He dreamed of her and woke with the scent of her perfume on his hands. She had been gone for more than a week. She had gone out for groceries and had not returned. Her car was found, with her purse, cell phone, and keys, in the parking lot of a local grocery store. Surveillance tapes showed nothing; she had parked beyond camera angle. No one saw or heard anything.
That she’d been taken seemed obvious.
He sweated, ground his teeth, and spun in his bed — their bed. He rarely slept. He would doze for a few minutes, dream of her, and wake with a shudder, a shout, or a reach across to her empty spot.
He cried, forgot to eat, and did not bathe or shave. His friends and family stopped calling; he depressed them. “Where’s your faith?” his well-meaning sister had asked. He had asked in return, “Where’s your honesty?”
He knew she had been taken and he would never see her alive again. If he saw her at all it would be dead, or in pieces. Mourning overwhelmed him.
Cops poked and probed. They searched his house, car, and place of business. They interviewed, cajoled, and bullied him and everyone he knew. They so obviously wanted to blame him that they focused solely on finding the evidence they needed to have him indicted. They wanted that dead body like a dog wants fed a fresh joint bone.
He let them think and do as they wished. He knew it made no difference who they focused on. They would not find her. They would not seriously look for her. Blame the spouse was their motto. They were right most of the time to do so. He knew this. The one thing he did not allow was himself to start wondering if maybe he had done it. He knew he had kissed his wife goodbye — a smooch, a light peck, nothing significant — and had made himself a sandwich. He had eaten and watched a ball game while she was out being taken.
He never wanted to eat or watch baseball again.
Waking with her scent on his hands kicked his pulse into a wobble. He felt a rising panic, like a dog hearing the family car pull up after a few hours pining for his pack to return. He wanted to prance to the kitchen and find her cooking eggs and toast. He wanted to hear the shower running and know he could slip in and find her naked and warm and wet and soapy. He wanted to hear her humming as she did housework. He wanted to hear her footsteps on the floorboards, the toilet flushing, water running. He wanted any sign of her still in his life.
He heard only the house holding its breath. It held his, too.
He drank a lot of tea now. He could not be bothered to make coffee. Once he had taken pride in grinding freshly roasted beans and brewing a great cup of java. Now he had no patience for such frivolities.
Every time the telephone rang he jumped. Every time it rang he cursed aloud and smacked his fist into himself. He would answer and say nothing, often hearing the same. He would hear people with nothing pertinent to say babbling as mechanically as robot calls pitching unwanted vacations in Branson or begging for a donation to some cause no one cared about.
He wanted to scream.
He wanted to shatter the world with a scream of frustration, loss, and pain.
He wanted her back. He wanted intensely to hold her. Touching her hair would fulfill his destiny. Seeing her smile at him would create his world anew.
That morning he roamed the house with his palms against his nose. He inhaled her scent as if it sustained him. Nitrogen and oxygen could go to hell, if only he had her perfume to breathe.
Had he gotten up during the night and touched her things? Had he sleep walked to her vanity and picked up her bottles of lotions, unguents, and perfumes? It would not surprise him if the cops had video of him doing that.
Had they hidden webcams everywhere? Were they watching and listening to every shuffle, belch, and fart? Was his life a hapless technician’s parallel world now? Or did they have a machine to keep eyes and ears on him? Carnivore, Einstein, Tempest, Echelon, TIA, Crime Mapping, VICAP, VICLAS, Predator Drones, Surveillance Satellites, Semi-Rigid Dirigibles and Inflatable Sky-Eye platforms, UAVs, HALO drops, dragonfly and bee drones, fly on the wall drones, robots and spies everywhere; he gasped and sat down on the couch, dizzy. His senses swirled.
He needed to settle, eat something, and stop his mind from wandering where it would go, as that old Beatle song put it. Fix the hole, yes. Fill it. The one left by her having been taken.
Taken from him, yes, but from her life, too. Taken out of her world. Forced into compressed suffering. Her fear, her pain, terror enhancing both. Her face crying, tears and blood running.
“Oh God.”
