Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  “It’s quite obvious what the next move must be. Write a note back to Blake. See if he bites. One doesn’t go fishing without a pole, Vesta. You were always so wishy-washy. You don’t just pray for rain, you drive straight to the reservoir if you’re looking for water.”

  Oh, Walter, I should have dumped you in the lake once and for all, I huffed. It was intolerable in that bed, in the dark with my big farting dog. I needed space. I needed fresh air to breathe. Finally, I raised myself from the bed and cracked the window half an inch. A slot of cold air came through. That was better. I nudged Charlie away. He took offense, stepped off the bed altogether, and curled up at the top of the stairs, stretching his jaws in the near darkness and eyeing me with dramatic hatred. Poor dog. I’ll feed him better tomorrow, I told myself. If he was my alarm and bodyguard, he needed to eat right. He needed to be in top condition, especially now, with ax murderers and dead girls and strange invisible creatures limping through the pine woods all night, even if they were just in my imagination.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Will you be mine?” were the last words I remembered in the morning when I woke up. I’d been dreaming of Walter, his ashes piled around me like an anthill, and then it all turned to quicksand, and someone’s hand was reaching out, a diamond encrusted watch on its bony wrist. The time was ten thirty. I grasped at the fingers, but all I felt was air, and then fur, and from a distance I could hear the clinking of glasses and cutlery on bone china. “Wilst du be meinen?” It wasn’t Walter’s voice exactly, but close enough. When I opened my eyes, there was Charlie, tail wagging ferociously, head nudging my hand, my chin, then his soft, thin tongue lapping my cheek like a warm wet towel.

  “Oh, all right, my sweet,” I said. I could feel the lack of rest immediately in my bones, in my eyes, my joints, my feet. I eased myself down the stairs and to the kitchen, laying my eyes firmly on the papers on the table by the windows facing the lake, nearly aflame now with the rising sun. It was late morning. Usually Charlie would wake me predawn, and we’d be up and out the door—my teeth brushed, face washed, and fully dressed—just as the first needles of light were breaking over the horizon. The table, however sunlit, was just as I’d left it. Empty mug, pencil, pen, the questionnaire, and my notebook, which I hadn’t used. I was proud of my work. It was as though I were a sculptor, coming down to his studio bleary-eyed after a long night’s toiling with his clay; and from the hard work and exhaustion, he’d gone up to bed unaware of the brilliant life-form he’d created and left downstairs to dry, to take to itself in the night, to become a real thing apart from him. And so Magda had become a real thing.

  In the kitchen, I opened the door to let Charlie do his initial business, preheated the oven for the chicken, and bent down to get a can of nutritional supplement from under the sink. This was not an ideal source of nutrition, but I knew I needed one. Walter was always poking fun at my thinness, comparing me to other women around, at once humiliating me for being slight, bony, flat-chested, and them for being fleshy, big-bosomed hogs. He didn’t mean to be cruel. That was just his sense of humor, a bit like Magda’s. It was hard to have friends without making Walter feel I was conspiring against him. I think he felt left out: he could sense most people didn’t like him. “People are idiots” was how he rationalized his loneliness. Sometimes he complained that being as intelligent as he was made it difficult to feel truly accepted. “People are frightened,” he said. “Peasants,” he deemed them. Occasionally he read someone else’s scientific work and claimed to feel comforted that he was “not the only intelligent being on the planet.” What he thought of my intelligence, I never deigned to ask. He knew perfectly well why his personality was so displeasing. At the few dinner parties I gave in Monlith, Walter was on his best behavior. He knew how to impress the people he hoped would fund his research, or a dean who was about to hire a new professor Walter didn’t like. In those cases, he could be charming, and acted the perfect husband, holding me around the shoulders, kissing me on the hand in a secretive way to tell me how beautiful the food looked, gracious, handsome, so handsome. A handsome man must be terribly cruel to generate such discomfort in the people around him. Had Walter been ugly, he’d have been despised. The folksy people of Monlith were easily swayed by fancy looks. They were too afraid of seeming prejudiced to be unkind to him. “Walter, the handsome German.”

