Abominations of Desire

by Vince Liaguno

  “Just one of your shirts,” I said, embarrassed and pushing the shirt and pillow out of camera range. It might have looked like I shoved you out of bed. “I’m kind of a slob today, but I promise the place will be clean when you get back.”

  “No worries,” you said. Then you told me more about the mess things were in at the new site, basically three bosses with different ideas of what should go where, and language barriers, too, and the culture so different from that of an American office. You whispered as if afraid to be overheard, and instead of a normal eavesdropper paused around a corner, or with ear to a cup held against the opposite wall, I imagined a security tech in headphones, huddled beneath a bank of computer monitors, typing commands to isolate the frequency of your voice.

  “Hey, the cab drivers here are crazy.”

  “Really?”

  “Maybe worse than New York. It’s like I’m taking my life in my hands to get to work.” A blip froze the image for a moment and your face became completely still. You stopped talking, but there was other audio: the grind of equipment, a metal door sliding open, a sledgehammer swung into a piece of drywall.

  You coughed, and it seemed to jar the image back into motion. “Sell any new policies today?”

  “I worked from home.” Fidelity Life is good about that: no need for me to go into the office every day, as long as I call in and keep my accounts updated. “Went out for a quick lunch at Panera’s, to escape the apartment for a bit.” Burger King, actually, but you wouldn’t have approved.

  “That sounds pretty good right now. There’s an odd spice to things here, whatever I try. Maybe it’s the water.” You raise a clear plastic glass to your mouth and take a long drink. The glass is smudged on the outside, or there’s something in it, or it’s some stupid pixilation from the compressed video. “Miss you.”

  I smile as big as I can in response—to make sure you can see it. “That’s what I like to hear.”

  [A whistle of wind.]

  “Love you,” I said, and from your image it looked like you said the same thing, and our words cancelled each other out. You told me you’d check in later from your hotel room.

  I closed the laptop, putting the computer into sleep mode.

  If only I could put myself in that mode so easily. I kicked the loose covers towards the foot of the bed then swung my legs over the edge and stood.

  When I walked to rescue “you” from the floor at the other side of the bed, it struck me how the half-dressed pillow had landed, the shirt sleeves twisted at odd angles as if the arms flailed in the air during the fall. If there had been a head on this improvised body, its neck would have broken.

  *

  We talked usually twice a day, once via video chat and once over the cell phones, with countless emails between. It was a good pattern, keeping us connected—but in isolated doses. I felt like my words and manner were somewhat forced: saying I missed you, and meaning that of course, but with a false cheer to the rest of it. As I think about it, a relationship isn’t built on scheduled bursts of conversation but on little gestures or meaningless breaths—things you wouldn’t bother to share in an email or repeat with some special emphasis, but you don’t have to, because you’re both in the same room. It seems to me, the real intimacy lies in those throwaway moments. Half-registered as they happen, but missed terribly when they’re gone.

  When you’re gone.

  So maybe I shouldn’t have been so embarrassed about the pillow. I’m guessing a lot of people do this, when they’re used to someone else in the bed: cuddle instead with a blanket or pillow, maybe even an article of clothing that reminds them of the person who’s missing.

  Would it be so strange to talk to these bits of cloth as well? Small observations: a comment about work or the day’s weather; a reminder about the rent check or an overdue library book. People talk to themselves all the time, so how is this different? It’s a comfort.

  *

  One of those nights—a rare night, when I fell soundly asleep—I dreamed that you were dead. It wasn’t exactly a nightmare, though all the trappings were there: a fogged cemetery, a tombstone carved with your name, a hand clawing up through grave dirt. Instead of being frightened, I step forward and clasp the hand, not bothered by the cold gray fingers, dirt and blood beneath the chipped nails, and I brace my feet and pull, helping you out of the grave the same as I’d help you off the couch after a weekend nap. A flash of lightning highlights your figure, and there’s smudges on your clothing, and clumps of dirt in your tangled hair. I brush soil off your shoulders, pat at wrinkles in the dress shirt and try to smooth a rip in the pants leg. I comb my fingers through your hair to push out the dirt.

  “They did a good job on you,” I say. “You’ve held up pretty well.”

  Your head has fallen to the side, like you’re listening to me. I lift it upright, but it tilts back over.

  “The striped shirt was a good choice,” I say. “Goes well with your gray skin tones. It makes you look thin, too.”

  I reach to hug you, and you let me. A few of your joints crack, so I don’t squeeze too tight. I nuzzle into your neck for a moment. There’s an earthy smell, like fresh fertilizer, along with some chemical undertones. “That’s a different aftershave, isn’t it?”

  I step back, tell you how good it is to see you again. I’m so glad you could pull yourself away from those other obligations to make time for me.

  And then I start blathering away about myself, the self-help book I’ve been reading, a local news story about a missing puppy, and a joke email Dean at work forwarded to me.

  When I woke, my face was buried in the collar of your shirt, and I breathed in faint traces of spice and sandalwood.

  *

  If I tell you.

  If I tell you how you passed...

  Those details, the cold facts of them. An official phone call, an impossible formal explanation, then cruel logistics: your body in a box on a plane, the usual ceremonies of funeral and grieving.

