The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (5 page)

I find it hard to fall asleep. I do everything within my power to stave off the hour that I must finally go to bed, and when I do, I throw myself into bed in the most uncomfortable positions, my legs hanging over the edge, a bunched-up pile of duvet or a small throw pillow distractingly placed under my side or the small of my back.

The bed is permanently unmade, the kitchen uncleaned. I call in sick with more and more frequency, and then spend the day in my sleepwear watching daytime television when before I did not watch television at all.

The only time I feel like myself is while in the garage, wearing my magnifying goggles, the soldering iron in my hand, or my miter shears, or when using the diamond tip carving burrs I bought only a few days ago. I think of her in these moments, or if not of her directly, of what I’m doing for her, for us, and it’s almost as if she is standing right next to me, watching me as I build.

In my imagination, my wife is training. For survival, for success.

In my imagination, she is strong, much stronger than before. She has taut arms and a strong back and thick legs. Her feet are tough, her hands gloved in calluses.

Since my wife’s accident, I have found more than the normal amount of dead flies in the house—on the windowsills, on the kitchen table, floating in the toilet water. Under the magnifying glass—borrowed from my office—most of the flies look to be stabbed through, a small sliver of wood running through an abdomen or an eye. One of them looked caught, tortured, its legs removed, wings twisted back. At normal size, my wife was never this cruel. Her need for survival, I believe, has made her so, and in a way I am proud, am glad that she survives. She is a woman who, before, could not open jelly jars, who was afraid of dogs and open closets and mice and insects. I am not unconcerned, however, that if I do not find a means of reversal soon, she will be lost—to civilization, to me.

Before she had been reduced to the size of a coffee mug—in fact, ever since we have known each other—my wife had been the kind of person to leave notes. Notes of thanks, notes of displeasure. Small reminders of things to be done, gentle and not so gentle reprimands. One night, shortly after we were married and living together for the first time, and after I had gone to bed for the night, she placed a plastic grocery bag full of dirty dishes next to my side of the bed. These were dishes I had used but hadn’t yet washed and put away. They were a day old, or no more than two days old at the most. After I woke the next morning and stepped on the bag of dishes and twisted my ankle on them and nearly fell over because of them, I picked up the bag and found affixed to it a small yellow Post-it note on which she had simply written
Yours
.

Often her notes began
Please remember to
, or
Don’t forget we need
, or
Did you remember that
. But just as often she dispensed with even these pleasantries and left me notes that read
Laundry
or
Dishes
or
Your shoes on the floor
or
The hairs you left on the bathroom sink
.

Even now, even at the size of a coffee cup, she leaves me notes, though lately I do not understand them, or cannot read them, even with the assistance of one of my many very strong, very good magnifying glasses. Nor do I know where she has found the paper or the pencil with which to write these notes. I find them in surprising, implausible places. Affixed to the bathroom mirror, which seems much too high for her to reach. Mixed in with the little pieces of lint and detritus in my pants pocket or the inside breast pocket of my jacket. At the bottom of my cereal bowl. Stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet.

At first these notes offered some form of communication between us, though there seemed to be only so much for her to say.
Please hurry. I miss you, too. At night I am cold. The ants rarely bother me, but I cannot abide the flies.
But the longer she remains in her miniaturized condition, the less intelligible these notes are. I found one just the other day that read
Puppies make the best mayonnaise
. And another that read
Flies on the living room windowsill
. A third that read
The life you promised me
. I have found some notes that do not contain words at all, but merely doodles or scribblings or diagrams. She will draw on them at times, but, as she is not a very accomplished artist, these drawings do little to move me.

Rarely do I know what to make of these notes. For a while, I thought to keep them, though I couldn’t say why or to what purpose. As a needless reminder of this somewhat rocky moment in our marriage? Now, as I find them, I collect them in a small envelope I keep in my back pocket, and at the end of the day, as I undress for bed, I empty the envelope’s contents into the trash, and the next morning, I start all over again.

The house took me nearly two months to complete, much longer than I had expected, but having completed the house, having added the bed and the rest of the furniture, having finished painting the rooms inside and out, I opened it up to her yesterday, only to wait to see what she would make of it.

