by Brian Hodge
She forced herself to plan. He had seen most of her body; here, certainly, was a man with a schooled eye for the structural. When next they met, she would wear something full-length and open-throated, drive him to remember the contoured vee of her groin and the smooth divide of her breasts, swelling against fabric. First you showed them, then you covered up what they knew to be there. It was a technique that drove men loopy with want.
Tonight's difference was that she wanted this man to want her. For no logical reason whatsoever. Human beings are rarely logical in their own self-interest.
Tomorrow she would see him. Not bad, for someone who had not planned her life beyond a couple of hours ago. She had felt fulfilled in taking a chance and now felt the need for caesura, to push her past the moment of first contact.
It was only when she was halfway home she realized she had overlooked an important aspect of the ritual. She was slipping, she thought with a smile; she had not taken an advantage. She had forgotten to ask his name.
The next day, when she came to visit him bearing flowers, she found his hypnotically beautiful house empty. She killed herself shortly before midnight, beneath a moon fuller by a sliver, her heart drained, her emotions betrayed, her trust violated. The blossoms and petals she bore marked the location of her death for the briefest of times, and were scattered by the receding tide. By morning, even her footprints were gone.
The man was not in the custom of drinking alone, but having begun with company, he cycled through a fresh bottle of the cabernet with few jabs of regret. Alone again, he leisurely recaptured her smile, her turn of head, the way she curled a phrase. Prior to this night, his only real solace had come from sleep, thin and fitful, or brooding like a proper existentialist.
The alcohol finally shoved him through. Another flammable liquid, like his forsaken cans of gasoline.
He awoke when it was all over. He did not wish to remember what took place. The jags of it retained by memory were sharp-edged and lethal, ceremonial mutilations of the mind that would stick, as counsel, to instruct him in the things to avoid if there ever came another next time. It was no dream. It was a nightmare, real as pain.
Drunk on the smoky red, he had fallen through the door, his constant mantra of Lorelle derailed by intoxication and his close encounter with Kayce. His success was accidental–he knew this when he heard Lorelle's voice, entreating iced tea from the roof deck–and therefore, totally unplanned.
He was so polluted, so achingly precipitous, that he ruined it all.
He remembered Lorelle wrestling him off her.
Sex, vulnerability, trust, all his careful and civilized talk sedated, leaving recriminations, anger, a card house of vacant words and boundless hypocrisy, his morals a sham, his compassion fled, his low primitive ebb worse than any beast…
She left him in loathing. She died by fire. In the Mazda, as previously. It was not until he saw the departing taillights that his own terror sobered him in a snap. He ran downstairs, staggered after her, lost the race. He collapsed onto the driveway paving, which was where he was awakened by the sun.
A fragment: During their fight, just a phantom track, really, he had called her a bitch, wanted to throttle some sense into her. Didn't she realize he was trying to save her life?
The Mazda hit a patch of oil in the dark and destroyed itself on the cliff rocks near the sea. Lorelle had spent a very long time burning. As painful as the drowning death must have been, it had happened inside of two minutes. The fire took its sadistic time obliterating her, and her nerves must have recorded enough shock for an eternity. This time there was no traffic and no witnesses, and Lorelle died alone, trapped in blast-furnace compacted metal, screaming as her arms and legs cooked down to bone, the bone burned to ash by the intense heat.
And in the aftermath, this time, a new wrinkle: The man had never before visited a morgue. The charred mass stuck to the steel drawer was not remotely identifiable as something he had spent time loving. Someone. Still did love.
He dropped the irises and orchids atop polished mahogany, and watched her go down to meet the earth a third time.
It could have been worse, he kept saying to himself, horribly. He might have gone berserk and strangled her, or bludgeoned her to death in his besotted haze. The next time–if there was one–he might tip over the rest of the way and become the actual cause of her death, as opposed to catalyst. With the best and most noble of intentions, he might kill the woman he loved.
