumer items I ever cared about. I need a structuring of sound to give me sense, a foundation from which I understand myself.

The Shudder to Think CD I bought after seeing them at age sixteen, my first time driving alone the streets of DC that would later become my home. It was at the old DC Space, an arts collective downtown in a section of town that had been all but abandoned to money laundering front business, adult bookstores, and late nightclubs. Guitars screamed through overdriven amps, drums mixed thumping punk beats with Brubeck time signatures. I was sweating. Everyone danced, bodies pushed against each other, held up by the crowd. And after the show, the band simply stepped off the foot high stage and joined the crowd. I walked over, got eight bucks from my wallet and bought a CD from the singer. I told him I liked the show. He thanked me. He introduced himself: Craig. All those memories locked into the plastic disc of that CD.

Memories don't require physical remnants to entrap them. They float between the present moment and imagination. And yet flipping through my CDs always felt more like a review of my life than any photo album, any yearbook or any diary. Perhaps it is not the music at all, but the fact of ownership, how this object changes the direction of my life, if only slightly, pulls me toward it with some small work of gravity.

The third break-in was when they stole my CDs, about eight hundred of them. Almost my whole collection.

The window into our living room was cracked, the screws I'd driven into the windowpanes had fallen to the ground. The panes were scarred in two spots where the window had been jammed up, pulling the wedged screws with it. There was a smudged oil palm print on the pane of glass.

All I could think was that at least he hadn't been using the front door.

***

The two cops that arrived were fit, alert, and helpful. They responded with sympathy, which is the best one could do, considering that most breaking and entering cases go unsolved. We told them what the other cop had said and after a brief description of him, they both sort of cocked a beleaguered half-smile at each other as if to say Of course Dorflestein would say that. The two checked around the backyard, in the space between our house and the one next to ours. They peered suspiciously over at the house next to ours where the porch-sitting neighbor lived. It seemed like they knew something. The house stands about seven feet away, with a narrow strip of dirt between the brick walls. The dirt area is closed off from both the road and the alley, perfect for someone to slip a ladder in to jimmy open a window.

Three break-ins in less than three weeks. I felt like I should begin leaving out cookies for the intruder like you would for Santa. I felt like a weekly paycheck for this junkie out there. Like he had free reign over my life. Like I was a pent animal providing for him. But I didn't feel angry or scared. Mostly I felt nothing. It was strange, but it was strange like a theoretical question. Like a loaded query Socrates would pose in one of Plato's Dialogues, waiting for the respondent to fall into his logical trap.

Q: How does one respond to a situation in which no response will affect the situation?

A: One does not respond.

I could get angry. So what. I could slam my fists against the wall until they swelled up bruised and raw. So what. I could be scared. I could hold a warm knife in my pocket wherever I went. A gun. So what. I could cry, complain, scream or rant and it would not affect the situation I was in anymore than the sound of one of the dried up autumn leaves outside hitting the concrete. There is no control. There is no security. When engulfed by the silence beneath the white noise I am unable to speak.

***

I see him prying the window open and crawling in. His head of blonde hair over his face, red from exertion and exhilaration. He could come in and wait for us. He could be here in the afternoon when Rachel comes home from work. He could come in at night, while we sleep. He is watching us. He knows when we are here, when the lights turn out, when we’re sleeping, awake. He watches the drapes flutter inside our locked windows as we move by them. He watches them settle into our silhouettes inside.

***

His name is Shane, as in Shenandoah. It was written on the first subpoena Rachel got, for Shane's arraignment. He was our neighbor. I remembered the brands that scar his arms, dark puffy worms embedded in his skin. He’d had a friend with him, a James Silas Jones. Through a small town quirk they’d taken the CDs to the local record store and tried to sell them to my friend Jaye, who recognized my collection. Jaye had called the cops and the two had been busted. Shane was seventeen, James was eighteen.

It was strange to have a name to fit the crimes with. To see our belongings in a box, picked at and counted by the police. To feel so dislocated from the objects at our fingertips.

