Elastic Heart

by Mary Catherine Gebhard

  “You’re the only good thing in this world, Raskol,” I said, hugging him tight. I let Raskol down and opened the back door for him while I went to make tea. I was in a ground floor apartment, so he was able to play in a small fenced-in backyard. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Raskol.

  Raskol bounced around in the snow before turning on his back to roll around. He always had to get every inch of his body covered in dirt. I laughed, shut the screen door, and went to the kitchen.

  As I placed a kettle on the stove, there was a knock on my door. Not aggressive like the delivery man, and not soft like Doris, the landlady. It was somewhere in between. I frowned, wiping tear stains from my cheek. I wasn’t expecting anyone.

  Still reeling from the encounter with him and the man in the alley, I picked up my newly acquired .22 and opened the door.

  “Woah there!” The visitor immediately stepped back. It was the man from the coffee shop. The bastard had followed me home. Well, I had my gun and all my tears were shed, so bring it on, fucker!

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked, raising my .22 slightly. Did he send you? I wanted to ask.

  The man narrowed his eyes and cocked his head to the side slightly. “Usually ladies buy me dinner before they beat me up.” I tightened my hold on the .22. It still seemed too small, but the guy at the gun store had basically insisted that if I was starting out, it was the one for me. I didn’t know a thing about guns, so I’d listened and bought it.

  I still didn’t feel right owning one, but it was better than the alternative. Already I was seeing its value: I had a nice barrier between me and the new asshole.

  “I think it’s best you leave. Now.” I straightened my aim. It felt like a billion marbles had been let loose inside me, but hoped I was keeping it cool on the outside.

  The man eyed the gun and returned his gaze to me. All sharp edges and muscles, he was handsome—if you’re into assholes, that is.

  “I’d like to take you out,” he said.

  “Are you insane?” I nearly dropped the gun at the unexpectedness of his request, but held firm. Was it possible that I’d mentally snapped after seeing him? None of this was happening and I was actually living out my life in a mental ward.

  He seemed to genuinely mull my question over before answering, “A little bit…maybe.”

  I leveled my gun. “Well the answer is: No. Fucking. Way.” He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by my cannon aimed at his nose. That bothered me. I mean, it was my only leverage.

  He smiled a wry half-smile that, if I had been any other girl in any other situation, might have made me melt. I wasn’t any other girl, though. “My finger is slipping,” I warned. “It would be a shame to mar that pretty head with a bullet.”

  “You think I’m pretty?” Folding his arms across his broad chest, he leaned against my doorframe.

  “I think my trigger finger is getting tired,” I spat.

  He kicked off the door. “All right, I’ll leave for now, Miss…?”

  I shook my head, aim still steady. “None of your fucking business.”

  He nodded, mulling over my response. “Sounds French.”

  “It’s not.” What was this guy’s deal? Get the fuck out already. I gripped my gun for emphasis and he winked and turned around. I waited until he had disappeared down the street to slam the door. My heart was racing. Sweat prickled the back of my neck. The stranger was all I could think about. He was ridiculously handsome, but he was more than that. He was intimidating. Like a movie star gone rogue. I didn’t know if I was afraid of him or utterly beguiled. In the end, I went with completely disgusted.

  The tea kettle sounded, its high-pitched whinny bringing me out of my fugue state. I ran into the kitchen and pulled it off the stove. As I finished pouring the hot liquid into my cup, I remembered Raskol was still outside. I walked back into the room and opened the screen door.

  Lying on his side and completely tuckered out, Raskol didn’t even lift his head when I opened the screen door.

  “Some guard dog you are,” I muttered before turning back to get my tea.

  After the coffee shop douche left, I spent most of my afternoon and evening dry heaving, sobbing, and throwing things against the wall. When 10 pm rolled around, I threw on my makeup—war paint against the cruel world—and went to work as if I was a normal human being. Inside I was crumbling like ancient ruins.

