The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  She went back to the kitchen, and Peter glanced at the books on her mantle. Odd selection, nothing but medical books. Gray’s Anatomy. Davis and Christopher’s Textbook of Surgery. Maybe she was a nurse or a medical student. She had said really nothing about herself.

  Angel came in with two glasses. God, she was lovely! A goddess from a dream. Made Sarah look like a stick of furniture. She took a small sip from her glass but didn’t offer the other glass to him.

  “You have to earn yours,” she said.

  Peter bowed. “Your slave awaits your command, my mistress.”

  “Remove your clothing,” she commanded. “Every stitch. Your mistress wants to see if you are worthy of her attention.”

  Peter loved games like this. He began with his shoes and socks, then unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off. Angel sat on the sofa and watched while he undid his pants, let them fall, and kicked them away. He had worn sexy black nylon briefs in hopes that his visit with Sarah would turn out differently; now he slid them down with the slow showmanship of a stripper. His penis began to swell with its own theatrical flair.

  “Has your eager slave earned his mistress’s approbation?” he asked.

  “The mistress is satisfied with the immensity of her subject’s devotion,” she said, and handed him his glass.

  Peter sipped. It was cheap scotch, rather bitter, but at this point in the evening he didn’t care.

  “Perhaps it would please my mistress to follow suit?” he suggested.

  Angel smiled. “For the moment she chooses to look. Then, perhaps, it will please her to touch. And then, if her servant is worthy, she may command him to undress her. Now, stand over here and allow your mistress to examine her servant’s body more closely.”

  He came close to the sofa. Angel’s eyes on his body felt even more exciting than hands. She ordered him to turn. Peter drank his scotch and basked in the sun of her eyes, felt them moving down his muscular back to his buttocks, which he tensed for her benefit. Every sweaty hour of working out had been worth the toil. He moved his feet farther apart, picturing the delicious glimpse she was getting of his balls. He gulped down the rest of his scotch.

  “Stand there like a good boy,” she ordered. “Your mistress shall return anon.”

  Peter heard her move into the hallway, probably to the bathroom. Getting undressed, no doubt—and he was a little disappointed, remembering her suggestion that he would be allowed to undress her. Well, that wasn’t going to ruin his evening. Too bad Angel’s apartment wasn’t directly above Sarah’s so she could hear the bedsprings squeak—rub it right in the bitch’s face!

  He wandered to the kitchen, found the bottle of scotch on the counter, and refilled his glass. Maybe ice would cut the bitterness, but when he opened the freezer he couldn’t see any ice, just some meat or something wrapped in cellophane. No, it looked more like cabbage heads. Who in the hell froze cabbage heads?

  He picked one up, looked at it, and felt his legs buckle beneath him. His arms and legs suddenly had no strength, and he collapsed to the floor, unable to move. The severed human head lying on his chest stared at him with frozen eyes. Beneath a frosty black mustache, its thin lips were frozen open in a snarl.

  He saw Angel standing above him. She picked up the horrible cellophane-wrapped thing, put it back in the freezer, and shut the door.

  She smiled. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Didn’t you want me to give you head?”

  Chapter Seven

  Sarah awoke from a dream of being smothered, and for a moment she didn’t recognize the room. For some reason she was expecting her childhood bedroom, and this wasn’t it. In a bewildered panic, she raced through her mental files of every place she had lived: Peter’s house, the three apartments in Madison, the place—oh yes. Shit. This place.

  In the same instant, she remembered what had happened last night, Peter singing “Strangers in the Night” while he stumbled up the fire escape with the woman upstairs. No wonder she had slept so badly.

  The woman upstairs—Sarah realized she had been dreaming about her. Something creepy, a spectral blonde glowing like a will-o-the-wisp in the moonlight, but she couldn’t recall any more of the dream.

