Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  “Use your imagination, Vesta,” he would say if I ever looked unhappy. “Nothing is so serious. Cheer up, please.”

  He liked to tell me that I was the source of my own misery, that I was choosing to believe that my life was limited, boring. He explained that everything was possible, and moreover, everything—every thing and scenario—existed in infinite versions throughout the galaxies and beyond. I knew it was a childish belief, but I had adopted it anyway. Imagining infinite realities made whatever nuisance I had to withstand more tolerable. I was more than myself. There were infinite Vesta Guls out there, simultaneous to me, scrolling down the TOP TIPS FOR MYSTERY WRITERS web page, with only one small variation: one Vesta Gul’s hair was falling across her forehead in a different way; one mouse pad was green instead of blue, and so forth. In another dimension, there was a small fire-breathing dragon sitting next to me on the floor. And in another, Charlie was being strangled out in the car by an eighty-foot boa constrictor. And so on. The job of the sleuth was to narrow down potential realities into a single truth. A selected truth. It didn’t mean it was the only truth. The actual truth only existed in the past, I believed. It was in the future where things began to get messy.

  Map out exactly how the crime was committed. Imagine every detail.

  This was ridiculous. If I could map out exactly how the crime was committed, there would be no need to solve the mystery. I supposed there were possibilities to consider, there were versions of different pasts that I could list. Then I could deduce which version was most true. That I could do. But “every detail”? How much detail was “every”? Was it enough to say “his beard was thick” or was I expected to explain just how thick, and of what texture, and when the last time the beard had been trimmed, and with what kind of implement, and by whom? If a beard was recently trimmed, would Magda come back to life? No, such careful imagining had to be limited to crucial scenes. If the beard was trimmed in a cave by the quarry in the dark, messily, brutishly, with a switchblade, and that switchblade had slit Magda’s throat, then the beard was worth conceiving of. But if the beard belonged to a passerby in Levant with no knowledge of anything whatsoever, then it had no bearing on the mystery. Or maybe I was wrong. If there were infinite universes, with infinitely small discriminating details, then every hair on every beard was of some consequence. Didn’t every little thing count? I stared off, considering how I’d ever account for all the beards on Earth, and then on every Earth in the realm of possibilities. But I stopped myself. If there are infinite meanings, there is no meaning.

  Give the murderer a clear and convincing motive. Well, I needn’t give the murderer a motive. The murderer must have done that for himself.

  Create a three-dimensional world. Your characters should have lives that extend beyond the particular situation. You can use the worksheet for writing character profiles to start bringing the characters to life.

  Mystery was an artless genre, that much was obvious. Not that the more literary novels I had borrowed from the library seemed any more inspired. What got put on the library shelves was all the stuff that won’t surprise you. Blake’s invitation, or poem, I could call it, wouldn’t have made it onto anybody’s nightstand: it was too weird. Her name was Magda. What kind of opening was that? An editor would deem the note too dark to publish. Too much too soon, they’d say. Or it wasn’t suspenseful enough. Too queer. I tried to remember the openings of the last few books I’d read. I couldn’t.

  Only one part of the TOP TIPS article seemed useful—the character profile questionnaire. I thought it could help me imagine Magda more precisely. It seemed easy enough to fill in the blanks. That kind of thing was good for people getting older: brain teasers, games. Walter had been keen on such mental exercise. He always had a chessboard set up, and he’d make a move, get up and sit in the opposite chair, make another move. “This way, the psyche confronts itself. There is a dialogue. The mind must be spoken to, Vesta, otherwise it starts to atrophy. It turns to sludge.” It made me think of a fountain in the Monlith shopping center, the chlorinated water recycling down and up.

  “But if the mind talks to itself,” I said, “isn’t it just saying what it wants to hear?”

  Walter was right about needing someone to talk to. Thank God I had my Charlie. Without him, I feared I might lose all sense.

