by Jay Sigler
I filtered her out. She had a point. I used to stay late when I had to but I found myself rushing home these days if I knew she would be around.
“...And that's why you shouldn't be spending so much time by yourself.”
“I know, I know. Sorry. Let’s meet up as soon as possible to get this done.”
“Sounds good. Give me about five minutes.” She looked at me for a few more seconds and then went back to her office. I weeded through my inbox for the email with the equation and thought about deleting it, pretending it never existed. But I had a feeling another copy would find its way back to me.
“So, where should we start?” Julie asked, appearing at the door a few minutes later. It looked like she had thrown on a layer of makeup and brushed her hair.
“I don't know, I suppose the beginning. I still can't believe he just drops this on us, with no warning.” She rolled her chair a little too close to mine.
“That's why he's The Stork,” she said to me with a wink and a smile. “The Stork” is what we started calling Mr. Stark one night when we were working late. Not only for the similarity to his last name, but also his nature to just swoop in and drop off something unexpected at any given time.
“Yeah, you're right; I should have learned to expect this shit by now. Alright, what do we have here?” I asked, pulling up the equation in my email. It was a form of Schrödinger's Equation, mostly used in quantum mechanics.
“What do you think we're solving for, a way to keep cats alive?” she asked, half joking.
“Not sure, but we do know that half of the Dirac Constant needs to be less than the change in particle position times the change in momentum,” I said.
“I'm not certain about that. Are you sure we even need to use Planck's Constant for this equation? Can't we convert it to the version with the Hamiltonian Operator? We can then use the Potential to figure out the wave function.”
I thought this over in my head. She was right, that would be the easier way. I was the one who usually came up with those types of ideas. I attributed my lapse in cognitive speed to recent events.
“I suppose that would work,” I told her and started plugging numbers and variables into the computer. Once we had the basic method we were going to use, the rest was just meticulous data manipulation and verification.
We finally came up with our solution around 9:45 pm. We had worked so late I had to take the last train of the night home, which left the station at 10:00 pm. The extra time spent with Julie on that equation kept my mind occupied long enough to forget about how miserable I had become. But when I boarded the train for the long ride home, every disparaging thought about my desolate life rushed back twofold, almost as if I had to make up for the time I had briefly escaped it.
As I settled into my single seat in the top row, I was surprised to see Shawn in the same car. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he was in this same car on the same train this late at night. I thought back to my earlier theory about Shawn's appearance causing the disruptions on the train and further convinced myself that they were not independent events. He was also the one that killed the Happy Couple in my dream. The Happy Couple that had been missing in reality for over a month. He tried to appear like he was sleeping, but I could see the dim halogen lights reflecting off of the white slits of his eyes and knew he was awake. He had on his same black trench coat and hat, but something about him was different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, at least not then.
The conductor and the assistant conductor walked through the cars asking everyone for their tickets. Riders usually presented a prepaid ticket and the conductors used a tool similar to a hole punch to mark it. When they got to me, I fumbled around looking for my ticket. I realized that in my hurried scramble to catch the last train of the night, I had left it in my coat which was still at the office. Tired of waiting for me to produce a ticket, the conductors said they would catch me on the way back and left through the dual sliding doors onto another car. Frustrated and pissed off that I had to buy a ticket while a prepaid one sat in my office, I felt Shawn’s eyes steady upon me, dissolving some of the anger into embarrassment. I sighed and looked up to meet his eyes. He slid his hat to the back of his head and was now awake – or at least not pretending to sleep. His eyes flickered to the seats in front of me, the seats where Rob and Gina would normally have sat in the morning. After a few moments of staring at the abandoned seats of my missing friends, he nodded towards the door the conductors had exited through and said, “I don’t think they’re coming back.” As he said this, his eyes moved back to the empty seats, indicating the real subject of his observation. He then grabbed the top of his hat and slid it down over his face. Conversation over.
