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done—small things, lies, impure thoughts, whatever came to me—because I hadn’t actually done anything bad that I could think of, and then I’d cry while receiving absolution, convinced that the black mark was still there on my soul.
    But then I was no great student of church teaching. Most of it was lost on me and left me bewildered in ways that made my parents pant and choke with laughter when I asked them about it. For the longest time, I thought the priest was saying Jesus and the twelve
decycles
, and I always wondered why the son of God was riding around with a bunch of clowns. At the time, I earnestly thought of running away with the circus, like it was a good deed I could perform during Lent. I never lived that one down—it was a family joke forever.
    But through the veil of humor and confusion, my remorse was real enough. Remorse over something I couldn’t understand.
    That was the feeling the Blooms and I shared in later life.
    After Mr. Bloom died, I never saw Mrs. Bloom, except obscurely, framed in windows, walking through the house and turning those lights on or off. I never rang her bell or peeked in. I respected her privacy and the web of grief that had spun itself and caught her as ill-fatedly and fatally as a hapless insect in spring flight.
    She’s the only one of my closest neighbors I haven’t spied on, and the only one I never will, on principle.
    As for everyone else? I despise their hermetic normalcy too much not to violate it, and for no better reason than the sheer pleasure of hearing it pop. They don’t deserve their happiness if that’s even what it is. To me it’s fake happiness. The margarine version of what the philosophers meant. But it seems to do for the majority, and all the quirks and bland neuroses that fill it up yield surprising substance if you look with hateful enough eyes, hear with spiteful enough ears. If you take a resentful interest, you can make it more than what it is. If you want to destroy it from the minutiae out, you will see the diabolical in the detail, and savor it. A voyeur’s incriminating pointillism. Connect the dots and make the damning picture.
    But then, maybe this is simply what bored people do.
    Pry.
    And bored destroyed people pry with vengeance, then justify it by recourse to their pain.
    Or maybe it’s technology that has made us all so prurient, craving more of the real in our reality TV.
    I think the truest reason I do it is to find out all I can about what is findable, even if it’s mostly mundane, because there’s so much I can’t find out about what matters. I’ll never know why my parents died, or any of the details. I’ll never get my mind around it. I’ll never be whole or unharmed or kind again. But I can know everything about my neighbors’ lives, and in so doing, I can ease what is unsatisfied in me.
    The spying started years back, with Dave. It wasn’t long after my parents’ funeral, and just about two years after Dave’s father’s death. Dave was doing his ineffectual best to help me through the worst, having fashioned himself the local expert on filial grief.
    He was on a mission day and night, depositing himself on the couch like some stubborn adjunct caseworker who’s decided that his salvation lies in your own, and that stoned silence and snacking are the strongest forms of sympathy.
    The fucking toad didn’t leave my house for weeks, not even to restock the fridge and cabinets with the purported comfort foods he, and he alone, was consuming with such gusto. He got Mama Kitty to do that. He’d literally call in an order and make it sound like it was for me.
    â€œYeah, I know, I know, but the only things I can get him to eat are Cherry Garcia and DiGiorno. I’m tellin’ ya, the guy’s gone. Really bad news. You remember what I was like. It’s a miracle he’s eating at all. Just get a bunch of stuff—the stuff I