Crawling back into bed seemed an unproductive strategy, so the homesteader brewed a pot of coffee and waited on the sun and its clarifying agency.
He was no longer a young man, and could no longer relate to what that young man wanted, or would risk. Liam had fallen out of love with himself before everything else; and could only wince at the thought of his body going through its regrettable paces. Sexual desire was the virtue of youthful biology and its agenda. For all others, it was the sin of outliving a use. It was self-indulgent and masturbatory: a withering away, a hanging onto a pretense after that pretense was discovered and turned out.
Impetuousness, regardless, was not in his nature. Nor was it his practice to chase after unhappy wives. Reason reasonably trumped cinematic emotion—at least in the waking hours of an older, insensible man. Where one hesitates, age intervenes and one forgets the urgency. Too many questions by then have been answered in life; and one has come to understand the formality and vanity in answers. Still, Fate was a cosmology that acted through foolishness as readily as wisdom; though there was no telling which was the case when Liam thought about Eva.
The hapless suitor wondered how he should persuade her to quit her hopeless predicament at any rate. It was impossible to believe his rural existence held much attraction for her past novelty, which for youth was always ample excuse to toss away better judgment. Only desperation could cast his holiday funhouse as refuge from an abusive spouse. No woman of experience would walk willingly through a front door where a wounded child, and not a man, built a castle.
Liam made a long morning of it and went into town to visit the cat and check his postbox. This naturally put him in town near the municipal theatre, which in daylight was less ominous.
Due to the valance, nothing was seen of the fly loft or its complex rigging. The snoop had entered through unlocked doors, and impertinently climbed to the principle stage to investigate the mysterious scrim curtain. A gentleman stepped forward with suddenness from a border drape. Half-dressed in a tuxedo, he exclaimed, “Careful there! Careful where you step!”
Liam kept up his appearance of barging in with a pert question. “What’s the object concealed here?”
The fellow was either a thespian or, more likely, the master of ceremonies seen the night before. He strolled into the footlights with alacrity, cutting a striking figure. “What do you suppose it is?“ he asked, projecting his voice with a bigger audience in mind.
Given the different lighting, the scrim curtain was not so translucent as it was previously. Three corners of the rectangular object that had hatched the great calamity could nevertheless be traced, so it was proposed, “Whatever it is, its purpose is to sell tickets.”
“It serves more than that,” said the performer with a smattering of injury.
“Ah!” Liam made a simpleton’s show of it. “It’s a box for sawing a woman in half!”
This merited an interrogation. “What is your occupation, sir?”
“An artist. A painter.”
Throwing up a gloved hand, the receiver of this information waved his fingers through the profuse light and ruminated, “Where length and breadth are drape makers, they refer to only the precondition to our consciousness: Plane geometry. Yet where consciousness imposes a third dimension, a door has already been breached. Nay! Some horror preceded us through it, unspeakable in its violent birth! Every inch of space (we come to suspect) is willed into existence by the swiping claw of a predator; and where we stray into these wakes, and perceive only tranquility in rippling patterns of clouds, it is because atonement was paid for them.”
The buttonholed man was in no humor to brook riddles. He looked fretfully at his feet, where the scrim curtain swayed with consequence. The outline of a trapdoor was briefly uncovered, and its opening was of such impenetrable blackness that talk of third dimensions seemed unwarranted.
The showman did not resume what occupied him prior to this interruption but, with an expression that could not be separated from his acting, watched his disquieted intruder flee.
A gloom pervaded the windows in the tower that afternoon. David was not on premises when his replacement arrived, although a nonsensical Post-It was stuck to the door:
Went to hospital with a stomach complaint; the new hire drove me. ~David
The log contained no new entries since Liam’s departure the prior evening. David’s sack lunch sat in the refrigerator and, connoting greater treachery and duress, his antacid bottle sat on the desk.
