Sad Guy on the Bus Part 2
Just Linen and the Sad Guy
[This is part 2 of Sad Guy on the Bus. If you want to start from the beginning, here’s part 1.]
Monday morning Linen woke up and realized she needed to xerox 35 20-page packets of supplemental reading for her Lit Survey before 9 o’clock. The 8 o’clock bus wouldn’t get her to campus in time to do all that xeroxing, and she’d missed the early run. She hustled out the door, dug the car out of the melted-then-hardened snow, and drove down to State College on roads white and gritty with old salt.
About halfway down the highway, following a couple of other cars between two fields, Linen saw a doe run up from the south, across the state penitentiary’s fields, towards the road. Linen and the car in front of her braked hard. The first car in the row did not brake but hit the doe. The animal was thrown into the air.
The doe spun a full pinwheel, legs still running, landed on her feet on the north side of the highway, staggered and collapsed. The car that hit the doe skidded to a stop on the shoulder, digging into snow. Linen and the person in front of her began rolling forward again. As they passed the place of the accident Linen saw the doe flounder to her feet, stare around terrified, and bound for the tree line. Just before she reached the trees, the doe fell and did not move again.
That afternoon Linen forgot she had driven her car to State College. It happened so rarely. The Ford Escort was on its last legs and Linen liked to husband its strength.
Linen lined up in the bus queue. The Sad Guy came down the hill, crossed the avenue, saw Linen in line, and fell back a few steps so he wouldn’t have to stand behind her.
“Some people,” said the older woman who stepped up behind Linen, jerking her head at the Sad Guy and speaking loud enough for him to hear. She’d been part of the regular bus crowd for several years. She meant, he’s acting like there’s something wrong with you, dear, but we all know there’s something wrong with him.
“Yeah,” said Linen. This time she didn’t think up any excuses for the Sad Guy. He’d exhausted his supply. She sat on the bus, also exhausted, leaned her head against the window and imagined having spaghetti for dinner.
She was going to share her dinner with me. She must have planned to. Days later, when the landlord opened the sort-of carriage house where Linen lived, they found she’d set the table for two and gotten out the book she mentioned lending me. It is called Dendera and tells the story of a group of old women left out for the elements in their old age. The women save each other, build their own town, fight viciously among themselves, mostly die off, and finally mount an attack on the village where their young kinfolk still live. They also wage an ongoing war against some bears.
Sometimes I think Linen meant the loan of Dendera to be inspirational — you don’t need to keep looking for Mr. Right, older women can be tough on their own — and sometimes it seems like a cruel gesture — you’re over the hill, you’re a monster among monsters, we’re all monsters here.
I never imagined Linen as cruel. But then, you never really know people, do you?
While Linen was thinking about spaghetti and just before she remembered she had left her car in the campus parking garage, the Sad Guy sat down beside her.
Instantly Linen forgave him everything he had ever done to her. A handful of slights that could be summed up as How dare you look at me, how dare you drop your books, how dare you cough, how dare you exist anywhere on this bus. Her mind also abandoned the train of thought that was about to tell her she’d forgotten her car.
“Good afternoon,” said Linen.
“Good afternoon,” said the Sad Guy.
He took a book out of his briefcase and started to read. Linen, sliding her eyes over, thought that it was a boring-looking book. Tables of numbers. Actuarial tables? Logarithmic tables? Linen had never made much out of numbers. The Sad Guy kept reading the book. His eyes moved, moved, he scribbled some figures on a note card, worked an equation, flipped ahead to where he had a page marked with a sticky note, added another figure to his equation. As he worked, his body began to shake. His eyes kept scanning the page. He was crying.
Linen put her hand on his arm.
The Sad Guy flinched and actually hissed.
I couldn’t have hurt him, Linen thought. He wore a wool jacket that she, deep in her Navy coat and a wooly sweater, thought was completely unsuited for below-freezing weather.
She said: “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing,” said the Sad Guy. He wrote down a figure, then crossed it out.
“Please.”
