See You in Paradise Page 13

  One afternoon it was waiting outside the bathroom door.

  The next, it was inside the bathroom—behind the curtain when they pulled it aside.

  The day after that they locked the door.

  Over that weekend, and the next, Lurene stayed Lurene, and said nothing about the wraith, and so neither did Carl. But on Monday morning, he asked her, as she got up from the breakfast table, if he could see.

  “See,” she repeated, as if she didn’t know what he meant.

  “See it happen.”

  Her frown deepened, her eyes narrowed.

  “I want to know,” he said. “I want to know how it happens. How it comes out.”

  For a moment he thought she would strike him, but what she did instead was begin to weep. “I don’t think I could,” she whispered. “I don’t think it would work. With you there.”

  He stood, took her into his arms. He had not made love with his wife, his entire wife, since these strange days began. He missed her. The other one, the happy one—with her it was too easy. His love needed something heavy to hold it down. He said, “Don’t cry, don’t cry.”

  “This can’t go on,” she said.

  “It can. It can go on.” Though he knew she was right.

  They stood in silence for a time, gripping each other so tightly they could barely breathe. Then she pushed him away, walked down the hall, and emerged a new woman.

  That afternoon, around lunchtime, he was working on some text formatting, trying to convince a client she didn’t want blinking letters with sparks shooting off them, when he heard the wraith get out of bed. Its feet thudded on the floor, and he heard them dragging dryly across the room, like a pair of sandbags.

  He had grown used to its wanderings, and he tried to ignore it. But after a moment, the footsteps continued into the hallway and down it, to stop right outside his door. His fingers paused over the keyboard, and he held his breath. The door wasn’t locked. The wraith had never seemed to show much interest in him without Lurene around.

  “Hello?” he squeaked.

  The door flew open and crashed into the wall behind it, deepening the depression the knob had dug over years. The wraith was staring at him, its eyes blacker and deeper than ever, and as lifeless.

  He jumped out of his seat. “Uhh …” he said.

  It took three long steps toward him and grabbed his shirt in its long gray fingers. It was right there, right up in his face, holding him close. He was not frightened, not yet, but he understood that he was helpless. The wraith had a smell, not a bad smell, like that of wet stones drying in hot sun. A bit of ozone, a bit of rot.

  “What … what is it?” he managed.

  The wraith pulled his shirt open, and the buttons clattered on the floor. It—she—pushed it over his shoulders and down his arms and tossed it back over her head. She was very, very strong. She reached for his belt.

  “Whoa, whoa!” he said, and she stopped. She did not back off. She stared at him. He gulped air. And then took the rest of his own clothes off, without her help.

  The wraith pushed him into the bedroom and onto the bed, then settled itself over him like a landslide. Its skin was neither rough nor cold, though it wasn’t as warm as living flesh, and certainly wasn’t as soft as Lurene’s. It had the consistency of scar tissue, rough but yielding. It felt unbreakable. It felt like it would survive for eternity.

  And it turned him on! That was certainly a surprise. He touched hips, belly, breasts, and felt as breathlessly eager, as hungry, as lustful, as he had ever felt in his life. He marveled at himself, his breath catching in his throat. How was it possible? But it was. The wraith knew precisely what to do with him, and did it without hesitation. It moved over him, shifting its tremendous weight, sending shocks of pleasure through him. It could kill him in an instant, that was the crazy thing. It could crush him, but instead of feeling afraid, he felt safe. Protected by it. Gentled. Unlike with his flesh wife, he used no condom. It hurt to penetrate and it hurt when he came.

  Its eyes remained open, its lips pressed shut, until it was through. Then it heaved itself up off him and flopped over, facedown on its pillow.

  It took a while before Carl realized the whole thing was over. When his heart stopped racing, he picked himself up and tiptoed back to the office. He put his clothes back on, realized he couldn’t button his shirt, then threw it in the trash. He had to walk past the wraith again to get a new one, but it didn’t budge. Somehow he managed to return to work.

  When Lurene got home, they did it in the shower again, and the wraith didn’t bother them. He could barely keep it up. And when afterward Lurene emerged from the bedroom, fully herself, she gave him a look. But she didn’t pursue it. Whatever had happened, she didn’t want to know.

  And so it continued for several weeks, became routine, and he amazed himself at what depths of depravity it was possible to grow accustomed to. The warrantless wiretapping continued, the vice president shot some guy in the face, and Carl got himself off daily with his giggling fake wife and a lumbering clay monster. The new normal! His work increased to full productivity, and the fissure that these strange events had wrenched open simply filled itself in and smoothed itself over. He began to wonder if this was his fate, to be married to a pair of horny half-women, and he decided that there were worse ways to live out one’s days.

  But then one morning Lurene came out of the bedroom disheveled, stooped, and utterly whole. He gaped. He didn’t have to ask, but he asked.

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Well—can’t you—did you try again?”

  A sharp look. “Yes I tried again, you prick!”

  He winced, sunk a bit into his chair. “I’m sorry!”

