by Jack Douglas
He lifted the chair opposite her and hurled it across the room, where it splintered into pieces. “What the fuck are you doing?”
His voice wasn’t his own. But there was no time to debate minutia like that. Without further warning he reached for the edge of the table, palms up, clenching the corner with his nine fingers and flipped it right in front of her.
She spilled from the chair and fell onto the rug to her right, bawling like a newborn baby.
The computer lay open on its side, still feeding the room with bleak artificial light, and he savored the horrified look on her face. He stared into her pitch black eyes and smiled.
“You filthy slut,” he hissed.
“Craig,” she cried, “what are you doing? What the hell is wrong with you?”
She tried to sit up but fell backward, yelping in pain as she fumbled toward the couch.
He reached down and grabbed her by the waist, lifted her, flung her back in the direction of the kitchen. He could scarcely believe his own strength as she struck the wall just a few feet from the peeling linoleum. “What’s wrong with me?” he shouted. “Eu tenho cancer.” He pointed to his right temple. “A tumor right here in my head.”
“No,” she shouted. “That’s not true, Craig. You’re fine. We just need to get you the hell out of here!”
“Es toucontente aqui,” he hollered back. “I’m happy here. Isto é um paraiso. This is paradise.”
The bitch was shaking her fucking head. Trying to tell him what the fuck he wanted, just as she had been doing for the past three years. But not anymore. She wasn’t going to force him to leave Portugal like she forced him to leave Hawaii. He was not going to leave Lisbon. Was not going to lose this flat. He fucking loved it here! What else did he need?
“Vivimos aqui,” he said, his arms spread wide as though he were a realtor showing the flat for the first time. “We live here.”
“No,” she cried, her voice cracking. “We don’t live here. We live in
New York. Don’t you remember, Craig?”
He stopped his advance and grinned. “Ah, the Beeeeg Apple?”
“Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “Please don’t.”
But he started coming again, moving toward her like an injured animal closing in on a meal it instinctively knew it could not afford to lose.
“You just had to fuck him, didn’t you?” he said. “You just had to fuck that bastardo downstairs.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Craig! What bastardo?”
With his left hand he grabbed her by her tank top, lifted her up, pushed her against the wall, and moved his fingers around her throat. With his right, still wrapped in a tee shirt to ebb the blood oozing from his severed finger, he drew back and punched her in the face with all his might.
Her nose burst open, blood spewing down the sides of her face, her screams drowned out by her choking.
“You want to leave me?” he said. “Well, let’s see you leave without your pretty fucking head.”
With both hands he grabbed her by the ears and slammed her skull hard as he could against the wall.
“These walls are fucking thicker than we thought,” he said, smiling, lifting her up and slamming her head against the cracking sheetrock again.
She slumped in his arms but hadn’t lost consciousness yet.
“What do you say we call your fucking mother,” he said into her face, “invite her over for some earl grey tea and pound cake? Maybe some candy fucking corn?”
He lifted his knee and drove it up between her legs. Groaning, she fell in a heap to the floor.
“Que se passa?” he whispered, tilting his head. “What’s the matter, puta?” He hunched over, leaned in toward her, listened to her quick shallow breaths. “Do you love me, puta?” Blood still dripping from his lips, he moved in, planted a kiss on her neck. “Do you love me?” he said again.
No response. Slowly he stood.
“Fine,” he said. “Vamosser so amigos.” He lifted his foot and kicked her as hard as he could in the head. “Let’s just be friends.”
Chapter Forty
Amy curled herself into a ball, hoping Craig thought she was dead. As she lay on the floor, barely conscious, she tried to wrap her chaotic mind around the happenings of the past six days. Nothing seemed to make sense. She had been brutally attacked in the bedroom only forty- eight hours ago. By Craig? It couldn’t have been. The room had been dark but not so dark that she wouldn’t have seen some part of him. An arm, a leg, some shadow. The kind of shapes one saw immediately upon waking in the middle of the night, even in the blackest of rooms. Surely she would have smelled him, felt his breath. Heard him growl in anger as he snatched her back by the hair.
No, it couldn’t have been Craig.
But the memoir. In the memoir he’d admitted his complicity. Hadn’t he? Hadn’t he admitted his role simply by introducing his story as a memoir, as a tragedy? She was so confused, so goddamn bewildered.
Craig had saved her life by performing CPR when she was electrocuted. And he had sliced off one of his fingers merely to prove to her that they were still alive. Still flesh and blood and bone. Would he really have put himself through all that for a story?
No. And there were things he simply couldn’t have done. Her image on the far hallway wall, the sight of herself through the peephole. Impossible. Was it really just a hallucination? A trick of her starving mind? That might explain what she had been seeing in the mirror the past few days, the dark hair, the black eyes, the wrinkles where before there were none. The terrible burns now on the right side of her face. But it couldn’t explain how she felt from the very first full day at the flat. Her legs had been exhausted, her knees popped. She could no longer carry her own weight. All this even before she had been ravaged by the unseen beast in the bedroom.