  I took a pen from my purse and began to write down names of suspects on the back of the receipt for my camouflage bodysuit. This was fun, wasn’t it, Walter? My instincts—something the mystery genre writing instructions made no use of—told me I’d need six names. I felt that one must be some sort of monster, some ghoul, some dark, scratchy thing that leapt out of the shadows, a figment of rage representing the dark subconscious of all of mankind. The pine woods were good territory for a character like that. As I wrote the word “ghoul,” my hand slipped on the paper and the u elided with the l, making a single character that resembled the letter d. Don’t they say that accident is the mother of invention? I could call this ghoul Ghod. He would be rather like a gob of goo and nerves, and I felt very clever in seeing the subtle meaning of the name, so close to God. I was going to be good at this, I thought. But I shouldn’t be too confident. An overconfident sleuth could misinterpret evidence. She might only see the clues that would lead her to the solution she’d first had in mind. And I wanted to be surprised by what I discovered. I wasn’t a know-it-all, like Walter. Try to surprise the reader at the end, but always play fair. Oh, I’d play fair, but I’d play the game on my terms. I’d follow my own whims and fancies. That was the life I wanted—a free life, free from expectation. That was fair.

  I still needed a strong male lead. Someone in his mid- to late forties, a kind of Harrison Ford type. I’d always thought Harrison Ford looked a bit like Walter, handsome, strong, vulnerable, and sensitive, a man with an intuitive sensibility, a mind reader of sorts, someone successful, debonair, distinguished. That kind of man could get away with anything. My Harrison Ford might be an avaricious landlord, making uncouth deals in darkened alleys or the back rooms of jazz clubs, but always with the highest moral agenda, always with a warm heart. And he’d have a posse of good-natured underlings at his beck and call. A staff, so to speak. That might make my cast of characters complicated, to deal with these underlings. So no underlings, I decided. Walter had had only one underling at any one point—young research assistants, all of them young women.

  I would call the Harrison Ford character not “Harrison Ford”—it would be hard to separate the real from the imagined—but “Henry.” Regarding Henry was the perfect point of reference for this character. Someone who had once been ruthless, selfish, a narcissist, but is redeemed through sudden tragedy. He might have lost his fortune, and was now forced to work at the hardware store. Or he just frequented the hardware store in Bethsmane, because he was a plumber, or a contractor, or a carpenter. Anyway, I knew I could find him there.

  I had the librarian print out a copy of the character profile questionnaire. She seemed a bit peeved.

  I clicked the X’s on my internet windows. There were more people in the library now. It was close to lunchtime. I took one last look at myself in the reflection in the dark astral plane of the computer screen. There I was. I was the same as ever, just floating now in the digital abyss like a great seer or a god or just an idea.

  I gathered my things, clutching my papers to my chest, and hurried out back to the car. Charlie would be getting cold and sad all alone, I realized.

  We didn’t stop to walk around in town. I didn’t get my usual donut and coffee. We simply sped home, mindful of the Bethsmane police station at the curve in the road around Twelven Creek. I didn’t want to bring any attention to myself. I could already sense a shift in the atmosphere. When someone’s habits are interrupted, even slightly, a small town feels it and some people might take notice.

  Charlie leapt out of the car once we pulled into the gravel drive and I opened the passenger door. He ne
arly wrenched my shoulder out of its socket, as my arm had somehow twisted around his leash. I didn’t think of myself as an old lady, but at my age I am at risk for certain ailments. I’m supposed to—but don’t—take my Boniva once a month. It would be easy to swallow it in the morning and walk around for the hour you’re meant to walk as the medicine is absorbed into the body. But somehow it felt unnatural, like poison. I didn’t trust it. I got the feeling that the chemicals in this medicine would actually leach calcium from my bones. Maybe it was in honor of Walter’s dogged dismissal of any fancy pharmaceuticals. When he got cancer, he blamed it on Pepto-Bismol.

