The Introvert

by Michael Paul Michaud

  They would say the same sort of thing to the people that worked in our retail outlets. Things like, “It’s a beautiful sunny day outside, so anyone willing to come inside to shop on a day like this is definitely looking to buy.” But then if it was raining they’d say, “Look at how miserable it is out there, anyone willing to come outside on a day like this is definitely looking to buy.”

  They had the same sort of spiel for when it was snowing or sleeting or whether it was summer, fall, winter, or spring. As far as the company was concerned, whatever day or time or season it was, and whether in person or by phone, was always the best day to sell vacuums. This was actually the second rule of The Company Culture Handbook: “Every Day is a Good Day to Buy.”

  CHAPTER 22

  When I got home I found that the new landlord had already fixed my sink, so I could finally make dinner with water from the kitchen, and even if it was the same water that came out of the spouts in the bathroom, it somehow seemed different to me, at least psychologically, so I was pleased that it had finally been fixed.

  I knocked on his door to thank him after dinner and when he opened the door I could see that he had cats, and though I didn’t entirely trust cats, I was relieved to see that the white chew bone was no longer there.

  “I want to thank you for fixing my sink,” I said, then realized that he must have indeed brought his own tools since I had disposed of the landlord’s tools in the same landfill as his body. Then I thought of how the landlord’s body was probably rotting and foul by that point and was maybe even covered with maggots and it made me grateful that I’d only thought of that image after I’d already eaten my dinner. Then I figured that I would have been especially grateful if I’d have eaten rice for dinner that night, only I hadn’t had rice for dinner, so although I was still grateful, it was just a regular amount of grateful.

  As I was thinking of how grateful I was the landlord said, “Just doin’ my job,” and it snapped me out of my thinking.

  Then I told him, “The last landlord tried to fix it once before, but it didn’t work for very long, so I suppose that means he never did fix it at all, but merely tried to fix it and failed.”

  The new landlord just looked at me when I said that, so I figured I must have said something rather strange, so I thought back on what I’d just said and couldn’t find anything all that strange about it, then before I could think on it anymore, the new landlord started speaking again.

  “Well, if you find it starts actin’ up again, you just come let me know.”

  “I will,” I said then returned to my apartment.

  ***

  Donna came over that night because she phoned and said she wanted to see me so I said “fine” even though it was a work night and I normally tried to get to sleep early.

  I buzzed her upstairs once she arrived and soon she’d knocked on my door and I let her inside. She shook off her coat and I realized that it must have been raining outside because of how wet it was, and it made me think of the paradigm shift and how she must have really wanted to see me if she was willing to come over when it was raining like that.

  We put her coat away and took a seat on the couch and I could tell that something was bothering her, then I thought that maybe it was because I still wouldn’t telephone her, and though I thought we were already past that, you could never really tell with women so I figured that I shouldn’t discount the possibility entirely.

  “I had a visitor today,” she said.

  “That’s nice.”

  “It wasn’t a nice visit,” she said.

  “I see.”

  I’d found myself saying “I see” with increasing frequency and while before I found it funny because it seemed as if I was parroting the officer, now I just found it a normal part of my talking.

  “It was a police inspector,” she said. “He was asking me a lot of questions.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  Donna squinted her eyes together and I could see they were moist, but then she opened them back up and she didn’t actually cry and that surprised me because she did cry an awful lot and this certainly seemed like it was going to be another one of those times.

  “He was asking me about how long we’d been dating and asking me about certain nights we’d been together and even asked me a little about your movements from a couple years ago.”

  “I see.”

  “Why are they asking me these things?”

  It seemed to me that there was no point in not telling her, so I told her at least the part about finding Molly on the street two years ago and how it had turned out that Molly’s real name was Jasmine and how Jasmine’s owner had been killed and how they were now suspicious of me because I happened to have Molly and also lived in the same building where another man went missing. I felt that my explanation was mostly the truth even though I left out the part where I’d actually killed the two people and the fact that their suspicions were actually correct.

  “But someone confessed to it?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So why are they still asking questions?”

  “Who’s to say why policemen do the things they do?” I said. This was my attempt to “Always Diffuse Discomfort” but it didn’t seem to work.

  “I’m scared.”

  I noticed Donna was staring at my green chair, and it seemed as if her brain was churning rather fiercely, so I got up to get her some beer. I twisted the cap off and handed her the bottle, but she didn’t touch it and instead kept her eyes on the green chair.

  “I was with you the night he went missing,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “I told them that.”

  “You see? And someone has already confessed to the crime.”

  “I mentioned that, too, but he didn’t seem convinced they had the right person.”