His own voice startled him. He looked around to see who’d said it as he realized it was his own cry of despair. What is this god talk? he wondered. How dare I resort to magical thinking and superstition when she needs me to find her, rescue her. Immediately fantasies of charging in, destroying her kidnaper, and carrying her to safety as she sobbed in his arms, as he kissed her neck, her face, her lips, tasted her, smelled her hair, her skin, her perfume.
On his hands. He raised his palms again to his face and inhaled her fragrance.
“Oh God.”
This time a whimper replaced the shout.
He sat on the couch crying until he listed to the left and fell asleep with his feet flat on the floor. He slept for an hour that way and woke with a stiff neck, sore back, and numb left arm. His legs tingled as he stood. He walked to the kitchen with an unsteady gait, not sure if he might fall over. He did not think it would matter if he dropped dead. It might even be a relief to find himself smacked against the floor, life ebbing, in pain and numb. He would give himself to nullify his existence. Fair trade, he thought.
He made a pbj sandwich, crying when he realized it was her favorite, strawberry preserves. The peanut butter was his, chunky. She preferred creamy but got chunky to make him happy. She ate what she did not prefer because of him.
He felt guilty enough to cut his own throat.
“Easy way out,” he said aloud, immediately blushing as he wondered what the cops and their robotic eyes and ears would say about that. Would they consider it a confession? Would they browbeat him about suicide as admission? Would they hammer him with encouraging platitudes or hand him a knife?
No, they were more sly. They would be silent. They knew silence, a kind of absence, was the best torture for him.
Who would take her? Who would want to hurt her? She was a wife and mother of grown children, a woman of compact body and neat clothes, a person of substance on a scale no reporter would ever notice. She lived modestly, harming no one, helping many. Why would she be a target? How had she enticed a predator? Surely there was sweeter meat to be had.
Every time he raised the sandwich to take a bite her scent on his hands slithered past the chunks of peanut that stormed his olfactory awareness. Olfactory, he thought. A grade-school word. He’d always thought of it as the Old Smell Factory, so he could remember it. His mother had taught him that. She’d worn Lily-of-the-Valley perfume. She’d made him eggs and toast.
His wife’s scent was Emeraude, an old-fashioned kind of vanilla-based allure with a long pedigree. She’d told him about Estée Lauder once, having read it in a magazine. She favored the scent that made her his cookie, his cake, his treat. That had been her joke. She preferred food to flowers. She knew which became more a part of him. She understood instinctively how to lock them into a single being.
Was that it? Had he been taken along with her?
“The bigger part,” he said, nodding. Conversations with one’s self meant madness, didn’t they? Or was it just how the third kind of chimp consoled itself when separated from its troop, barrel, carload, or tribe?
Was that why it hurt so much, because part of himself had also been taken?
He opened the refrigerator to get a beer and found none. “Oh.” He grimaced. Now he was responding aloud to the fridge? As long as it doesn’t talk back, as the old joke went. We need the eggs, as another joke went. Fun with your new head, a dish to be eaten cold.
Fourth of July fireworks cover the sound of the suicide’s gunshot, he knew. Was he back to thoughts of canceling himself again?
He turned the TV on, then off at once. Chatter repelled. Same with radio. He could not read. He could not concentrate on anything but her absence. Worrying about her. He felt suspended on the ends of two swords, one hope she was alive, one sure she was dead. Desperation versus mourning, he thought. Each steel blade probed deep into his ribcage and his feet had no purchase on any solid ground.
Where was Jack the Ripper when you needed him? At least his blade hadn’t lingered.
He’d stayed away from her underwear so far. From touching her clothes and burying his face in her scents. He had hugged her pillow and cried, though. He had also spotted a pair of her panties in the hamper and had felt a sick twinge in his cock. Pheromones, molecules, he’d thought. I want so badly to fuck her again.
He’s stayed away from her possessions but saw reminders of her everywhere he looked. He would have to clear away her things once her death was confirmed, he thought. A cold part of himself imagined giving her stuff to Goodwill. Would relatives swoop down to loot, as he’d seen happen to his paternal grandparents when his great-grandmother had died? Vultures had carried off furniture and other things that had not even belonged to his great-grandmother. He’d been a teenager then and had balked. He tried to stop one of the more egregious thefts and his grandfather had told him, “Let it go. Doesn’t matter.”
