Displacement

ChiZine Publications

“Displacement” © 2012 by Michael Marano
All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This short story was originally published in
Stories from the Plague Years
by Michael Marano, first published in print form in 2012, and in an ePub edition in 2012, by ChiZine Publications.
Stories from the Plague Years
was originally published as a limited edition hardback by Cemetery Dance Publications.

Original ePub edition (in
Stories from the Plague Years
) October 2012 ISBN: 9781927469224.

This ePub edition December 2012 ISBN: 978-1-927469-70-5.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

I didn’t decapitate Catherine.

I liberated her from her body, trespassing on her self-inflicted inner wound . . . doing her the favour of pulling it to the tangible. She hated her body with the spite a mother saves for an unwanted child—because her body, in its arrogance, never fit the carefully purchased fiction of her life. She punished herself for being fat, though she was translucent-thin from a lifetime of shifting physical hunger to trinkets she could buy and people she could control.

With one thankful stroke (
thankful
, in that only one stroke was needed), I rewrote the fiction she’d so foolishly bought. New, red words defaced the
Sex and the City
calendar that hung in tribal-mask adoration over the Norwegian pine table in her breakfast nook, blurring calligrapher-precise notes made in peacock blue fountain pen. Rude, thick words, darkening, rewrote the still-life tableau of the lone espresso she’d made for herself just before my arrival, marked the perfect twist of lemon rind resting beside it on Italian porcelain that she’d first shown me years ago, when she’d theatrically unpacked the set to which it belonged. Cooling ink blotted the covers of the book she’d placed beside the espresso, so she could preach to me the marketed Truths the book asserted. All that stayed legible of the back cover copy was the idolatrous, bold-type prayer: “
She seemed to have it all. . . .
”

I stood in the lifetime of half-seconds, in the muted
between
that vista’ed from one beat of her Pilates-strengthened heart to the next, taking in the entirety of her kitchen, her home into which she invited me in the way that legend says one should
never
invite the un-living. And I saw that Catherine had nothing, that she was owned by all she thought she owned.

So it was a
good
thing I did for her. A benediction wholesome as St. Francis’s forsaking his life of comfort to wash the sores of lepers.

True, it was good for me as well—maybe the most intense moment of mutual gratification we’d shared. As her frail and spurting prison fell,
I
was liberated, too. Liberated from the rage I’d just felt and the stone-heavy hatred for her that had pressed inside me for years. Both rage and hate dissipated like smoke, and at last I knew without distraction the good things my heart held for her. I felt light as the avatar I’d become, ghost-dense as those in trances are said to feel as they let divine spirits speak through them.

I needed Catherine to understand I was helping her, to understand the baroque theatre she’d invoked by inviting me here. So while her eyes dimmed, I held her by her delicate jawline (and not by her strawberry blonde hair perfumed with the conditioner and shampoo she’d used since before we were lovers), and showed her the still-breathing mass that had been distasteful to her for so long.

In my dusk-trance, in my
becoming
her longed-for demon of the vindictive ex-lover, I held her level to the catharsis of my sight, freeing her from her vanity. I shared my view from my apotheosis as myth and let her see her own painfully distant thinness. I let her see that she’d exceeded the elfin slightness she’d always thought beyond her reach. The body she rejected lay where it had fallen beneath hanging expensive cookware she never used. For the first time, she saw herself outside the tyrannical, mirror-defined view of her life that had held her hostage, saw that her starved flesh was worthy of forgiveness.

I turned her face to mine. Her eyes, clear and blue, were losing their glimmer as beads do when they become scuffed and dusty. I smiled, letting her know in those desperate seconds that all was forgiven. And that I still loved her.

Her lips moved, sweetly, trying to speak. I thought of carpenter ants I used to catch, how their jaws flexed as I hurled them into a spider’s web or steadied them for the Truth of the sun focused through a magnifying lens.

And that was when, as I was fixed by her lorelei gaze, the police charged and ground me against the refrigerator, which wasn’t necessary, as I’m not a violent person.

Tackled from transcendence, shoved back into earthly, bruising flesh, I cried out as I was pinned against cold white metal. I cried out at the injustice that my final instant with Catherine should be violated—that the last thing she’d feel would be pain—because the rough blow of the policemen had made me drop her to the wet linoleum floor.