  I can’t illustrate such moments for you. They’d teach you too much about what happened, maybe make your death real again.

  It would undo everything.

  *

  Here is how I did it:

  Prayer is a kind of wish that hopes to influence the world. Through repetition, it sometimes gains traction.

  In theory. I’ve never quite believed in prayer—in the proper, religious sense. At the same time, I’ve never let go of the idea that a person’s imagination could make things happen. Self-help books about positive thinking, or the idea of a “guided visualization” leading people to see their life goals, and then tease them into reality—to me, such concepts have always seemed reasonable and right.

  There’s a power to negative thinking, too: the classic idea of self-fulfilling prophesy. My brain waves are naturally wired to worry—to ask, continually, What’s the worst that could happen? I’ve got a gift for passing similar worries to others—which is why I’m good at my job.

  So, whenever we were separated for a time, I wondered if I’d never see you again. What different scenarios would prevent your return: the temptation of newfound love in a foreign land; a bout of food poisoning that slips from dehydration into dysentery; a slight cough that later hacks blood into a Kleenex, or pops a blood vessel in your brain; an auto crash, or some stray cinderblock dropped from the roof of a high-rise or out the trash chute of an orbiting satellite.

  If something were to happen to you during our lengthy separation, odds were good I’d have imagined it in advance.

  And then I’d blame myself for it.

  If my worried thoughts could anticipate your death, my grief could bring you back. Is that too huge a leap in logic?

  There’s power in grief, in the sincerity of tears. After your passing, I continued to hug a shirt-covered pillow at night, weeping over the stiff-ironed fabric and softening it. Your cologne continued to fade from the cloth, but some slight residue of your presence stayed with me. I added more articles o
f clothing: undershirt, pants, socks, arranged on your side of the bed as if ready for you to fill them. In my happier night-time moods, I could stretch out my hand and pretend to touch you.

  In darker moods, my hand in the dark felt an abandoned pile of clothing, and it was like the swell of a grave mound.

  Each night, I would lie beside your grave, one arm forlorn over the pile of dirt. I listened for the sound of your fingertips against coffin fabric, the tearing of puffed silk, the scratch of nails against wood. Beneath the bed as I slept, your stiff hands would cup and dig through packed soil. You scratched at coffin and bedframe, earth and mattress alike.

  The mound of clothing rose like a filled stomach. A gasp of rotten breath clouded the air where you used to sleep.

  *

  A terrible wish, certainly, but not without its share of beauty. Who could blame a wish born of love and grief?

  There’s a similar theme in some favorite tale from your childhood: a prince’s kiss breathing life back into a glass-coffined beauty; a clay golem roused by loving touch or ritualistic words of cabbala; a parent’s wish over a magical fragment of taxidermy, summoning a lost child’s return. Such tales are common across different time periods and cultures.

  I don’t know which of these tales, specifically, caught your fancy as a child. I didn’t know you then, obviously.

  Mostly I know about our five years together—from my perspective, and what I assume about yours.

  I hoped that would be enough.

  *

  Now I’d like to tell the story of my own death, if it were to happen before my work with you has finished:

  Outside the apartment door, my supervisor from Fidelity Life says, “No, Jay hasn’t checked in for at least a week. Some of his accounts need updating. He’s never let things slide before.”

  Knocking on the door.

  “See? No answer. His Saturn’s out front, so he should be home.”

  More banging on the door. Hello. Hello?

  “I’m not authorized to—” Mrs. McKenzie from across the hall. He cuts her off.

  “Well who is? Get the landlord here. Or the police.”

  Numbers punched into a cell phone.

  “And that awful smell—like a dead animal. How could you not notice?”

  “Been like that for a while,” she says. “Jay told me not to worry about it.”

  The doorknob rattles. Pick one of these: A credit card slips into the door frame. A shoulder slams into wood. A flying kick. The landlord arrives without ceremony. Mrs. McKenzie remembers she has a spare key. The door is already unlocked.

  They step inside and immediately know something is wrong. The smell of death overpowers them. Mrs. McKenzie covers her mouth and kneels, says “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  In the living room, light filters through squinted slats of the mini-blinds. I’m stretched out on the sofa, eyes shut and dried spittle at the corners of my mouth. My pallor is deadly gray. I’ve soiled myself. An empty prescription bottle lies overturned on the coffee table.

  They can’t know, but the guilt has finally overwhelmed me. I wished for something I hadn’t a right to, invented my own prayers and rituals until they worked a kind of magic. The result wasn’t what I expected.

  They step past me into the kitchen. Hello? And suddenly my supervisor, who I never thought liked me, yells my name and rushes forward to where I’m curled up on the floor. My face is contorted in agony, hand clawing over a stilled heart. “Oh, how sad,” Mrs. McKenzie says. “How terribly sad. You know, his partner died not too long ago, when— “

  “Nothing here,” my supervisor says. He heads into the hallway. My feet dangle a few inches above an overturned chair. A thin rope is tied around an exposed support beam in the ceiling. My face is purple, and my tongue has swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Mrs. McKenzie insists this time she is really going to be sick. My boss pushes me in the chest, making me swing back and forth. When I’m at my furthest arc, he ducks under me and continues down the hall.

