By Andres Vaamonde

In My Intruder, a man discovers an odd kind of companionship in the burglar who repeatedly breaks into his flat. At first, the intrusion sparks fear, then fascination — until the line between victim and host begins to blur. Told with wit and restraint, this story balances humour and unease to reveal something tender about solitude and the human need to be seen. A dark, stylish piece of psychological realism where loneliness becomes its own crime scene.

I was on the couch when the intruder put his hands on me. It was late. I had just given up trying to fix the broken television again. The useless remote lay in my lap, inert. 

“Do not panic,” the intruder said, from behind me, laying one hand on my shoulder and the other over my mouth. His latex gloves felt cool against my chapped lips. He smelled faintly of pine. “If you cooperate, I will not hurt you,” he said, evenly, without ambition.

I followed his order. I didn’t scream. I didn’t flinch. There was no hope in trying to extricate myself from the intruder’s firm grip, and I didn’t feel called to, anyhow.

“Nod if you understand,” he said.

I nodded. I had never been robbed before and was surprised to find the experience so frictionless. I wasn’t agitated, nor afraid, and we were making great time. Clearly the intruder knew what he was doing. I appreciated that about him. If I had to be burgled, I was grateful, at least, to be in the care of a professional. 

“In a moment, I will release you,” the intruder said. “When I do, you will direct me to the valuables. You will not move. Nod again if you understand.”  

I nodded again.

When he released me, I felt myself suddenly adrift, a boat unmoored from its dock into the foggy sea. I pressed my palms down into the couch to steady myself, but the couch just depressed under my pressure and lost shape. I unclenched my jaw. A plasticine bouquet, remnant of the intruder’s gloved grip, lingered on my lips.

“There’s a jewelry drawer in the armoire in the bedroom,” I said. “Top left.”

While I waited for the intruder to conclude his business, I ran the pads of my fingers over the television remote that still lay in my lap. Years of untreated, congealed grime had accumulated in the crevasses beneath the buttons, condemning them to an indefinite sentence of un-pushability. A minor inconvenience, on which little mattered. My wife and I used to cuddle on the couch and watch our shows in the evenings, but we didn’t do that anymore.

In my bedroom, the intruder went about his business quietly. All I could hear was the faint suggestion of the armoire drawer sighing open and jewelry tinkling into coiled piles.

I let a minute slip by. The intruder seemed like a reasonable enough person, but he had still broken into my house. I wanted to make sure he knew that I respected his authority lest he feel the need to enforce it. A warm little terror slicked through me at the thought.   

Eventually, I called out from the couch to check on him. 

“Hello? Are you done in there?”

There was no reply.  

I let another minute go and then I got off the couch and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Inside, I found barely any mark of disturbance. The furniture remained in place. The windows were all still closed. I wondered, briefly, if I had imagined it all. The confident man in latex gloves, grabbing me on the couch, telling me to sit still. To be fair, I’d recently had the great fortune of spending the vast majority of my time alone, and I could feel the aloneness begin to clot within me and swell to the surface. Once or twice the week before, for example, I’d flinched upon catching my own reflection in a mirror.   

When I approached the armoire, though, I discovered that the jewelry drawer was empty, save a single torn piece of paper, onto which I found a brief note, written in clean, confident script. The pen strokes were bold but not gratuitously inked. The letters and words were all equally spaced and sized on the paper.

“Thanks,” it said. “Take care.”

🫠🫠🫠

            The following day, around noon, I awoke to a call from the woman who had once been my wife. We spoke every so often on the phone to obligatorily update one another on our respective conditions, the facts of our lives listed in bullet-points. She always started, transmitting her information with brevity and purpose. She told me about her new projects at work, her friends’ pregnancies, her ongoing cold war with the home internet provider. Mercifully, she spared the details, knowing that my recap list was always shorter and also far more lonesome. That was her way of describing it: lonesome. I didn’t feel lonely, though, and in fact thought that most of her engagements sounded heartbreakingly tedious.   