  For lunch I made fresh coffee, and spread peanut butter on another bagel. I didn’t feel like cooking. I took a long hot shower, considering the work I had ahead of me. I had only two suspects so far—Ghod and Henry. By the time I was dressed again, the sun was setting. Time had vanished. I called Charlie back inside.

  * * *

  • • •

  I hadn’t been bored at all that winter. Boredom hadn’t even occurred to me. It had been so much work to keep myself and Charlie clean and cozy, to keep the wood-burning stove fed with wood, to clean the ashes, sweep the floors, plug the drafts in the windows with dish towels. Each day I shoveled a trail through the new snow down to the lake, where I walked and let Charlie crunch over the glazed surface. Inside there was hot tea to make, the fire to start up again. Before we knew it, the sun was down and we were exhausted. I could barely drink a glass of wine and open a book before I dozed off on the couch, the dark pines misty with windswept snow, and then it was all dark and the fire gently crackled and Charlie went just a few yards deep to do his business and then bustled back in, and we went up and got into bed, and the day was done. We were like hibernating bears from November to March. April was when things started to thaw. Charlie and I were all right. We had weathered the storms. But now, with Magda’s mystery to solve, my winter habits seemed pathetic and mundane. How did I stand to live through all that boredom? How did I not tear my hair out, or start acting crazy, talking to myself, pacing, building friends out of snow? I had Charlie to thank for my sanity, I supposed. When he was sleepy, I felt sleepy. Drowsiness would fill the mindspace between us. It was like a pill we took in the winter afternoons. A cup of tea, a quick visit to the woods and toilet, and we were out like two melted candles.

  Now the days were longer. The sky turned orange and pink. Glorious yellows and violet dashes reflected on the lake. The black trees on my island swayed like marionettes in the wind. I could picture God’s hands pulling invisible strings. Maybe Walter was up there with Him in heaven. “When you pass from this Earth, you will know Him,” said Pastor Jimmy. I clucked my tongue. It was all nonsense, was it not? What was real was what was down here, on Earth. The world of nature and its miracles, that was God. There was so much joy down here, so much to explore. And there we were, my dog and I, with the lamp casting a warm glow over the table, a hot cup of fresh coffee. I rarely drank coffee at night, but I wanted to be sharp. My usual glass of wine would make me sleepy. I even lit a candle, as I’d often done in the winter, for ambiance. But I lit it now for focus: a burning flame sharpens the mind. This was what Walter did when he was up late working, writing his case studies, doing whatever it was that he did. I turned down the radio, took out my photocopies, lay the receipt for the darkness bodysuit aside, and got to work on my questionnaire.

  Three

  Name: Magda.

  No last name. I liked that she was just Magda, a little name floating there in the soft birch woods wind. She was my Magda in that way. I had discovered her. And if the past was certain, and it held a certain truth, Magda’s past was mine to discover and know, and I felt I knew her so well already. All I had to do was think.

  Age: 19.

  She was still a girl, I reasoned, but old enough to have a few scars, a few stories. She had a youthful spirit. Even if she was as old as twenty-four, she would still feel that she was nineteen. And if she’d ever been pregnant, she’d have gone where the couple at the library had gone, to have the baby sucked out of her and ruined and disposed of. She would have no qualms about doing something like that, I thought. Pity, shame. Perhaps her murder was God’s retribution. But, oh well. Magda wouldn’t want her life ruined with a baby. She wouldn’t want to be beholden to a child, or to its father, and have to spend her days spooning up mushed carrots into the face of a creature that was only half hers. The other half, I’d assume, would have been a mistake. She’d run away before she got in too deep. She’d get out of Levant, go south, where there were more people like her, restless, cunning and bold. That was the problem in Levant. Nobody was restless. Everything was set in its ways. Anything that was out of the ordinary was tossed out or ignored. Nobody had bothered to make friends with me on the lake. I had neighbors half a mile around the shoreline. They had waved just once when I passed them in my rowboat. And the way they’d waved was as if to say, “This is our property. Get away, go.” I just wanted to explore a bit. I just wanted to know how they kept things up over there. From what I could see, there was a boathouse sinking down on rotting wooden pilings, a door locked but hanging downward and open, so I could see inside a bit, but only at the darkness there. And their house, set far back from the water, was hidden by trees. Dark pines. There was a small dock on the property, and that’s where the neighbors were, both in bathrobes, standing, looking down at the water. They’d seemed surprised to see me, the way the man put a hand out to stop the woman from talking, then pointed in my direction, where I was, twenty yards away on the water. The man was unshaven, the woman had big poofy hair and looked sickly. I waved back, but they turned and walked up the dock and quickly disappeared into their pines. It was odd. I don’t think they had any children. On a few occasions I’d seen their big black truck turning off before me on Route 17. If they’d known Magda, they wouldn’t have liked her. They didn’t like me.

