Her Scent On His Hands
He dreamed of her,
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,
Spun in his bed.
Their bed.
He rarely slept.
He would doze for a few minutes,
Dream of her.
Wake with a shudder, a shout,
A reach across sheets to her absence.
He cried, forgot to eat,
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.
He would never see her alive again.
If he saw her at all it would be dead.
In pieces.
Mourning overwhelmed him.
Cops poked and probed.
They searched his house, car,
His place of business.
They interviewed, cajoled,
Bullied him and everyone he knew.
They so obviously wanted to blame him.
Focused solely on finding the evidence
They needed to have him indicted.
They wanted that dead body.
Dogs whining for 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.
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.
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,
Find her cooking eggs and toast.
He wanted to hear the shower running,
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,
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,
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,
Begging for a donation,
Shilling for a 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,
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 got up during the night
Touched her things?
Had he sleep walked to her vanity
Picked up her bottles?
Lotions, unguents, and perfumes?
It would not surprise him if the cops had
Video of him doing such things.
Had they hidden webcams everywhere?
Were they watching
Listening to every shuffle, belch, and fart?
Was his life a hapless technician’s parallel world now?
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, Inflatable Sky-Eye platforms,
UAVs, HALO drops, dragonfly and bee drones,
Fly on the wall surveillance,
Robots and spies everywhere.
He gasped and sat down on the couch, dizzy.
His senses swirled.
He needed to settle, eat something.
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,
Realized it was his own cry of despair.
What is this god talk? he wondered.
How dare I resort to magical thinking,
Superstition when she needs me.
When I need to find her, rescue her.
Immediately fantasies of charging in,
Destroying her kidnaper,
Carrying her to safety as she sobbed in his arms,
As he kissed her neck, her face, her lips,
Tasted her skin, smelled her hair, her perfume.
On his hands.
He raised his palms again to his face,
Inhaled her fragrance.
“Oh God.”
This time a whimper replaced the shout.
He sat on the couch
Crying until he listed to the left,
Fell asleep with his feet flat on the floor.
He slept for an hour that way,
Woke with a stiff neck, sore back,
A 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,
Pain going 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
For him.
He felt guilty enough to cut his own throat.
Knife’s too dull, he thought.
“Easy way out,” he said aloud,
Immediately blushing.
He wondered what the cops,
Their robotic eyes and ears
Would say about that.
Would they consider it a confession?
Would they browbeat him?
Yell about suicide as admission?
Would they hammer him with
Encouraging platitudes,
Hand him a sharper knife?
No, they were 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 stink of peanuts,
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 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 they merged?
What parts of him had been taken
Along with her?
“The bigger part,” he said, nodding.
Conversations with one’s self meant madness,
Didn’t they?
Was it how the third chimp consoled itself,
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,
Found none.
“You, too?”
He grimaced.
Et tu, Brutus?
Now he was responding aloud to the fridge.
As long as it doesn’t talk back,
An old joke went.
We need the eggs,
Another joke went.
Fun with your new head,
A dish to be eaten cold.
Fourth of July fireworks
Cover the sound of
A suicide’s gunshot.
He knew of Doubting Thomas.
No wound left untouched.
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
Past 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.
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,
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.
He 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
Still he saw reminders of her
Everywhere he looked.
He would have to clear away her things
Once her death was confirmed.
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 items,
That had not even belonged
To his great-grandmother.
He’d been a teenager then,
Had balked.
He tried to stop one of the more egregious thefts.
His grandfather had told him,
“Let it go. Doesn’t matter.”
It did matter, he’d insisted.
It’s theft.
He knew the piece of furniture being hefted out
Had been bought by his grandmother,
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.
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, cheerful,
A serene presence
Who could also charge after him
With a yardstick
Should he act up.
Would his own kids’s kids
Remember his wife like that?
As a mix of kindness
With occasional stern terror?
Would they know her in heaven,
As the Clapton song went?
Would she recognize them
After their own years passed?
He slapped himself, hard.
It made his ears ring.
God damn me, he thought.
Another slap.
More escapism.
Heaven was conceptual,
Same as God
Same as redemption.
None of those were factual.
Taking refuge in such balmy
Subtropical lies
Was a mental vacation,
A lapse
betraying 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
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 never surfaced again?
Eaten by the world.
Swallowed whole by some degenerate
A moron with a
Sub basement dungeon and
Monochromatic lusts.
This right now was how he would live
Measure the rest of his life.
Not knowing
Meant never falling to either side of the fence.
No.
It meant sliding ever lower
Onto the stake
Splitting him up the ass.
It would reach his throat
Before he died.
He would suffer
Fit to harden Vlad Tepes.
After such an existence
A blotting out was to be preferred
Over any imaginary afterlife.
No atheists in foxholes my ass.
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,
It 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 —
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 family guns.
Her scent on his hands
Was not a cake
Dipped in tea.
It was not a synaptic catalyst
To remembrance,
Nor the mercy of
Celebrating a life.
It was Poe’s final brick
As it sealed away forever
An alcoholic’s temptation,
A cask of primo wine.
It was Jude’s obscurity
As his killer frolics at a festival.
It was a sweet reminder of
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,
Trying to relate
If only for a moment,
With someone he saw as
A potential murderer —
If only to elicit more information.
Honey to the skel’s shit.
Skel, short for skeleton,
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,
Tangled plot skeins.
He hated that his life had become
Purple prose.
He chafed at knowing it.
Self-referential irony,
An unreliable narrator.
For fuck’s sake.
He kicked a wall.
It left a mark.
It would upset his wife,
He thought.
Yeah, she’d care
If she could.
They never found any
Missing money.
Traced no payments.
How could they find
What was not there?
Absence makes the
Heart bleed harder.
He thought of his bed, his house,
He thought about life.
He raised his hands to cover his face.
Her scent on his hands made him cry.
/// /// ///
2600 words
Tuesday 17 April 2012
prose 11:00 hours, poetry 17:49
story one sitting,
poem two sittings,
1710 Dianne Avenue, Bellevue, NE, USA
long day
left ear’s plugged
damn
