Close encounters: fiction excerpt: 1996 by Gloria Naylor.

1996 by Gloria Naylor Third World Press, July 2005 $19.95, ISBN 0-883-78263-4

I wonder how many people actually get the chance to act out their fantasies. I was one of them, and can say the feeling is one of complete and utter peace. I would sit at the folded card table in a second-floor room that I used for a study and look at my twenty by thirty patch of tilled soil, feeling there was nothing more in the world that I needed. Literally nothing. I had my writing. I had my two acres of land fronting a shoreline. I had my good health to keep it all going. The only thing I didn't have was a way to keep those damn cats out of my garden! There was a strange woman, the neighbors called "the cat lady," who had moved into a brick split-level ranch just across the road from me. She had at least twelve cats. They weren't house pets, but roamers. Over the years, I'd see them perched up in my oak tree or walking back and forth across the road. I didn't mind until they started using my garden plot as a litter box. At first I appealed to their owner's good nature. I baked a batch of peanut butter cookies and took them over to her one evening. When I rang the doorbell, she peeped at me from behind the lace curtains at her front window. There was no denying that she was home because her car was parked in the driveway. I rang again, and she finally came to the door and opened it a crack. "I'm your neighbor from across the road," I said to her, "and I thought you might like these." She opened the door fully, and I was astounded by her size; she was a good six feet tall with brunette hair and exceptionally pale skin. She slouched a little in the way that tall women do from a lifetime of trying to cover their height. She didn't invite me in, and I didn't ask to come in. I just explained the problem I was having with her cats, and she told me that she would fix it. They were probably used to no one being at my place, she told me, and they'd begun to take it as their own. She'd try to keep them in the house from now on if I would please just leave her alone. I didn't think I was being that much of a bother, but like I said, she was a strange woman.

The next week I didn't see the cats at all. Then one Sunday, when I went out to mark off my garden for the new seedbeds, there was a huge pile of cat clung in the middle of the section I had planned for my tomatoes. I cleaned it up without saying anything. The next day I did the same. I became obsessive with my cat dung patrols. Each morning before my coffee, I'd go out to check. And each time I discovered a clump. It was like a pyrrhic victory. Ah ha--again, I'd think. Whenever I saw one of the stray cats on my property, I'd run downstairs from my study and scare it away. There was one, a gray tail-less Minx, whose size rivaled that of a medium-sized dog, that I found especially troubling. It was certainly the right size to be the culprit for leaving such large piles in my garden soil. it was late January, and I dreaded the moment for setting out the tomato and pepper plants thriving in my green house. On my way there I saw cat shit curled up between the leaves of my zucchini, clinging to the petals of my marigolds. I was seeing cat shit in my dreams. This had to stop!

My next visit to the cat lady was without cookies. She didn't open the door this time, she spoke to me through the window. She was doing what she could, she told me, but her babies needed exercise. I suggested that she put them on a leash and walk them up and down the Avenue of Oaks. This, of course, did not sit well with her, nor did my contention that the huge gray cat was probably the main offender. She would keep Orwell in the house, she told me. And when I reminded her that was the same thing she'd said two weeks before, she disappeared from behind the curtains. At least I had a name for my contender, "Orwell."

I thought about calling the police, but I knew they'd only laugh at me. I tried to find out as much about this woman as I could from the neighbors. Her name was Eunice Simon, and she worked as a paralegal in town. She was unmarried, with no children. She never spoke unless spoken to, and if she had any friends, they weren't on our side of the island. The neighbors put fences up around their gardens and used pepper spray to discourage her cats and suggested I do the same. I stubbornly rejected their advice. It was my land and my garden. Why should I be the one to make concessions?

To add insult to injury, my water heater broke down, and I faced washing up in cold water during the only two really cold months that we had. And my tree rats decided to make a return visit to my attic. The "no problem" plumber took two days to show up, but the exterminator kept his word and came the very afternoon I called. He could put fresh bait in the attic, he told me, but it would be more effective if he could also place them underneath the house. Did I have any pets? Looking back, it seems like a small matter, and I guess I should have left the whole thing alone. But twenty-twenty hindsight is no sight. How could I know that my answer to that question was about to change my life forever? No, I told him, I have no pets.

Dick Simon is not having a good day. He spent the morning in a Senate Intelligence Committee closed session for a hearing on the latest budget proposed by his office in the National Security Agency. Why did he always have to beg those bastards for money? Didn't they understand the importance of what his agency--the NSA--was doing for their country?

