The archangel’s glow was cool against the blood orange sky, and after a bruising meal of un-tenderized cube steak, the homesteader took his least worrying convictions to bed. He could not defenestrate his abandonment of the observation post so easily, yet was only resolved to meditate on his action and not sleep.
The wind picked up and the power went down in a gale. Eva’s tap came without interruption, and directly she was away from the bedroom’s windowpane and at his footboard. Too brief an interval passed for her to circle the house and enter through the front door, so it was presumed she osmosed into the dreary room, as would a draft penetrating clapboards of a ramshackle dwelling.
He could not fathom his transition out of, what surely had been, more discomposing slumber. Nor could he say why he felt more separated the couple on this her second midnight visit. Maybe he read too much into it, since he could not reasonably expect a wife of another man to rush into his house and enfold him, as would a mother rushing to a bedside to ease a child from his blenching dream. His difficulty notwithstanding, every treasured feature of her face was soon restored and all was set to right.
From the window of her car, Liam thought the welkin uncommonly uniformed in its Payne’s grey shade; few stars were counted to pierce it. Whatever celestial features should impress themselves on his eye, coming out of so pitiless a void, must be nonpareil in their terror and scale to survive these distances. What one saw of the heavens were only its most fierce, tenacious monsters.
The somber buildings of Wavery Bean expected them, yet were little nuanced under a climbing gibbous moon. Their sheared shadows dragged through the bright inviscid calm like Charon’s drooping oars.
It should not have surprised the captive that his captor once more gravitated to the theatre and its late night rehearsal. He resisted the idea, and gave a semblance of whispery protest. “What else can be seen here?”
The fellow stowaway’s finger rose to hush him, pointing his sights to the stage where men again tussled with cords. All was as it was before, except the furniture in the Edwardian room had changed: It was no longer a parlor but a bedroom.
As with their previous intrusion, a commotion initiated the shadow play, though it deviated from its earlier script. The blackish box opened to reveal not a single silhouette but a composite. With two disparate aspects, a diabolical choreography commenced. Momentarily the form resembled two halves of a dissected toad hopping independently of one another, but these two halves were lovers. Their outlines, not by accident, overlapped with the four poster bed in the foreground. It was easy to imagine that their activity was in front of the scrim curtain and not behind it. This impression was so strong that Liam was shortly convinced of its fact, but he could not understand how the black bodies were being projected, like holograms, into the furnished room. He kept glancing to the darker corners of the translucent drape awaiting its arrival; and surely it came…
This time the towering automaton did not move with difficulty, but with stealth. It carried a bludgeon as it approached the energetic lovers, and moved much like a roach or spider crawling beneath the wall of a house. Its smooth sideways motion placed it at the foot of the bed, whereupon a perverse Punch and Judy puppet show began.
The nightmarish outline wailed away on its hapless victims. The first strike of its club rang comically like a bell, although this sound, as was again the case, emanated from an offstage Foley. The second blow succeeded in interrupting the lovers’ dynamic, and the third separated their bodies. With the assignation ended, the attacker did not relent. It began whacking with greater desperation. The lovers flailed and bleated as each violent blow whipped up the ends of the scrim curtain like paper flames. The motion of the strikes became increasingly fluid, grizzly, and animalistic. The aggressor was no longer a machine but a hellish fiend resonating with the music of its destruction.
The spectator winced—first at the noise and then at the brutality. The cloaked automaton did not cease its action until every element in the corresponding automatons was reduced to irreducibility. Oily residue sprayed over the partial concealment of the curtain, and the alizarin color matched the velour of the grand drape.
Liam looked to his companion, who had not flinched. “What is this?” he blurted with disapproval.
Eva did not respond.
During his averted gaze, the trapdoor opened. All the pieces of the macabre story fell through the hole, as if falling onto a bed of downy feathers. This ending—more a comma than an exclamation point—was accomplished with unnatural quietness. Were it not for the dripping red stains on the curtain, and the ringing in his ears, Liam might have questioned whether the preceding event he witnessed took place.
The habitual trespassers fled out the lobby doors ahead of the dimming footlights, and found the street as vacant as the theatre they left behind.
The faithless wife drove her accomplice again to the dam, and though he perceived no hazard in returning here, greater apprehension was sensed on Eva’s part. Perhaps she wished to avoid a pattern, and any increased likelihood they should be discovered. Still, she parked in the same relative place, though the moon’s light was more compromising than it had been with their earlier visit.
What they saw at the theatre was jarring, and this dampened any expectation of small talk, which before crowded their company at the reservoir. The dashboard radio was used to chase away the dreadful single-mindedness of the quiet, leading Eva to announce, coyly, on opening her door, “I’m cold.”
The suitor puzzled at the lack of prelude, and watched his paramour step to the rear of the car and crawl into its backseat. The distracting music set no mood, and might well attract more attention than mask whatever she wished to keep hidden. He too got out of the car, and peeked cautiously at the embankment and chain-linked perimeter fence before coming on the passenger door.
