All of these things happened about a month ago but I am having a very hard time remembering what came first. There seems to be a strong forcefield of disorientation emanating from a mentally ill person in distress. I think my family was inside that forcefield during many of the events I’m describing, and it’s hard to recall what happened.

From my perspective, when I yelled at Magging for lying to these locksmiths and probably ripping them off, was the moment things actually became weird.

I am not an expert on mental illness, but I am very wary of people who talk about their condition and don’t medicate it, or just radiate a certain chaos. I guess I prefer a more understated mental illness, maybe that rarely mention they are feeling weird and maybe just drink or smoke or exercise or shop the scary thoughts and feelings away. There are many folks with serious diagnoses, and few of those people engage in vindictive criminal behavior.

Lately it has not been Maggie’s crimes against us that obsess me. Lately it’s her actual personality, which I loathe in myriad ways.

My neighbor is the ultimate version of the person I dread the most: the narcissistic, pedantic, I-used-to-be-cool-in-my-20s (so much cooler than you were in the your 20s) asshole who currently lives in this damn city. There are many of these people in New York, which is something I realized when I was in my mid-40s. Simultaneous with that realization was an understanding that I was that person. I constantly referenced my past when I was at work with younger colleagues.

God, what a hard day that was, followed by severe policing of my small talk. I heard myself repeatedly launch into some recollection and then pull myself back. No more jokes about the bathrooms at CBGBs. No one cared about one’s celebrity encounters in 1995. My small-talk game, I saw, signaled old, desperate and oblivious, and I didn’t mind the old as much as I minded the desperate obliviousness.

This was an insight that Maggie lacks. She believes she is actually fascinating because she was once a dancer and worked in TV and likes classic rock, specifically Paul McCartney, with whom she feels a cosmic connection.

But Wyatt thinks I have the tipping point wrong. He says the moment things started was when he and Calvin were throwing the baseball in the alley, and Maggie was in the alley, and said hello, how are you? Calvin answered, “Good. How are you?”

She said, “My husband wants to divorce me and he says this house is his house even though I paid in full for it.” Calvin and Wyatt made sounds that could pass for agreement, and went back inside. But that, Wyatt, counters, was the end of normality, from which we descended into full-blown crazy.

Who knows? But we do all agree that late in that at some point, on some day, she saw us very, very clearly and went to work.