Clarissa didn’t apologize for her broken voice, which meant that she was, in these few moments, being personal with me. Her apologies were a way of maintaining distance and formality. She turned toward the window and braced herself up a few inches to see the sidewalk. I knew that soon I would maneuver myself into position to see what she was looking at. Everything seemed to be okay and she turned back to me with an empty sigh. “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like I’ve been to heaven and been brought back to earth. I’ve seen how things should be and now I’m here seeing how things really are.” Her head glanced around again.

I got up, folded my hands across my chest, and leaned against the wall. I could see the raven-haired woman on the street, hand in hand with the boy-the same boy I had seen her with at the mall-and I wondered why Clarissa, if she had someone to watch her child, would have them tag along on her work rounds. As I listened to Clarissa and watched the plotless drama on the street, I noted a black Mercedes turn the corner and cruise by. I noted it because it was the second time I had seen it in less than a minute and it was significantly under speed. This second time it passed, the raven-haired woman saw it and took a few steps back. The car slowed to a stop, then reversed itself. Clarissa saw me looking out the window and she rose and turned to me, scared. The car was now stopped in the street, carelessly angled. The driver got out of the car and left the door open, approaching the woman and child. He was groomed like a freshly cut lawn. A trim beard framed his face; close-cut gray sideburns fringed his bald head. His suit was well cut and dark and set off by a stark white shirt. I could hear him yelling and cursing. He was wound tight and unwinding rapidly in front of us.

A horrible chain reaction occurred. The man, who looked like an Armani-clad Mussolini, increased his screaming and made his hand into a beak and began poking at the woman like an angry swan. She was knocked unsteady with each jab but defended herself with angry, equal shouts. But the man lost control and pushed her too hard. She lurched back, tripping. But she was holding the hand of the boy and as she fell, he fell with her. With this blow the chain reaction became uncontained, entering my apartment. I felt the shove that drove the boy to the ground and experienced his terror at the noise and violence. I was down the steps running toward the scene, hearing Clarissa screaming and running behind me, hearing Tiger barking from Philipa’s window. I took the steps in threes as the legendary slow-motion of panic set in and turned seconds into minutes. I wondered, in these moments while time stretched itself, why I could not step off a curb but stairs did not present a problem. Why could I not rename the curb to stair step and be on my way? Why do I see the light from a lamp as a quantity and not as a degree? Because it was written on the bulb, that’s why. I suddenly knew what my enabler was: language. It was my enemy. Language allowed me to package similar entities in different boxes, separate them out, and assign my taboos. I was at the bottom of the stairs when time caught up to itself. A child’s scream broke my thoughts; chaotic and angry voices jarred me. I heard my breath gasp and heave as I turned and headed toward the lawn.

The attacker pushed his voice to a rasp and I heard him yelling cunt, cunt, you cunt. I was barreling across the grass when he turned and grabbed the child’s arm, trying to pull him up, but I threw myself between them and covered the boy like a tarpaulin. The man tried to pull me off, but I had clenched my fist around a countersunk lawn sprinkler and I was impossible to move. He began to kick my ribs. Fuck you fuck he said.

He tore at my shirt trying to lift me off the boy, whose shrieks had intensified, had penetrated Philipa’s apartment, and had roused an angry superman. For the next thing I knew, the bearded man had been lifted off me and thrown against his car. And I saw Brian holding him there, standing between me and him, while Tiger gnarled a few feet away. The man was foaming and spitting and he swore at Clarissa and jerked himself away from Brian, who was twice his size and a hundred times more a man, and who continued to menace him, forcing him back to his car. Before he peeled away, Brian took his foot and kicked the Mercedes door, which I realized later had probably created a three-thousand-dollar dent.

Clarissa swept up her boy, who was wailing like a siren. She held the back of his head against her and he slowly calmed. The scene quieted, and we stood there in silent tableau, but anyone coming upon us would have known that something awful had just happened. Clarissa approached where I lay in a clump on the ground and asked was I all right. I said yes. She pointed to the raven-haired woman and said this is my sister Lorraine, and I said that’s Brian. And Brian stood there like Rodin’s Balzac. He looked around, “Everybody okay?” Yeah, we all said. Then Clarissa urged the child forward and said, “This is Teddy.” Teddy held up his arm, spreading his fingers and showing me a grass-stained hand. My shirt was torn open and Clarissa touched my exposed ribs. “Ouch,” I said. And I was pleased that I had chosen the perfect word for the occasion.

After making sure that Mussolini was gone and couldn’t see our destination, we five soldiers marched up to my apartment. Brian took charge and I asked if he had a Red Bull and yes, he did. Then I wondered if I had made a mistake; I worried that it might be dangerous for Clarissa to have a Red Bull now, when she was most inclined to load a gun and mow down her child’s attacker. I decided to put her on crime watch. If ever there was a moment for my Quaalude-laced wheatgrass drink, it was now, but I had long since decided that spiking punch was a bad idea, bordering on the immoral. Anyway, I was nervous about the chemical collision of an upper and a downer, and wondered if the combination could create a small explosion right in the can.

Teddy scrambled around my apartment on hands and knees, occasionally rising on two feet and moving hand over hand along the windowsill. Brian stood like a sentry and was asking questions like “Who was that guy?” that never quite got answered. But I did know what he was: an angry, unmanageable tyrant, haunted by imagined slights, determiner of everything, father of Teddy, ex-husband of Clarissa. This marriage couldn’t have lasted long, as she’s young, the boy’s an infant, and the husband’s too violent to have been with her a long time. I assumed that Clarissa would have left when his monstrous streak first appeared and that he had no reason to hide it once he was in possession of her.

Clarissa’s sister, who evidently had flown in from somewhere to stand sentry over Teddy until the crisis passed, was the most upset at Mussolini and also was the most lucid, rattling off all his worst qualities to Clarissa and listing all the legal and practical ways to intimidate him. “Clarissa, I know you can’t hate him because he’s the father of your child, so I’ll hate him for you,” she said.

Clarissa quaked imperceptibly, and I watched her contain herself. She pulled herself inward, doing what she had to do as a mother: think how she could protect Teddy. She looked around the room as she thought, holding each position for an instant before shifting her head or body. As ideas occurred through her, she would respond to them physically. She shook her head; she would express dismay; her lips would tighten. Finally she whispered, “I can’t go home. Where can I go?”

Lorraine said, “You can stay with me.”

“No, no,” said Clarissa. “He knows where your hotel is.”

I said, “You could stay here for the night. All of you.” They all looked at one another and knew it was a good idea.