see the cuts, and this had
given her pause, could she really be smiling and joking with you in such a perfectly casual way &c., all this emotional yoyoing being quite hard on your heart, which has to keep shifting gears. You pay and thank her and walk out. You don’t want to be seen carrying a shovel, which in urban Cambridge looks like a stage prop, so you go home, stopping along the way to purchase concealer. You leave the shovel in the library, then stand in the bathroom, dabbing makeup below your right eye. It stings as it goes on. It’s not a professional job but it will do for now. Near the cantina where you had your birthday party, there’s a shop that specializes in travel books. It is hilariously comprehensive. The only time you actually purchased anything here was before your trip to Germany. The choice you faced then was paralyzing: all manner of guidebooks, designed for travelers of every cultural and socioeconomic stripe. Hip pseudonarratives for backpackers. Upscale guides to East Berlin couture. You went low-budget, buying one of a series written by local students and updated every year by a fresh round of unsuspecting field agents who vow never to do that again after a hostel in Croatia leaves them with what their pediatrician back home calls without a doubt the nastiest case of scabies he’s ever seen. You know this because you used to teach these students and they used to tell you. You had frank and open relationships with them. You held your office hours in a café and always someone came, if not to ask questions, then to shoot the breeze. Sophomores had crushes. Your sections were coveted. For three years you TFed introductory logic, as well as Kant and the Enlightenment Ideal; once you applied to teach a seminar on indecision. That was the title you proposed: On Indecisiveness. Your so-called advisor turned you down, proposing that what you really wanted to do was work out your own hang-ups in front of a captive audience. Maps of New England shingle a wire rack. You find one that unfolds to the size of a picnic table, detailing roads all the way to the Canadian border. You pay your thirteen ninety-five plus tax and yes, please, a bag would be good. The office-supply store sells three-cubic-foot cardboard boxes for two twenty-nine apiece plus tax. You estimate the station wagon’s cargo area and settle on six. They’re an ordeal to carry, six flattened boxes along with a roll of clear packing tape and a black permanent marker. The only way to do it is to pin the boxes to your flanks as you walk, taking short, shuffling steps so as not to lose your grip on the slippery cardboard, the surface of which seems to have been finished with a kind of wax. It takes you a while to get home. Plus you’ve got the map (in a high-quality paper bag with twisted paper handles and the artfully weathered logo of the store imprinted on the side) to contend with. All the cash transactions have left your pockets swinging heavily with change. You arrive home winded, your mood black. But you must go on. Catch the bus across the river, where you enter a store that sells camping equipment. Along the back wall is a supernumerary array of hiking boots. A lanky boy comes over to dispense wisdom. Hardcore, he says when you tell him you’re taking a winter backpacking trip. He sells you your third pair of new footgear this year, as well as down-filled nylon pants and high-tech gloves and a parka and a rugged backpack and a box of plastic packets that produce heat when twisted. They go inside your gloves, he explains. The total comes to about thirteen hundred dollars. You hand him your credit card but it comes back. You have exceeded your limit. You exceeded it when you bought new shirts and new pants and cufflinks and a ruby pendant, and so you ask the boy to hold your purchases and go off in search of another ATM. The first one you come across doesn’t allow you to take out more than five hundred dollars at a time. All right, then, you’ll do it three times. Again the machine stops you in your tracks: you have reached your limit for the day. You tingle unpleasantly. Does “limit for the day” mean the calendar day, meaning midnight, or a twenty-four-hour period, in which case you’re going to have to wait until morning? Either way, you can’t wait that long. You’re going to have to make an unscheduled stop at the bank. The lady behind the desk at a nail salon directs you to a branch five blocks away. You hightail it there and get into what feels like a conga line at an old-age home. Only one window is open. You hold back bleats of impatience and when you finally do make it up to the window, the teller asks if you want that as a cashier’s check and you say cash, please, twenties. This