The woman who had once been my wife wasn’t trying to humiliate me. I knew that she earnestly wanted me to find work again and make friends again and return, once more, to participating in the world. This was completely ridiculous, of course, but I didn’t hold her misjudgment against her. It was mean and futile to resent people for making mistakes they couldn’t help themselves from making.

“Do you remember the turquoise necklace Stephanie got me for our wedding?” she asked on the phone after finishing a recap of one of cousins’ combination baby shower dog bar mitzvah.  

“Yes,” I said, though I didn’t remember the necklace, and only vaguely remembered a Stephanie. 

“She and I are doing dinner next week,” she said. “She always complains that I never wear the necklace. She’s right, of course, because it’s hideous. But I think I should probably put it on when I see her. Do you mind if I come pick it up this week?”

This would be a problem. Ugly or otherwise, the intruder had found the turquoise necklace worthy of burgling.

“I will mail it to you,” I said.

She sighed, as she often did when I expressed intent. “And how are you?”

“Well,” I said, considering my options. 

The intruder’s visit was the most interesting thing to happen to me all year, let alone all week, and telling her about him would grant me free passage out from the necklace hole I’d dug myself. But I didn’t want the fuss. I hadn’t called the police for the same reason. What would I have told them, anyhow? That a man wearing latex gloves and smelling of pine had broken into my house, gripped me almost tenderly, and then stolen some apparently hideous turquoise jewelry that the woman who had once been my wife didn’t care to bring with her when she left? I knew that the intruder was strong and self-assured, but I didn’t know what he looked like or how he got into my house. I didn’t even know if he’d taken his shoes off. I’d spent most of my life failing to provide explanation. I relished, of late, existing outside of the record. I was floating on my back in water through life. It was so amazing.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “The television is still broken.”

🫠🫠🫠

A week or two later, the intruder returned. He didn’t tell me not to panic this time. He just wordlessly put his gloved hands on me, where I sat, as ever, on the couch. His previous visit hadn’t left me injured or put out, but I still found being robbed to be a little annoying. I especially didn’t appreciate being robbed twice in such quick succession. Frankly, it seemed unsporting.    

I also didn’t have much else in the house for him to burgle. The woman who had once been my wife took most of the nice things when she moved out. That hadn’t bothered me at the time because the nice things mainly belonged to her in the first place. I really didn’t need all the stuff. I didn’t want it. I had this vague idea back then that my divorce project would be to wean myself from the opioidic teat of material consumption. I wish I could say that I’d arrived at this idea via pure introspection or concern for the fate of the Earth. Unfortunately, though, the cold truth was just that I hadn’t yet mustered the courage to quit my remote job in human resources for a digital advertising agency.

I don’t think I ever achieved my Siddharthic minimalist goal. I also never mustered the courage to properly quit my dumb job. Instead, one day, I just buried my work laptop in the planter of the Bird of Paradise plant the woman who had once been my wife left behind because it was very dead. Six months have since passed. The direct deposits continue to appear in my checking account regardless.

Staid under his grip on the couch, I worried what the intruder would do upon discovering the house barren of robbable things. Ideally, he’d just leave. But a man of his temperament seemed unlikely to waste time. Perhaps he’d get creative and try harvesting my organs. Maybe he’d just hit me for the fun of it. My skin prickled at the thought.

“Same as before,” he said. “Nod if you understand.”

I nodded. The first time, I’d probably given him a messy, fowl-ish nod. This time around, I tried my best to nod in a clean, measured way. The calmer he thought me to be, perhaps the more reasonable he might behave after he discovered I had nothing he could take.

“Look around, by all means,” I said, when the intruder released me. “I just don’t know if there’s anything good left.”

He didn’t reply.

“I know the television looks nice, but it’s broken. Trust me, you don’t want it. Really.”

If I had free use of my hands in that moment, I would have slapped myself in the forehead. I sounded so dumb, and so perjurious, and for no reason. The television was a genuine lost cause. There was some kind of terminal issue with the input and output ports. I blew on the cord ports for hours and bought enough dongles to choke a small horse, but nothing helped. One time, back when the woman who had once been my wife had still been my wife, I’d taken a screwdriver to the back of the machine and tried to jam new life into it. In the process, I tripped, and, somehow, stabbed the screwdriver directly into an electrical socket. I woke up a few hours later wading in a shallow pool of my own urine in a hospital bed.  

