Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  Magda’s face in my mind seemed to me still hidden behind the curtain of silky black hair and smushed into the soft ground of the quiet birch woods. There were probably worms and maggots crawling up her lips and into her mouth. How could she talk at all with a mouth full of stuff like that? What might she even want to tell me? Her body would speak for itself, I guessed. She might have dark red polish on her fingernails. She might be wearing fake diamond earrings, a gift she’d received for her birthday. From some admirer, most likely. An older man. Not Blake, who was just a kid, and wouldn’t have been the one to buy her diamonds. Her hair, splayed across the forest floor, would be damp by now, full of dead leaves and detritus, but I imagined it would still look glossy, vibrant. Such a young girl, maybe nineteen? Nineteen and a half at most. “Magda.” I clucked to myself. A pity you had to die. What a dumb, cruel world. And yet it didn’t seem to be a real world. Not my world. Magda’s world was dumb and cruel. Mine had a mysterious note in it, but otherwise was placid and mellow. Walter had told me stories of the war, and they were worse than vampire books. They didn’t seem at all real either. It was dumb and cruel that anyone had to die at any moment they weren’t ready for, if they still felt there was more life to live. Walter had been ready to die, I thought. He nearly did it on purpose. “I’m bored now, let’s get this over with.” That was his attitude.

  You could imagine the deaths of these dull heifers roaming the Save-Rite, these sad mothers with nothing to do but eat and fold laundry with tiny, stubby fingers sticking out of their huge bloated hands. Their lives must feel like such ineffectual blither blather. Did they even think things to themselves? Why did they look so idiotic, like domesticated animals, chewing their cud until the slaughter, half asleep? I had to feel sorry for those women, imagining each of them strangled and bludgeoned deep in my birch woods, left to rot or to be eaten by wolves. A woman should be laid to rest with dignity, of course. No matter where she lives or what she does with herself. When I die, I thought suddenly, wistfully, bury me under an apple tree. I was carried away by the thought. And then it seemed ridiculous, which it was, as no one was listening. I chuckled to myself, raked my fingers through my white hair.

  Magda couldn’t be too pretty, I reasoned. Anyone too pretty would have had people out looking for her. She’d have admirers, sure. Every teenage girl had those. I would have worried about her going out at night, smoking in a tree house, or huffing paint—I’d read about that in a magazine, in line at the grocery store the week before. But she couldn’t have been too popular or too beloved. She may not have been missed at all. Perhaps the people of Levant were even happy to overlook her absence. There might have been something about Magda that those folks didn’t want to see. She may have been a nuisance, a burdensome personality that got under one’s skin, but one would have a hard time describing exactly why. Nobody would ever question her absence, as though saying her name could invite her back, and everyone was happy that she was gone. Her parents in Belarus had been glad she’d left in the first place, fed up with her misery and complaints. They kicked her out, I imagined. “All you do is brush your hair and smoke cigarettes out the window,” her mother may have said, stirring a pot of soup. “Go get a job. If you hate school so much, go out and do something.” “You are ungrateful. You think your life is so hard because you aren’t some whore on the television? Ugly girls find honest husbands. Thank God you aren’t a beauty.” Or her father, drunk off plum brandy or whatnot, sitting on a tapestried sofa in front of his grainy television screen, a lace doily covering an old coffee table, said, “Get out of my house, Magda. I can’t bear to look at you. You make me sick. Go to America if you’re so miserable here with us. Go work in McDonald’s.” Maybe I was the only person who cared that Magda was gone. Blake had cared enough to leave a note, but was that really caring? If my friend was dead in the birch woods, I’d certainly have done more than leave a note. And so I would. I decided then and there: I would do more. I’m coming for you, Magda, I said in my mind. Nobody seemed to notice that my mindspace was so hectic as I paced the aisles of canned soups and boxed cereals. Nobody in the market seemed to notice me at all.

