English-impaired muscle-bound hulk.
My mouth went dry. Erika, the sole source of my soul’s inspiration, the pinnacle to which I climbed, the apogee of my orbit, now feared me. Feared me as if I were capable of producing, from within the folds of my clothing, a straight-edge razor honed with atomic precision for the singular purpose of slicing her jugular should she, at that or any other moment, refuse to rejoin me in my destiny. I would be lying to say that I did not want her back, desperately so, but to have shined the light of fear on her caused me to step back, literally, and re-assess the entire situation. So I stepped back into the Easter air, no longer comforted by its lack of humidity, and stared, not quite as wide-eyed as Erika, at the world around me. Disbelief. How, I wondered, had this fate befallen me?
“I’m sorry,” I said as put my hands into my pants pockets in an effort to assure that I would not use them against her. “I probably shouldn’t pursue you, still.”
She was still tense, her shoulders drawn up high against her perfect jaw bones, hiding her elegant neck. She pursed her lips, it lasted only a half-second, before she sighted her eyes along her nose and looked down at me. Down, and I was taller than she.
“No, you shouldn’t,” she paused, dramatically and purposefully, hoping the words would sink in, I believe, “pursue me ... still.”
I sighed heavily, audibly, as if a cartoon balloon had formed above me with the word “sigh,” a squiggly, uncertain, exclamation point caboosing along behind it. Erika Montrose, my destiny -- pre-appointed by a thousand astrologers, foreseen in the tea leaves at the bottom of seer’s cup -- was slipping from my grasp. I turned, the hardest move I have ever made my legs make, to force them, finally, away from their point of no-return, and made my way down the cement steps from her apartment and onto the sidewalk. The earth never felt so hard beneath my loafers, gravity never pulled me so diligently, as I made my way the block-and-a-half to my car. Behind me, probably, now certainly, was the woman with whom my life was meant to be spent. Behind me, my life was ending.
Knowing the truth of her deception is something, now, I will never access. The restrictive order against me, legally called a Protection From Abuse (as if I had ever), forbids me any semblance of contact with her. That was Kissling’s idea. He sat that day in the courtroom with doe-eyes of assumed fear for his newly-beloved’s welfare while I sat, ramrod straight and in my best suit, on a bench across the aisle. The gall to think that she, Erika, could believe that I would ever cause her harm, physical or mental or otherwise, if another avenue existed, appalled me. The judge, though, ignored me. It took only a minute for her to obtain the state’s protection from me; a moment that mimicked the several low-rent welfare mothers who had pleaded their cases before the same magistrate (to be sure, their husbands or boyfriends must assuredly be cut from the unshaven beer-guzzling, sports-loving cloth of those who would raise a hand against a woman). There, in that courtroom, Kissling escorted Erika away from me, his arm wrapped securely around her as if I had dragon’s breath capable of incinerating her were he not shielding her from some last minute paroxysm of violence on my part.
So it was that day, a personal day taken by me (my first) to witness the end of something that had seemingly, months before, no end. I allowed myself a glass of the Scotch I saved for my father as I sat in my bedroom and read the letters she had written to me during the course of our relationship. Were they not the signed affidavits of her unending love? How could this reality be so, I wondered? May blossoms burgeoned heavily on their stalks and my spirits sank. Skirt hemlines rose with the temperature and I could not be bothered to notice. Erika, the Meaning, was now clothed in the mantle of the state’s authority and I, who had bought her diamond stud earrings for her birthday (a ring, I had assumed, should wait until later), was a menace.
There, though, in her own writing was the truth. Her love for me. Forever and ever Amen. Interspersed throughout the letters were the photos that I never quite considered good enough to put in my photo album because of their slight imperfections. Photos of us on the beach, my hair mussed, or of us bundled up at the base of a ski slope, my cheeks overly red from wind burn, or us smiling cheerfully, my eyes momentarily closed, at some function or another.
It had been months, and I had forgotten what it was before I opened it, but I unfolded the photocopy paper that was also in the shoe box. I gathered my breath. It was dried, nearly petrified, but it still was: the condom.
What possessed me to visit her apartment that evening I don’t know, but I waited until someone to mount the steps who knew me as a familiar guest before I emerged from hiding and tagged along.
“Wait,” I called as I hurriedly approached the door he had just unlocked and was pulling open. He looked toward me, squinted, and relaxed. He knew my face but nothing more.
“You going up to see Erika?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I motioned towards him with the box of memorabilia. “A surprise.”
He smiled knowingly as if he understood the romantic implications and let me slip in through the door before he removed his key. He lived on the first floor -- Erika lived on the fourth -- so he bade me good evening (“have fun”) and went into his apartment as I took to the steps.
I knocked loudly on her door, three loud raps. BANG. BANG. BANG. I waited a few seconds and then I heard her footsteps on the hardwood floor on the other side of the door. She was unchaining the door when suddenly the sound on the other side evaporated and there was nothing but the black hole which had sucked in my relationship and was now drawing in sound. I waited ten seconds and knocked again. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Nothing.