  A general physical description of Magda would take some effort. I’d been able to picture her dead body quite easily, and from that I could gather certain unassailable facts. But her face was still obscured.

  General physical description: Attractive, unusual face due to ethnic heritage.

  Some might find it too unusual, especially as it was framed by her long silky black hair that was so slippery, so fine, that it hung on either side of her face like a picture frame. It made her face all the more strange and tender, put on display in such a way. Her skin was pale, but it wasn’t freckled or mealy. It was almost rubbery. You couldn’t see any pores in it. I imagined that she’d have a slightly upturned nose, a large one. And green eyes? Brown eyes? They were narrow, inscrutable eyes. Green, yes. Berry-red lips when she was living, but now they were pale, white with death, flaky, pressed into the dirt. I pictured her face a bit more clearly from the perspective of the ground beneath it. She wore a lot of makeup on her eyes. Heavy black liner, false lashes, and mascara that made her eyes into tarantulas. She thought it made her look tough. She had a thick chin, a little waddle there that she hated. She thought it made her look fat. She would point to it in front of the mirror at school and say to her girlfriends, “I’m so fat.” And she’d flick at the little pouch there. But she was not fat. Far from it. She was a bit taller than the average, five eight, five nine maybe, but stooped down, a posture of both diffidence and revolt. Magda didn’t care about popularity. She was more concerned with power in a mystical way, maybe, or in a sexual way. She was feminine, refined, but she was hard. She had a man’s kind of intensity. Manly shoulders, I could imagine. Her fingers were long and there was an elegance about her hands and long fine wrists. She could have played piano. If it weren’t for the shoulders, she could have danced in the ballet. But the shoulders were wide because she hunched her back in that way. If she straightened up, she’d be tall and lovely. Perhaps if she’d stayed in Belarus, she’d have worked hard on that posture and would have ended up in Moscow, dancing with the Bolshoi by now, and not dead, facedow
n and nearly forgotten here in Levant. American children were so lazy. When I saw the little ones dragged through the supermarket in Bethsmane they could barely keep up with their mothers. Most of them sat in the cart, chubby legs pinched by the metal spokes, mouths covered in red from a Popsicle or hands and faces smeared with chocolate. Magda had not been like those children. She hadn’t been raised to be a sloth. She was a rebel. She dressed like a tomboy. Her fingernail polish was chipping. She didn’t tweeze her eyebrows, but shaved them off completely, then drew them on with brown eyeliner. They were thin, highly arched, odd, punctuating curves.

  Every summer, groups of teens from Eastern Europe were shipped over by an employment agency to work the registers in the fast-food restaurants on the main highway, to keep up with all the tourists driving upstate to see the falls or the ocean or parks. They all spoke perfect English, better English than the locals. Perhaps Magda had been one of those fast-food workers, and she’d overstayed her work visa, and had been living off the grid, hiding, working for pennies under the table as a home nurse for some senile old man. This made perfect sense to me. And so it was decided.