A Different Bed Every Time

by Jac Jemc

  “You’re welcome,” you call, and his response is an insouciant “Fuck you.”

  You know what’s going to happen before it does, and you don’t do anything to stop it. He’s down in the garage with his supplies defining the margins of his sanity. He’s making illegible decisions and convincing himself he’ll decipher the handwriting later. Here is your sister’s husband, your husband, for the sake of the rest of the story, and he’s planning her demise, your demise, accordingly. And you know it’ll be complicated for your sister when all of this unravels: but there’re no children involved so you say, “What the hell?”

  You wonder about your sister blaming herself but figure she’d rather feel guilty than dead. You, however, are ambivalent. Here’s what will happen. Your husband will come upstairs and apologize. He’ll ask if you want to go get a drink. He’s had a wretched week. You’ll say, “Where?” He’ll say, “How about we just head around the corner to Ray’s?” You’ll say, “Sure,” and head for the garage. He’ll rush after you, pull your arm, suggest you just walk. The car’s been acting funny. You can imagine what he’s got laid out in preparation in the garage already. Trash bags, cutting tools. If he’s smart: some lye.

  God love this man and his nutty streaks. He has no idea anyone is on to him, least of all his victim. You think how foolish he is to do it in the garage—the concrete will stain—but it’s not your problem. You think of calling your sister and saying something cryptic that might ease her guilt after the fact, but decide it might be too fishy. You want her free and clear of this nut job ASAP.

  Birds glide beneath your skin. For a moment, you think, who’s the nut now? You’re convinced this joker’s gonna kill you tonight. What? Suddenly you’re clairvoyant? But you know too well; he has that calm about him where he’s sure of himself and he doesn’t need to do any convincing—he just needs to let the story unravel.

  The birds keep chirping, but you’re still convinced you cannot get gone enough. He’s sure this will solve all his problems, but you know this gesture will be read like a wasteland. It doesn’t matter what’s been or what will be. Tenses have been paved over.

  Say you walk to Ray’s. You sneak to the bathroom. You examine your face in the mirror. You’re pretty sure you don’t believe in an afterlife, but in the event there is such a thing, who knows if you’ll be able to see anything, much less your own face. You look at the blue flame-tinted circles beneath your eyes. You think of all the deaths you’ve avoided: the canoe trip in the storm, the mugging, that time your appendix jammed itself huge into the rest of you. All incongruous warnings for the decision you’re making right now.

  You look a little longer. No, you’re not getting sentimental, but you want to make sure there’s enough time for the sedative to dissolve in your drink. You don’t want to wake too early to a gray foggy cloud of your own bright scarlet. You don’t want to see the brownish tint of you as the yellow pages sop up your gore.

  You emerge, and the bartender gives you a look like he has a secret he knows he should tell you, but you look away quickly so he doesn’t feel implicated. The whiskey barks down your throat all familiar-like, but husband is all fanned eyebrows and tilted breath.

  You gulp the drink down and smile at husband and bring his hand to your mouth for a kiss. It is sweaty, but you make nothing of it.

  The rest is blurry: you get loopy and other patrons notice. Husband takes you home. He butchers your somnolent self like a fine-boned rabbit. He flushes fourteen pounds of you down the toilet. He files a missing person’s report and your sister grows confused. They never find the rest of you.

  Stories start coming out around the neighborhood: large purchases of rubber gloves, trash bags, knives and saws. A regular at Ray’s says he saw the two of you there and tells how you’d gotten wiped out with one glass of whiskey. Husband’s office reports missing quantities of sedation samples.

  The police find the wad of your muscle and fat in the septic tank, but your husband’s lawyer argues a person could survive the loss of this much flesh. He charms the grand jury into thinking the evidence is inconclusive. Turns out it doesn’t matter if people recognize you buying the damning supplies. Husband remains a practicing physician in the free world. Your sister can see what happened, and as soon as the trial is over, she runs as far away as possible to start a new life.

