Rock, Paper, Scissors

by Naja Marie Aidt

  “What I want? After all this? Don’t you think we have a whole lot to discuss? For one thing, I’d like an explanation.” She smiles contemptuously. Just one moment in the sun and he feels so hot it’s as though his blood is boiling; his headache’s splitting his skull in two, as if his cranium has become too small, as if the tissue in his head is pressing on the helmet of his skull. Patricia shoots him a cold glance. “You’d almost think you hate me,” he says. “Do you hate me?” No answer. “Why do you hate me all of a sudden? Haven’t I helped you and supported you as best I could?”

  “Just stop it.” She looks up and regards a ginkgo tree’s columnar shape. “What do I want?” she says, calmly. “Why do you keep asking me that? You just heard what I want.”

  “But this has got to be a joint decision! For God’s sake, we live together! I love you!”

  “Oh, do you now?” she says, still without looking at him.

  “Maybe we can have a baby together, one we know is ours. Later. That’s mine. Okay? Why are you so stubborn? Please look at me, Patricia?” Her eyes linger briefly on his, then she turns back to the gingko tree.

  “It’s very simple,” she says. “I want a baby. I’ve wanted a baby for a long time—unlike you. Now I’m pregnant, and obviously I don’t want to have an abortion. Is that so strange?”

  He stares at her profile. Her beautiful, aquiline nose and her fine little ears, from which a single white pearl dangles in a slender filament of gold. He loves her ears.

  “Yes,” he says. “I think it’s very strange. There’s a strong possibility that you got pregnant that night. No normal person would run the risk. I just can’t understand how you can even consider having the baby, especially when you can take a test and actually find out if he was the one who got you pregnant.”

  She turns her head and looks him straight in the eyes. “What would I do with that knowledge? I’d still have to give birth, either way. To a dead child, mind you.”

  A pause. Once again he feels a surge of powerless rage, a hatred of this fucking fetus that’s sloshing around in Patricia’s body, that has possessed her, that has fucking possessed her, he thinks, sweat rolling off him. He says, “Then you’ve got to put it up for adoption. If you’re going to be so fucking obstinate.”

  For an instant her eyes spark to life. There’s a brief flash of terror, which is followed again by a cool, stiff expression. “I hope you don’t really mean that.” He shrugs irritably. “What else?” “You know what?” she says, slowly raising her right hand while turning toward him. She points at him. “You listen closely.” Her voice is low and savage. “I know better than anyone how to live with what happened to me. Don’t you lecture me. Don’t you make demands. Don’t you ask me to put anything up for adoption. I want to have a normal life again. And I will. A life more normal and joyful than my last few months with you.” She lowers her finger, but continues to stare at him. “I have my reasons for not involving you in this, Thomas.” She studies his face. His nose, mouth, chin. It feels very uncomfortable. As if she’s gauging him. As if he were a stranger. Then she looks into his eyes.

  “I’ve rented an apartment near the river,” she says. “I’m moving out. I’m moving, Thomas. I’m leaving you, and that’s how it is.” He opens his mouth to talk, but nothing comes out. “That’s how it is,” she repeats. She stands, clutches her green suede bag, and hurries across the scorched lawn. He remains seated on the bench, in the sunlight, unable to move. “Patricia!” he shouts after a moment. He gets clumsily to his feet. “Patricia!” With all the strength he can muster in his lungs, he roars her name across the hospital campus. But she doesn’t turn around.