Chapter 10
While melting ice cubes created their own entropy in my drink, I analyzed Shawn’s words like an equation that had a solution in it somewhere. “I don’t think they’re coming back.” The combination of being tired and drunk launched me into a state of paranoia. I almost had myself convinced that he had done something to the Happy Couple – not exactly how it had happened in my dream, of course, but something bad nonetheless. I contemplated what to do. I couldn’t go to the police without solid evidence. Julie would fly off on some psychobabble tangent if I mentioned it to her. The friends and family from the funeral had been there for Vicky, not me. I had no one else. I grabbed a picture of us from the mantel over the fireplace and spoke directly to it. Through a steady stream of tears, I begged her to help keep me from losing my mind.
I set the picture back on the mantel with the utmost care. It was from a nature hike we had taken though Yosemite Park about seven months before. On a whim, we hopped in the old beaten-up Honda Civic, now browner from rust than the original paint, and just left for the weekend. The story behind the picture was something we had many laughs over. In the middle of all of God’s natural wonder, there we were running around looking for a bathroom. There wasn't one on any of the trails we hiked through. The irony had us laughing so hard that the search to find a bathroom was almost no longer needed.
We finally stumbled upon an outhouse and decided that this was one memory we wanted to capture on film. That explained why we were both crossing our legs in the picture. My eyes blurred over with more tears, and the dual image they created showed me every reason I hurt two times. I lost perspective on the main focus of the picture. There were about fifteen other people in the background flocking to the outhouse like bees to honey, but what stuck out was the man wearing the black Converse shoes. And then it hit me. What I couldn't put my finger on before. Shawn wasn’t wearing the black leather boots I had seen him in every day since we became train friends; he had on black Converse sneakers. I don't see how I could have missed that. I used to be good at picking out the minor details.
My knees buckled and my breath grew short. I struggled against the gray that was trying to steal my vision. Rob had worn the same type of shoes and now Rob was gone. Shawn had even acknowledged their absence on the train. In my mind, I knew Shawn had something to do with Rob and Gina, even if it didn't seem possible.
Chapter 11
Shawn and the missing Happy Couple became my new obsession. As a result, the quality of my life sank even lower. Over the next few weeks, paranoia crept into every waking moment and I depended on more and more alcohol to deal with my life. My wife was gone. And two of my friends had disappeared. End result: I was still alone. The booze wrapped my life in a cloudy, vague dream, making everything seem almost unreal. It was like watching myself in a movie, but not feeling anything. This was fine by me since every unexpected, unanticipated sound I heard made my body's heart race, pumping both blood and fear through its veins. If I heard a branch brush an outside window, it was Vicky’s killer coming back to finish me off. The wind blowing leaves across the roof was Shawn coming to silence me for what I knew about Rob and Gina. Unlit rooms outlined the shadows of these men, waiting in doorways for me. My neck hurt from so much twisting around, sure that someone was
behind me. I held it together enough to convince Julie that everything was great, but like Sheila's gray hair, the reality of my life was a draining toilet, flushing to nowhere you’d ever want to go.
Alone in the house that was once our home, my routine had switched from frozen dinners and reruns on TV to chilled vodka tonics and reruns of Vicky’s death playing over and over in my head, like some scratched DVD stuck on the same snippet of image and sound.
I still couldn’t believe it had happened. I had to work late to solve one of the endless math problems, so Vicky was home by herself. I called to tell her I would be home late and to go ahead and eat without me. She told me she would save any leftovers and to take my time, don’t rush. She knew how much this job meant to me and that there would be sacrifices on her part when I took it. I should have rushed. What I came home to was worse than any nightmare I’ve ever had, recent ones included.
I parked next to her car in the garage after driving home from the train station. Right away I knew something was wrong. Vicky had always been a Christmas junkie, putting the tree up before Halloween, setting porcelain snowmen around the house, and hanging lights off of everything that even slightly resembled a hook. She loved it and I loved her, so that was how it went. When I got home that night after another long day at the office, there were no blinking red and green lights shining out from the front window where our tree stood. The rest of the house was also completely dark. I figured that Vicky had fallen asleep on the couch after work and just hadn’t turned them on.