  About a day after you’re chopped to bits, you wake up in some mental state at Ray’s, bodiless. “This must be the ghost life,” you think. But you never cared about anything. What could you have to settle? And here? Say this boredom is eternal. “Well, then,” you think half-heartedly, “all these men are stuck smoking with the wrong sister.”

  Somebody Else’s

  Looking back, it’s hard not to feel crusted. When I press on those memories they exhale a dusty hiss. I showed up on the set and had my lightly padded skeleton sewn into some lint ball of a sweater. The episode was set in a ski resort, the town heavy with snow and trapping everyone in the lodge. Of course, all of it was filmed on a studio lot in California and cut with some stock footage of a ski lift climbing a mountain. My character was just supposed to be sitting by the fireplace when Larry walked in to show his cousin Balki how to pick up a lady. His line was, “Would you like some coocoo?” The character wanted to say “cocoa,” but was so nervous to talk to me that it came out “coocoo.” I was supposed to say, “I think I’ve had enough, thanks!” and stalk off, a suspicious shell of a woman.

  All went according to plan, and I waited anxiously for the episode to air, for my agent’s calls to increase in frequency. But the episode came and went, and the phone never rang. I guess I could have kept trying, but if I wanted to, I would have, or at least that’s what a book told me.

  I started to stay home, watching the old movies I’d grown up with—suspense thrillers and musicals and dramas about aging film stars being replaced by younger ones. I reached into the gap between the cushions of my couch to find change to tip delivery men. My shoulders grew weak until it was a bother to lift my arms, and before I knew it, I wasn’t raising my hands even to the height of the doorknob. Staying in was easy enough. I had residuals coming in from a corporate training video I’d done in college. I was living in a house my grandfather had left me when he passed away. My sister showed up every other week to convince her limbs around me and eye my scalp oil, unable to tell me to shower. I’d smile and tell her I was fine. “I’m happy!” I’d say and she’d gather the dirty dishes piled on every surface and heave them into the sink before donning her rubber gloves to scrub off the scum. I could feel cavities nesting in my teeth; I knew the root of one tooth was dead. The pain rang and pounded like someone wanting to be let in. I spoke pulverized truths to my sister trying to get her to relax. “I can leave whenever I feel like it” and “I just need a few minutes to be myself.” She’d give up and leave and I’d trace paused cartoons off the screen of my television for fun. The arrangement felt logical at the time.

  I refused to admit my behavior was not normal. The outside world and I were like cracked magnets. We had been one and the same, but we’d broken apart and could now do nothing but resist. Every time I considered leaving my home, I wondered what could be waiting for me out there and never came up with an attractive enough answer. It wasn’t even fear. That’s what I kept telling myself.

  I’d sit on my couch and try to catch the sunlight on my watch face. I’d direct the light onto my cat until she chased the slow burn of the reflection. Bugs showed up, cinching themselves through the pipes and the baseboards. My sister would appear to ask me lists of questions out of pamphlets she got at the doctor’s office. I’d test myself by trying to guess how she was diagnosing me by the questions she asked. My record was guessing bipolar from the first question. “‘I feel so restless or find it so hard to keep still that other people have pointed this out to me.’ Do you feel this way ‘Rarely,’ ‘Occasionally,’ or ‘Most of the Time’?” I said, “Penny, do I look restless? I’m not bipolar,” and she sta
red at me like I had pressed her into some impossible place.

  When our mother died back in Tulsa later that year, I wanted to pay my respects. I booked a flight and called a cab. When I walked out my front door, there was the proof that that agoraphobia pamphlet didn’t apply. I got on a plane and tried to take the stains out of the memories of my mother. The asshole next to me kept forcing his elbows down on the armrest that my hip meat kept forcing up. Eventually he spilled a mess of words into the air at me and moved to sit across the aisle next to a child flying alone. I adjusted that armrest up and relaxed comfortably for the rest of the flight.

