I couldn’t understand how it’d come to this, how he’d gotten there. I puzzled it back as best I could.
But, no matter what’d gone before, he’d come into my apartment. He’d purposefully come in, looked for me.
What could he have wanted?
I gave a look to his unconscious form, the curve of his torso.
He’d already known it was me. If I’d answered his knocks, he would’ve forced his way in, there was no other thing to imagine. He’d cornered me into my bedroom. There was no excusing it—the fact that I’d done what I’d done didn’t change the fact that he’d known it was my bedroom, known I was there, had turned the handle of the door.
No police.
No police.
I found my breathing was matching his, wasn’t quite sure if I’d been trying to do that on purpose, if I was still trying to do it on purpose, it just seemed the tempos clicked, nothing to do with anything.
My eyes were leaning backward, my thoughts drifting around words, simple strings, no reason to them, waiting for a melody.
No police.
Opened the door.
Knew it was me.
That locked door.
I’d moved toward the kitchen, let my eye sink to the flat of the counter top, vaguely stared at the plastic bag that’d held the condom box, flicked it to the ground. My hands slipped to my pant pockets, my left one coming out with Ginette’s identification, a few of her dollars, her credit cards, receipts.
***
It was out of the question, my calling the police. There was no way to twist it into This man broke in and I attacked him. Even if there wasn’t ample evidence that this wasn’t true, even if I manufactured some way to make it seem this is what’d happened, he’d wake up, he’d write down everything.
Something about that was horrifying, that he’d write it down. Or he’d pull the stitches from his mouth, explain, stitch himself shut after it was all out of him.
The clock showed it was just after four-thirty. The building would be waking soon, some of it already was, I was no longer some entity all alone.
I put Ginette’s things into the man’s pant pockets, got my cupped hands under his arms, tried to drag him, had to hump him along in awful tugs, back stiffening, cramping, the slithering of my bowels becoming too much to deal with.
Everything collapsed, everything.
I couldn’t begin to understand any of it. I was furious, kicked him in the ribs with my heel, this causing a squeak to his snoring, nothing else.
Abruptly, forceful, making me stop thinking about whatever I was about to think about, I went through his pockets, extracting Ginette’s things I’d just put in, then found her apartment key, some used tissues, a used Band-Aid, some receipts.
No key to the padlocks.
I stuffed everything back into one pocket, a sudden pang of needing to urinate, went into the bathroom, ran the water, slapped some to my face, undid my pants front and voided myself standing there.
When I was through, I absently flushed the toilet, then ran the water, soaped and washed my hands, looking at my face in the mirror, watching myself pretend, keep myself distracted, do things while I was doing other things.
***
The corridor was awful, nobody in it, the knobs of closed doors stationary, the light a stale breath, not even noticeable, just there.
I was more aware of myself and how uneasy I was. I couldn’t imagine there was a way to make the operation quick, to just swing him the ten paces, twelve paces, fifteen paces to the next door—less than that, more than that—get him inside.
Would it take five minutes?
It couldn’t take longer.
I tried to imagine some way to explain myself were I witnessed, but it was idiot, even if I could explain myself there’d be no escaping I’d been seen.
I discovered that he had locked the door to thirteen, which for some reason was more off putting than anything else. Likely, it’d just been a principle thing, there was no way someone who realized their apartment had been entered by a stranger wouldn’t lock the door, next time out.
It wasn’t his apartment I reminded myself, but was bored with it, bored with reminding myself about him, it was tiring.
I retrieved the key, propped the door after briefly peeking around the apartment, assuring myself it was vacant, returned to my door and stood with it open, resting pressed into my ribs.
I heard the ping of the elevator, jerked back so quickly my head, behind my ear, struck the thin of the door side, my hand striking the door, too, as it raised to press the sore.
Grimacing, face clenched, I watched in the direction of the doors, heard them open, close, nobody stepping off.
I swallowed heavy, infuriated, shut my door and smacked myself in the face a few times, made shoving motions at the air, panted, sneezed, growled as I wiped my hands of the mucus that had issued on the sides of my shirt.
Looking down, I saw his nose was bleeding. Not his nose. A long scratch to his cheek. It hadn’t been there before. I stared, about to kneel to examine it, then saw the blood on my untrimmed toenail, into the hairs behind it, the rise of the joint.
I hadn’t even noticed stepping on him, again, kind of smiled, then stopped—or didn’t feel like I was smiling, my thoughts tense, but probably still was.
***
In shoes and socks, I jogged to the elevator, called it up, hit the button for the basement, jogged back to my door. Using the fact that I was already winded to urge me on, I bent down, curled my elbows under his armpits, waddled backward with him, six seven eight nine ten eleven waddles, his body halfway out the door, six seven eight waddles, his feet out, my door clicked shut.
The rest of the length to thirteen was feverish, hardly seemed to matter, squeals of cramp, sweating, thought I’d wet myself but had no idea, really. I could only move him in quick tugs with three breath pauses between after the first few efforts, let my head loll around, really felt I could pass out, no blood in me, no air in me, felt myself tensing against the empty behind me as though the empty were made of fingers made stiff to tap to halt.