During his newly-regained forty-fifth year, he wondered how Lorelle would have handled this, were their fates reversed. He hoped she would have gotten on with a life, found someone new. He hoped she would be blessed to bypass this deadly loop and evade its snares. Fruitlessly, he wished she could, achieve some magical understanding that the raving animal had not been him, but a thing pulled out of his psyche by grief. There was no guidebook on how to navigate his predicament; no template for the procedure apart from his own groping trial and error. He needed absolution and forgiveness, and would not reap either, even through Lorelle. If she returned again, it would be with no memory of the previous time-track erased. No warning bells. No "worse" alarm. Never say worse.
A year until he had to repeat his evening with Kayce. Little salvation there, now.
The man prayed to unhearing gods that he was not beginning to hate Lorelle. That his stonewalled frustration would not fester, that it would not grow worse.
He stopped drinking, took up smoking. Once more he supervised the installation of the glass door. It took him less time than before; he knew all the glitches by heart.
On a cursory inspection of the wine rack, he saw the bottle of cabernet he would share with Kayce a year from now. The thought lent him a curious feeling of stability.
He was getting good at this way of life.
Meeting a lunatic on a beach at sunset, thought Kayce. Well, that was certainly one way to think twice about doing yourself in.
Half past dinnertime she stopped pondering her own image in the vanity mirror, donned her newest bathing suit–a curvy one-piece in eye-searing magenta–and with a towel around her neck went down to consider the ocean, in the way a person toying with a loaded gun considers how simple it would be to place muzzle to temple and snap an unschooled trigger finger, just once. No motive, no Sherlockian maze of reason or intent … merely something done one day, as opposed to not done.
The lunatic was a classic, unshaven, white-eyed and disheveled, one baby step away from a shopping cart and a lifetime of panhandling on the Venice Beach boardwalk. She did not spot him immediately because he tacked on her like a skittish, abused dog, veering near, then detouring away at right angles. The light was poor. Her attention was on the water. The noise of the surf easily overrode the small sounds of his stealth. She had seen him several times, and yet was startled when he popped up in her face.
The man radiated toxicity toward Kayce, his gesticulations blind and apprehensive, his entire manner deranged and tentative, as though he feared he would explode on the spot, or she would dissolve from view, a specter of the sea, an hallucination to which he would speak in spite of his conviction that she might not be real.
He knew her name, and that scared her. He babbled, and repelled her before the import of his obscure message could be expressed. He advanced to the brink of her barrier of personal space, forcing her to back away, hands-up in warning, as he tried to unload a frightening rap about how they had met before, this night, this beach, several times over. When she finally turned to escape he yelled louder. She glanced back, her heart rioting, once there was a safe and increasing distance between them. Her last sight of him was a depressing picture of isolated loss and madness, of a stranger on his knees, futilely clutching handfuls of sand.
She rushed home, anger slowly displacing her fright. The lunatic did not follow her. Yet somehow, he had known her name. Wonderful–now she did not even have the succor of the beach anymore.
In a bizarre way, the man had saved her life. Her late
nt plan of suicide had been elbowed aside and replaced with real-life, real-time acts of personal survival. The moment in which romantic extremes were indulged had been punctured; to persist now would be a reaction, a self-victimization that would soil her purpose. She did not want anyone's sympathy or participation, not even a crazy person's.
Kayce returned to her home, her mirror, and embittered sleep. Maybe tomorrow she'd do it.
After blowing it in a major way with Kayce, the man returned to the drawing board, literally.
His architect's world was a slanted, padded board. High-intensity work pinlights and Scum-X and chewed pencils. In work, he had always been a sleuth of the indefinite, knowing by instinct, dead reckoning perfect fits in impossible spaces, lending harmony to warring concepts, always led by the surety that he could make things fit and work, somehow. It had been that way with the sliding glass section of the door.