He slapped his book shut and put book and notecards back into his satchel. “Well, what?”
“I can see you’ve been crying,” Linen said. “A lot. For months. If you tell me about it — I don’t want to impose, we don’t have to be friends, we don’t have to talk anymore ever again — but if you tell me why you’re sad, that might help you feel better.”
The Sad Guy’s mouth wavered. He wiped his arm across his eyes. He made a lame attempt at a joke: “I could tell you about it, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Linen looked down at her Klaeber as she thought about this. She glanced back up at him. “I don’t think that would help.”
The Sad Guy didn’t answer. He kept looking at Linen. The lines on his face softened and he waited to see what she would say next. He looked tired and, Linen thought, very beautiful.
It was only late afternoon, but the sun slanted almost horizontally across the field. The light bleared through the window across the aisle. The glass was greasy from so many heads leaning against it.
Linen thought of the doe. Maybe she’d clambered to her feet again. She might be deep in the bracken now, feeding.
“I saw a deer hit by a car this morning,” said Linen. “She spun all the way around in the air, running, hit the ground, still running, and made it almost to trees before she fell.”
“Yeah?”
Linen remembered her car was still in the campus parking garage. Too late to do anything about that now. She’d have to catch the bus to town tomorrow, rescue her car, and drive back home in the evening.
She said to the Sad Guy: “What if you let me buy you a cup of coffee and you tell me all about it?”
He followed her to the donut shop, which stood on High Street across from the secondhand store. Linen, who was already drooping and ready for an early night in bed, fortified herself with hot tea — a Lipton bag in a cup of boiling water that took forever to cool off — and a sugary donut. The Sad Guy took only tea.
They sat and looked at each other warily. The Sad Guy’s knuckles were rust-colored-grubby. His accent was local — north Appalachia, not so far off from West Virginia, nasal and lilting, with those odd little quirks. “Your coat needs cleaned.”
“It sure does,” Linen, agreed, smiling. “But I’ll manage.”
“So. My story.” A Mississippi girl, Linen listened to his voice before she paid attention to the words. He’d lived somewhere else besides central Pennsylvania for quite a while, with that voice. Maryland? Virginia? A little too sleepy to focus properly, Linen nodded and listened. He had a girlfriend? Of course. For a long time, six, seven years.
He described the long-ago girlfriend. How she laughed. How she danced. His face sometimes softened, sometimes lit up. The Sad Guy’s story wasn’t particularly interesting, Linen thought, but telling it, he became much nicer. Once he must have been a kind, open-hearted person.
“And then she died.”
“Oh.” Linen swallowed the last bite of donut she’d just stuffed into her mouth and choked. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
The Sad Guy leaned across the table over the teacups. “She died and I can’t bring her back.”
Linen had not the slightest idea what to think of that. No point in answering, you can’t just bring people back. He had to know that.
Right? He had to know that.
“You see, I imagined her.”
“Oh.”
“I imagined her and we were in love for years and then I imagined her dying and now I can’t imagine her back.”
Linen slid her hands across the table and wrapped them around the Sad Guy’s hands, teacup and all. It felt like grasping a cage of bone. The cup was still full; he was not drinking his tea but holding it for warmth. “What was her name?”
“Laura,” said the Sad Guy, with just a glimmer of that sweet, sweet smile. Finally he drank his tea and stood up. “Thank you.”
Linen began shrugging her too-big, needs-cleaning Navy coat over her sweater. “I’m afraid listening wasn’t as much help as I thought.”
“Not at all,” said the Sad Guy. He followed Linen to the door.
“I think I’ll call that donut supper and go straight to bed,” Linen said. “Walk safe.” She was already thinking about curling up and watching Star Trek on her VHS player. Maybe she planned to step across the yard to my apartment and ask, apologizing, if we could put off our supper together.
The crush she’d had on the Sad Guy was fading. She felt terribly sorry for him, of course, and she understood. She could easily imagine having a pretend boyfriend and mourning his death in earnest. But also, she would choose not to do such a thing.
