Lessons in Amateur Stalking John J. Stazinski (bio) Dark, dark! The horror ofdarkness, like a shroud, Wraps me and bears me onthrough mist and cloud. Ah me, ah me! What spasmsathwart me shoot, What pangs of agonizingmemory? —Sophocles When I was eighteen, a shirtless teenager hit and killed my widowed mother with his pickup truck. I know he was shirtless from the picture in the next day's newspaper of a cop giving the kid a field sobriety test. In this photograph, his pants sag enough to show the waistband of his boxers. He wears no belt. His hair is sand-colored [End Page 89] and disheveled from, I imagine, his pulling his nervous fingers through it just before the snapping of the shutter. His belly is slack, hanging casually and without self-consciousness, in the way of young men who frequently go without shirts in the summer. He is unaware that someone is taking his picture. I learn from the article that he is a year younger than I am. He lives two towns over and is working construction for the summer. He will be a senior in high school in September. It is August; he will be back in class in a few weeks. I will be off to college. There is another photograph as well, this one of the car my mother was driving, a Mercury Sable, the first new car she'd ever owned. The car is unrecognizable here in the newspaper. We see only the driver's side. The windshield glass is gone. The space where it would go is crumpled to the size of a textbook. The driver's door is ajar, but the viewer of this picture knows that it was not opened with the handle, either from the inside or out. It would have had to be jimmied open, would have required serious leverage and torque, the Jaws of Life, which, it is clear from the picture, are tragically misnamed. There is another cop here, caught in midstep with a clipboard in one hand. His head is angled to look inside the car. What he is looking for, or at, is unknown. There would have been blood on the steering wheel, mingling with the pebbles of glass on the floor, hardened now onto the seams of the vinyl seat. The cause of my mother's death was blunt-force trauma to the head. That piece of steel that connects the roof to the body of the car and holds the windshield in place caved on impact, crushing her skull beneath it. The boy's truck was jacked-up on oversized tires. He simply ran over the car and my mother inside it. The cop may be looking at the blood, or he may be simply awed by the way the car is crumpled like a candy wrapper. It is a difficult photo to look at but equally difficult to turn away from. To my eye there is a kind of equation in these two pictures, though I am unable to get a handle on just what it is. There are operators missing. Images from the narrative are absent. And the absence, the lack of something, draws one's attention back to the page in an effort to fill in the missing frames. The tragic, hollow feeling I have, that anyone would have, when looking at this newspaper comes not from viewing the remains of a deadly car wreck and a boy whose guilt can be read on his face but from the attempt to piece together just what has occurred. It comes, one realizes eventually, from the sight of that eerie void on the page where my mother should be. Superimpose a picture of her from outside this scene—her driver's license photo, say, or the one on her [End Page 90] hospital nurse's badge, and the story is complete. Now we have a completed equation; now we have cause and effect. I hadn't seen this newspaper in ten years. I could describe it from memory, though I no longer thought of it daily. I knew that the picture was on the front page, centered...