I Love You More: A Novel (31 page)

We’d say goodbye to the man we’d shared, the man we’d loved, the man whose memories we’d feared, whose dreams we’d denied. For we knew our reunion was our crescendo. Oliver’s death had been a prelude, the year in between an interlude. And so we’d light a candle, close our eyes, imagine every inch of him, and feel him, all of him, his breath on our necks, hands on our breasts, his maleness inside us. We’d taste the morning, or the day, or the night on his lips. We’d smell soap, or aftershave, or sweat on his neck. We’d hear him say our names, softly, lovingly, just before he climaxed. Physically and spiritually we’d orgasm. Inside this
petite mort
, every second, every minute, every hour of our lives
with Oliver would pass before us. We’d experience every emotion each had brought forth. Finally, exhausted, as if he were an unsightly speck of dust, we’d flick the memory of the man who had scorned us into the air. We’d blow him a kiss as the mouths of darkness consumed him. And we’d pray, not for Oliver but for ourselves, because though the worst had passed, we weren’t certain we’d recognize the good that was yet to come.

As we rose from our baths, fully cleansed, petals sticking to our wet flesh, fingers and toes wrinkled and rubbery, we imagined how we would feel after our reunion. We imagined the heaviness lifting. For one split second we believed we felt a supreme lightness, an omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. For one split second we felt angelic. After the sensation passed, we blew out our candles, dried our bodies, wrapped ourselves in fluffy pink robes, glided to our bedrooms, crawled beneath our blankets, and for the first time in many months, welcomed our dreams.

FOUR
Truth

(The Murder)

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth
.

—
PABLO PICASSO

You
see
things when you’re dead, and you
know
all there is to know. Everything—your memories, your senses, especially your vision—is sharpened. For some, the hereafter is nirvana, a state of transcendence where there is no suffering or sense of self, where beauty and happiness abide. For others, like me, death is an acid trip. Faces, furnishings, objects, trees are clear one moment and then stretching from their bones and frames the next, elongating, melting like Salvador Dalí’s clocks. I prefer my death to that other one. I prefer surprise to status quo, sordid to vanilla, bizarre to boring. I prefer to have my cunning and acumen tested. When I refer to faces and such, obviously I don’t mean me. I no longer have a face or a body. I am a shape-shifting mass of shimmering molecules, white and silver and gray and black. My home is the air. Though some hover near their grave sites, there is no designated place for the dead, no good place or bad place. We are merely energy fields, wafting, watching, reading minds and emotions. Me? I do more than simply watch and read, I fuck with the living. They may feel a breeze, a change of temperature—some say it gets cold when we are near—but they can’t see me.

I can’t help but wonder if everyone’s transition is similar. In those last moments before I died, knowing it was inevitable, I
felt many emotions, surprise, confusion, anger, but none of those accompanied me to death. Here I feel placid. It’s not that I’m apathetic, quite the opposite in fact, but I am distracted. How could I not be? I’m forever drifting through the vast feast of the living, forever surrounded by lust and evil and crime, forever devouring and gorging and delighting in all I see. There will come a time when I leave this air, when my molecules will find their way into the womb of another woman, but the details of that journey are not yet known to me. So for now, I wander and wait.

At this moment, I float near Diana. I see the detective, the one who is investigating my murder, touching
my
wife’s skin, traveling inside her. In my death, they become clay on a wheel. I feel nothing as they spin into one, as their skin moistens, compresses, rises, and falls, nothing but curiosity. As everything did, and everything always will, it all began with me. Diana’s story is my story. It’s hard for me to remember what life felt like, but even now I remember that sensation of having my breath stolen the first time I saw her. I remember wishing I could crush my entire being into hers. Wishing I could own her, that I could dig my fingernails into her flesh until it bled, hear her screams, watch her face contort in pain. That was how much I admired her beauty. I remember holding back every time we made love, being proud of my ability to command her body, cause it to quiver beneath mine, without destroying her. In that, I always knew I was different. I always knew that my lack of empathy, my unquenchable desire to control, to hurt was unique, and thus so was I. That I could manage these overwhelming urges, that I could bend them to fit my needs, that I could so skillfully hide them from the world was testament to the fact that I was special.

After I died and before the detective shared her bed, I’d watch Diana masturbate, her fingers touching those magical places, her body stiffening and releasing. Sometimes I’d wind myself around her neck, whisper into her ear, tell her I’d known what the three of them were planning all along, praise her for outwitting me.

