Ray Harms reflexively put himself into a brief wall sit as he prepared to listen to his wife speak; the empty fluorescent backstage hallway brought back high school athletics and its related movements. He set his phone on the shining linoleum floor and held himself in an approximation of the correct posture for thirty-seven seconds before his legs were trembling. Two overall-wearing tech crew made their way by, jargoning at each other, and Ray hit play on his wife’s voicemail. Her words dissipated into the long corridor.

Your daughter let another girl, not Hallie —it’s a girl we don’t know—put a stick down her throat today at school. They were on the blacktop, the girl had a stick, and the fucking, her two front teeth, her adult teeth are chipped. I didn’t want to call you earlier and I know you won’t hear this until after your talk but that’s what I’m dealing with.

Tess had let another girl put a stick down her throat. What the fuck did that mean. Ray wanted to know if that language, “let another girl,” had come from a teacher, his own daughter, or from Yvonne. The word “let” was the piece he was stuck on and it was probably that word, if it had come from some teacher or his daughter, that had actually caused Yvonne to delay in calling; “let” was distressing. He guessed that Yvonne, like him, was confused by the word in this context, as it related to Tess and what she wanted to have happen to her body, or was willing to allow. Ray had two minutes before going on stage.

The overalled stage tech couple returned out of the hall’s distant murk; one had an attractively broad pancake face, wore their hair in braided pigtails and looked like they came from mass land ownership, he’d later learn this one was Sadie; the other had a hooked scar near their mouth that seemed to sharpen all their features, and a receded hairline that gave the appearance of quickness, this one he’d learn was Lorna. Each wore comically large sets of keys on a belt loop. Ray intuited the pair were sleeping together; Sadie’s joyfully inefficient gait, toddling as they chased Lorna’s direct forward progress, seemed to articulate recent past or near future sex. Strangers to him. Wake up, Ray.

Earlier they seemed not to notice him at all, but now Lorna spoke rather ominously, “You’re needed.”

Ray looked at his watch, saw he had over a minute and a half, decided to not make a joke about having plenty of time, and instead followed the two back from whence they came. The pair unlocked two different doors, doors that seemed needlessly locked, one off the long hallway and one that led to a tight set of spiral stairs, to the wings. Sadie and Lorna were gone again, though Ray still did not know their names at this point, back down the stairs in their overalls. There was no opener, no introduction, only the agreed-upon six p.m. start.

Ray watched the seconds tick by on his twenty-dollar black Casio and thought about his daughter, her teeth. He would need to learn what to do to make her the kind of daughter unwilling to let another girl put a stick down her throat. This was a new thought. Previously, he’d thought about how to help her make herself happy, how to model that ability. He tried to be obviously interested in the world around him, ask questions. He did not know how to make her on sight the type of girl you wouldn’t dare come close to with a stick.

Still standing in the wings, the empty stage inexplicably bathed in purple light, Ray thought about what he would be willing to learn in order to help his daughter become repellent to predators, violent lovers, sycophants, peer pressure, beautiful manipulators; he thought about pigeons clustering under a heat lamp in winter with commuters waiting for the L at the Davis stop; thought about why he didn’t drink real milk anymore; thought about Tess as an infant, asleep on his chest for entire afternoons, the warm wonderful glop of those naps; he thought about what was reasonable to anticipate he would be able to bring into his daily routine of parenting and that also would be an improvement on the current routine; thought about how to maintain a routine; failed; thought about how repetition or lack of repetition is in so many cases all that matters; thought about how to parent, what was worth ignoring, and what it means to ignore. What it means to pay attention. Ray’s watch read 6:00:02. At show time, per his contract, the interior theater doors would be locked and only ticketed customers would be allowed in by staff stationed at entrances. He’d had trouble with protestors at every stop. The crowd did not become silent as the house lights went down and then swelled back up into a dim glow, Ray asked that the audience stay lit, but there was an audible rounding to the noises being made.

Ray walked onstage, into the sound.

His talk was malleable in that it never changed, yet could easily be disguised. In the case of a crowd that felt, in pockets, skeptical, Ray would performatively feign that he was abandoning his prepared remarks. He would pause, take the mike from the stand, charmingly effect defeat, let his hands drop, and utter a version of the following sequence of words: “I had a talk prepared. But I’m tossing it”—then another beat to gauge the crowd’s reaction—“What I think I actually am going to talk about is expectation.” Or anxiety. Or worry. Indecision. Lost time. Sometimes he’d ask for a word from the audience, a word they associated with death, pain, regret. Or he’d lead with an anecdote.

