See You in Paradise (17 page)

Then his eyes traveled to the counter where Lurene had fallen and saw the cutting board, covered with the rough husks of his breakfast. It was wrong somehow, and he stared at it. In the bedroom, Lurene emitted a high, pneumatic whine. A chill ran through him.

The paring knife was missing.

He gasped, dropped the receiver. It bounced against the wall, thudding hollowly as an old bone. He spun and lunged into the hallway.

She was there.

For a moment he thought it was someone else. She was standing straight, her shoulders thrown back, her head held high. She was buttoning her blouse back over her unblemished chest and neck. Her eyes were bright, and something was the matter with her face.

She was smiling.

“Lurene?”

“God,” she said, with a little laugh, “sorry about that!”

He stared. She shook her head and advanced toward him with a kiss. It made a soft hot smack against his cold lips.

“I have no idea what came over me,” she said. There were tears on her face, and she cheerfully wiped them off with a quick finger, as if they’d blown onto her from somewhere outside. “But I feel much better.”

She moved past him to the coatrack and shouldered on her heavy jacket.

“I thought …” he stammered.

“Me too!” She gawked at him for a long moment, then let out a mighty equine guffaw. “For a minute there, I wanted to die.”

“So you said.”

“I’m really sorry.” She pulled her woolen cap out of her pocket and popped it onto her head. Her hair pressed against her cheeks and five years dropped off her in an instant. “I scared you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” He slumped back into his seat.

“It was just, you know, everything, it just came down on me all of a sudden.” She had her purse now, her keys, her hand on the doorknob.

“I thought you took the knife.”

She blushed. Blushed! Lurene had never once blushed, as far as Carl could remember. She said, “I did,” and immediately clapped a prim hand over her mouth. Her fingers parted, her lips poked through, and she said it again. “I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. But something snapped, and I felt better.” She shrugged. “Gotta go. I’m sorry, sweetie.”

Sweetie?

She blew him a kiss (blew him a kiss?) and walked out the door. Her sprightly steps clicked on the stairs, and a minute later he watched out the window as she half-ran, half skipped across the street and down into the subway.

He sat for a short while in stunned silence, listening to the radiator clanking and drops of water leaking into the sink. Sweat poured down his face and into his collar and he tried to slow his breathing.

Carl worked at home. He maintained various websites. Some of the websites he maintained actually sold web hosting and design. His livelihood was entirely ephemeral, a direct-deposited paycheck wafted on a breeze of multilayered virtuality. Every day he wondered if he really, truly, was going to do it—was he actually going to sit down and work again? It just didn’t seem real. And then, every day, he went ahead and did it, and the money mysteriously arrived in his bank account. And often he spent it on imaginary things—music downloads, software. When occasionally some physical artifact of his labor arrived in the mail—a tax form, an invoice—it always gave him a jolt.

But today especially, this sense of unreality permeated the apartment. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he considered going back to bed and sleeping it off. Restarting the day in a different frame of mind. He sighed. The computer waited in the study for him to power it up, and the stain on his newspaper spread. Any moment now, he would get up and do something, anything, to break the spell. And then he heard the bedsprings creak.

He was still for a good thirty seconds. Then, idiotically, he said, “Lurene?”

Of course there was no response. The creak was not repeated. Nevertheless, he couldn’t resist saying her name a second time. More quietly now, more to himself than whatever phantom his imagination had inserted into the next room.

“Lurene?”

The nothing that resulted caused him to flush with embarrassment, and his sweating redoubled. He let out a low, quiet chuckle.

It was time to go to work. He would take a shower, get dressed, then call Lurene at her office to make sure she was all right. There—a plan. He was stirred out of his stupor. He got up and walked down the hall and had his tee shirt halfway up over his head before he even got to the bedroom. He stepped over the threshold, freed his ears from the collar, and tossed the shirt onto the bed, where it struck a naked woman in the back.

He screamed. The shirt slid onto the bunched bedclothes. The naked woman didn’t move.

She faced the opposite wall, her head in her hands. Beside her lay the paring knife, dark with blood, and blood stained the sheets it lay upon.

For a moment, as he recovered himself, he believed that it was her, that it was somehow Lurene. He knew her shape, the pattern of vertebrae, the curve of her neck and shoulders, and these were those. But as he steadied his breathing, as his eyes adjusted to the brackish light filtering through the curtains, he could see that this body wasn’t his wife’s. It was scarred, pitted, scraped. It was gray and battered as a sidewalk, and as lifeless. The back was striated, like a stone plucked from a glacial moraine, as if a lifetime of scratches and welts had never healed, never faded; and it did not rise and fall with the woman’s breaths. There were no breaths. Only his own, growing quieter in the room.

Nevertheless, when he spoke, it was to say, once again: “Lurene?”

It rose to its feet and turned.

The thing that faced him now was like a statue, a statue of his wife, cast in concrete and left to weather, forgotten, in some abandoned town square. It gave the impression of advanced age and great strength, and it stared at him through flat gray-black eyes that did not blink. It wasn’t Lurene, but looked like it was supposed to be.

“Who are you?” he managed to ask.

The thing looked at him. Its stillness was uncanny. It stood with its legs slightly parted, its torso twisted a quarter turn to face him. The wide face, the heavy breasts, the bony hips were flawless facsimiles of his wife’s, hewn from beaten old stone.

