Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  Suddenly the woods flooded with sounds. Crickets, the hum of life, everything at once—something was jogged loose in my ears. It was the kind of jolt one feels when one’s heart is broken—the world becomes deafeningly loud. I’d discovered something about Walter a few months after he’d died. I’d found a little notebook among the papers and files and legal pads in his office at home, just a pocket-size thing, a quarter the size of the kind of paper Blake had used to write me that first note about Magda. Inside, Walter had scrawled out a list of girls, students at the university who had come to him for help, I supposed, and whom he preyed upon, listing everything about them that he coveted, staging mind games he could play with them to coax them into his arms and trousers. He wrote in German, his cursive hard, moody, exuberant as though his own writing excited him, flashy. Mandy, long-limbed, tan, thinks I am a “genius with a cute accent.” Likes animals. Tell her the story of the cat. Give her Schopenhauer, to confuse her, then preach. And Gretchen, short and stubby with big bosoms. I used a German dictionary to translate. I read through each entry.

  Vicky

  Joy

  Theresa

  Sarah

  Wanda

  Patricia

  Clarice

  Karen

  Sofie

  Jean

  Emma

  Catherine

  Patty

  Rosie

  Amy

  Rebecca

  Joanne

  I threw the notebook in the trash, along with all his other papers, then wished, when the trash got picked up, that I had burned it all instead, had the nerve to burn the whole house down and scatter the chalky ashes in an open sewer grate somewhere, let all of Walter’s thoughts seep into the urine and feces that must still exist somewhere in the bowels of this messy Earth.

  Most of my erotic memories were from my adolescence, obsessive crushes on boys who reminded me of my father, spurts of mustache hairs, slight bulging muscles in the trousers. I always liked men with strong legs. And then one afternoon at a fair where there was a kissing booth to raise money for a community garden in the town where I’d grown up, I watched the eager young gentlemen hold their dollar bills and rub the BBQ sauce from their supple mouths as they approached the girls behind the makeshift counters. I didn’t even look at the kissing, just the backs of those boys’ heads, leaning, their shoulders cradling their desire like a baby they were carrying. Oh, I’d been deprived of so much by falling in love with my husband. I’d been so pretty once. And now I was ruined, an old lady with a mouth full of dirt. Enraged, I flipped myself over and looked up at the sky, catching my breath and then losing it again at the audacity of all those stars glittering above me, blinking and shimmering without shame. Even though so many had already burnt out, like me, they still glimmered. They still survived and hung there as though to say, “Remember me! I was beautiful! Let my light shine on without me! Never forget!” I was a coward for having lived as I did. But never more, I resolved. I would persist despite my fear, despite my innocence, my depravity, my skillful denial of all that had pained me. Never again. After I’d settled in on the ground, warmed the dirt beneath me, let bugs crawl into my hair like Magda, I got myself standing, head reeling with hunger, and felt around for what it was that I had tripped over. It was a soft plastic package—my camouflage bodysuit, of course! I went inside, shocked to hear Wagner playing on the radio, and without thinking, walked directly into the trap I’d made, skittering the teacup across the floor and giving myself a near heart attack even before I flipped on the lights. I wiped the dirt off my face, undressed, and put on the darkness suit.

  Seven

  I didn’t bother to heat up my dinner. I didn’t even bother to pour my wine into a glass, just sucked it straight from the bottle, and used my fingers to pick apart the cold, coagulated chicken, not caring that the gelatinous fat was clinging to my lips and gumming up my teeth. I stood at the sink and chewed and sucked and swallowed, staring down into the old porcelain, listening to the symphony, coffee grinds dotting a puddle of water sitting stagnant, reflecting up at me, black on white like the reverse of the night’s sky. When I was done eating, I stood and breathed and collected myself. In the window I could see my face, wrinkled but gleaming. A sheen of sweat across my forehead made me look alive. When I turned the outside lights on, I could see the imprint of my body in the dirt. It was like an outline from a crime scene, my bootprints like marks to be measured and analyzed. I rubbed my eyes and when I looked out the window again, I saw Charlie. He was just sitting there, eyes two red beams focused on me through the window. I gasped and knocked on the glass, but he didn’t move. He was like a statue, just staring at me. I couldn’t believe it. At first I thought maybe he was stunned there, maybe he was frightened. I went outside in the darkness suit, breathing hard with anticipation, to see what condition he was in. Was he hurt? Was he frightened? I wanted him in my arms, to kiss his head and pet him and comfort him. He must be so frightened, having spent a night and a day out there all alone, doing God knows what, I thought. He stood now on four feet, backing up away from me toward the pine woods as I approached. Oh, Charlie, I said to myself. Do you not recognize your own mother?

