The Open Curtain

by Brian Evenson

  One day when he was in the shed, she chose to enter his now unlocked bedroom. He had moved all his own things out of it to leave it exactly as it had been when her sister had been alive, except the bedding was missing. She waited that night for him to come in, but he never came. When she wanted him, she had to knock on the door of the shed. He would come to the door and ask what was wanted, and when she responded, she would hear a scraping sound. When he opened the door the rest of the room would remain hidden behind a sheet he had strung onto an old laundry line. It did not smell good inside. He would squeeze his way out, shut the door and lock it, and only then, outside, would he converse with her.

  “What are you doing in there?” she asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Seventh month. She woke up one Saturday morning and looked out the window to find him locking his shed. He kept shaking the locks to make certain they were secure.

  She got up and went down to the kitchen, put two bowls on the table, poured some cereal for herself and for him. He came in, looked at the table a few seconds, then went into the living room. When she followed him, she found him with one hand on the doorknob.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I have to buy something.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  He put his hands into his pockets, then took them out again. He reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out his wallet. It was empty.

  “No,” he said.

  “How are you going to buy it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you need to borrow some money?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I need some money.”

  She began to put on her coat. “I’ll drive you,” she said.

  He went out the door. When she went out she found him in the back seat of the car.

  “Don’t you want to sit in front with me?” she asked.

  “I’m buckled in,” he said.

  She started the car, pulled out of the driveway. “Where to?” she asked.

  “Antique store.”

  “Antique store?”

  He nodded. She drove him around downtown until they found one that seemed acceptable to him, a shop with an old desk in the window, license plates from all fifty states tacked up just inside the door.

  “Help you?” said a man in overalls, sitting behind a counter on a tall stool.

  “Yes,” said Lyndi. “Rudd?”

  “I need a hitching weight.”

  “A what?”

  “For a wagon. A hitching weight.”

  “Now what in the world you after a hitching weight for?” the man asked. “For hitching?” When Rudd said nothing, the man said, “Not much market for those.”

  “No,” said Lyndi. “I suppose not.”

  “Then again,” he said, “no harm looking.”

  He got off his stool and ambled to the back of his shop, waving for them to come along. He stepped over a pile of old sewing machine parts, a stack of fifties pinups wrapped in dusty plastic, then rounded the corner into a small boxy space, a sort of large closet with the door removed. There was horse tack on the walls, most of it cracked; an old nickel-plated camp shovel in one corner; a trowel; an odd spiked ball hanging on the end of a leather strip; a plaque upon which were mounted five strands of barbed wire, the names of each burned into the wood beside it; a picture of an adobe hut with a sign on its side reading J. James, notorious outlaw, slept here; a fist-sized box of horseshoe nails; a scattering, along the floor, of rusty horseshoes, one still attached to a taxidermied hoof and foreleg. On a double-thick shelf were lead sinkers and plumb weights, a bullet mold, a jumble of loose, broken-toothed gears.

  “What exactly does it look like when it’s at home?” the man asked. “This hitching weight of yours.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rudd.

  “You don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?” asked Rudd.

  “I never had to know,” said the man. “Until now.”

  They tried the other dealers in town, without success. One had a wagon in its front yard and the owner went out to take a look at it, thinking it might have a hitching weight attached, but no. They drove home, Rudd increasingly moody.

  “What do you need it for?” Lyndi asked.

  “Weight,” he said.

  “What are you weighting down?”

  “Nothing yet,” he said.

  She waited for him to say more, but he said nothing. When she tried to query him further, he said, “Quit asking, Elling,” and then, growing hysterical, “Where’s Lael? What have you done with Lael?”

  At home, he went immediately into the shed, shut the door. He came out once, near evening, to take from the kitchen several packages of frozen hamburger, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of white bread. It was days before she saw him again.