“Erika, I know you’re in there. I just heard you walk down the hall. Look, I have something I want to show you,” I held up the shoe box to the peephole through which she must now be looking. There was the barely perceptible sound of weight being shifted from one foot to another, but I could hear it as loud as a church bell. “Just let me show you.”
I knew I wasn’t allowed to be there. Wasn’t permitted, by the state, to talk to her or look at her or write to her. I wasn’t allowed anything but I deserved an explanation. I was owed an explanation. I demanded an explanation. I opened the box and pulled out the folded photocopy paper and held it up eight inches from the peephole.
“I need to know about this,” I said.
There was nothing on the other side of the door. Silence. Muted silence, even. An attempt, on her part, to be quieter than quiet allowed.
“Just let me in,” I said.
Still nothing. I waited for a moment and, I don’t know why, put my shoulder into the door. It gave way, the chain having been removed, and I fell across the threshold while the door banged against the wall and Erika stumbled backwards. I crashed into the floor and my box split open and spilled love letters and imperfect photos across the floor. In my hand I could feel the photocopy paper and the dried condom inside it as I crushed it while tumbling unceremoniously to the ground. Erika backpedaled away from me, screaming something at me while I looked up from the spilt memories spread out around me, the condom in my hand, and tried to say something articulate. For a moment I tried to get up and scramble toward her, love letters scattering as I slipped on them, trying to stand, when I saw the portable phone in her hand. What she said to me I don’t remember; it was mass of shouts and shrieks and scrofulous language.
I spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of her building in a full run, the apartment complex’s door banging sharply behind me as I fled down the street toward my car. Such an ignominious ending, I thought, as I recklessly pulled the keys to my car from my pocket and scratched the paint job on the door as I struggled to get the key in the lock. Over. Done. For finality’s sake, I could never talk to her again. I had been driving for several minutes before I realized that I still had the photocopy paper in my hand. Within it the condom which had started my dementia. Within it...her loverman. A man I no longer was. A man I could never again be. A man, any fond memories of which might have exist
ed, trickled onto the floor of her apartment and melted into the past as soon as she would have gotten around to picking up the expired letters of her love for me. That was when I turned around.
I parked the car across from her building and mounted the steps to the front door where I discovered, much to my amazement, that the security door was ajar. Perhaps it was so because of my hasty retreat from the building, perhaps some other reason, but it was open nonetheless. Surely, I thought as I pulled the door open, this was an omen prophesied from some ancient oracle, that Erika would recognize her fault in abandoning me. Such a coincidence could not be accidental.
Her door also was not locked when I arrived before it. It was shut but the lock had been broken just twenty minutes earlier when, in some Neanderthal fit of rage, I had crashed through it. I pushed it open and stepped inside and saw, around my feet, the now shredded remnants of what had been only a short while earlier letters professing her undying love of me. Now, they were fit only for confetti to be tossed out of some tall building onto columns of GI’s marching during a New York victory celebration of some undeclared war. Whatever proof I had that she had once loved me now lay splintered on the floor.
She must have heard me standing silently in the doorway because, just a moment later, she turned the corner and stared at me. In her right hand was a butcher knife; in her left, the portable phone. She pressed the phone’s “on” button and a deafening beep echoed down the hallway.
“If I have to dial 9-1-1 it’s going to be because you’re bleeding to death and I suddenly felt sorry enough for you to call for help,” she said as she cocked the arm with the phone out in front of her as if it were a pistol she were pointing at me. “But I wouldn’t bet on my charity at this point.”
I stood there, motionless, and suddenly felt the weight of the paper-wrapped condom in my hand. I held it out toward her, a crumpled mass of over-folded paper, and sighed. Though I may have at one time wanted to beat her, it would only have been metaphorically and in the nature of getting some sense into her, I could now only see the glint of the blade she had used many times to chop open bell peppers or quarter tomatoes. While she had a knife and a phone I had only a condom; a condom that contained the deposit of another man from a season now long since erased by time. Outside, I could hear the sound of a car horn honking, an impatient horn imploring some other driver to get a move on or get out of the way. To make a decision.
I stood there a moment longer, staring at the knife and the phone, and dropped the paper-wrapped condom onto the pile of torn letters. It fell quickly and slapped the ground, the last sound I ever heard in her apartment. It is that moment which crystallized everything for me, that moment which I shall forever remember, above and beyond all the long evenings of VCR movies and Beaujolais by the fireplace: that her love, if ever it existed, had morphed into fear. A fear which would have, if I’d moved forward, forced her to make a decision she had never anticipated making.
I can see her there now, the sunlight streaming in from the windows in the living room behind her, the dust motes twirling within the beams that crashed into the sofa and bounced off the coffee table, standing with a knife and a phone on the edge of a decision that would have to be made quickly. Instantaneously.
About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.
Also by William Young
The Signal (Paperback only)
Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse
The Undeath of Rob Zombie - Day 199 (Smashwords.)
The Third Time is the Harm - Day 654 (Smashwords)
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