An Elegant Theory

by Noah Milligan

  It doesn’t take long for us to hail a cab. I’m not sure why. I didn’t call one, and our street is not a busy thoroughfare, but one appears like magic. The drive to the hospital is quick and uneventful. Cars don’t clog the streets, and those that do stroll around the neighborhood seem to get out of our way as if we have an invisible police escort. The nursing staff greets us and gets Sara in a wheelchair. She balloons her cheeks now and grimaces more often as her contractions become more frequent. I want an epidural, she says. Now. The nurse laughs. Let’s get you into a room.

  It’s bigger than any hotel room or studio apartment I have ever been in. It has a full-sized couch and two closets and a washbasin and mini-fridge and a table and chairs and a recliner and Sara’s hospital bed and a dresser with a large, flat-screen television. It literally is nicer than our apartment. The nurses appear to be identical twins. They are tall, nearly six feet, and have red hair and tons of freckles. They even seem to smile in sync as they get Sara into a patient’s gown, into the bed, and set up an IV. Pitocin, the one nearest me says. This should speed up the labor time. What about the epidural? Sara asks. We have to get the doctor’s permission, says the one farthest from me. We’ll call her and let you know. She’s not even here?

  The nurses leave us alone in the room. I rub ice chips over her forehead and lips. Sara curses under her breath. It feels like my ass is ripping. Just breathe, I tell her, and I mimic what we learned in Lamaze class. Hee hee hoo. I mimic what she should do with her mouth, lips wide, cheeks hurting from the stretch. Hee hee hoo. In and out, sweetie, I say. Just like me. Oh my GOD! She screams. She turns pale, then pink, then red, then pale again. She bites her lips so hard I’m afraid she’ll bleed. It’s coming, she says. I can’t wait any longer. I look between her legs, and the baby’s head is crowning. Wait, I say. Please just wait. I hit the button to call the nursing station but no one answers. It just rings like a telephone might, on and on and on. Oh My God! Sara screams. OH MY FUCKING GOD!

  I open the door and peer down the hallway. It’s empty. I listen. There isn’t any sound. There isn’t the clicking of a keyboard. There isn’t a static-y voice spewing orders over the intercom. There aren’t the squeaking wheels of an orderly’s cart. The whole hospital has been abandoned. All I can hear is Sara screaming for someone to help her. This baby is killing me! She screams. Please someone just get it out of me. I walk down the hall. All the rooms are dark. The nurses’ station has been shut down. The computer monitors are black. Papers are filed away. Doctors do not rush down the hallway, stethoscope in hand. There’s no one there to help us.

  Please, Coulter! Help! Help me! I’m dying!

  And I run. I find the stairwell, and I run. I burst through the door, and I don’t turn back. I’m too scared to turn back. I think if I turn back, then I’ll surely die. I race down five flights of stairs, and I know I will never go back. I will never speak to Sara again. I will never see my son. Everything has gone silent at this point in the daydream. I can’t even hear my shoes squeaking on the stairs. It’s like I’ve gone deaf. Then I see the exit. It’s one of those fire emergency doors, and it says that the alarm will ring if I push it open, but I don’t care at this point, and I push it open anyway. Then everything goes black, and I feel this raging pain run down my neck and spine. That’s when I come to.

  Dr. White placed her thumb underneath her incisor and pushed and pulled as if checking to see if it was loose. “I see,” she said. “And you feel bad for this imagined abandonment? Do you think you have commitment issues, perhaps these daydreams are defensive psychological mechanisms of escape?”

  “I think it has more to do with her disappearance.”

  She removed her thumb from her mouth and dried it on her pants. “Your wife is missing?”

  “I believe she is dead.” I told her the same story I’d told the police, Sara’s parents.

  Dr. White remained quiet for several seconds, scrutinizing me. It was like she was studying to see if I was lying.

  “Can you make them stop?” I asked.

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” Dr. White said. “But I have to ask this. Did you do anything to hurt Sara?”

  “I just need them to stop.”

  “Coulter. Answer me. I can help you. Did you do something? Did you do something you shouldn’t have?”

  “I told you what happened.”

  “She left you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she hasn’t returned.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe she is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Because she was. Because I was tired of lying about it. “She would’ve called someone by now.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I believe you.” She lay her pen and notebook down and smiled a motherly smile. “Why don’t we call that enough for today?”

  I nodded and got up to leave. Before I made it through the door, however, I felt a feeble finger on my shoulder. She handed me a card with a phone number written in blue ink.

  “My home number,” she said. “Just in case.”

  I found my mother alone, sitting on the couch, her head tilted back, eyes glazed over. She must have doubled up on her pills again. Methprylon. A generic downer. She’d told me she took them because of her anxiety, that she’d tried pot before but didn’t like it, made her dizzy and hurt her throat. This was the only thing that worked. “Makes me numb,” she’d said. “Best feeling in the world.”

  She looked more than numb; she looked dead. I placed a mirror under her nose to see if she was still breathing. The glass clouded with fog and then faded away. Her pulse thrummed weakly. She’d be fine in about eight hours. Dehydrated, groggy, and suffering from a severe headache, but she’d be alive.