  She got up slowly, one limb at a time, aching because her second-hand mattress sagged into a circulation-choking rut. She stood naked and stretched, trying to get rid of the kinks and twinges and the residue of her dream. Already hot. She went to the kitchen and discovered a new outrage: she was out of coffee.

  As she drove to the grocery store, she saw Peter’s Volvo parked around the corner at the side of her building. It was still there when she drove home. The coffee made her feel no better, nor did a bath. She tried to write but couldn’t. Peter had pulled some dirty tricks before, but nothing like this.

  Yesterday he had started off seeming so contrite, so eager to change, but just when she was tempted to give him another chance he had started bellowing at her, and she knew his bellow all too well. Usually it was a prelude to slamming her up against the wall and slapping her till her nose bled. He weighed twice what she weighed; it wasn’t fair.

  For two years she had tried to excuse the abuse. After all, he had never punched her with a fist, though sometimes he pounded her against the wall hard enough to leave bruises and an aching skull. Two years of that crap, and she had still wanted to believe him last night. And even after he had started yelling and jabbing a corkscrew at her like a dagger, she had suggested he could call her and they could try to be friends.

  So he responded by saying “Fuck you” and going home with her upstairs neighbor.

  I’m crazier than he is, she thought. Crazy for ever putting up with him. Crazy for wanting to give him another chance. Crazy for caring what he’s doing up there.

  In the afternoon Sarah stole out for another look. The Volvo was still there. Unbelievable! Here she was, trying to carve out a little bit of peace in this wretched hellhole so she could write a book, and even that measly scrap of solace he had to steal from her. It seemed like a new way of slamming her against a wall. She had put up with too much abuse from him already. She wasn’t going to put up with this.

  She climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing and stood at the woman’s door, intending to pound on it and demand to see Peter. Or had she in fact come up to eavesdrop? Certainly she was straining to hear them in there, a snatch of baby-talk, a pig-like grunt, a bedspring squeaking, any damned thing.

  Sick, she thought. Still, she listened. It was even hotter up here, the air wet and stale and already making her perspire. Was that a moan?

  She heard a quiet creaking behind her and spun around. It was the ghost, peering at her from his half-open door, face white as paper, his eyes pale blue.

  “Sorry,” he said, his voice as faint as his footsteps were each morning. “I thought it was someone at my door.”

  Sarah just stared.

  “Are you a friend of hers?” he asked.

  “No. I . . . I just wanted to meet my new neighbors.” Sarah was whispering, not wanting Peter to hear her voice through the door. “I haven’t met her yet.”

  The ghost stared at the woman’s door, then at Sarah. “Nor have I,” he said, “and I’ve been here a long time. I don’t think she’s around very often.”

  “Well, she was here last night,” Sarah murmured.

  “Was she really? I didn’t see her.”

  Something about his manner, his whiteness, more like smoke or fog than a person. Almost not there.

  “Perfect neighbor,” he whispered. “Never around, I mean.” Then he caught himself and said, “No, I didn’t mean I never want to see you around.”

  Embarrassment brought some blood to his face, making him for a moment look more like a human than a ghost. A shy Kafka bug, embarrassed by his own shadow. Someone even weirder than she was.

  “My name’s Darnell.” He gave her a distant smile, not exactly friendly, but gentle. Maybe too shy to be friendly.

  “Nice to meet you,” she whispe
red. “My name’s Sarah.” She started for the stairs.

  “You could come in. I could make some coffee.”

  She could hear how difficult that was for him to say, each word forced through a gauze of shyness.

  “Maybe for a minute,” she said.

  She stepped in, grateful to be out of the landing. Darnell shut the door, and it seemed to her that they both relaxed a little. He led her to the living room and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

  His place was identical to hers. The likeness made her uncomfortable; it seemed to make them twins, two ghosts superimposed over each other. Even the contents were similar: books, books, books, and a few sticks of furniture. But one major difference—his place was clean and neat, everything in its place.

