Chris apologized and looked out the window, watching as the man called Patrick hobbled along, the bus quickly leaving him behind. He’d talked to him, talked to him about…a van? Something like that. He shook his head and went back to vaguely watching the world passing outside.
That night, he was in front of the television when another image swept over him, blocking all other thought. Some program by HBO started and the screen full of white snow leaped out at him from the set. Ranks and ranks of screens floated before him, covered with images, newsfeed, webpages. His entire consciousness was swimming with it, filling his head with details and titles, pictures of everything he could imagine. It rocked him back on the couch, his eyes wide, staring at the phantom picture in front of him.
“Jesus,” he said, involuntarily, gasping for breath.
“What is it?” said Stase, reaching for the remote, looking for something else to watch.
He shook his head, quickly, half trying to shake away what he was seeing, half as a response to her question.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Nothing at all.”
In dribs and drabs, more pictures came over the next couple of days, floating up into his mind at work, in coffee shops, on the bus to work and home again. He saw a collection of black birds lining a rafter, an empty church, clean-cut faces and white coats and vans, hollow-eyed people sitting motionless in different places, and one by one, little by little, they started to slot together into a coherent whole. Every evening he looked at Stase with slightly new eyes. Every evening he looked at the house, at everything they did, at everything they had done with new eyes. And every night he dreamed. He’d forgotten what they’d done and what they’d been through. Those nameless constructions he’d built within himself had forced him to forget, but he was remembering now.
The final jolt came a couple of days later, when he was walking home. There, at the end of his street, sitting at the corner and watching him approach, perched a large, black bird.
Chris’s breath went completely from him, and a shaft of cold sliced through his spine. His vision clouded, became dark, and then was full of light. The remaining memories came rushing back to him, a mental cacophony and he stopped in his tracks, unable to move.
The bird stepped along the fence, dipped its head, and then turned one eye to look at him.
He regarded it suspiciously, standing where he was, not wanting to move, wanting desperately to bolt, but not letting himself. All the time, battling against that inner struggle, was the knowledge of what it was that stood before him, perched so innocuously on the top of a fence. There was no innocence there. Not a shred of it. Not in the gaze, not in its stance, not in the mere fact of it being there.
Mustering as much calm as he could, he said slowly, deliberately, quietly, “Leave me alone now.”
The bird turned its head as if listening, and then, seemingly in response, suddenly took to the wing, black feathers beating strongly against the cool night air.
He was probably crazy for talking to a bird, but then again, he might not be. He was probably just crazy.
Chris watched it as it soared above the rooftops till it was no more than a speck against the twilit, steel-blue sky.
Then he walked slowly home.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Severance
Five days after he saw the crow, he came home after work and Stase’s things were gone. Chris stood there staring at the empty spaces not knowing what to do, not quite believing what was plainly evident in front of him. At first, it didn’t really make sense. He thought maybe the place had been burgled, but then rationality took over and he saw that all the portable stuff that a burglar might take was still there. All his things were still there too. He walked from room to room, mentally cataloging, struggling to understand, and refusing what he was seeing. And then, the bleakness washed down upon him in a wave of realization and emptiness. He just stood there.
Though he looked, knowing what had happened, there wasn’t even a note. Had she thought so little of him that she could just walk out without a word? He kept telling himself that there was some other explanation for what he was seeing.
For a while, he sat on the bed, staring blankly at the wall and wondering what he was going to do. There was no point calling her parents. She wouldn’t be there, and even if she was, they wouldn’t tell Chris. He knew that they tolerated him at best, despite the congeniality of their meetings. Stase only saw them maybe once a year now, the dutiful annual visit, so it was a fair bet she wouldn’t be there. They were too much a reminder of her old life, and in a way, she tolerated them in the same way she had tolerated things about their own relationship. She would have found someone, somewhere, away from him and difficult for him to trace.
He cursed himself for allowing her to be so secretive, perhaps for not taking enough of an interest despite the distance and the fights. He should have forced himself to bridge that space between them. She had kept so much from him. But them she always had. In the beginning, even later, none of it had mattered because she was with him, part of him, and whether separate or apart, we all have holes in our memories that we gloss over. Just in the same way that we all have parts of our shared existences that we gloss over because it’s convenient. The things that we want to remember. The things we don’t.
His despair turned to cold rage for a moment. He felt abused. How could she have left him without a word? It was gutless. If she’d cared, she would have told him something, but to sneak out while he wasn’t there… He looked around the bedroom, impotent with his anger. There wasn’t even anything of hers left to throw. He punched the air, but it did nothing, and he swung at the emptiness again, even though the gesture was pointless.
One more time, he walked around the room, opening drawers and closing them, opening the wardrobe and looking at the empty hanging space. He went into the bathroom, but all her toiletries were definitely gone too. Empty shelves stared back at Chris accusingly. He glanced at himself in the mirror, and his image stared back with hard hostility, then afraid, then with a haunted, hunted look. He turned away from the mirror and went back into the bedroom and checked again. No matter how many times he looked, the evidence didn’t change.