  If he was watching me now rinse the mouse droppings out of the sunken rim of a can of vanilla-flavored nutritional drink, he’d knock it from my hand and go to the fridge, take up a stick of butter and a steak, tell me to eat like a grown-up, not like some lazy teenager slurping a milkshake. How nice it was to do what I want. “Tough times,” I recalled the woman at the pound had said, handing me my puppy. I wiped the can with the hem of my pajama shirt and pulled the tab and gulped it down. I could feel the cold stuff filling my stomach. It tasted like malt, familiar to me from childhood. We used to sprinkle it on fresh cheese. Now it was like sludge, but I knew that it was good for me.

  I pulled on a pair of corduroy pants and a thin cotton sweater to take Charlie for a walk. I would have preferred to stay indoors and study my papers. But I couldn’t let him down once again. I did feel guilty for having kept him hungry, for having shoved him in bed. “I’ll make it up to you,” didn’t I say? He stood in the doorway, his leash in his mouth. “Oh, you can wait one more minute.” He sat on the rough doormat and dropped the leash. I didn’t brush my teeth or wash my face, but before I went to the door, where my coat was hanging and my boots were sitting, I came back to the table, just to admire my work up close for a moment. Charlie was patient. He didn’t whine, but I could hear his breathing get quick and heavy.

  My name was Magda, I saw in my own writing on the back of Magda’s turned-over questionnaire. Without sitting, I picked up the pen and opened my notebook.

  Dear Blake, I wrote.

  But what would I actually write to him? Charlie pawed at the doormat. I ignored him and closed my eyes. The light from the lake came through my lids, turning everything bright red, blood red. I thought of a poem, a line from something I’d heard once, or many times, but not something I’d read, per se. It was like a song lyric in my mind, maybe something Walter used to sing.

  The blood-rimmed tide.

  I wrote that down. And then I felt I had to rhyme the rest, to be proper.

  Dear Blake.

  The blood-rimmed tide, the sun-lit lake.

  I know she died, the hints I take.

  To look and find, I seek to make

  The discovery of her body.

  Next clue?

  Well, that was an awful poem. I could almost hear Walter groaning. But Blake was just some Levant teen, after all. He’d find it brilliant. He’d think I was a genius. I tore it from my notebook, got my coat and boots on, clipped Charlie to his leash, and off we went, down the gravel path and across the road and up the grassy swell to the birch woods, where it was bright and peaceful. Birds were singing. I let Charlie off his leash to bounce as he pleased. He stopped now and then to sniff, to do his business. Spring was in the air, and I held my silly poem in both hands. It was embarrassing. I hadn’t put my name on it. I still had the little black rocks in my coat pocket. It dazed me to think that it was only yesterday that I’d discovered the note from Blake. Here is her dead body. Only twenty-four hours since I’d first come to know of Magda. And how quickly we’d gotten to know each other! I read my poem again and again, then tried to forget it, as Charlie and I made our way deeper through the birches along the path, which was just as we’d left it the previous morning.

  I kept my eyes peeled for something I might have missed—a drop of blood, a tooth, a finger, one of Magda’s dirty tennis shoes. Or oh God, her head tumbling between the trees like a bowling ball. Blake had said body, hadn’t he? That could have meant headless body. I had to steel myself for that possibility. If Magda’s body was headless, surely he’d have m
entioned that fact. I don’t know where her head is or I didn’t take her head. Blake wasn’t a monster, he was just a kid. And a heartbroken kid at that. I wondered how he would explain Magda’s absence to Shirley. “Her rent is due tomorrow,” she’d say, forking up boxed mashed potatoes, more macaroni, whatever it was those Levant people stuffed themselves with.

  “She’s probably working overtime,” Blake would say. “To make enough money to pay you. You charge too much, Mom. She works more than you do.”

  “Don’t try to make me feel bad, Blake. If your father hadn’t left us, I wouldn’t have to charge her at all. Then again, if your father was here, I don’t think a girl would be sleeping down there. He wouldn’t stand for that. He’d go to the police if he came home to find a stranger down there. And a foreigner on top of it. . . . But haven’t I been nice? I took a risk on that girl. I could get in trouble. Kidnapping, they could charge me with kidnapping, couldn’t they? She’s lucky she has me.”