  When she’s out of sight, he slumps onto the bench. Everything’s unreal, blurry. He buries his head between his knees. A normal and joyful life, she said. The opposite of a life with him. In the morning, when she goes to work, before he’s gotten up, the little click of the lock when the door closes. Not a word of goodbye, he thinks, furious. He has difficulty catching his breath. And yet he lights a cigarette, the nicotine clawing at his throat. Thoughts and images swirl around in his brain, his headache growing more and more intense: Patricia, naked in the shower, smiling as he hands her a towel; Patricia sitting opposite him in the kitchen one winter evening, a glass of wine in her hand; private conversations they’ve shared while lying in bed in the dark of night; the sensation of gliding into her; the wet softness of her mouth; her hand on his back. Is he the one who impregnated her, in the car on the way to Kristin’s, maybe, or on her desk in her office? Or is it the lover he suspected her of being with all those nights in May when she didn’t come home? And: Why does she have Luke’s number? Now he pictures Luke’s oil-squirted hands sliding across Patricia’s skin, there in Kristin’s kitchen. Did she have an affair with Luke? The rapist left his sperm in Patricia, but the police couldn’t find a match in their database. They have nothing at all, no traces, no description. Thomas shakes his head slightly. Patricia’s voice early one morning: “I think of it as a bad dream. I won’t let him mean anything. Not one thing.” Thomas flings his cigarette and arches forward, resting his head in his hands. The sun is burning his back and the nape of his neck. And Jesus, this past Monday when he came home from work, she was sitting on the basement stairwell just like he’s sitting now, her head in her hands, silent as a stone pillar. It startled him, he hadn’t seen her until after he’d been waiting at the elevator for at least two minutes. She hadn’t made a peep. “What are you doing, Patricia?”

  “I wanted to see the place where it happened.” She turned her head slowly to look at him. And then she’d shown him exactly where it happened. Around thirty feet down the hallway that runs between the storage units. Not far from the microwave and the money. She’d lain down on her back. “I lay like this,” she said, her voice lucid, “right here. I don’t think it took very long, but it felt like . . . like an eternity.” She lay there, unmoving, her eyes closed and breathing heavily. Didn’t even flinch. It had made him terribly nauseated. When they were back in the apartment, he threw up in the kitchen sink as she chugged orange juice directly from the carton. “You’re so thin-skinned,” she said. And shortly afterward, as she wiped her mouth on her sleeve, “I’ve signed up for karate. You should too. It strengthens the spirit.”

  “The spirit? What do you mean by that?”

  “Karate helps you focus and it empowers you. It’s not just self-defense. It’s a lifestyle.”

  “I’m not interested in changing my lifestyle,” he replied.

  “No,” she said. “If only.”

  And now, here on this bench where he sits hyperventilating, crouched over, boiling hot, dripping with sweat, writhing, his headache pounding intensely, he thinks that by then she’d already made up her mind. Of course she had. All that stuff about the spirit and karate was a critique of him, which he hadn’t understood at the time. She was ridiculing me. Rage bubbles inside him again. But a moment later he’s sobbing hoarsely. She’s leaving me. She has left me. A chasm. A black hole to disappear into. My life is vanishing. A hand settles on his shoulder, startling him. A muscular porter in uniform looks at him worriedly.

  “You shouldn’t sit in the sun. It’s too hot. Get under the shade, so it won’t make you sick.”

  “I am sick!” Thomas shouts, sobbing. He leaps to his feet and seizes his bicycle, then flees from the hospital as fast as he can. His eyes flicker, his vision wobbly, blinding white spots, sensory overload, he pounds the pedals as if the devil were on his heels, his headache feeling like a tight-fitting cap outfitted with razor blades. He races through a large intersection, and the sun thrusts its unbearable light right in his face, an eighteen-wheeler drives straight at him, an eighteen-wheeler is about to run him over, it nearly catches his back wheel, the bike rack, but he dodges it, he dodges it at the last possible moment, the cars are everywhere now, and he’s propelling forward like a rocket, disregarding the red light, he’s shouting and screaming at the truck driver, at all the others
, giving them all every dirty hand gesture he knows, outstretched arm, middle finger, and: cuckold, Christ, “Fuck you,” he screams. “Fuck you all!” But after another fifteen-hundred feet he’s about to keel over, he doesn’t have any more strength, and suddenly he’s dizzy. His entire body weak, he careens down a side street, his breathing raspy and dry; it feels as though his eyes are being squeezed out of their sockets, the tremendous pressure from within, from the brain, his bicycle tips over, he crawls across the dirty flagstones of the sidewalk, props himself against the base of an apartment building. Sitting with his back against the wall, right beside the building entrance, and now he really feels nauseated. Dreadfully nauseated. His gut fizzles and bubbles. He spits up a small quantity of greenish bile. He can barely see anything now, everything’s a gray-white mass. He feels the wall against the back of his head. He’s freezing in his sweat-soaked shirt. His teeth chatter. His cell phone rings in his pocket. And then he passes out.