And now he recognized some of the marks—a deep cleft in the chin where Lurene had a barely noticeable scar. A long gouge that outlined the pelvis, where Lurene had shed a benign cyst. A gravelly rake across the thigh, faded to pink on the real Lurene, the result of a bicycle accident on their vacation in Europe three years before.

And finally, on the inside of the left wrist, a three-inch laceration, following a vein, that corresponded to no wound he had ever before seen.

Carl and the thing stared at one another for long minutes, his eyes ranging in horrified fascination all over this strange body, the thing’s eyes locked in place upon his own. It did not speak. It did not move—until, at last, it broke its gaze and sat down, in exactly the position of contemplative misery he had found it.

Shirtless, sweating more profusely than ever, he strode down the hall to the phone. He snatched up the receiver from where it dangled, tapped the hook until he got a dial tone, and called Lurene’s cell.

“Hi! I was just thinking about you.”

There was a lilt in her voice, a playful chirp.

“Uh …”

“I know I don’t tell you this often enough,” she whispered. “But I love you. I really do.”

“Thanks.”

She laughed. “’Thanks’? How romantic!”

“I love you, I mean. I do. But …”

“But what!”

“Lurene?” he said, low and soft. “Lurene, tell me something. Be honest with me.”

“Yes?”

“Did you cut yourself this morning?”

There was a long beat before she said, as if it were the punch line of a joke, “Nnnnno!”

He didn’t say anything. From the bedroom, silence.

“Although,” she went on brightly. “Although it’s funny, I had this idea on the train this morning that I had. I was so upset. I was almost certain I cut myself. But now I feel like it was a dream.”

She stopped, but did not sound finished.

“The thing is,” she went on, “I didn’t. I couldn’t have. There’s no … there isn’t any … cut. On my wrist. There’s nothing.”

“Nothing,” he repeated.

“No.” And now she sounded a bit uncertain. “Why—That is—What makes you ask?”

It was several seconds before he said, again, “Nothing.”

He might have told her about the thing, but he didn’t. What would he say? Besides, he didn’t want to puncture her bubble of cheer. She had earned it, after all.

Carl Blunt did no work at all that day. He sent an email to his boss claiming flu. It was so much easier to lie in email than on the phone—he didn’t even have to disguise his perfectly healthy voice. Though he made a couple of typos, for good measure.

After that, he got the hell out of the apartment. He walked through the park, hunkered in his coat, his gloveless hands plunged deep into the pockets. He ate lunch at the pizzeria at the end of his block, went to the drugstore, bought underwear and aspirin, and went to see a movie. He was back at the apartment by four thirty. He hung up his coat, put down the Eckerd bag, and took a deep breath before going down the hall to the bedroom.

There she was. She had moved. She was lying facedown on the bed now, her head pushed into the pillow. The pillow was hideously distended, as if she were made of lead. The mattress sagged in the middle.

He plucked up his courage and sidled into the room, staying close to the wall. He edged around the dresser and chair, pressed himself to the closet door, then leaned far, far out to pluck the knife from the bedclothes. It made a little gluey sound as it detached itself from the puddle of dried blood. The thing remained still, and Carl withdrew quickly, scooting out of the room with the knife suspended between his thumb and index finger.

In the kitchen, he washed it, placed it in the dish rack, and sat at the table to wait for Lurene.

Thirty minutes later she walked in the door. She dropped her briefcase on the floor, hung up her coat, did a little pirouette, then came to Carl for a kiss hello. Up close, she looked different. At first he thought it was merely in contrast to the thing in the bedroom. But no: she was different. Her skin was clear and soft as an infant’s, her hair thicker, her eyes brighter. It wasn’t a question of age. Tiny lines still fanned out from her eyes; her cheeks betrayed the slightest hint of future jowls. It was a question of pain. In her face, there was none. It was a face to which no insults had ever been spoken, that had never been slapped or seen a hooded man with electrodes attached to his arms. The scar on her chin was gone. She was utterly, frighteningly unscathed by life.

“Good day?” she said.

“No.”

“No?” She skipped to the sink and began to fill a glass with water.

“I didn’t get anything done.”

“How come?” She sipped her drink, cocked her head, gave him a little grin.

He didn’t answer.

“Maybe you didn’t get anything done for the same reason I didn’t get anything done.”

“What,” he asked, “is that?”

She winked. “Distraction.”

“Okay …”

“I was thinking of
other things
,” she sang.

“Ah.”

She put the glass down, came to him, and kissed him. She plucked his hand from his lap and pressed it to her breast. “Sexy time!”

“Well …”

“C’mon, don’t be a poop,” she said, hauling him to his feet. She grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and pulled him to her, pressing herself against him. “Let’s go.”

“I think you should go in there alone, first.”

“You want me to get all ready?”

“No,” he said. “I mean—there’s something in there.”

His voice, he thought, was dark with foreboding. But she didn’t seem to notice. She had the cheery obliviousness of a character on television. It was as if he were setting her up for a punch line.

It occurred to him that she was nearly as frightening as the thing on the bed.

“Something special?” she cooed.

“No, Lurene. Really.” He gulped. “Something scary. Something you left there this morning.”

She let go of his shirt, fell back on her heels, pouted. “Are you trying to ruin my fun?”