Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  “Yes, your sacrifice won’t go unappreciated.”

  “Why are you… ?”

  He lowered the camera. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m building the perfect woman with pieces of stolen beauty. She’ll come to life once it’s complete.”

  Chrissy stared at him, unable to speak.

  “I’ve stolen from here and there for months now, you see. But now I have a whole woman to myself, right here. I can finish all my work at once. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  No. No. He was serious, wasn’t he? And the worst part was…

  No.

  She believed him.

  Chrissy yanked harder and harder at her restraints, but the activity only shot more bolts of agony through her head.

  She passed out again.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  When Chrissy woke up, she was alone. Nighttime darkness filled the room. The stereo boomed away on the lower level. Her head pounded like she had the worst hangover in the world.

  Her skin felt numb in patches all over her body.

  Use your head this time, she told herself, and not as that jerk’s punching bag.

  S&M handcuffs. She remembered they were easy to escape. Yes.

  In a few minutes, Chrissy was sitting on the edge of the bed, massaging her chafed wrists. It was the only part of her body that felt normal. Her clothes were nowhere in sight.

  Oh God, I am so screwed.

  She stumbled down the spiral staircase. The world dipped and yawed.

  The stereo grew louder as she reached the ground level. Boom boom boom. It came from the living room where she’d jerked off Bellagamba. She heard him now: moaning, like he was having sex.

  She ran for the door.

  A naked woman jumped into her path.

  No—a cloud of a woman. Swirling, floating bits of photographs. Hollow. But the woman’s hand was certainly solid enough. She knocked Chrissy off her feet.

  Chrissy fell backward into the kitchen. She slammed against the stove and collapsed.

  The mosaic woman advanced, her eyes and lips moving in a parody of a real woman. Between the floating bits of pictures, Chrissy saw Bellagamba standing there, naked and pale.

  “Ladies, ladies,” he said. “Please don’t fight. There’s enough of me to go around.”

  Chrissy stood back up. Blood dripped from her broken nose over the numbed corner of her mouth. A blue flame hissed up from the stove. She must have hit the controls when she fell.

  A roll of paper towels stood nearby. She picked it up and held it over the flame. It ignited instantly.

  “Ugly bitch!”

  She threw the flaming towels at the mosaic woman.

  The roll caught in the center of the photograph cloud and hung there. The woman burst into flames.

  Her scream sounded like a swarm of bats.

  Bellagamba attempted to put it out with his hands. “No no no! Darling!”

  The flames caught on his arms and spread rapidly across his hairy body.

  Soon, the photographer and his creation were both shrieking pyres of flame.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Once she was satisfied they were dead, Chrissy put out the fire with an extinguisher she found in the darkroom. The smell of charred meat hung thick on the air.

  She examined herself in the bathroom mirror. Red welts covered perhaps three-quarters of her body. Her face was swelling into one big pustule. She could still cry, though.

  Nothing was left of the mosaic woman except for the picture of Raquel Domina’s right butt cheek. Chrissy also found the silver digital camera.

  Of course it was a picture of Raquel. The universe couldn’t pass up such an opportunity to be cruel.

  Chrissy compared the perfect contours of Raquel’s skin to her own ruined buttock. Bellagamba had photographed Chrissy’s left cheek while she was knocked out, and now it was nothing but a crater.

  Sobbing, Chrissy jammed the photograph against the wound. “I’ll help you rub it in, you bitch. Hope you enjoy it.”

  When she stopped, she noticed that the feeling had returned to that area.

  She looked at it—and gasped.

  She ran to the mirror to confirm.

  Her ass cheek had grown back. It looked a lot like Raquel’s.

  The photograph was now blank. Just a gray square.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “How did you know my stomach’s turning red?” Raquel Domina said over the phone. “You gave me something, didn’t you?”

  Chrissy relaxed into the folds of Bellagamba’s couch and tried to keep her voice steady. “Let’s just say I have something very interesting to show you. It should answer all your questions.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the apartment of the Desmond’s photographer.”

  “The Desmond’s photographer? Okay, give me the address. I’ll be right there.”

  After the call ended, Chrissy got dressed. She set up the silver digital camera on a tripod beside the waterbed. Then she searched the place until she found a baseball bat.

  Smiling, she took it downstairs to wait for Raquel.

  Muralistic

  The mural in the children’s play area of Augusta City Library normally featured what you would expect. A cartoonish cow stood in a field bordered by a split-rail fence. But today, a shadowy figure with wings walked on the horizon.

  “Huh,” Gerald said as he noticed the addition. He rubbed a hand across his stubbled cheeks, then looked down to his one-year-old son. Parker had pulled Thomas the Tank Engine off the shelf and was murmuring something about a fire truck. “What do you think of that, buddy? It looks like a pterodactyl.”

  “Fire truck,” Parker said, then abandoned the train for the toy kitchen in the corner. He ran with both hands up in the air and squealed with excitement. Beyond the play area, other children buzzed as they waited on couches or read picture books.

  A mother seated nearby said, “It looks like a what?”

  Gerald glanced at her tight-fitting tanktop before forcing himself to look up at her face. “A pterodactyl. You know. A dinosaur? But it doesn’t quite fit in with the cow. And it’s too small.”