Down to her camisole and skirt, the lunar reflectivity revealed no blemish on Eva’s skin through the back window. (The wavelength of light conceivably filtered out tints of discoloration.) If she intended him to swoon over her submission, he instead lodged an objection by inserting his shadow between the moon and her injuries. The imposition of a dark curtain lent gravity to his words. “What did we see at the theatre?”
The beautiful woman’s shoulders were aligned with the contours in the roof upholstery, where she may have envisioned empyrean stars. Her eyes, however, reproduced the true hollowness of the automobile’s interior: No soul clouded a middle distance in them. They merely presented brown tumors hanging on a fragrant screen.
Given the crematoria aspect of the open car, Liam thought his lover passingly androgynous, with her body being no more inviting than a field cot. Indeed, she resembled a corpse of kaolin on the narrow cushion. An oppressive weight leveled her breasts, even as it sharpened protruding bones elsewhere.
Compulsion had him stroking her ankle like a bell pull where he hesitated pressing a desire, but another mental impediment entered his mind:
One of her high heels was missing.
He glanced around the door for it, but Eva supervened by lifting her bare foot to clip his belt buckle. The supple offering was covered in the gauzy mesh of a nylon sock, and was not unlike a spider’s nest that a child steps into unwittingly. The apprehensive lover stared lengthwise down the plank, and straddled it.
The couple’s combined mass sank into the fake vinyl leather, yet failed to create the desired locus. The man’s head became a muscle; and the will inside it, a bullying child. He clawed at her querulously, thinking the moon had burned away both his dilemma and her bruises. Their embrace would only appear scintillating to an onlooker, since the point in it was quickly lost. Liam tried to picture their bodies entwined on his aunt’s roomy bed, and with half the hope that a rickety roof would collapse on top of them and dispense with second and third acts.
The inamorato wished to interrupt biology’s deterministic program, to allow for a switch to reset in his brain. Love was a word that came to him: a button of a certain size and shape that, when pushed, would push through. He could not think what words should fall in place afterwards like necessary cogs and gears:
This was the love of an amnesiac who strays into familiarity, and somewhere beneath the half-unbuttoned camisole and array of elastic bands that tied her off on both ends, an erotic impulse flirted with the sundry; and what was intended to jar loose animal memory became, through no willful plan, a proverbial whole lost in the sum of its parts: inguinal wrinkle, femur dimple, pubic wrinkle, abdominal crease, mammary crease, median lumbar dimple, lateral lumbar dimple, gluteus crease, welt, blister, vaccination scar…
A Stygian shape dipped over the rear window, but it was only a cloud of unusual ambition overtaking the moon. The visible part of her disappeared further into its umbra, though her wet mouth served as a placeholder for her general idea. Liam’s heart gushed with a degree of authenticity rarely achieved when his conscious mind deliberated. These were unbridled feelings well known to his sleep.
Eva reached behind her neck to undo the clasp of the lavaliere, dispelling his doubt. The chain dropped over the placket of his shirtsleeve. She kissed him again, and this time the cooling wax stamp cemented fate. It tasted of tears, which spoke of contrition. He swallowed them like communion wine, and as if he took consecrated blood into what he had never known before that moment to be a vessel. The legal aspect of these transferences was to codify, intellectually, where emotion rushed ahead to lead. The necklace dropped between their bodies to the floorboard, along with any circumlocution. Her breathing became his answer, and was at first a steady brook at his throat before, measuredly, becoming thicker blood trickling over thundering water.
Liam surrendered whatever plan had been forming and settled, insouciantly, on Eva’s albumen cheek. He pictured their feet hanging comically out the open car door, yet these undefended extremities did not present themselves properly to his mind. They bore strange resemblance to flat irons, or black body protozoan. Firing synapses directed dispatches at them, but these bursts sounded as crinkled paper, or as unspectacular insects making nests in his clairaudient ears.
With emphasis, he dragged a clump of fingers over his damp forehead and saw Eva, bizarrely, returned to the front seat. Her exhalation had pushed out the door, over the high grass and boundary wall, and compelled every care to run ahead of her.
At the moment the ignition key clicked, the passenger had resumed the front seat beside her. He did not understand what transpired between them since principle articles of clothing were never removed. Like the worst kind of lover, he must have fallen asleep—by the midpoint of their return journey, he was convinced of it.
An occasional peek over his shoulder was hazarded, perchance to spot Eva’s missing shoe or necklace in the rear floorboard, or other evidence of their tumble. This much was obvious: The driver presently wore one heel, pressed resolutely to the accelerator where before two heels, in tandem, greeted him at his bedside. At no point prior to their theatre visit did Liam recall Eva limping or mentioning a difficulty. No—the shoe must be in the car, or lost in the mud at the reservoir, even if its bearer cared little for the inconvenience of losing it.
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