            “I swear,” I said to the intruder. “I’m not trying to deceive you. I really don’t have many nice things.”

The intruder lifted his hands off my shoulders, briefly, before dropping them back down and giving them a brief, firm squeeze. 

“Okay,” he said. Then he proceeded to steal all of my kitchenware.   

🫠🫠🫠

The intruder began to visit regularly. He took whatever he could find. He took my clothes, my shoes, my one winter coat. He took my step ladder, my chess board, the pair of binoculars the woman who had once been my wife bought me as an anniversary present and which still remained in their original packaging.

I learned nothing about the intruder despite his frequent visits. I never even really laid eyes on him. He always approached from behind. I never dared trying to steal a glance at him.

One time, though, while he was dismantling a ceiling light fixture behind me, I caught a brief glimpse of his contour, reflected in the black mirror of the broken television. He seemed tall and taut. I couldn’t see any detail in his face, but I could tell, even through his ski mask, that he possessed a cliff of a jaw line. As he rose to his toes to gently coax the sconce from its position, he seemed imminently composed, his whole entire body one fluid muscle, working to a point. In that moment, watching him efficiently disassemble the light fixture and stow its component parts in a large duffel bag, I realized that I envied him. Not because he had all my stuff, but because he was a person who knew what to do—and did it.

🫠🫠🫠

            In her next call, the woman who had once been my wife asked if I could send the gravy boat along with the turquoise necklace when I got the chance.

“What do you need the gravy boat for?” I asked.

“Thanksgiving,” she replied, flatly, and I noted that indeed it was November. 

I asked her to hold for a second, and I went to the kitchen to confirm what I already suspected: the gravy boat was gone. All the cutlery was gone, too, along with all the plates and bowls and glasses and cooking utensils as well. The intruder had even taken the grills from the stovetop and the handles from the kitchen cabinets. He annoyed me sometimes, but I couldn’t repress my admiration for his fastidiousness.

“What is it?” the woman who had once been my wife asked when I returned to the phone. 

“Oh, right,” I said. “Bad news. The gravy boat has a crack in it.”

This was a rather uncharacteristically quick and clever excuse. Perhaps the intruder had rubbed off on me.

The woman who had once been my wife sighed her typical sigh. “And the necklace?”

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “I’ve been a bit distracted recently. I’ll send it ASAP.”

This wasn’t quick or clever like my cracked gravy boat gambit, but that was okay. I still needed to present as myself. I didn’t want her to suspect anything. Not that I had any notion of what she might suspect, or if she even found me worthy of suspicion. I guess I just mainly wanted to avoid being perceived, boring as that was.

“You’re not still trying to fix the television, are you?” she asked.

I laughed, light and easy. “No, no,” I said. “It’s not something depressing like that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” I said, my lips curling, almost verging on the beginnings of a smile. “I’ve made a new friend, actually.”

🫠🫠🫠

After his sixth or seventh visit, the intruder stopped coming. Intellectually, I knew that relief would be the appropriate response given the circumstances. I didn’t feel relieved, though. I grew more and more anxious with each peaceful week peeled by. I had a recurring dream in which a hole opened up in my abdomen, right where my belly button was supposed to be. In the dream, every time I tried to squish myself back together and close the gap, the hole only grew in diameter. Perhaps this was the lonesomeness the woman who had once been my wife warned me about, metastasized at last, and blossomed into a cruel, true lunacy.

But I wasn’t sure. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t so crazy that I missed the intruder. I did some research and found out that it was completely normal to feel anxious when your routine changed. Also, I had always implicitly considered the intruder a leech. But maybe I had it backwards. Maybe he helped me. What of my goal to shirk material possession? The intruder helped with that. I could concede that his assistance was a little inadvertent, but so what? Very often, I had found, intentional help ran contrary to its stated goal.  