  I crawled back into my apartment at the butt crack of dawn and had been in bed—well, on couch—ever since. I will stay on the couch forever. Couch is my new home. I will live and die in fluffy pillow perfection. When they come to retrieve my body they will say… Well, I don’t know what they’ll say. And who cares. Because I’ll be dead. I’ll have died among my people: the pillows.

  It was around two in the afternoon, the only reason I knew that being the paper delivery. And seriously, who still gets a paper delivered? I had tried over and over again to cancel, but no luck. I didn’t give a shit what the paper said. I knew it was all lies, and I got my lies the way all millennials do: the internet.

  With my head firmly planted on the pillow, I breathed in dust mites and stale shampoo. I really needed to wash my fucking sheets. And hair. And body. Okay, I needed to wash everything. To my left, Raskol had taken up half of the pillow, his snoring a clear sign he was also okay with the plan to spend the rest of our lives there on Planet Couch.

  Despite my dirty sheets, Couch felt like a safe place. On the rectangular safe haven, I felt like I was buoyed against the world. A raft just floating away from all the bullshit.

  I sighed, turning over to face the ceiling. Despite how wonderful a notion it was to just stay on Couch forever, I knew it was impossible. Mainly because I had to pee. That gnawing urge in my lower gut reminded me that the world kept revolving, and I had to revolve with it. Even if I really didn’t fucking want to.

  I got into the habit of following him. Maybe that meant something inside me had cracked and I was insane now, or maybe that meant I was the sanest one in the city. After all, I was the only one who saw him for what he was: rotten, dirty, and utterly corrupt. Still, I couldn’t help but remember the saying “If everyone’s insane, then you’re the mad one.”

  Shrugging it off, I followed him as he walked into a relatively low-key restaurant. I noted it was odd because he always ate at higher class establishments. I didn’t take too much time to ruminate on the fact, though, because at least it meant I could follow him inside.

  When he ate at high-end places, it meant my tail stopped at the door. Most days I looked like a wet rag, wrung and hung out to dry. Fancy restaurants only let rags hang in the back with other rags.

  I slid in the door, took a seat facing his back, and thanked my waitress for the menu. The glass of water she gave me was slightly dirty; a faded lipstick stain kissed the glass. I ordered a basket of fries so she would leave me alone for a bit and settled in, my face obscured by the drink menu.

  “Well I can’t see why I would support that.” His nasally voice drifted to my ears. I perked up, trying to hear more. “A lot of my constituents have cancer or friends and family with cancer, and that drug would help them. Unless you have something that would make me change my mind…” It was no secret that politicians took bribes, but hearing the conversation occur so casually over cheap food and dirty dishes was nauseating.

  “We have our reasons for needing the drug stopped.” The voice that spoke next stopped my heart. My menu nearly slipped from my grasp as my palms grew sweaty. It couldn’t be…could it? I looked over my menu to see the owner of the voice. It was him—the other him—the guy from the coffee shop, the one who had asked me out. I knew it, I just knew the guy was an asshole. Clearly the fucker had asked me out because he worked for him.

  Clearly he wasn’t done with me.

  I wanted to vomit, but I swallowed the bile and kept listening.

  “Our company is willing to offer you full financial support for your next campaign,” the coffee shop fucker continue
d. “We’ll even help you create a small cancer charity walk to show you care.”

  Senator Morris took a slow sip of his drink. “All for my support against the bill?”

  The man from the coffee shop smiled. He was attractive, his smile all Colgate and his sharp jaw lined with the hint of a five o’clock shadow. His eyes were a warm golden hazel, inviting almost. I knew better… The house in Hansel and Gretel was inviting, too.

  “Well for such a big donation from us,” Coffee Shop Fucker went on. “We would of course expect you to garner support from your friends in the Senate and House.”

  Senator Morris lowered his drink, a small smile on his thin lips. “Of course.”