  I got in line at the checkout and looked around at the townspeople. If any of them knew Magda, if they cared about her, they hadn’t noticed she’d been gone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Maybe she’d gone out, with Blake, I supposed, and they had gotten in some trouble. Blake again. What nerve he had, leaving Magda’s body all alone. He must have been involved somehow. I wasn’t an expert in crime, but I knew this much: Blake was a suspect. He had contact with Magda’s dead body. He knew something. It wasn’t me. His denial only made him seem scared and paranoid. And if I knew anything about paranoia, it was that it sprang from guilt and regret. Always. I’d seen it clear as day in Walter when we were having our troubles. “You’re crazy,” guilty people say. They try to dismiss your inquiries. “You’re paranoic,” Walter insisted. Guilty people will try to divert your attentions. “Vee vere just talkink! I vas just helping her!” he said. Nobody will ever find her. Blake was guilty of something, whether of murder or neglect or stupidity, I didn’t know yet. If there were any actions to be taken, the first would be to find that boy. I had little to go on. But then again, the town was small. He was literate, that Blake. I knew that at least. And he had enough common sense to know if someone was alive or not. He must have felt Magda’s wrist or throat. I wondered how long he’d waited, wishing or not wishing for her heart to beat. Three minutes without a pulse and you’re dead. I knew that. But there’d been stories on the radio, I remembered, of people who had come back to life after hours, days even. “Jesus was dead and buried and three days later, he rose,” Pastor Jimmy said. And what did it really mean to be dead, after all? If one is still alive for the first few minutes without a pulse, then a heartbeat is not necessarily the signpost for being alive. The heart isn’t the gauge. Even when the heart dies, other organs continue to live. Then where is the line between alive and dead? It’s the brain that dies when the heart stops pumping. Yes, this was true. The brain needs oxygen, which the heart and lungs deliver. And without the brain, there is no mind, doctors said: If the brain is dead, the person is gone. The mind is over. But what if the doctors were wrong? What if the mindspace was not something made by the brain, and what if it continued even after death? Oh, I could get carried away imagining all sorts of theories. At times I wondered, Walter, are you hearing all this? Was he still up there, sharing the mindspace with me? What would he think if he could see me in this new life in Levant, a single old lady in the woods, with a dog? Walter always hated dogs. How did I love a man who hated dogs? We all have our quirks and issues, I told myself.

  So while Magda’s heart may have stopped, her skin and nails, her teeth even, they might still be living. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven already. Skin cells live how long, twelve hours? Had Magda been murdered yesterday, or after midnight? Or days ago? Only her dead body would tell. And who knows where her body got dragged to, off the path where it had once been. Maybe an animal had taken it. Could a bear abscond with an entire human being, leaving no trace of blood, no nothing? I could go back to the birch woods and look around some more, for evidence of the body, but I was frightened. Death was fine to think about, but to get too close I felt would infect me somehow. It would change me. Walter’s dead body had been bad enough, and I hadn’t seen him looking dead for very long. One moment his body was there, he was alive inside of it, and the next moment he wasn’t. It was horrifying, just that. If I’d found Magda mangled and bloodied, I would have had a nervous attack. It might spoil my mind, I thought. I could go crazy. And I couldn’t afford to do that. I had to take care of Charlie. My garden was already growing. And who was I? I was just one person, a woman of seventy-two. Could it be? Was I so old? I had problems of my own. I had my own plans, my own path to follow. I had to row out to the island. I had to fix something for supper. I had to read a book, to sweep, to brush Charlie’s coat and look fo
r ticks. Magda and Blake were not my problems.

  Still, I had the note. It was the note that was the problem. It was evidence now, and I had it. If anything happened, if the police got involved, I would have to come forward. I’d have to confess, “Yes, I had it the whole time.” And I’d lie, “Under here, beneath all these papers. Oh, I’m an old lady. I am forgetful. I barely even read it, thought it was just a piece of trash.” Who would believe me? They’d put me in jail. Hiding evidence of a crime was a crime in itself, was it not? That note made me an accomplice, a suspect even. “Strange woman, an out-of-towner with a funny name.” “What brings you to Levant?” The police had asked me that when I first moved into the cabin. Of the locals, they proved to be the least charming of all. Standing there in the doorway with their hands on their hips, as if I were some kind of threat to them. They had come to my cabin to intimidate me, I thought, and thus to indoctrinate me, so to speak, into the culture of Levant.