  She glanced through one of the many bookcases. Every book seemed to be about religion. Lovely, she thought. As soon as he returned with the coffee, he was going to start proselytizing. Sarah was an agnostic, which meant that she couldn’t see any reason to believe there was a God, but couldn’t see any way to prove there wasn’t. She was already dreaming up excuses to get out of there when Darnell drifted in with two cups of coffee, so quietly that she hadn’t heard him.

  “Can’t stay long,” she warned him.

  “Do you take milk? I’m afraid I only have cream.” He placed the cups and a cream pitcher on the coffee table. “Please, sit down.”

  She perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to bolt in an instant, and Darnell sat facing her in an uncomfortable-looking wooden armchair. He didn’t look like someone who cared for comfort. An ascetic, Sarah thought. A weird little monk.

  He made coffee the way she did, so strong that without the cream it would strip the skin off your tongue. There was a wooden chessboard at the other end of the coffee table, each piece placed, she noticed, precisely in the center of its square. The game was well underway, and each captured man was neatly arranged on either side of the board by rank, a place for bishops, a place for rooks. Very tidy.

  “Good coffee,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “So you’ve never seen her?”

  “No, she keeps to herself. She always seems to come and go by the fire escape, never uses the stairs.” Darnell frowned at his coffee for a while and said, “But I don’t like her. Her place gives me the creeps. Sometimes I hear strange sounds.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s always late at night, I’m usually asleep. Something will wake me up, maybe her shoes on the fire escape. Then dragging sounds. Thumps, moans . . . muffled cries, like someone gagging. It’s hard to get back to sleep.”

  He looked like a virgin frightened of sex, and Sarah wondered if the sounds of lovemaking were what disturbed him so.

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  Darnell seemed to be startled from some train of thought. “You mean for a living? I work at the main library. Cataloging.”

  Silence. Of course he would work at a library. Bartleby the Librarian, haunting the stacks.

  When the silence began to sound eerie, Sarah said, “You must be interested in religion,” and even as she said it she wondered why she was bringing up a subject she didn’t want to talk about.

  “Oh,” he said. “You mean the books. Religions. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, etcetera. But I’ve not yet discovered what I believe.”

  Darnell rested his elbows on the arms of his uncomfortable-looking chair and placed his chin on his hands. “Christianity seems to come the closest,” he said at last. “But you have to read between the lines. And what you find between the lines is the occult. Simon Magus wanting to buy Jesus’ secrets of magic from Peter. The Gnostics. The Templars. The alchemists and the mystics.”

  Another silence. It figured: he looked like a guy who would pore over worthless old books of religion and occultism while other people were out living their lives.

  Sarah said, “I guess I don’t think about it much. Nothing you can prove, nothing you can see.”

  “Oh?” Darnell considered this for a while. “Suppose you awoke one day inside a room. There are no windows. No door. You cannot recall how you got there. Let’s say there’s furniture, lamps and vases, a refrigerator filled with food, everything you need to survive. Some people never wonder what lies outside those walls or how they got there. If they have curious minds, of a scientific nature, perhaps they carefully measure the legs of the chairs, the tops of the tables. If their curiosity is on a grand scale, perhaps they even measure the walls and the ceiling, or rap on the floor to see if it sounds hollow. But they tell themselves that nothing lies outside the walls, and that no one built the room and put them inside it. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “I guess if there’s no window, then there’s not much point in wondering what’s out there,” she said.

  “Maybe not.”

  He thought some more, his delicate chin resting on his fingers. Really not a bad-looking guy, Sarah thought. With his slender bones and almost colorless hair, he was the opposite of Peter. She noticed that his eyes never strayed to her breasts. He seemed asexual—not gay, not straight, just not.

  “But what if there were others in the room who swore they’d glimpsed the outside?” Darnell asked. “Wouldn’t you be curious to hear what they said?”

  “I dunno. That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe they’re just lunatics.”

  “And what about your own dreams?” he asked. “What if you dreamt of the outside again and again? What would you do then?”