He heaves a sigh and spins his chair so he can look out his plate-glass window onto the sprawling design of the buildings below. A virtual city lays under his gaze with twenty thousand people employed to do everything from cutting hair to frying hamburgers to deciphering the most sophisticated codes on the world. His city. That's the way he's always thought of Fort Meade--his city.

The plate glass gives him back part of his reflection. He is what could be considered a handsome man. Dark wavy hair, olive skin, and a strange cast of gray eyes that appear larger than they are behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He spins back to his desk and picks up his favorite paperweight, a snow globe, which he shakes vigorously. It usually helps him to relax--watching the white snow swirl around and around, settle, and finally reveal--nothing. That's what his city at Fort Meade is like: a bustle of activity that doesn't really exist outside of its campus.

As Assistant Deputy Director of the NSA, he is the second most important civilian in an organization so secretive that its very charter is still classified as top secret. Its employees, whether cutting hair or deciphering codes, all tell family and friends that they work for the Department of Defense, period. Simon loves that--the ability to be there and not be there. To have privy to almost every form of communication in the world while he sits at the center, holding all those lines in the palm of his had. Invisible. Invincible. He shakes the glass globe again.

"It comes in threes," is what he told himself that morning after forgetting his badge in his car and not being allowed in the building. Harry has known him for ten years, and he still wouldn't let him in. He must remember to write a memo commending Harry for doing such a great job, regardless of how he had argued. But, then again, that memo might reflect badly on him since he should never have forgotten his badge. He cancels out the memo in his mind. Dick Simon never does anything that will put him in a bad light, regardless of how small.

But it did come in threes: first, the Senate hearing; then, the forgotten badge; and now, a message waiting on his desk from his sister, Eunice, in South Carolina. It's marked "Urgent." And he knows that's a damn lie. There is nothing about Eunice's life that warrants urgency. Maybe he would call her after dinner, or maybe he wouldn't. But then again, maybe one of their relatives had died. They had lost their mother and father several years ago, so that only left a small circle of aunts, uncles, and cousins. None of whom he likes well enough, or is close to enough, to warrant that he call his sister any earlier than after dinner. But then again....

He stops himself. He could have gone on forever, with dozens of variables to entertain for the importance or non-importance of her message. That's how his mind works. It is a curse from his background in mathematics. His explanation ultimately comes down to what he feels, and Dick Simon rarely lets what he feels influence a decision. It's what is practical, what is concrete that matters.

What is pending on his desk? Calls to answer, memos to write, with the most important memo being a summary of his meeting with the Senate Committee. He puts down the snow globe and buzzes for his secretary.

"Come in, Mildred." His speaking voice is low and modulated. People find themselves leaning in toward him to better hear what is only a shade above a whisper. He never raises his voice. Even when angry, it takes on a stillness, a slow cadence that seems to center itself in some depth within his chest.

As Mildred walks in, his long, slender fingers tent themselves in front of his face, a gesture that means he is focusing, deep in thought.

"Sir?" Mildred stands in expectation.

"I want to dictate a memo. And, by the way, how urgent did my sister sound?"

"How urgent, sir?"

Mildred is a competent secretary, but she has the infuriating habit of repeating the last words of any request--her way of being sure she heard the whisper-like voice correctly.

"Yes, how urgent?"

"I couldn't really say, Mr. Simon. She wasn't crying this time."

His face flushes slightly behind its olive tones. When Eunice makes a fool of herself, she, in some ways, was making a fool of him, too. He searches Mildred's face for sarcasm, but only finds a deadpan professionalism. Well, he thinks, if she wasn't crying, then it definitely would be an after-dinner call. After dinner--that time of day when he's driven himself back home to his town house in Dupont Circle and shut the door on the world and all his problems. Since he's unmarried and childless, it is a time of total peace. Dinnertime is when he regroups, pulls back the pieces of himself that he's torn off to give to a hundred problems that make up his day. He is a gourmet cook, and so dinner ingredients are picked up fresh each evening from his favorite specialty market: foie gras, truffles, salmon filets, or whatever else might hit his fancy. A warm plate and a chilled glass of Chardonnay separates the Dick Simon of NSA and the Dick Simon of Dupont Circle.

