We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  “What happened to your face?” the security manager asks after he has been staring for too long. It is a fair question, although one you are rarely asked.

  You do not tell him what happened to your face. You do not tell him that, after your husband’s death, you played Alice and pushed your face through a bathroom mirror.

  Instead, you tell him dolphins sleep with one eye open.

  That peanuts are one of the ingredients in dynamite.

  “Lady,” he says. “Look, lady. Just go home. And don’t come back. Ever.”

  * * *

  Two months go by and they still have not located the missing girl. You keep forgetting where she is—Alabama? Mississippi? Anyway, it’s someplace far from Manhattan, but it could be your next door neighbor, you are so enthralled. Oprah has the girl’s parents on one afternoon, and you all but make a party of it. You bake cookies and buy soda and even, toward the end of the hour, fix yourself a cocktail. Police keep searching for a body, says the mother, but we believe she is still alive. The father agrees. So does Oprah. Personally, you doubt the girl is still alive, and wonder what it takes to lie to yourself and make yourself believe that. It must be a parent-child thing, you think. Because when your husband died, you did not lie to yourself. He was right there and there was no denying any of it. You couldn’t. Even with Oprah on your side, you couldn’t.

  He complains of stomach pains a few days before he dies. There is even an appointment with Doctor Mendes on the schedule; you write it on a Post-It note and stick it on the refrigerator. It is the least you can do. He works and you stay home, thinking about being an artist but unable to do it. All you have is shoddy pottery with too many undulations. “Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me you didn’t sit here watching T.V. all day.” Of course not—you’ve made the doctor’s appointment and scribbled your own reminder on the Post-It.

  In 1906, one of the earliest radio transmissions of actual decipherable sound came in the form of a resonant and eerie solo violin replacing the dash-and-dot theology of Morse code to a group of shipboard radio operators at sea. The tune was recognizable as “Silent Night,” and the sound of that lone violin, for only a brief period of history, filled up the entire world.

  Because facts are facts.

  You cannot sleep without him because he is still here. You feel him in your half-sleep when you roll over. His warmth still spreads across the mattress to your side. Once, you even jar yourself awake when you swear his arm comes across your shoulder and pulls you against him.

  Maggie and Joel, the handsome couple, check in on you from time to time. They bring foil-hooded casseroles in hot crockery and practically want to force-feed you. You are too thin, they say. Your eyes are practically sinking back into your head, they say. Almost conspiratorially, Maggie informs you your breasts are shrinking.

  But the problem is—

  The problem is—

  * * *

  The problem is he never makes it to Doctor Mendes because he is killed in an automobile accident.

  * * *

  You take part-time work editing a local magazine. You can do it from home, which is nice, and it gives you something to do with your free time. Because all your time is free time and you are beginning to lose yourself. You enjoy working on the magazine and, after a while, even make a suggestion that they should include a segment about strange facts in every issue. That would be something, you say. Because there are so many strange facts. Like sixty percent of all potatoes in the U.S. come from Idaho. Like most hamsters wink instead of blink.

  But the problem is—

  * * *

  The problem is his car swerves off the road and crashes through the median into oncoming traffic. It is a mess. There is a lot of news coverage. For a while, it overshadows the missing girl in Mississippi. Or Alabama. Or wherever. There is talk that he must have fallen asleep behind the wheel. Some eyewitnesses say the car just slid over all the lanes and crashed through the guardrail. They say he was slumped forward over the steering wheel, although no one is positive he was asleep.

  At a bar with Maggie, you tell her how the medical examiner found all that shit inside his stomach, that it was something called pica, where you subconsciously eat indigestible materials. Maggie does not believe you at first because it all sounds so bizarre so you go to the library together and get books. Maggie is shocked. Then she says, “You poor thing,” and looks like she wants to hug you but doesn’t. As if bad luck is contagious. You tell her he did not fall asleep—that he was bent over the steering wheel because of the severe stomach cramps. You tell her about the appointment you set with Doctor Mendes and how, sometimes, he would have difficulty moving around because the pain was so great.

  “It says pica is brought on by great amounts of stress,” Maggie says, reading from the book.

  You do not want to hear this.

  You think, Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, and do not want to hear this.

  * * *

  So then a funny thing happens: the distraught mother and father are questioned by the police in the disappearance of their daughter. Maybe other people see this coming, but it takes you by surprise. You keep thinking of the way they held out hope on Oprah, and the way Oprah’s hand sat on the mother’s knee throughout the interview. If Oprah believes you, does it matter what the police think? They are not charged with anything, the parents—it is simply an interview—but the media throws a parade, and there are awful pictures and headlines in the newspapers the following day.

  And still, the girl is missing.

  You tell him about the girl they still have not found and he makes a Jimmy Hoffa joke. You do not find this funny. You tell him you do not find this funny. He kisses the top of your head and says something you cannot fully make out. Sleep is quickly claiming you both.

  Because you’ve started this thing together.

  This crazy, crazy life together.

