This must be the place

Something happened to me last week, and I’m still trying to understand what it was and what it means. Writing helps. But the narrative won’t settle yet. Maybe it’s too soon. Or maybe it won’t. There are different stories here.

In one, a man came into my house in broad daylight while I was home and stole from me. I called 911, but the first two calls didn’t get picked up, and they only answered on the third call. I waited for a long time before the operator answered and told me the cops would be by to take my statement. They never came that night, nor the next day, but the intruder came back and made his presence known. 48 hours later, they stopped by when I was not home. That night, the intruder came back yet again and tried to get into my house again. The system failed.

In another, an intruder came into my house in broad daylight. I found him in my bedroom and it frightened me and I ran away. He came back the next day, and again the next day. On the third day, the police caught him. He’s now in jail. The system worked.

Both are true. Both are misleading. But there are many others, too.

A mentally ill man came through an unlocked door. He was hungry, so he ate some food. He made little attempt to conceal his identity or actions. He later returned things he’d taken from me. He couldn’t communicate but he meant me no harm. He is now incarcerated. The system failed him.

Or, a dangerous man came into my house. He stole things, and he also moved things around in my house in weird and threatening ways. He returned multiple times, threatening my safety. He is now incarcerated and will get the mental health care he needs. The system worked.

Whether the system worked or failed, and whether I did the right thing or didn’t, both might hang on whether he gets the help he needs or not. I don’t know now, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know. And that assumes a little help is all that’s needed. I want to believe in these mechanistic, institutionalized interventions as if they absolve us all. I know better. I don’t know anything.

Here’s another story. Longer, and true, but still incomplete. I could write twenty of these and still not know which is the real one. The intruder could write twenty. The OPD officers could write twenty. They might all be true.

…

I was on a zoom call late Wednesday morning when I thought I heard notes played on the piano downstairs. A neighborhood cat must have come in and walked on the keyboard, I thought. The back door was open, as it usually is, so Nala, our pit bull, could come and go during the day. I kept talking, but wrapped up the call at early and went downstairs, grateful for a short break before my next call.

In the kitchen, something caught my eye. On the shelf under the spices, where the water glasses live, in one of those plastic sleeves that nice cards come in, there was a laminated one dollar bill onto which, over and around the word ONE, someone had stamped the extra letters to make it say

NEVER FOR
M ONE Y
ALWAYS FOR LOVE

This is a line from This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody), a song by the Talking Heads. It is my favorite song. The list of people in my life to whom these words mean something went through my head, starting with my daughter. For my birthday last year, I invited a bunch of friends to see Stop Making Sense at the Parkway Theater. My daughter had recently emerged from years of being intensely embarrassed by me in that “could you please not speak or move or even breathe or I will be so mortified I don’t know how I will survive” kind of way, and now seemed to think I was sort of okay. She came to the movie, and when This Must Be the Place came on, she and I danced in the aisles, in front of two of her friends and a few dozen of mine. No shame, all joy. Others caught the bug and joined us. She loves the song too. But my daughter was in Virginia, staying with her aunt and cousin. What the hell was this thing doing in my kitchen? What was it trying to say and who was trying to say it?

I took a picture and texted it to my best friend, who’d been over the previous night, and my husband, who was in London. My friend texted back WHAT? No, I didn’t leave that there. No, it wasn’t there last night.

Then I noticed that the little box with a piece of cake on the kitchen counter was open. I peeked in. The cake was gone. Thank god, I thought. I’d tasted it, and it was kind of bland, so I’d ignored it so far, but in the back of my mind I knew that I would eventually wander downstairs between zoom calls, deep in thought about something, and eat it without even noticing. Someone had saved me those empty calories. But wait, what am I thinking? A packet of sugar had been torn open and spilled across the counter. I started to clean it up. No, wait, don’t do that. I should leave it. What am I doing? Who is here?

The carton of milk was out on the counter. Had I left it out? I picked it up. It felt light, nearly empty. Was it low before? Maybe? Doesn’t matter. Who put the Never for Money thing on the shelf? Has a dear loved one come to visit unexpectedly and this is how they’re announcing their arrival? Or is someone threatening me? Or am I just going nuts?