  “Charlie,” I said aloud. I slapped at my knee to summon him toward me. To my shock, he lifted one side of his snout to show me a long canine, flared his nostrils. I stood straight and put my hands on my hips. What was this nonsense? I thought. He should be purring like a kitten to be back home. “Come here, this instant,” I said. But I didn’t get any closer. I didn’t want to startle him and have him run away again, out into the woods. He stood stock still, straddling the earth like he was going to take off. I decided to take a different tack, and crouched down to the ground, made my voice sappy and soft. “Come here, boy,” I said. He started to track back and forth, side to side along the perimeter of the dirt garden. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I cooed. But of course I wasn’t going to hurt him. Had he lost his mind? I tried to reconcile his anxiety and hostility by telling myself that he was just an animal, a slave to his instincts, and he was probably in shock still. He may be traumatized, but the moment he smelled me, I surmised, he would melt into his old self, be my pet again. Right now he was a wild wolf, afraid and on guard in the darkness. He must be hungry, it occurred to me. Spittle clung to his lips and flung onto his face as he shook his head no. I slowly backed away and went into the cabin to retrieve the chicken from the fridge. I darted around the kitchen quickly, but slowed my pace once I was outside. Charlie was acting so skittish. Every time I moved, he lurched to the side and roiled his mouth, flashing his fangs in the harsh white light of the flood lamps.

  “Your chicken,” I pronounced, bending down and setting the open Tupperware on the dirt like an offering. He was like a lion, the way he eyed me. He growled. It hurt my feelings deeply to be so distrusted, to be seen as a threat, unwanted, rejected. I went back inside and watched through the open doorway as he stopped and stared at the chicken, looking up at me now and then to make sure I wouldn’t leap out and what—attack him? Minutes passed before he finally began to acquiesce. He tiptoed across the dirt to the Tupperware, lowered his head at last, then quickly snatched the chicken and darted back to where he’d seemed to deem it safe, at the edge of the garden, as though there were some force field there that I wouldn’t dare to cross.

  This is ridiculous, I thought, and although I was hurt and concerned, I was also overwhelmingly relieved. I hadn’t lost him, after all. I stood and watched him hunker down with his cold chicken, holding the bone to the ground with his paws and chewing off the flesh. He looked playful from where I stood on the threshold of the cabin. I tried to relax and listen to the “Blue Danube” playing on the radio now. I would give Charlie his space, his time. Who knows what he’d seen out there? After years of domestic living, a night and day away were probably akin to me being picked up by an alien spaceship. But wouldn’t that be
worth the terror, to see beyond the earthly realm? Maybe he’d seen Magda out there. I went inside for the rest of the wine and watched Charlie chewing his bone through the window, now smudged with chicken fat from when I banged on it with my greasy fist. When I finished the wine, I decided to open a new bottle. A bottle of red wine that I’d been saving for a special occasion. It was one of the things I’d brought with me, packed into the back of the car when I drove out from Monlith, a Mouton Rothschild from 1990, something Walter had bought and insisted we sit on for decades. “We shall drink it when something extraordinary happens,” he’d said. And so it had sat on its side on a shelf in the basement along with other wines, which I donated to the Monlith soup kitchen before I’d moved away, not even thinking of how ridiculous that was, counting the bottles out in boxes, lining the back concrete wall of the church. The Bordeaux looked like blood in the dark-green glass bottle. I opened the drawer where I kept my corkscrew and found something there I’d never seen before. It was a black, vinyl-handled switchblade. “Magda,” I thought to myself. She had left it for me.

  It was heavier than I expected. I held it in my hand, looking for how to open it. All I had to do was squeeze at the metal edge, and the blade flipped up. The metal was cloudy, but the blade was sharp. Maybe it was one of those knives I’d seen advertised on late-night television in Monlith, the kind that can cut through pipe as well as slice a tomato without wrinkling the skin. I put the tip of the blade against the soft bed of my thumb, pricked it so that the blood welled up, just a speck of it. Yes, the knife was very sharp. I shut the blade. I was quite sure it was Magda’s. She’d slide the knife in her back pocket whenever she went out, walking to work, or out here to the pine woods to meet with Ghod, to do his bidding so he wouldn’t report her to the authorities. Why hadn’t she just run away? Why did Magda have to die? Perhaps she’d told Ghod she was pregnant, to get out of some deal. She’d think Ghod would have lost his lust for her, but instead he killed her. It was a harsh, cruel world. Magda was right to carry a knife. Poor thing, she hadn’t been quick enough to use it, crushed under the weight of Ghod’s carnal fury. I’d never enjoyed it much, being suffocated like that, enduring what I could only tolerate while it pleased Walter so much, it seemed. He cried out in short whelps, always in German, my name called out not for me to hear it and know he loved me, but along with the fuck’s and god’s, like my name was some curse word, and he could shout it to marvel at his own erotic forbearance. “Wow, I am really good at this. I know, because I’m enjoying myself so much.” That was what came across. But maybe Magda had a different experience. Maybe she’d been loved properly by Leo, and could refer back to that tenderness and attentiveness every time Ghod pressed himself against her. And inside her. I could imagine it.