  I listened to the rest of their conversation, but after they finished discussing the cancer drug it was nothing but small talk and flattery. I followed him to his car and waited until he went inside his home. He would kiss his wife and two daughters, take off his tie, brush his teeth, then read the news in his study until about one in the morning. That was his nightly routine.

  He never watched porn. He never masturbated. He never had sex with his wife (I was beginning to think his daughters had appeared by immaculate conception). He never did anything remotely unseemly at home.

  I supposed he got his jollies from strangers. From people like me.

  I watched his nightly routine until he crawled into bed at one-thirty, and then I went home.

  I’d moved after he had attacked me. My old apartment never felt the same. My bed wasn’t mine any more; it belonged to him. Even my shower didn’t belong to me; it belonged to the memories of how I’d tried to scrub him off. When I moved, I thought it would get better. Even though I bought a new bed, it still felt like his bed. Even though it was a new shower, I still remembered scrubbing him off.

  I slept on the couch now.

  My appetite was one of the first things to go, one of the first things he took. So, despite having only eaten half a basket of fries hours before, I still wasn’t hungry. I lost a tremendous amount of weight in the months following the attack. I looked sickly for those months, not that anyone noticed.

  There was no one to notice. My parents were dead and any “friends” I’d had disappeared when they found out. Even my “best” friend Effie disappeared. We’d been as close as sisters, but she completely abandoned me when the news got ahold of the story.

  Her desertion still cut.

  I let myself wallow in the shame and misery, contemplating death by starvation for a good two months, before finally giving myself a kick in the ass. I didn’t exactly bounce back, though. I crawled back.

  After everything that happened, to get back to a sense of normalcy was like climbing from the bottom of a snake-filled ravine. I clung to slippery rocks, I kicked the venomous snakes trying to bite at my heels, and eventually I pulled myself up and over the edge.

  When all was said and done I wasn’t the same Nami. I was changed.

  I thought back on the previous months as I opened my refrigerator and pulled out a bag of “meatless” meat for tacos. That was another thing that changed: I became a vegetarian. BH—before him—I was a ravenous carnivore. I ate steak and burgers and hotdogs like they were going out of style. Now I couldn’t stand the sight of them. I wasn’t not really sure why. At a certain point, though, I stopped questioning the changes that happened to me and just accepted them.

  The stove sounded just as Raskol’s feet pitter-pattered across the linoleum. I glanced down to see his furry face, ready for any offering that might fall into his mouth. I reached into the skillet and picked out the only cooked piece, dropping it into his hungry maw.

  At least all the shit and fuckery had brought me Raskol.

  I turned on my computer as I shoved a taco into my mouth. I wasn’t hungry and eating actually made me nauseated, but if I didn’t fuel up, I would be worthless and then he couldn’t pay. The red meatless meat slid down my chin, but mess didn’t bother me much any more. Raskol inched closer, tongue out, as if I wouldn’t notice the fact that he’d gone from sitting on the edge of the couch to licking my chin. I shoved him away and wiped it off hastily, the red smearing against the back of my hand. My slightly sticky finger moved against the track pad, looking for the USB icon.

  I recorded everything I did when following him. The police wouldn’t help me so I figured I had to help myself. It had been about six months since the incident and that meant I’d had about six months to stew. To ruminate. To contemplate how I’d been violated not once but multiple times.

  By him.

  By the police.

  By the media.

  By everyone: people who were supposed to protect me from the dregs of society. Dregs like him.

  I guess you could say I was a little bit mad.

  My plan was an ever-evolving thing. It wasn’t as though I had practice in these things, in revenge. When I first crawled out of the dark hole he had placed me in, I was filled with almost too many emotions to process: anger, shame, humiliation, sadness, anger again.

  Despair.

  How had this happened? How had he gotten away with it? There were so many different things I wanted to do to him. I envisioned hot pokers. I imagined ancient torture techniques (even looked up a few). Scaphism didn’t sound too bad an end for him.

