Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

  I shook my head. “It hardly sounds feasible,” I claimed.

  He regarded me for a long time, with that look of his that made me feel like layers of myself were being slowly peeled away, briefly considered, and discarded. Inside, I squirmed a little.

  “No,” he finally said, “probably not.”

  Like his wife, I too was much younger than Gerard, almost two decades younger. I had become friends with him only because of his wife, who had been my friend years before either of us met Gerard himself. We had grown up together, been in school together, and went everywhere together. We were often mistaken for being brother and sister. When people discovered that we were not in fact brother and sister, they would wonder if we were a couple, though when I would tell them we were old friends, that seemed to provide an explanation they could grudgingly accept.

  Indeed, when Gerard first met the woman who would become his wife, he met me for the first time as well. His future wife and I were sitting at a table outside the Balmain, drinking, and when I excused myself to use the restroom, he approached our table.

  “May I ask,” he asked the woman who would become his wife, “you can’t possibly be serious about the fellow who just left the table, can you?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said, promptly. “Simply a friend.”

  By the time I got back Gerard was sitting at the table, on the same side as her, touching her elbow lightly. I resumed my position across the table from her. Eventually, I left.

  A month later they were married.

  II.

  On the day of the move, I, as one of Gerard’s only friends, showed up. I was the only friend to show. Perhaps, with his wife having vanished under suspicious circumstances, I was his only remaining friend.

  I helped him organize boxes and affixed to them the strips of colored tape that were meant to tell the moving crew where the boxes were to be placed in the new house. When the movers showed up, Gerard made the crew foreman listen while he explained each color of tape and what room it corresponded to. When he finished, the man grunted and picked up a box. “We’ll move your boxes from one house to another,” he said with a broad accent. “That’s what we’re paid to do.” And then he left the room.

  Nevertheless, we continued to arrange and label boxes. “But what if she comes back?” I asked at one point, mainly to see what Gerard would say. “What will she think when she finds you gone?”

  He stopped and set down the roll of tape he had been using. It was a vague color—teal, he called it—only distinguishable from the blue tape if you looked at strips of both side by side. There was, I was certain, zero chance the movers would bother to do so.

  “Well,” he said slowly. “You’re not moving, are you? I suppose, when she finds me gone, she’ll come see you.”

  Perhaps I read too much into his answer, but it troubled me.

  I stayed until the boxes were all loaded and the truck had started off. And then I stayed even longer, long enough to help him finish the dozen stubbies that he’d left in the fridge just for that purpose.

  “You’ll drive there tonight?” I asked, a little worried about how much he was drinking.

  He shook his head. “No such luck,” he said. “I’ll sleep here, in the back of the car, and then drive down in the morning.”

  “In the back of the car?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Because,” I said, “for starters, because it’s a fucking car.” After a moment, I offered, “Why not stay with me?”

  But he simply shook his head. “No,” he said. “I couldn’t impose.” And though I claimed it was no imposition, he still refused to accept.

  We were each on our last stubby when he asked a question—not the question that I dreaded him asking, although still a question that I suspect he wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t been drunk.

  “You think I did it, don’t you,” he said. “That I killed her?”

  I politely demurred, staring instead at the narrow mouth of my bottle, and yet he persisted. “Come on,” he said, “you can see that all the rest of them think I did it. Why do you think they didn’t show up today? So why did you? Don’t you think I killed her?”

  “I don’t know,” I claimed, “exactly what to think.” And in saying this I was lying only slightly.

  I didn’t see him again for some time. By the time I passed the apartment building again the next morning his car was gone, and I thought, Ah, well, better to just leave him alone in his isolated country house, and for you to forget about him, and him to forget about you.

  Months went by. Ten, maybe eleven. I had no word from him. He was living perhaps three hundred and fifty kilometers away, in the interior, somewhere near Goroke. I could, I told myself, forget about him, go on with my life as if nothing had happened, despite the loss of my real friend, his wife.

  And then he chose to break his silence and contact me. It was a simple letter, sent in a paper-thin airmail envelope despite having only several hundred kilometers to go. I slit it open with a knife.

  Come see me.

  This was all, apart from an address and a telephone number.

  I called the number. No answer. I called again, then again. Finally I had him, a strange connection, staticky in the extreme. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?” And then, despite the fact that I was already speaking, “Who is this? Is anybody there?” It’s me, I believe I said, your wife’s best friend. He didn’t seem to hear me. “If this is some kind of joke …,” he said, and then hung up.

  I will wait for a second letter, I thought. When a second letter comes, I will trek out to see him.

  But no second letter came. A month passed, and then another. I sent a letter to the address he had provided in the letter, expressing my intention of visiting him, but there was no response to this either. When I called again, the number was no longer in service.

