The drawing was not as perfect as the first. His hand was shaky and the lines were not following her body contours. This seemed to anger him.
“I think it’s good.” She pecked him on the cheek and got up to prepare lunch. As she left the bedroom she turned to look at Carl. His hands obviously ached for he grimaced as he opened and closed his fists. He stopped only to shred the paper and let the bits fall into the stained sheet.
Beverly retrieved her robe in the kitchen and prepared an elaborate lunch. After setting the table she found Carl dressed and in her office playing with the computer keyboard.
“You’ve got to turn it on if you want to produce anything,” she giggled from the doorway.
She saw Carl glance at the sketch that she had left next to the keyboard. Every curve, every shading was in place.
“Carl, come on. Lunch is on the table.”
She was already seated when Carl entered the dining room.
“Slow-poke,” she teased.
At the table Beverly kept staring at his hands.
“How do you get those things?” asked Beverly, a forkful of pasta poised in front of her lips.
Carl looked at his cut and calloused hands. “I bury things.”
“Bulbs?”
“What?”
“What do you bury? Are you planting a garden? God, it’s been, what, six months since I’ve been at your place. Remember, it was the day I signed the lease for this house.”
Carl nodded.
“Can you imagine? We’ve been neighbors now for six months and lovers for five of them.”
Carl smiled at her.
“And it’s been days since you smiled at me like that.”
“I’m sorry, Beverly. I’m under some stress right now.”
“That why you’ve been working so hard in the yard?”
Carl laughed. “As a matter of fact that’s exactly why I’ve been digging.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No!”
Beverly looked down at her plate and realized she couldn’t finish the pasta.
“You’re a special person,” Carl said as he reached for her hands. He squeezed her hands tightly. “I have to go.”
“Please, Carl. You never wanted to leave in the past. You would spend as long as a week with me and go home reluctantly to check on your place. Now I can’t get you to spend a single day with me. Why?”
His eyes seemed to shimmer under salty tears that never fell. As he got up she watched his linen suit fall in wrinkles around his robust body. He still had the body of his youth and Beverly assumed it was due to his penchant for digging. She watched him walk to the threshold of the dining room and stop. His hands reached up and grasped the lintel. He hesitated. Beverly rushed from her seat and threw her arms around him. She could smell his body through the cloth, rich and heady stifling her breath.
“I love you, Beverly, but ...”
She waited for the “I can’t make a commitment,” which never came. He merely reached down to his right trouser pocket, almost slid his hand in, but stopped. Instead he patted the pocket and pulled away from her.
She watched him walk down the gravel path until he was hidden by the fir trees. When she brought her hands up to her face to rub away the tension, she smelled the garlic embedded in her fingertips and remembered she had to clean the dining room after the half-eaten lunch.
After completing innumerable petty chores she decided to hunker down to write. As she entered the office she noticed that the sketch was missing. She searched the floor around the computer table hoping that it had fallen. It was not there. Beverly sat on the hardwood floor and felt her tears sliding across her cheeks.
That night, in bed, Beverly lay naked upon her cotton sheet, the tan of her body emphasized by the white of the material. Her dark eyes penetrated the dimness of the moon-sprayed room. The ceiling fan whooshed the air above her head. Her mind settled on that sound for comfort as she closed her eyes. Whoosh ... whoosh it lullabied amongst the hyacinth smell of night. Her limbs softened on the verge of sleep when suddenly her breath halted and she found herself panting for air. Her head turned toward the open French doors leading to the garden. She swallowed and choked, then with her hands she pushed her body up off the bed scrambling to the floor. Finally she was able to stand and move to the garden. The summer heat cooled by the moon’s full glow hugged her body. Her breasts, stimulated by the night chill, ached as she sucked in deep breaths of air. A dream, she said to herself, as her breath started to come in normal rhythms. A dream, a nightmare, she thought.
But sleep never came that night, and it seemed that over the next few days she dozed lightly only at the keyboard or while reading on the garden swing. Deep, dreamy, reviving sleep never came. Neither did Carl.
One morning after her shower Beverly stood in front of the full-length mirror behind the door to her bedroom. She had been skipping meals and when she did sit to eat, she barely touched her food. However, her body seemed to be swelling. There was a gnawing inside her gut, a steady nibbling at her intestines. She belched as she tried to push on her stomach. Then she noticed the nail on her right index finger was loose, not just a portion of it, but the entire nail was coming free of its bed. She swung the bedroom door open and rushed to the bathroom for a band-aid.
“Shit,” she audibly complained and wound the bandage tightly around the finger.
When she looked in the mirror she saw two reddish, bloated cheeks beneath the dark semicircles that undermined her big eyes.
She had been pondering the possibility of an allergy or asthma, but these new symptoms frightened her. Could her ailment be more severe? If Carl did not come today she would have to try to reach him. He had no telephone and no road led to his house, but she knew if she just kept walking upstream along the water’s edge she would reach his place. But she didn’t have to, because that evening, as the sun was leaving he arrived.
