Entropy (28 page)

There was a certain proximity that had once existed in our marriage, a closeness of body and mind, dense with candor, longing and indispensability. Yet there was now a distance here, a radius of doubt and incongruity that I had never before noticed. I didn't want to wake her, but I had to leave soon.

I did not contact my handler again, until the sixth morning after I had arrived home. The department was disappointed that I hadn't already come in. William McCoy was dead. According to police records, his body was discovered at the scene of a fatal arson fire. The arson and domestic terrorism case I was involved in had been officially closed. The deaths of the two men in that adjacent building was ruled an unfortunate accident, and no further action would be taken. Three of the suspected arsonists were dead and no further arrests were going to be made in the case.

I was going to be psychologically evaluated, then reassigned to a different investigation or put on medical leave, depending upon the outcome of the review. It wasn't something that I wanted to do. The idea of becoming a regular man, ordinary and abiding would disrupt me, and the possibility of such an existence filled me with fear.

I watched Noemi's body move slightly as I slipped out from underneath her. Leaning up against the headboard, I opened up a sealed file describing the case they wanted me to be involved with, but only on a consultant basis. Most of the photographs inside were of children. Any leads or specifics were extremely preliminary. Only one set of crime scene photographs had been included at this point. Instead of immersing myself further, I closed the red file and opened another. I searched through all the evidence, names and substantial leads I had gathered as William McCoy. Included was an autopsy report on the woman I had killed. There were no records of her fingerprints in any of the federal agencies, including Interpol. No one could even establish her identity let alone link her to any previous crimes.

Noemi rolled over and opened her eyes. There was never going to be a proper or right time to tell her about the things I did, and the fractured characters I had become. I existed only in a false, morality play where she would never sit in the audience long enough to see the ending. Written across the bottom of the coroner's report, attached on a sticky note, was a question directed to me about the woman who I had killed.
Did you know when you shot her that she was pregnant?

***

The bleeding from the back of my head had finally stopped. I had tried a second time to interact with the gunman – this time to convince him to release the one female passenger who had been taken hostage. He had ordered me back to my seat and pistol whipped me for my troubles. I called him a coward. He was becoming more unstable and violent. The last thing this town needed was another tragedy. The people and the landscapes here had bled enough. An opportunity would soon present itself again and I would take it.

The gunman stopped the recorder and dropped the earpiece into his lap. The gun swayed loosely in his hand. I couldn't see his face. His head was down between his legs. After a few minutes he rose up and looked back at the three of us in our seats. He set the gun on the seat next to him. I thought he was going to surrender himself. Instead, he tucked his gun into his waistband as he rubbed each of his temples one at a time.

I realized that there was a real risk that I could be killed because of what I did. It stayed with me every day. The wrong address or information in an undercover operation, and I'd be discovered dead in an abandoned rail yard, or dumped on a deserted road; strangled, shot in the head or worse. Noemi could never accept that I was willing to sacrifice everything, including her, to protect strangers. What she failed to understand was that I had become accustomed to, no dependent upon the lifestyle of alias and deceit. It was something that I had come to terms with. However it wasn't fair of me to ask someone else to share in my existence.

And sitting there on the bus, facing potential death again, made me question the choices and sacrifices that I was making.

Was she there outside behind the police barricade, hoping that she would see me descend the steps from the bus? If I did see her when it was all over, I would quit, and struggle to become what I should have always been for her. There wasn't much sound coming from outside. Inside, I could hear the gunman begin to softly sob. Whatever he had been listening to seemed to burn into what little resolve he had, like the way William McCoy torched that clinic and took an anti-abortionist into his bed, willingly, disgustingly and repeatedly. That autopsy. It wasn't my child. It just couldn't have been. There had to be other men.

The possibility that I had murdered a child I had helped conceive encumbered me with such coldness and anguish. It was something that I could never tell anyone, and never tell Noemi. I loved her, but I struggled to balance the lives of the men that I had become. The husband in me longed to hear Noemi gently speak my name, and to feel her tender hands brush across the small of my back as she walked into our bedroom, naked, her wedding ring still housed around her slight finger.

Who was I?

Anthony Bariole

No.

Who was I?

Peter McDonnally wanted for the brutal beating and robbery of three people on a commuter bus. Items taken from the victims included a platinum watch, a wedding ring and cash. Witnesses said that McDonnally threatened one man with a handgun, then beat him beyond recognition with a fire extinguisher. He was spotted leaving the scene after he escaped though the emergency exit. Current whereabouts unknown.