  “Jeez. Maybe get a different pillow or something.”

  Darnell smiled faintly. “Do you believe in evil?”

  “Sure. People do rotten things all the time.”

  “No. Evil with a capital E. Something apart from the self.”

  “No. People do evil things. Squirrels don’t. Rocks don’t. That’s all the word means, lousy behavior, breaking the rules. The rest is baloney.”

  He thought about this for a minute. Sarah pulled at her sweaty shirt. Darnell apparently didn’t own a fan. Nor did he seem to need one: he looked perfectly comfortable in his long-sleeve white shirt and long black trousers. He had probably never worn shorts in his life.

  “Don’t you believe in souls?” he asked.

  It was the kind of question that ordinarily made her uncomfortable or impatient, but Darnell’s gaze was soothing, and somehow from his lips the question seemed more compelling than it would from someone else’s. Sarah was about to quibble over the word—what did he mean by soul, the personality?—but his eyes reminded her of the cool waters of the creek where she and Johnny used to play.

  “I used to have a brother named Johnny,” she said. “Two years younger, cutest little guy in the world. I can still remember when Mom brought him home from the hospital, his big round face, little tuft of hair. He was so cute he made me jealous.”

  She wondered why she was telling this weird wisp of fog about Johnny. His cool blue eyes seemed hypnotic, vague as the sky but never bored.

  “I fell in love with him,” she continued. “He was my doll-baby, my . . . I can’t describe him, such a happy little guy, I mean a smile that would melt ice. When we got older I liked playing with him better even than my girlfriends. He was my best buddy. I don’t think I was ever innocent. I mean, I came into this world with an attitude, and I’ve been on the warpath ever since. But not Johnny. He was like the sun. If I wanted to play hide and seek, then he did too. If I wanted to play school and be the mean old bitch teacher and make him sit in the corner for being a dumb little brat, well then that was okay with him too.”

  Darnell’s eyes seemed to listen as closely as his ears, with the kind of benign caring that one hoped for in the ideal priest, a priest so detached from his body that he felt neither lust nor greed. Though it wasn’t like Sarah to open her heart to strangers, she found herself eagerly telling the story.

  “So anyway, when I was 12 he ran out in the road and got hit by a car. I was on th
e front porch tying my shoes—I saw it happen. I ran out screaming my head off. The bumper had hit his head. His face . . . there was blood.”

  “You needn’t picture it,” Darnell said. “There’s no point in that.”

  “The person driving the car was an old woman. She hadn’t seen him. She sat in the car, too upset to get out. Johnny wasn’t dead, not yet.”

  Sarah stopped. After all these years, she couldn’t tell the story without a pain in her throat. Nothing else in her life had ever been so terrible; nothing else ever could be.

  “There’s a point to this,” she said. “That night Mom and Dad and I were sitting around his hospital bed when he let his spirit go. I mean literally let it go—I saw it leave. It seemed to exhale from his mouth. I saw a glow, like a cloud of sunlight. It floated above his body, just hovered there, and I could feel it saying goodbye to us. We all saw it, even Dad. The room felt peaceful, not so sad, though of course we were all crying. And then it left. Ascended. And we knew he was gone.”

  She met Darnell’s eyes. There was something of the same peace in them, though cooler, not radiant as the cloud of sunlight had been.

  “So I guess I believe we have souls,” she said. “I don’t know what they are, maybe some force of the personality, I don’t know, that connects people who care about each other, or something like that.” She made a face. “I guess that’s what’s called gibberish.”

  Darnell watched her thoughtfully. “A force. Yes, I agree. But you believe it fades after one dies?”

  “I don’t tell many people about this,” she said. “But my brother has come to me more than once. Not like a ghost—more like a comforting glow of sunshine when I need it. The last time was when my parents died—Johnny came to me and helped me through. He was a hell of a lot more helpful than my boyfriend, I can tell you that.”