Lorelle had teased him once about never being satisfied with his work. "You always try to go back and change it," she had said. "You're the King of Tweak." He had countered that one doesn't poke at what works, nor mess with success; his watchword was never to intellectualize the intuitive and it got us this house, didn't it?
Now he worked to revise the sliding door out of his existence. And the strategy was not yielding peace; the ideas were not coming, period, thank you, try again later.
He had never used a computer to help him design. Machines were not intuitive. Forty-six came. And went. Again. Then, forty-seven. Time marched.
Phone messages dwindled and he reflected briefly on how isolated he had become. Everyone else out there in the world was waiting patiently, they all understood, and thought they were giving his genius time to evolve his next and newest brilliance. After all, it wasn't as if he'd been out of the loop for three years; merely one, plus small change. If you flip an hourglass often enough, the sand never runs out. He nodded at clerks in stores, silently gassed his car and paid his bills, and kept to himself once the plastic was off the house, and the counters leveled, and the furniture emplaced. He installed the glass door by rote, now thinking in terms of how it could be eliminated. One rib-tickling irony of this plan was that his design sense actively rebelled against putting something else in place of the door. It was supposed to be there; any substitute would just remind him that it was all wrong.
He was smoking and drinking now, far too much, letting himself go. No wonder he had freaked Kayce out on the beach. Another error for his burgeoning tally of mistakes; another year of waiting squandered in a moment of madness.
The door had remained, mostly because of its promise. When he at last gave up and returned to the house, Lorelle was already inside, waiting for him, fixing her tea herself, and voila, there he was, passing GO again.
Losing Kayce had provided a few tangential insights. What it was all about, he decided, was power. The power of stimulus and response. Guilt trips and paybacks and all the petty agonies inflicted day-to-day by people who turned love into a weapon, and became assassins. Perhaps the lesson was that Lorelle would be spared the one horror worse than all her combined deaths–the decay of his own love.
Or maybe the black topology of his own personal Mobius loop boiled down to his bullheaded refusal to accept the truth of loss. It was a diagram he revised constantly, yet never improved. Nothing else in his world was this close to an absolute, and he had behaved like some fanatical Chosen One, when in hard didactical fact he was simply a man suffering a deep loss. In the name of being right, he had become willing to sacrifice and destroy everything good he could still remember about Lorelle. Everyone who had a grail felt just as right in their own particular quest. Causes and effects could provide a veneer of statistical validity if your grail was ever challenged. The world was full of heretics. But logic was for calculators, and the only truth toward which he cared to bow tonight was that no matter how many times this backslip befell him, he would never know the why, any more than he knew why he'd hit a red light one day and a yellow light exactly one day later.
By the time he got back to the house he understood that he wanted Lorelle to know one simple thing–that he loved her. His hands shook as he braced himself for the onrushing downside.
"I think if you have a shave and sit in the whirlpool for awhile, you'll feel better," she told him.
Investigators, police, Authorities with a capital A; they all converged eventually on Kayce's apartment. They had but to follow the smell.
She had executed perfect razor incisions, if there was such a thing as a textbook for suicide. She had died in her bathtub, subsumed in crimson water gone cold days before. When one of the cops joked about the sands in this chick's hourglass finally running out, his buddy noted that the victim still had great tits; what a fucking shame.
Picture a man sitting quiet sentinel in an intensive care unit.
The man is not sure of his age. Bedside, he can see his reflection in the curved gray glass of vital signs monitors. The woman he loves has fallen into a coma, beyond practical recovery, a hair short of clinical brain death. Her pupils ignore light.
Inside her head, she might be screaming.
The man speaks to her as though she is another person, alive and cognizant, living a life. The floor physicians are accustomed to this sort of behavior. The man is routinely permitted access and time alone.
The words spoken by the man would break your heart; anyone's heart. The nurses have ceased to eavesdrop on his pain because it is, without hyperbole, too excruciating to hear. My god, he really loved her, they say, already referring to the patient in the past tense.
