The Lock Artist

“That’s a whole story in itself, of course. This thing that has kept me silent for all these years. Locked up here inside me, ever since that day. I cannot let go of it. So I cannot speak. I cannot make a sound.”

Again, Mike references his childhood trauma in the novel’s introduction. The most prominent post-traumatic symptom he exhibits is his muteness. The shock of the incident was so severe that he has not been able to speak of it or anything else since the event. This quotation also contains a first reference to a pervasive theme in the novel: the irony that Mike has this unspeakable pain “locked up inside” himself, but he possesses extraordinary skill in unlocking locks. Despite his ability to unlock physical locks, he is unable to “unlock” his psyche and unburden himself of his suffering.

“He was scared. I could see that as clearly as I could see his face. This gun in his hand, it was supposed to take the fear away, to make him the master of this whole situation. But it was doing exactly the opposite. It was making him so scared he could barely think straight. This was an instant lesson for me, even at nine years old. It was something I’d remember forever.”

Mike recalls the robbery of Lito’s liquor store when Mike was nine years old and looking after the shop alone. His observation that the gun in the robber’s hand causes more fear than security relates to a much-emphasized theme in the novel: Violence is self-perpetuating, in contrast to calm, technical, methodical work, which minimizes conflict and destruction. Mindful of this fact since childhood, Mike refuses to touch a gun throughout the novel.

“I wasn’t scared myself. Not one little bit. It’s the one advantage you have maybe, being scared all the time. When it’s time to really be scared, when all of a sudden you’re finally supposed to be scared… it just doesn’t happen.”

Even when he is only nine years old and faced with a gun-wielding robber in his uncle’s liquor store, Mike does not feel fear. Mike’s utter calm and clarity of mind in high-stress or dangerous situations is a prominent motif in the novel. Here, he suggests that having endured such an intense trauma as a child has given him a lifetime immunity to panic.

“I could still go back to that day in June for the simple reason that I had never left it. I wasn’t repressed. I didn’t have to go digging to find it. It was always there. My constant companion.”

Mike’s cynicism toward the caring gestures of others is particularly strong in the case of his mental healthcare team in the years following his trauma. He feels condescended to when they suggest that he is in shock or denial and cannot yet confront the memory of the event in order to process it. He suggests here that the fact that the memory of the trauma haunts him vividly and continuously means that he is, in fact, able to confront it. Based on a common-sense understanding of mental health, this reasoning seems backward (or at least confusing), but Mike sticks to it adamantly in the novel.

“And hell, I think I just made everybody uncomfortable, you know? Like they couldn’t forgive me for what had happened to me, and how that made them feel when they thought about it. So they tried to help me so that they could feel better.”

This passage represents one of the clearest examples of Mike’s misanthropy. He is so obstinately unwilling to accept the help offered to him that he has convinced himself that those individuals’ ostensible benevolence must be selfishly motivated. This cynicism is ubiquitous in the novel and extends to everyone except Amelia: He does not accept help from her in the novel, but he at least entertains the idea of one day seeking her out for emotional support.

“Those metal pieces, which are so hard and unforgiving, so carefully designed not to move… Yet somehow with just the right touch it all tines up and God, that one second when it opens […] the way it feels in your hands. The way it feels when something is locked up so tight in a metal box, with no way to get out. When you finally open it… When you finally learn how to unlock that lock… Can you even imagine how that feels?”

This is an explicit description of the emotional and sensory pleasure that Mike derives from picking locks. It is a clear clue that picking locks and cracking safes is a coping behavior for Mike: He feels a sense calm and clarity in the act, and a sense of emotional relief and release when he succeeds. This activity tends to an emotional need in Mike, providing comfort for the anguish he experiences as a result of his childhood trauma.

“And me? I felt nothing. I swear to you, as soon as we stepped foot into that house, everything drained out of me. That ever present buzz, the constant humming from that one moment in my life, playing out in my head, over and over, becoming like a constant static on my internal radio… As soon as I opened the door to a stranger’s house and stepped inside, the static was gone.”

Mike experiences a powerful sense of calm when he is in dangerous—and particularly illegal—situations. This episode, when he breaks into the Marshes’ home with his high school classmates, is a particularly striking episode of this kind of spiritual peace he feels when breaking and entering—an almost meditative clarity. Because of his post-traumatic emotional burden, he feels agitated and overwhelmed during much of his daily life, but his criminal work offers him this small reprieve.

“The way he looked down at the ruin he had caused, the cruel smile on his face. How happy this made him, the sheer mindless destruction in that one moment. I hated it. I hated it like a sickness and I knew I’d never forget it.”

