Nocturne (3 page)

The boy nodded. He was dressed in black slacks and a tan leather jacket. He wore an earpiece that blinked a bright blue dot every few seconds. “Lucky I happened to be walking by just now, or you’d have had a nasty swim. The closest place to climb out of the river’s not for a few hundred yards upstream.”

The Man gave the boy a wan smile and shrugged. “Thanks again.”

“Better watch yourself around here,” the boy called after him. He gestured at the river and the Man nodded as if he understood. “Not the safest place to be taking a stroll, if you know what I mean.”

He did.

He thought the boy might finish by calling him “old man,” but he didn’t, and he felt an urge to ask him for his name. But, again, he didn’t. What difference would it make?

The rest of the day in the office passed uneventfully. The meetings ended around two-thirty and he spent the balance of the afternoon at his computer trying to catch up. He managed to get himself into a rhythm, approving or denying claims with an almost mechanical fervor, barely glancing at the forms and the names, which meant nothing to him, emptying his mind of stray thoughts, welcoming the blankness of the job and the numbness it provided. Approve one, deny three; approve one, deny four. Deny, deny, deny.

At five o’clock, the timer on his watch beeped. He finished with the last claim and shut down his computer, waiting until the quiet whir of the hard drive stopped and the orange light blinked for the last time.

Outside, the shadows were long on the land; the sun—he could just see it since his window faced south—was low on the horizon. Taillights and headlights, blinking red and white, threaded their way over the distant highway overpass; beneath them, the bright white dot of a train’s engine pulling into the freight yard. He watched the scene for a while before remembering that he was supposed to stop and pick up a steak for dinner, and he sighed as he pulled his jacket from the back of his chair.

The halls were already quiet, the lights in many of the offices dimmed and the doors closed and locked. Somewhere he could hear the furious clack of fingers on a keyboard; a water jug gurgled. Lonely sounds.

He made his way to the elevator, waited for the doors to open, pushed the button for the basement. As he waited to descend, the elevator lurched. He imagined it falling, dropping him to his death. The car slid to a gentle stop, released him into the parking garage. As he crossed the empty space, he listened to the clack of his shoes on the pavement, the soft echoes and chirps and car doors closing in places out of his line of sight. He listened for sounds that did not belong, and his eyes scanned the shadows and columns where an attacker could be hiding. But he was soon at the side of his car, then safely deposited inside it (after checking first). Now he was making his way to the exit of the parking garage. Now through the gate and out onto the darkening streets.

The market where his wife did their grocery shopping was on the main road in Stepford, the next town over from where they lived. He took the exit before his usual one and made his way there. The street was packed with rush hour traffic, and it seemed as if every light was against him. It was after six-thirty by the time he pulled into the parking lot, and the first nimbuses of evening fog were beginning to appear beneath the streetlamps.

The market was small, brightly lit, stocked mostly with local produce and patronized mostly by young people whose jobs required multiple cell phones and frequent travel to eastern lands; the meat department was off to one side. He waited in line to be served, standing behind an obese woman with thinning blond hair and a grumpy Pomeranian in her arms. Despite the chill in the air, she was wearing only a thin dress, and her bra strap showed. It was paisley, he saw. He stared at the folds on the back of her neck, waiting as she ordered a variety of cured meats, asking for extra thick slices. Jingly music played over the ceiling speaker.

“Two steaks,” he told the butcher when his number was called. He gestured to the display.

“Sirloin or t-bone?”

He frowned, uncertain. “Sirloin, I guess.”

The Man watched as the butcher lifted a pair of the steaks from the tray and placed them on a sheet of waxed paper on the scale. The slabs draped over the side and the top one slipped off and onto the stainless steel countertop. The butcher moved it back. The Man could see traces of dried and congealed blood where the steak had dropped, deep red. So very red.

The tang of old meat and decay came to him, warm and sweet. He hadn’t noticed it before.

“That all?”

He took the wrapped steaks, shaking his head. “Thanks.” On his way to the cashier, he added a bottle of lighter fluid to his basket and some matches. He read the warnings on the packages while he waited to pay for his purchases.

When he walked in the front door of their house, his wife greeted him with a smile. She took his briefcase and the steaks and disappeared into the kitchen with them. He wandered up to their bedroom, avoiding looking at the closed door of the room that they had decorated with so much happiness and anticipation years before. He thought he heard a noise coming from inside it, but he kept his eyes forward, even though he was unable to think about anything other than the son they had had and how they had given him a good, strong name. About how strong the son had been.

It was they who were weak.

He changed slowly out of his work clothes, carefully unknotting the gray tie and folding it and laying it tidily next to the others in the top drawer of his dresser. Next, he pulled off his dress shirt and white tee shirt. He sat on the bed and untied the stiff waxy laces of his shoes. He placed them on the floor in the closet. Off came the black socks, then the trousers.

Now he could smell the meat on the grill, and he called down to the Woman to cook his rare.

“You sure, honey? You usually like it medium well.”

He told her he wanted it bloody tonight, knowing that she would oblige him by cooking both steaks the same way. In the past, he had worried about contracting mad cow disease—what was it called?
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
, his mind whispered—but the threat seemed too distant anymore, too unlikely. It was a slow disease, not quick to the kill. They would go mad long before dying of it.