  What do you do in such a circumstance, with a friend who is not, technically, a friend, who is only a friend because of your connection with his wife, who vanished? Who vanished under mysterious circumstances? Do you simply forget about him, let him fade slowly into oblivion? Do you think, yes, I’ll contact him someday, only not yet? Or do you do as I did and instead take it upon yourself to show up at his door?

  From the outside it looked ordinary, a small stone house that hadn’t been updated for a century or perhaps more, but it was solid. I rapped on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again and called his name: Gerard. There was a long moment in which nothing happened, and I envisioned myself driving back the three hundred and fifty kilometers to the city without even having seen him.

  And then the door opened. He stood there, blinking against the light, staring at me, no hint of recognition on his face. I said his name again and then, finally, his expression changed and he said, “Ah, it’s you.” Turning, leaving the door ajar, he walked back into the shadows of the house.

  Inside, it was a shambles. Despite nearly a year having passed, everything was still in boxes. Or, rather, piles of half-opened boxes were scattered throughout the rooms, with pieces of clothing, towels, draped over them. There was no bed that I could see—and when I asked him where he slept he gestured feebly to the garage. I went and opened the door and saw more boxes, whole crooked stacks of them, with all different colors of tape on them and, there, squeezed among them, a camp cot.

  “What happened to your bed?” I asked. But he simply shrugged.

  I followed him into the living room. He asked me if I wanted something to drink, and when I asked for water he went into the bathroom and came out with a glass smeared with toothpaste. He washed it in the sink and then brought it to me filled with silty water. Once I had finished it, he carried the glass back into the bathroom.

  “What’s happened to you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “My wife’s gone,” he said.

  “That was almost a year ago,” I said.

  “I wanted to wait to unpack until she could d
ecide where things would go.”

  “Gerard,” I said, “she’s not coming back.”

  “She might come back,” he said. “She still might come back.”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t be a fool, Gerard.”

  He turned to me with that same look of his, the one that made me want to squirm. “What do you know about it?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I claimed. “Nothing at all. But—”

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he interrupted.

  III.

  I of course knew what he was going to ask me. I’d been dreading it long before his wife’s disappearance and had expected him to ask it well before now, but it had taken him being alone in the middle of the countryside, with nothing but his own mind for company, to bring himself to ask.

  After I had killed him, I considered what to do with the knife. I had carried it for a year, perfectly happy to let him live as long as I felt I was not threatened. And yet I was always prepared, always armed. I would have to get rid of the knife. I was reluctant to do so, considering what else it had been used for, although I had no choice.

  But first, before doing anything else, I had to sleep. I had driven nearly four hours, in the dead of night, to reach Gerard’s house. I had hidden my car halfway down the dirt track, edging it into the tall grass, smearing the plate with mud. Better to take a slight risk and sleep a few hours before heading back.

  So, I rolled his body facedown and went into the garage to rest on his camp bed.

  As I slept, I had a dream. I dreamed about the time when all three of us were still alive: myself, Gerard, and his wife. Not about the month before his marriage or the few happy months after, but the time after that, when she came to tell me she had made a huge mistake, that she belonged with me, not him, that she hadn’t seen it before despite how long we had been friends. Perhaps she hadn’t seen it, she claimed, because we had been friends.

  I was, both in the dream and in life, startled by this—I had long been in love with her, though thought she had no feelings for me. In both the dream and in life, I had succumbed: I became her lover.

  But in the dream we had remained lovers. Gerard had eventually died—either of natural causes or we had killed him: the dream was unclear on that score—and then the two of us were together, happily ever after. We had a child, a son, and went on to enjoy a happy life.

  Needless to say, actual life had turned out somewhat differently.

  When I awoke, it was broad daylight. I rubbed my face. I would be wise, I told myself, to wait until dark before starting off. It would minimize my chance of being caught.

  I got off the cot, stretched, and went from the garage into the house proper. He was still there, lying facedown on the floor, in his own blood. It was a mercy, I told myself. Flies were there now, buzzing all around him, and when I wasn’t careful I began to hear a kind of susurrus in their buzzing, as if something was being whispered. It’s just a body, I told myself, but in the end I retreated back to the garage.

  Sitting on the edge of the cot, I thought about her. She had come to me, telling me that she and Gerard were going to the seaside. She told me I should come too, secretly, that she would find a way to slip out to see me. Is that wise? I asked her. But wisdom, of course, had nothing to do with it. And, of course, I went.

  We had several good days together there, moments when she claimed to Gerard she was going to town or elsewhere and then instead trekked a kilometer up the beach to spend a few hours at my cottage. A moment even when she sneaked out in the middle of the night. Did Gerard suspect anything? I didn’t think so, although that was of course one of the things I’d been wondering ever since she had vanished.

  But no, I didn’t think he knew, and it was clear from the way he finally posed the question, in the small stone house right outside of Goroke, right before I killed him, that if the thought of myself and his wife having an affair had crossed his mind, it had only recently done so, here, in Goroke, while he was alone with his thoughts. Or he had been good, at least, at presenting the matter at that moment as if this had been the case.