Linen started to cross the street when the Sad Guy took a quick step after her and grabbed her wrist.
Linen turned right around to stare at him.
“Your turn,” he said.
Linen went full-on Mississippi. “I do beg your pardon.”
The Sad Guy smiled at her, showing teeth. “You’re forgetting your part of the bargain. A life for a story, right?”
Linen stared at him. The only warm part of her was where he was gripping her wrist. It took her a minute to remember what he meant. “I never said yes.”
“But you took my story anyway.” The Sad Guy’s smile faded. “I think you’re a thief.”
Linen jerked her arm back.
“You watched me for months.” The Sad Guy stepped away from her. “You wanted my story and you took it. I knew you were a thief.”
His voice rose. People looked.
He turned away from her and started walking fast up the hill, shoulders hunkered down — and Linen was going to leave it at that, but suddenly her heart felt like it was breaking, really breaking, a pain clear through, front to back. She ran the few paces uphill to catch up with him, books jouncing in her arms.
“I’m not a thief,” she said. “I’m not. I watched you because I was sorry for you, and curious, and I thought you were beautiful. I didn’t know it was a real bargain. I thought it was a joke. But I won’t have you hating humanity — or yourself — or whatever it is you hate because of me. I didn’t believe you and I should have believed you. For that I apologize. I’ll keep my word.”
The Sad Guy thought about this. Then he grabbed Linen clean off her feet, books and all, with both arms. He spun her around. Putting her down, he said, as if talking to himself: “All right. All right.” Then, to Linen: “It will be all right, I promise.”
He took her whole stack of books and papers. Linen stretched her shoulders back and felt a hundred pounds lighter. Then she slid her hand around the Sad Guy’s arm. It was now fully dark. High Street to Allegheny, Allegheny to Bishop. A long trudge up the hill.
The Sad Guy lived in a tall, thin old house — 1830s or 40s from the general shape of it — that had been papered with asphalt siding a hundred years or so later, or 60 years ago when the Sad Guy lived there. The narrow front faced the street. One side was an alley so narrow a thin man could have barely squeezed through. The other side was wide as a footpath to the back garden. Along that footpath a porch ran down the side of the house. The downstairs tenant had filled the porch with things — empty pots and bags of potting soil, an old sofa, a cat carrier, a bicycle with a wheel missing.
The Sad Guy led Linen up the stairs at the back of the porch. The stairs zigzagged to the second floor landing, then the attic landing. As they climbed the stairway swayed away from the house and the nails squeaked.
On the attic landing the Sad Guy turned his key in the lock, then stooped to go in. He flicked on the switch.
The one attic room extended the length of the house. At each end of the attic, a curtainless window let the cold flow in through small glass panes. To the left as you entered, a bathroom had been partitioned off. To the right, a fridge, a two-eyed stove and a 1950s-era enamel sink with a built-in draining board formed the kitchen.
You could only walk upright down the center of the attic. First you came to a wooden farmhouse table and a couple of wooden chairs. Further, a La-Z-Boy was angled against the sloping roof facing a small TV that stood on a milk crate on the other side of the central aisle. At the end of the attic, an unmade bed covered with books and papers and clothes and rubbish was pushed up against the wall under the street window.
Except for the bed, everything was tidy and bare.
It was almost as cold inside as out.
“Stand on the register,” said the Sad Guy, putting down his things and Linen’s things and fiddling with the thermostat. Linen saw a big grating in the floor. She took off her boots and stood on it. Warm air began to flow up through her socks.
“It’ll blister you before long,” warned the Sad Guy. “Though you gotta love that moment just before it does.”
He, too, took off his shoes and stood on the register. With their coats off, it was the only way to make the room tolerable until the heat filtered weakly through the rest of the space. Linen imagined the Sad Guy tenting down on the register — seated on a pillow, blanket over his head, flashlight in hand — to stay warm while working his math problems. This really was an uninhabitable attic.