The watchful observer shook off the somnolent allure of late afternoon. Figures seemingly stirred in the observation deck’s pendulous curtains, but these effects were attributable to the mischief of floor furnace vents. A cursory examination of the main office did not end his unease, and in returning to his post he confronted a situation identical to the one met the day before—
The door to his station had closed behind him and was stuck. Several shoves against it would not dislodge it.
With no headway made, the observer charged down the helical stairs. Sunset approached as a crucible, and in crossing ahead of it, something in his desertion was telegraphed. He hiked down a trail toward the boundary fence until the wind, forgotten in its suppression, fiercely returned. It rose from the thistle like a swatting hand, and sent him tracking the woodline further east until he came to another place to cross. Again the wind roared at him, this time stripping shadows from the trees and setting them on end like brigands in the low branches.
He withdrew from whatever scheme had been in his mind.
Liam peddled westward, catching the sunset’s final burst in his bicycle spokes like roman candles; these theatrics extended as far as Margaret’s apartment steps. Morgan was briefly viewed on his window perch, but night’s advancing shadow reclaimed the feline before the caretaker stepped over the threshold.
The landline telephone greeted him inhospitably. It chimed brashly on the kitchen countertop, and felt like it had been ringing for hours. The caretaker poked along the beveled cupboard doors and pulled out the bag of dry cat food, and wondered why the answering machine did not intercept the call.
After topping off the pet’s water bowl, a flashlight from the sink cabinet was used to probe under the stove. Morgan’s foam ball was spied and retrieved: Its color, should he swear to it, was green.
As with the stuck door, and frightful boundary woods, something told the caretaker no good would come from answering so persistent a telephone summons. He returned to the parking lot speedily where someone rushed him from a twilit hedgerow.
“Will you do a favor?” asked the desperate man.
The request pushed the cyclist against the bicycle rack.
A frantic gesture in his pants pocket produced a fistful of keys.
“Please,” the fellow pleaded, “I need someone to place this letter on the kitchen table, which is right inside that apartment doorway.”
“Me leave a letter on a table?” repeated Liam incredulously.
“I can’t go in there,” the man explained. “Not anymore. Everything in there that belongs to her—it burns my hands to touch any of it.”
Liam looked up to an unlit second floor window, which was in the same building as Margaret’s apartment; he resisted.
The neighbor droned prayerfully, to himself. “The worst sort of man lets time make decisions for him, and destroys years of another’s life with kindness where an honest man would have spared that life with a second of cruelty. The worst man lets time deal its slow cuts and blows on his behalf, and says and does nothing heroic to intervene. He sticks around dutifully, loyally, until time has cut free what, by then, has withered from neglect.”
Liam voiced his opposition feebly, “I don’t know…”
“It will take but a minute…”
The set-upon visitor judged it best not to argue with so tragic a figure, and accepted the offering of keys. The anguished tenant stepped aside to let him pass, sideswiping the same bush from which he murkily emerged.
“You’re bleeding,” noted his recruit.
The fellow did not look at his forearm. “On the table,” he repeated.
Liam nodded and climbed the exterior stairs, though wondered if the blood was from a genuine scratch or some murderous deed. No handwriting was on the front of the envelope, although its dimensions signified nothing more ominous than a commemorative card. Still—did a restraining order prevent the man from crossing this threshold?
These questions were left late to ponder; the deed doer’s hand was already on the doorknob. He looked down from the landing to see if his torment’s architect was watching, but the hedgerow had reabsorbed the man without a rustle.
Stepping into the dark dwelling, a grey tabletop was met. The envelope was laid on it, and Liam backed to the door. The sliver of a pale figure emerged in an interior doorway. The trespasser was prepared to call this shape a ghost until the person lifted his arm in cordiality; his arm reacted sympathetically. This “inhabitant” was only his own reflection in a full-length bedroom mirror. Liam perceived agony in this face that he did not perceive in himself, which contributed to his delayed recognition.
It was judged best to leave the keys in a planter beside the front door.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.