  The question he asked me was, “Were you having an affair with my wife?” He asked in a way that made me think that the idea had only then occurred to him. The answer, of course, was yes, and I, of course, claimed no. And with indignation: how could he even think such a thing? But after that question, I knew other questions would follow, and before long he would figure out that not only had his wife vanished; she had vanished because I had murdered her.

  It was the fourth day at the seaside, I think, our fourth encounter anyway, when she admitted to me that the reason she and Gerard had come to the seaside was because they were leaving the city, moving away.

  “Moving,” I repeated.

  Yes, she said, to the country, a small house, to work on their marriage. They had recommitted to one another and were planning to start anew.

  “This,” I said, gesturing at the sheets crumpled around us, “is a funny way to recommit.”

  For a moment her brow creased, then it smoothed. “Oh,” she said, “I thought you understood that this trip was the end. That this was me saying good-bye.”

  It was true, she had said that, and yet she had said it other times, so many times before: how was I to take her seriously? But now, finding that they were leaving, it did strike me that perhaps this time she was in fact serious.

  What did I say to her? I don’t recall exactly, except to remember a certain degree of desperation in my pleas, a certain amount of humiliation. She protested that she didn’t expect it to end this way. I came to understand that she’d been expecting to have a final moment of glorious infidelity she could carry delicately back with her into her “recommitment” to her marriage. Things ended abruptly. Or, rather, they ended with her, tight-lipped, no longer saying anything, getting rapidly dressed and fleeing the cottage.

  After she was gone, I lay in the bed for some time, staring at the ceiling. I was thinking. I was pondering the degree of my humiliation. I was wondering, if I waited long enough, would her marriage collapse? Would this final gambit go wrong and lead her back to me? I lay in that rented bed in that rented cottage and considered the shape of my life and saw many years of her occasionally straying, momentarily departing from Gerard to seek consolation with me, but always going back to him. And, in my mind, even when he finally died, she did not come to me but found someone else, someone more like Gerard. I realized I could not be with her nor could I escape her, that I was condemned to a sort of diminished life in which, slowly, over years and years, I would become nothing. That there would be no escaping this unless, somehow, I had the good fortune of her dying and freeing me.

  And so, slowly, by bits and starts, my resentment and humiliation growing, I arrived at the idea of killing her.

  It was a great deal easier than I thought it would be. I had a snorkel and a mask, and I waited hidden in the dunes down from where I knew their cottage to be. I waited an hour, perhaps two, and when I saw them step out of the door in their bathing suits I moved into the water and toward them. Before long, I saw beneath the waves the pale legs I recognized as belonging to her. I positioned myself with great care, and then, with a large crashing wave and a moment of distraction suggested in the flexion of the legs of her husband, as they both turned back to face the beach, I yanked her off her feet and below the water. She was too surprised to resist, and by the time she thought to do so, I was drawing her away, keeping her under, not allowing her to breathe. She struggled, once almost escaped. She managed to claw my mask down around my neck. However, the act of seeing my face and realizing who it was proved more of a shock to her than the mask had been, and I managed to keep the snorkel in my mouth long enough that before I ran out of breath she was dead, drowned. And then, leaving her body to drift, I reaffixed the mask, cleared the snorkel of water, then dragged her slowly out to sea, taking her body to the edge of the reef. I slit her throat open with my knife, the same knife I would use a year
later to kill her husband. I watched the blood that would draw the sharks to her slowly bloom and then released her corpse and allowed it to sink gently into the darkness.

  I returned that day to the city. I was there, waiting, when Gerard came back, bereft, unsure of what had happened to his wife. I was there to comfort and reassure him, though, above all, to reassure myself that he did not suspect me. After all, I could not know for certain what his wife had let slip about our relationship.

  But for a long time I was convinced he knew nothing. There was only that gaze of his, those brief moments of thoughtful consideration as he looked at me, that left me unsure. Which had led me here, to this cot in this garage, staring at the door that led into a room containing his dead body.

  I did my best to clean up after myself. I rubbed a damp cloth over every surface, obliterating my fingerprints. I lit a fire in the fireplace and then turned the gas on low on the unlit stove just before I left for good. I got in my car and drove at a stately, leisurely pace back to the city. By the time the place caught fire, I was kilometers away.

  I have been here ever since, unsuspected, alone, bereft now of not just one friend but two, both of whom I betrayed. Do I regret it? No. And then again, yes. In truth, I do not know what I feel, though I do know that often at night I dream of them, of their deaths. Of the slow seepage of her blood into the salty water. Of the sharp spurt of his against the stone wall as I slit open his throat. I lie and dream, and wake to hear the blood beating in my own ears, and wonder, Could this have turned out any differently? Could we all still be alive? Happy even?

  But no, I think, once daylight starts to break. Things could only have turned out this one way, only exactly as they did.