I lock the french doors on the back of the house. I lock the front door with the chain, which I never do. I check the door from the kitchen to the driveway. I make myself a cup of tea and add the last of the milk. I call the Oakland Police Non-Emergency number. The phone tree has a lot of options and for many of them the voice gives not only a number to press, but also spells out the long URL where you can get more information online, so it’s slow going. After about five minutes I realize I’ve spaced out. It’s noon, and I have another call. I go upstairs and resume the march of the zooms.

While I’m on my noon zoom, my husband texts back from London. Yes, he says, about the dollar bill, someone gave that to me years ago. It was in my drawer marked private. Where did you find it?

In the drawer where you keep your stash of cash? Yes, that one. I gracefully end the meeting a minute early and go downstairs. The cash is gone. Duh. Well, that explains it. I have a 1pm zoom, so I go back to the office, tucked in the far corner of the upstairs.

It’s only 1:45 in Oakland but 4:45 in DC, so this was the last meeting of my day today. I haven’t had lunch. I head towards the stairs, but I hear a sound in the bedroom and go in. There he is, this young, tall, very blond man, going through the plastic baggie I had thrown some jewelry in when I came back from the east coast last month. The dresser drawers are open. I’m seeing him in profile, but he turns to me, and his expression is one of frustration. Why am I interrupting him, he seems to say? What the hell am I doing here?

At that point, my brain and my body split. In my mind, I’m calmly but firmly asking him to put my jewelry back (has he actually taken any? none of it is worth anything), and to leave immediately. But my body has done something else, because now I am pounding desperately on Jason and Anna’s door, two houses down. At least one of them usually works from home, but I’ve forgotten they are away. Maybe Diana, across the street, I think, and it’s only when my feet feel rough pavement that I realize I’m barefoot. I am holding my phone, and I have dialed 911, and there’s a message quietly playing about someone being with me as soon as possible. What am I going to say? I vaguely recall being in my bedroom, being yelled at, with great irritation, in a language that sounded Slavic. Was it Russian? He looked a bit like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, but dressed for a MAGA rally instead of a dystopian futuristic Los Angeles. I decide Rutger Hauer must be Russian. (He’s Dutch.)

Diana’s not home either, but from her front porch I have a perfect view of the door to our kitchen. Rutger (he needs a name so why not) has come out of it, and is standing next to my car. There’s a pillar on Diana’s porch, and I attempt to hide behind it, but I’m like a toddler playing peekaboo who thinks that because I can’t see you, you can’t see me. I must look ridiculous. I jump off the porch and I’m now behind Diana’s butterfly bush, a lattice of stalks and blooms that used to have a lot more foliage. I can see him perfectly. And of course, he can see me. I look even more ridiculous.

But Rutger isn’t coming at me. He’s just standing there by my car, saying something I can’t hear. He just seems frustrated again, and angry that I don’t understand him. After what might have been 10 seconds or 5 minutes, a black Sedan pulls up with the window rolled down. “Are you okay?” a woman asks from inside. “I heard screaming.” Had I been screaming? “No,” I say, ”I’m not okay. Can I get in your car?”

“Just drive,” I plead, once inside. We go a few hundred feet, and I ask her to pull over. Her name is Jessica. She lives in the apartment building next to Diana’s house. Her husband is home and she’s texting him. He can see Rutger still standing there, now pumping his hands in the air, still immensely frustrated with how we are all handling this situation.

I look at my phone. I am no longer on hold with 911. I dial it again. It rings, but then hangs up. Whatever. I’ve read the stories. Oakland has the second slowest 911 response time in the state of California, a state not exactly known for its stellar public services. People routinely get a busy signal when they call. I’d read a story last year about an off-duty cop who’d been stabbed, called 911, and never got through. A stranger ended up driving the him to the hospital himself. He lived, but barely. Many people in Oakland just don’t bother with 911 anymore. They turn to whatever other resources they might have. For the moment, I have Jessica and her husband, Dao. I’ve never met them before.

Dao texts Jessica to say that Rutger (he doesn’t call him that) has finally moved on. He’s walked to the corner, and started down the hill towards Lakeshore. But now he’s stopped. He’s just sitting on the curb, pumping his fists in the air again. Jessica turns around and we drive the very short distance back to my house. I go in. My eyes are jumping around. What’s moved, what’s changed, what’s missing? A door slams and I jump. Oh shit, the door to the laundry room. The wind has pushed it shut. I hadn’t checked that it was locked. That’s how he got in. He came into my house, ate my food, took my husband’s cash, and I let him right back in.

