I learned my father had broken into his neighbor’s apartment and stolen her underwear in the wake of his passing. I’d been told many things about him by those who had known him better than I had, and the stolen underwear was just one. He had a good sense of humor. He was unduly rude to my cousin when she was ten years old. He had a male lover while he was stationed in San Francisco. He had been permanently banned from the bar below his apartment for unknown reasons. The truth is, I’m indifferent to my father. I think of him as little more than a serial alcoholic, and the man who once slept with my mom, which resulted in me, and beyond that, a man whose relationship to me and others exists largely in short, unfulfilling bursts. And, a man whom I learned the most about through his passing.  

He had done it because he was bored. This was what he had told my mother after the incident. One must wonder if the opposite of a crime of desperation isn’t a crime of malice, but a crime of boredom. I’m reminded a bit of the horrific murder committed by Jung Yoo-jung, who, fueled by her fascination with true crime media, killed her tutor out of sheer curiosity. Instead of related media, perhaps it was alcohol that had fueled my father. From how it’s depicted, I imagine it as such: 

He is drunk. He is considerably drunker than he usually is, which includes multiple failed attempts at rehab and at using medication to curb his desire for alcohol. He is drunk in a way that infantilizes a blood-alcohol test. This drunkenness causes him to exit his apartment, and seeing her unit directly above and across from his, he takes the stairs up to her floor and around the winding, maze-like corridors of his building. He finds her unit, out of spatial intuition and familiarity with the structure, having lived there for approximately twenty years at that point. I don’t imagine there’s much going on in his mind at that point other than the alcohol-fueled, libidinal forces that propel someone this far in their plan. I imagine him slamming his body into her door, all 6 feet 3 inches of him getting through with surprising ease. The frame around the door snaps where it meets the lock, and the door flies inward along with his whole body. The occupant, a woman named Jules, is in her apartment doing her usual evening rituals. I imagine her yelling at him, telling him to get the fuck out, threatening to call the cops on him. I imagine all of this gracing his ears with the profundity of a draft from an open window. I see him tearing open a chest that contains her garments and stealing a pair of her panties, like a ridiculous frat boy. He leaves without saying anything of note to her, and no one else in the building intervenes or comes out of their units to see. He wakes up with underwear in his unit, the contraband draped over the side of his armchair as some kind of trophy. 

At least, this is how I imagine it goes from his perspective. His thoughts, his hangover, and his subsequent amusement are ultimately his own business. However, I can’t help but regard that words themselves have almost no place in this absurd, horrific moment in his life. There was no preluding harassment, no threatening texts, and certainly no jokes between him and Jules insinuating my father would or could ever do such a thing. Even my own mother would tell me, of the incident, that she thought he was joking in the macabre, black way he often did. His very drunken behavior was nowhere near new for him, since to know him was to know the alcoholism that came with. 

In the vacuum of mystery that surrounds the details of this story, I can’t help but be swelled by the unanswerable questions of that night so as to elucidate it all further. What words, if any, were exchanged in this situation? Did he text anyone after with a picture of the underwear, or did he just text the words themselves, declaring his victory? Did he engage in any small talk with neighbors that night, perhaps about the weather? Did he say anything to her rabbits, who were scampering around in her apartment, any words of comfort? Above and beyond all of this posturing, did he even have any real, recognizable thoughts during this time that were words at all? Did the voice in his head say anything to him, within him, or was the entire event just reliant on a drunken, lizard cognition? 

Somehow, it’s this last possibility that rings the most likely to me: that language of any kind did not enter him, not just because he was so drunk, but because of his unwillingness to talk with himself, to exit this zone of stupidity, of adrenalized rush he found himself in. Even if the walls and spaces were spinning, or his own balance was largely absent from his body during this time, was there anything worth saying? While I don’t think he was so drunk that he was rendered inoperative, or nonverbal in effect, I do feel that, ultimately, he was so cognitively absent that language didn’t return to him until the very next day. 

Jules would later be the first to tell me this. My father and Jules would make up, as they’d see something shared in their circumstances—he was at least six months behind on rent, and she was a paralegal. She was able to help him keep his apartment, but this relationship wasn’t a one-way street: she was perhaps the only professional squatter I’d ever met, having lived in the same apartment building as him for years and not paying any rent since her original first, last, and security deposits. She gave him a Frank Sinatra vinyl, and he gave her back her panties. All was well again, in some way that resembled reason. 

