10.29.05 lus ball

Merry Christmas mystery

Anto is my neighbor. Recently, he moved even closer to the northeast window of my apartment. He is your usual noisy neighbor, getting even noisier as he approaches full size; growling, barking, pacing or sometimes thrashing about in his newly built cage.

Yes, Anto is an animal. He is the most recent addition to the alien nationals that live in our compound that include an Australian, an American and a Japanese. Anto, of course, has no nationality, though he has a breed. He is a pure-breed German. A German shepherd, that is.

Several days ago, early in the morning, as the sun was climbing out of the clouds that have come to blanket most of our days of late, I was awoken by Anto’s noises. He was barking,
not in the aggressive manner, but in a frustrated manner of someone going after something within reach but couldn’t be reached. I lay in bed listening to him, trying to figure out what must be causing his agitation so early in the day.

Since I couldn’t go back to sleep with his racket, I decided to take a look and maybe talk to him to be more considerate of his neighbors and pipe down. Before that I decided that I would also pay the toilet a visit.

So, from the toilet, I groggily walked towards the window from which I would be able to see Anto and talk to him from there. But a few steps before getting to that window, there was a sudden loud explosion, that sounded to me like the discharge of a gun. Instinctively, I ducked behind a post that is positioned near that window that also dissects my living room space into an odd configuration.

Then I smelled the acrid aroma of gunpowder wafting through the window and I also saw that tell tale wisp of white smoke. Oh my God, I thought, Anto has been gunned down.

A few seconds passed and I crept closer to the window. Anto was quiet but otherwise he was still up and about and he didn’t appear to be bleeding. There was nobody in sight.

At that moment I thought, how I envy the police, our local police; How easy for them to pick out theories about crimes from thin air and how confident they can face the media about those theories that, more often than not, involve the usual suspects and the usual stories.

I went back to bed with the flurry of theories about that explosion. The most likely candidate was that somebody threw a firecracker. This could easily be ascertained by trying to find the paper remains of that cracker that would be scattered about in a neat circular pattern, which for a single explosion would stand out. But I didn’t want to do that right away, I was, after all still sleepy, and if that explosion (whatever it was) was intended to quiet Anto, it worked. Anto had become quiet as a mouse, though still fretting about.

I went back to sleep thinking, Merry Christmas, that was the first cracker explosion I’ve heard for this season, even if, at that point, it was still a mystery if, indeed, it was that at all. And then, just as I surrendered to the darkness of sleep, I corrected myself.

That was not, by any means, the first explosion of the season. The first one, one of many that have already happened and will continue to happen, not only quieted down dogs but actually killed people, children. More tragically, though, they have killed our ability to make the connection between our continued need to celebrate Christmas with explosives that are manufactured under conditions that make death certain and injury, unavoidable and the fact that certainly and unavoidability are non-negotiable.

But they can be stopped, when, to begin with, the buying stops.