  The words he says that you cannot make out are suddenly very clear. Because you’ve been hearing them all along. You’ve been hearing them for quite some time. Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me you didn’t sit here watching T.V. all day.

  * * *

  At restaurants and shopping malls, alone, you hum “Silent Night.” Aloud, you sing the part that goes, “All is calm, all is bright,” and are pretty sure those are the words. You also overhear a little girl discussing how Alice slips back and forth through the looking glass to her mother, who listens to the child with passing interest. You smile and order a large iced tea and a salad. At least you are eating again.

  * * *

  Tell me—

  He says, “I’m so worried about us.”

  You hear him but convince yourself that you do not.

  * * *

  They find the girl on a Wednesday. Alive. In the basement of a farmhouse in Mississippi or Alabama—one or the other. Two men with grizzled beards and flannel shirts are arrested. Oprah is seen giving a double thumbs-up on her commercials. Police swarm the farmhouse and mill about like one hundred people who’ve lost a contact lens.

  She had been kidnapped and the parents are shown on T.V. clutching each other and clutching their daughter, their faces collapsed into red, sobbing crevices. There is no apology by the news media for their heartless front page renderings and baseless assumptions; it all seems readily and conveniently forgotten in the face of this wonderful news.

  * * *

  You get a phone call from Doctor Mendes’s office wondering why your husband skipped his appointment. You do not tell them about the car accident. Instead, you tell them a pig’s orgasm can last for thirty minutes. Then hang up.

  * * *

  Following his death, you play Alice and try to push your head through the bathroom mirror. They save you by stitching your face up, and although many people stare—and Maggie and Joel shake their heads and look like they want to collapse into tears—it is only the goddamn security manager at some nameless drug store who finally asks about it.

  And
what do you tell him?

  What?

  Tell me, tell me, tell me—

  Facts. You tell him facts. Because that is all that makes sense. No matter how insane or ridiculous or bizarre, a fact is a fact and it does not change. You find comfort in this.

  * * *

  Following his death, you play Alice. But they caught you in time and stitched you up.

  Next time, they won’t be so lucky.

  There was a fire and there was the sound of much ammunition shooting off. It scared the horse and it began kicking up its hind legs. The fire brought down the pillars. The horse was kicking up its legs and someone shot it down so it would not do any more damage to the storefront and so it would not hit someone in the chest.

  Painstation

  There comes a time in every fanatic’s life when he or she is confronted—inarguably—with the severity of their own psychoses. It is at that moment a decision is to be made: pursuit or disengagement? It is the mind’s way of warning its host that he or she has crossed the threshold of reasonableness and has stepped foot into the muddy trenches of human decline.

  Such a realization was made clear to Keanan as he crouched behind the wheel of his Civic in the dark, hidden from streetlights, and watched Casey Madigan disappear into Façade. The notion struck him like a throng—a thousand metal utensils clattering to a cement floor—and he broke out in a sweat. Evenings, he’d stay late at the office because she stayed late. Four cubicles down from his, he could adjust his computer monitor at an angle that would reflect her image. She hardly spoke to him. He didn’t care. Watching was sufficient.

  Keanan cracked the Civic’s window. Frigid November air whistled into the car, fragrant with the stink of the East River. Across the street, dull sodium lights flooded the stone front and gold-and-white awning of Façade. He’d never been inside the club, knew nothing about it. Yet, as he watched Casey slip inside the smoked-glass doors, it quickly became a place of severe importance to him. In his mind, he watched the svelte clockwork of her buttocks shift beneath the tight fabric of her skirt; imagined himself running his hands through the breath of her hair; caught glimpses into the pursed openings between the buttons of her blouse, and at the treasures within.

  Pushing the car in gear, he spun around the rain-soaked alley and headed back toward his midtown apartment. Once there, he showered, masturbated bitterly, and fell asleep with his pale and knobby legs draped over one side of the bed.

  One evening a full week later, as Keanan watched a collection of Mexican janitors with lazy fascination push through the office, Casey strode past his desk. The lilac scent of her perfume coupled with the swoosh of her pantyhose jerked him from his daze, and he watched her walk, stifled by fixation. Sitting up in his chair, he shuffled through the paperwork cluttering his desk until he found the Façade’s dining brochure, folded it, and stuffed it into a desk drawer.

  He peered around the wall of his cubicle and stared at Casey by the copy machine. His neck felt prickly and his heartbeat was racing. The back of her legs—specifically the creases at the back of her knees—caused him to shudder, and he quickly turned away. In his mind, he embraced her warmth as if she required such affection, needed it from him, and he wondered what her breath would feel like along his neck, what her mouth tasted like. With almost youthful fascination, he contemplated the color, shape, texture of her nipples. He contemplated everything.

  The swoosh of her stockings was suddenly very close to him. Her head peered around the side of his cubicle.

  “Fucking copier is jammed,” she said.

  He saw her face as something exclusively designed to accommodate his obsession. Eyes, mouth, nose—her perfection was something more than evident. Not for the first time, Keanan wondered how a creature of such exquisite splendor had been created: what sort of god had, in all his malevolence, felt the desire to provoke him with such unattainable magnificence?