Already, less than a day later, there are signs of life inside it.

The bed is unmade and there is a mess in one of the living rooms—pillows on the floor, a lamp left on, signs of domesticity, of being lived in. I can’t see very well because I am only looking through the windows. I’m afraid to open the house up. If I unhinge the house and pull it apart, I run the risk of catching my wife and splitting her in two. Regardless, there are signs of life, of living. Soon, I should be able to devise a way to return her to normal.

But then again—it is such a nice house. Much nicer than our normal-sized one. Is it possible that she and I could be happy there together? Once a week, I could return to normal size and buy groceries, run errands, make our lives comfortable. I could even continue working—shrinking myself every night after coming home. I could sleep with my wife then. We could be together. Though it goes against my sense of ethics, true, it is so much simpler a solution.

And I have so far tried just about every known process for deminiaturization that I can think of. I have brought home engorgement and enlargement solutions, a number of which I developed myself and know for certain to be foolproof; I’ve made her spend four hours inside the Magnifying Chamber, a rather small device itself, small enough, anyway, to slip into my pocket before I left the office for home, breaking, again, any number of laws and office policies; and, as a last resort, I carried her out of the house and drove her to the remote piece of badlands owned by the company and there, uncertain as to whether she would even survive, I pushed her through the Fibonacci Tunnel.

Nothing has worked.

I’ll leave my wife a note explaining my idea to her. If we discuss it, I’m sure she’ll see the benefits. I’m sure she’ll see that this might in fact be the best thing for us.

For a moment, for one single moment, a long but single moment, I harbored a fantasy of what life might be like, what our life together might be like, if I were unable to restore my wife to her original size. If we were to live together in the dollhouse I built for her, which is, as I’ve said before, a very nice house, a much nicer house. Then I spoke that fantasy out loud, and then the fantasy was ruined.

What I mean to say is: This ordeal has taken its toll on all of us.

Today, I had to fire one of my employees, Richard Paul Wear. He was not the best man—as his actions proved—but he was a very good miniaturist; he was ambitious.

And though his actions are unpardonable, I cannot blame him entirely. I should have known that miniaturizing a phone for my wife would lead to, if not this exactly, something similar. But I was concerned. I had had no word from my wife since I finished the project, and after the first two days, I saw no more signs of life in the house. The bed was made; the rooms were neat and untouched. I left her notes, but they went unanswered. She had stopped leaving me notes long before all of this. My questions about miniaturizing myself were ignored. I called for her, softly so as not to damage her shrunken ears, but my voice did nothing but agitate the bird. The truth is, I sorely missed my wife. The construction of the dollhouse, as it was for her, helped me manage through her absence, and there were little signs of her presence around the house—the flies, the dulled razors, the notes, the torn buttons—and though annoyances, they proved to me that she was still around. Since the completion of the house, I have heard nothing.

Therefore, I bought a cordless phone and miniaturized it. (The depths to which I have sunk!)

I wasn’t sure if the signal would work for such a small phone, nor did I have a means of testing the equipment, but I figured there was nothing left to lose. With a pair of tweezers, I placed the tiny phone on the coffee table of the downstairs living room of the dollhouse, where my wife could easily find it. Three days passed without word from her. I called home once or twice a day. The phone must not have worked, I thought. Or she has left me—even if she had not yet left the house—or she was dead.

On the fourth day, I came back to my desk from a meeting and found a message on my phone. “Come home for lunch, dear. I’ve missed you so.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized just how much I had missed the sound of her voice, full and loud and loving. Why hadn’t I thought of the phone before? There was nothing small about her over the phone line. I did not hear the voice of my shrunken wife, but rather the voice of the woman I loved, the woman whose touch I missed. The sound of it brought tears to my eyes. I felt faint. I wanted to leave immediately, drive home, meet my wife, tell her how much I loved her. I grabbed my jacket and was about to leave when one of my technicians came in with a problem, an accident in the lab, which, in the end, took me until lunchtime to correct. As soon as I could, though, I sped home, my heart in my throat.