“Bathroom’s over there.” The bathroom was worse than the rest — above freezing, at least, but barely. The Sad Guy had left the water trickling to keep the pipes from busting. This was like camping with no nature, no magic. The place smelled like scrapple and rust.
Stepping out, Linen saw the Sad Guy putting a small tray covered in aluminum foil into the toaster oven perched on the enamel drainboard. His dinner, probably.
Linen was too tired to eat. She felt wretchedly cold. The Sad Guy was becoming a nuisance, and his apartment was worse. She wanted to go home and sleep. Even lie down here and sleep. Or, well, whatever.
She looked around the attic while the Sad Guy messed with his dinner. The table had been set — she remembered the china was there when they walked in —
— not set for dinner, but laid out for an operation, linen cloth, high-school science-lab-looking knife, she didn’t know what it was called, antique white barber’s bowl, faintly cracked and stained various gradations of rust and brown in the cracks.
So this was whatever.
Linen took off her sweater and sat at the table in her tee shirt. She folded her hands in her lap, inspecting the setup. It was not even properly clean.
The Sad Guy turned around. He must have been looking at Linen quite a while before she glanced up.
“Ah,” he said. “Good.”
She thought: This guy is truly off his rocker.
Then she thought: He’s all alone. The folks on the bus despise him. Clearly no one ever comes here. When you’re alone, you peer into the universe looking for a reflection. Well then, I’m that reflection. I have to make it a just one.
Then she thought: He’s manipulating me into thinking this somehow. It’s a trick.
Then she thought: I am not responsible for his pitiful schemes. I am responsible only for myself. I made a promise and I will keep it.
She began to shake all over — hard shakes, like when your fever is rising. Her teeth chattered. It’s all right, she told herself. This is only fear. I’ll get past it. The Sad Guy will help me.
This is a ridiculous line of thought, her mother said. It’s maudlin.
Shut up, Mother, I’m doing something important here.
This is hard for me to write, even though I know it’s probably kinder and more gentle than what actually happened to Linen. I read over the sentences and I feel sick. Then I dream about her and I have to write some more. Why did she stay? She must have followed thought process I’ve ascribed to her, or something very much like it.
“What’s your name?” she asked the Sad Guy.
“Walter.” Of course it was. “What’s yours?”
“Linen,” she told him. “May I have some water?”
Walter brought her water. He wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
“I feel sort of afraid.”
“That’s quite reasonable.” He sat across from her and rolled his sleeves up past his elbows, turned his palms up.
The inside of his right arm was so marked that for a minute Linen didn’t know what she was looking at. A de Kooning in mixed media: keloids, punctures, tracks, bruises of all ages. Scars.
“You see,” Walter said. But Linen was not sure what she was meant to see.
He tied his handkerchief around her upper arm, much tighter than they did the rubber strip at the doctor’s. He didn’t clean her arm — of course not, thought Linen, there’s no need — but waited a while until her skin felt full and tight.
She imagined her arm turning purple, blue, but she didn’t know if it looked any different and she was probably exaggerating. She didn’t know because she didn’t look — not once — at anything but Walter’s face.
His habitual expression — that terrible, corrosive sadness — dissolved. Close up like this his face was serene, intent.
There was a little pressure, not much, then a bright flash of pain. Like lemon juice, Linen thought.
Warmth flowed comfortably down her arm on both sides.
She slowed her breathing, in for eight counts, out for eight.
It seemed like no time before Walter folded her arm back on a rag and carried the bowl to the sink. He poured it out, rinsed the sink, rinsed the bowl, returned.
“Ready?”
Linen held her arm out again. This time was harder to ignore. Her blood flowed maybe a little more slowly (she didn’t look) and he adjusted the lancet, kneaded her arm, pressing hard. She began to have a bruised feeling that became more and more difficult to ignore. She imagined her whole arm purple. A plum pricked by a rusty nail.
“Now I’m confused,” Linen said to distract herself. “I thought you wanted the blood for something — trace sigils on the table, drink it, I don’t know what.”
The Sad Guy made a joke gagging noise. “Blood’s nasty, why would I do that?” He considered. “I mean, it’s less nasty than some of other bodily humors, I guess.”