***

Once as a teen, when this guy I knew was going upstairs to get his coat at this house, I slipped forty bucks out of his mother's purse that sat on the kitchen table. I didn't feel bad about it, not too much. I felt confused, driven to do it and not wanting to do it at the same time. A few times I joined my friends in hopping into cars to steal the stereos. Usually they would end the night with five or six stereos and I would steal the deodorizers. One night a cop pulled me over in my dad’s Volvo station wagon while I had two sheets of acid in my backpack. He gave me a warning for speeding and told me to head home.

Could this have been me, I wondered. Would I have broken into someone’s house at his age? I probably would have, given the chance and the idea. At eighteen, there wasn't much to hold as important. I was a solipsism. My only escape was music.

And luckily music was better. Better than anything. Better than everything. Than the high of breaking laws, of marijuana, better than the cheap beer, the acid, PCP. No drug could compare to the pure feeling of heat that music created inside me. Because a good record can briefly transform me into a god. When I listen to A Love Supreme I’m not only myself and John Coltrane at once: I am the flow of music, the journey. I am the searching solo atop the insistent groove of bass and drums. I am Elvin Jones, the pulse of hearts. I am McCoy Tyner, circling the main melodies like a Sufi dervish.  I am them and myself. I stand above and within the music both at the same time. It is the architecture of transcendence.

***

I see them forcing the window open with a crow bar and climbing in. They admitted to the police that they wore socks on their hands because they didn’t have gloves. They are wearing socks. They are ridiculous, filing through the apartment with sock-puppet hands. Snooping through the medicine cabinet of ibuprofen and Q-tips. Opening the fridge, rooting through the panties in Rachel’s drawers. I see them there constantly now as I read or watch a movie. They are in the house. They live in the house right now. They are in each corner behind our backs. I feel their presence when I walk in and check every window for cracked glass and forced marks. They are the floorboard creaks at night, the sound of the radiator pings that shock me out of sleep at night. The sound of Rachel restlessly shifting in bed next to me late at night, when we should both be asleep, but instead lie in bed silently. They live in the house because they live inside me now.

***

We moved all of our possessions that had any value into a friend's apartment. She joked that her apartment would probably get broken into next. I laughed, but decided that I would assume that it would, just in case. I was beginning to do this, to decide that each next step would twist my knees. Each passing car was going to veer off and hit me as I walked down the sidewalk. I shied away from people on the street. I kept my fists balled in my pockets throughout the day.

Without our things, the apartment began to feel hollow, stale. We stayed home a lot for fear of having to reenter the house again with the fear that we would open the door and find someone standing there, his breath irregular and heavy in the silence of the apartment.

When I would leave, I blared classical music from the alarm clock and the radio in the kitchen. That volume would perturb any intruder sneaking into our windows, I thought. I wanted the music to protect my house while I was at work and school. I imagined the concertos and symphonies bouncing off the white walls and hardwood floors while I was gone. Every time I came home I would listen closely at the door to make sure the radios were both still at full volume. And still, when I walked in the absence of our belongings and the obsessive checking of the windows and the back door gave off its own blanket of silence that covered the music.

During this time I heard on the radio news that police only solve five percent of breaking and entering crimes. Statistically, it seemed safer than driving. One can steal with virtual impunity. Our neighbor is still in jail, while the juvenile is in treatment and job training. I would like to say that I feel relief, that I feel like the scenario had concluded. But one night Rachel told me over dinner that today was the first day she hadn't held her cell phone already dialed to 911 as she entered the apartment. I didn't realize that she'd been doing that at all. The break-ins forced a silence upon us. And still our voices seem tinny, weak inside the silence.

And the intruder is still in my house. He will always in be inside my house. He is in my world. He follows me. He hums silence. I feel his presence like a nagging pain in the left shoulder, a reminder of vulnerability. He is the floorboard creak at night, my reflections in passing windows that I momentarily don’t recognize. He is the squeal of ambulance sirens that speed past me. He lives inside me, the silence below the fine music of the flow of blood, the ringing whine of the nervous system like an alarm that can not be shut off, only smothered.

Shane’s brother has been released from prison. He sits on the porch watching the neighborhood, just like Shane did. His eyes hold the same empty expression. And lately at night, when I’m gone and Rachel is home, someone has been ringing our doorbell. And there is no one there when she answers.