  She leaned forward to glance at the wall. “That’s pretty cool.”

  Again, Gerald tore his eyes off her. He reached out to pull up the back of Parker’s shorts where they had fallen to expose his diaper. The mother didn’t notice Gerald’s attention, however—or if she did, she didn’t care—because her little girl was approaching the other adult in the room.

  He was a bearded black man who often sat here during the wait for Mother Goose Story Time. Like now, he always occupied the rocker beside the Lego table. He scowled at a laptop computer balanced on his knees. Gerald had never identified a corresponding child, but he never doubted that Laptop Man, as he thought of him, had one within the crowd of roaming toddlers. No one in their right mind would otherwise hang out here before nine o’clock on a weekday morning.

  “Tracy, honey,” the shapely mother said. “Don’t bother him.”

  Tracy had placed a hand on Laptop Man’s arm and was peeking at the computer screen. He stopped typing to look at her.

  “Tracy,” the mother said.

  But then the librarian interrupted, announcing Story Time was about to start. Gerald grabbed Parker’s hand and led him away. The mother and little Tracy walked directly in front of them. Gerald was careful to keep his gaze elsewhere.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Back home, Gerald told his wife about the mural. He finished with, “The woman next to me didn’t know what a pterodactyl was.”

  He must have betrayed something with his smile, because Eileen raised an eyebrow. “The woman ‘next to me’?”

  “Tracy’s mother, apparently.”

  Crossing her arms, Eileen leaned back in her chair. It was the high-backed executive chair she’d brought from Staunton Medical Center when she moved her office home. A two-thousand-dollar laser printer—another trophy from SMC—hummed behind her as it printed out a patient’
s file.

  When her other eyebrow raised, Gerald shifted uncomfortably where he stood. “What?”

  “You know what. I can tell from the look on your face what she is.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Young and attractive.”

  “Honey—all right, that might be so, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna cheat on you.”

  “‘Doesn’t mean I’m gonna cheat on you’… what? You left a word off the end of your sentence, Gerald.”

  He put his hands on his hips. “And what word is that? ‘Yet’? ‘Doesn’t mean I’m gonna cheat on you yet?’”

  “No. ‘Again.’”

  A beat passed in which he just stood there, staring at her. Down the hallway, Parker smashed something in his bedroom.

  What do I have to do? Gerald thought. It’s been over a year, and I still can’t live this down.

  Eileen turned back to her desk. “I have work to do.”

  He left her to it.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  After Parker went to bed, Gerald spent the evening alone in the master bedroom. He sat leaning against the headboard, reading a magazine about video games. The baby monitor, on the night stand, was up too loud. When Parker shifted in his crib, it sounded like thunder. But Gerald liked it that way so he wouldn’t feel alone.

  Eileen finally came to bed at about ten. She put on her nightgown, brushed her teeth, and climbed between the sheets without a word.

  “We need to talk,” Gerald said.

  She grunted and rolled away from him.

  “I want to make things better,” he said. “I was thinking, now that we’re both home and I’m taking care of Parker full time, maybe we should have another baby.”

  She rolled back to regard him. “You remember why I moved my office home?”

  “To keep an eye on me. So I don’t misbehave again.”

  “‘Misbehave.’ That’s not a serious enough word. Parker ‘misbehaves’ when he draws on the sofa with a ballpoint pen. What you did was an utter betrayal that stabbed my soul.”

  Gerald slapped his magazine down beside the baby monitor. “So why are you still with me?”

  She rolled away again. “That’s a good question.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The artist responsible for the pterodactyl had returned overnight to paint over the previous image. The figure was twice as large now, having flown halfway down the cartoon fence toward the camera.

  Gerald stared at this, but his mind was occupied. Why can’t she forgive me? And the answer was always, Why should I expect her to?

  Luckily, the mother with the magnificent body had taken little Tracy elsewhere today. Maybe to the pool, where mommy could sunbathe and…

  Stop thinking about it, moron.

  Laptop Man sat on his rocker in the corner as usual, scowling at his computer screen. The machine must have been giving him fits, because he was grumbling under his breath—something about “them” and “those messages.” Probably a spam virus.

  Parker stood at the Lego table, smashing two blocks together. “Broken, broken,” he chanted, sounding on the verge of crying. Gerald gently took the blocks from him and showed him how to fit them together.

  If only other things were as easy to fix.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  After feeding Parker and putting him down for his midday nap, Gerald pulled out the makings of bologna sandwiches for lunch. Eventually, Eileen emerged from her office and sat down in the breakfast nook. Her arms were crossed, and her eyebrows were bunched together. Gerald recognized that posture; he called it the “powder keg look.” He’d seen it all too often. It was best to tread lightly when the powder keg look was out, but that would make for a mightily uncomfortable meal.

  He braced himself. “How’s work today, honey?”

  “Just fine, honey.”

  He stopped in the process of slathering mayonnaise and took a deep breath. “Okay. What did I do now?”

  “Your computer. I’ve been looking through your browser history. I know what websites you’ve been visiting.”