  Having eaten all the chicken, Charlie now worked to dig a hole in the garden of dirt to bury the bones. It seemed he might be out there all night, and I was tired. My legs twitched from all the walking I’d done, and my head swirled with the wine. I went up to bed, not turning off any lights, and left the front door wide open for Charlie for when he decided to come inside. Knowing he was alive, that he had returned to me, however suspiciously, was enough to arrest my anxieties. I lay down in bed, listening to the radio, drifting in and out of consciousness.

  Pastor Jimmy was on the air.

  “You’ve got to stop the anger in your family and restore the joy back to your life. And that will cause you to have godly children who will be raised to listen to the voice of God right away. They’ll listen to God’s voice. And they’ll listen to you, their father. When I come home, we have dinner, we sit around the table and I say to my kids, ‘What did God say to you today?’ And they tell me. ‘Well, I just heard God tell me this.’ Or ‘Today I heard in my heart God tell me this.’ Or ‘I heard God tell me this.’ And they’re hearing God’s voice. And you know why? Because I’ve trained them to listen to my voice. I don’t want God to have to tell them something a hundred times before they listen. I want them to hear God’s voice and immediately respond. And how do I train them in that? By having them hear my voice, and immediately respond. I hope that you’ll follow that policy and your life will be changed.”

  “Thank you, pastor,” said a man over a crackly line.

  “Now you have a good night, all right? Next caller.”

  “Yes, please,” the voice sounded familiar. “What to do when you are angry for good reason?”

  “I’m sorry now, what? Are you there, miss?”

  “Yes, here I am.” The girl’s voice was raspy, and clearly foreign, heavily accented not like Walter’s, but like Magda’s. I listened carefully. I closed my eyes lying in bed, as though looking at anything would distract me from what I could hear.

  “Well, say it again, dear. I didn’t quite get you.”

  “Yes, please. What to do when a thing is not so good, and you are angry, but not that nothing is wrong. What to do when, yes, if there is something wrong and for good reason you have anger?”

  “Let me see if I understand you correctly, miss—”

  “Magda.” Tears came to my eyes. The girl cleared her throat. “Magdalena Tanasković.”

  “Magdalena, you’re called?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Magdalena, tell me if I’ve got you right. What you’d like to know is what to do when your anger is warranted. When there’s a good reason, as you called it.”

  “Yes. Because I think some time it is right.”

  “Well, Magdalena, as I told the last caller, righteous anger is a sin.”

  “Yes, I know this. But if someone has hurting you?”

  “First of all, I want you to know that the Bible says God will never allow us to go through more than we can handle. He knows us better than we know ourselves. You can make it through this, miss. Philippians four, thirteen says ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ You are going to be fine. Now, God told Abraham, ‘You are going to need to leave your relatives and go to the place that I call you to.’

  “Not everyone has love in his heart. But you have to live by the Word of God, no matter what. And James one says ‘Count it all joy when you encounter these trials.’ It talks about being happy when people hurt you, when people are against you. Consider it a joy and privilege that you are, in a way, able to suffer for the name of Jesus by being abused.

  “Now I’d say the number one reason women think their anger is justified is when there’s been a betrayal by their husbands. And I’ll say to you what I say to them. I say this over and over again. I cannot seem to say it enough. You need to remember that God has forgiven you for what you’ve done in the past. That’s the most important thing to remember. You’ve betrayed God many times, haven’t you, Magdalena?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Number two, people will disappoint you. You have to accept that fact: people will let you down. Sometimes we put people on such a high pedestal that they can’t measure up to our expectations, and we then get disappointed. And then when they stumble, we get angry. Your closest friend could betray you, sure. Nobody’s perfect. David said in the book of Psalms, ‘If it would have been an enemy that betrayed me, then it would not have bothered me or hurt me. But it was you, my friend.’