He looked refreshed and even smiled when he saw her. Beverly moved awkwardly toward him as he entered her house. Her body felt full, her skin was pigmented with splotches of dusky red tint. A stale eggish odor emanated from the folds of her flesh.
“Oh, Carl, I need you.”
Carl held her and swept his long fingers through her thinning hair.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me. It started the day you left. I’ve had trouble breathing and ...”
Carl pressed his lips to her mouth and thanked her.
“What for?” she asked moving her head back slightly so she could see him.
“For what you’re doing.”
“Carl, I don’t understand.”
He moved her back through the hallway to her bedroom and sat her on the bed. He knelt before her and undid the buttons on the front of her dress. His hands caressed her shrunken breasts and his tongue circled the hardened tips. Beverly was embarrassed, amazed, and soothed. He pulled the dress completely open and let his lips slide down to kiss her distended stomach as if she were pregnant from his seed.
“Do you know what’s wrong with me?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You’ve taken my place in the grave, Beverly.”
“What are you talking about?” Her voice was louder than she meant it to be.
“I’m so afraid of dying, Beverly. I’m afraid of the brown earth encasing me, swallowing me into its bowels. Several years ago when I found out that I was terminally ill, I traveled the Amazon where I learned a trick from a small tribe that lived at the mouth of the river, a means to stay alive. To forestall death the tribal chief would carve out an exact replica of someone in an enemy village. Then he personally would bury the reproduction deep in the soil. The deeper he buried it the longer the spell would last. At times it’s lasted as long as five months for me.”
“My God! What are you talking about?”
“The sketch, Beverly, I buried it after I left here last time. I had to do it. I could feel the maggots starting to eat away at my innards. I would h
ave bloated like you and ...”
Beverly screamed and grabbed her stomach with her hands. Her shoulders hunched upward as her body tilted forward to release a hoarse cry. Carl held her tight and kissed the auburn hair already lying rootless on top of her head.
“I love you, Beverly. That’s why I almost gave you the sketch. But it was too late for me to find someone else. Neurological control had dissipated in my hands to the point that I couldn’t draw a straight line and it had to be created by my hands, a photograph wouldn’t do. The original sketch was made when we first slept together. Then I didn’t mind the idea of using you but later it preyed on my conscience. I thought of how I would miss you. But this is the greatest act of love you could give me, and I realize you’ve always been braver than I. Probably loved me more, too.”
“What about me, Carl? What about my life?”
“I’ll always think of you, Beverly. When the time comes to take your remains down the river I promise to pray for you. I built an elaborate casket for your image. It’s sturdy; should hold up for quite some time. It’ll make the decay take place more slowly. Give you time to settle any matters you think are important.”
“What if I go to the police?”
“And say what?”
Beverly swung her body down across the mattress and rolled over onto her right side while still clutching the churning life contained in her stomach.
“I lined the casket with the best white satin I could obtain and smoothed the sketch across the bottom among some rose petals. Before closing the lid I kissed your representation, and sang a hymn as I lowered the coffin into the grave. It was a moving ceremony, really. This is the first time I’ve ever buried someone I loved.”
Beverly was screaming. Was it inside her head or coming up through her body? She was too confused to know for sure. Carl rolled her over onto her back and she felt him trying to enter her. Her hands beat against his head. She pounded and kicked to release herself from this bringer of death.
From far away she heard him say that he was leaving, he couldn’t stand to see her like this.
“You did it! You did it!” she yelled and watched him walk out of the room.
She slid off the bed and stumbled into her office. She was alone in the house now. As she sat at her desk she remembered every detail of Carl’s face and form. She tried to duplicate it on paper but failed. If only her hands could mirror the image in her mind. All she could see were the pronounced cheekbones, the straight slender nose ...
She wrung her hands together and as she did sheaths of skin dropped onto the desk blotter. Her howling reached as far as Carl, who was about to push his boat into the lake.
MIND GAMES by Adam Meyer
The old woman opened her eyes. Shafts of sunlight peered from between the drapes, illuminating swirls of dust. The sheets were damp with her own sweat. A glance at the clock. 6:37 a.m. At least she’d had a few hours’ sleep. It was hard to sleep these days.
She lifted her head from the pillow and sat up arthritically, old bones aching. She looked around the room, saw heavy oak furniture and rocking chair and a thirteen inch T.V. and photographs on the wall, but the faces staring back at her from the frames were those of strangers, and—
Oh my God, she thought. Where am I?
Afraid to move, afraid to stay still too long, remembering that, there had been someone here last night, forgetting who, knowing only that she didn’t want to meet him again.
Where am I?
The faces: smiling, staring, screaming with their eyes.
Who are you? she asked them silently.
But they were deaf, and their frozen mouths permitted no words anyway.
Oh, dear God where is this where is this where is—
She moaned, a short, pained sound that rose from her tortured soul. She was home. This was her own apartment. She had been lost in her very own bedroom. Herman would have laughed if he had seen her a moment ago, a senile old woman who couldn’t recognize her own name. But Herman was lucky: he had never been old, he was young forever, just like the photos on the wall. Just like in her mind.