The intruder had also proven true in his promise to never physically harm me so long as I cooperated. I admired him for keeping his word. It was one thing to be a talented, nice-smelling thief. But to be so honorable as well? I bet that set him apart, as far as burglars went. Maybe, I worried, it had even accounted for his sudden disappearance. Maybe an unstable homeowner had misinterpreted his good burgling manners as weakness and shot him dead. It seemed entirely plausible. The world was muddied with tragedy and maladjustment.

Until he stopped visiting, I hadn’t even really considered that the intruder also intruded on other homes. Of course, I knew that he had to make a living, and that I had very little stuff of value, so I tried not to begrudge him the betrayal. The realization stung a bit, nonetheless. Late one night, almost a month into his disappearance, while I rotted on the couch in front of the broken television, I ordered a bunch of random items online, to restock, just in case. 

🫠🫠🫠

The next time the woman who had once been my wife called, I picked up on the first ring, and immediately poured into the phone.

“The turquoise necklace!” I cried. “It’s got a crack in it! Like the gravy boat! It’s broken in two!”

I waited for her to sigh. I waited to hear the sigh she always sighed—the hungry inhale of breath, followed by a slow and steady exhalation, like she’d at first been surprised by her displeasure, and then eventually remembered its place in her life.

She didn’t sigh, though. She just told me that it was okay.

“But it’s not,” I said.

“It is,” she said. “Let it be.”

I didn’t want it to be okay. I didn’t want to let it be. I wanted the woman who had once been my wife to yell at me, to scream at the top of her lungs, to berate me and accuse me and pull on all my little frays. I wanted her to demand that I send the gravy boat and the turquoise necklace even if they were broken, even if my hands got bloodied in the process. I wanted her to tell me that she would do all the work, like always, to put the pieces back together again. I didn’t know what prompted me to harbor such sentimental and unlikely emotions. I assumed the worst.

“How’s that new friend of yours?” she asked, to break a growing silence.

“Yes,” I said, slowly, collecting the broken television remote in my free hand and giving it a squeeze. “Good.”

“Good,” she said.

            She paused, and I heard the distinct shuffle of a phone’s receiver being held against a chest. In the background, through the muffle, I could make out what sounded like a conversation.

I wasn’t deluded enough to think that the woman who had once been my wife lived celibately after our split. The fact that she might be sleeping with other people hadn’t ever occurred to me as something to worry about. Still, I had always assumed that she took our weekly calls in private. And yet here she was, with company, speaking to me on the phone. I couldn’t decipher their conversation. But I noticed something peculiar and familiar about her mystery guest. It was a man—a man who spoke evenly, and without ambition. 

            “Sorry,” she said, when she came back on the line. “Where were we?”

“Is someone there?”

            She took a moment to reply. Then, very carefully, she answered in the negative.

            “Have you been broken into recently?” I asked, trying and failing to suppress the shout in my throat.

            “What?”

            “Like, robbed. Home invaded.”

            I looked down to my lap and noticed that I was still gripping the broken television remote. The ridges and furrows of my hand bloomed blood-red.

            “Oh,” she said the pitch in her voice rising—maybe?—a feather higher.

“Well, have you? Have you been intruded?”

“No,” she said. “I lock my doors.”  

🫠🫠🫠

Weeks passed. The intruder didn’t come. The woman who had once been my wife didn’t call. She texted to say she was busy with work. She didn’t ask about the necklace or the gravy boat.

I fielded one outside inquiry during this dry spell. It was from one of my old managers at the digital advertising agency, calling to make sure I’d received his evite for our upcoming annual performance review.

I told him I had received it.

He told me that that was great, and hung up.

I kept the phone clasped to my ear for a little, embracing the dull buzz of the dial tone. When my arm inevitably grew sore, I placed the phone on the couch, screen-up, and laid my ear down upon it, the buzz roaring through me now, impressing its way through my passages. I placed my hand on my other ear, the one facing upwards. I clamped shut over it.