  He stood, palms sweating against the pleats in his pants. “I’ll check it out. Could just be a stuck piece of paper.”

  When she finally left for the evening, he followed her out into the street. It was cold and the bundle of his coat would hide his face if she happened to look in his direction. She paused amidst a wedge of pedestrians before a crosswalk while waiting for a break in traffic. Vapor wafted from her mouth. Absently, Keanan wondered what it would be like to inhale her exhalations. Would that somehow make her part of him? Almost?

  She took a cab to the East Side. Keanan followed at a safe distance in his Civic. With assumed knowledge of her destination, he felt confident keeping a healthy distance behind the cab. Three out of the five nights this week she’d hopped a taxi and disappeared beneath the gold-and-white awning of Façade.

  Up ahead, he saw the cab’s brake lights flare in the darkness. Tapping his own brakes, he eased the Civic to a halt in the rutted, rain-swept alley. His breath jabbed at the windshield, fogged it up. He saw Casey pay the driver and vanish through the tinted glass doors as the taxi backed up, did a one-point turn, and zipped past Keanan’s car. Adjusting his tie, he popped the door and hurried toward the club.

  The interior of Façade was poorly lit and only moderately populated for a Friday evening. A pianist at the end of the bar tinkled the high keys. The dull murmur of conversation rose from a sparse arrangement of circular tables to his left. The air, blue and cloudy with cigar smoke, burned his eyes. He pushed alongside the bar to his right, grabbed a handful of cocktail napkins, blotted his eyes. Looking up, he saw Casey pass down a dark, narrow corridor at the back of the club and disappear. To pursue her now, he knew, would be ridiculous. Yet there was something nestled in the creases of his brain, forcing him to continue, to follow her. At that instant, nothing else seemed to matter—his surroundings had suddenly become ineffectual and without consequence.

  A clean-shaven bartender in a shirt and tie materialized. “Get you something?”

  Keanan shook his head. With the stealth of a drunkard, he wove between a pair of tables and slipped into the darkened corridor. The din of conversation from the bar was immediately blocked out. Sharp, acidic smells filtered into his nose. Two restroom doors stood opposite each other further down the corridor. He paused outside the women’s room, absently chewing at his lower lip, a foot tapping on the linoleum. The door was open a crack, the light on. He pushed his head back against the wall and peeked inside.

  The restroom was vacant.

  Where did she go? he wondered.

  Continuing further down the corridor, the echo of his footfalls became more and more prevalent. The stink of acid now burned his eyes. Unable to see properly, he ran one hand along the paneled wall, wincing at the sticky feel of it.

  He stopped. There was a closed door at the end of the hallway, a watercolor caricature of a grinning skeleton in a top hat painted on it.

  Go home, a voice in his head spoke up. Go before you embarrass yourself.

  The voice was powerless. His mind—stronger than any voice could hope to be—summoned Casey Madigan in all her angelic grandeur, nude before him like a thousand missed opportunities suddenly united into one perfect instance, one final chance to do what he needed so badly to do.

  He pushed against the door and it opened with little protest. Before him, a wooden staircase dipped into blackness. The stink of sulfur now accosted him, potent and unapologetic. Something else, too…

  Lilacs, he thought. Her perfume.

  What was at the bottom of the stairs? There was no light switch—none that he could see, anyway—and there didn’t appear to be a railing to hold. Despite this, he felt he could not be swayed; he suddenly needed to see her, at least one last time, before going home. His tenement was getting darker and darker with the passage of each day. How long could he stand there in the dark, listening to the groanings of his neighbors through the walls, while his mind repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated? Eyes closed, he only saw her face. Her image: reflected on the black walls of his cramped bedroom, his cramped mind. Each m
orning the spray of the shower against his body was her embrace…was individual fingers poking and prodding and caressing. It got to the point where he’d wake up, his face sore and puffy from sobbing in his sleep, curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor. Or in the hall closet. Or on the kitchen counter.

  It’s been long enough, he thought, feeling as if he were actually talking to her. I need to take you now. I need another look. Nothing else matters.

  He started down the steps, the planks protesting beneath his feet. The sensation of submergence—of sinking into the earth—grabbed him around the throat and he suddenly found it difficult to breathe. The stairwell emptied into a spacious, cellar-like room with a low ceiling and track lighting. The walls were cinderblock and black with moss. Faintly, he could hear the pump of industrial music vibrating the floor and in his ears. A series of bolted steel doors stood at the far end of the room. A shape shifted in the gloom, its movement giving it away.

  “Hello?” Keanan’s voice quaked.

  The shape stepped into the light. It was a man, constructed primarily of muscle and leather, with a shaved head and deep, insect-like eyes. He acknowledged Keanan without significance, and situated himself on a barstool in front of the row of steel doors.

  Keanan approached timidly. Had he been mistaken? Surely Casey had not come down here…