Once, when I was in high school, one of the drunks from the block came in. Our house, a 1920s brick row house in the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan, faced Inwood Hill Park, and the park benches were a favorite spot for drinking cheap liquor out of paper bags late into the night. (Lin Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame claims Washington Heights as his home, but he grew up a block north, in an identical brick row house, and we are technically on the Inwood side of Dyckman St. Still, if you’ve seen In the Heights, you’ve seen my neighborhood, but with the color saturation jacked up.)

These regular drinking confabs were just part of the scenery. They were loud, but as a city child, hoots and hollers were my white noise. I could sleep through anything. But I wasn’t yet asleep one night when suddenly one of the regulars was standing in our living room. The door had been unlocked, probably my fault. The way I remember it — and this was a long time ago, I think I was 17 or so — my mother and sister weren’t home, but I had a friend over. I had no choice but to confront this intoxicated middle aged man, sputtering aggressively but incoherently. I remember pushing him out into the foyer and locking the door. It was scary, but I don’t think I was in any real danger. He was big, or at least seemed so to me, but too drunk to resist with any real vigor. For years afterwards, I would dream about locking the door and then him coming through it anyway, as if it had magically unlocked itself. I still have it occasionally. It’s always that exact door, that exact jimmy-proof deadbolt that made that distinctive thunk when you locked it. Everyone in New York had at least one, sometimes several, unless they lived in a doorman building.

But then and now, locks do not magically unlock. People (okay, me) leave them unlocked. Which is what I had done, again. I wasn’t mad at myself for leaving the back door open in the first place. I’ve lived in this house for 22 years and the french doors thrown open to the deck in good weather is part of why I love it. The day had been beautiful. But I had known someone had been in my house, and I had failed to secure it.

Now I am standing by the door I’ve just closed. I try 911 again, and while I wait on hold, I try to sort out what’s happened. There’s a padded envelope on the stool by the door that wasn’t there before. I pick it up. Right, I had put my daughter’s pencil case in it, the one she had left on her last visit. She’d asked me to send it to her. There’s no case in it. But why is it by the back door? I unlock the door and step outside. On the cafe table, there are a handful of pencils and a few small watercolor paint brushes laid neatly out. They are perfectly centered, perfectly aligned, as if set down with care. And yet, on the deck beneath the table, the wrapper for a hastily opened tin of sardines has been carelessly discarded. Oh good, I think, we had too many sardines. We always think we’re going to eat them and then we don’t. Wouldn’t they have gone bad at some point? And then I look at the pencils again, and I feel a little sick. I will have to tell C that I tried to mail her pencil case back to her, but I can’t now. It’s been…lost? Along with some of our sardines. I will need to work on that message.

Later, I will get calls and texts from many friends, checking in on me. It’s a violation, they say. You must feel so violated. By then, I don’t. I know that I don’t because 17 year old me, pushing the drunk man out of my front door, did feel violated. Did anyone say You must feel so violated? I don’t think we said things like that back then. I was also choked and mugged on the platform of the 81st Street subway station around then, but I never had nightmares about that the way I did about that lock. 54 year old me only feels violated on behalf of 21 year old C. I wish he hadn’t gone through her art supplies, taking what he wanted and so purposefully leaving the rest. It’s only the pencils that make me shudder.

I go to the front door. I had latched the chain, but now it’s off. We keep a key in the lock on the inside. It’s gone. The car key lives by the other door, the door from the driveway. I check; it’s gone. Some cabinets are open, drawers have been disturbed. But lots of things aren’t gone. He’s rifled through our drawer full of more stamps than we will ever use in our lifetime, and taken none of them. There’s a pouch of foreign currency on the counter, untouched. I’ve just switched to a new phone, and the old one is sitting on the counter, next to my watch. He was in the house for at least a few minutes after our unpleasant encounter. He had plenty of time to go back for any of these things if he’d wanted them. He could have even gone and gotten my computer in the office, the one room he hadn’t been in. It’s still there, the ever-present blue zoom logo reminding me of the topics and tasks that seemed so urgent half an hour ago. For a split second, I think I’ll check my email. It’s that kind of self-inflicted brain damage, it occurs to me, that results in not reacting when I hear odd sounds in my house, in not checking the back door after an evident home invasion. Did I deserve what I got? Jesus, what kind of thinking is that? At least I refrain from checking my email. Small victories.

