Hole: A Ghost Story

by Rod Redux

  Step Six: Place the tip of the razor on your forearm, about two-thirds of the way from your wrist to your elbow, with the blade facing your palm. Now slash along the vein toward the wrist, making sure you don't sever any tendons since you'll need the use of that hand in the following step.

  Step Seven: Quickly place your razor in your right hand and repeat step six for your left forearm.

  Congratulations! You have successfully slashed your wrists! Place the razor next to the tub and lie back in the warm water. Don't think about how you are now going to die, since that will only make you panic. Instead, focus on the growing peace and tranquility inside your body as the loss of blood makes you steadily weaker.

  The web page continued, detailing other methods of killing oneself. Mary had a feeling the website was more an exercise in black humor than anything else, but the advice seemed genuine enough, and she wondered just how many people had referred to the site before offing themselves. It seemed rather ghoulish and unkind, but she was also grateful for the help. She would have slashed side-to-side instead of lengthwise had she not looked it up.

  She logged off the internet, then cleared her browsing history. She didn’t want the people who maintained the website to get into trouble over her suicide. She knew how John Q Public liked to point fingers. She was doing this of her own free will.

  She finished her coffee, prayed, then went upstairs and drew a warm bath.

  ***

  Now that she was sitting here, blade to her flesh, she found that her resolve was weakening. Why was she really doing this? Were there no alternatives? Why not file for divorce, take Hank for all she could get? She could smear his good name, fuck all his friends, tell his buddies how pathetically small his tallywhacker was. They could all have a good laugh at his expense.

  But that was not her style. Passive-aggressive to the end, her death would be the ultimate pronouncement on his worth as a husband.

  DO IT! She screamed inside her head.

  She hesitated at the last instant. She’s forgotten which hand the website said to cut with first. The good hand, or the bad hand? She didn’t want to mess up.

  Doesn’t matter! Just do it!

  Heart quickening, Mary gathered her determination and ran the blade up her forearm, tracing the blue line of the vein. It hurt, but not as bad as she imagined it would hurt. Blood welled from the wound immediately, running down the smooth curve of her arm, pattering into the warm bath water, staining it pink. Trembling, she switched hands with the knife and unzipped her other arm. This time it hurt much worse. She gasped, kicked her right foot at the fresh new stroke of hot agony. Water splashed over the side of the tub onto the bathroom floor.

  “Fuck!” she spat through her clenched teeth.

  She placed the X-Acto blade on the edge of the tub and tried to relax, clearing her thoughts like the website instructed. She sank down until the water covered her breasts. She raised her arms in front of her, watching the blood gush out of them, and understood why she had opted for slashing her wrists instead of something a bit easier, like pills. The wounds in her arms, she saw, looked like long bleeding cunts.

  She laughed a little, let her arms drop in the water.

  The pain in her limbs eased, became a dull throb. Endorphins were making her euphoric, or maybe it was the blood loss. Did it really matter? She was surprised how fast she was bleeding out. The water had already changed color, deepening from pink to scarlet.

  She let her head fall back, closed her eyes.

  Now, he’ll see, she thought dreamily. Now he’ll understand how bad he hurt me.

  Was she talking about Hank? Or her brother?

  It didn’t matter.

  Tired. She was so tired.

  Her body felt like it weighed a million pounds. Funny. She’d always been so careful about her weight. Hank hated fatties, said his dick was too short to get past their lard. Sensitive guy, her Hank, but like her mother always said, she’s the one who picked him.

  She thought of that old joke.

  Question: Why do men have a hole in the end of the penises?

  Answer: So they can get oxygen to their brains.

  She’d always thought her Hank was different. Guess the joke, in the end, was on her.

  Mary wanted to raise her arms one more time, see if they were still gushing, but she couldn’t move them an inch. She was so tired… and they were so so heavy…

  Her head… spinning like she was drunk. She imagined that she was swirling down a dark drain, sinking into it. This must be what it feels like at the event horizon of a black hole, she thought.

  The inexorable tug of gravity at the edge of the singularity, the cold black nothing sucking you in, so powerful not even light could escape. She felt the pull of that dark whorl, so insistent, so dense, and let herself spiral in.

  Strange, she thought. That death should be a hole, too.

  7.

  Hank Stanford was once a happily married man, but that was “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”.

  He used to find himself getting excited as the day progressed, as it got closer to the moment he could put a dot on the end of the workday and head home, spend some time with his woman, no more clients to deal with, no more courtrooms or crabby judges, just him and Mary, a good dinner on the table, and maybe some nookie later, after a couple hours of television. He was a simple, undemanding man, and though there were times he spent his money too freely, and there were times he daydreamed about a more exciting career in the big city, he was mostly satisfied with the modest life he’d made for himself in the modest town he’d grown up in.

  But not anymore.

  These days, his gut began to roll as the workday drew to a close. He found himself looking for excuses to delay his return home. He volunteered to help his partner Travis with paperwork or research for a case, thought of things he needed to buy from the supermarket or from the Super Wal-Mart the next town over.

  If he were a drinking man, he might have started frequenting one of the sports bars in town, but, thank God, he’d never acquired a taste for alcohol. He hadn’t inherited that monkey from his father.