  So that was Shirley. Both caring and worried, maternal and selfish. Blake, in his tender pubescence, wouldn’t be able to hide his heartbreak for very long. How long, I wondered, until he broke down in tears, spilled his guts, crawled into his mother’s bed to be held and rocked. “She’s dead!” he’d cry. “I left her body in the woods. But it’s not there anymore. She’s gone. She’s gone forever. No, I don’t know who killed her. It wasn’t me!”

  “Shush, shush now, my boy,” Shirley would say. “Just a nightmare. That little slut is just off with some new boyfriend, I bet you.”

  If this scene was true, if Blake had left the body, and then come back to find it gone, maybe he would come back again, I thought.

  When Charlie and I reached the spot on the path in the birch woods where I’d found Blake’s first note, we paused. Charlie scratched at the ground, sniffed. Yes, there was something, someone had been here, not us. I could see it in the twitch of Charlie’s nose, in his eyes, the soft bend in his ears, not quite pricked like he’d just seen a fox, but curious. Ears attuned to something from the past. An echo. I tried to imagine what he was hearing. Nothing had changed more than would change in a day from wind, from scampering chipmunks, the sun drying and warming the earth, the moon pulling and cooling it. The place was familiar to me now. It had a feeling about it, like something had happened there, a memorial kind of feeling, like when Walter and I walked the fields at Antietam, following the young man in his silly Confederate soldier costume. “On this spot of ground, so many young men lost their lives, fighting for freedom,” or whatever he’d been told to say. There was something that must have happened to the ground once it became a place where someone died, where a living soul took a final breath. It gave me a rush to think of it. I tried to focus on how it felt there in the birch woods. There was a charge, I was certain of it. A magnetized force in the air.

  I stopped and took out my poem for Blake. I lay it on the ground and weighted it down with the little black rocks. I placed them in a circle around my carefully penned lines. I wished I had a flower to tuck in, to make it prettier. Those rocks were so harsh, so black, like coal against the white paper.

  I stood and watched the soft wind flip about in the shy new grass, the gentle buds in the birch branches like fish poking their heads out of the water. Soon the trees would be full of leaves, and the rushing sound of the wind when it came through would be different. It would be louder. Now it was still quiet, gentle. I could hear the sharp little flipping of the corners of the paper of my note as the wind came and went. Charlie kept by my side. I could tell he was anxious to be home, to eat a proper meal. And so was I. We turned around, and leaving the note there for Blake, I felt I had taken a significant step in my life. When else had I done something so brash or brave or ridiculous?

  As we walked back out through the birch woods and down the grassy slope and across the street, I thought not of Magda, but about that line of poetry I’d had stuck in my head. “The blood-rimmed tide.” What was it? I had never been one for poetry, had barely studied it, never even considered borrowing a poetry book from the library as my reading. Most days I hardly remembered that poetry existed. It seemed preposterous that there were still poets out there among us. How did they make a living? What use was there in poems, when people had television now? Even a good novel had to compete with TV shows and movies. I’d seen teenagers at the library watching television on the screens of their mobile phones. Nobody in Levant would be reading poems. Not unless it was for school. The closest school was in Bethsmane. It was, in fact, just a block down from the public library. I supposed I could go there and ask, “the blood-rimmed tide,” what poem is that from? And perhaps it was from no poem. I’d invented it. “I’m a poet,” I may discover.

  “I’m a poet,” I said to Charlie as I rubbed his head. We trotted together up the gravel path to the cabin and followed our usual protocol. I hung his leash and wiped his paws and opened the door. Hot now from all the walking, I hung my coat and took off my boots. The oven was well heated, so I tore the plastic wrapping off the chicken, pulled out the bag of giblets, plopped it in a pan, and stuck it in the oven. No salt, no pepper or spices. Charlie and I didn’t care about things like that. The giblets I fried up, with two more eggs for Charlie. And as he ate that, I took my cold bagel and coffee back to the breakfast table, to my papers, my deskscape, I thought of it, and ate and drank and looked out at the water aflame with sunshine. Today was the day, I decided. I would get rid of Walter’s ashes. Well, not “get rid” exactly. That wasn’t a nice way of putting it.