Getting on the wrong city bus headed home from the dentist as a boy, 1981, waiting until he saw Lake Michigan blinking by on his left, pulling the rope to stop, walking all the way to the lake against the flow of head-down commuters, without a coat in early October. Lost in his own city. How quickly fear could justifiably enter into a boy’s life. Wrong bus: so quaint. Then, he’d speak of how fear is not danger. And so on.

The anecdotes were invented but also genuine for Ray. There was no deception; he was trying to stay alert to the moment onstage when he could give the audience an opportunity. In an attempt to subvert expectations, Ray attempted to be more self-deprecating, more unsure than his most famous clips would suggest he would be. He believed this demeanor buoyed the videos the audience knew with a retrospective humanity while simultaneously encouraging a new level of attention. Lying forced Ray to focus in a way he otherwise couldn’t sustain. He had gotten lost as a boy, he’d been afraid, but not in a way he understood as worthy of speaking about. He didn’t value stories from his own life as much as the stories he made up, but he couldn’t access what that meant beyond not liking himself. Whether he cared about himself or not seemed unrelated to his care for the audience.

In a stand of trees behind the high school freshman year, walking home by himself after cross country, Ray had seen the sickly school janitor, who was dying of emphysema, his bright green oxygen tank there with him in the woods, flagellating himself deep in the pines while humming “Hey Jude.” Ray tripped over a stump as he made sense of what he was seeing, hearing, standing, fleeing in the wrong direction. Running to a street he barely knew existed a mile in the wrong direction. Standing in front of the other barber in town, not his own, the other barber standing in his bright shop with his push-broom making faces at Ray as Ray panted in the window. The other barber saying, “Shoo, shoo now.” Ray feeling like his life had slipped, like he could reasonably stop going to church and his parents would understand, hell was real but church was not, that he could fuck now without penalty, just needed a willing participant. He walked home with awful thoughts. Unerring directionally after catching his breath. Even today he still couldn’t listen to that ridiculous song. Don’t make it bad. Jesus. He didn’t know how to tell that story in a way that had meaning, or how to tell it at all.

Still, there were many ways in.

The Harms’ home was invaded the week after a nationally high profile, that is, white and suburban, school shooting. A Tuesday. The break-in had no connection to the shooting other than relative geographical location, the Midwest. Proximity, though, is enough to spook Americans.

A man wearing a ski mask and navy blue coveralls kicked down the Harms’ front door. He was very tall. Six and a half feet. He punted the Harms’ terrier, Mack, across the kitchen as it tried to bite him, went upstairs, ignored their daughter’s bedroom and Yvonne, and pulled Ray out of bed by his neck, dragged him in this way down the stairs to the first floor where Mack was whimpering, slumped against the cabinets in the kitchen. The man demanded Ray’s wallet, car keys, garage door opener. Ray did as the man asked; crawling hobbled but quickly to retrieve the items, his family screaming from the top of the stairs as the man whipped Ray in the face with a handgun. The man left. Ray was not unconscious, bleeding mightily from his ear. He stood, and as the man drove away, Ray walked out his open front door to watch his own black Buick accelerate into the night. The lights came on next door. The neighbors came over, had already called an ambulance. The neighbor lady was yelling “Ray, this world is bleeding and void.” Ray was surprised she knew his name. One evening he’d heard her compare a minor back injury she’d incurred at work to 9/11, straight faced, as Ray soberly retrieved his mail, and once she had asked Ray, without using his name or making eye contact, “What particular white heritage are you all?”

But following the attack, what ultimately gave Ray an audience was this: he wouldn’t close the front door. Even after it was repaired. First, out of a stubbornness he couldn’t name, and then as a deliberate gesture. He wouldn’t return to normal; he wanted to be less afraid than before. Even if the gesture felt easy to mock, performative in a thin way, making this choice gave it meaning beyond what Ray could have anticipated, for himself and then, shockingly, others.