causes her to stare at you in a harrowing way, and you wonder if she’s going to call the police or hit the button for the silent alarm. Then you realize that she’s annoyed at having to count it all out. Which is highly inappropriate: they’re a bank, giving out money is their job. If you were of a different state of mind and less pressed for time, you’d ask to see the manager. Back at the camping store, the boy has got everything all packed up and ready to go, which seems to you a remarkable act of faith on his part. You tell him that upon further consideration, you don’t need those hand warmers after all. They work great, he says. You’re sure they do, but no, thanks. He shrugs and fishes them from the bottom of the bag, saving you sixteen dollars and ninety cents. Every little bit counts. When you lay out the stack of bills, he goggles. Near the building where you lived briefly with nymphomaniacs is a purveyor of cheap housewares. The salesman encourages you to go for something heavier than the lightweight duvets you have chosen. They won’t really keep a body warm, he says. That’s all right, you say. Your final errand run takes you to a second drugstore. You fill a basket with the following: lighter fluid, matches, a box of latex exam gloves, ten rolls of duct tape, trash bags, a jumbo package of baby wipes, and a large bottle of double-caffeinated soda. For appearances’ sake, you have also thrown in a fishing magazine. The total comes to sixty-one eighty-five plus tax. You’d like to pay with some of your abundant loose change but that’s not a way to remain inconspicuous, making people count nickels. Outside, it has begun to snow, big flakes like nonpareils. At home you stand in the entry hall, brushing yourself off. You close your eyes and dream up contingencies. The vanity of this soon dawns on you: there are an infinite number of them. You could make them up all day long. You might as well accept that something could go wrong, because if you’re not willing to accept that, then you’re not really willing to go on. And you must go on. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. You go upstairs and close the blinds and set your alarm for seven P.M. You lie down fully clothed and fall into a dreamless sleep. WAKE RAVENOUS. You haven’t eaten since breakfast, and that was tea. Now you go down to the kitchen and eat everything you can find. You make a fresh cup of tea, fortifying yourself for what comes next. The air in the library has grown fetid. (Is this possible? Does it happen so fast?) Begin by taking everything out of their pockets. He has a single house key and a bent promotional postcard for a rock band and a state ID with an address in Quincy and a parole card and a phone and a small amount of cash. Her cellular phone is lipstick-red and chipped. You set it aside, adding her thirty-one dollars to his sixteen, folding the bills into your back pocket. Every little bit counts. Her wallet contains coupons, a driver’s license, a library card, which last amazes you. Unduly: for why should she not read? (Because you cannot allow yourself to conceive of her as anything other than an object.) She lives, lived, in Roxbury. You never knew. You will yourself to unknow it. Her skirt peels up as you drag her out of the way. Thighs the color of suet, convenience-store briefs, a sparse gray fringe protruding. Once she’s moved, you make her decent again. You spread out one of the duvets. Being thinner, he moves more easily, although in the process the trash bag slips off, exposing what you still cannot bear to see; and you have a moment where you can’t go on. But you must. You position him parallel to the short end of the duvet, roughly four-fifths of the way down its length. Crouch down, head averted and mouth tightly shut, and fold over the edge of the duvet, covering him. Roll him over. It’s difficult. He is non-compliant, dead weight ha ha ha. The smell is impossible to describe, don’t even try. Curse yourself for having forgotten to purchase a surgical mask. You’re going to need another shower by the time this is done. Over and over he goes, on a bias, so that instead of a ne