Like the episode with the robbery of Lito’s liquor store, this image of Mike’s classmate, Trey, who has broken the Marshes’ large aquarium, further emphasizes that violence and destruction are self-perpetuating. If Trey had not caused this needless destruction, the boys’ crime might not have been punished so severely, and Mike might not have been caught. This episode also foreshadows the sadism of Sleepy Eyes, who also shows delight when causing bloodshed later in the novel.

“So there it was. My big lesson of the day, something I’d take with me and never forget. The whole legal system—If you think it’s just a big set of rules, you’re dead wrong. It’s really a bunch of people sitting around and talking to each other, deciding what they want to do with you.”

Mike’s view of the criminal justice system is just as cynical as his view of human benevolence. Because of the way he is treated after being arrested for breaking into the Marshes’ house, Mike comes to believe that all so-called justice is determined by the whims of the powerful. He does not appear to adjust this worldview even at the end of the novel, when the man from Detroit is killed and Sleepy Eyes is brought to justice.

“Another half hour passed. Finally, both of the women came down together, their high heels clicking on the stairs. Ramona was in black, Lucy in a dark shimmering burgundy. Skintight, lots of leg, lots of chest. Hair pinned up. Lipstick and long dark eyelashes. Eye shadow almost glowing. Lucy looked especially transformed with all the makeup. The unevenness of her eyes was even more pronounced now, but somehow it made her bone-chillingly beautiful.”

This passage is a striking example of the objectifying manner in which Mike describes the female characters in the novel—particularly Ramona and Lucy, but also Amelia. He does not offer this degree of detail when discussing their personalities or activities. The observation about Lucy’s makeup is typical of Mike’s descriptions of Lucy and Amelia: He often portrays them as physically flawed, which enhances his attraction to them.

“‘Good boy.’ She grabbed me and kissed me hard on the mouth. ‘I really do hate you,’ she said, ‘but Wesley was right. You are beautiful.’”

This example of Lucy’s behavior toward Mike is emblematic of her aggressively ambivalent attitude toward him. She is simultaneously ultra-confident in her sexuality around him yet insecure about her talent relative to his. She is unapologetically rude to him, yet overtly affectionate and flirtatious. Mike appears to find this dramatic ambiguity intriguing and attractive.

“I can’t overstate what that day had done to me. I really can’t. When I was new to the school and feeling like I had absolutely nothing, that was a bad time. But now it wasn’t just a matter of having nothing. It was having nothing and knowing exactly what it was I didn’t have. What I’d never have.”

This passage offers one example of the pervasive feature of self-pity in Mike’s narration. In this instance his self-pity is evidently so burdensome that he says cannot adequately express it in text. This a common inelegance in Mike’s narration and arguably interferes with the reader’s ability to empathize with his character: If he were not so explicit and didactic in his lamenting, his audience might feel more inspired to pity him.

“I got that funny feeling again, at the thought of someone breaking into the house and standing there in her bedroom, watching her sleep. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know if was wrong for me to be there, but somehow it was like that idea didn’t really apply to me, because I knew I was there for the ‘right’ reasons, and that I’d never do anything to hurt her.”

On several occasions, Mike breaks into Amelia’s home and into her locked bedroom to deliver drawings to her while she is sleeping. He understands that this is a violation and bristles at the idea of anyone else perpetrating such an act, but as he states in this passage, he considers himself to be exceptional—that his criminal behavior is excusable because he has benevolent intentions. He absolves all his criminal acts with this logic, but he does not extend the same sympathy to other criminals he encounters in the novel. He is swift to assume the worst in others’ moral character but considers all his own illegal activity justifiable.

“As I slipped into a dream, I could hear the water pouring into the room, running down the walls, coming through the window. Pooling on the floor and then rising. Slowly, inch by inch. Until I was submerged in it. Like every night. Like every dream.”

This passage is the first significant appearance of Mike’s emotional obsession with water. This fixation or phobia will eventually be explained late in the novel when he details his childhood trauma, which involved a near-drowning. Mike’s fear of large bodies of water recurs on several occasions later in the novel, but this the only discussion of what is apparently a recurring nightmare about drowning.

“I’ve had more than one moment like this in my life. These moments when I could have taken myself right out of the game. Cut my losses. Taken the whole thing to my probation officer, maybe. I can’t help wondering how differently my life might have turned out if I had played it that way. Even once.”

A prominent feature of Mike’s narration is his fantasies of alternative outcomes. This passage is an example of one type of fantasy that Mike repeatedly indulges in: a reflection on how he might have saved himself from the dire consequences of his criminal career. Despite these reflections, Mike puzzlingly states on multiple occasions that he “didn’t regret any of it […] to this day” (280).

“The man was gasping for breath now. I was waiting for that feeling to kick in, that feeling of complete calm I’d get whenever I had broken into a strange house, but it wasn’t happening. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was nothing like any other break-in I’d ever been a part of.”