  “Winters get cold out here. County does its best to clear the roads but a gal like you has to take precautions. Now if anything happens, you call us right away, okay?” They called me “Miss Gool.”

  “Gul,” I said. “Like the ocean bird.” And then, as though I thought this would soften them, I said, “But please just call me Vesta.”

  “You’ve got your landline working, ma’am?”

  I said I’d get it up any day, though a year later, I still hadn’t. I had no need for a phone. I had nobody to call, and nobody would ever call me. But those policemen were persistent. “Now, you aren’t shacking up with any strange types, are you, no tenants? There’s a special ordinance for tenants. You can’t be renting this place out like a hotel, you know that, don’t you? The county has strict rules.” I shook my head. The only people who ever came to the cabin were my handymen. “And no little boyfriends?” I giggled, though I wished I hadn’t. “And nobody’s approached you? You see anything suspicious, if anyone tries to contact you, just know, people around here, sometimes they’re up to no good. We’ve been having problems, youths, mostly, they get drunk and do stupid things. And then of course you’ve got the homemade narcotics. Nothing you need to concern yourself with. Just be aware. You know, it’s a pretty spot you have here, but this isn’t exactly a retirement community,” they said.

  I knew what they were saying. “Times are tough,” I said and nodded. I held Charlie by the collar and stood and listened to the policemen say their piece.

  “If you see anything strange, if anybody asks you any favors—”

  “What kind of favors? Am I not allowed to be neighborly?”

  “There’s no cause for alarm,” they said. “Just be advised. There’s good reason this land went for so cheap.”

  “Thank you,” I said when they were done, and shut the door on them.

  I never heard of any criminal activity. I’d been in Levant a whole year, and the worst thing I’d seen happen was a single car crash. A driver hit a tree on Route 17. I’d driven past the tow truck hitching up the wreck. But that was all. I hadn’t liked those policemen, their flabby, parched faces, eyeing my home, my private space, with guns in their belts, badges gleaming, strutting around the acreage like they owned the place. Jealous, they were, that I’d had the cash to buy the camp. That was prime land, and I’d paid pennies on the dollar for it. If nobody in Levant or Bethsmane could afford it, they ought to be happy I’d saved it from ruin. Anyway, I paid my taxes. Those cops worked for me, after all. No, I wouldn’t tell them about the note. If Magda’s body got dredged up out of the lake, I’d burn the note and bury the ashes. I’d act shocked and horrified if they interviewed me for the local paper. “I can’t believe it,” I’d tell the reporter. “To think something like that could happen here, on my lake. . . . No, I saw nothing, heard nothing. I would have gone straight to the police if I had.”

  With my groceries in the backseat, I drove to the library. I returned my book about trees and a thick novel about pioneer women that had struck me as melodramatic. One of the public computers in the reading room was occupied by a couple whom I guessed were in their early twenties, though the people of the area tended to look about ten years past their actual ages. Even their children looked prematurely aged, so worn and bloated. No wonder, I thought, considering the kind of women who were feeding them. There was no outdoor recreation for kids that I’d seen, no playground, no jungle gym at the school. Monlith had had a public park by the school, and wherever you went there was something to occupy the children—crayons at the restaurants, coin-operated bucking broncos, even a petting zoo. If we’d had a child, it would have grown up well in Monlith. But it had never been a possibility. Pointless to even think about it. I stood and watched the two young people huddled in front of the flashing computer. Then I walked over, pulled out a free chair in front of a dimly lit screen, and cleared my throat. I looked around for the “on” button, but couldn’t find it.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know how to turn this on?”

  The girl—braces, eyes edged with deep crow’s-feet, a mouth both lipless and fleshy somehow—darted a bony arm across my lap and flicked the dun-colored mouse on the soiled, gelatinous mousepad. The screen of my computer came to life, showing astral patterns, swirling like the northern lights I’d read about in National Geographic. A few icons on the screen blinked on.

  “Thank you, dear,” I told her.

  “Uh-huh,” she replied.