at, even burrito you’ve formed a kind of cone. Back up and start again. And once more. There. That ought to do. Now you duct tape like it’s going out of style, resulting in something that resembles a silver cocoon or, more accurately, a chrysalis. You unpack the second duvet and repeat the process with her. She is noticeably larger. The lack of symmetry bothers you. Nevertheless you regard your chrysalises as things of beauty. A vision comes to you: they erupt, two new creatures formed from the soup of what used to be him and what used to be her, winged, magnificent, ethereal, flapping off into the sky, taking your troubles away. While you linger in this fantasy, her phone goes off with a mighty blast of trumpets. Scrape yourself off the ceiling and look at the screen: ANDREI. Her husband? Son? Pimp? Who knows. You wait until it stops ringing, then check the missed calls. There are six. This concerns you. Has she mentioned the name of the man who pays her sixty dollars to clean house? (Does she even know your name?) Does she keep her schedule written down? In an accessible place? As you cannot answer the questions, nor hope to alter the actualities underlying those answers, you set them aside and concentrate on what you can control. You turn their phones off. Ten thirty-two P.M., and you’re behind schedule. It’s a good thing you slept three hours instead of four or five. You’ve needed the extra time. Constant activity has prevented you from confronting what you have done; nor have you given much consideration to the alternative, which now stands before you as you go to the kitchen to start assembling cardboard boxes: the phone. Look at it. It is still possible to pick it up and dial. But is it? No. Not anymore. Or perhaps they would understand, if you explained to them the expression on his face, the pressure of the gun against your throat. The gun wasn’t loaded, but he could have jumped you from behind and strangled you or—or—or what about this: he could have hit you
with the bookend. Or the poker. Anything was possible, and you can talk, you have always been able to talk; pick up the phone; it would be so easy, wouldn’t it; would obviate all this effort, free you of so many burdens. If you do not, your night has only just begun. Go on. Two by two you carry the assembled boxes to the library, where you fill each with ruined books, not all the way to the top but enough so that they won’t go flying everywhere or feel unnaturally light, should anyone want to pick them up—not that that will happen. Why would it? You must believe it won’t. Sealing the boxes with packing tape, you label each one either BOOKS LIVING ROOM or BOOKS MASTER BEDROOM. You jog through the streets, through the gentle snow. Her car is right where you left it and your heart stops: a parking ticket. How is that possible? You checked the signs. You read for content.
Then you see that it isn’t a ticket but a leaflet advertising a two-for-one tapas brunch. Angrily you tear it into bits, resolving to never, ever eat at that restaurant. For someone who cleans for a living, her car is a hellacious mess. Standing beneath a gas station overhang, surrounded by curtains of snow, you rid it of everything belonging to her: unopened soda cans, smeared newspapers. A bit of jiggering gets the second row of seats down, leaving the cargo area empty and flat. You pay for your gas and ask for two tree-shaped air fresheners, both in Royal Pine. Despite your bang-up mummification job, the stench in the library seems to have worsened. You gag as you crouch down beside her. Slip your hands under her. It’s hard to get purchase, because the tape is so taut and smooth. It’s your own fault for being thorough. What you need is a handle; and so you use duct tape to fashion one, drawing inspiration from the bookstore bag’s twisted paper handles. Gingerly you raise her up—she bends a little, but less than you expected—and give her a test jounce. Solid. Go. Deep breath and open the library door and drag her down the hall and into the living room and down the hall again and across the kitchen and into the service porch, the linoleum helping you along, outside and thudding down the frosted wooden steps and drop her in the snow with a powdery whup.
Butterfingered, you fumble out the keys to the station wagon and raise the rear hatch. Sit on the bumper, then bend over and pick up the handle and row backward, scooting yourself into the cargo area with your neck and body bent over sideways, you’re too damned tall but you do it, you get her mostly up, and when she is half in and stable, you climb carefully out the passenger door and hurry around to the back and push her the rest of the way in. You would never have guessed how awkward this is. She won’t move like you want her to; she is heavy and stiff. You lower the hatch without closing it and go back for round two. With him everything’s chugalugging along dandily until you get to the top of the exterior steps and the handle rips loose and you go tail over teakettle into the snow. There’s no time to fix it; scramble back up and pull him bodily until he’s on the ground, then squat down and slip your arms underneath him and the cold burns and your lower back yodels and you get up, staggering around. The hatch is closed. Why couldn’t you have left it up.