  Eighth month. When he did finally come out of the shed, he no longer seemed to recognize her. He navigated the house strangely, as if it were an unfamiliar place, as if the floorplan were shifting with each step he took. He called her Elling almost exclusively now, but she was glad to have him say anything to her at all. He committed acts he didn’t remember, would eat lunch and then a few minutes later ask for lunch. He asked her questions, and a few minutes later asked the same thing again.

  “How are things in the shed?” she asked.

  “Good,” he said. “Good. It’ll care for itself for a while.”

  “Perhaps you should see someone.”

  “Elling,” he said. “Rudd’s feeling just fine.”

  “No,” she said softly. “He isn’t.”

  She called her bishop, explained the barest details of the situation, asked for advice.

  “Oh,” he said. “Goodness.” He gave her the number for LDS Social Services, the Church-sponsored clinical program. She called and was put on hold; eventually they hung up on her. She called back and after fifteen minutes was given someone to speak to—a licensed therapist, she was told.

  “Well,” said the man. “I’ve got an opening three weeks from yesterday.”

  “Three weeks? Can’t I arrange for anything sooner?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re understaffed. It’s the best I can do.”

  “But he’s bad,” she said. “It’s a real problem.”

  “You could check him into the hospital,” he said. “But I’m sorry, that’s as soon as I can manage.”

  She made the appointment, informed Rudd of it. Would he go, she wanted to know. Was he willing to give it a chance? A good honest-to-goodness counselor, she thought, hearing her aunt’s voice in her head. Grain-fed.

  “Sure,” said Rudd. “Unless Lael comes back first.”

  She caught him looking into the mirror, speaking to his reflection. “I don’t have anyone,” he said. “I don’t even have me.”

  “You have me, don’t you?” Lyndi asked and came forward, put her arms around him from behind.

  He just kept looking into the mirror.

  “No one,” he said. “No one at all.”

  With a stick, she pushed out the mud between the cracks in the shed walls. Inside, it was dark. She could see nothing, nothing at all. There was a stench seeping out. When she put her ear to the hole, she heard a strange, slight hissing.

  What’s next? she wondered. She contemplated having him committed, taking him to the hospital, but no, she wanted to talk to someone, she wanted to speak with someone first.

  She began to chart his behavior, thinking that the statistics might be of some help later. There were certain consistencies that she might not have noticed otherwise. For instance, he always checked the lock on the shed eight times after he locked it, banging the lock each time. He called her Elling between twenty and thirty times a day, but never more or less. When he was committing acts he would not remember later, he would hold his face slack, looking almost like a different person. He would speak to himself while regarding his reflection in the mirror, but when
he looked directly at his hand, he seemed to think it belonged to someone else. He consistently disliked being touched, not only by her, but by his own hand.

  She consulted a lawyer about getting the wedding annulled. Was it possible? It was possible, he suggested, if both parties agreed or if there was some indication the wedding had taken place under coercion, but it was not the usual thing. Was she Catholic? If not, why not opt for a simple divorce?

  But it was too much to even think about: barely twenty and already divorced, her life for all intents and purposes over, at least in Utah where a premium was still put on the virginal. Her parents had had difficulties, had even struggled; her father had been obsessive-compulsive, her mother distracted; it was not always such a good combination. But they had weathered it out; they had stayed together until they died. Rudd was sick. He didn’t know what he was or who he was, and she didn’t know either. If he could get better, she thought. And then, He never will.

  10

  She had been sleeping but was dreaming of water, the smooth glassy surface of Lake Powell, her body speeding across it just over the surface. She plunged down suddenly into the water and traveled along beneath, scraping the bottom, and when she tried to get to the surface she couldn’t. She struggled and awoke, found a hand clamped tightly around her neck, cutting off her breath.

  “So, Elling,” Rudd’s voice said. “We kill her?”

  She could see only his dim outline in the darkness, his body straddling her hips. She struggled. No, she tried to say, but couldn’t speak. She could hear the blood grow loud in her head, beating slower and slower. She shook her head as much as she could, managed to scrape together something of a breath.

