Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1)

by P. G. Lengsfelder

  I turned off the water and carefully stepping over him I grabbed my laptop and organized myself on the bed. The anticipation made me giddy; a rising elation, not unlike the afternoon I knew I’d consummate my relationship with Harold. Or anytime I was about to slip into water. The results were easily parsed and by a little after 2 AM the results were finally in. They were disappointing.

  Experiment & Observation: comparing normative male and female faces for attraction variables.

  Total Respondents [18,668]:

  72% women [13,441]

  28% men [5,227]

  Female respondents (most attractive male):

  Blonde hair/blue eyes [23%]

  Blonde hair/green eyes [27%]

  Dark brown hair/blue eyes [28%]

  Dark brown hair/green eyes [22%]

  Male respondents (most attractive female):

  Blonde hair/blue eyes [26%]

  Blonde hair/green eyes [27%]

  Dark brown hair/blue eyes [22%]

  Dark brown hair/green eyes [25%]

  Even calculating for standard margin of error, it was a wash. A wash! Back to square one. I fell asleep on my computer.

  ***

  “Where am I? My god, my levo!”

  I woke on my bed, wrinkled, still in my clothes.

  Malcolm disoriented, draped in the same blanket I’d wrapped around Elizabeth, stumbled to the door. “What have you done? What about my levo?”

  “Malcolm, it’s okay.” I tried to calm him but he struggled with the door, unable to open it. Panic set in.

  “If I’m not there, I won’t get my meds. They’ll cut me off, they’ll cut me off.” He made croaking other-worldly sounds and started to cry.

  “I’ll get you there. When do you need to be there?”

  He blubbered. I couldn’t understand but one word in four. “The Metzinger?” I asked and he nodded as mucous poured out of his nose, spittle from his mouth. I didn’t want to touch him but I had to. “Take my hand. I’ll get you there.”

  “It’z too late,” he moaned. “Too late.” He bent over, disintegrating.

  “No, Malcolm. C’mon.” I stood him up and towed him through the door to the elevator. On the eleventh floor, it stopped.

  “Damn it!” I propped him up and pounded the buttons to keep it moving. He drooled and keened and then, with the sound of wet rubber flapping against a wall, he shit himself.

  “Oh no.” The stench of diarrhea rose quickly, overtaking the space. The elevator doors opened and the same well-dressed, older woman started to get on. She gagged, clutched her mouth and started retching, then stumbled out. I pounded the buttons. The doors closed.

  He was much heavier than I’d imagined and I could barely hold up under his weight. Alternately I held my breath and sucked in the nauseating stink sagging and saturating his pants. As we exited the elevator, past the usual gaggle of mothers and babies, we left a slippery trail of yellowed excrement across the rotunda floor.

  I dragged him out the door and down the steps, toward the hospital across the way.

  “They tried. They tried,” he sniveled.

  I moved him as quickly as I could but it was like pulling a cadaver. “What did they try, Malcolm? What did they try?”

  “Tri, trihexy. Phenidyl, and now without, oh my god, without . . .” He collapsed at my feet, soiling my legs and shoes in his shit.

  “We’re almost there. C’mon Malcolm, you can do this.” I helped him to his feet, turned him around in the right direction. “C’mon.” We started again.

  “Tell me,” I said trying to sober him as we moved and hoping that he’d remove some of his weight off my shoulders and back. “Tell me about your family. Do you have family nearby? Anyone I can call?”

  “I’ll never die.”

  “What?”

  “Never die. Never on the street.” He waved his arms in ballet arcs. His right hand covered in his own shit. “Die with family.”

  “We’re here. Malcolm, see.” We busted through the hospital doors into the lobby. I screamed for help. Malcolm skated on the excrement still oozing from his pants to his boots, and as he did he collapsed on top of me, knocking me over. I fell like a freshly cut pine, twice cracking my head on the lobby floor. I was a rag dolly of jaw jolting, teeth rattling timber. The room spun, turned taffy. Malcolm covered me in warm vomit, and I swallowed it.