And so you have to drop him again. When the hatch is open, you squat and lift again, ignoring the pain. You get him in semi-straight but this isn’t the time to be concerned about aesthetics; you’re out there in the open and you glance at the windows of the neighboring house, miraculously still unlit. Run back to the library and grab the third duvet. It hides them both with room to spare, although to your eye it’s more than obvious what’s underneath. To solve this problem you go back into the house and collect the pillows from the downstairs bedroom. They do nicely to fill in the gaps, smoothing the two lumps into a solid mass, sort of like an air mattress. Why you would be transporting an air mattress, you have no idea. If pressed, you would use the excuse that you needed padding to cushion the boxes of books that you intend to put on top of them, or else the boxes would bounce around, damaging their contents. In your head you practice delivering this explanation. The first box fits, though you have to wedge it in, and you realize that if you fill up the entire cargo area, you’ll have obstructed your rearview mirror. Under normal circumstances that’s bad enough; in this case, it might be a fatal error. Recalibrating feverishly, you go inside and collect all the plastic bags from your long day of shopping. Indian-style on the kitchen floor, you use a chef’s knife to slice open all your nice, neat boxes, transferring the ruined books from the boxes to the bags, tying the bag handles twice so the contents won’t spill out. You use up all nineteen bags—exclusive of the paper bag from the bookstore, which still holds the map—and take them outside to place them atop the duvet. Now you’re talking. Now it looks like an amateur moving job, the exact impression you’re shooting for. You give yourself a mental high-five. You’re still going to have to do something about the ruined carpet. But not right now. The stove clock says one ten in the morning. You shower again, don your new cold-weather gear, and pack your (her) duffel with a change of clothes, including one pair of new shoes still in their soft drawstring bag. The shovel. The bag with the map, to which you add their phones and both sets of identification. Lighter fluid and matches. Trash bags. Backpack. Soda. Fishing magazine. (Why not?) A flashlight. The knife, seems like a good idea. Put on your eleventh pair of latex gloves for the day and load up the car. The wind throws down snow from the branches. You zip up your parka. The shovel goes under the edge of the duvet, the garbage in back, everything else on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Road trip ready, you get behind the wheel and head north. EARLY ON you glance at the speedometer and are surprised to see the needle touching eighty. This is idiotic, given the road conditions. Not to mention the danger of getting pulled over. So you police yourself (hahaha) closely, with the result that the trip drags. Radio stations surface, then sink, all holiday favorites. A cassette sticks halfway out of the tape deck. With some hesitation you push it in, but what pours from the speakers stands your hair on end, a tune you’ve heard her singing before. You eject the tape and throw it out the window. You will have to live with silence. You’ve done it enough. The rubbery beat of the windshield wipers. Tiny explosions of snow. It seems that the air fresheners are making the stench worse, calling attention to what they are intended to conceal. You toss them ou
t, too. But you can’t drive with the smell building up like that, so you lower one of the rear windows an inch. Cold air rushes in behind you, a noise like a pursuing tornado. It keeps you alert, and the smell dwindles to a tolerable level. At least the car has four-wheel drive—something you didn’t think about in advance. Luck or fate has saved you there. I-95 runs all the way to New Brunswick, but you don’t go nearly that far, stopping north of Portland for food and fuel. The gas station is strung with tinsel. In the bathroom you remove the battery from his cell phone, dropping the phone itself in the trash. The battery you pocket. The clerk wears a floppy Santa hat and a look of existential despair. You buy another green soda. So much caffeine must be unhealthy. It sure feels bad. Try not to look jittery as you take out more twenties. Gas alone will cost you several hundred dollars over the course of this trip, and it occurs to you that criminals, just like everyone else, must be feeling the recent increases at the pump. Everybody hurts during tough times, even the wicked. You almost giggle, right there in the middle of the mini-mart, to imagine mafiosi complaining of shrinking profit margins. Before leaving town, you place the trash bags in an alley. Alone on the road, with nothing to do but stare into the surging snow, you bury or shed or at least suspend the klaxon thought that you, too, are among the wicked. For a while you hug the shoreline, running