  I looked for the internet, and managed to use the mouse to click open the browser window, and typed in www .askjeeves.com, as I’d learned to do in a computer course Walter had encouraged me to sign up for, back when he was still alive enough to have good ideas, but already sick. “You need to embrace the future,” he’d said. “Get to know what’s out there. When I’m gone, there will be no need to keep living the way we have, with these old things. You’ll move on. But you have to put some effort in, Vesta. You can’t be lazy.” He’d become caring and concerned for me once the diagnosis was certain. He may have feigned concern before then trying to divert my attention away from what he thought I might know about how he spent his time outside of the house. He was almost never home. I liked it when he got sick for that very reason. For years he’d ignored me. Then suddenly, I was the person he clung to.

  The computer class had been taught by a man in his thirties, a child to me, and he’d spoken to me so gently, with such reassurance, guiding with his finger across the glowing screen to show me where to click, where to drag, how to delete, to select, to navigate. And so in the Levant library, I took kindly to the internet, and set off to have all my questions answered.

  The first thing I wanted to know was whether Magda was a real person, if she’d even existed at all. I half expected to find a little obituary written up about her in the local paper. “Is Magda dead?” I Asked Jeeves. What I found were 626,000 web pages, the first dozen devoted to a tragic story of how a young British fan of what seemed to be a highly successful all-boy band, a girl who had devoted her life to “blogging” about the musical group, dropped dead one morning waiting for the school bus. She was only sixteen. “Magdalena Szablinksa collapsed, and then passed away.” Well, that didn’t help me.

  Three more “Magda” web pages caught my eye. The first was Magda Gabor. She’d been Zsa Zsa’s sister and dead for over twenty years already. For the last three decades of her life she’d been incapacitated by a stroke, poor woman. Six husbands. Hungarian, an actress and a socialite, whatever that meant. And that sister of hers. Of course this was not the Magda I was looking for.

  The next Magda was an Italian opera singer who seemed to have done quite well for herself. Her last performances were in a single-woman opera, which to me meant she must have known something about a woman’s power, a woman’s need to have her voice heard, and so forth. What courage she had. This was a true pioneer, and not some skinny lady in an apron, milking a cow like in that dreary novel I’d just returned. This singing
Magda lived to 104, and had only just died that last September. Poor Magda Olivero. She seemed far more worthy of the name than the others.

  The last dead Magda I found was Magda Goebbels. I didn’t need to read about her. If anything would give me nightmares, it was the story of this Magda. I clicked the window closed.

  There was no use in consulting the Levant phone directory. I didn’t know Magda’s last name. So I Asked Jeeves, “Does anyone named Magda live in Levant?” and found an African American woman named Magda Levant, living in Lubbock, Texas. Then I tried “How about a Magdalena in Levant” and was directed to a listing for a house for sale in Chula Vista, California. That wasn’t right. The couple on the computer next to me gathered their pens and paper—a composition notebook, no spiral wire between them—and left their computer screen on and flickering. When I glanced at it, it showed the web page of a local abortion clinic. Magda Goebbels indeed, I thought. The woman had poisoned her six children, and for what? To spare them the suffering of watching her being put on trial? I thought of Nuremberg, and how Walter’s throat would fill with phlegm whenever something pertaining to the war and Hitler and the Nazis was on the radio. He’d cough and choke. “Turn the damn thing off!”

  A twinge of sadness. If Walter were here, he’d know just what to do about the note. He’d have a theory, fixed and finite, without any wavering clauses, no doubt, no panic. I loved how sure Walter was about things. I missed that. We didn’t always agree, but it seemed that confidence and conviction could turn even a wrong answer into a right one. “Use logic, Vesta,” he’d say when I expressed some flowery opinion. “It’s either this or that. Decide and move forward. You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.”

  I clicked my internet window closed. There were the northern lights again. Everything seemed spectral and foreboding. The reading room was empty and darkening now as clouds gathered outside the large picture windows. I felt very abandoned and lonely. It was momentary sadness, that was all, but just for that second, with Goebbels, and the tiny embryo in the belly of that girl, I was paralyzed with dread. Rare that I ever felt so bad. I felt I weighed several hundred pounds, like that waddling donut eater in Save-Rite. I could barely breathe, but I did turn back around to face my computer. The purple-cushioned swivel chair squeaked and groaned. The librarian had disappeared into some back room behind her desk. I was glad. I didn’t want to be seen in such a state.