No, wait.

Who was I?

Jonathan Levin. Wanted for the sexual assault of a woman on a commuter bus. Was said to have exposed himself to the other passengers as well. Witnesses said that before the attack occurred, he was mentioning something about school children attending their first day of school next week. Was heard saying aloud that he could smell innocence in the cheap material of the seats. Samples of what was believed to be semen was found in the general area of where he had been sitting. He was spotted leaving the scene after he escaped though the emergency exit. Current whereabouts unknown.

No.

Who was I?

William McCoy. Wanted for the arson-related burning of a commuter bus. Three other passengers were killed in the blaze. The bodies were charred beyond recognition and dental records were being requested by the county coroner. He was heard by a witness saying that the world was a cruel, apathetic existence, and should burn in the fires of industry and guilt. He had remained at the scene for several minutes after the bus was immersed in flames, and shouted that flesh would singe but would be changed for the better, and carried away in the arms of the Lord. Current whereabouts unknown.

No.

I stood up from my seat. I could be killed here, my body lifeless and without meaning. There would be no one who would be able to identify who I had really been.

I wouldn't even be a name on the toe tag of the elongated shape that would be stuffed inside a black body bag.

How did we get here?

We were once such a happy family but now I am left alone with only my memories as a comfort to the love we once shared and the child we had borne.
When did you start to drift?
I think about this daily trying to pinpoint the moment that our relationship fell apart. I recall that it had started before the unthinkable had happened but after the police found Jenni, everything became a fractured mess.

I am no longer a mother, a wife or a lover. I am now completely alone in this world; my life torn apart by sickness, evil and hate.
Why her?
Why did he have to pick her?
It was not just her life that was destroyed by that act of wickedness that will always haunt. I pray for our child and I still pray for our love. Despite everything you have done, I still live in hope that you will return.

When I first discovered you had left, I fell to the floor, finding security only in cradling my own body. I was at the edge of a precipice; frightened by the cold isolation of the faded and dried colors imprisoned in the splintered flesh of your wooden palette. From where I lay, it resembled the skin of a man: experienced, mature, damaged and covered in age spots from where the darker chemicals had absorbed into the grain of the wood. I was surprised that you hadn't taken it with you when you left, because it was of no use to me. I was once your muse as well as your lover and mother of our child, but now, I was no longer a stimulant to the physiological depths of your artistic temptation.

I was nothing.

As much as I wanted you to leave after I had found out about your infidelity, I also wanted you to stay, even though I knew it was for the wrong reasons, and that it would be a mistake. I had once thought that I was stronger than that, and would have been able to put aside the faded hope that I had clung onto and move on with my life.

You had left me a hand-written note. It was penned steadily and was unfeeling, with structured cold sentences. Things had now gone too far, you said, and I remembered how pithy you could be when I disagreed. You must have dropped the letter through the mail slot of the apartment when I wasn't here. By avoiding me, you made me feel like I had done something wrong, that it was me who had violated our sacred bond.

That act alone made you a coward.

I didn't see the note at first. It was hidden underneath an unopened moving box, whose tough corners were wilted at the seams because of the rain that had leaked from the roof.

On the night before you left, I thought that I heard you rustling about for your brushes, the ones that you used to keep in the antique hutch. That hutch still remains, timid in the distant corner opposite the kitchen, in the living room beside a bay window, with its shelves in need of care, and its unattached glass doors resting against the window. I no longer have the desire to finish restoring the hutch. To devote myself to such a task and to breathe new life into some old furniture makes no sense after all that has happened. Decay and death is the natural order and it is futile for me to resist it.

At night I sit alone in the dark. Sometimes moonlight pours through the cold glass, and spills across the floor, like milk from our child's table. I miss cleaning up after her, our beautiful and innocent little girl. I miss all the things that, at one point, had made me angry and irritable as a mother. I miss our daughter and the family unit that we once shared.

***

It's odd, the situations you long for, and the circumstances that you wish you could endure again and again, no matter how cursory, and no matter how painful. Part of me wishes to be arguing with you again, just so that I can put my hands on your chest and feel the intense heat of your opinions tearing through your flesh. And when one of us finally submits, anguished and possibly regretful, our different chemistries can react with each other in a collision of eroticism, audacity and selfishness.