I walked into the house without making a sound so I wouldn't disturb her and looked at the couch. She wasn’t there. I thought that maybe she was upstairs in the bathroom or had gone to bed early. I flipped on the foyer lights and made my way to the kitchen, planning to grab a bag of Doritos and bottle of Pepsi, check on Vicky, and then watch some TV. When I grasped the light switch in the kitchen before turning it on, it felt slick, the way your hands feel after putting moisturizing lotion on them. The switch flipped up, the lights came on, and my life changed forever.
On her stomach, head turned to face the heat register beneath the row of cabinets, was my Vicky. She was dead. The plastic Ziploc bag pulled tightly over her head was not expanding or contracting with her breath. The once translucent bag was splattered red, like someone had beaten a tomato inside of it. Her arms were stretched out, both palms faced up towards the ceiling, and each hand had been nailed to the floor. A horizontal crucifixion. I stepped forward right into the puddle of warm blood dribbling out of the bag. The brushed silver handle jutting out from the side of her neck belonged to the knife we had cut our wedding cake with so many years ago. What began our life together had now ended it. I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up. Then I just sat on the cold tile floor, one arm resting on the toilet, the other one hanging uselessly on the floor next to me. I stared into nothing and entered a state of shock. When I discovered my vocal cords, the sounds emitted from my body couldn’t be described as screams. They were inhuman noises thrust out from the very depths of my being. This went on until I slumped over onto the toilet and passed out.
The police later told me that the actual cause of death had been a blow to the head by a blunt object, possibly a bat. That was supposed to make it easier on me, knowing that she wasn’t subjected to such hideous torture prior to her death. Cops were so understanding. They said that the bag and knife business had been done afterward. “Postmortem” was the word they used. They believed that the killer had been in the process of decapitating her when I came home and scared off him or her. They said they didn’t understand the nailing her hands to the floor, but that they were working on it.
That’s the memory that I’ve dealt with every night since it happened. My dead wife, nearly beheaded and stuck to the floor like a bug in a box. Her blood soaking through my sock, forcing me to physically touch what was my new reality; an existence filled only with hate, self-loathing, and paranoia, with the bottle my only escape from a constant state of pain and suffering.
Chapter 12
My life existed in a drunken, depressed state for an indiscriminate amount of time. The only indication between being drunk and sober was the pain in my head. If it was throbbing, I needed to drink more. That logic didn't work with the pain in my heart, but it also didn't stop me from trying. I could barely find a glass to drink from. They were scattered everywhere about the house, with sticky film coating the edges and marking the exact spot where I had finished the drink. My journal became full of thoughts and ideas that I hardly remembered writing. Gibberish I couldn't even decipher in the mornings.
“Fuck every with your wife life knife.”
“Kill you and morning. You want this.”
“Buy drink vodka.”
“He killed Rob and Gina.”
“Julie is a psycho logist.”
“Stop trying. Give up.”
“Your Alone.”
Friends and family stopped all communication the second they left the reception. The list of things I cared about dwindled to just thoughts of Vicky and my train friends. That list purposefully excluded me.
“You guys will not believe what happened to me this weekend.” It had to have been some Monday, and Neil had obviously prepared another extravagant boating story. “I’m out sailing, looking for a good spot to catch some carp and these fucking college guys start circling me on them goddamn wave runners.”
“You tell them they were scaring the fish?” Frank offered, helping the story along.
“You’re goddamn right I did! I said, ‘Hey you douche bags, why don’t you quit splashing each other like a bunch of homo mermaids and get the hell outta here?’” Neil said, glancing over at Sheila to make sure he didn't offend her. “Sorry, Frank, nuttin' against your type,” he added as an afterthought, winking at Sheila with a grin.