It did matter, he’d insisted. It’s theft. He knew for a fact the piece of furniture being hefted out had been bought by his grandmother and had no attachment to his great-grandmother.
“It’s okay,” his grandfather said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“But it’s not okay,” he said aloud, for the microphones and cameras, for the ghosts and demons watching him. Fuck them all. It is not okay to loot. He thought about the scene in Dickens where the dead man’s bed curtains are stolen. It showed how pathetic poverty made people. What poverty of soul had ridden his relatives when his great-grandmother had died? Ironically, her name had been Nell, although she had not been little. He remembered her as fat, white-haired, and cheerful, a serene presence who could also charge after him with a yardstick should he act up.
Would his own kids remember his wife like that? As a mix of kindness and occasional stern terror? Would they know her in heaven, as the Clapton song went? Would she recognize them after so many years passed?
He slapped himself, hard. It made his ears ring. God damn me, he thought. More escapism. Heaven was conceptual, same as God or, for that matter, redemption. None of those were factual. Taking refuge in such balmy sub-tropical lies was a mental vacation that betrayed his wife’s memory.
He pulled up short and sobbed. Was he already thinking of her as dead? Was she irretrievable? What if she came back changed? Being raped and brutalized, held against one’s will, wrought changes. What if she came back broken? Would she let him fuck her? Would she jump and shriek at his touch? Would she become emotionally cold and physically withdrawn? Would it be worse than her death? Maybe losing her cleanly was better than a lingering Tantalus existence doomed to end in contempt and regret. He wanted to sob again but nothing came.
He thought about it. What if he never found out what had happened to her? What if she simply never surfaced again? Eaten by the world. Swallowed whole by some degenerate with a sub-basement dungeon and monochromatic lusts.
This right now was how he would live out the rest of his life, he thought. Not knowing meant never falling to either side of the fence. No, it meant sliding ever lower onto the stake that was splitting him up the ass. It would reach his throat before he died. He would suffer as Vlad Tepes never enjoyed.
After such an existence a blotting out was to be preferred over any imaginary afterlife. No atheists in foxholes my ass, he thought. Anti-theists fought a valid war for the right not to be. Did I solicit thee from thy clay to make me? Something like that, from the epigram at the start of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her husband, Byron, someone’s poem in citation, a quotation of savvy defiance that cut to the creator’s sadistic heart. Maybe it was Milton, that would make sense.
He regretted suddenly his entire teaching life, all those books, all those students, all those literary lies. Given this moment’s crux, he wanted to leverage an expungement of all he’d been. Socrates sipping hemlock was too gentle a metaphor to suit him. Seppuku, perhaps. Mishima and his ilk. Hemingway’s shotgun blast, chasing the echo of his father’s gun, of so many others in his family.
Her scent on his hands was not a cake dipped in tea. It was not a synaptic catalyst to remembrance, nor of the mercy of celebrating a life. It was Poe’s final brick as it sealed away forever the alcoholic’s temptation of a cask of primo wine. It was Jude’s obscurity as his killer frolics at a festival. It was a sweet reminder of the conceptual Hell made for anyone who strays too far from the bubble of illusion.
It will turn out all right, one cop had said. A bluff, macho sergeant in a K-Mart suit, just made detective and trying to relate to someone he saw as a potential murderer, if only for a moment, if only to elicit more information, honey to the skel’s shit.
Skel, short for skeleton, meaning the walking dead. See people as already bones and empathy is stripped away with the flesh, compassion with connective tissue. Skels mattered about as much as kindling.
More death imagery, he thought. This crap would thrill some academic if it cropped up in a turgid novel of convoluted prose and tangled plot skeins. He hated that his life had become purple prose. He chafed at knowing it. Self-referential irony and an unreliable narrator, for fuck’s sake. He kicked a wall and left a mark he at once worried would upset his wife.
Yeah, she’d care.
He raised his hands to cover his face. Her scent on his hands made him cry.
/// /// ///
2600 words
Tuesday 17 April 2012
11:00 hours
One sitting, 1710 Dianne Avenue, Bellevue, NE, USA