Neighbors began following suit, not only next door, or in the immediate neighborhood, but in distant parts of town, the state, in clusters around the country. Strangers. Leaving the front door open. Posting pictures of their open doors. The coverage was steady, surprising. Weather, pets, somnambulism, other very legitimate con- cerns limited, in short order, the movement to Tuesdays, to mark the initial attack. Ray began encouraging people, in place of actually leaving the front door open (reluctantly through videos online and then more enthusiastically with an e-mail newsletter he titled Harms Way that Yvonne helped him set up), to spend Tuesdays thinking about not acting defensively without cause, not living life in preparation for violence. The door gesture fell away, other than symbolically in some of the merchandise he sold. A door ajar within a bold circle on a baseball cap.

Ray’s acolytes were strange to him, and though he did not dislike them, he couldn’t easily recognize their fervor or even their attention as being well-intentioned or not. The newsletter had nearly forty-five thousand subscribers. Some of the videos had ten times that. He refused to appear as a talking head on TV regardless of the channel because he felt it would accelerate both his popularity and its downturn. Hating himself made Ray confused by the attention and wary that it would soon disappear. But they paid to hear him speak, asked questions that filled the time he was paid for, and had given him a career, after three months of unemployment prior to the break-in. Before that, for nearly fifteen years, he’d worked as a shipping manager at a company that made conveyor belts. The company had been purchased by a German manufacturing conglomerate six years before Ray had been fired. Larner Belt Co. became Geschäft Schnell. For those six years, Ray was given an annual six thousand five hundred dollar post-tax bonus for taking a German class once a week in the meeting room during his lunch hour. What is this ficken life. He’d been remaindered during the pandemic.

The theater in Columbus was not sold out, but the entire lower section and possibly a third of the balcony was, almost one thousand nine hundred seats in a venue that could hold nearly three thousand. Ray’s guaranteed take home as negotiated by his booking agent was fourteen thousand dollars, not including merchandise. Ray could see what appeared to be more couples than at his last few stops. No obvious trouble yet. The presence of so many couples led Ray into the register of a repentant ex-addict now tasked with counseling parents struggling with their children’s mistakes. And yet the talk stayed the same:

“. . . my baseline is to push against any remaining instinct I have toward militaristic preparedness. Fear is being shouted at us in the form of health care, advertising, politics, it’s all over, and paring down our reality into a landscape of threats shapes what we are capable of thinking of, wanting, hoping for. I am not afraid of hypothetical violence though it surrounds me. My fear is that I will run out of ways to communicate that the insurance being sold to us is false and not insurance at all. Figuratively, literally. Many of you, most even, probably already agree. And so what does this forum give us? Converting the converted is a waste. But I can try and give you language to bring to others—”

*

As the Q&A was about to begin, a protestor wearing coveralls and a ski mask began walking down the long aisle toward the stage silently, holding a sign on a stick that said fuck ray harms i’m bearing arms. Ray could see both the man’s hands, and no gun. Locked theater doors apparently had made no difference. Protestors were the reason that Ray required the auditorium lit. The audience reaction was palpably mixed, some standing, shouting, some with phones out calling the police, others waiting for the interruption to be over. Ray addressed the man, reading the sign aloud.

“Nothing I say has anything to do with you,” said Ray to the protester. The masked man did not move.

Ray deserved the harassment. The break-in felt unfinished, especially because he was profiting from it. And he could endure more. Ray overcompensated in other ways to account for the imbalance he felt, was too trusting, too indulgent.

More members of the crowd were yelling at the masked protestor. Others had left with purpose along the perimeter of the theater. The man was around twenty-five feet from where Ray stood onstage, dressed exactly as Ray’s attacker had been. Ray had spoken about the break-in many, many times, and tens of those talks were available, in full, online. Fairly consistently his most ardent detractors had chosen the get-up of his attacker as their uniform. Whoever had allowed the man to cross the lobby unobstructed and then let him into the theater had seemingly come to and alerted the three on-duty security guards. The guards were walking down the aisle toward the man, guns drawn. The protestor allowed himself to be taken away, the remaining crowd applauded, and the man called back toward Ray over his shoulder, “See you soon.” Police sirens could be heard outside the theater.

Before the protestor had cleared the room, Sadie and Lorna entered the theater holding a live microphone and found seats mid-theater. Sadie said, “If it’s still okay with you, Ray, I’d like to ask a question.”

