Entropy (11 page)

I pushed away a piece of partially submerged metal pipe moving towards me and fumbled for the switch on the flashlight. Behind that steel pipe was the body of another victim; a child. It lunged at me as I pushed away the steel pipe; a twisted shape of anger and insensitivity attached helplessly to its face. My eyes widened in shock, and I screamed in terror. I was alone with my fear. I began to tear my diving equipment away from my face. There was blood pouring out of my mouth. I gasped for air. I looked up and could see police officers looking down, cupping their hands around their mouths, shouting - their voices echoing against the vastness of the deep rock walls. All I heard were mumblings like the incoherent babble that came from the end of a squawk box. I felt concussed. There was pressure against my ears. I thought that I could hear the rotor blades of the helicopter. In my confused state it sounded like a hummingbird fluttering above an orchid.

***

The child had been dead for about two weeks. That was what the acting coroner concluded about twenty minutes after the body had been lifted out of the quarry, but he would begin the autopsy and establish positive identification straight away. The department was still checking to see who might have been the registered owner of the abandoned vehicle. If no one came forward to identify the body, they would make a formal appeal through the media. His bottom jaw was missing. It looked like it had been blasted off with a shotgun.

I leaned against the side of an ambulance as an emergency technician attended to me, grateful that the helicopter crew had returned to the quarry and risked their lives to save me. There was a large pad of cotton inserted between my gums and the lining of the inside of my cheek. The taste of latex from the paramedic's gloves lingered against my lips. Another technician stood in front of me and shined a small beam of light into my eyes, checking that my pupils were dilating and that there were no signs of a concussion.

Water could teach you how to hurt if you let it.

Blood was still trickling from the wound that had penetrated my suit. I leaned over and tore the area open below the knee, stretching the hole wider so they could apply some alcohol and gauze. Using a pair of sterilized tweezers, the technician removed some small shards of glass and rock that had become embedded in the laceration. After dabbing at the blood and drying my leg, I said that I would dress the wound myself. He ignored my protests and I watched as the man started to wrap gauze around my leg and side and cover up the other scars that were embedded underneath my skin.

***

I turned on the faucet and let the level of the water run high and uninterrupted along the edges of the sink. It made sense that most of the bodies had been discovered in or near outlets of water. Most of the later victims had developed what the medical examiner called “adipocere”; a fatty discoloration of the skin. Water did so much damage to a body. It washed away the physical evidence and the broken, fragmented sins of the pious.

I could hear my wife stir in the bedroom. I peered out into the hallway. In another hour or two she would wake up. I wondered if she had reached over and traced her fingers listlessly along the edges of the impressions that my body had left behind on the mattress. Outside the window, a neighbor was loading fishing rods and a tackle box onto the flatbed of his truck.

I turned off the water in the sink and dried my hands on the towel spread across the width of the shower door. My clothes had been tossed into a pile in the corner behind the door. I bent over and sifted through them, and found my T-shirt. It still had dried mud that stained along the collar and under the arms. I scratched at it. It never came out; the smell from the dampened straw and animal feces was saturated deep into the cotton fibers. I stretched the shirt slowly across the breadth of my shoulders, noticing how the muscles in my chest had started to change since I had stopped training over two years ago, as I pulled the T-shirt into place around my waist.

I had been a collegiate swimmer, spending up to eight hours a day immersed in the pungent aroma of chlorine. It dried out my skin and made my lips insensitive. My muscles burned intensely when I reached a certain point, when I used to push myself back and forth obsessively, wanting to become an Olympian. But I never reached that accepted pinnacle. And I always felt that I was a failure.

Although things had changed, the truth still remained, that the goals and the dreams that we held ourselves to were the ones that, in the end, often destroyed us.

Water could teach you how to relent if you let it.

I stepped into the shower and ran my hands across my face. The hot water steamed up the glass door. I finally heard the bathroom door open and close. There had not been any knock at the door. My wife leaned her back against the door of the shower and I watched as her partially naked shape darken and finally absorb the moisture on the textured glass.

“Are you all right?” she questioned.

I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. The silhouette turned and her hand touched the side of the shower door. I grabbed the handle and pulled on it so that she couldn't open it.

“I'm sorry. I don't know how many times that I can keep saying it though without breaking,” she said. Several minutes later she gave up and quietly left. The impression of her beautiful shape stayed on the glass door for a few minutes and then disappeared.

I turned off the water and slid the glass panel aside. She had left the room before noticing that I had been in the shower fully clothed, wearing the T-shirt and the now torn pair of jeans that I had worn underneath the dry suit at the quarry dive. My hand slipped away from the brass fixture and I locked the bathroom door, hoping that she wouldn't hear the turning lock. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and kicked my wet jeans onto the floor. I scratched at the stitches on my leg. The cut was still saturated with ooze and puss. I leaned up and stood naked in the center of the room.

The full-length mirror framed in oak wood on the back of the bathroom door was covered in steam. However I could still make out my body, which initially appeared red and blistered from the heat of the water. But as the condensation cleared and my body began to dry, it became more expository, the degrees of imperfections noticeable across the latitude of my skin. I rotated my body and stared at the lower arch of my back. That was the only part of me that still looked clean, authentic. I left the bathroom, the steam trailing behind me into the hallway.

When I closed the bedroom door behind me she became aware that I was inside the room. I watched her move unconsciously across the surface of the bed against the dark sheets. I wondered if I leaned close enough if I could smell the strawberry in her hair, taste it in the fragility of her skin. I accidentally jostled a lamp she had purchased the day before at the edge of the bed. The shade still had the plastic wrap attached. It made me feel temporary. Her warm breath brushed across the tiny hairs on the edge of my thigh and I felt her body roll closer on the mattress when I sat down.