She quite literally wasn’t herself.
And if she were not herself at times, she reasoned, then Craig wasn’t either.
Not when his bright blue eyes dimmed to black, when his head tilted to one side. Not when he attacked.
We’re living someone else’s lives, she thought. Then, No. We’re dying someone else’s deaths.
Yes, that made more sense, if any sense could be made of this.
With that thought, that breakthrough, Amy finally allowed her mind to rest. She drifted like a cloud over Oahu’s Sunset Beach on a breezy day. And then, as though no transition were needed at all, she was again there with Craig in Hawaii, strolling hand-in-hand in the evening along Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, with only the stars and glowing tiki torches guiding the way. The usually bustling street was otherwise empty. No tourists or street performers cluttered the sidewalks. No music emanated from the dozens of bars along the way. All was quiet, the only sounds being made by their footfalls, Craig in his flip flops, Amy in the new Prada sandals Craig bought for her right before they left.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “What is?”
“That we live here.” His bright blue eyes shined in the light from the torch fires.
“What do you mean?”
“We. Live. Here,” he said, his voice echoing in the vast emptiness, the sound barely fading as it wafted out to sea.
Amy heard the words play out over and over again in her mind, an echo like an old favorite record spinning for the trillionth time. “We live here.” The three most perfect words Craig uttered during the year they spent in paradise. “We. Live. Here.”
And the echo continued, those three words riding like a surfer on her brain waves for minutes after Amy’s tired heart finally ceased beating.
Chapter Forty-One
Craig scrolled down as fast as he could toward the end of the document. He didn’t recognize any of the words, any of the chapter headings. He had never even used chapter headings before.
“This isn’t mine,” he spit out. “This isn’t mine.”
He scrolled to the bottom of one of the last chapters. The chapter was titled Departures.
Her nose burst open, blood spewing down the sides of her face, her screams drowned out by her choking.
“You want to leave me?” I said. “Well, let’s see you leave without your pretty fucking head.”
With both hands I grabbed her by the ears and slammed her skull hard as I could against the wall.
“The walls are fucking thicker than we thought,” I said, smiling, lifting her up and slamming her head against the cracking sheetrock again.
She slumped in my arms but hadn’t lost consciousness yet.
“What do you say we call your fucking mother,” I said into her face, “invite her over for some earl grey tea and pound cake? Maybe some candy fucking corn?”
I lifted my knee and drove it up between her legs. Groaning, she fell in a heap to the floor.
“Que se passa?” I whispered, tilting my head. “What’s the matter, puta?” I hunched over, leaned in toward her, listened to her quick shallow breaths. “Do you love me, puta?” Blood still dripping from my lips, I moved in, planted a kiss on her neck. “Do you love me?” I said again.
No response. Slowly I stood.
“Fine,” I said. “Vamosser so amigos.” I lifted my foot and kicked her as hard as I could in the head. “Let’s just be friends.”
“Son of a bitch,” Craig rasped. I killed her. But, no. He couldn’t have. His fingers reached for the mouse and scrolled down further in the manuscript, as far as he could go. To the very end.
He stared at the screen. Read the last line.
I stared at the screen. Read the last line.
“What the fuck?”
As he said it, “What the fuck?” appeared on the screen. He touched his right eye.
I touched my right eye.
Tugged at his hair.
Tugged at my hair.
“What the fuck is going on?” I shouted. “Am I losing my fucking mind!”
He leapt to his feet and ran toward the front door, screaming “Let me the fuck out of here!”
He pounded on the door with his fists, kicked at it with his feet. All the pent up rage he had harbored over the past three decades were taken out on that door. He fought it until he could fight no more, until he was sure bones in his hands and feet were broken beyond repair.
Finally, he slumped to the floor.
“It’s over,” he said, his head hanging in defeat. “It’s fucking over.” The pulse was thumping in his ear.
(It’s a tumor.)
Maybe the tumor was driving him insane. Didn’t they affect certain parts of the brain?
(Or an aneurism.)
No, it had to be a tumor, because (With an aneurism you go like that!) He had to end this once and for all.
Craig turned and scanned the living room for sharp objects. If he’d had his choice, he would have chosen pills, but Amy had days ago flushed all his Vicodin down the toilet. There was no gun in the flat. He didn’t know how to make a noose. He couldn’t jump out the fucking window. He had to slit his wrists. But with what?
His mind flashed on the ice pick.
Craig pushed himself to his feet and hobbled toward the kitchen. As he passed the computer he looked down at the new cherry screensaver. It read:
read on
He wanted to ignore the fucking computer but something almost physical pulled him to his knees. He waved away the screensaver and his manuscript—not fucking mine!—stared back at him once more.
A new chapter titled The Letters suddenly appeared.
The Letters
I stepped into the kitchen, trying to divert my eyes from Amy’s body. She was food; that fact was not lost on me. A woman’s place is in the kitchen. She had always prepared my meals, and now that she no longer could, I would eat her if I had to. But I had already made the final decision on my own fate.
(Well, maybe just a few more bites.)