“Please,” Ray said, thankful to have Sadie steering the event back into its scheduled rhythm.

“In the hallway before the show today, was that to avoid people knowing your exact whereabouts? Not being in the green room?”

Ray did not feel called out, and it didn’t seem to be Sadie’s intention to expose him. Something about the way they asked the question felt supportive to Ray. There was some scattered confused laughter.

“What this question is about, and this is true for all of my talks, is that I don’t spend the time prior to a show sitting in the green room. Our man who was just here is an example of why. The non-hypothetical man. There have been protesters, some actually armed, at every one of my talks on this Midwest swing. I am protecting myself against a likely threat, not an imagined one. But I’m not hiding.”

There was some light applause. Lorna stood and gently took the mike from Sadie, who sat. Lorna asked, “Doesn’t that still run counter to your whole message? I’m really asking.”

“There’s no purity to my approach. I’m human.”

Heartier applause, sensing an end, a simple takeaway. Lorna gave Ray a thumbs-up and Sadie mouthed thank you. Ray frowned warmly.

There had been tension between Ray and Yvonne prior to his leaving for this Great Lakes stretch of talks. Tess had been asking Yvonne why Dad continued to dwell on the attack. Yvonne shielded her actual feelings on the topic from her daughter, saying, your dad is making good money right now. Tess was nine, and aware. Her words were not as precise as what she actually understood. She knew there was a perversion, a base immorality, a sickening flaunt to how her dad was making money; she wanted her mom to give voice to that, to name it, but Yvonne refused. For her, within certain vague and unspoken boundaries, a job was a job. Especially since Ray had been out of work.

But she agreed with her daughter.

While signing hats bearing the Harms Way logo, as police in their winter garb hung around the lobby, Ray caught the eyes of Sadie and Lorna through the milling crowd and waved them over.

“Where should I eat around here?” Ray could have asked his phone this question, but he wanted to know these people.

“Lot of walkable options—” said Sadie as Lorna began speaking German at Sadie. They went back and forth in German. Ray tried to keep his face neutral as the two spoke, they were debating whether or not to invite him to dinner at their home, and then Ray interrupted them with “Ich bin ein guter Gast. Und was sind ihre Pronomen?” He couldn’t tell if they’d known he spoke the language or not. Minor celebrity was odd in that way; Ray often couldn’t be sure who actually knew the basic facts of his life.

Ray followed Sadie and Lorna to their home in Lithopolis, twenty minutes outside of town. They drove a 1990 VW Golf, green pearl—Lorna told Ray the year as soon as they registered his reaction. The car was in good condition with only a little rust near the rear wheel wells. Twice Ray thought he was being followed; the protestor from the show had rattled him more than he wanted to admit. The gray Ohio sky was spitting. Wintry mix.

Their home in Lithopolis was stark white, worn like their car, an upright and stiff two-story with a detached garage. Within three hundred yards was a Marathon gas station, several houses that looked related in an inbred way, and a fenced-in concrete mound with no markings.

Inside, sitting alone on the couch in their living room, Ray listened to Yvonne’s voicemail again, and then dialed. Out the living room window the night was gray with what was becoming snow. Yvonne answered but didn’t say anything immediately. Ray could hear his wife’s breathing and a microwave beeping.

“I saw a post on the boards about the protestor,” Yvonne said.

“It was no big deal. Ends up helping me in the long run I think. How’s Tess?”

“She’s in her room. We have a dentist appointment tomorrow, early. She’s just going to be late for school or I might keep her home. It’s fine. Dr. Aysterlee.”

“I don’t understand, really.”

“She was on the blacktop with this girl, Avery, who I guess is or was a friend, it’s hard to know. And they had sticks, hitting each other. It was snowing. Avery might have slipped.”

“On the voicemail you said that Tess ‘let’ the girl put a stick down her throat.”

Yvonne said nothing, maybe waiting for Ray to continue.

“Was that your word? Like do you know that Tess allowed this girl to do that?”

“Ray, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“It seems important to know if she got hit in the face with a stick or if she actually let a girl put a stick down her throat.”

“Enough,” said Yvonne. The husks of past fights now present in a conversation that was ending.

Sadie and Lorna were making some kind of rice and bean meal together and drinking wine out of thin little stemless glasses when Ray walked into the kitchen.