  When he couldn’t put it off any longer—he usually surrendered when his belly started growling for supper—he slid behind the wheel of his Mustang and aimed his hotrod home. He did this with a sullen expression, his lips drawn thin in the middle of his neatly trimmed beard, the muscles in his neck and shoulders winding tighter and tighter the closer to home he got.

  It probably wouldn’t be so bad if he’d stopped loving his wife, if his feelings for her had cooled the same way hers had cooled toward him. Then he could go home and enjoy the rest of his evening, their interactions cordial but dispassionate, without all this frustration and despair twisting around in his belly.

  Sometimes he woke from bad dreams where he was searching his house, tearing it frantically apart, looking desperately for something. He couldn’t quite remember what it was he was looking for when he woke, but he was wise enough to know that the dreams were a metaphor, a way for his sleeping brain to express the agony he felt at losing his wife’s love.

  File that under Useless Information. He knew he wasn’t going to find anything under the sofa cushions or behind the television. A cheese doodle, perhaps. Maybe a sock.

  Maybe it was a mid-life crisis thing. They were both, God help them, slogging through the Change at the same time. For Hank, mid-life had brought with it a shorter temper and a spare tire around the middle; it had limned what few regrets he had and was painting white streaks in his pumpkin orange hair. For Mary, it accompanied a withdrawal into herself, a slight fogginess of mind, and, of course, the cessation of her period.

  The first time she missed her period, they thought she was pregnant again. Despite their age, Hank and Mary were giddy. They’d tried most of their marriage to have a child, but it was scary, too. Late-life pregnancies were risky. There could be any number of life-threatening complications. Yet, despite the hazards, Mary was willing
to try one more time, and maybe they’d finally have a child like they always wanted.

  Hank asked her if she wanted to run to the pharmacy and get a home pregnancy test when she told him she was a week late, but Mary said no. She didn’t want to jinx it. She’d made an appointment with her doctor. She didn’t trust those cheap do-it-yourself pregnancy tests.

  Hank went to work the morning of her doctor’s appointment with a big goofy grin, a bounce in his step. He didn’t tell Travis or his secretary Brandon that Mary might be pregnant, but he did spend the day fantasizing about a redheaded little boy who would have his dad’s keen intellect and his mom’s gentle disposition.

  The poor kid would be useless, spoiled rotten!

  Hank went home for lunch, still grinning that big goofy grin. He walked through the door, questioning her with his eyes, only to have his dreams gut-punched out of him.

  Mary was standing at the range, frying ham for their sandwiches, her head hanging down. She’d washed off her makeup. Her face was pallid. He could tell by her red nose and naked, bruised-looking eyes she’d been crying.

  Not looking up at him, she murmured, “I’m not pregnant. The doctor said I’m pre-menopausal.” And then she’d begun to cry.

  He went to hug her but she put her hand in between them.

  “No! Just… give me a minute,” she’d said, not thinking that maybe he needed it more than she did, that he might be hurting too, but he swallowed down his hurt like he always did and let her be. He walked down the hallway to his office and sat at his desk, staring out his window at the yard and the trees

  A yard that would have no swingset. Trees that would never be climbed.

  He beat himself up on the inside for an hour, mostly for allowing himself to hope… for thinking that maybe this time… this time…

  He wished Mary would come talk to him, help ease this pain, but she was holding it all inside, as usual. She stayed in the kitchen, banging pot and pans around like her mother did. When she was ready to be comforted, Mary would come and take what she needed from him. Until then, he could cool his heels somewhere out of sight, and stay out of her hair.

  It wasn’t selfishness. She was just about the most selfless woman he’d ever met. It was just… her own emotions were so powerful and raw, so demanding. They eclipsed any sense she might have of his needs.

  But she never came to him. Her heart stayed locked in ice.

  Hank turned onto the driveway and eased up to the garage. He braked in front of the garage door, killed the engine, got out. He twisted his head to the right and left, listening to the bones in his neck crackle.

  He hesitated in the driveway, reluctant to go inside. It was such a beautiful evening. The sun was low in the sky, the shadows stretched across the grass like they were racing away from sunset. The field across the road from his house was planted with corn, and the smell of the crop was rich and green, a good earthy smell, but his picturesque surroundings did little to relieve his anxiety.

  Maybe we should just get a divorce, Hank thought. It was becoming obvious she no longer had feelings for him. He had tried to make love to her this morning, tried to break through the icy rind that had crystalized around her heart since the miscarriage, but she’d laid there beneath him like a corpse. Her passive way of punishing him.

  Punishing him for what?

  For everything, of course.

  He was tired of bearing the yoke of her disappointments, tired of swallowing his own emotions so Mary was free to deal with hers.

  Sure, he felt guilty for cheating on her, but she’d pushed him into it.

  He was no saint. God knows--! But he’d never claimed to be one.