Through streaked vision, I saw pictures Catherine had taped to the refrigerator of models from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue: motivational reminders for her to stay away from food, to own her body the way she wished to own it.

And she’d been thinner than those models were. Nightsticks came out.

Soon I was unconscious.

—You’re very sick, Dean.

As he spoke, the gaze of the mirror touched us: a fourth wall blinding us to our audience as would stage lights. In blinding us, it took the place of our audience. My twin, my hypocrite brother, lurked behind the mirror and the whirring lens that watched just past the mirror’s dead, silvered gaze.

—You shouldn’t make judgments like that. It’s not conducive to good patient/therapist dialogue.

Doctor Johansson was my court-appointed psychiatrist. His statement about my health (said without preamble) raised the curtain on this, the Second Act of our one-room drama. This was when I’d midwife things forward. When I’d make palimpsests of our First Act for those who’d have access to records of our exchanges only from this moment on, due to the red tape thickets of court bureaucracy. By now, Johansson was used to my hijacking his professional rhetoric (even, at times, setting his own rhetoric aside). He struck me as a nice person who knew to not take my
Doctor Phil
-flavoured parries personally. He wore on his tweed sleeve his rich liberal’s need to help people like me. His voice was soothing and unsettling, like HAL’s in
2001
. (
—I really think you should take a stress pill and think this over, Dave.
) Thoughtful sessions of white wine and NPR programming no doubt filled his evenings, and World Music no doubt filled his CD collection, stacked alphabetically on a teak rack from Pier One. Past his Brahmin demeanour glowed a warmth incongruous as the big, Mr.-Potter-from-
It’s-a-Wonderful-Life
wooden desk he sat behind in this sterile, fluorescent-lit room. By his desk squatted a dishwasher-sized air filter that seemed placed to pull smoke from the grandfatherly pipe he never lit, but always held.

—I have your medical records here, Dean.

—You spoke to Doctor Baker, back home? How’s he doing? I said, for the benefit of the polite mirror that, unlike any other audience, wouldn’t cough or shift chairs. And for the benefit of the underpaid hacks and interns at CourtTV who’d never get access to the files Doctor Johansson held, but who should know the name and location of Doctor Baker for the sake of a supplementary interview or two.

—I didn’t speak to Doctor Baker. The records were faxed last night by your lawyer.

—I . . . left instructions they should be made available if I were arrested.

I shifted noisily in my as-yet-to-grow-warm metal chair and smiled; my chest twinged, as if I were waterlogged from a day of swimming. Things dimmed, the way they do when you step into the shadow of a great church on a sunny day. Seated, I crossed thresholds again . . . perhaps this time, not alone.

Doctor Johansson chewed his lip that clearly craved the stem of his pipe.

—You planned? For your arrest? We’d thought it was your lawyer’s idea to send the records. . . .

—No. Mr. Seltzer followed my instructions. I try not to do anything slipshod.

The lighting of our little one-room drama continued to dusk in my sight as I inflected my role, and floated my lawyer’s name to our silver-eyed audience . . . my public defender’s name was in the papers. The mirror is a hungry audience, even when a camera doesn’t lurk behind it. Its gaze is a prison that never blinks. And it’s ever-greedy to see and to inflict wounds. Torn bodies. Torn psyches. The mirror savours both. So does the lens, and the mirror-dulled eyes the lens summons.

—Slipshod?

—You have my records. I’ll be dead by spring. No time for subpoenas and all that Paul Drake stuff.

—Ahh . . . Paul Drake?

—He’s the detective Perry Mason hired to do leg work.

—I see. About your cancer . . .

—I feel fine. Thank you. My digestion’s okay. But I should be on a bland diet. Then it’s weeks before my stomach, pancreas and liver give out.

—And you know, he said, running his thumb along the folder holding my medical records as if testing the keen of a razor, —that there’s no way to get your case to trial before you die.

I’d known Doctor Johansson was no fool before I’d met him, and had researched who’d likely be assigned my case, should I be arrested in the jurisdiction in which I had been. His few publications were quite good, and his dissertation was better than the limp-dicked work of his graduate advisor. He understood, though not the way I did, that the Second Act curtain had been raised. It was time for our interaction to change as would that of two smoking-jacketed characters in an Ibsen play. So he stated the obvious, referring to the figurative pistols we’d placed on the mantel in our First Act. He knew he had to be bluntly certain of the implications of what we were saying, and to gauge how to adjust his interaction. As would any actor, for whom
listening
is the most vital skill, I followed his cue.