He dipped a knuckle into the bowl, studied it, lost interest, and half wiped it off on the cloth.
“You’re not, like, a reptilian fanboy or something?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, a fetish, I guess. A conspiracy theory. Lots of people really believe. There are folks on Geocities with web pages about reptilians. Anyway, they’re these sort of advanced aliens. It’s Art Bell stuff but worse. The reptilians, if I remember correctly, have infiltrated all the powerful human families. The Bushes and the Rockefellers and of course the Windsors are reptilians. Even though humans are inferior they’ve battened onto us somehow, and — this is the salient point in this context — they have these rituals where they drink human blood, especially menstrual blood.”
The Sad Guy laughed. “I bet women follow them around. I mean, if there were reptilians, women would follow them around. You’re all so eager to please.”
Linen ignored that part; it was a little too pointed.
“I don’t know about women, I learned about them from male students who actually intended to hunt them. But those students were also going to form a militia and stop the black helicopters from fluoridating the drinking water, so there’s that.”
“Some people,” Walter said.
His eyelashes were heavy and gold, so gold.
Linen asked, “If you don’t care anything about all this blood, isn’t this a much of a muchness? Why not just shoot someone if you want to kill them?”
“Neighbors.”
“Poison?”
“Hm, well. Okay, here’s an analogy. Anorexia’s one of the most fatal mental disorders. I have anorexia; I could just shoot myself and give the neighbors a little excitement, why not do that? Why waste all this time forcing a minimum number of disgusting calories into my mouth every day, then relapsing, then recovering, especially if I don’t plan on recovering in the end? Isn’t it much of a muchness? But I don’t have shoot-myself-itis, I have anorexia. The one doesn’t satisfy the other.”
“That was helpful, thank you.”
“You don’t have any desires that are objectively pointless — or vicious, even — but are so foundational they don’t need any justification beyond themselves?”
“No.” Linen thought about it. “Or if I do, they’re things that are more or less acceptable nowadays, so I haven’t noticed them.”
“Lucky woman. Well. Until now, I suppose.”
When Walter returned to the table a second time he prodded Linen’s arm and then tied it off with his handkerchief.
“Your right hand, please.”
She left her left arm resting on the table. She lifted her right hand out of her lap and held it out to him.
A person has 10 pints of blood, she thought. Am I remembering that right? But this is all ounces. Her head swam.
A pint’s a pound the world around, her mother reminded her.
Golly, mom, thanks, Linen answered. I appreciate that. I do hope I pass out before I die. I wonder how much blood I need to stay alive anyway. How long it will take.
“Walter — I don’t want to be rude and I’m not taking my promise back, but I’m probably going to just run away. Like, any minute. Like now.”
Walter instantly lifted his hands away from Linen’s arm. “The door’s not locked.”
Linen sat on the edge of her chair.
“It is interesting, isn’t it, how people make choices?” Walter said. “And unless you’re completely a moron, a piece of furniture, you keep making them, right? Even if it’s the same choice, the circumstances keep changing.”
Linen held her right arm out again.
Slow breaths. Eight counts in. Eight counts out. She was getting a migraine — a big one, auras, everything spinning. “Tell me a story,” she said.
“What about?” Walter asked — not unkindly, really asking. “I’ll make up a new story for you. Anything you like.”
“Something warm,” said Linen. “Something with roses and summer.”
“That’s the Snow Queen,” Walter said. “I don’t remember much of that one, but I can make it up … there once was a beautiful girl, but she was so lonely her heart turned to ice. One day she walked out into the woods, very far out, where only the bears live. The sun set and she lay down in the snow. She was cold, but since her heart was ice, she didn’t feel it. She fell asleep, and as she was sleeping the fairies came out of the hollow hills and found her … ”
The story went on and on, Walter’s unresonent voice relating one adventure after the next. After a while Linen could no longer follow the thread of the story. Walter held her arm in place with both his hands.