As soon as the door to thirteen was shut, both of us inside of it, I broke down crying, wheezing, hands and knees, my forehead boring into his chest.
I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.
I pulled myself up halfway, still on my knees, now with my shoulders against the wall, opened and closed my hands in front of me, found they were shaking so much they never quite got shut all the way or open, in fact they moved the same, in and out, whether I meant them to be shutting, opening, nothing.
Kind of standing, doubled over, elbows to the center of my thighs, hands crossed over each other, limp at the writs, neck arched, peculiarly, stiffing taut as I held it, I got to the kitchen, ran the faucet, drank from my blubbering hands, using the wets of them to wipe at my face, poking my eyes over and over while I did, because they just wouldn’t close, were stained open, indelible.
***
In the main room of thirteen, I breathed in tugs of my gut far in, enough my ribs would show through my bare skin, out in a blunder of my gut a mound over my waistband.
I was trying to get any sensible line of thought to catch, sensible just meaning any three consecutive sentences having to do with one another. Time felt long and all finished at once.
What must have been the dozenth time I looked at the recliner, I took note of the duffel bag, moved toward it. It was his, which got me oddly excited, like it proved something, something about how he shouldn’t have been there, gave him again this sense of interloper, of tourist, of the thing out of place and I urgently needed to keep him framed in such a way, the force of how garish he’d been was not foremost in my thoughts, anymore, I was slipping into fatigue, fatigue making me feel guilty of everything.
I unzipped the thing, found a change of clothes, a paperb
ack novel, a plastic bag with toothbrush and small tube of toothpaste, a stick of deodorant.
I was arguing whether this made it seem more like he didn’t belong or more like he did—on the one hand, it made thirteen seem like a hotel, a destination, on the other, made him seem he’d returned home. The clothes had a musty scent, everything seemed used, specks of chalked water to the plastic bag—then I uncovered the three sacks of liquid.
Like in a hospital.
Fluids.
There was also a pouch of supplies—needles, tape, something to secure the line to him intravenously.
He snored a series of moaning hiccups, squashed bleats out his nose.
I took up a bag, read the side, felt it flaccid, heavy in my hand. I dropped it, disgusted irrationally when I thought This is how he drinks and in the same thought knew it was also how he ate.
***
I was gripping his ankles to bring him further into the apartment when the voices of two people passing in front of the door jarred me, just a quick sound of them, voices in good humor, half of a laugh and they were gone.
I moved to the peephole but didn’t put an eye to it.
The clock on the microwave above the stove showed it was past five in the morning.
It was morning. Had I killed him an hour later than I had, I never would’ve been able to have brought him back to thirteen.
-He isn’t dead, I whispered, not even regarding the remark, it hung there. Then I scratched my ear, nodded, made Hmn sounds, agreed that he wasn’t dead.
I hadn’t meant Dead, hadn’t meant Killed him or whatever I’d thought, whatever I’d whispered.
More unsettling though, I realized I was actively considering Ginette dead. And it comforted me. It made me feel safe. Ginette dead had been somehow my driving focus, what was holding things to place. If she was dead, there was every chance I could go undiscovered.
-But she’d not dead, I said, a slower whisper than I’d done about him.
She isn’t dead.
-Ginette isn’t dead, but I hope she is, I said it, swallowed it, then paced to the padlocked room to distance myself, drift to a new consideration.
I returned to his duffle bag, emptied it, went through everything, checked for small pockets I might’ve overlooked, but there were no keys. I emptied his wallet of everything, thinking the keys might’ve been slipped into one of the slots, but there was nothing.
My attention drifted back in the direction of the door. I tensed, thinking I’d heard the sound of another door shutting, waited for more voices, but if someone passed, they did so without a word, with nothing.
Glancing back to the floor, I saw his identification, picked it up.
Dimitri Livenst.
He was smiling in the photograph, his lips unparted.
***
I stretched out my lower back, a turn of my torso, my vision darkening, taking a long time to come back to normal and I felt light, like I was a dent on the back of my skull looking out at what I could see through my eyes.
I went to the kitchen, touched around for something to eat, couldn’t think of when I’d eaten, figured I needed something in me. I devoured three slices of cinnamon bread, spitting out the last bite when I tried to swallow but found I’d not chewed it enough, couldn’t get the mash right in my mouth to chew it more, my throat kept rising to swallow, impatiently.
There was a cork board mounted next to a wall telephone, and on two thumb tacks were keys, one long, fat, the other small, a green sticker about the size of a medicine pill on it, halfway peeled up and dirty from fingers touching the adhesive.
I moved with the stickered key to the padlock after one last handful of water, only catching it in one palm, lapping it twice then slurping.
A headache that’d been rising worsened right into my eye, I brought the top of my wrist to it, then was startled by the sound of a vibration, something rattling along a hard surface.
It sounded again, just as abrasive.