  When I sat down next to her, she didn’t move, save for the rhythmic bouncing caused by my sitting, an equal and opposite reaction. Once the bobbing stopped, she continued to stare up into the ceiling, without the slightest clue I was there. I wished Sara was there at that point. I missed her. I did. But it didn’t really hit home until that moment. I wanted someone to talk to. I wanted someone to laugh with and complain about my day with. We’d used to do that before I started on my dissertation full time. I’d come home from work, and I would complain to her about the stupidity of my students, how a freshman would confuse the integral under the curve with a differential equation about rates of change of motion. A no-brainer, really. And she would laugh to humor me. She’d tell me a story about a woman who was spanking her child at the grocery store when another woman scolded her for punishing her child. “They ended up brawling right in the middle of the store. In front of the kid and everything. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” Jeez. I would’ve said. “Didn’t anyone try to stop them?”

  “No,” she said. “Everyone just let them get away with it.”

  He’d seen her around campus now a dozen or so times. He knew her name, Sara, though not her last. She drank iced coffees and sang eighties pop songs underneath her breath. He knew she had class at 8:00 am, intro to biology for non-majors, and again at 10:00, English Composition I, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays she took college algebra and intro to political science. She abhorred taxes and the right-to-life movement. She would have something greasy for lunch, a cheeseburger, or a Reuben, always with French fries covered in brown gravy. She chewed fruit flavored gum and read fantasy novels and Homer and celebrity gossip magazines. She smelled of peanut butter and honey sandwiches. In the afternoon, she hung out with her friends, picnicking in the sunshine or playing Ultimate Frisbee. She drank out of the hose and wiped her nose with her wrist. Sometimes, when she thought others weren’t looking, she scratched behind her right ear like a dog might. Coulter found this irresistible. It was like they shared a deep, intimate secret.

  He watched her every chance he could. He skipped electricity and magnetism class in the mornings and special relativity in the afternoons. Instead of going to
the lab, he would watch her play a pickup soccer game or watch her watch television. Her apartment she shared with a Vietnamese girl who never was home, so Sara had different boys over regularly. Since he didn’t know their names, he gave them some. Dan was the tall, athletic boy. He ran track and used an inordinate amount of hair product. Craig appeared to be the artistic type and attempted to be dark and brooding with his horn-rimmed glasses. More so, he was timid, and Sara always looked disappointed when he left. There was Hollowitz, the Jewish kid who made up hyperbolic stories about his and Sara’s sex life, telling his friends about that “one time” in the library when she’d let him touch her breasts. Two or three times per week a guy would come over. Then he wouldn’t be seen for a few weeks, recycled with new, anticipatory guys, anxious guys, guys who knew her reputation. For Coulter, these midnight hookups resembled a mangled car crash on the side of the road. It was difficult for him to watch, but he couldn’t tear himself away.

  Her mother sent her care packages of candy and socks and short story collections, anything longer, like a novel, and she would be afraid Sara would blow off her studies in lieu of a good book, Coulter imagined anyway. She read Jesus’ Son and Nine Stories repeatedly. She ate jawbreakers and spit green when she couldn’t finish them. She attended punk rock concerts alone and looked awkward and out of place, wall-flowered near the bar as the rest of the crowd head-banged to three-chord power riffs. Coulter did the same, trying to find the courage to introduce himself, but always he chickened out, afraid she might laugh at him, or maybe even worse, invite him to her room.

  On a few occasions, he became afraid she noticed him watching her. One time, she attended a Delt frat party with some girlfriends. Usually, Coulter wouldn’t follow her into places like this. They were too small, and he would stick out, a nerdy loner who came uninvited. There was just too much risk he would be caught. So he’d stay outside, around fifty meters or so down the street. He’d find some place to hide, behind a car or shrubbery, or he simply might walk the street, passing before the house every half hour or so, fearful she might leave without him. These times were the worst because he wouldn’t be able to see her. He liked to think she gossiped with her friends and played innocent drinking games like quarters or pong, but instead he dreaded something more sinister was going on, a line of coke in the bathroom, whippits making her dizzy, half-conscious sex in a closet with a guy who didn’t even know her name. He knew this to be irrational, paranoid, creepy even, but he couldn’t help himself. This time, he had to get in there to make sure she was okay.

  It wasn’t like Coulter’d expected. Kids sat on dingy couches, huddled in groups of two or three. Music blared a little too loud, drowning out the awkwardness. Boys stayed to one side of the room, girls the other. No one questioned Coulter why he was there. No one seemed to notice him. He slid past them, grabbed a beer, and wandered, searching for her. He checked the living room and kitchen, the garage and back patio. She wasn’t in the bathroom or in one of the bedrooms. But then he heard her voice. It was clogged and shrill, dry from cigarette smoke and yelling. She was in the dining room, playing a card game with a few people. It was a simple game they called conundrum. One player held the cards, a dealer of sorts, as the others would guess the position of the next card relative to the last one or two in play, whether it would be higher, lower, outside, in between, red, black, or one of the suits. If you got three correct, you could pass your turn to the next player, and the person who got a guess wrong had to take an equal number of drinks as the cards on the table. A rudimentary understanding of statistics would allow someone to be good at the game, but Coulter’s eidetic memory allowed him to never be wrong. He could even recite the order in which every card had been played. Jack of clubs, ace of hearts, two of diamonds, nine of spades, four of spades, three of clubs, queen of diamonds, king of spades, four of hearts, seven of clubs, seven of spades, seven of hearts, ace of spades, jack of hearts. They each got a kick out of the three sevens in a row. Coulter didn’t understand their amazement. It was bound to happen sooner or later.