  Charlie finished his breakfast and joined me by the windows. He was very sweet then, belly full, rubbing his head on my lap. He smelled of iron earth and also faintly of feces. I didn’t really mind. When two beings live together, the smell of them just becomes the smell of togetherness. I myself needed a bath, but I didn’t feel like taking one. It was too much effort to disrobe, wait for the water to heat, address my body for what it was now, so little, just a little thing I had to keep clean, like washing a single dish one uses constantly. I might as well stay dirty, get sweaty on the rowboat, take a bath that night, with my glass of wine. I’d think some more about Magda, make a few more notes. And then I would go to bed and sleep especially well since I’d slept so poorly the night before. In the morning, Charlie and I would go on a big long walk through the birch woods. Wouldn’t it be curious to discover my little note as I’d left it on the path there, my little black rocks dotted around my poetic message to Blake? Was he reading it now? I wondered. Was someone else? For a moment I imagined the neighbors had seen me leaving it and were phoning in a complaint of littering. “That weird old lady just left some kind of garbage in the woods. Come out and see. It’s some kind of funny writing.”

  They’d hang up and ask one another, “Is that old lady right in the head? Is she a witch who likes to eat little children?” I didn’t trust the neighbors.

  My mind wobbled over my poem again and again. “Next clue?”

  Charlie was splayed out in a puddle of sun on the carpet. I tried to breathe deeply. I chewed the cold bagel and drank the coffee. The chicken had started to smell, roasting well. It would need an hour to cook. If I left it for a little while, I figured, it wouldn’t burn. Nothing bad would happen to it, no. Nothing was keeping me from checking on my poem. Nothing.

  And with that, I put my boots and coat back on. I clipped Charlie to his leash and pulled him back down the gravel path and across the road and up the grassy swell and out through the birch woods, following the worn path through the trees until the place where I’d left my note. Though I looked and looked, up and down, far past the place where I’d left it, it was gone. Someone had come and taken it. Even the black rocks were gone. But then I saw them, lined up, certainly not by accident, spelling out the letter B.

  Well, that was quite enough for me.

  “Come on, Charlie!” I yelled, and we scampered out of the woods. It took me less than ten minutes to get hom
e, my heart all ajump and very perturbed by how soon my note had been snatched. Somehow I had been thinking it was all just a game. Blake wasn’t real. Nobody was really watching me out there. Everything, everybody, even Magda was just a figment of my imagination. Pastor Jimmy had said, “Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you.” But this was no trick. Someone, B, Blake, was out there, communicating with me. And then there was Magda. How was it possible that I’d conjured her up so easily in that questionnaire? It was as though someone had been feeding me the answers, someone in my mindspace had been telling me what to write, as clear as my own thoughts. But how could they be mine exactly? I’d never even met the girl. This made me very nervous, oh, this made me really wonder exactly what was happening, and who was this Blake, and what did he want from me? And how would I do whatever it was I was being asked to do? Could I really solve this little mystery? Find Magda’s dead and rotting body? Did I want that? Why couldn’t Charlie go do it? He was always sniffing out dead animals and things. Well, I suppose human beings are better at solving the more human mysteries. The body must be hidden someplace Charlie wouldn’t go, that I wouldn’t go, that nobody would go, unless they were on a mission. “My God,” I thought suddenly. “The island.”

  This was all enough for me to dash inside, turn off the oven, not even wipe Charlie’s feet or anything, just grab my purse and keys, lock the door, and get us in the car and drive away. I was panicked. I didn’t know where we were going. Charlie was delighted, stuck his head on my shoulder from the backseat, watched the vista through the windshield. We passed the little store with the man with the damaged face. Henry, I thought. There he is. More of the story became clear to me. I could almost map out the entire cast of characters I’d thought up the night before. Henry was the man at the store. There was a little house out back, where his father must live. That’s where Magda would go to work, to take care of the old man, and where she and Henry had their relations. Somewhere not too far away would be Blake and Shirley. And then Leonardo. All I couldn’t account for yet was Ghod, the ghost creature. Perhaps I’d never have to contend with Ghod. I didn’t want to. A chill ran through me as I turned onto Route 17. I was driving very quickly, so quickly, in fact, that I’d forgotten to strap on my safety belt. I did so, and as I buckled myself in, I swerved a bit, and within a second, a police car flashed its lights behind me. There was nobody else on the road. I’d been in no danger, caused no danger for anyone else.