  “Elling?” Rudd said.

  She worked her hands free of the blankets, began to dig her fingers into his arms. He seemed not to notice. She tried to reach his throat.

  “Elling?” he said again.

  “No,” she mouthed.

  The blood was slowing in her ears again, and slowing as well, she felt, were her hands. She could hardly move them. There was a boiling in her ears, the room losing first the quality of its light and then fading altogether.

  When she became conscious it was morning. She could feel sunlight on her but could hardly move. She got up and locked the bedroom door, fell back on the bed. Her throat hurt. When finally she got up for good and looked in the mirror, she saw her neck speckled with neat ovoid bruises. She swallowed, as best she could. Her nails were broken, she saw, her hands bloody on the tips with not her own blood but Rudd’s. She washed them, washed her neck as well.

  When she came out of the bedroom she was holding her mother’s hair dryer like a gun before her. She went from room to room. Rudd was nowhere to be found. She left the hair dryer on the mantel, took up the fire poker, went out into the backyard.

  “Rudd?” she called, standing beside the shed, then realized it was locked.

  She went back into the house, sat at the kitchen table. On it was a postcard showing a cityscape, the words Nueva York! printed along the bottom in purple letters. She turned it over.

  Dearest Rudd,

  Am having a wonderful time here in the Big Apple.

  Wish you were here.

  Join me?

  Lael

  The postmark, she saw, was local, Provo, dated the day previous. The card was clearly written in Rudd’s own hand.

  She put it down. Taking the poker, she went out to the shed.

  She worked the poker’s blunted nub between the door and the frame, pried opened the door. It was warm inside, the smell horrific, and when the door opened there came as well a swarm of black flies that whirled about her head, butting against her lips, her eyes. She shooed them away.

  There was the sheet hung as a curtain just inside the door and she could see when she got closer that he had made slits in it, versions of the garment marks though backwards:

  Carefully she reached out, tugged the sheet off the clothesline. Behind it, he had torn up the wooden flooring, heaping it splintered and jagged against one wall, exposing the bare earth beneath. He seemed to have worked the earth, for it was loamy and when she stepped onto it she sunk up to her ankles. In the middle, on its back, sunk almost to the lid, was the old refrigerator.

  There were, she could see, flies creeping in and out of it through a tear in the rubber seal of the door. She put her ear closer to the tear, heard a dull hissing within.

  She went to the mud-caked window and broke it out with the poker, to get the smell out a little, to get more light in. She looked around. In one corner lay a pile of filthy bedding, stained and frayed. Next to it, the box he had kept in his room, sitting directly on the dirt, mold creeping up its side.

  She opened it, saw again the church books. She removed them one by one and dropped them atop the torn-out flooring. Taped to the bottom of the box was the map, but she could see now, from the way it stood out in the tired light, that there was a raised rectangle in the map’s center, something hidden.

  She peeled the map from the box’s damp bottom. Underneath were several sheets of paper, folded, words typed on them. The first began:

  “The Murderous Existence of William Hooper Young” by Rudd Theurer

  For my decade I chose the 1900s and the year 1903 but some of this happened in 1902 too. The most important part in fact (the murder)….

  In 1902 William Hooper Young was involved in killing a woman named Anna Pulitzer and dropping her body in a drainage canal. The body was “nude and lying in slime.” I said “involved in killing” on purpose: certain people think that he might have had some help from someone named Charles Elling….

  Oh Christ, she thought. It went on like that, giving the facts of the murder and the trial, speaking too of the hitching weight Young had used to weigh down the body, some sort of high-school project that seemed to have infected Rudd’s life. The ritual nature of the murder that seemed, at least slightly, to foreshadow the murder of her parents. No wonder Rudd had gone mad, she thought; he had written about a murder and then had almost been killed in a similar fashion—it was as if he had raised the dead. More disturbing, she thought, he had begun to see her as Elling, for Elling, it turned out, was the partner in crime, the one on whom Young tried to blame the murder when caught by the police, the one the police could never find. Like Lael, she thought, and then, In what sense for Rudd was I his partner in crime?