Back downstairs, I find perhaps the strangest thing of all. He has left a note. It’s what appears to be a Slavic name, and then maybe the start of an international phone number, starting with +26? Or it could be the fragment of an equation? Is this the beginning of a bad Dan Brown novel?

I am shocked to hear a voice coming through my phone. 911 has picked up. The report doesn’t take long: address, man in house, no physical contact, I am not harmed, yes things are missing, phone number they can reach me at. Officers will come to the house as soon as they can.

Jessica and Dao, my new best friends, are texting me. You know he’s still right around the corner, right? Really? Wow. He has my car key. I can’t find the spare one. He’s just sitting there pumping his fists into the air. Ok, I’ll call the cops again and see if they might be able to come sooner.

I do, but all I get is “we can’t give you an ETA.” I text back to Dao, should I just go politely ask for my key back? LOL. I’ll go with you if that’s what you want, he says. Wow, that’s super nice of you, but it is crazy? I don’t think he’s armed. He didn’t try to hurt you. We meet and discuss further. We walk together down the hill and around the corner. The guy is gone. I’ve missed my chance.

I’m alone in the house, waiting for the cops. I catch a friend who is free and talks me down off the adrenaline. Come out with us tonight, she offers. I would, but I have a feeling I’m going to be stuck here waiting for the cops. Just me and Nala, who is still asleep under the deck, still oblivious.

I’m right. It’s now 9:30 and they still haven’t shown. I pack a bag and drive our old beater truck to a friend’s house, since I still can’t find the spare car key. He’ll probably steal the car tonight, but I don’t know what else to do. This time I actually lock all the doors. I chain the front door. The key he took only opens that door, so if it’s chained, he shouldn’t be able to get in.

In the morning my husband is awake, and he texts that he thinks he knows where the spare key is. I go back to the house. The car is still there, but the key isn’t where he thought it was. I look around more, trying to figure out what he touched, what he took, what he moved, but I’m out of time. I have a 7 am meeting (east coast hours!) and I need to get back to my friend’s house, where my computer is. I’m headed back to the truck when I notice, carefully placed on the windshield, my car key.

Was that there before? When I was watching him from Diana’s porch, is that what he was doing, putting the key where I would see it? No, Dao and Jessica and I were in and out of that door a lot, and none of us saw it there. It is sitting on top of the windshield wiper, positioned to be noticed. I stand there, stunned. Rutger came back last night and GAVE ME MY KEY BACK.

It’s like I’m looking at the Talking Heads dollar bill again: a delightful thing made deeply creepy. Am I happy to have it back, or freaked out that he was here again? What kind of home invader returns the most valuable thing he has stolen? Was that what he was trying to say while I watched him from behind Diana’s butterfly bush? I don’t want your stinking car. Come get your key, please. Could he have been trying to tell me he was sorry he had scared me that whole time, and the car key was his attempt at an apology?

I work from my friend’s house that day, go to a doctor’s appointment, have dinner with a friend. The day comes and goes without a word from the Oakland Police Department.

It’s Friday now. I’m trying to pay attention to my phone but I miss OPD when they call at 1:30. The message says they have “officers at the scene” but I am not there. It’s not a scene now, just a house, I silently protest, and they said they would call before coming over, but all I can do is call the number they leave and tell them I’ll stay around the rest of the afternoon. They don’t come. By 7 I’m hungry and go meet a friend for tacos, phone in hand with the ringer on full volume.

We’re just finished when my phone starts to go crazy. I’m getting texts and phone calls at the same time. The call is from an OPD officer. My neighbors (the ones texting) have spotted Rutger trying to get into my house again, and called 911. This time, they got there. They have detained him a few blocks away, and want me to come ID him.

IDing him will be easy. I saw him face to face, I saw him from across the street, and I’ve seen him not only on our security camera footage but also our neighbor’s. He went to Jason and Anna’s house, touched and rearranged each of their packages, and didn’t take any. He doesn’t seem to be aware of these (quite obvious) cameras, or at least makes no attempt to conceal himself. In the footage from our camera he loiters around our front door for a while, and at one point he rubs his hands together and very intentionally puts both palms flat on the glass of the window next to him, leaving possibly the clearest and most complete set of fingerprints one could hope for, so visible you wouldn’t need to dust for them.