🫠🫠🫠

The morning of the last Thanksgiving before the woman who had once been my wife left, I walked into the bathroom after placing the turkey in the oven and found a fire in the sink. A lit candle had tipped over, knocking into an unboxed stack of paper hand towels. The fire was pretty big, but also confined to the sink. All I had to do was turn the faucet to extinguish the fire. I remember looking at the fire, and then putting my hand on the faucet knob, and then remaining still, completely still, before leaving the bathroom, the fire still lit within. I assume the woman who had once been my wife eventually found and extinguished the fire. We never spoke about it.

🫠🫠🫠

My intruder finally showed up late one night or early one morning and laid his hands upon me as he always did. I took a deep inhale, searching for his pine scent, but smelt hardly a whiff of anything autumnal. 

I raised my shoulder upwards against his hands, to feel his grip. I felt him briefly balk, and then tense, but quickly return to applying his even pressure. He was a professional, no matter what.

I raised the ante. I stuck out my tongue and licked his gloved hand.

He withdrew with a start.

“What the fuck,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, lying.

I swiveled around to face him. To my disappointment—though, in truth, much in line with the banal reality of the world—there was little to look at. My intruder wore an unremarkable black jumpsuit. He was of average height.

“Why don’t you have a weapon?” I asked, sitting up on the couch. “Shouldn’t you have a weapon or something?”

My intruder took a step backwards.

“You should have a weapon,” I said, scooping the broken television remote out of the folds of the couch and wagging it towards him. “It’s not safe for you to be breaking into people’s homes unarmed.”

He took another step backwards.

I stood up off the couch.

“I think you need to restrain me, now,” I said. 

Now he began to really back-peddle, groping with an outstretched hand for the doorway through which he’d come. As he went, I noticed that the cuff of one of his gloves was bunched up around the base of his palm, as though he’d hastily squeezed them on. I couldn’t believe his negligence. It disgusted me.

“You have to restrain me,” I said, stepping towards him. “You will not get what you want if you do not restrain me.”  

I searched his eyes. They were brown, and ordinary, and flat.

“Restrain me!” I cried.

“That’s not how this works,” he said. 

I threw the broken television remote at him.

I aimed for his head but missed high. It collided with the top frame of the front door and splintered to the ground around the threshold, through and out of which my intruder promptly ran. 

🫠🫠🫠

            When I awoke in the hospital after the electrical socket incident, the woman who had been my wife asked me what happened.

I told her the only thing I could think to say. I told her that I felt like when you sleep funny on your arm and wake up to find it numb. I could move myself around a little bit, but only as an observer of the motion, a passenger.

            When I finished telling her this, she placed her hand on my hand.

            “So, you’re saying that, while you were fixing the television, you accidentally lost control of your body and tripped because you suddenly felt numb all over?” 

            I sighed. “Yes, that’s it,” I said. “Thank you for putting it into words for me.”

            And then she gave me a hug, and she held on for a while.

🫠🫠🫠

My intruder hasn’t visited for a very long time now. I’ve done everything in my power to invoke his return. I purchased, installed, and then destroyed one of those little doorpost home security system cameras and scattered its obsidian shard remnants on the frizzled doormat. I hope my intruder will correctly interpret this little gesture as an invitation. I’m also leaving the front door wide-open at all times just to be sure. The windows, too. My intruder isn’t the pretentious type, I know, but I’ve made sure to get a new credit card and max it out, anyway. Every night, I take my newly purchased valuables, all still in their original packaging, and lay them in a trail, leading from the porch out front, through the open doorway, through the living room, and into my bedroom, the door to which I have permanently amputated from the hinges. Inside the bedroom, I lay on the bare mattress, a couple of choice pieces of fine jewelry and pine-scented air fresheners scattered around my supine body. Often, I am nude, and often I am handcuffed to the bedpost, my mouth covered with duct tape. While I wait for him, I practice the nod that my intruder will request upon his arrival and detention of my body. A slight rise of the crown of the head, followed by an equal and opposite slight dip of the chin. It’s a slow and steady nod, one that does not betray a hint of resistance or a hint of displeasure. My intruder will acknowledge what a great nod it is, I am sure.

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