“Come back to bed,” she said, as she lightly traced the back of her fingers on my arm. I turned over my shoulder, aroused but frightened by the intensity of her eyes and her lips, pursed together. When she exhaled, they separated ever so slightly. She raised her arms towards the light in the room and stretched her body stretched. This action displaced the flimsy straps and material of her slip, exposing her nipples, the structure of the bones in her neck, her collarbone and shoulders.

“I can't do this right now,” I said. “I have to go back in to town to file a statement. I pulled out another body early this morning.”

“What about my body?”

“Please don't do this to me,” I said.

“It doesn't matter what you do,” she began. “All of those poor children are dead. You can't save them.”

“I'm trying to save myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. You wouldn't understand,” I said. “I'm not even sure that I do.”

“Talk to me,” she pleaded.

“I have to finish this,” I said.

Her fingertips caressed the tender spot above my kidney. “Stay with me.”

I shut my eyes and tried to summon the courage to stand and leave. She never retreated in her solicitation, loosely grabbing the end of a sheet and lowering it so that I could see the enticing darkness of the inside of her smooth thighs. When I didn't move to leave, she put her hands underneath my T-shirt, moved even nearer and closed her lips on different pockets of my skin. I finally managed to stand and turning my back on her, stretched a light sweater over the width of my shoulders. My body still ached from the fall.

“I can't stay here with you,” I said.

“You can't, or you don't want to?” she asked. “I asked you once before and you never answered me. Are you going to leave me?” I tightened the belt around my waist and stopped and walked away. However I stopped when I reached the door of our bedroom. I wanted to leave her, to move away from here and what had happened so much, but it would have taken a courage that I wasn't sure that I had anymore.

The lace-up slip that she wore had fallen down deeper over her shoulders and completely exposed her breasts. In the mirror she looked like a wilted flower suffocating in an intense heat, dehydrated and flaccid. The muscles in her abdomen contracted and she eventually raised her head, her eyes flushed and swollen. She looked vulnerable, the way an injured animal can appear but in the same moment, behind the soft frailty, be unabashedly licentious.

“Say something,” she said, ignoring the soft tears that settled comfortably into the tenderness of her warm skin, never ashamed or cheapened by the transient exhibition of her breasts, her nipples, her small, round aureoles that had slipped out from underneath the safety of the material. In that artless instant she possessed no regard for her own body's isolation, the partial abandonment of privacy and self. She reached out and clutched feverishly for the stability of my hand. I could see the small puncture wound on the inside of her forearm above the elbow and the slight, jaundiced discoloration where the tip of the needle from the injections had consistently penetrated the skin. I fought against the paroxysm of empathy and pity, slipping instead into the comfortable expanse of hate. I didn't know what else to do, and I didn't know where else to go. There wasn't any water around for a couple of miles.

“We can't keep doing this,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Walking around, listless in this huge space of avoidance and regret.”

“What do I have to regret?” I asked.

“You know what I mean,” she said, somewhat defeated.

“I'm not sure that I do,” I said disdainfully, with the intent of damaging her more.

“Is that necessary?” she asked.

“What?”

“Trying to constantly break me.”

She was always beautiful, even here on the bed, fractured and unconsumed, her body disclosed to the small fragments of light that advanced across the unvarnished floor. I withdrew from her and turned away towards the window of our bedroom, pulled the curtains aside without care and watched the rain that had continued to fall since I had pulled that body out of the quarry a few hours before; that child, his lower jaw blasted away and detached. I could still taste the artificiality of the apparatus against the enamel of my teeth. With my back towards her, I listened to her struggle to compose herself, to construct an intently focused thought in between her deep and random gasps for air.

“What do you want me to say that would possibly make a difference?” I finally asked.

“That you still love me. That you'll touch me,” she said.

“I can't. I'm not sure that I know how to do that anymore,” I said.

“Yes you do,” she whispered softly. “I need you to touch me,” she pleaded.

“You don't get to ask that of me,” I began. “Fucking me again and again isn't going to take back what has happened,” I said.

“Fuck you, you righteous bastard. You goddamn perfect saint.” She slid off of the edge of the bed onto the cold floor and leaned back against the mattress and box spring. Almost all of her legs were exposed now, bent slightly at the knee, the back of her heels barely touching the hardwood floor, the tender form of her rapturous thighs outspread enough so that I could almost see the shadow of her dark pubis. I turned, knelt down beside her and replaced the straps of the slip higher up on her shoulders. In doing so, the back of my hand brushed against her cheek.

She closed her eyes and craned her neck, stretched invitingly, displaying the delicate slightness of her features. I spread out the taut uncertainty in my hand and touched the golden flesh of her throat. She opened her mouth and nipped on the edges of my fingertips. I closed my eyes and tried not to externalize my emotion and vulnerability. I just couldn't show it again, even though she desperately wanted me to.

“I hate you,” she said.

“No you don't,” I responded.

“You don't have to leave,” she said.

I touched the small hole on her arm lightly. “You should put some gauze over that. It looks infected. Have someone else treat you next time. I also need to go to the hospital. I'll be back soon,” I said. She pushed up the sleeve of the sweater that I had put on and touched the underside of my left arm, studied and admired the rough surface of my skin. She paused at the spot where I had been given identical injections to the ones that troubled her. Her eyes softened at its appearance and became less defensive, and her tone transformed into a visceral array of remorse and grief.

“The doctors called yesterday while you were gone. They think that because of your job, what you do and the contact that you have with those bodies, that regardless of how careful you are, that they should increase the number of injections because of the high risk of infection. The results just aren't improving rapidly enough,” she said meekly.