The Dick Simon of Dupont Circle has a screen saver on his computer made up of Easter bunnies, hopping from one side of the screen to the other. A cascading group of bunnies in all the colors of the rainbow--hop, hop, hopping across his screen. It is the closest he ever comes to a sense of humor. The Dick Simon of the NSA is renowned for not having a sense of humor, and he likes it that way. He is a machine, all work and only work. But his home holds a secret about him that no one at work would ever guess. And keeping a secret from a place whose mission is breaking through secrets is gratifying. When he sits in front of his home computer, that night after dinner, it gives him his one and only smile of the day. After he has had equivalent of a good belly laugh, he is ready to call his sister.

"It took you long enough."

"It was a rough day at the office, Eunice."

"I don't know why I bother. You don't give a damn about anything that concerns me."

"What is it, Eunice?"

"Orwell is dead. My baby is gone."

A cat, he thinks. She's calling me about a damn cat. "Sorry to hear that, Eunice. Was it a peaceful death?"

"He was poisoned."

"How do you know that?"

"I had an autopsy. It was rat poison. Gloria Naylor killed him."

"Who's Gloria Naylor?"

"A woman who lives across the road from me."

"And how do you know she did it?"

"Because she hated my cats. She told me so. And she hates me, too, because I'm a Jew:'

Here it goes, he thinks. It always comes down to this. I didn't get the job. I didn't' get the house. I didn't get the raise because I'm a ... loser. His sister is a loser, and that's the bottom line. A part of him hates her for that, for not finishing law school and ending up a mediocre paralegal. The professors hated her because she was a Jew, but if it turns out that most of them were Jews as well, what did she say then? They were self-hating Jews. They had it out for her from the beginning because of the way she looked, walked, talked--felt. Then there is a part of him that feels deeply and sadly responsible for his sister's paranoia. Perhaps if he had been a better brother after their parents died. If he hadn't been so intent on his own career. If only, if only ...

"... and then when she left that day, she looked back at me and I saw it in her eyes. I saw it in her face ..."

"Eunice, it looks like we've both had a long and hard day. Why don't you rest and we'll tall about this another time?"

"How did I know that you'd say that? How did I know that was exactly how this conversation would end?"

Eunice decides to take matters in her own hands. She doesn't know why she went to Dick at all; he has never supported her. It's times like this that she misses her father desperately. Those long, slender violinist's hands stroking her back and telling her that everything would be all right. Daddy would fix it.

Well, for good or for bad, she doesn't have him now. She goes to her phonebook, finds the number for the deputy sheriff, and dials. She wants to report some irregularities that are happening in the house across the road from her. She can't put her finger on it, but it seems like there are drugs involved. How does she know that? Well, cars are always stopping there from morning to night, and she's seen boxes being unloaded after midnight. Just a suspicion, but it bears checking out. There, she thinks, hanging up the phone, that should do it.

Deputy Sheriff Miller, a slight man with balding hair, runs his hands over his head. Another call from Eunice Simon. She was always reporting "irregularities," a strange car she couldn't identify cruising past her house, a stray dog being sent by a neighbor to torment her cats, strange noises in the middle of the night. The woman was a squirrel, no doubt about it. But he was obligated to check out any suspicion of drug dealing. It was becoming rampant on the island. What had once been a quiet place where people didn't even bother to lock their front doors was slowly becoming an armed camp. Neighborhood watch teams, alarm systems, and attack dogs were now the norm.

He turns to his computer and runs the name she had given him. Gloria Naylor. It comes up with nothing, not even an overdue parking ticket. It still doesn't mean anything. There were a lot of drug users and pushers who were yet to run foul of the law.

The next day he does a little discrete investigation of the woman who lives next to the Coffin Point plantation house. The description he gets of the woman peaks his interest. She's a writer. She's black. And she wears dreadlocks. Some kind of radical, that was for sure, but not necessarily dealing. Then, again, how could she afford a place like that on that end of the island without some major help? You didn't pay for a place like that on welfare checks. Perhaps, it will be best to turn this tip over to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Those DEA guys had the means that he doesn't to get to the bottom of things. They've even been known to do a little unofficial snooping around before going back to a place with a search warrant. Miller picks up the phone and makes the call.

This passage from the distinguished novelist's much-anticipated new work sets the stage for a mysterious chronicle of harassment. It is her first book since The Men of Brewster Place (Hyperion, 1999). (Used by permission of Third World Press.) See BIBR July-August 2005, "Worth the Wait" for a review.