a string of quaint towns whose wreathed wooden homes evoke visions of ruddy-faced lobstermen and plump, jolly wives, everyone gathered round the fire, glugging eggnog, swapping presents, intoxicated with good cheer. Turning inland, you pass a sign for Kennebec County, population 117,114. In the last two hours you’ve seen three other cars, all going in the opposite direction. You toss his cell phone battery clattering onto the blacktop. North again, a narrow road unspooling through the forest. The sun has started to send up shoots; iced-over ponds glimmer. That’s okay. You anticipated this. Your goal is a location remote enough that you won’t have to worry about operating in broad daylight. Consulting the map, another westward turn. The forest closes around you like a hand. Stop the car and get out and stand on the shoulder, playing the flashlight through the trees, your breath rising in great white balloons. The snow is deep and inviting. You should have sprung for the hand warmers. Strap the shovel to your new backpack, tighten the laces on your boots. Put the high-tech gloves over your latex gloves. Open the hatch and push aside the books. You have your doubts about the strength of her handle. On the fly, you decide to use the duvet as a kind of stretcher or sling by which to drag her. This idea fails, spectacularly. After crashing down the embankment (much steeper than it looked; plus you land awkwardly on the shovel handle) you have to spend time digging her out and repositioning her. Even then, she won’t keep straight. The duvet grows heavy, starts to tear. This will never work. You overestimated yourself. You scramble up the embankment with the ruined duvet and exchange it for the knife. She has sunk into the powder. You kneel beside her, cutting slits in the tape wide enough to work your gloved fingers into. Lean back and pull and walk backward. She comes. Slowly, but she comes. Okay. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Your fingers hurt and your back hurts, but you are moving, and that’s enough to power you on through the trees, smearing a trail that anyone could follow. Fifty feet. Your nylon pants make a swishing sound. A hundred feet. Owls low. Hundred fifty. Complexly woven branches render the sky a vast gray rosace. Smell the evergreens, dense stands of eastern white pine. Much better than your air fresheners. You wish you could chop down one of these tall soldiers and hang him from the rearview mirror. There’s less snow on the ground now, most of it clumped in needles overhead, like cotton bolls. Brown needles on the ground. Patches of ice; you slip and right yourself and pull on. Swish swish. Two hundred feet. That’s what they call Maine, isn’t it? “The Pine Tree State.” Your fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Yawkey made your social studies class memorize the state capitals and flowers and so forth. To keep your mind off the difficulty of the task at hand, you run through nicknames. Massachusetts: the Bay State. Vermont: the Green Mountain State. Swish swish. Three hundred feet; four. The only state without “state” in its nickname is New Mexico: Land of Enchantment. Focus on warm places. Florida: the Sunshine State. California: the Golden State. Hawaii: the Aloha State. Five. After Arizona: the Grand Canyon State, you set her down and catch your breath (it comes sharp and clean and electric), unstrap your shovel, and bend to dig. Except you can’t. The earth is frozen. You strike at what feels like solid rock, and for the first time all day and night and day, frustration wells up to the point where you cannot contain it. With an animal howl you slam the shovel into the ground, the mud cracking into poker chips. You do this again and again, but nothing. It would take hours to clear even a few feet. What you need is a pickax, and since you don’t have one, you’re going to have to leave her here or else bring her all the way back through the forest, back through the snow, back up the embankment, the thought of which makes you want to surrender. You cast about for salvation and it comes, literally, in a ray of light: there: a hollow log. Go to it. You test it by getting down and crawling halfway in. Yes, it will work. You drag her to it, then cut off the duct tape, heeding the (unsubstantiated but intuitive) notion that she will decay faster this way. You unroll the duvet and out she comes, not reshaped and winged but the same as before, perhaps a little grayer. You’re well past the urge to vomit but slipping your arms under her armpits does give you a bad moment. You wrestle her toward the log, smelling the deadness on her, feeling her clay through your gloves. On second thought you might not be totally done with vomiting yet. You get her head inside and then push her by her legs, bit by bit, her knees bending rustily, so slowly it’s going, so slow until at last you get her in up to her waist and that’s enough, enough already, enough,
Jesse Kellerman Page 20