He wandered into the bathroom to drop the dirty clothes into the hamper, and the faint smell of chlorine drifted out if its depths, and he grunted. The man standing at the mirror looking at him was sorely middle aged, paunchy. His chest had a saggy look to it; the breasts were softened like cheese, and each came to a sharp point terminating with his pale and strangely pinched-looking nipples. The forest of hair had recently begun to sprout strange, kinky albinos, which he had harvested at first before giving up. He watched as the man in the mirror pulled on a Valley Tech sweatshirt that was a good fifteen years old by now. It smelled of him and a little bit of her. The man’s legs were white and thin.

He watched as the man in the mirror pulled off his underpants. He watched as he grew erect. The Man knew the Woman would expect him to make love to her tonight—she always did—and his erection nodded accusingly at him. It listed off to one side, as if it were some kind of divining rod pointing the way to Salvation. He watched as the man took hold of himself. He watched the man begin to weep.

There was no looking the Woman in the eye at dinner. She sat across from him and the empty highchair was there to one side. She had pulled it from the corner and it seemed to loom over them as they ate.

He wasn’t hungry. He watched as she cut into her steak, her arm sawing with relish, her jaw working the meat. He watched as the blood leaked from inside the slab and spilled onto her plate, warm and red and soaking into the potatoes, staining the pile of saltine crackers she seemed unable to enjoy a meal without. He watched her finish her supper with a glass of red wine.

Hours later, he watched as she winced with the first signs of discomfort, cramps turning to distress, pain becoming agony. She clutched her stomach, stumbling to the bathroom where she vomited into the toilet for a full half hour before calling to him. He stood in the doorway and watched.

The next two hours she spent sitting on the toilet, alternately groaning and crying out. Finally, exuding a sickly sweet aroma and bleeding from every orifice, she crumbled to the floor.

The illness emptied her out. The deadly bacteria had prepared its new home. She hung on for weeks; she wouldn’t die.

“Dinner,” she called from the bedroom door, startling him. He realized he’d left the bathroom door open. Had she seen the man in the mirror?

He sighed, looked down at the limp flesh in his hand. It was just as well. His shoulder was sore. He pulled up his underwear, pulled on a pair of sweatpants from the dresser, headed down to eat.

She asked him about his day. He provided a cautious answer, carefully gauging her response, her body language. There was no sign from her what she was thinking or feeling. She placed his dinner on the table; when he saw the blood pooling beneath the steak his throat constricted and he nearly gagged, but he said nothing. The highchair had been pulled back into the corner. He couldn’t stop looking at it.

They had had a son, some years past. They had given him a good strong name. And he had been strong, hadn’t he?

They were ones who were weak.

The Man was weakest of all.

†   †   †

That evening, after the dinner dishes had been scraped and washed and dried and put away, after the trash had been emptied and the table wiped cleaned, they found themselves in front of the television. Something was on, but the Man didn’t know what it was. His eyes were unseeing; his ears unhearing. He thought only of Death, of its various forms: radiation coming from the TV screen, leaking from the phone, spewing from the cell towers that surrounded them. He thought about radon gas seeping from the ground and formaldehyde off-gassing from the cabinets and carbon monoxide spewing from the stove. He thought about tree branches falling on them from hundred-year-old maple trees in the yard and earthquakes (even though the likelihood of one was vanishingly small) and of lightning strikes and floods. He thought of exploding gas mains and terrorists and home invasions. He’d given up thinking about food poisoning. That didn’t look like it was happening.

He realized, like a man realizes he is in a dream, that the Woman was talking to him. She said something, but all he managed to hear was, “nine o’clock,” which had meaning enough. Nine o’clock was their bedtime.

“I’ll be up soon,” he told her, watching her climbing the stairs in her nightgown, the red one tonight. He saw that she was still young and attractive, despite the hardness of the past couple of years, and something deep inside of him stirred, a longing to be with her.

They made love gently at first, tentatively, as if they were making love for the first time. There was a feeling of surprise in it, a newfound sense of discovery, of uncharted territory. Her hands were soft and warm, her breath hot on his neck and his chest and his thighs, and he sighed, arching himself into her, again and again. And the whole while, the blinking stop light outside their window cast dull shadows on their wall, as if keeping time.

The pain was not intense at first, just a dull heaviness in his chest, a hand holding him down.
Listen
, it seemed to say.
Slow down. Wait.
But soon its grip on him tightened. He felt as if it were a fist clutching his heart, ripping it from his chest. The pain radiated up and into his neck until it felt as if his jaw might shatter. At the same time, the pain expanded down his arm until his fingers were not his own but belonged to the pain.

He knew what was happening: he was having a heart attack.

So this, he thought, this is how the game ends. He closed his eyes and sighed as the Woman bucked and swayed over him.

Then, darkness.

He felt her shift in the bed next to him. He opened his eyes. The clock told him it was almost ten-thirty. He could feel her hand resting upon his chest, her thigh reaching over to settle upon his legs. He could see her looking at him, her hair falling over her pale skin, those delicate lines that had borne him a son. They looked at each other for a long time, not saying anything. Her hand slowly drifted down.

She finally managed to arouse him, despite his anguish, despite his resistance. And when she had finished, he rolled over, turning his back on her. He wondered if she knew he had held back. She had to know; she had to know why.