  “Hello,” a man’s voice says from far away, and he can feel soft pats against his cheek. “Hello? Wake up. Can you hear me? I think he just fainted.” Slowly the voice reaches Thomas in his pitch-black depths. “But is there a pulse?” says another, softer voice. And then: “Oh, good.” Thomas forces his eyes open, the sunlight is bright. He stares right into a mouth filled with perfect white teeth, and the mouth speaks again: “I think he’s waking up. Hi! Welcome back. You fainted. We’ve called an ambulance.” And the other voice: “Did you hit your head?”

  It takes a little while for him to understand what’s being said, but when he does, he runs his hand over his scalp—no, no pains. He shakes his head. A man in his early thirties stands over him. Behind him is a woman, a stroller, a large white dog. The man and woman are both smiling at him. “Glad you’re all right,” the man says, helping him to his feet.

  In the ambulance they take his temperature and pinch his skin. “Red and dry,” one medic says privately to the other. “Not much fever, badly dehydrated, low blood pressure.” He’s wheeled into the emergency room and put in a bed with green linen, shielded from the other side of the room by a curtain the same color as the sheets. He’s given an IV, and the solution drips slowly into Thomas’s parched body. The nurse smiles and assures him that he’ll feel better soon. He tells Thomas that a doctor will stop by shortly to check on him. Until then he should rest. And he does. He dozes immediately, and dreamlike sequences mix with the sounds around him: low voices, people walking past, a suppressed sob, trolleys clattering with instruments, and the periodic screeching of a baby. He feels his body sinking into the mattress. Senses his breathing growing even. He has only one thought: I want to lie like this forever. Nothing can disturb me here. Send me back to the darkness, to peace. But the doctor disturbs him not long after. There’s nothing wrong with him—apart from lack of fluids and heat exhaustion. The doctor examines the bump on his head and doesn’t believe it’s anything to worry about. “Do you have a headache? Dizziness?” No, not anymore. They’re both gone. “We’ll keep you here for a few hours. When you’re sufficiently hydrated, you can go home. And remember to drink plenty of fluids in the future. Eat some salt, eat something sweet. It is summer,” he says, a trifle irritated. “One of the hottest in many years.” Thomas nods. “Eighteen years,” he says softly. The doctor exits the room, pulling the green curtain closed and leaving Thomas alone in his little green shelter. He closes his eyes and thinks: Don’t sleep, don’t sleep. What if I have a concussion after all, he thinks.

  Then he falls asleep.