  ***

  First my tongue. Metallic. Throbbing. Gums swollen. Teeth vibrating . . . in waves. Feces, feces stinging . . . my eyes. Dry. Caked. Binding the skin, my knuckles. A curdled mouthful. His puke, his grit. I passed out again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Perfection. “She was at her most attractive when the space between her pupils was just under half, or 46 percent, of the width of her face from ear to ear. The other perfect dimension was when the distance between her eyes and mouth was just over a third, or 36 percent, of the overall length of her face from hairline to chin.”

  In foam, drifting.

  “A University of Toronto study found that the facial proportions of Jessica Alba were close to the average of all female profiles.”

  Faces. Roddy, Elizabeth, Momma, Harold. What was it that last time with Harold? Before.

  I saw him swinging by his neck, eyes open, motionless and dull, though they had cut him down before I got there. Yet I saw him so clearly. What they told me made no sense, broken clusters of words. Sorry. Gone. Dead. Suicide. Disbelief. Disorder. Still disorder. Blank spaces.

  I let him down.

  A void.

  Then questions from the police.

  No, the last time . . . with him. Where was it? What had he said? Forgive me. No, after that. He’d carried trouble around the house. As usual. No, this was different. Tense. Distracted. Afraid. He was sinking, a man caught in a mire. Wearing my thin camisole, he could see my areola. He loved that. He hardly noticed.

  He’d been reading about Dickens, the train crash Dickens had survived. Harold re-read the pages, not as if he’d lost concentration but rather to confirm his disbelief. I asked him why. I’m gathering, he said, but there wasn’t a hint of joy in the exploration or that his hero had survived, no explanation of what he was gathering or why.

  Eventually he came to me as I read. As he passed I saw the doubt, just as you can see rings on the water’s surface and know a rock lies below. The way he looked at me.

  But he would deny anything of the sort. Doubt like mine. Not quite. Like he’d been fooled. Deeply. I couldn’t tell by what because he came behind me and grabbed my shoulders, rather stiffly. I was frightened to see his face so I didn’t turn around.

  But he loosened. His ache closed around me. I wanted to run from it. It made me angry. He made me angry. He rubbed my shoulders, softer gentler. Then my arms, brushing my breasts as he moved past them. Like he was apologizing.

  His hands, running along my arms . . .

  Feeling his hands. I opened my eyes. A small room, though the walls were out of focus, with bluewhite bright light. It hurt. I closed my eyes.

  “I’ll turn down the light.” A woman’s voice.

  Even with my eyelids shut I saw darkness descend.

  “Is that better?”

  Slowly, very slowly, I adjusted to the darkened room and the woman standing over me. “Ya took quite a fall.” A mermaid and serpent tattooed on her neck. Cat eyes! The young female orderly! The urge to bolt, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

  “I’ve cleaned ya up the best I could, but when ya a bit better I can wash ya hair.”

  Dull in my sight, she was late-twenties with large jade aquamarine eyes and thick black eyebrows. Long, lavish ebony hair pulled back. Full lips not needing cosmetic support. Something exotic drew down her cheeks, hard and smooth like carved rocks sculpted by water. She stroked my arm again . . . soothing, even stimulating.

  “They want to keep ya a few more days for evaluation, then they want to send you to Bellevue CPEP. You stirred it up, even more than the first time. There’s still som
e talk, but in a hospital like this you’ll be quickly forgotten. You’re gonna feel disoriented, maybe even nauseous for a while, but they think your concussion isn’t that serious.” Her touch was tender, consoling.

  “I’m not supposed to tell ya this,” she went on, “but I don’t think you should go to Bellevue. They want to do an EOU, an Extended Observation. For up to seventy-two hours. It’s a different evaluation. Psychiatric.”

  I organized a few bits of the floating debris in my head and wrung out the words. “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “Days. Been. Here?” I was ready to revisit the galaxy.

  “Two, two days. Is it okay if I rub your head?”

  Electrons scattered. I closed and opened my eyes affirmatively. “Work?”

  The orderly began massaging my temples and eyebrows. Back to darkness, savoring the orderly’s touch. It’s been so long. This once I would let go of Harold. I wouldn’t resist.