He said, “I wanted to mention, about earlier, when there is an audience, and I’m being paid to talk, that changes the math for me.”

Lorna said, “You don’t have to sell us.” They handed him a glass of wine, his glass not matching theirs. They all toasted with a small lift and no words. Whatever was cooking smelled like andouille, turmeric. The house was drafty and all the lights were off beyond the kitchen save for a lit bathroom down a long central hallway. The house was creaking in the wind. Sadie said, “What I was thinking today hearing you speak was, if you aren’t afraid of violence—”

“It’s not that I’m not afraid of violence—”

“—if you aren’t haunted by it—”

“Okay.”

“—when you are afraid, or even the man today—”

“Reasonable to be afraid today.”

“—but apart from any reason, what are you really afraid of?”

Ray looked from Sadie to Lorna. The honest answer that he would not give was that he had no idea how to protect his daughter. The root of telling others not to huddle within the false carapace of readiness, guns, knives, bats, alarm systems, was not the break-in, but instead an elaborate trick Ray was playing on himself, attempting to convince himself that Tess would be okay regardless. Sadie’s and Lorna’s expressions gave away nothing. If there was something Ray should have noted in either person’s countenance that would lend understanding, he was missing it. He decided to use words to say nothing. “I fear not seeing the whole. The line between wariness, toughness or their opposites, can muddle easily.”

Sadie said, “Like the hallway. Not being in the green room. Looking back, it’s justified. But also how do you not let that kind of vigilance seep out into the rest of your life?”

“Yes,” said Ray, apparently having failed at saying nothing.

Lorna said, “And you don’t know the where the line is. How vigilant to be. And eventually somebody might get to you no matter what.”

“Or somebodies,” Sadie said, laughing, reaching out and grasping Lorna’s hand. Ray wanted to laugh but could not.

Sadie’s laugh became hiccups and they put their hand to their mouth, but Lorna seemed to understand the new sound emission as having meaning and looked directly toward the cause, rising from their chair as they did so. Ray caught on slower, meaning a full three seconds after Sadie’s hiccup, and now all three were staring at a man standing outside the kitchen window dressed in coveralls and a ski mask. It was the protestor from earlier. He stood stock still outside the window. Unmoved by the weather.

Ray felt Lorna and Sadie watching him, as if he had brought this person upon them, upon himself.

The masked man began walking away into the night. Ray went to the window and watched him disappear. They’d forgotten about dinner; the rice was burning. Ray turned from the window and Lorna and Sadie were gone. He called for them. No response. The house creaked on. He killed the heat underneath the rice and tried loudly making a joke, one that didn’t make sense. Nothing. The bathroom light down the hall went out. Black. The house full dark beyond the kitchen’s light. A draft swelled beneath the floorboards. Ray knelt in the kitchen, feeling exposed. He thought of the masked man entering this home, wet boot steps, no dog to kick here, he’d have to kick Ray and keep doing so until the job was done. Wake up, Ray. He pulled his phone out to make sure he had battery, he did, and then put it back in his pocket. Ray stayed down and tried to make his breathing as shallow as possible.

Ray was already thinking about how he would tell this story. He would leave this house not seeing anyone, wearing a ski mask himself in this telling, get to his car safely, wipers going quickly, find the highway and drive all the way home without remembering he was wearing a mask, which would have explained the looks he received from other drivers on the highway and while standing at the pump in Warsaw. He’d make it to his own home early the next morning still forgetting he was wearing the mask, come in the front door, and find his family eating breakfast, screaming at the masked man in their house. He would bridge that into talking about perception, the thin line between hypothetical and true violence, how the two can exist simultaneously.

The house creaked on. Still kneeling, Ray thought, “The house creaked on, waiting to host a different story entirely.” This was the time to leave. He could feel his safety as a finite entity; walk to the door, get in the car, leave. But he didn’t move. He was trying to think if he was missing something obvious, some indicator beyond his instinct to flee. Ray again focused on making his breathing shallow. He thought about how if he left now he’d be able to make Tess’s dentist appointment in the morning. His presence might be enough; he might not even have to ask her about the stick, he might not have to understand what happened at all. He was preparing to stand up, when he heard a familiar voice repeat, “You’re needed.”