  Coulter watched from the threshold of kitchen to dining room, not four or five feet away. He became transfixed by the game, the players’ excited yips when someone had to drink, the losers’ satisfied burps after taking their punishment, the way Sara chewed on her hair when faced with a tough decision, a six and a ten maybe, one a diamond, the other a club. He watched two rounds, then three. He watched four, then five. At first they didn’t notice him, but then Sara looked up at him, then one of the boys, just glances, a bit uneasy, a bit skeptical.

  “Would you like to play?” Sara asked, finally.

  “I’m sorry?” Coulter asked.

  Sara pointed to the stack of cards. “You can play if you want to.”

  “Oh no. No. I couldn’t.” He smiled, or tried to. To him, it felt more like baring his teeth.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice trailing off. “If you change your mind.” She didn’t finish her thought.

  Embarrassed, he left quickly, hoping she didn’t see where he went.

  How could he be so stupid?

  How could he get so close?

  It wasn’t like him to be this careless. Usually meticulous, he had escape routes pinpointed, excuses rehearsed, lies he could’ve dispensed. He’d replayed countless scenarios in his mind. Hi, he should’ve said with sign language. My name is Coulter. I am deaf. She would’ve been taken aback, and he could’ve had a chance to escape. Instead, he looked like a fool, a creep, a lunatic.

  He tried to tell himself to go on home, to go to bed, that everything would be okay in the morning. She probably wouldn’t even remember him. He would be a prop in an otherwise normal evening out with friends. Some drinks, some games, some laughs. A strange guy. But she might start putting things together. Maybe she recognized him. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she knew him.

  He walked the campus. He toured the library, one of the few buildings still open at this time of night. He went to a diner, ordered a cheeseburger, and didn’t touch it. He was only stalling, though. In the end he succumbed to the temptation, walked to her apartment, and perched underneath the frozen willow tree, and waited.

  Sara arrived after about an hour, alone. She hurried to the front door, her hands shaking as she fumbled with her keys. When she finally got the door open and stumbled inside, she flipped on the light and her silhouette appeared behind her thin curtains. She put up her coat and then disappeared deeper into the apartment. Probably she was in the kitchen making a hot cup of tea or in the bathroom washing up before bed. Although he couldn’t see that part of her home, he imagined she had a very set routine. He bet she washed her face with good soap, not that cheap stuff from Wal-Mart or even worse the Dollar Store, but imported stuff, the stuff that costs eleven bucks a bar. He imagined she flossed until her gums bled and brushed her hair exactly 125 times. She probably gargled with hydrogen peroxide just to be safe and exfoliated each night with a rough-textured sponge.

  She returned a moment later and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Her bedroom was at the northwest corner of the building, facing the street. Usually, she would sit on the edge of her bed, then do some stretching exercises. Every night she would do them, no matter how hard or how long her day had been. She would stand up and twist and grab her ankles and rotate her head. Her arms would outstretch and circle to alleviate the tension in her shoulders. The knots would dissolve, and acid would settle into her muscles. She would have a glass of water on the night stand to help with that. Next, she’d lotion her thighs, then her calves, and then her feet. He imagined she’d be more comfortable now, out of the clothes that seemed to strangle her. The dresses she wore were tight, and the heels of her shoes left blisters on her feet. By now she would be in some old track shorts from her high school days, maybe a T-shirt from a concert she’d attended with a boy who didn’t work out. At last she would pull the blanket up to her chin and curl up like a child scared of the dark.

  But not that n
ight.

  For the first time since Coulter had been watching her, she did not trouble herself with her routine. Instead, she clicked off her lamp, and her bedroom went dark.

  Something was wrong. He could tell. Really wrong. She shouldn’t be alone. He had to do something. More than anything he wished to slide in next to her. To hold her and run his fingers through her hair and tell her that everything would be okay. It didn’t even matter if he believed it or not, just telling her would help. He tried to will himself not to go up to her window. It wasn’t the right time. It wasn’t. Soon he could. Outside of class he would talk to her again. He would ask her if she’d like to go to dinner. She’d say yes, and they’d go to Pazetti’s where he’d learn she’s a vegetarian, or trying to be, but every once in a while she couldn’t help but cheat, and she would with him, she’d order the veal and feel guilty and want to call it an early night because of it, but he would talk her out of it, and they would end up having their first kiss outside the restaurant where everyone could see them.