  “No one knows where you work. Would you like me to call?”

  “I can’t miss . . .” But I couldn’t finish. Exhaustion flooded over me. Please don’t stop. But the orderly did stop. I wanted more.

  “I can call for you. They must be wondering where you disappeared, huh? But you won’t be able to return to work for a few more days.”

  Warring! What would Warring say? Not showing up.

  “Do you want to go to Bellevue?”

  Psychiatric evaluation. If Warring finds out . . . “No, I . . .”

  “Listen, I think I can get you out of it.”

  Opening my eyes was like lifting weights. The orderly parted those full lips; she smiled sweetly. I could’ve swum in those green eyes. “You can call me Nan. I’m a Nurse Assistant. I can get access to records. If I’m careful, you know, I could do that for you.”

  The weight prevailed and I went willingly into darkness, Nan’s hands applying exactly the right amount of pressure. Why not. The hell with this. “Yes,” I said. Yes.

  ***

  The hospital’s lobby doors slid open. “Thank you,” I said to Nan. The nurse, nurse assistant, had been appropriate. Nice, actually.

  I tried to count the days I’d lost, three or four. This one felt crisp, the sun setting. I attempted to lift myself out of the wheelchair but my weight and the oscillating buildings around me dragged me back down.

  Nan reset me, tapping me on the shoulder and bending over me. “Let me take you home.”

  By any measure she was a beauty, exotic, maybe one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

  “No, no. You’re on duty.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Well, I live a ways from here so— ”

  “You live right over there.” Nan pointed to The Octagon and began wheeling me that way.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Clairvoyant.”

  I couldn’t turn to see her expression and I was too drained to make sense of her comment. Perhaps she was like me, perhaps she had a special gift, if such things existed.

  Nan pushed the wheelchair forward. “Sit, relax.”

  All I could think of was lying in bed with Nan stroking me, the beauty of it. Her beauty, and how it might somehow be a link in my investigations. She seemed to be deep in thought as well, because neither of us spoke again until we reached The Octagon’s entrance.

  “I’m sure that was degrading.” Nan interrupted my trance. “Depraved, really.”

  “What? I can make it from here, thanks.”

  “Some Christmas. I guess you were trying to help that poor man, but you end up paying for it instead of being thanked. Let’s everyone just keep the system flowing. Check the boxes. Next. Everyone keeping themself out of harm’s way. ‘I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.’”

  “Matthew something-something.” With effort I raised myself out of the wheelchair. “‘Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough troubles of its own.’ I’ve heard it all before. Momma’s a Lutheran, though probably not like many other Lutherans, thank goodness.”

  “Hmm. Okay. So can my husband and I lend you a hand?”

  “A hand? I’ll be fine. I may not look like much but I’m pretty capable.”

  Nan tore a piece of thin cardboard from the Kleenex box in the basket behind my head and pulled a pen from her pocket. It clicked. I heard her scribbling on the cardboard. “Maybe you’ll need someone, you know, to lean on.” She handed me the paper and a phone number. “We’ve gone back to the basics.”

  “I’m not much on religion.”

  “We’re not born again.” She laughed. “Well, maybe we are. But in a very different way. Like I said, back to basics. The things that naturally drive us. Anyway, all of us can use a hand from time to time. Maybe you could help me.”

  “Well I do appreciate you getting me out of that place, Nan.”

  “I hope to see you again. Call that number.”

  The Octagon tenants filtered in from their day. On went my shaded glasses and hood. I made my way into the building.

  ***

  In the elevator up I was lucky enough to encounter only one man, older, probably in his sixties and distinguished, wearing a dark blue striped suit and carrying a newspaper. Cufflinks! He stood to my left. I could read the headline:

  “Times Square hacked. Police narrow search.”

  “Good evening.” He surprised me.

  “Good evening.” I stood slightly behind him. I must’ve appeared odd, covered in my hood and shaded glasses. Nonchalantly, I removed them both.

  Almost immediately the elevator seemed to speed up. In my ears and chest. The man stared straight ahead. It wasn’t just my hospital hangover. Atoms ricocheted, the pressure a bit unpleasant, a bit arousing. Very physical, absolutely sexual. If I’d acknowledged the fragments of myself dancing in the elevator glass, I would’ve passed out, I’m sure.