  It’s almost 9:00 P.M. when Thomas leaves the hospital, walking right past the bench where Patricia left him. Stooped, he trudges across the desiccated grounds, and the heat is nearly as intense as it was during the afternoon. He doesn’t have any interest in going home, but he has even less interest in doing anything else. He can’t stomach the thought of staying at Maloney’s or Jenny’s. He doesn’t want to explain, doesn’t want to drag anyone into the chaos his life has become in the course of a few hours. Alice has called and left a message. They’ll finish painting in the morning. Only four days remain until the store opens. Thomas progresses slowly through the streets. The fresh fluids in his body have done him wonders. Maybe Patricia’s at home in the apartment, and they can discuss this properly. On the train home he decides he’ll be calm. Not get bent out of shape. The new store is the most important thing now; he’s got to remember that, he can’t have a meltdown. He considers his condition for a moment, but it’s as if the heat exhaustion and the hysteria have completely drained him of emotion, his unease is gone. But he’s hungry. He stops at the tapas restaurant and eats standing at the bar. He stuffs himself with chorizo, shrimp, and aioli; he asks for ham dressed in garlic and parsley, for fried calamari, stuffed chili peppers, and roasted potatoes in tomato sauce. When he comes home, Patricia’s not there. The living room’s crammed with moving boxes. Thomas takes a cold shower, smokes a cigarette, and thinks about how, in the future, he’ll be able to smoke wherever he feels like it. He can fucking smoke in bed, if he wants. He stares hatefully at the cat, who stares back. “What?” he says. “What do you want?” It must understand that Thomas doesn’t want its company. With its tail raised, it walks out of the living room, and soon he hears it scratching in its litter box in the bathroom. Exhausted, Thomas lies down on the clean sheets. She can kiss my ass, he thinks. She can sail away on her own fucking sea. The fucking bitch. But then he’s close to whimpering again. He rolls onto his side, pulls himself together, and glides again into a hybrid state: Now he’s awake. Now he’s asleep. One moment he’s dreaming that he’s walking with Maloney through a kind of tunnel or tube. But it’s also like being under the sea. And he hears the faint whoosh of cars on the street. Maloney laughs. The next moment he opens his eyes and gazes out the window. The blinds aren’t closed, and he sees the illuminated windows in the building across the street. It’ll be hot when the sun comes up, but he can’t bring himself to get out of bed to close the blinds. Then he finds himself in some sort of music competition, a TV show. He’s standing on stage. He’s playing the saxophone. He’s showered with applause. A woman with a pageboy haircut thrusts her glistening red lips toward him. Is that a feather boa tickling his chest? When he wakes, the cat is curled across his belly. In disgust he shoves it over on Patricia’s side of the bed and gets up to take a leak.

  Already at 7:00 A.M., he hears her shoving moving boxes around. Groggy with sleep, he has almost forgotten what happened, but then it returns, a storm raging through his body; his stomach clenches, his throat constricts. The bedroom is dark, he can’t remember closing the blinds. Maybe she did it. Maybe she was in here while he slept. He sits up in bed. The bed is moist with sweat. He stands in the living room doorway, buck naked. Patricia glances up at him, then continues stuffing books in a box.

  “Don’t take my books,” he says.

  “Of course I’m not taking your books.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’ll be picking up the rest of my stuff on Saturday, once I get the keys to my apartment. Luke promised to help me move.”

  “Luke?”

  She looks at him. “Yes, Luke. And one of my colleagues.”

  “Whose name is?”

  “Whose name is Kamal.” Briefly she scrutinizes his nakedness. “Aren’t you going to get dressed?”

  “No.”

  “Oookay.” She grabs another stack of books off the shelf.

  “So that’s just it?” he asks. “Is that all you have to say to me?”

  “What should I say, Thomas?”

  He turns and goes to the kitchen. He starts the coffee, drinks a glass of pineapple juice. He lights a cigarette. Smoking, naked, he returns to the living room and stands right in front of her. “For one thing you could tell me if this is only about the pregnancy, or whether you stopped loving me a long time ago. And you could tell me whether you’re seeing someone else. Is there someone else? Where were you all those nights?”

  Sh
e sighs, then sits on the edge of the sofa. “It’s very simple,” she says, surprisingly mild. “It’s been hard for a long time, and when you assaulted me at the office, that was the last straw. I couldn’t forgive you, however much I tried, because it was violent, Thomas—no matter how you look at it. That became totally clear to me after I was raped. What you did to me was an assault. And no, I’m not seeing anyone else. I’ve been out having fun, I’ve met different men, but I’m not seeing anyone. And I’m not interested in having a relationship with anyone. I want to be alone. I have this great need to be alone right now.” She leans back and drapes her arms across the spine of the sofa. “I’m not actually mad at you. I was yesterday because it was a stressful situation.”

  “So what is it?”