Knowing what to do, however, won’t be easy. I’ve pulled up to the flashing lights but sit in the car for a moment and try to gather my thoughts. The police had not even visited, not taken a statement, not asked a single question other than the few the 911 operator recorded. The idea that they would actually catch the guy had never occurred to me. Now they want to know if I want to press charges. The obvious answer seems to be yes, but I have so many questions. Is he actively trying to get arrested? Is that why he came back yet again? If so, it has worked. What’s the catch? I resolve not to be rushed or pressured into a decision.

I need the resolve. I would like to talk to the suspect, I tell the officers. Why? I want to ask him why he returned my key, I say, though I haven’t really thought this through. This man was in your home, he took your things, he could have hurt you, the officer says. I know. But I would like to talk to him. Can you get a translator?

The cops seem to have pegged me as a little off, but now I’m crazy. A translator? They look at me as if to say We’re the force that didn’t even make it to your house for two whole days, and you think we have a translator handy? The guy speaks English, one officer explains. But he was shouting at me in something that sounded like Russian, I tell them. Polish, they say. He’s Polish, and maybe Ukrainian. But he speaks English — not well, though.

They let me talk to him. Up close, through the window of the patrol car, he looks younger than I remembered. He’s surprisingly docile. Was I expecting the man who yelled at me in my own bedroom, or the one who quietly returned my car key? I guess I’m getting the latter. I decide to start off on a friendly note, so I thank him for that. He sort of nods, head down, eyes up and to the side. I ask his name but I can’t understand the answer, and still don’t when I ask again. I ask why he brought the key back. Again, if he’s speaking English I can’t tell. The engine of the cop car behind us is way too loud. I consider asking them to turn it off so I can hear, but I’m afraid they’ll make me end my little interview. I bark at him to speak up like a stern grandmother and try another question. You brought back my car key, but not my house key. Why not? Where’s my house key now? This time I can make out a response. Not your key, he says. Not your house. My house. He nods. My house, he says again.

The pieces start to fall in place. When I walked into the bedroom and screamed, I was disturbing him. That’s why he yelled at me with such irritation. That’s why he leaves so slowly, plays the piano, and keeps coming back. That’s why he returned the car key but kept the house key. He was pumping his fists with the frustration of being kicked out of his own house. The Talking Heads dollar bill? He was just redecorating his house. And he has good taste. We should always have had that out.

I’ve stepped away from the patrol car, and someone asks for my ID. The officer has the suspect’s ID in his other hand, and I get a look at it. My eye lands on his name. It’s the name he wrote on the notepad in my house. He wasn’t leaving me a note, or even taking one himself. He was marking the house as his. Maybe the handprints on the window served the same function, leaving his mark.

Does he really believe it’s his house? Is this just the kind of thing a criminal says when caught to be provocative? But he was so easy to catch. Never concealing himself, barely running away, leaving ample evidence. If this isn’t exactly the right explanation, it’s in the right ballpark. He may have acted criminally, but he’s mentally ill.

If I press charges, what will happen to him, I ask the officer. He’ll get a mental health evaluation. And then? It depends. If I don’t press charges, what will happen? We will release him. Like, right here? A few blocks from my house, the house he thinks is his? Yes. We can’t hold him if you are not pressing charges. But he’ll go back to my house, won’t he? Yes, the officer says, I would guess that he will.

I’m more convinced than ever that his behavior, while criminal in effect, is the result of mental illness. And incarceration is the wrong response to mental illness. But there’s at least a hope of getting him care once he’s evaluated. And if I let him go, not only does he not get help, but I have an unwanted visitor possibly every day I’m in Oakland. I tell the officers I will press charges.

They take my statement. Everything I say is true, but now you know more, and if you’d been standing next to me, you might have screamed, WAIT, that’s not the story! I make sure I include that he brought the key back, that he never threatened to hurt me. But it’s a line drawing, not even a sketch. Just the facts. Or some of them. I answer the questions I’m asked. As I’m finishing, an ambulance pulls up. They’re putting him on a stretcher. They’ll take him away as a patient, not a criminal. Did they do this for me? To placate me? Are the optics just better, as they say? Or does it really mean something? Is there help waiting for him?

The officer, having gotten the answer he wanted, now turns to me, face on, intense, looking right in my eyes. Now I need you to let out all your anger at me, he says, entirely serious. What? I’m not angry, I say. You must be, he says. We didn’t show up for two days. I’m so sorry. You have every right to be angry at us. You should yell at me.

