At 3:49 in the frigid darkness of Sunday morning, with the wind outside howling like the ghost of Ethel Merman, the burglar alarm in my house commences a lunatic shriek.
"Who's down there?" I cry out from the sanctity of my second-floor bedroom, shaking the sleep from my head and immediately wondering if I should have thrown in a major profanity to establish the fact that I am plenty miffed and not one to suffer homicidal maniacs gladly.
No response.
I am expecting -- what? -- that intruders will politely respond, "It's just us burglars. If you got, maybe, a few items we could have, we'll just toddle along."
"I'm going down there," I say, hoping to be talked out of it by anyone, my wife, my neighbors, my Fear of Intruders support group.
"No, you're not," declares my wife, closing the bedroom door and locking it. Then, over the sound of clanging alarm and pounding heart, the phone rings: the burglar alarm company, asking if we want them to send a policeman.
"Yes," my wife says, and hangs up, muttering, "What do they think, I'll go out and flag one down myself?"
"I don't think there's anybody down there," I say, hoping to convince at least one of us that it's a loose wire, a missed connection, an electronic malfunction understood only by graduates of Mervo Tech. "I'm going down."
"No, you're not," my wife repeats.
"OK," I say, "but if I write about this in the newspaper, I'm putting it in that I wanted to go down, but you made me stay up here."
"If you write about this?" she asks, raising at least two eyebrows.
"Well, yeah, you know, if we survive," I say, looking for some corner in which to cower and wondering why the police haven't arrived, since nearly three minutes have passed.
Now the phone rings again: the police, I imagine, saying they can't come because the roads are bad. Or the National Rifle Association, calling to say, "See? We told you so!"
But no: an unexpected voice of strength and authority:
"Michael?"
My mother-in-law. Four in the morning, she's calling to chat?
"I heard you have the police at your house."
Already she heard? How does such news get around so fast?
"The alarm company called," she explains.
"The alarm company? What do they want from you? They're sending you in as police backup?"
"My mother, from the SWAT team," says my wife.
We assure my mother-in-law that things are fine, big mistake, she should go back to sleep. The clock now says four minutes have passed, and still no police.
"Sure," I say, "next thing you know, they'll try to tell us there's other criminal activity going on in the city of Baltimore."
We look out the front window: no signs of help. Out a back window: all that snow, all those footprints waiting to be traced. What fool would commit a crime on such a night?
"I don't think anybody's down there," I say, still hoping to make one of us believe it's only a technical problem. It must be. The city of Baltimore can't keep making people move away, can it? At 4 in the morning, the mind races. Headlines will be traced to this very doorstep. The lock on the bedroom door will mean nothing when the intruder, looking like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining," shows up with an ax and an attitude.
But then, salvation: a policeman coming up the front walk.
"I'm going down," I say, actually meaning it this time, hoping to let the officer in before any intruder nails me at the front door, hoping the officer doesn't think I'm the intruder, hoping not to get caught in a cross-fire.
"It's probably nothing," I greet the officer, "but you know how wives are. . . ."
He checks all rooms: nobody here. All windows and doors: no signs of attempted entry.
"The wind," he says. "It's setting off alarms all over town. The wind chill's 16 below."
Which means: Alarms are clanging even in the county, where nerves also rattle. Which means: It's OK to go back to bed in the city of Baltimore.
"Just remember," I tell my wife, when we turn off the light. "I was ready to go down there and do battle."
"Of course you were," she says, patting the place where I used to have a biceps. "You were never braver."
tTC