I hadn’t considered the beach house. I hadn’t seen you. But I see you now
.

I know she is thinking of me, not this detective. He is no match for me, no match for her. He is soft, gentle with her body and emotions, honest with his own.

Can you hear me? He is weak
.

“Touch me,” she says to my air.
Haunt me
.

It is obvious to me now why so many murderers go free. The detective allows his heart to rule his head. Why did it take him so long to believe what he knew? And why is he searching for a key? Yes, he was right about me hiding money, money I’d rather see go to waste than fall into the hands of my ungrateful wives, and, yes, he was even right about me having a safe-deposit box, but my box doesn’t require a key. It can only be accessed by a six-digit code. Mine is the numeric equivalent of Ares, god of war and my given surname. If this detective had any wits about him, wouldn’t he have discovered that by now? Wouldn’t he have discovered the box itself, the bank that contains it? Wouldn’t he have discovered my real name? Sometimes I surprise even myself. Clearly I was a skilled illusionist. Getting away with stealing someone’s identity while alive is one thing, but how many have maintained the ploy after death?

Oliver Lane was born in the same hospital and on the same day as I. He died eight minutes after he entered the world. We shared the same space for three of those. Though we never met, when I decided to change my identity he was my choice. His mother was fifteen years old. Her well-to-do socialite parents felt blessed when he passed because they could continue telling their lie: that their daughter had merely been staying with her grandmother for a few months. Even someone who lives eight minutes needs a birth certificate, but no one filed for a social security number or death certificate, and he was never buried. Along with used bedpans, bloody gauze, and wasted syringes, the hospital disposed of him in the same way his mother disposed of his memory. I felt an
affinity with Oliver Lane. My mother was older than fifteen, but like his, she didn’t care two shits about me. I never knew who my father was. My mother created some story about him going off to war and dying a hero; she never said which war. I had a slew of uncles. The one that lasted the longest, Ray, beat me when he got drunk. He had a penchant for the belt. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying my childhood was fucked up. The trouble started when I was nine years old. I was small for my age, got bullied. One day I fought back, beat a kid, got expelled. That kind of behavior continued until I found my calling: women.

I was fourteen when I had my first woman. She was a friend of my mother’s. I was delivering her paper when she called to me from her porch, asked me to come in and change one of her lightbulbs. I climbed onto a chair, started unscrewing. She undid my fly, stuck her hand through the opening in my underwear, and I was done. A woman’s hand was a beautiful thing. For the next few months, I wandered over to her house to fix this or that, and she taught me the art of seduction. At fifteen I decided to practice what I knew on a girl my own age, and before long another, and another. I took pride in the fact that I could make them feel good. I could save them from themselves, free them from the confines of their virginity. It wasn’t long before I realized that I had a gift for duplicity. With women
and
crime. By the time I was sixteen I had an admirable rap sheet, petty stuff mostly, robbery, assault, and voyeurism. I liked watching women through the filmy, fluttering curtains of their windows at night. I liked watching them perform the mysterious practices of their sex: shaving their legs, rubbing their bodies with lotion, applying makeup and perfume for a night on the town, emerging from a bath wet and glistening, their hair fastened into a makeshift bun. I loved everything about a woman’s body, that lovely curve where her neck meets her shoulder, those few strands of unconfined hair at the nape of her neck, her delicate wrists and ankles, but mostly I loved her
helplessness, her vulnerability. Her shape and size, even her age, never mattered. I found and still find, even in death, all women beautiful.

There was one woman I watched for a long time. She lived in the rich part of town in a big house, probably much like the house where Oliver Lane’s mother lived while she incubated him in her belly, while the muscles of his heart grew, each beat pumping blood through his developing lungs and forming body, sprouting arms and legs and toes and fingers, the capacity to see and hear and feel pain. The woman’s husband went to work in a suit and tie every day. There was just something about her, the way she moved, as if the ground were a cloud, so sensuous, so inviting, so choreographed that I was certain she knew I was watching. Her grace and delicacy were in stark contrast to her husband’s large awkwardness, his fat hands, hairy back, paunchy belly, selfish lovemaking. Yet even when he sloppily rolled from her, his body disgusting and sweaty, she didn’t voice dissatisfaction. She smiled and kissed him, rubbed his chest and shoulders as he mentally reentered the world. I remember thinking that one day I wanted a woman like her, that she deserved a more attentive lover, a man who appreciated her fine gifts, but I knew that the boy I was would never be attractive to the woman she was. I would need to be a man, a powerful and wealthy man.