The man wonders if the fact they are both back in a hospital again, after so long a time, might help some cycle to close. Then he chastises himself for his own futility. Not important. All that matters is for him to keep giving back the things Lorelle told him that last night, after he had cleaned up and calmed clown.
"You worry too much," she had told him. "You should know I love you without having me here to tell you all the time, but I'm telling you to your face so you won't have any lingering doubt, okay? No Gothic novel jazz. I'll love you as long as those stars are up in the sky."
They had been out on the deck, outside the in-work sliding door. She had looked upward, with the expression of a woman who had mistaken the moment as significant, a turning point. The man averted his eyes; he had seen the same stars wink out too many times by now.
"No applause for the lame poetics," she had joked.
The sea was not eternal. Neither were the stars she had cited, nor the sky itself.
Her words had made love to him. Her words were enough. They had to be.
Sometime during the night, the comatose patient in 302 dies. The man is nowhere to be found. Someone phones his machine, at home. It was finally too much even for him, the nurses all agree, sympathetically.
At home, the man ignores the hospital's message. He sits lotus, considering his ghost image in his brand-new sliding glass door.
He has done what was necessary. There is even a time for love to die. It is possible someone will wish to punish the man for what he has done, but the Authorities will only ask questions and then leave him to his grief.
He is no more and no less than human. In him, the species' infinite capacity for futility, error and loss had to be balanced by equal measures of transcendence, insight and gain. He wonders if it will be enough, for Lorelle, for Kayce, a year from now, for him to be merely human.
He lights a cigarette, keeps the lighter flame burning until his thumb grows hot. He thinks of the beach outside, the glass door, of the fact glass is forged from sand, via heat. Trivia.
His ghost image meets his level gaze, toys with its ghost lighter, feels no such pain. The doorway invites him to try again.
Kayce savors the salt-spray and the wet give of the beach beneath her bare feet. Each outgoing wave exposes tiny, wriggling things in the sand. Simple pleasures.
She always makes this particular house her turning point. Probably som
eone's summer home; the damned place seems empty and deserted most of the time, but for signs of vague activity, like the invisible passage of caretakers. She has gone so far as to inquire with the broker for the area. The place was being refurbished by a prizewinning architect. He's the guy who put in all the glass; maybe you've seen his stuff. The broker, a seedy ferret named Speaks, has all the subtlety of any lecher, and his obvious manner motivates Kayce to put the rest of their preordained conversation on permanent hold.
Tonight, Kayce does not intend to return home. She has left everything behind her in order. No note: As she nears the architect's house, she feels an imminent delay in her plans as moments add themselves to her life, unbidden.
The enormous glass door on the seaward side of the house has been broken, smashed to a billion smithereens. She is aware of a black, non-reflective gap there, as though a small plane was flown through the wall.
Her heart accelerates at the thought of an intruder lurking inside. Another trap for her. She mourns the violation of this property in advance; soberly assesses that her testimony might be required later, in case someone needs details.
There is movement inside, indistinct enough to make her doubt what she sees. A trick of the light. Nothing happens for long moments. In another life, Kayce might have let the opportunity slip. Tonight, going with the flow of the unexpected, she decides and moves with less hesitation, recalling her highfaluting speech to Cort about sudden fire, the fast heat and stealth of real passion.
Already she is climbing the path, imagining meeting the mystery architect at last: He'll play lonely and tragic, like he's had his heart broken… he'll refuse a drink; there'll be a backstory, there… he'll have a fastidious name to match mine, and if he's any good, he'll laugh at the observation …
She has her back to the ocean now, so it cannot be reflected in her eyes. She has no sane idea of why she should even bother trying, why she deludes herself with fantasy meetings and their promise of further entwinements. All she knows is her strong attraction for the house, and the stranger inside. Magnetism. Tidal pull, perhaps.
