See You in Paradise (18 page)

“Lurene,” he said. “You cut yourself this morning. With the knife. And it … left something. In the bedroom.”

Now, at last, a look of annoyance crossed her face. And perhaps a tiny spark of fear. She held up her hand and unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse.

“Look,” she said. “Nothing. No cut.”

“There was blood in there.”

She scowled.

“And the other thing,” he said.

“The knife?”

“No.”

She stared at him with can-do intensity, like a fighter pilot.

“Okay, ya lunk,” she finally gushed, slapping his chest with a fine ivory hand. “You need a shower anyway. Come to think of it, so do I. I’ll go in there and clean up whatever mess I left and I’ll meet you in the bathroom, whaddya say?”

He swallowed, nodded.

She spun and marched off. Carl remained in the kitchen, standing, listening. Her hard-soled office pumps clomped the length of the hallway, passed onto the carpet of the bedroom, and then stopped. He bent over, straining to hear. Would she scream? Would she run out?

She wouldn’t. She didn’t. She was absolutely quiet, for at least a minute. Carl continued to sweat. The wall clock thunked out the seconds.

And then, at last, her footsteps started again. Slowly now, gently, she took three, four, five steps, and again stopped. The silence this time was longer: two, three minutes. And then he heard the bedsprings creak, and a small, guttural yelp, and a ragged release of breath.

“Lurene?”

He moved to the entrance of the hallway, gazed down at the inch of bedroom he could make out through the distant, foreshortened door.

“Honey?”

A groan, movement on the bed. And then Lurene’s shoes touching the floor, one, then the other. A grunt, and footsteps. One, two, three, four. And on five, she appeared.

Her hand was wrapped around the wounded wrist. Blood seeped from underneath. Her shoulders were sloped, her back bent, her face a mask of misery. “Carl,” she said. “Find the bandages.” And she fell, gasping, to her knees.

Every morning for a week, she disappeared into the bedroom to get dressed and emerged cheery and full of life. Every morning she left the thing behind, with Carl, in the apartment. He managed to work with it there—he had to. Sometimes he heard it get up and move around. He had found, on the internet, the word:
wraith.
The ghost of a person still living. He didn’t know if that’s what it was, specifically; the proper nomenclature hardly seemed important. It was a handy nickname for something that he sure as hell was not going to call “Lurene.” The wraith. Sometimes he could swear it was standing in the hallway, waiting for him. But he never budged from the study except for a quick dash to the kitchen for food, or the bathroom. He did not attempt to talk to it. He tried to be quiet, so as not to bother it.

When Lurene came home from work each day, she would draw him into the bathroom, into the shower, and make love to him there. Never before had she taken the initiative in an act that, under ordinary circumstances, she lacked the reserves of joy even to contemplate; he had always demanded (well—requested, really), she had always submitted. Now, though, he found himself shocked and embarrassed, embarrassed by her ardent desire, by his sudden, livid physical response. Her body was so light, so unencumbered by its own corporeality; every motion was effortless and perfect. And then, even before his lust had managed to leave him, she would go—leave the shower, dry off in silence, and return to the wraith. She could feel its need, she told him. She had to go to it, or it would come to her.

One afternoon it was waiting outside the bathroom door.

The next, it was inside the bathroom—behind the curtain when they pulled it aside.

The day after that they locked the door.

Over that weekend, and the next, Lurene stayed Lurene, and said nothing about the wraith, and so neither did Carl. But on Monday morning, he asked her, as she got up from the breakfast table, if he could see.

“See,” she repeated, as if she didn’t know what he meant.

“See it happen.”

Her frown deepened, her eyes narrowed.

“I want to know,” he said. “I want to know how it happens. How it comes out.”

For a moment he thought she would strike him, but what she did instead was begin to weep. “I don’t think I could,” she whispered. “I don’t think it would work. With you there.”

He stood, took her into his arms. He had not made love with his wife, his entire wife, since these strange days began. He missed her. The other one, the happy one—with her it was too easy. His love needed something heavy to hold it down. He said, “Don’t cry, don’t cry.”

“This can’t go on,” she said.

“It can. It can go on.” Though he knew she was right.

They stood in silence for a time, gripping each other so tightly they could barely breathe. Then she pushed him away, walked down the hall, and emerged a new woman.

That afternoon, around lunchtime, he was working on some text formatting, trying to convince a client she didn’t want blinking letters with sparks shooting off them, when he heard the wraith get out of bed. Its feet thudded on the floor, and he heard them dragging dryly across the room, like a pair of sandbags.

He had grown used to its wanderings, and he tried to ignore it. But after a moment, the footsteps continued into the hallway and down it, to stop right outside his door. His fingers paused over the keyboard, and he held his breath. The door wasn’t locked. The wraith had never seemed to show much interest in him without Lurene around.

“Hello?” he squeaked.