“It’s all right,” he said again. “You’ll feel like you’re falling. It’s all right. I’m here, I’ll catch you — ”
And Linen did pass out, head nodding, body slumping, tumbling out of the chair, her full weight too much for Walter to catch at that angle, dragging the bowl along with her and landing in her own blood on the floor.
When Linen’s eyes close I lose the thread of the story. Walter’s mind is opaque to me.
Here’s what I imagine, though.
Her head hit the floor with a crack, enough to bring her around, grumbling, dazed, sick. Everything spun. “Ohhh why did I wake up, now it has to start all over again.”
Walter laughed at her. “This is nothing. Head between your knees. There you go.”
Walter propped her up then wiped the table and floor. She came to a little more and found he was wiping her hair clean with the dishrag, a handful of strands at a time. He made her drink some water, then a whole bottle of Pedialyte. Helped her stand up, caught her when she instantly pitched floorward again, helped her to the bathroom, held her under her arms on the toilet, propped her up in the La-Z-Boy.
He fished his warmed-over dinner out of the oven and split it neatly into two portions, neither more than two or three ounces. Spaghetti from the Italian place down the road, ruddy and sustaining. Linen ate hers and felt better, then felt like she was going to throw up.
“Slow, shallow breaths,” Walter counseled. “Not too deep, please don’t throw up on my armchair.”
“How do you know so many odd things? Like how not to throw up?”
“Oh well … I learned to throw up first, that’s the easy part. When I was just a little guy, four or five years old, I didn’t like my food to touch. Peas couldn’t touch the carrots, that sort of thing. So to teach me not to be so picky, my dad would stir my plate into this horrid slop and make me eat it. And I taught myself to throw up just by thinking about it. And since he couldn’t make me eat it twice, he’d whip me. And I thought, ‘That means I’ve won.’ Every time he’d whip me, I won. But an inconvenient side effect of learning to make yourself throw up is it’s hard to control; after a while a smell or even a memory — anyway, you have to train yourself not to do it.”
He sat on the floorboards at the foot of the La-Z-Boy, looking up at Linen.
“Tell me something about you.”
“I had a twin who died when we were born. She was younger. Her name was Lacey. And, oh, I’m writing this dissertation on Beowulf that’s fine, I guess, but I’m not up to it yet. I think it’s a tale for old men, old women. Never mind that, it’s awfully esoteric. And then last afternoon I was walking and I got into, I guess it was Bald Eagle Mountain, up in that gap there, and I walked right into a fairy camp. They didn’t talk or move and they had these bright, bright eyes. And from a birds-eye view I might think, well, I’m sad or my life’s not going anywhere, but when I look at it up close, it’s full of all these joyful moments. One after the next, strung together, gift after gift.”
“That’s Muncy Mountain you mean over there,” Walter said. After a bit he added, “I thought anyone who volunteers to be murdered must be depressed. Or a nasty fetishist, of course.”
Linen smiled — a smile that lit her whole face. “I don’t want to die. Not at all, not one bit. Who does? But it seemed like a worthwhile occasion. And as for a fetishist, no, but does a crush count?”
The Sad Guy wrinkled his nose, but he couldn’t help smiling back. “Under the circumstances, I suppose we’ll allow it.”
The sat in an amber globe and talked. It was the very first, the very last night.
Walter shoved enough books and papers aside to make space for Linen in the bed under the window. Piled four or five comforters on her, well, she needed them, so far from the floor grate with the cold flowing through the glass. When the wind picked up, the window panes rattled in their settings.
“Everything’s spinning,” Linen said.
“Isn’t it luxurious? That’s 36 ounces for you. You won’t be steady on your feet for a while yet, so holler if you have to get up. This is how I spend my Saturdays — well, sometimes, you have to keep track — ”
He lay beside her until she fell asleep, but she slept lightly and whenever she woke again she saw him roving around the attic or sitting in the chair where she had sat. The amber globe still hung there, the dim incandescent light that didn’t illuminate the corners. She revolved like Pluto at its outermost orbit.