“Shit!” he said, and sat slowly on the side of the bed, his forehead resting on his hands. What was he going to do? He massaged the top of his head with his fingers and then looked up again. He had to approach this rationally. He looked around the room seeking something, checking that she’d left nothing, but there wasn’t a single thing out of place, not a thing that didn’t belong there by rights. Not a trace of Anastasia remained. Oh, there were their personal things, their joint acquisitions, those things purchased in deference to a certain conception of taste, but clothing, toiletries, jewelry—all gone. The worst thing was that he knew there was nothing he could do. Maybe she had gone to stay with one of her new friends, but the problem there was that he didn’t really know who those new friends were. There were snatches of names, semi-remembered in his own obsession with solving the mystery of what had happened. He didn’t ever really know where any of them lived.
Was this a punishment for what he’d done in chasing the answers to what had been happening to people, to what had been happening to them? Was Anastasia’s departure linked to what he had done? He knew there was no real answer in the asking, but he had to find somewhere to begin apportioning blame.
There was no one he could really tell.
He paced from room to room again, trying to find some confirmation that the whole thing wasn’t really happening, knowing in his guts that she had really gone. She hadn’t even talked about it as far as he could remember, but memory these days was a strangely insubstantial thing. He didn’t feel like tears. He just felt numb.
He sat for most of the evening staring at the wall, powerless. The least she could have done was leave him some confirmation of what she’d done. Twice more he wandered from room to room, looking at everything, seeking a message, a note, anything.
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The phone rang about 11:00.
“Chris?” Her voice was hesitant.
“Stase? Where the hell are you?”
“That’s not important.”
“What do you mean it’s not important? Of course it’s bloody important! Where are you?”
There was long silence. He could hear her breathing at the other end of the line. “I’m not going to tell you. I think it’s better that way.”
Chris forced himself to keep his breathing, his voice, steady. “Why are you doing this, Stase?”
Again a pause. “I just think it’s better. Let’s just call it a trial. I think we need some time apart.”
“Why are you doing this, Stase? Why are you fucking doing this?”
“Chris, I don’t want you to get angry. I just want you to listen to me, okay?”
He held his breath.
“Okay?” she said again.
“Yes, but I don’t understand. Couldn’t you have talked to me about it first?”
Her breathing was close to the phone. “If I’d talked to you about it,” she said quietly, “you would probably have talked me out of it.”
“Christ! How long have you been planning this?” His breathing was faster now, shallow.
“Listen, Chris. I don’t want you to get angry, okay? Just listen to me. I think this is for the better. We need to have this time apart. I need to work things out, and I can’t do that if we’re together. I need time alone by myself. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
She hung up the phone. She hadn’t even given him a chance to respond properly.
He stood with the receiver to his ear for several seconds, waiting for her to say something else, to pick up the phone, to do something.
“Shit!” he said, slamming the receiver down into its cradle. “Shit!”
Rage washed up first, and then dissipated just as quickly to be replaced by cold emptiness. It was impotence. She had made him totally powerless. He had a quick thought and quickly keyed the last caller number. It hadn’t sounded like the call had come from a cell. He waited, tapping his foot and closing and unclosing the fingers of his other hand. Number withheld.
“Shit!”
He paced the room, looking for something to do, something to fill the void he was feeling. He went outside, out into the backyard and stood there in the darkness, breathing shallowly.
The night was chill and there’d been rain earlier. In their tangled backyard with the piles of rotting vegetation, the smell of corruption rising damply into the air around him, he stood, feeling totally isolated from reality. There was nothing he could do. He went back inside to the lounge, switched on the television, but couldn’t watch it. There were moving images that just wouldn’t resolve into anything meaningful. He stared at them, not really seeing them, hoping somehow they would make everything all right. The sound was a meaningless blur. He sat staring into nothing, hearing Stase’s voice, and her breathing on the end of the phone.
He finally slept in his cold bed alone, strangely having enough presence of mind to set the alarm, but he awoke still feeling hollowed and impotent. He had to go to work and he had things to do. He would try to call her during the day at work. He knew she was going to be there; she’d already said that she couldn’t afford to take time off at the moment, but it was little consolation. As he drank his morning coffee, Chris was still trying to come to terms with the resentment and the sense of fragile powerlessness warring inside him. He was dreading work. What if anyone asked? What would he say? He decided to deal with that the only way he knew how; he’d just say nothing. It was like that time he’d been forced to try to disguise the marks on his face. He dreaded the looks, the knowing glances. After all, he was basically a private person and the last thing he wanted was his life on full show.
An odd thought came to him then. Stase had always wanted their life on show, as long as it was under her terms. Chris had been along for the ride, sitting back and letting her shape those terms. He thought it was a fair price to pay for what he was getting in return.