The last time I remembered your hate washing over me was when I walked away from you while we argued. I had never before walked away, but instead, would be like a boxer who despite being punched repeatedly, would refuse to lower their hands and not fight back. I remembered walking into your studio and tearing away at a blank canvas. I should have directed my hurt at a finished creation, but I wanted to destroy the uncreated mural that might have eventually graced its skin, and to blight your inspiration and creativity. You then came in behind me and ripped that Prussian blue sweater I adored so much at the shoulder. It ripped from the seam, and exposed my skin.

I wanted to hit you, pound hard at your chest with desperation and torment, but instead, I grabbed a jar of brushes and threw them at you. Each one collapsed to the floor after striking the wall behind you. When I turned to run out of the room, we collided and I fell. The color can I landed on spilled across the drop cloth. It was a tone I had never seen before, and against the paleness of my hands and wrists was somehow exhilarating.

You also noticed this, and I saw that look you would get when you were struck with inspiration.

I instinctively removed the torn sweater and stripped down, watching you grab your brushes. I smeared some of the color across my abdomen and hips. You spun around my body, telling me not to move, then to move quickly, then not to move again.
Hold. Please. I'm sorry.

Sorry.
I think it might have been the only time you ever said that to me.

God, I loved you so much.

You grabbed more of that exquisite color and as I bent over at the waist, my leg stretched across the end of the table, you poured it over my back. It felt cold and dense. I spun around and slapped you. You responded by licking my throat, perhaps the only region on my body that by now was not bathed in that pigment. I watched you drop to your knees, and then closed my eyes when I could no longer differentiate between the cold color and your brush washing over me ...

***

Despite being apart now for four months, I still recognize you in everything I see. You taught me how to study angles and lines, and I notice how they change in differing light and shadows. It doesn't matter where I go. Sitting in our unfinished dining room, I find myself folding and assembling my napkin to understand its texture and possibilities. I can, at times, hear your voice telling me not to focus on the object directly, but on spaces between the dark and the unseen.

Often it didn't matter what you were telling me, I just wanted to hear your wisdom echo its way through the dark. I wanted to be lost in your certainty. But at times I thought that when you painted me, you never really noticed me at all; just the atmosphere around me pressed up against my curved, naked body. You wouldn't have known I was even there if it wasn't for my pulsing chest, or my beads of sweat that sometimes dripped to the floor.

You once painted me in the living room, naked, my extended belly bulging like ripe fruit toppling from a basket. That was such a very long time ago. At the time, you said that my skin tasted like peaches. I remember how the dimmed streetlights outside corrupted the light, and bathed my shape in a salmon tincture. You stopped to turn my body towards the left, and while guiding my shoulders, let your fingertips warm and gentle trail against my swelled breasts. Your hands moved across the plain of my rounded stomach. It paralleled a pumpkin, a yellow-orange squash seeking comfort from the sun under a patch of darkened leaves. I remembered that was when I first realized that I loved you, when I watched you picked them - the pumpkins that is, as you stretched their vines, and gently pried their tired stalks from the secure comfort of their dirt womb.

I used to love fall. I loved the smells, and the arrogant attitude of Nature, who with the security and confidence that she possessed, passively allowed the entropic destruction of what made her beautiful. During that time of year, the McIlheny's would welcome the township onto their farm. Large, decorative hay bales were sold out of the back of a rusted pickup truck. Children would stand at the banks of a small lake at the far edge of the property, looking for small frogs. A pair of empty overalls was given substance with mulch and leaves that spilled from the wrists and ankles like unkempt hair.

There was an older man who gave children slow rides on an enormous tractor, his large wicker hat casting shadows against the stalks of corn. If he hadn't moved, he would have looked like a withered scarecrow, an aged protector of crops and vegetables, that stood propped against two cracked and uneven pieces of wood. The tires of that tractor were so tall compared to the children, that when the more mischievous ones would try to give them a kick, they would have absolutely no effect on the hard, compressed rubber.

I remembered passing a display of gourds, and feeling sympathy for their sometimes grotesque appearance: maligned and twisted, like the unwilling victims of a degenerative disease. They were like lepers; separated from the beautiful, the elite, and cast aside by others as stricken denizens of a once close community.