  In the twenty years they’d been married, he’d cheated twice. The first time, he’d been drunk. They had only been together a year. Travis, his business partner, was getting married, and Hank and all the rest of their buddies had thrown a bachelor party for him at a hotel in Peoria. Hank had gone to the bathroom to make room for some more beer and one of the stripper’s they’d hired had slipped into the washroom behind him. She’d been making eyes at him all night, a cute little strawberry blonde, and he had studiously tried to ignore those smiles and fluttering eyelashes, but when she eased through the bathroom door and pulled him around toward her, his dick still hanging out, he figured this was never ever going to happen to him again, and so he let her suck him off. He’d felt terribly guilty about it the next day, when he woke with a hangover, but there was no taking it back.

  The second time, of course, was with Penny.

  But he didn’t feel like enumerating his own sins tonight. Right now he needed to figure out some way to get through to his wife, to break down this crazy embargo she’d declared on his love for her, figure out where they needed to go to from here.

  Tonight he was going to tell her about Penny. Tell her how he really felt about her pervert brother and that cold-hearted bitch she called a mother. How the ghosts of her past had made a haunted house of their marriage, where every creak and rattling rainspout was cause for alarm, leaving no room for the couple who lived there to let down their guards, even for a moment.

  He’d swallowed back his hurt and resentment and anger until it felt like a cancer in his guts, and he had to sick it up.

  He just couldn’t take it any longer.

  His heart thudding in his chest, stomach twisted in knots, Hank walked around the side of the house to the kitchen doorway. As he walked, he rehearsed his opening arguments in his mind.

  Funny as that might sound, it was an apt metaphor. He felt like he was about to argue the most important case of his life, and if he won, if he could get through to her, then maybe their marriage would win a reprieve.

  If not, he planned to pack some things and leave tonight. He could stay with Travis until he found his own place. No more tiptoeing around the ghosthouse.

  His shoulders set, Hank pushed through the patio door into the kitchen.

  He was a little surprised she hadn’t started dinner yet. You could normally set your watch by her routine, but the kitchen was deserted, the counters gleaming, the dishes all done and stacked in the strainer to dry.

  “Mary?” he called. “Hon?”

  The house was immaculate, of course. One thing he could say about Mary, she was a good housekeeper.

  Hank noticed her laptop on the dining room table, the screen saver bouncing from edge to edge. He went to it and tapped the space bar, but only the desktop popped up, the standard Windows background. There were no applications running.

  “Mary!” he yelled louder.

  The house had an air of abandonment. It was too quiet. Normally Mary kept the TV or the stereo playing so she didn’t get scared while he was working, but there were no other sounds besides those he made himself.

  Maybe she was in bed. She was staying in bed an awful lot lately. Part of her protest.

  Hank walked through the dining room into the foyer, then turned and clomped up the stairs. He called her name again as he poked his head through their bedroom doorway, but their queen-size bed was empty, the sheets turned down neatly for bedtime.

  Had she gone out? She normally left a note if she had to run an errand, but she might not have today. Things had been prickly of late.

  He was about to double back and return downstairs when he heard a plink of water in the adjoining bathroom. Tiny noise, that drop of water. By all rights, he shouldn’t have been able to hear it, but the house was so silent...!

  Had she taken a bath and fallen asleep in the tub? That wasn’t like her either.

  “You in the tub, Mary?” he called, walking into the master bath.

  He stopped.

  He saw her laying there, her head rolled back on her shoulders, her eyes shut. She looked like a wax manikin. Her skin was white and slack, almost translucent, with a faint blue tint. Her dark hair was curled at her cheek. The tub was full to a few inches below the rim, bright red and still.

  He saw the X-Acto blade on the edge of the tub nex
t to the soap. There were drops of dried blood around the handle, a Chinese ideogram in scab.

  The sight knocked the wind out of him. Hank fell back against the doorframe, fumbled at the doorknob to keep himself from plopping down on his ass.

  “Mary,” he said low, tears starting in his eyes. “Mary, no!”

  He went down on his knees, walked on them to the side of the tub (just like he’d walked on them, grinning, when he proposed to her) and then he laid his brow on the edge of the tub, right next to her cheek, the hair of their heads faintly touching.

  “God damn it, no,” he said, his voice low and trembling. “Not like this.”

  8.

  The apparatus of death is a multifarious and relentless machine, designed, it seems, to grind down the bereaved, to squeeze out every ounce of sweat and tears, to strip the nerves raw, to press the bereft on without pity, flogging them to physical and emotional exhaustion, perhaps as punishment for their survival. The first phone call starts the ignition, and then the machine takes off, dragging the mourner on a roughshod journey through the desolate terrain of loss. In simpler days, one had only to bury their dead and, of course, to mourn them, but in these modern times, there are operators to alert, mechanics to oversee, a menagerie of accountants and form-filler-outers one must satisfy, just to steer the monstrosity, gears spinning, engine churning, big smoke stacks puffing fumes, toward their loved one’s final resting place.

  And God help the man who falls over the rails, because the machine doesn’t yield.

  Call one:

  After sitting with his wife for— what? He didn’t really know how long he sat there, his head beside hers—Hank finally climbed to his feet and tottered down the stairs to look for the number to the police department. He wasn’t really sure where Mary kept the phone book. Did people even use phone books anymore? He finally thought to use her laptop and looked the number up on the internet.