He just never expected her to leave…ever. He could hardly believe it. He didn’t really believe it still.
Any thought of doing something about the cathedral and the clean-cut guys in the van had slunk away looking furtively over its shoulder. He had more important things to worry about now, like trying to re-find what was left of his life.
People left other people, not Chris, and not Stase. Not Stase and Chris.
As he walked out the front door, the hollow walked with him. A motion over the other side of the street caught his attention. Perched on the fence across the street sat the black bird. He stopped on the top step, staring across at it accusingly. He frowned. It could have been any bird, but somehow he was convinced it was the same one, the one that had been haunting him over the past few weeks.
He called her as soon as he got to work. She started early and was always there first thing. He got her voice mail. An hour later, and he got her voicemail again. Around lunch, he huddled over the phone, not wanting anyone to overhear and he tried through the switch, but they just put him through to voicemail again. On the fifth attempt, he left her a message.
“Stase, call me please. I need to talk to you.”
For the rest of the afternoon, his phone failed to ring, and in desperation, he sent her an email. That drew no response either.
Going to her office would be pointless, he knew. She worked on the tenth floor, and she’d probably left a message with security to not let him up, not that her employers appreciated people turning up on personal business anyway. Her corporate security had built extra walls around her, walls that he knew he’d have little chance of getting through, and he wasn’t about to turn up and create a scene. He had only one choice, to go home and wait for her call. Just as he had controlled their life together, she was now controlling their separation, on her terms.
Three nights, he waited, fragile and tense. Twice during those three days he cried alone. Anger had turned to loss had turned to sorrow, then to frustration and back to sorrow again. He kept turning around to say something to her and then he’d catch himself and realize she wasn’t there. At work, he was tense and on edge, reluctant to engage in any conversation that wasn’t directly related to work, and he was noncommittal when his workmates asked about how things were going.
On the fourth day, he got her call.
“Chris, can we meet somewhere? Maybe for a drink?”
She sounded calm, and he frowned at the question. It was a strange thing to ask. Or maybe it wasn’t. Somewhere public, somewhere safe, though he couldn’t imagine what she thought he might do. Perhaps she expected retribution. Was she feeling that much guilt? He chased away thoughts of what she might have been doing in the meantime.
“Sure, where?”
She named a bar and a time.
“About seven? Sure. See you then.”
Chris wandered into the bar feeling a mix of emotions, looked for her, but she hadn’t turned up yet. He ordered a drink and found a solitary table by the door. She arrived about fifteen minutes late and didn’t notice him as she walked through the door and looked around the bar.
“Stase, over here,” he called out to her.
She was looking slightly nervous as she walked up to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”
Small talk.
“Yeah, I’m okay, I guess. You?”
She nodded.
“Can I get you a drink?” Chris said.
She started removing her coat, putting down her bag and pulled out the stool to sit. “Yeah, thanks. A gin and tonic.”
Chris watched her as he made his way to the bar and got her drink. She was looking at the other patrons, around the room, everywhere but at him. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, drawing deeply. In her other hand she kept hold of the lighter, tapping it briskly on the table in a regular, nervous rhythm. She looked drawn and ill at ease.
Chris carried
her drink back, pulled out his stool and sat opposite, his elbows on the table, not bothering to reach for his drink.
“So,” he said.
She sipped at her drink and took another drag of her cigarette.
“So, how are you doing, really?” he said.
Stase looked at him, a brief, glancing look, and then looked away again. She shrugged. “It’s okay.”
Chris picked up his drink and took a sip. He’d been hoping for something else, not this.
“What did you want to talk about?” he said quietly.
There was hesitation before she spoke again. “I need to come round to the house and get some things. I wanted to sort out a time with you.”
He frowned. “All you had to do was come over, Stase. Why the need for all this? Why don’t you stop this nonsense and just come back home? I don’t know why—“
She held up a hand. “I didn’t want this. I just wanted to see how you were, have a quiet chat and work out a time when I could get the things.”
“You can come over any time.”
“No, I want you to be there. It’s better if you’re there.”
“What’s better, Stase?”
She shook her head and took a drag of her cigarette. “So when can I come over?”
“Whenever you want. Thursday. Is Thursday okay?”
She nodded. They both sat, saying nothing, not meeting each other’s eyes, sipping at their drinks. Chris’s glass was getting empty, and he turned it around and around on top of the table, waiting for her to say something else. She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, and took a last sip of her drink.
“I’ll always be your friend, you know,” she said.
Chris just looked at her.
“Okay,” she said, reaching for her coat. “I’ve got to go.”
“Is that it?” he said.
“I’ll see you on Thursday evening,” she said, reaching for her bag. Then she was gone, leaving Chris staring at the door. He looked down at his glass, pushed it across the table with one finger till it stopped, resting against her empty glass in front of where she had been sitting.
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