When Mike accompanies Sleepy Eyes, Tall Mustache, and Fishing Hat to break into a man’s house in Ohio, for the first time, the typical sense of meditative clarity that he feels in dangerous situations fails him. Presumably because of the violence of the scene and, in particular, Sleepy Eyes’ rampant sadism, Mike remains agitated and upset. This marks a turning point in his criminal career and in the novel: Hereafter, Mike becomes more intent on saving himself from his dangerous lifestyle.

“These are the methods of crude men. They can’t face the safe on its own terms. So they do what? The same thing men have been doing for thousands of years, right? They resort to violence. […] No patience. No skill. No intelligence. Just brute strength. They have to break something. It’s the only way they know.”

When the Ghost is first training Mike to crack a safe, he shows Mike a safe that has been brutalized by a variety of break-in methods including sawing, torching, and drilling. He wants Mike to view these methods as vulgar, emphasizing by contrast the elegance of his own delicate safe-cracking technique. This statement echoes Mike’s observation on several other occasions in the novel that violence and destruction are marks of a man’s inferior character: He observes this in the man who robbed Lito’s liquor store, in Trey (who broke the Marshes’ aquarium), in Gunnar, and in Sleepy Eyes. Mike considers himself, with his sophisticated technical skill, to be morally and intellectually superior.

“You touch a safe the way you touch a woman […] Never forget that. […] The greatest puzzle in the world, young man, the greatest challenge a man can face, is solving the riddle of a woman’s heart.”

One of the Ghost’s most notable rhetorical devices is the analogy he draws between cracking a safe and seducing a woman. It is a problematic cliché that is much emphasized in the novel—Mike often references it in scenes when he is cracking safes. Unsurprisingly, Mike, who often objectifies the female characters in the novel, finds this analogy very compelling.

“Feeling your way through those contact points…that takes a special kind of touch, the kind of touch the Ghost was talking about, caressing the safe like it’s a woman, feeling the slightest tiny movement deep inside her.”

This passage is a notable example of Mike’s embrace of the Ghost’s safe-as-woman analogy. Physical touch is an important motif in the novel, and it features prominently in safe-cracking scenes as well as love scenes. In the explanations of safe-cracking, like this passage, there is a strongly sensual and sexual tone to the description of the act.

“It might be too late. He might already be dead in there. Nine years, one month, twenty-eight days. That’s how much time had passed since that day. […] I pulled the handle and the door swung open.”

The first time Mike cracks a safe, demonstrating for the Ghost, he is motivated by the traumatic fantasy that he is saving a young boy locked inside that safe and if he does not open it in time, the boy will die. At this point in the novel, it has not yet been revealed that Mike’s childhood trauma involved him being locked in a safe— rescued miraculously at the last minute, within a hair’s breadth of suffocating to death. When this story is revealed in the following chapter, the reason for Mike’s obsession with safes and cracking locks becomes plain.

“I rode through Milford first. It didn’t look much different. Until I got to the bend in the road and I got my first big surprise. The Flame was gone. In its place was a generic-looking family restaurant […]. More importantly, the liquor store was gone, too. Replaced by a wine store, of all things.”

Mike makes a spontaneous trip back to his hometown to find Amelia after a year of separation during his criminal career. When he returns, the changes to the town are unexpectedly dramatic. This passage is a striking example of the way Mike seems to exaggerate the length of his criminal career and the transformations in his life and in the world that occurred during that period—despite the fact that the novel’s timeline makes it clear that only one year has elapsed since he left Michigan. This dilation of time is a notable narrative idiosyncrasy.

“I can’t hear what’s going on outside the safe very well, but I know one thing for sure. As much as I’ve ever known anything in my whole life. I have to be quiet.”

In finally explaining the details of his childhood trauma, Mike remembers the moment he knew he had to be utterly silent in order to be safe. The emphasis on silence in this passage leads the reader to understand that this was the moment when Mike’s muteness, which has persisted into his adulthood, began.

“I am not allowed to open that safe or even touch it under any circumstances, my mother has said more than once. […] But today seems like good circumstances to me all of a sudden after what I’ve just seen and I don’t want my father to do to me what he’s done to Mr. X, so I pull the safe door open and I get inside. It’s empty now, of course, because my father doesn’t live here and he doesn’t have any guns or anything else to put in it, so I have just enough room if I sit cross-legged. Then I pull the door closed.”

This passage contains the revelation that Mike’s childhood trauma involved him protecting himself by locking himself inside a safe. This is the formative event in his life: It causes his post-traumatic muteness and his obsession with cracking locks. This revelation is therefore a climactic moment in the plot. The simplicity of the explanation, which Mike has dramatically withheld until the end of the novel, is somewhat anti-climactic.