  I examined the photos my mother had framed all along the staircase: so many of me making smiles like I was dying with forced charm before a dance recital, photos that were sixty percent ceiling, where I clutched bouquets of flowers after the high school musical. I recognized a lingering pride in my belly, and in the reflected glass of the frames, I saw an abstract smile pulling itself from my lips. I had had such hopes, but now when I thought about my ambition, I felt pity. My dream had been to excel at convincing people I was someone else. The intention felt so specific now. It felt sad and misguided. It felt better not to know what the hell I was doing than to think about where that impulse had come from at such a young age.

  I thought of the bugs roaming the house back in California and how it felt good to recognize a problem.

  I held it together most of that day, meeting with the undertaker and going to the florist with my sister and her family. Not until I went out to the garden and saw one of my mother’s footprints still stamped into the waterlogged mud of a flower bed did I cry. My mother had just had the yard resodded. She didn’t think she was about to die. You could see the seams stashed all over the lawn where sheet of grass met sheet of grass. I found a single weed that had wormed through the newly laid mess. “It’s okay,” I thought. “She would have found you.” And my mother would have. She was ruthless, determined to a fault. She kept after something until she forgot why she was after it. My mother thrilled every time I got another role, every time I became another option. She seemed sure I’d find someone better to be.

  That night in the shower, so much of my hair washed down the drain that I worried I might disappear, but when I wiped off the fogged-up mirror, I saw my head was still full of locks and tangles. I combed it carefully and emerged in pajamas to find my brother-in-law waiting to brush his teeth. “Don’t bother,” I said. “Come with me.” His face lifted slowly and he followed me down the stairs. My sister was at the counter, flipping through my mother’s address book, making sure we hadn’t missed letting anyone know. I pulled a bottle of rye from under the counter. Surely no one had touched it since my father had passed away. I poured for all three of us and asked my sister who she thought she’d been in our mother’s eyes, and who she’d wanted to be. My sister said she’d never thought of it that way, and I said, “Let’s.”

  Half

  As often is the case, the situation was nearly impossible to recognize as an ending. Each tried to rehash the circumstances again and again to his or her own advantage. When even every unintended chance had been given to and misused by Benji and Pippa, they knew it must be over. When they were able to see it, when the sunlight finally hit the surface of it in a way that they recognized the crack for what it was, the decision was clean and obvious and certainly a relief. For so long they had both been sure of each other, they knew this break had to be even and sharp in a way that no one could get sentimental or nostalgic.

  They owned a good deal of stuff. Neither could recall who purchased what, so lost in each other had they once been, but suddenly King Solomon was remembered by Pippa, and Benji concurred that everything needed to be destroyed. It would be the only way—break it all down and hurl it into large dumpsters.

  Cutting tools were purchased by Benji—this was clear—Benji now owned the destruction equipment. Diagonal slashes were dragged through every object. They started at the sternum of their home, tearing through books with thick scissor blades. The large chainsaw broke through the center of the couch easily, sending cotton and carcinogenic foam rubber into the air. Pippa went back to the hardware store and purchased bird flu masks. Benji refused one at first, but Pippa expressed her concern—she didn’t want the guilt of his slow death to rest on the end of this relationship. He accepted and then perspiration grew around their mouths in equally salty increments.

  Pippa sat looking at a necklace Benji had given her and suddenly, metal to metal, wire cutters severed the links into two strands. “Everything,” Benji said. Anger and agreement drove Pippa’s hands into the shoebox beside her and pulled up a stack of photos, her fingers destroying them in one clean pull of corner from corner. Benji smiled at her, but Pippa couldn’t see it under the paper mask. Benji used the CutCo knives to saw through cans of soup and then bent the knives until the blades snapped. Pippa tore through every precious dress she’d sniffed out in thrift stores and sample sales. Benji unplugged the TV before trying the saw on it first and then resorting to the sledgehammer. He didn’t pause as he slid each baseball card out of its plastic sheet. Pippa kicked through framed drawings she’d made of Benji. Let’s be clear: they meant every word.