  I bowed my head, put my shaded glasses back on. The elevator settled at the eleventh floor. The man got out.

  “Good evening,” he said again as the doors slid closed.

  The atoms disassembled. Maybe it was hospital hangover.

  ***

  This was an unusual time for me to be in my hallway, early evening, when I was usually at work or, on the weekends, locked in. The final beams of daylight at each end of the hallway softened the sand-colored carpet. I was still pleasantly medicated as I approached my apartment. Until a chill passed through me. Something wasn’t right.

  Posted on my door in cobalt blue ink was the notice:

  MANDATORY MEETING

  Tonight 7:15 PM

  Homeowners’ Association Meeting Room

  EVICTION HEARING

  HOA Members only are asked to attend and provide a

  quorum for discussion regarding the possible eviction of

  Penthouse Studio B owner/tenant.

  The Lease-to-Own Tenant will be expected to attend and speak to the HOA Members.

  (signed Helen Dorward, President,

  Homeowners Association)

  Like I said, I was a little slow. But a pall was breeding in me, what Momma called svingete ark. I re-read the notice posted on the door. My door. P-Studio B. “Oh god, they’re evicting me.”

  I unlatched the door and held onto the table as I put down my keys. My phone, the one I’d left more than three days earlier on the counter, buzzed frantically.

  The first message: “Eunis. It’s Elizabeth. Where are you? I’m going to have to call someone if you’re not here soon. Call me.” I closed my eyes.

  I listened to the second message. Again Elizabeth. “Where are you? What am I supposed to put in my report? I’m worried that you’re okay. And this won’t look good with what’s going on here. Please call.” Oh geez. I rubbed my temples.

  Third call. “Came by your place this morning. No answer. Please call me. The cops won’t do anything for forty-eight hours.” Cops! I saw a shrou
d undulating around my heart.

  Fourth call. “Damn you, Eunis, if you’re trying to stiff me on the eight grand, I’ll call the cops. You were supposed to meet me at the coffee shop. Call me and make this right. I’m not kidding.” Oh no. No!

  Fifth call. “Eunis, this is Carol Warring. Why didn’t you show up for work? Are you okay? Have you quit because of the investigation? Please call and give some explanation.” Then as she hung up, I heard her say, “Highly irregular. I don’t need this bullshit.” A winding sheet constricted around my heart.

  The clock hit 7:15 PM. I opened my eyes. I needed to get to the homeowners meeting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The basement. According to Dickens I was descending into the asylum’s cage for the criminally insane. The HOA meeting was in session. But I could make this right. Once the neighbors understood they were only seeing a fragment of the situation, this would all be behind me and I could get back to my work. But neither my hand on my chest nor deep, deep breaths stopped my growing dread.

  Out of the elevator, the buzz of voices and the rapping of a gavel dropped a dank apprehension around me. My breath came in short, fast hitches. A muffled voice addressed the room and the crowd quieted down. I stood at the door. I could hear the speaker clear enough.

  “This is the most disgusting, depraved tenant we’ve ever had. And I’ve seen it with my own eyes and smelled it with my own nose.” More rumble from the crowd.

  “It’s in our bylaws. Capital improvements will benefit. We get to keep the deposit as well as the security deposit. Most important, our membership can safely walk the halls and lobby, day or night. This tenant must vacate. It’s all there in our contract. God knows we have enough witnesses to this degenerate.”

  A pause.

  “I don’t see Mrs. Cloonis anywhere to defend herself, though I can’t see what she’d have to say under the circumstances. So I guess we can vote or have some discussion.”

  How often had I ever spoken to strangers? Now to a roomful . . . But all that I’d worked toward would be lost. Harold’s sacrifice, for nothing. I’d be left with nothing. Penniless. My job, my career. My pledge to Harold —his death wasted. The oaths I’d made to myself reduced to the same ashes, with nowhere but Momma and the farmhouse in my future. Plus all the witches, goblins and ghosts that she’d promised.