I’m not angry at you for not showing up, I try to say. I’m angry at the choices you gave me. Jail him as a criminal or let him free to go back to my house. I’m not sure I believe you that he had a meth pipe on him. I don’t know what to believe.

But yes, OPD should have shown up. Every time I’ve told someone over the past two days I’m fine, he wasn’t violent, I’m very lucky, they say That’s great, but you didn’t know that, and neither did OPD. They should have come. They’re right. I was lucky. Many are not. It’s disturbing to live in a city where 911 takes so long to pick up, where the cops don’t show up for days.

And yet, they caught him. Is it a sign of brilliant prioritization that they focused on other more urgent cases, but then swung into action when they had a chance to do something meaningful? If I’m being honest with myself and I’m really not traumatized, then what damage was done? Is the real story that they didn’t show up for two days, or that they pressured me to press charges on a mostly harmless, severely delusional young man? Or is the real story that I agreed to?

And once you go to whose fault any of this is, it’s turtles all the way down. Whose fault is it that the OPD is so messed up? I know this cycle. Something bad happens, and the public demands that safeguards be put in place so that it never happens again. We establish extra layers of oversight to double check. Lots of bad things have happened in OPD for decades. Lots of remedies have been layered on. Each year, a greater and greater proportion of the resources go into safeguards, oversight, reporting, and the like, and less and less go into the core functions of the department, like sending cops to respond to break-ins. The culture becomes increasingly focused on sheltering against the blame that falls like rain, sometimes in torrents, but always at least a drizzle, on the Department. It’s a cycle no one seems to be able to stop. And no one remembers exactly where it started. But it’s outrage after failures that start it, almost everywhere. Outrage that’s entirely merited — but ends up ensuring the very outcome it meant to prevent.

What I do know is that this officer standing in front of me, asking me to yell at him, didn’t make the rules about which crime in process to respond to. I know, because I asked, that officers were twice dispatched to my house after the incident, and both times a higher priority call came in. I know, because I study this stuff, that many times this officer could have come to my house, he was slogging through piles of paperwork, entering the same information into multiple systems, complying with oversight and reporting directives that date back to the 1960s. Maybe he also decided years ago that, as a cop, no matter what you do, you can’t win, so it’s no use trying any more. But that part I don’t know. The rest of it I’ve seen.

I return the officer’s direct gaze. I look into his eyes. I realize that after all my confusion and clarity and questions, there is one thing I haven’t said. He caught the guy who was in my bedroom. It’s not simple, but it’s true. I say thank you.

He tells me he wants me to run for city council. I tell him I would never do that unless I knew how to fix the system, and I don’t. He tells me he’s retiring next year. I ask if I can call him after he’s retired and learn about his job. He says You have my number. I do? Yeah, I just called you, about half an hour ago. Oh, right. He says he’s going to look out for us, patrol our block better now. I tell him I won’t be there. I’m leaving anyway, not because of this. But I know my neighbors will appreciate it. I think about Jessica and Dao, and make a note to give them his number, though I know he’s not supposed to give that number out.

The ambulance is pulling away. I can’t see the guy I called Rutger, but whose name I now know. I still have so many unanswered questions. Who is he? How did he get here from Poland? Is he, as the cops keep suggesting, addicted to meth? Or is he just, as my grandmother would say, garden variety crazy? And did he know my name? My last name is Polish. My father’s family came to the US so long ago that we don’t have much connection to Poland, and I don’t speak a word of the language. Did he choose our house because he thought I was a fellow countryman? What does he know about me, if anything? Surely they’re not going to put him away for very long for stealing $500, a piece of cake, a tin of sardines, and my daughter’s pencils. Will I see him again? Will I understand this any better then?

I have another thought. Does he know the song? This Must Be the Place, from the album Speaking in Tongues. It’s a classic, from 1983. The guy looks like he could have been born after 2000. Still, it starts: “Home is where I want to be, pick me up and turn me round.” If he really thinks my home is his, it’s quite the message. Now he’s been picked up. Maybe he’ll be turned around, whatever that means. Whether he was trying to get arrested, or just delusional, or something else entirely, I don’t know. Here’s how the song ends:

I’m just an animal looking for a home, and
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me ’til my heart stops
Love me ’til I’m dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head
Ah-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh

The outro is the prettiest melody you can imagine, so I play that in my head as I go back to the space he and I shared, albeit unwillingly, for a minute or two, and try to figure out what the hell just happened.