I would mention this to my mother a few years later, that a neighbor of his had told me that he had broken into her apartment while she was there and stole her underwear, and my mother remembered that my father had in fact told her about the incident, and given her the same reason he would tell Jules when he was explaining himself: that he was bored. This non-reason, or perhaps a perfect explanation in relation to the absolute absurdity of trying to validate or impose any kind of logic on what he had done, is, on the one hand, a stern insult to any kind of basic morality, and on the other, the grand punchline to all of this. That he had broken into his neighbor’s apartment and stolen her underwear because he was bored. 

Though notable for its palpable horrificness and its absurdity, the incident, as unexplainable as it is, still doesn’t stand out exactly like a sore thumb given the rest of his life. He was no salt of the earth, but he would make for a good supporting character in a Bukowski novel. In terms of his perennially alcoholic behavior, his narcissism, and his tendency to harass my mother out of nowhere just because he felt like it (a habit which could be said to stem from the same boredom through which he broke into his neighbor’s apartment and stole her panties), the incident doesn’t change much about my perspective on him. However, it certainly hints at a reality I had known about him: that there were things that I didn’t know, that I still don’t know, and to a certain degree, may never know or may never want to know. Not simply because it would erode some silly facade of him being fatherly, but because, to say the least, it would diminish what positive attributes he did possess, and further what sides of him I saw in myself. 

I remember the night he died. I was at work, a menial job in the wake of finishing my bachelor’s degree with no immediate plan in life, doing security labor at a music venue in Seattle. It was a Thursday night. I got the call from his sister informing me. I went through the motions—I left work early, met with my mother, and stayed the night there. I felt slightly sad, or rather, I felt like I should feel sad, and that prompted something resembling sadness. I certainly didn’t cry or react hysterically, like how I would come to know his closest friends and family members rightfully and understandably would. 

Laundry theft is regarded as a “gateway crime” to sexual crimes, similar to how young children gleefully enacting violence on small animals is seen as a gateway crime to sociopathic behavior later in life. While I have no outright knowledge of his committing sex crimes in his life, I do have direct experience with him being a womanizer. While far from one another, all of this did lead to me asking Jules, the neighbor, at one point during my time in his building cleaning out his unit about some of the other, darker edges of his life. She told me that there were things she witnessed and knew about that she’s sure I would never want to know. The truth is, I absolutely do. Reality usually has a habit of being soberingly banal, even in its most horrible aspects. I have this image in my mind of him drunkenly bringing back a woman (if not multiple times) and, while she was blacked-out drunk, sexually assaulting her on his mattress on the ground, by the window, with Jules watching it all in utter horror. 

I believe that, in her not only being a victim of his drunken antics that fateful night, but living so close to him and seeing into his apartment, there is a certain degree to which Jules understood my father more than me. When she tells me that she feels that there are things she’s seen my father do that I don’t want to know, I know this is coming from a deeply truthful place. Not because I respect my father, simply because he happens to be my father. This is not the case at all. Perhaps there is a level to which, in learning about my father’s enactment of these horrible things which go unspoken, in her mind, it prevents me from becoming a person like that if I’m not aware that my own father had both done and gotten away with them. Not only criminally, but in the mundane sense of being allowed to continue on with his life, to be the kind of person he was, especially at his absolute worst, including that night. 

Like many of us, I never truly learned the entirety of my parents’ life stories. I never learned about his one-night stands, his stories of being unduly cruel, or of him being turned down for a date. At best, I’ve learned about these things from others, and if I have learned parts of them, it is because others share them out of a kind of respect seen as universal, a very pure and basic nicety to uphold my father over all else, including, to a very certain degree, his own imperfection. To this, I have to give due credit and respect to Jules for not telling me more, not telling me the absolute worst. Perhaps she has some more ingrained beliefs behind this; perhaps she believes words are spells, that saying something manifests them into a kind of reality not merely memetic but truly real. Perhaps there’s a level of mistrust of me because of my relation to my father. Still, my curiosity persists, but I am nonetheless glad not to know. I must be.

Alden Nagel is a bald Master’s candidate of Literary Arts at Central Washington University. Previously published by Manastash Literary Journal and Punch Projects, he is currently working on a book of non-fiction. Originally from Seattle, he is currently living in Ellensburg.