  “And number three, forgiveness is a decision. It’s not a feeling. It’s a choice you’ve got to make. You have to say, ‘I forgive this person.’ And you have to insist on forgiving them no matter what, even if you still feel angry and nothing has changed. And fourthly, you need to go to them and say, ‘I forgive you. Even though you hurt my feelings, I forgive you. And I love you. And let’s fix this. Those are the four steps that I would take.’”

  “So if something hurt you, you say thank you, I forgive you?” Magda’s voice was just as I’d always imagined it, sarcastic, cutting, and sweet. “You think, ‘Forgive me and God say OK, no problem. She is slut anyway.’ And so you—”

 
“You hear, folks, the pain of anger, how it cuts into the heart of the one who holds it, and spews poison onto anyone nearby? Let us pray.”

  I shuddered, as though an icy wind had blown across the room. I held Magda’s knife in my fist, pressing nervously on the metal edge that would make the blade flash up. I would never forgive Walter. I would not apologize for his betrayal. If anyone gave me trouble, I would flash the blade. If anybody so much as gave me a dirty look, I would slice them. Pastor Jimmy ended his program with a short sermon on the dangers of giving in to the pleasures of the flesh.

  I stopped listening when I heard Charlie walking around downstairs. He had finally come inside. I was woozy, and felt a little nauseated from both exhaustion, the wine, and the radio. I lifted myself off the bed and plodded down the stairs, first heavily, lazily, then tensing, remembering that the door was still open and Charlie might get alarmed and run out again. I tiptoed the rest of the way, hearing his heavy breathing from the lakeside room. It was the noise he made when he was irritated, like an old man. I walked quietly to the door and shut it. I turned off the radio, which now played some tweeky church music on an electric organ. I switched off the kitchen lights and walked lightly toward Charlie. He seemed to have curled up under the table, and as I approached, he lifted himself up and turned his back to me. It was so cruel, so cold. I felt awful. I wanted to be close to him, to patch things up between us. And I wanted to make sure that he hadn’t been physically harmed in some way. Maybe he had scratches that needed cleaning, or even stitching. It must have been a horrific day in the wilds for him to be this closed off and angry at me. To add the stress of my neediness would have been selfish, I thought. So I didn’t squat down and rub his head, the way I would have liked to, but I did bend over, just to try to see his face, his silvery head reflecting in the yellow lamplight, the wrinkles around his neck like they were when he was still a puppy, smooth as velvet. That is when I saw the shredded papers beneath him, like a nest. He’d ripped up all the papers that had been on my desk—the note from Blake, the poem, my writing, everything. It was like some kind of bird’s nest he’d created, out of spite, I was sure. I’d ignored him in my pursuit of Magda, and this was his revenge. For a moment I wanted to hit him, but I would never. He’d even torn the blank pages from my notebook. I could see the twisted wire spiral and the hard cardboard cover lying like a dead thing by the leg of the chair. I lifted it carefully. I’d get rid of it, I thought, so as not to incite any more angst from Charlie if he ever saw it again. I was sad to have lost Blake’s note. And as I carried the notebook to the trash, I opened it. There were a few ragged pages left, hanging by shreds. On the back of one was something written in hard ballpoint pen and scratched out. It was the beginning of something I hadn’t remembered writing. I turned on the kitchen lights again and studied the scratched-out words. If I held the paper up to the window, darkness illuminating it somehow, I could read the words. Her name was Magda, it said. She died and there is nothing you can do about it. I didn’t—and there it stopped. A false start, it was. The only evidence left intact. But how had it gotten there? I couldn’t think. I pulled the page out, picked off the shredded spiral shreds, and folded it up. Now I felt that I had two sacred things: this paper and the knife. They were charged with energies. I was armed now. Nothing could hurt me. And yet I locked the door. Would Charlie protect me, I wondered, now that there’d been this rift between us? I imagined some madman breaking in, holding a gun to my head, and Charlie just sitting there, yawning, clacking his gums as though he were only disturbed that he’d been woken up for the moment. He’d go back to his wild dog dreams. Ghod might be out there, looking in through the windows. He might have a hunting rifle aimed at me that very moment. If anybody was out there, Charlie would know. Animals had a sense of things. Walls did not limit their senses, as they do with human beings. A mere rodent scratching at a berry up the gravel drive would have caused Charlie to paw at the door, whine and yelp and cry until I let him out there to run around during the day. But now he was quiet. Too quiet, I thought. Silence like that felt unnatural. I put my fingers in my ears just to make sure I hadn’t gone deaf. I could hear my heart beat on the inside, my own breath, slow and shallow.