Frank smiled and shook his head, preparing his response to Neil’s comment. “Real funny, Neil. You’re hilarious. But you know us mermaids don’t like being called homos.”
Sheila laughed at Frank’s response, not hiding the snort that came out with the laugh.
“Well, if you're a mermaid, it's weird that you would even be associated with something that smelled like fish.”
“You watch your language in front of the lady,” Frank jokingly scolded as he mimed fish gills on his face with his open flapping palms.
“Yeah, yeah, you're right,” Neil laughed.
“You know, I’m not so sheltered that I haven’t heard things like that before, Neil. I am a big girl,” she said between bites of hash brown. Her face reddened and she hoped Neil didn’t realize the “big girl” comment could have meant two different things.
“Okay, okay,” Neil continued. “Still, I should turn down the potty mouth around the ladies. It’s just this damn marina they’re putting in is bringing all the inexperienced moron sailors to the area. A bunch of clueless idiots.”
It went on like this for the duration of the commute. There was something very therapeutic to me about these unimportant conversations centered around nothing. When I heard them, a sense of normalcy kept my mind off of the real, more disturbing parts of my life. For a few hours a day, it was like I was a part of a group that just sat and talked and laughed. Only I never really talked and I have never laughed. I just sat.
This temporary escape was working well until I started to see Shawn on the train more frequently. He'd been sitting on the bottom row now, closer to my remaining friends, trying to become a part of their group. I got the paranoid feeling that he was planning to do something bad to one or all of them, just like the Happy Couple. And after the dream I had, my feeling became a certainty.
In my dream, I was riding the train with Neil and Frank, just like any other morning. The three of us exited the train at the regular stop, Neil clamoring on and on to Frank about another fantastic boating adventure. I followed closely behind them, but as in real life, they didn’t know I was there. For some unknown reason, they started following th
e tracks of the train we had just exited, walking back towards the direction we came from. Neil balanced himself on one rail like a tightrope walker, while Frank jumped forward in the middle, making sure each foot touched the log of wood that completed the “H” between each rail. Left foot, one log, right foot, next log. This went on for miles in distance, but minutes in dream time. I glanced around after a while and noticed that we were in the middle of a forest. We had walked so far that we were equally as far from nothing in both directions. At this point Neil stopped and looked at Frank.
“Psst. Hey, Frank. You want to see where I keep my boat?” Neil looked around to make sure no one had heard him.
“Yeah, I want to check your bad boy out.”
“You’re damn right you do!” Neil said, his voice going from loud to soft. “But you have to be very, very quiet.”
“Why?” asked Frank with a smile. “Are we hunting wabbits?” Always able to make a joke in the right place.
“C’mon, let’s go,” said Neil, and he suddenly sprinted away from the train tracks towards the forest.
Frank followed him like a dog to its master, the two of them looking like school boys, racing each other to the tree line, dodging holes and hurdling old stumps. I too made my way behind them, hovering over the ground rather than walking on it. This is the way I sometimes moved in my dreams, with the scenery moving past me while I stayed in one place. I wasn’t worried about getting separated when they disappeared into the trees since I somehow felt attached to them as if by an invisible rope.
Suddenly a gigantic lake presented itself, so big that the other side of it couldn’t be seen from where I stood. The curved border encompassing the lake both to my left and right was a solid wall of trees. A sea of green surrounding a lake of blue. Similar to the scene with the Happy Couple entering the alley, once I crossed the lines of trees on the edge of the forest, the sky turned a dark, dangerous gray. I looked up, expecting a sudden cloud cover. There were no clouds. It was as if we were in a fishbowl that some giant had draped a scarf over. As the grayness settled in and my eyes adjusted, I found I was able to see the things around me in greater detail. Each individual blade of grass had such clarity, I could have been seeing it through a magnifying glass. The surface of each pebble on the hard packed dirt told me its story of how it had come to be that shape.