I found a cell phone, Dimitri’s I imagined, on one of the bookshelves, jittering along to an incoming call. It stopped and I watched it lay, jittering, the intervals peculiar.
I felt a grab in my bowel, like a hand closed up around my insides and tugged down, something hung like a weight from the base of throat.
I opened the phone, found that six text messages had just come through. I hit the button to read the last, the phone shivering with a new message as I stared at words I couldn’t decipher. I checked another message.
Another. Another.
Gibberish. Strings of letters that didn’t even resemble a language.
Not gibberish, I hissed, suddenly struck myself in the leg, hard fist, pressed and pressed. Just a foreign language.
I’d no idea what any of it said, but every message, every of these last seven, had at least two question marks in them.
***
Both padlocks came open easily, I pushed up on them, they slipped through their loops, hit the floor, were quiet.
The room smelled of the rain outside, both of the windows open a crack. It took me a moment to focus on it, but there was a clock on the far side of the bed, a radio, the volume humming just loud enough to register. The bed hadn’t been made, but was not overly disheveled, not undone, mixed into the folds of the turned up sheet and blanket were a patterned camisole, one sock, a pair of panties on the floor by the bureau and two more and something else, some cloth I couldn’t tell what—a scarf perhaps, leggings—stuck out the lip of the middle drawer, just slightly opened.
The light switch activated a tall lamp, the shade to it decorative, made to look like painted glass but plastic, the bulb inside soft wattage.
The sound of my breathing was so distinct it felt I knew how it would be spelled, like it enunciated itself in its hush out its hish in, the congestion behind it distinct breaks in syllable though no interruption to the sound.
It was just a room.
There was no sign of anything out of place. There were drinking glasses and two cookies on a plate—I broke one in half and it was obviously not stale, just out of the package that day, that afternoon maybe.
I checked under the bed, saw some random sheet of paper, a coin.
The closet was immaculate, the inside of the drawers perfectly orderly.
I didn’t understand it.
From the open windows I became aware of the noises from the street, starting to become regular, car doors, shifts of traffic, burbles of talk, laughter, sneezing, coughing, the still present shiver of moisture in the air.
As I backed out of the room, I noted that there were two other padlocks hanging from two other mounts, amateurishly affixed to the wall, a thumb tack there for hanging the keys.
***
The reality of the night beginning to grip me, I paced the apartment, moaning a little bit.
It was irrelevant at this point what’d come before, it was irrelevant.
I couldn’t help but argue that, tilted from a certain perspective, there was a clear chain of events, something not understandable, perhaps, but certainly discernable. Absolute events, an absolute sequence to them, regardless. I was in no semantic situation and whether this was true all of a sudden or true as the result of a slow progression, it simply did not matter.
But still, I writhed at the sensation of unfairness, inequity, the drift that certain moments were charged more fiercely, made heavier, blundered with so much more weight than others.
There simply did not seem to have been enough time to have changed so much, but this is not what I’d been before. It was not. But a result couldn’t be so immediate.
A result of what? What was I a result of?
I growled, as though there were somebody putting these questions to me and as though I was putting the questions to somebody, having them mocked, stared at bewildered in response.
It remained that it was no metamorphosis, no bir
th that’d happened, so how did it go from this, I pointed at myself, to that, I pointed at Dimitri.
After a pause, a grip of nausea, like greasy hands gripping the wet bones of my wrists and ankles and jangling them, making my breath bubble, I said the word Irrelevant, again, but it had a different tone, seemed much more comforting.
Irrelevant. Irrelevant.
But one more time saying it, this no longer sounded like a word, it became a singsong sound, a child mimicking another child’s unintelligible giggle.
Irrelevant. Irrelevant. Irrelevant irrelevant. Irrelevant irrelevant irrelevant irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
***
I dragged Dimitri into the unlocked room, tried to hoist him onto the bed but couldn’t, gave up, couldn’t catch my breath from that particular effort.
Panting, humps of my chest, I collected his duffel bag, anything else that seemed to be evidence of his presence, tucked his telephone into my pocket, looked around to see that apparently he’d scrubbed up my vomit.
He must’ve done it before knocking on my door. I was struck with curiosity, wanted this explained.
Had I not directly, immediately occurred to him? Had he just seen the mess, started cleaning, as though there was some honest explanation?
No.
I took one of the covers off of a bed pillow, arranged it over Dimitri’s head.
He’d cleaned up, angrily, scrubbing with me in mind, just didn’t want to leave the filth to stain and harden, had maybe shot off a message to the person on the other end of the line. As soon as he’d had enough, he’d wiped his forearm across his mouth, flapped his open palm again and again against my unlocked door.
I propped his body up, like I was a chair back, titling his head so I could look down at what would’ve been his face were it not just a pillowcase faintly warming, cooling in a tiny little spot.
I shifted my shoulders in practice tenses, unsure of how to apply the pressure, the torque, what would be enough to break his neck, then all of a sudden I had my arms wrapped on him and squirmed my torso obscenely, fell over, heard an easy shift of bone and skin, crawled forward, tried to stand, too woozy, disgusted.