No, I’d leave the body alone. My sole reason for being in the kitchen was to locate the ice pick. I had to stay on task, find it and then finish this.
(But you got everything you wanted, Craig. Amy’s not going anywhere.
You’ve got food and shelter...)
No.
(Not to mention one hell of a book.)
The ice pick was sitting where I’d last left it on the counter. I grabbed it, trying to keep my eyes glued to the ceiling.
That was when I first noticed the vent.
#
The prose stopped there. Craig lifted himself again to his feet. He picked up the laptop to use as a light source and moved into the kitchen, careful to avoid staring at Amy’s body. He reached for the ice pick, his eyes now fixed on the vent in the ceiling.
What was the manuscript trying to tell him?
“Fuck it,” he said. He put the laptop on the counter with the screen angled up, . Then he placed the ice pick between his teeth, bit down hard, and used what little strength he had left to push himself up onto the kitchen counter, his hands and feet roaring in opposition.
The blood on his soles made the counter slippery. He grabbed hold of the top of the cabinets for purchase, then slid his way toward the end of the counter, in the direction of the vent.
It was too small to climb through. He’d already known that.
Then what the fuck am I doing up here?
He removed the ice pick from between his teeth. Using the pick as a crowbar, he went to work on removing the vent. Dust fell onto his face and he coughed, blood spraying from between his lips. After six difficult minutes he had removed one side from the ceiling.
One side was enough.
A half dozen envelopes slipped through the opening. They fell like snow, some coming to rest on the counter, others fluttering to the blood-soaked linoleum floor.
#
The envelopes were letter-sized, stamped but not postmarked, deliverable to an address in the continental United States. The writing was poor but it was a zip code Craig immediately recognized, an area not far from where he had attended law school—the ironbound district of Newark in northern New Jersey--an area populated with thousands of Portuguese immigrants.
Craig also recognized the return address, the address to the flat here in Lisbon. The sender’s name was written as A. Dias Silva.
Amaro Dias Silva? Our landlord.
Back in the living room, Craig set the bloody letters on the floor in front of him and the laptop screen and sat down. They were clearly old letters, had been sitting in that grate for some time. Years. Decades, maybe.
On the back of each envelope was a number, one through six. Craig chose number one and opened the seal on the back. He removed a single piece of paper from the envelope and studied it, not entirely surprised to find it was written in English.
6 January 1975 Dear Carlito,
Fatima and I have arrived in Lisboa, and I am afraid little has changed. She remains distant and unhappy. The flat we let is a disappointment, and our calls and letters to our landlord have gone unanswered to this day. But I see all this as a challenge Fatima and I must overcome, and I hope that she will come to see our situation in the same way.
I miss you, brother. Please write to me when you can.
Sincerely yours, Amaro
Craig swallowed hard, ulcers now lining the tissue of his mouth and throat, summoning a pain he had never known before. What he was experiencing wasn’t quite deja vu, but it was close. He flashed on the original email he had sent to Amaro when he and Amy first arrived at the flat, then on the words he had read in his own manuscript. The words were so similar to those of Amaro’s in this letter to his brother.
Shaking his head in panic, Craig flung the first letter aside and quickly moved on to the second envelope. He removed a single page dated 9 January 1975, and began reading.
Their situation, Amaro wrote, had become intolerable. Amaro had finally reached their landlord Otavio by telephone. Otavio assured him he would have someone over that morning to fix the plumbing and the electricity, but no one ever showed.
Fatima was at her end, A
maro wrote. She had just stormed out of the flat to get some air. Part of Amaro feared she would never return. Yet part of him hoped she wouldn’t.
The first letter to Carlito’s brother had not yet been sent. Amaro wrote he simply didn’t have the energy to travel to the post office to place the envelope in the mail. He was hungry. He and Fatima had little money and were surviving on scraps. The job he was promised had fallen through.
Craig set the letter down.
Otavio? Where had Craig heard that name before? Not from Amy but from that little fucker in the tavern. He thought back.
“...the assassinato-suicidio.”
(The murder-suicide. “At our building?” Craig had asked.
The small man nodded. “Otavio and his wife Isadora,” he’d said softly. “They lived there one week before he went maluco.”
“Mad?”
The small man leaned in toward them. “When they found Isadora,” he said, “she was in sixty-seven pieces. And still that wasn’t all of her. The rest of her, they found in Otavio’s stomach.”)
The little fucker in the tavern. Was he the key to all this? The small dark man with fish breath and nine fing...
Craig stared down the lengths of his bloodied arms. Both of his hands were trembling. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them, refusing now to look past his wrists. Finally he did, examining each hand, studying each of his
Nine fingers.
#
Craig reached for the third envelope and slit it open, the edge of the single page slicing his thumb. Shit. Fresh blood smeared across the words on the page dated the thirteenth of January, 1975.
Fatima has been unfaithful, the letter began. The night she’d stormed out of the flat she never came home. The following day Amaro dragged it out of her. She had spent the night downstairs with some bastard she knew growing up in Coimbra.