  When everything had been clipped and ripped and unhinged, Pippa took Benji’s hand and hauled him outside. She pushed a shovel into his grip and took one for herself. She pointed to the northwest corner of the yard and she took the southeast. They began digging a diagonal trench through the garden, ruining a full lawn that had taken years to even out because of the heavy shade. It was a generous break from the particulate air of the indoors. Pippa tore off her white mask and Benji did the same.

  Questions quickly entered each of their minds, but they replaced them with the work of calculating exactly how many more minutes would pass before this epoch would end. Only several feet of space kept them from the moment they would meet in the center of the yard and spade would clang against spade. They both knew the real work of this decision would come with phone calls and cups of coffee and the hard task of making others understand. Small pools of pity and misunderstanding and alliance would gather between family and friends. Pippa and Benji had only small pockets of fear: elegance, rationality, indecency, skepticism, and forgiveness.

  Above them, in a tree, large now but once so small one or the other of them (who could remember?) had been able to carry it with a single hand, a crow sat cawing and searching the branches for life.

  With just inches between them, Benji dug in one more time and Pippa met his effort. Breathing hard, perspiration everywhere, they looked behind them at the line that had been drawn and one final thought arrived to their minds at the same time: there is no specified distance between being alone and around.

  Judgment Day

  When Pewit was a child, his parents told her about the wild Scissortail monster who would decide what her afterlife would be. Pewit had been poring over the Roman heroes of her mother’s heritage and the Greek monsters of his father’s. Pewit imagined himself away from her parents, in the world of these myths, where things were always and never what they seemed. Pewit’s parents saw the way he believed everything was possible and made up a new monster, one that Pewit had not already read about, one that Pewit might think still existed, one that had not yet been conquered by a myth and a hero. They told Pewit about its barbed-wire limbs and its chalk-white nipples. Pewit lived in fear of the Scissortail Beast for a long time, imagined the way it would divide him, the way the Scissortail, with a few quick cuts, could make Pewit one thing, rather than another. How the Scissortail could take away Pewit’s bothness. Pewit was tired of only being something when compared to another. Pewit wanted to be the same thing no matter what she was standing next to. Pewit wanted to untitle himself. One afternoon Pewit found a duck in the barn tangled in some unwound fencing wire, dead from fright or exhaustion. On the wall above the duck was a drawing of the Scissortail, just as Pewit had imagined it—its arms raised menacingly. The image of the
Scissortail lorded over this trapped dead duck. Pewit was not afraid, though. Pewit had known someone had been crawling into his imagination for weeks now. She looked behind her to see if that person was watching her. Pewit knew if he thought his own thoughts, he would come out fine. Pewit didn’t have it figured out but liked it that way. Pewit had been snagging on herself. He had confusions that were more certain than he would admit. Pewit was not one or the other. Pewit would not die and go to just one place. Pewit knew she would be everywhere at once and that the white noise of feeling every sensation at one time would make it feel like she was nowhere at all, and that would feel like home. Pewit pitied the Scissortail for its one-sidedness. The Scissortail had been an invention to make Pewit behave. To show how well he knew what was the right thing to do, Pewit reached his small arms carefully into the barbed wire and extracted the duck, cautious not to puncture its unfeeling body but scarring himself. Pewit brought it into her mother to prepare for dinner. Then Pewit walked calmly to the bathroom, lined up the antiseptic, the band-aids and his arms, and did the careful work of making sure every bit of herself remained intact.

  Hammer, Damper

  Before they took him in, he’d made a ritual of pressing his ear to the side of the upright piano as his mother played until she’d warn him away.

  Now, in the dark of the night, lit with red blinks and glowing screens and the light from the hall, he watches his parents sleep in the chair and the cot beside him, and he is not old enough to think, “How serious could it be?” He waves his hands, trying to vanish them like he saw in the magic show. He imagines walking out of this place on a tightrope and emerging on the other side of the wall to much applause. When the sun appears in his window at five a.m., he flourishes his palms again. He wonders at how fine he feels.