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WHAT ABOUT THE CAMERA? I’ll tell you how it all falls into place. I’ll tell you about the way you don’t ever really have complete control over the situation. I’ll go as far to tell you how long it takes to really wear one of them down. But you’re the one that’ll have to get used to the camera.
You’re the one that’ll have to frame the shot and make sure you get everything recorded. It’s not going to be enough to leave behind a crime scene. You’ve got to think of it like a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t get anywhere close. Think of everything like it’ll be later picked apart, layer after layer.
Get a good brainstorm going. Figure out where it could all go right. Figure out where it’ll all go wrong. Between the highs and lows, you’ll see that it’s a performance. The house targeted becomes the stage.
Do this and you’ve got it all made. Do that and you’ll be able to satisfy the cults spun around the intimacies of the craft. The cults watch everything. The cults will show up to the premiere, buy it when it comes out on video, tell the world so you won’t have to. They’re all looking, wondering why one is any better than the rest. I’ll tell you why so few rise to the top while the others sink and become just another crime statistic.
I can tell you everything.
But it’ll be you that’ll have to forget the camera’s there.
Forget the camera because the camera’s not going to forget you.
I’ve got to get this off my chest. You’re dealing with other people’s property, and more so, other people’s homes, you have to get it straight before you don the mask, the role. You’re probably asking—what the hell did you do to make it work?
Tell them right then and there, “Because we can.”
You tell it to the victim’s face, “You were home.”
It’s coincidental that they become the victims because it could have easily been anyone. Some say that everyone’s capable of being at risk at some point in their home-owning, residence-renting existence.
The performance is nothing personal.
Fact:
You’re always at risk.
It’s what we—myself and one other invader who will never be named; no one is named, for the sake of your record, your future performance—liked the most. It’s what got all the ideas forming, the gears of productivity and planning rolling. The realization that risk is always there. We liked that it was, inevitably, for the sake of the performance.
Nothing more. We do what we do because we can.
And we aren’t the only ones entertained.
It had everything to do with entertainment.
Never forget the importance of entertainment.
What was it I said about the camera?
Exactly.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Oh yeah, it was pretty wild, thinking about it now. The thing about this stuff—you don’t think about it until it’s all said and done. The whole thing signed on the dotted line. It’s kind of like you become superstitious: Did I leave that one item I was supposed to leave? Did I send the text I was supposed to send? You become superstitious about the entire thing around the time the authorities start picking apart the layers. You watch it on the news. Hear about it on satellite radio. Keep tabs online, running traces, bookmarking various columns. You do all that, same as anyone else that’s interested. Same as the investigators assigned to the case. Same as any potential studio representative looking for another great story. We’re all on the edge of our seats, looking, watching, hearing, listening… senses strained for something to pop.
When it finally does pop, you don’t have to worry as much.
It’s actually a different kind of worry, now that I think about it.
You kind of worry that you won’t really get to enjoy what everyone else is going to enjoy. You’ll see the news reports, the writings about the act, people equally fascinated and disturbed about what you basically did for the performance, the performance that is now reaping its own kind of secondary, second stage performance. You’ll see it all start to form as planned, and then you’ll be caught up with whether or not you intended “this” to be like “that.” Nothing’s perfect, basically. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
I still look at the aftermath, the rollout, and wonder if one of the media outlets got a crucial bit of advice wrong.
Wonder if the cults devouring the performance are just digesting it—with each pass, becoming more diluted.
Someone’s going to undo what we did.
Someone’s going to one-up us.
It’ll be another group of homes.
It’ll be another meticulously planned performance.
It’ll be received similarly, but this time it won’t be like ours, where it was added to a list, made a marvel, only to be written down in a book, some creative nonfiction piece, made into a movie, based not on our performance but on that book, the literary analysis.
And then forgotten.
See, though—what we did hasn’t been forgotten.
Because you’re not the first to make contact, asking for advice, asking for something. It happens all the time. It’s just that, in my mind and his, my partner in performance, the act is dead.
Any feeling we had for it, dead.
Long dead.
When I think about it now, really putting myself out there, letting myself reminisce, I can almost feel the same rush, the same thrill, the same warmth that we received shortly afterward.
It was a different kind of celebrity.
We’ve got our names down on the books, in the FBI records.
I’m played by that actor that won an Oscar a few years back.
The reason we did what we did?
We did it for entertainment. We did it for enjoyment.
We did it for the attention.
We did it because we knew we could.
Nowadays, it’s barely anything but something on the bookshelf, some archival print in the back of my mind.
But see, that’s why you’ve got to make a dent.
Get it right the first time because you never know if you’ll get a second chance.
Yeah, I know.
You want me to tell you about how we got the idea.
How we really got into it.
This is more about you, not me.
But I’ll humor you. Promise me that you’ll humor me when the time comes.
Just promise me, okay?
You’ll know when it happens.
We started early, shortly before dawn. The camera was there even when we weren’t. It started on the outer banks, and panned up and outward. We were dressed in white and made sure to keep everything clean. That’s code for gloves. We started on the outskirts of a big lake. The name of the lake, like everything else, we leave unnamed. The authorities do the filling-in later. Give them too much and it’s just another robbery or break-in and you don’t want that.
But we had something in mind.
Daylight.
It almost never happens during the height of a new day.
It never happens during the week when vacationing families, looking to get away from the city, fill the houses lining the lake.
Camera shot wide across a paved road.
I can still picture SUVs and Escalades, newly washed sedans and sports-utility vans driving the speed limit, hulking with them bikes, boats, and other luxury items.
We had it right, which was a good sign when we knew.
We spotted the house on the far eastern bank, expecting it to be the one to begin what we would end up lengthening out across six houses before the end of the week.
Camera narrow in that driveway, the front gate opening and closing on its own. We walked around the back of the house. It was impressive, really it was.
The price on these houses is astronomical.
I couldn’t imagine investing so much in something that is basically used only once or twice a year. These are getaway houses?
There was privilege in this community.
Many of the homeowners had small-to-medium empires of their own.
The more rural you get, the more of a performance it tends to be. That’s something we learned in the months of planning before the final pull-off.
We learned that for all the tall gates and security systems, the guards and barking dogs at night, it’s that level of silence that defines what rural can be.
The silence isn’t security.
Just because those shrubs grow high, and the vines cover your windows, it doesn’t mean that in the depths of the silence there isn’t someone watching.
We watched.
We stepped inside these homes.
We took our time, learning their routines.
We weren’t going for just another performance, you see.
We wanted to create a series of performances; this meant that we had to plan everything, every single invasion, as its own step. ...