I also remember you seated on a fragile wooden crate, turned on its side behind a picnic table, with a row of small glass mason jars highlighting different colors laid out in front of you. One by one you painted unique characters onto a child's pumpkin, flicking your brush patiently over its sturdy rind. I picked up a misshapen gourd, a golden piece of deformed fruit, and held it in the palm of my hand.

“I feel sorry for them,” I said aloud, not expecting you to break your concentration and listen to me. I don't know what made me say it.

“For what?”

“These poor, misshapen gourds.”

“Why?” You asked, setting the tip of your paintbrush into a small jar, full of water. The pale blue color escaped from the harmless clutches of your brush and swirled majestically in between the molecules of that delicate, life-giving balance of hydrogen and oxygen. I never saw anything so beautiful, but perhaps I was searching too hard at the time for someone who would love me. Droplets of water hung at the edges of your fingertips. It caused me to notice your nails. They were smooth and rounded, like a woman's.

“Because no one seems to care about them, except when the leaves have fallen. They are merely cultivated to be a slave to our fortunes during fall. And tomorrow, we'll just clean up the remains of their bodies like soldiers fallen in battle: who they were and what they could have been will be left behind as colored stains on the cement of sidewalks and front porches,” I said.

They had my sympathy.

No, my pity.

My childish pity for the sad fruit had brought a tenderness to your eyes, and drawn to them, I could no longer hide myself from you. I could no longer hide myself behind the layers of my emotional blanket, nor behind the language and thoughts that hid me from the diseases of emotional uncertainty and consequence. I should have retreated then, and receded back into the isolation of my career and remained alone. Instead, I allowed myself to move closer towards you, towards your existence and polite apprehensiveness. I was hopelessly lost and in your control.

I wondered if you looked through the window of the front room when you dropped off the letter, and saw the remnants of our life. The instruments of your art no longer took up space: the set of palette knives, the different length and style of brushes scattered around the lip of a cracked and stained coffee cup. The only thing that occupied the solidarity of the unfurnished, stuffy room was the distributed pieces of our truncated marriage, and the now pathetic, colorless silence that accompanied them.

I turned on the faucet and watched the stream of water rise to the rim of the glass. When I held the glass up to the light, aged, colored swirls showed through. I guess I hadn't washed it so well. Maybe I had done it on purpose, to keep some semblance of your existence behind that could be measured and cherished.

I had to unwrap the glass. It had already been packed, and I stepped on the newspaper that had been used to wrap the glass when I sat down at the kitchen table. One of the articles mentioned your upcoming retrospective and auction in New York. The advertisement had been placed some months ago. The rustling sound of the paper seemed to echo throughout the vacancy of an achromatic existence, a place where honest colors became emaciated, starved of their nutrients by the cruel event that had passed. Everything after that was lonely, and every morning that should have heralded a new day and a new beginning was stillborn.

I stared into space. I had pinned your note to the wall with a pushpin. It stated that your attorney would contact me when the divorce was finalized, and that you had already signed the papers. You had made arrangements at the bank to have fifty percent of the funds raised at the auction from your works, to be placed into my account. I didn't care about the settlement. Somehow you knew that I wouldn't be there for the auction. Somehow you knew that I wouldn't go to New York. I hated your presumptive arrogance, and I despised myself for having opened myself up so much that allowed you to know how I thought.

***

Alone at the high school's art department, I am unable to even glance into the sullenness of my own reflection, or examine any of the paintings from past students that adorned the sterility of the dressing room. I shudder as I realize that our daughter will never be able to walk these halls and experience the highs and lows of being an adolescent, a young lady, a woman, a mother. It's hard to trace back and understand where things started to bend and finally fracture between us, where passion and pride shifted against the immobility of my own sense of reason. I felt like I had disappeared into the collective ravine of forgotten objects, like articles of clothing in a “Lost and Found,” or a damaged painting, deliberately ripped to represent an unprofitable body of work.

Placing my robe over the small dressing screen behind me, I struggle to unfasten the white buttons of my blouse. I pull down on the delicate straps of my bra, and slid each one over my shoulders, exposing my breasts as if I were going to be alone with a lover. I raise my legs slowly and step out of the shelter of my intimates. I then touch the deserted wasteland of my stomach and sense my daughter and her loss, through the retrospection of her legs struggling to kick at the comfort of my insides. I remembered your hands rushing to feel her through my body, and take part in our joy.