The door flew open and crashed into the wall behind it, deepening the depression the knob had dug over years. The wraith was staring at him, its eyes blacker and deeper than ever, and as lifeless.

He jumped out of his seat. “Uhh …” he said.

It took three long steps toward him and grabbed his shirt in its long gray fingers. It was right there, right up in his face, holding him close. He was not frightened, not yet, but he understood that he was helpless. The wraith had a smell, not a bad smell, like that of wet stones drying in hot sun. A bit of ozone, a bit of rot.

“What … what is it?” he managed.

The wraith pulled his shirt open, and the buttons clattered on the floor. It—she—pushed it over his shoulders and down his arms and tossed it back over her head. She was very, very strong. She reached for his belt.

“Whoa, whoa!” he said, and she stopped. She did not back off. She stared at him. He gulped air. And then took the rest of his own clothes off, without her help.

The wraith pushed him into the bedroom and onto the bed, then settled itself over him like a landslide. Its skin was neither rough nor cold, though it wasn’t as warm as living flesh, and certainly wasn’t as soft as Lurene’s. It had the consistency of scar tissue, rough but yielding. It felt unbreakable. It felt like it would survive for eternity.

And it turned him on! That was certainly a surprise. He touched hips, belly, breasts, and felt as breathlessly eager, as hungry, as lustful, as he had ever felt in his life. He marveled at himself, his breath catching in his throat. How was it possible? But it was. The wraith knew precisely what to do with him, and did it without hesitation. It moved over him, shifting its tremendous weight, sending shocks of pleasure through him. It could kill him in an instant, that was the crazy thing. It could crush him, but instead of feeling afraid, he felt safe. Protected by it. Gentled. Unlike with his flesh wife, he used no condom. It hurt to penetrate and it hurt when he came.

Its eyes remained open, its lips pressed shut, until it was through. Then it heaved itself up off him and flopped over, facedown on its pillow.

It took a while before Carl realized the whole thing was over. When his heart stopped racing, he picked himself up and tiptoed back to the office. He put his clothes back on, realized he couldn’t button his shirt, then threw it in the trash. He had to walk past the wraith again to get a new one, but it didn’t budge. Somehow he managed to return to work.

When Lurene got home, they did it in the shower again, and the wraith didn’t bother them. He could barely keep it up. And when afterward Lurene emerged from the bedroom, fully herself, she gave him a look. But she didn’t pursue it. Whatever had happened, she didn’t want to know.

And so it continued for several weeks, became routine, and he amazed himself at what depths of depravity it was possible to grow accustomed to. The warrantless wiretapping continued, the vice president shot some guy in the face, and Carl got himself off daily with his giggling fake wife and a lumbering clay monster. The new normal! His work increased to full productivity, and the fissure that these strange events had wrenched open simply filled itself in and smoothed itself over. He began to wonder if this was his fate, to be married to a pair of horny half-women, and he decided that there were worse ways to live out one’s days.

But then one morning Lurene came out of the bedroom disheveled, stooped, and utterly whole. He gaped. He didn’t have to ask, but he asked.

“What happened?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Well—can’t you—did you try again?”

A sharp look. “Yes I tried again, you prick!”

He winced, sunk a bit into his chair. “I’m sorry!”

She looked around the room, as if for some obvious solution she had failed to notice. “Fuck,” she said, and pulled on her coat and hat.

“You’re just going to go in to work?” he asked.

“Do you have some better idea?”

He shook his head no.

He spent the entire day in a state of mild anxiety, unaccustomed as he had become to being alone in the apartment. Several times he peeked in the bedroom to see if she’d been mistaken, if the wraith was there. But nothing lay on the bed. His palms sweated and he had to change his shirt often. He did things wrong, then did them wrong again.

He slept on it, figuring it would all make sense in the morning. But it was the same the next day, and the next, and all the rest of that week. And then one night Lurene stumbled from the bathroom wearing an expression of horrified epiphany.

“I know why I can’t do it,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

Unthinkingly, he added himself to the crowded ranks of men who responded to those words by saying “That’s impossible.” To which Lurene did not lower herself to reply.

He tried again. “We were protected.”

She shrugged, lowering herself onto the sofa beside him. They sat in silence, waiting for this new information to settle itself. The television seemed very loud. Carl turned it off.

“Carl,” she said.

He turned to her.

“You fucked it. Didn’t you.”

He looked at her with what must have been an expression of utter forlornness, and he realized what a weakling he was, that he had no volition, he could only do what he was told, he habitually ignored the world’s ills because he couldn’t abide them, and he had capitulated to her misery, not because it was right, but because it freed him from his own. And then he proved it to himself by saying, “It forced me to. I couldn’t stop it.”

Her slap was not unexpected, nor was it undeserved. But it was unprecedented. It turned his head with a sound like a splintering plank, and though it didn’t hurt, not much, it had all the force behind it of a ton of stone.