  She looked around the room, as if for some obvious solution she had failed to notice. “Fuck,” she said, and pulled on her coat and hat.

  “You’re just going to go in to work?” he asked.

  “Do you have some better idea?”

  He shook his head no.

  He spent the entire day in a state of mild anxiety, unaccustomed as he had become to being alone in the apartment. Several times he peeked in the bedroom to see if she’d been mistaken, if the wraith was there. But nothing lay on the bed. His palms sweated and he had to change his shirt often. He did things wrong, then did them wrong again.

  He slept on it, figuring it would all make sense in the morning. But it was the same the next day, and the next, and all the rest of that week. And then one night Lurene stumbled from the bathroom wearing an expression of horrified epiphany.

  “I know why I can’t do it,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  Unthinkingly, he added himself to the crowded ranks of men who responded to those words by saying “That’s impossible.” To which Lurene did not lower herself to reply.

  He tried again. “We were protected.”

  She shrugged, lowering herself onto the sofa beside him. They sat in silence, waiting for this new information to settle itself. The television seemed very loud. Carl turned it off.

  “Carl,” she said.

  He turned to her.

  “You fucked it. Didn’t you.”

  He looked at her with what must have been an expression of utter forlornness, and he realized what a weakling he was, that he had no volition, he could only do what he was told, he habitually ignored the world’s ills because he couldn’t abide them, and he had capitulated to her misery, not because it was right, but because it freed him from his own. And then he proved it to himself by saying, “It forced me to. I couldn’t stop it.”

  Her slap was not unexpected, nor was it undeserved. But it was unprecedented. It turned his head with a sound like a splintering plank, and though it didn’t hurt, not much, it had all the force behind it of a ton of stone.

  His head was hung when she got up from the sofa, and it was still hung when she marched into the kitchen, with what, if he had been paying attention, he would have recognized as her old steely
resolve. But the silvery snick of the paring knife being pulled from the block—that he recognized.

  He managed to stop her. She meant for him to. Her hand was in the air, the fingers white around the knife; her eyes were trained on the doorway as he stumbled through. He grabbed her by the wrist and she pretended to fight against him, and the knife clattered to the floor. She let herself go limp. He encircled her in his arms and led her back to the couch.

  “I want it out of me,” she said, through gritted teeth. She threw off his embrace and rocked back and forth, her lip between her teeth.

  “We could … get an abortion,” he said, and regretted it immediately. But she shook her head.

  “Not that!” she cried. “The other!”

  Her face was wet and livid, the lips trembling, and to his great surprise, Carl gasped and let out a sob. The sound it made was very loud, like a bedsheet being torn in two, and he slumped against the back of the sofa and for a few moments was insensible with grief. When he came around, he was again surprised, this time to find himself in Lurene’s arms, to find her kissing his forehead, his ear, his hair; to find her small rough hands caressing his cheeks, wiping the tears away. “Oh, baby,” she said, and her voice was deep and unhappy and real. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

  That beautiful lie! She had never before uttered it. He buried his face in her hot neck, and he pressed his lips to the vein there, which pulsed and leaped with blood, and they stayed that way for a long time, as out in the world things were bombed, and polls were taken, and money was allocated, and money was spent. To their child, should it be born, none of this would ever be quite real. All of it—the terrorism, the torture, the scandals—would have the hazy quality of near legend, the actual truth just barely out of reach, like a scary campfire tale about something that, swear to God, actually happened to a best friend’s cousin’s roommate. The events, though factual, would seem invented, and the characters would be parodies of themselves, rough outlines, without particular depth or dimension.

  A tragedy, Carl and Lurene might have said, that the truth was always forgotten, that history was dulled and simplified until it didn’t resemble itself at all. But they understood that forgetting was the way people managed to go on. Even they would be forgotten, eventually, and once they were gone, their child would come to wonder what they were really like, back when the world was such a storied mess. The child would recall Lurene as firm and stoic, Carl as decent and shy, and the two would seem long-suffering and impossibly old, heavy with the burdens of their age, like statues come to life.

  The Accursed Items

  A LIBRARY CARD, from a town he wishes he still lived in

  A STUDENT BIBLE, received at confirmation, its red plastic cover melted by the radiator

  LOVE LETTERS, seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag and packed, along with a plush bear holding a plastic heart, into an unlabeled cardboard box, itself loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes when the police headquarters was moved, and forever lost

  CAR WASH SUDS, evaporating on the pavement

  A PAINTED EGG, thought to have been broken by the housekeeper, forgotten in the absence of compelling evidence, swept into a cheap plastic tumbler and inadvertently donated, with the set, to Goodwill

  THE SCRATCHED STONE, covered by fallen leaves, that marks where a previous owner’s cat is buried

  A MINNIE MOUSE DOLL you found by the roadside and brought home, intending to run it through the washer and give it to your infant son, but which looked no less forlorn after washing and was abandoned on a basement shelf, only to be found by your son eight years later and mistaken for a once-loved toy that he had himself forsaken, leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame

  NUDE POLAROIDS of a thirteen-year-old female cousin

  A WHITE GLOVE worn through just below the second knuckle of the fourth finger, where she tapped her wedding ring for many years against the brass studs of the armchair

  THE UNPAINTED PATCH on the hood of the car where vandals scrawled epithets

  AN ACCOMPLISHED FORGERY of a famous painting lost in a 1965 mansion fire, which now hangs in the largest gallery of a major American art museum

  THE METAL PAIL from which the last traces of blood could not be scrubbed

  AN ICICLE preserved in the freezer by a child, which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repairman

  A GAY PORNO MAGAZINE thrown onto a baseball field from a car window and perused with great interest by the adolescent members of both teams, two of whom meet in the woods some weeks later to reproduce the tableaux they have seen, leading to a gradual understanding that they are in fact gay: an incident the memory of which causes one of the two, when he is well into a life that is disappointing emotionally, professionally, and sexually, to fling a gay porno magazine out his car window as he passes an occupied baseball field on his way to what will be an unsuccessful job interview

  A RÉSUMÉ that betrays its author as utterly unqualified for the position for which she has applied, but which, because it smells good, leads its reader, a desperate, experientially undernourished middle manager at an internet-based retail corporation, to invite her into the office for an interview that, although it further betrays the applicant’s complete unsuitability for the job, provides the middle manager with a physical impression to complement the good smell, which impression is intensely exciting, forcing him to hire her as a supplemental secretary, much to the bafflement, chagrin, and eventual disgust of his extant secretary, who, during her employer’s lunch hour, removes the résumé in question from his files and personally delivers it to the CEO, and who is with the CEO when he barges into the middle manager’s office and finds the unsuitable supplemental secretary standing beside him, crying silently with her dress half off, while he sits in his reclining office chair sweating profusely and holding a plastic letter opener in a threatening manner

  THE MORTAR spilled by the mason, hardened onto the rubberized plastic strips of your chaise longue

  AN UPTURNED BIRD’S NEST, blown from a tree into a snowbank

  AN OVERTURNED CAN OF PAINT, unnoticed for months, which when found is lifted whole from the floor, the spilled liquid hardened into the shape of a puddle in an accidental imitation of the fake-spilled-drink gags available in any gift or joke shop

  MEAT, left out on the butcher block by an unidentified tenant in the eight-bedroom house, which each tenant, insisting that he is not responsible, refuses to dispose of, and which within a day begins to reek, and within three days has drawn flies, and within a week, maggots, but which by now has become a symbol of the mistrust each tenant feels for his housemates and its continued putrefaction a point of pride, so that each tenant eats his meals locked in his room or out of the house, until the meat has nearly been consumed by the insects that have occupied it, and the house fills with flies, and the meat disappears almost entirely, save for a few dried strings of sinew and a dark stain that, at the semester’s end, cannot be bleached out by the landlord, who retains the tenants’ security deposit to cover the cost of replacing the block

  SHOULDER PADS her mother tore from an otherwise stylish dress, recovered from the garbage and employed to fill out her bra while she dances to pop music in front of the mirror

  A TWENTY-FOOT LENGTH OF CEMENT PIPE, ten feet in diameter, abandoned in a farm field, which the farmer has plowed around and which will barely be visible, months later, above the rustling cornstalks

  YOUR TONGUE, forming forbidden words inside your closed mouth

  A SET OF JUNIOR BARBELLS, the plastic weights grown brittle and split along the seams so that sand has spilled out, which he cannot bring himself to discard, even though they remind him, every time he works out on his state-of-the-art cable-based bodybuilding system, of a
time when he was weak and at the mercy of his father, who was the one who bought him the junior barbells in the first place, and against whom he mercilessly retaliated as soon as he was strong enough to do so, a retaliation that his father, lying prostrate on the shag rug with his face bent and bloodied, seemed, with a wry, knowing, split-lipped smile, to tacitly approve of and even take proud responsibility for

  TRIPLE-WASHED MIXED GREENS in a plastic bag, on a shelf beside others like it

  GRIT found encrusted in the tire wells of the suspect’s car that, after extensive testing in a forensic geology laboratory, proves to have come from a beach in Oregon the suspect claims never to have visited

  THE FATHER’S BELT, which the mother matches, as the child sleeps, to the scars on the child’s back, scars the child insisted came from falling against a schoolyard fence during a “shirts vs. skins” game of kickball

  A BISCUIT crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot

  THE ORANGE TOBOGGAN whisking her to her death

  THE CASSETTE TAPE that happened to be in the tape deck when it was stolen from a car and was still lodged there when you bought the stolen deck for thirty bucks from a collapsible buffet table set up on the sidewalk outside your office building, and which contained, as you learned the moment you installed the deck and turned it on, a desperate recorded plea for reconciliation from a weeping woman to the lover who spurned her, which fills you with both pity and delight to hear, pity because of her plaintive voice and the blurred, haunted quality of the recording, delight because the offending lover’s tape deck has been stolen