  To be honest, I still wasn’t entirely sure what my plan was. It had started out as me wanting to gather my own evidence, to be able to prove without a doubt what he had done to me. The police wouldn’t be able to turn me away.

  Then it metamorphosed.

  As I followed him, I began building a sick obsession.

  I wanted to know him.

  I wanted to understand the way he ticked.

  Each day I hid under the cloak of shadows, watching him go about his daily life, I peeled away another layer. What was I after? I still wasn’t sure. Maybe a reason for why he did what he did. Maybe to understand why he chose me and why he ruined my life. Still, as I kept going, nothing became clearer. If anything, it got murkier, and that just emboldened my obsession.

  It had been two months since I’d started my convoluted journey. Two months since I’d started following and evidencing everything he did.

  I had gone through one external hard drive already and my second was nearly full. As I uploaded the day’s work, my mind drifted back to Coffee Shop Fucker.

  I thought I’d been stealthy the past two months. I thought he didn’t know I was following him. Was it possible he knew? Why else would that man have followed me and asked me out? If I hadn’t beaten him up or pulled a gun on him, what would he have done to me? Perhaps he had told the guy I was an easy target. He probably thought I was the same girl he’d violated six months ago and so his lapdog wasn’t expecting a fight.

  I shuddered just as the computer dinged, indicating that my file was finished uploading. It snapped me out of my spiraling train of thought. I didn’t want to confront the idea that I hadn’t been predator these past few months, but instead had been prey.

  Crouched down amidst the trash and forgotten things, I wanted to scream. I didn’t like what I was seeing. It didn’t fit in my perfectly constructed view of him. There I was, standing outside his home collecting evidence on his violation of me, and instead of acting how he should have been—you know, like a raping monster—he was carefully tending to his wife’s wound. After his wife cut her finger while cooking, he came to dress her wound. He came to care for her.

  He even kissed her tenderly on the forehead while applying antiseptic to the bleeding finger. My stomach roiled. Who was this man? A person capable of completely annihilating someone like me without any hesitation, yet, at the same time, capable of tenderness and compassion for another. What did that even mean?

  I put down my camera for a moment, steadying myself against the garbage. It smelled like rotting vegetables. Growing up, I’d had a compost pile in my backyard under a big pine tree. I would play under that tree; there was room enough for lawn chairs and mattresses the neighbor kids and I co
llected off the streets during spring cleaning. The pine tree was that big. You walked under it and it was like a teepee of needles overhead. At least, that’s what it felt like as a child.

  Sitting next to the garbage, it smelled like that compost pile. When the neighbor kids and I used to hang out under the tree, that pile of garbage was always next to us. A small price to pay for having our own private hangout.

  Watching him, nostalgic memories of being a carefree child wafted inside my brain alongside the image of him.

  More dichotomous shit I had to deal with.

  Why couldn’t he just be a wife-beater? Then, at least, I wouldn’t have to wonder…wonder if it was just me that was the problem. If he could be so kind to his wife and the entire freaking state loved him, then was there something wrong with me?

  Had I somehow brought this on myself?

  I dropped my gaze from the window but had little time for self-pity. Loose cement crunched beneath feet, alerting me to a presence behind me. I gripped the cracked lens of my camera, keeping my focus on the small fractures. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to face the fact that I’d been caught.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I couldn’t focus on the voice of the person behind me. I was too inside my own head. My nerves were shot and I didn’t know what I was doing any more. I didn’t know right from wrong. I had been so certain everything was black and white but, dammit, it was gray.

  Swallowing, I let my grip slip from the cheap camera I’d bought from a secondhand store. Months ago when I’d started this mission, I’d only had a few dollars to my name, a name that had been completely razed by him. I’d walked into the pawn shop and picked up the camera from the final sale bin. It had served me well on this mission. I glanced back at the lens, the tiny fissures in the glass looking like broken ice. Now, I wasn’t sure if it was the mission I should be on.