  Gerald stared at her, a dozen excuses rising to his lips and falling away. There was no use denying it.

  “You know what hurts the most, Gerald? You promised you were through looking at them.”

  “I’ve only done that a few times.”

  “Oh?”

  “And it’s still not the same thing as an affair.”

  “How is it not?”

  “Because I don’t even know who those women are. It’s just entertainment.”

  Eileen stood up. She looked old and drawn. “I’m too angry to talk to you.” She began walking toward the stairs, back to her office. When Gerald opened his mouth, she held up a hand. “No. Just… tomorrow. Let’s talk tomorrow. We need to make some decisions about our marriage.”

  Her voice broke on the last word. She covered her mouth with one hand.

  Gerald watched her go until she left the room. A moment later, his knees buckled. He lay full length on the kitchen floor until he was sure he wasn’t going to be sick.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  They didn’t see each other again all day. Gerald passed her closed office door a couple times and heard her sobbing. When he knocked, she told him to go away.

  Parker woke up, and Gerald set him in front of the TV to watch his favorite Bob the Builder DVD. Then he took his computer out into the garage. It was the one Eileen gave him as a peace offering when they completed marriage counseling.

  He destroyed it with a sledgehammer.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  He slept on the couch that night but left the baby monitor in the bedroom with Eileen. It was only fair since he’d watched Parker all day. He wondered who would take care of their boy when they broke up. And how soon would that be?

  I wonder if I have an addiction, he asked himself as he tried to get comfortable on the old cushions. They still bore faint stains from Parker’s adventures with the ballpoint pen. Would she buy that?

  “It’s not my fault,” he whispered into the living room’s darkness. But the only thing that answered was the ticking of the grandfather clock.

  His thoughts drifted to the library mural as he fell asleep. He thought now the enlarged pterodactyl reminded him of a thunderbird from American Indian mythology. He’d read about thunderbirds in a video game’s documentation way back when. Some regarded them as a psychopomps—couriers of souls to the afterlife, like the Grim Reaper. Why would anyone paint that in a children’s play area?

  Odd that it would appear in the days preceding the explosion of the Gerald-and-Eileen powder keg. Or maybe not so odd.

  Thoughts of thunderbirds flitted through his mind until they flowered into a dream.

  Gerald was standing in the children’s play area at the library. The room was dark except for a spotlight illuminating the mural. A man was painting over the old pterodactyl image—and Gerald could see now that it was indeed a thunderbird. The thunderbird was partially in human form, a black shadow with feathered wings hanging off its outstretched arms.

  The painter wore a black suit over a black shirt with a black tie. Black fedora hat. Black sunglasses. Black skin. He used a black paint brush to slather black paint onto the wall.

  When he saw Gerald, the man turned to him. He removed his sunglasses to reveal black eyes with no whites. He smiled, showing black teeth.

  The thunderbird stepped out of the mural.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Wake up.”

  Gerald opened his eyes. For a moment, the person sitting at the foot of the couch was the thunderbird. He gasped.

  “Gerald?”

  He sat up, the afghan falling off him. Morning sunlight darkened the circles under Eileen’s eyes.

  “You didn’t sleep?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “Honey, it was just a website. That’s all.”

  Her fists bunched in her lap. “Don’t tell me it was just a website. Don’t tell m
e you’re not still looking at every woman who walks by. Don’t tell me you’re not still thinking about her.”

  “I haven’t talked to her in over a year. I’m still loyal to you.”

  She looked away. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “Yes. But you don’t want to be.”

  The words rose to his mouth, the ones he’d settled on last night: I have an addiction. It’s not my fault. They might give him a way out of this.

  Instead, he said, “You’re not being fair.”

  “Fair. Were you fair when you committed adultery?”

  “Were you fair when you snooped through my computer?”

  “I wouldn’t snoop if I trusted you.”

  He looked toward Parker’s room. Hopefully, their son would wake up, and they wouldn’t have to continue this conversation.

  “I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve tried hard.”

  “No, you haven’t. If you were trying, you wouldn’t still be visiting those websites.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. We used to visit them together, if you’ll recall.”

  “That’s not the point. You made a promise to me, and you broke it.” She got up and trudged into the bathroom. “Marriage is all about promises.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  There seemed nothing more to say.

  They ate breakfast in silence, except for talking to Parker. It was the most uncomfortable meal they’d had since the day she discovered his affair.

  After washing the dishes, Gerald loaded Parker’s diaper bag with extra items for the day: a water bottle, a Tupperware of Goldfish crackers, and his baseball cap for protection from the summer sun. But when he beckoned Parker to sit in his lap so he could put his sandals onto him, Eileen entered the room. She hadn’t unclenched her fists all morning.

  “Why don’t you leave him here?” she said. “I’ll watch him. You go on.”

  Gerald gaped. “Don’t you have to work?”

  “I’m taking the morning off. Go on.”

  He stared at her, noting how she glanced at the coat closet, where their suitcase was kept.

  He set Parker down. The boy immediately ran off to his room, hollering, “Fire truck! Fire truck!”

  Gerald stood up slowly. He wanted to ask if she’d be here when he got back. But he was afraid he already knew the answer.