  At the end of the essay was a single sheet of paper. She tugged it out. There, written in Rudd’s hand, in tiny script,

  SUNRISE IN HELL

  BY WILLIAM HOOPER YOUNG

  Verse 1st: Some sins are not to be forgiv’n

  Our Savior’s blood doth not wash clean

  The devil bars the path to heav’n

  And to our Lord we are unseen

  Chorus: Else shall we face sunrise in hell

  The devil he shall broil us well

  Much better shorten our own lives

  Than, after death, the devil’s knives

  Verse 2nd: Yet God has offered us in love

  A means of holy murder true

  Baptis’d by one’s own spilt blood

  The taken life shall life renew

  Chorus: Else shall we face sunrise in hell

  The devil he shall broil us well

  Much better shorten our own lives

  Than, after death, the devil’s knives

  Verse 3rd: To kill the sinner is to save him

  Before he doth besmirch again

  The devil he will but enslave him

  Unless the knife forthwith is giv’n

  Then there was a gap, a blank expanse, at the very bottom of the page an additional verse in Rudd’s hand:

  Final Verse: So call yourselves to action brothers

  Take for yourself the heavy knives

  Take up fathers daughters mothers

  Take them up and take their lives

  Her hands, she could feel, were shaking. I am surprisingly calm, she told herself and indeed in
her mind she was, despite the strong tremors of her body. Her hands let the papers fall. She saw herself step toward the refrigerator door and bend down to take the handle. She popped it out of its lock and then, in a single movement, wrenched the door open.

  Inside, the stink of putrid meat, the box filthy. A cloud of black flies, thousands of them, a tremendous symphony of them, bouncing against her arms and face and spinning about the room. Covered with flies, she realized she knew that it was Rudd who had murdered her parents, and knew as well that she had known this deep down for some time. The flies swirled about her and out the door, and in little more than a moment she felt herself adrift again, irrevocably and utterly alone.

  But the feeling did not last. What, she wondered, was that stirring, there, in the box, rising up, now that the flies were gone?

  When a messenger comes saying he has a message from God, offer him your hand and request him to shake hands with you…. If it be the devil as an angel of light, when you ask him to shake hands he will offer you his hand, and you will not feel anything….

  —Doctrine and Covenants 129: 4, 8

  The category through which the world manifests itself is the category of hallucination.

  —GOTTFRIED BENN

  PART III

  HOOPER, AMUCK

  1

  It took him a long moment to understand where he was. At first there was only a gray space, featureless, unlit, as tight upon and around him as a coffin, which slowly began to congeal, if congeal was the right word, into something else. The space opened itself up, fled back and away from him until he felt he could sit up, and perhaps even stand—though he remained motionless, unmoving, the relation between his body and his mind perplexed.

  He was, he could see, in a room, but a room washed out as if seen mostly in darkness. There, the edge of a cabinet, glass-fronted and snug against a wall. Furniture draped with a light tapestry, fringed at one edge. He could begin to make out the wooden frame of a bed, its stain chipped away along the edge that touched the floor, just below the tapestry’s fringe. He was lying on a plank floor that had been, he could smell, recently waxed. He turned his head and saw the gryphon-pawed legs and base of a swivel chair done up in dark leather, its back dimpled and puckered with rivets. It was sitting near a fireplace of white brick. Two narrow pillars, perhaps marble, perhaps a finely painted plaster, ran from floor to mantel. The grate was not free but rather tiled over with ceramic, the casement for a cast-iron burner bulging like a blood blister in its center. The stove was warm, he could feel from the floor, and the chair could be rotated, or swiveled rather, to take full advantage of the heat. Though at the moment the chair was facing the bed. It was conceivable, he thought, that he had fallen out of one or the other, chair or bed. More likely the chair than the bed, since he was fully clothed.