  He steps into the open bathroom. The shower curtain is pulled aside revealing my nude body in the tub. Most of the water and blood has dripped past the imperfect rubber stopper, but a long rust-colored spray falls from my wrist down the outside of the tub to the stained bathmat.

  “Don’t come in here,” my supervisor warns, but Mrs. McKenzie is already peering over his shoulder, preparing a scream.

  Whichever of these scenarios, they all end the same. My former supervisor points out that “The smell isn’t the worst here” (meaning in the living room, the kitchen, the hallway or bathroom). “The worst is coming from behind that door.”

  The closed door to our bedroom.

  He lays his palm flat against it, as if the inanimate piece of wood could have a heartbeat at its center. He takes a steadying breath, twists the knob then throws the door open.

  You are quicker. Many things I’d taught you—about our casual calm moments, the thoughtless patterns of our life together. This is what it means to be human, I said. This is what it means to be in love. So much was missing, still: the years before we’d met, countless hours you spent without me at work, with your own family, on an evening walk alone. Any thought you had and didn’t voice, or I misunderstood—I had no way to fill these in. I could only share my idea of you: wonderful and loved, yes, but incomplete.

  Some things I was afraid to share. That awful month last year that almost broke us up. Trivial arguments over money or household chores, my list of tics or habits that annoyed you.

  Anything about death: what it means, how it happens, why it’s designed to be permanent.

  So, you’re angry about these gaps in your knowledge. You’re bored and frustrated at having been brought back to an incomplete life. And I’ve abandoned you.

  You know nothing about the desires of the revived dead, those shambling hungry creatures from books and movies. But some instinct kicks in: a hatred of these fresh bodies of blood and breath and consciousness.

  Your fingernails have continued to grow, and your teeth haven’t rotted as much as the rest of you. My former supervisor from Fidelity Life doesn’t have a chance to react: you lash out, palming each side of his face, and one thumbnail presses into his left eye socket. He wriggles and turns his head away, exposing his neck, and although you can’t see the blood that thumps and rushes beneath his jugular you find it anyway, your teeth gnashing and twisting at healthy skin that makes you jealous even as you shred and chew it.

  He fights back, but you are strong and I never taught you to feel pain. He grows weak from loss of blood, and slumps to the ground.

  You have finally learned about death.

  Mrs. McKenzie is sick and half-frozen with surprise, but she finally breaks her stupor and turns to run. Perhaps she bumps into my hanging body, or trips over the chair in the hallway. You go after her.

  I also hadn’t told you that the revived dead are supposed to walk slowly. You might be quick enough to catch her.

  *

  You understand my dilemma?

  I’m so happy you’re here. It’s what I prayed for. But when you first dug your way back to me, I’m sorry I wasn’t as grateful as I should have been. I mentioned that long ago situation with Maddie and her sick cat—when I insisted that recognition would begin with the eyes. I looked into yours, and couldn’t find you.

  Well, I guess it was like bringing a trauma victim home from the hospital. There would be a lot of work before you’d be back to your old self. I led you by the hand around the apartment, re-introducing you to the world.

  —This is a couch. We can sit on it together.

  —Here is a glass of water. Hold it to your mouth, like this, then pour it over your lips. Oh, hold on. Let me get a towel.

  —Another shirt, much nicer than the one you’ve been wearing. Your arms go in the sleeves. No, take the old one off first. I’ll help you.

  —This photograph shows the two of us together. Yes, that one’s you. I know you don’t quite l
ook the same anymore.

  You were definitely listening to me. I saw a kind of inquisitiveness there, and some frustration, too. I sensed that you trusted me.

  But, forgive me, you still seemed like an empty shell. How could I fill you with enough memories? I told you about us, put our lives into words to help you remember yourself. I wasn’t sure it was possible, but I was determined to keep trying.

  *

  You sense it, don’t you? That it’s not working fast enough.

  Time passes. I have responsibilities at work, even with my flexible hours at Fidelity Life. I’ve got to find new clients: train them all to worry about horrible, unforeseen calamities.

  I can’t spend every waking minute with you—though each minute is a gift. It really is.

  I’ll admit you’re not the same. Your skin is rough and dry and gray. Your neck has bruised and rotted on one side, and I can see through to the collarbone. I don’t nuzzle so close against you anymore, because I’m afraid I’ll hurt you. It’s not the smell—even though it’s gotten worse, I’ve grown used to it. Mrs. McKenzie has started to complain, but I don’t mind. Who cares about her, anyway?

  Sit with me again on the couch. What shall I tell you about? How about this. Last year on my birthday, I thought the steakhouse dinner would count as my present. I certainly didn’t expect anything more. As it turned out, that small envelope wasn’t just for a card, but also contained plane tickets to New York for both of us. You’d made hotel reservations, too, and planned what tours and shows we would see. I’ve got pictures from the trip. I’ll get them in a minute.

  They’ll help you see what we had together. What we could have again.

  Yeah, I guess I am crying a bit. But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m happy you’re here.