Except when she tried to picture his face she couldn’t. She saw only a plane of gray like the one that waited outside the window.
She felt the familiar terror rising up, swallowing her whole, like the whale that swallowed Pinocchio.
Pinocchio. She remembered taking the girls to see that a couple of years ago. Oh, yes. Where were the girls? She had to get them off to school. The bus would be here soon.
She padded out of the bedroom and found herself in the middle of the hallway, wondering where she had meant to go.
Christ, the old woman thought, it’s eating away at my mind, cell by cell, piece by piece.
Only it wasn’t the Alzheimer’s. That was just an excuse the doctors had made to explain something they couldn’t understand. She knew what it really was.
But the old woman tried not to think about that as she shuffled into the kitchen and started to make breakfast.
The old woman’s daughter arrived at one-thirty. She was carrying a brown bag filled with groceries. She set it down on the counter and took a seat at the kitchen table beside her mother, who sat at the window and looked at the motion of people and cars below.
“You left eight messages on my machine this morning, Mom. You sounded worried, afraid. Did something happen?”
The old woman’s gaze was focused out the window, sifting between the dull blue sky stitched with gray clouds, and the figures scurrying along the sidewalk, carrying umbrellas in anticipation of rain. She looked briefly at her daughter and then away, as she said, “What are you talking about, dear? I only called once.”
“When?” The younger woman’s eyes softened, though her tone was still angry.
“Oh ... I’m not sure. I don’t know, it was several hours ago at least.
“Five of the messages pleaded me to come over right away, and the other three ...” She didn’t seem willing to discuss those.
“Well, Barbara dear, I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble,” the old woman said.
Her daughter gave her a strange look, hurt and angry and regretful. She said, “I’m Sarah. Barbara’s dead, mom. She died almost thirty years ago, remember? The car ... I was only five, and she was eight. Jesus, Mom, don’t you even remember that?”
“Of course I do,” the old woman lied. “Of course, how could I forget. Don’t cry, Sarah, don’t cry.”
Sarah wiped the tears from her face with a napkin. “I brought you some groceries, Mom. Should be enough to hold you through the week.
“Thank you, dear, that’s wonderful. Did you bring the spaghetti?”
Yes.”
“Good, I thought we’d have spaghetti for dinner. That was always your favorite.”
“Mom, I—I can’t stay that late, you know that. I’ve got to get back for John and Eddie.”
The old woman smiled, revealing a mouthful of teeth, most of which weren’t real.
“I wish you’d stay, dear. Your father would love it if we could all have dinner together, like the old days.”
“Oh God oh God oh God.”
“What’s the matter?” the old woman asked her daughter.
“Nothing,” Sarah said. “Nothing.”
They sat in companionable silence for almost an hour. Finally, Sarah spoke.
“Mom, have you thought about what I asked you the other day?”
Needles of rain splattered the window, exploding against the glass with a faint pitter-patter sound.
“What did you ask me? I can barely remember my own name, let alone what happened the other day.” The old woman frowned, eyes glistening with internal pain. It was bad enough that she was losing her mind, worse was the realization of it, and the fact that she was helpless to stop it.
“About coming to my house.”
“I’d love to visit. I don’t get out of this damn apartment for weeks at a time. It drives me nuts. I’ll go anywhere.”
“No
t to visit,” Sarah said, voice low, compassionate. “To stay.”
“For good?” The old woman’s eyes widened. Her lips parted, but no words came forth. “I ... I’d love to, but ... I can’t. I can’t leave this old place.
“Mom, I think maybe it would do you some good. I talked it over with John, and he says he’d give up his den for you to use as a bedroom. That way I could be near you, take care of you. I come out here for a little while every day, but it’s not enough. I don’t think you can take care of yourself much longer.”
“Well, as long as I can take care of myself, I want to. I have to. This is my home. I don’t want to leave. I won’t.
“But Mom!”
The old woman gazed at the window, watching the raindrops race each other from the pane to the sill.
“I’d like to go outside,” she said. “Take me out.”
“It’s raining. You’ll catch a cold.”
She chuckled. “That’s what I used to tell you girls when you were little.”
Sarah nodded. She knew.
“Will you go over to the supermarket for me, then? I need some things. I need spaghetti. For dinner.”
“I already did,” Sarah sighed, forcing back the steadily mounting anger and resentment. “I left the stuff on the counter.”
The old woman turned, nodding as if seeing the brown Waldbaum’s bag for the first time.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
Mother and daughter watched each other wearily.
“I’ve got to go, Mom,” Sarah said. “Eddie’ll be getting home from school in a little while.”
“I understand.” But the old woman’s eyes were filled with fear. She didn’t want her daughter to go and leave her alone. She wanted to go back with her, live there instead of here, hoping that things might be better somehow. But they wouldn’t, she knew that. He would find her. He would know.
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