—Doctor, I knew that before I started to . . .

There was a sound behind me, like the swift click-click of dog claws. I whipped my head back and, as always, saw nothing . . . and as always, scolded myself for looking when I knew I’d see nothing. I’d not even caught a shadow-glimpse in the silvered eye that framed our modest stage; the mirror disdained reflecting even the change of light that shaded my vision. I turned back to Doctor Johansson and said, —I may not be dead by then. But I’ll be too sick to stand trial.

—Dean, what were you looking for just now? Behind you?

He spoke the way a Dad would to a confused child. A final sip of the vintage Rogerian therapy exchanges we’d shared throughout our First Act in this glorified closet of dirty-chalkboard-coloured cinder block and linoleum, begun when I’d first been delivered here in my orange and silver raiment as Doctor Johansson stood like a gentleman to greet me from behind his mahogany stockbroker’s desk.

—Thought I heard something. Sounded like a dog. Maybe a guard dog. Sorry. I’m kinda jittery here.

All I told him was true, though I didn’t tell him the dog in question sounded to be walking on two feet.

—Ah. I see. Dean?

—Yes?

—Why did you kill those people?

—They killed me first.

He jolted, like a man awakened on a subway to find he’s gone past his stop. He’d asked me that question many times, with many inflections, over the past week. Each time I gave no answer. I think he’d been ready to give up, and had re-asked the question just now as the same kind of farewell we’d just given to our Rogerian interaction, of a kind once quaintly cherished by gin and valium-fogged ‘60s housewives. In answering, I’d taken off my mask of recalcitrance, and had put on another mask that was much older, and potent.

He collected himself, retook his own priestly mask of the cool clinician and asked, —
How
did they kill you first?

—They gave me cancer.

—How . . . did they give you cancer?

I drank a deep breath and carefully chose my words, knowing he expected a rant about microwave towers and tin-foil hats. The feeling of being waterlogged left me. The jig of dead shadows in my sight stilled.

—By making me miserable for so long. By filling me with self-loathing for years. By denying me so much sleep, peace and well-being that my body devoured itself.

I sighed, as if a splinter had been pulled from my psyche.

Tension, poison crowding my chest and throat like wet black fur. Quiet violence steeping my heart—thoughts of the arguments I should have had, the things I’d been coerced and manipulated to do.

The end of a typical day for me: the world grown large and me overwhelmed like a child within it. With no outlet or recourse save that which I had cut from myself in order to despise it for my weaknesses.

Pathetic. Useless. Helpless.

I gag on these feelings now, and the feelings of dread that washed over me each time I cracked my eyes to a new day, still tired from the riot of dreams that had bludgeoned my sleep, my jaw and teeth sore from the endless grinding I suffered through the night.

—The people you killed . . .
stressed
you, so that you developed cancer?

—Stress causes disease. What they did to me was . . .
is
murder.

Doctor Johansson reached for a lighter that was not on his desk, closed fingers on air, rubbed his thumb against his index finger as if to strike the flint. The thumb of his left hand pressed nothing into the bowl of his pipe. The prop that gave him an air of authority may not have been prop, but relic. The air filter by his desk, with an intake vent the color of old teeth, hinted that he once smoked here in defiance of state ordinance.

—You shouldn’t smoke near someone as sick as I am, I said helpfully.

—From what you tell me, it shouldn’t matter if I smoke or not.

Touché
, I thought, as he placed the pipe between his teeth, and after a moment, removed it.

—You killed ten people to avenge your own death ahead of time?

—I can’t set things right
after
my death. I don’t believe in ghosts, not the Dickens kind that get things done. And what I did wasn’t revenge. It was balancing the scales.

—Then why did you kill in the ways you did? Why were you so . . .

—Creative?

—Extravagant.

—There had to be meaning to their deaths. If their deaths had no meaning, my death would have no meaning. Then my life would have no meaning.

—Revenge for the cancer isn’t meaningful enough?

There was no judgment in his voice: a true professional, so rare in this world.