  “How so?”

  “Just some things he said and the way he said them. I think they suspect maybe he’s an attention seeker or delusional. They say they’re having his fitness assessed through the courts to see if he’s crazy.”

  “I see.”

  “But then he must be crazy, right?”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “What I mean is he would be crazy to confess to a murder he didn’t commit, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be crazy.”

  “But then if he did actually do it then he’d also be crazy, because only crazy people murder people, right?”

  She looked at me expectantly after she’d said it and I wasn’t immediately sure how to respond, but eventually I told her that a lot of people kill other people like in the military or policemen or in self-defense or for some other good and justifiable reason.

  “What would be a good reason to kill a landlord?” she said.

  “Who can say? He drank a lot and he wasn’t a very nice man. Maybe he had a lot of enemies.”

  I had taken a law course in college and one of the things that they taught us was that lawyers would sometimes point to “alternative suspects” when they had nothing else to go on even though most everyone in the courtroom knew that their client was guilty. Pointing to alternative suspects and other speculative alternatives could muddy the waters and shift the paradigm of the jury at least enough to raise a reasonable doubt, so I thought maybe if it worked on them, it would work on Donna, and it apparently did because she then said “I suppose so.”

  Another thing they taught us was the defense of “innocent explanation.” Just as with “alternative suspects,” defense lawyers often pointed to innocent explanations when they had nothing else to go on even though most everyone in the courtroom knew that their client was guilty. Our professor gave us the example of a drunk driver, and how the lawyer would suggest that maybe his client’s car had swerved off the road because a raccoon had run into the street, and that maybe the ground was uneven and that’s why he was stumbling around, and that maybe he was having a stroke or just spoke with a thick accent, so that’s wh
y his words sounded slurred and he would go on and on like that and I remember that most of the class had laughed until the professor told us that this stuff actually worked with some sympathetic judges, and then suddenly most of the class stopped laughing. Then one of the students asked how they got to the truth of the matter when counsel put forward such silly arguments, and our professor answered that the law isn’t about the truth but is about the process, and so that was the last law course I ever signed up for.

  Up to that point I wasn’t too sore about the inspector calling my boss or calling the girl I was seeing because I figured that he was just doing his job, and of course I knew that he was right to do so and even righter to be looking at me, so I figured it would be hypocritical for me to get too fussed about it.

  Only then I noticed how one of the button’s on Donna’s blouse had come undone, and I could see part of her bra and the curve of her breasts and it swelled me inside and I no longer wanted to talk about landlords and inspectors so I leaned in and started to kiss her, only she turned away after a moment and put her untouched beer down on the coffee table and said that she better get back home.

  She walked quickly to the front closet and grabbed her coat which was still wet from the rain, and as she put it on I could see that she’d started to cry, so I moved in to kiss her goodnight, but she turned away and I only managed to kiss her cheek and a moment later she was gone.

  That was the first night we’d been together that she didn’t help me to achieve it.

  It was also the first time that I thought of the inspector as red and open.

  CHAPTER 23

  The next day Donna kept her distance from me.

  Since this was actually what Mr. Peters wanted I thought that maybe she was just doing it to appease him but then I thought about how our conversation ended last night and figured that would be about as big of a coincidence as Molly’s name actually being Molly when I named her that, and since I didn’t really believe in coincidences, I concluded that Donna must be avoiding me.

  At lunchtime I approached her and asked if she’d like to have lunch with me, which was something I almost never did, but I did it on that day only to be told by Donna that she wasn’t hungry. I then discovered that I was no longer hungry myself, and so I didn’t eat lunch that day but instead just went back to work. As I was leaving that day I heard my name called aloud, and I turned to find Donna behind me.

  I was holding my lunch in my hand and was going to eat my lunch for dinner, which would in a weird way have made it dinner the whole time and not lunch at all.

  “Can we talk?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But we can’t talk very long because I have to get home to take Molly out for her walk because otherwise she might--”

  “It won’t take long,” she said, interrupting me.

  Her eyes seemed red and swollen, so I figured she must have been crying, or else perhaps she had some allergy I wasn’t aware of, but I didn’t ask her about it and instead we made our way across the street to a coffee shop.

  I ordered a coffee and she just had water and we sat at the back of the room where we could have some privacy. It was small and dark and not much of a coffee shop.

  Donna sat across from me and I could see her behavior was tighter than normal because she kept her jacket on and didn’t lean her arms over the table to hold my hands, which was something that she liked to do and something that I’d become increasingly receptive to.

  “I’ve been wanting to sit down with you for a few days now,” she said.

  “That’s nice,” I said, though the look on her face suggested that it might not be as nice as I thought.

  “You know I’ve liked you for a long time, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. I said it because it was true.

  “I know it’s silly but I’d often thought about how a life with you might be and--” Then Donna stopped talking and sort of waved her hands in front of her as if she was washing away her last sentence or else just didn’t know how to finish it. I took a sip of my coffee then and my stomach growled, and Donna must have heard it because she asked if I was hungry, and I said that I didn’t feel very hungry, but that maybe my stomach was hungry.

  “What is it about you?” she said, smiling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You say the oddest, simplest things but they’re adorable.”

  I wasn’t sure what made it so adorable because it was usually just the simple truth but I was happy enough that she felt that way about it.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Given the way that her face and her tone had just turned very serious, I thought that maybe she was going to tell me that she had tested positive for a venereal disease and that I should get myself checked out, and this put a damper on my spirits, but then I immediately figured what was done was done, so there was probably no point in getting too fussed about it.

  “I’m glad you wanted to talk,” I said. “I thought that maybe you’d been avoiding me.”

  She reached her hands across the table and took my own in hers, and though I’d been about to take a sip of my coffee I figured I best not disengage at that moment. I then prepared myself for a conversation about herpes or genital warts or maybe even some strange condition I’d never heard of before, but then instead she began talking about the investigation.

  “This thing with the landlord has really gotten to me,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “It’s just the thought of it, you know? And of course I know you had nothing to do with it, but to even be asked those questions...”

  She pulled her hands back and then I felt free to take another sip of my coffee and was rather pleased there’d been no talk of venereal disease.

  “I thought about breaking up with you,” she said.

  “I’m glad that you didn’t,” I said. I said it because it was the truth.

  “But I can’t have police officers calling me and asking me these sorts of questions. I just can’t--”

  She started to cry, and I thought that this might be sort of like when she was holding my hands and that I shouldn’t take a sip of coffee, but then I took one anyway.

  I felt bad that Donna was feeling this way, and I knew that it was mostly my fault for killing the landlord, but then I also blamed the landlord some because if he hadn’t beaten and killed his dog then I never would have had to make him red and open and then there never would have been an investigation into his disappearance and then Donna probably wouldn’t be crying now, although she did cry a lot, so it was possible she might have cried today anyway, but just about something different.

  “If only I wasn’t...”

  I took another sip of my coffee as she told me that one of the times she’d helped me to achieve it we’d apparently achieved more than we’d intended because she said she was pregnant, and the moment I heard the “p” word I could feel the liquid get caught up in the back of my throat and it took me an extra second or so before I could swallow. I then thought it might be a good time to diffuse discomfort, but then I figured there was nothing I could say that could really diffuse something like this so I asked her if she was certain.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “I see.”

  “We haven’t exactly been careful,” she said.

  “I suppose we haven’t.”

  I just sat looking at her and then finally she reached out across the table again and took my hands in her own.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” she said.

  “This will probably make it more difficult to avoid the appearance of conflict at the office,” I said.

  I thought that she might cry again, but instead she started laughing for the first time that day, and I decided to laugh along with her.

  She pulled her hands back again. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “A baby,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what it is?” I asked.
>
  “It’s far too early to know.”

  “Of course,” I said, even though I didn’t know that for sure.

  “I would have been so happy, normally--”

  Donna looked over at the window, and then so did I, and I could see that it had started to drizzle.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, her head still turned to the window.

  “I’m going to be a father,” I said. I said it because it was true but also because I wanted to say it.

  Donna didn’t say anything further. Instead, she abruptly got up from the table and said that she had to leave. I asked her where she was going and she said that she didn’t know, then I asked her if I could drive her home, and she said she was “fine,” which I knew for a woman meant the reverse, but before I could offer again she was out the door and twisting her way through the wind and the rain.

  CHAPTER 24

  As luck would have it, a man was stabbed to death that night not so many blocks from where I lived. It was not so lucky for the man who was stabbed, of course, but then I thought that it might at least distract the police with a new mystery, but the matter was quickly resolved as a drug-related crime. Then I felt bad about being happy about someone dying just because it might benefit me by distracting the police, but then I remembered it was drug related and figured that, just like my landlord, he probably deserved it.

  Donna remained distant at work the next day, and though I had always preferred that she keep some distance, especially after our meetings with Mr. Peters, I didn’t want quite as much distance as she was keeping. I tried to block it out and went on selling my vacuums, but I only sold one vacuum that day and then Donna left work without saying goodbye and that was when I decided to go visit the inspector.

  ***