When Linen woke up before dawn, the light was out and Walter, bone white by the harsh streetlight just above and to the side of the window, was standing beside the bed.
She felt better, and much worse. The room had stopped spinning.
He had taken off his shirt, though he was still wearing those baggy pants. He got under the blankets and leaned up on one elbow to look at Linen.
“How odd,” she said, meaning everything. Walter took her hand and pulled her fingers toward his right arm where a Jacob’s ladder of white scars ran from his wrist up past his elbow.
“Cutting, that’s called non-suicidal self-injury disorder. Kiddie stuff.”
Then the horizon of his side, ribs to the bare half-arch of his hip bone. Just at his belt a sore oozed; he was so thin his trousers gave him pressure sores.
“Anorexia, I mean, it’s controlled; isn’t that what you say about diabetes, it’s controlled?”
She pressed her fingers into the scars that made her think of her own new cuts. She felt embarrassed about doing this. “What about these?”
“Factitious anemia. See? A name for everything. But it’s not a perfect fit; factitious means you want to trick someone, you want to trick a doctor into giving you all these treatments you don’t need. I don’t want to trick anyone, I want to be left alone. I’d tell the truth if I had to, but I can’t imagine under what circumstances; I never go to doctors.”
“What about when it’s other people?”
“Munchausen by proxy, maybe? Inducing illness in other people. Again, not a perfect match. Presupposes an audience.”
Linen, also lying on her side to face him, asked, “Is this how Laura died?”
“Yes, well, no, not at all. That was an accident.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, goodness. We were both kids, I mean, I was a senior in college and she was a freshman — maybe still in high school.” He looked across Linen into the shadowy corner of the attic. “She wanted to please me and I wanted — just more. Just more. Anyway, there was no one to put on the brakes.”
He looked back down at Linen, who had cradled her head on her arm. “A dead body is really inconvenient.”
“And how horrible for her — ” Linen suggested.
“That’s nothing, she wanted to be there.”
“She was real, wasn’t she? Not an imaginary girlfriend?”
“When she died, I tried to think up something better for her. She made a choice, would have done anything for me, but I didn’t choose. I was careless. I used to think it all out, the life she should be living, all these details. I gave her a lot more backbone.” He smiled, remembering. “That’s the Laura I fell in love with.”
He kissed Linen.
“And that’s all of my sad story.”
Then he leaned across her, pressed her far wrist into the bed with his left hand, pulled the lab knife out of his pocket and used his right hand — his off hand — to slam the knife into her arm above the elbow and yank it down her arm in a jagged spiral. Linen jerked up as he cut her a second similar cut, clumsy but very deep.
The Sad Guy was about to go for a third cut but as Linen started to fight he changed his mind, tossed the knife away and just collapsed on top of her, chest sideways across her body, right forearm across her throat, left hand pinning her right hand.
Linen sat up in a blaze of strength, tossing him off of her. She threw herself forward to clamber off the foot of the bed.
“Go on,” Walter gasped. “Door’s open.”
Imagine her all the way up on her knees, arrested mid-flight, torso flung forward like winged victory itself.
“Go on, you don’t have much time — the neighbor downstairs, he’s an asshole but he’s up all night, just knock on his door.” She wasn’t listening. I don’t think she even heard. “Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t persuade yourself to stay here. Don’t valorize your own stupidity.”
Now picture Linen caught between her two wills — her body’s will, springing away like the doe toward the woods. Her mind’s will, throwing her against the bed.
She fell back.
She was crying. Tears ran down her face — not a few, but gallons of them, it felt like, filling her ears and washing down into her hair.
“I will keep my promise,” she said. “I told you I would. But I do want so much to live.”
He let her cry for a while. Then:
“A long time ago,” Walter said, “when I was just a little kid, single digits, I had this idea that if you purged the bodily humors bit by bit, according to a precise order, in precise amounts, you could achieve an ethereal body. I don’t mean a dream body, astral travel, that kind of thing. I mean this body — shape, extension, but no substance.”
He held out his hand, looking at it, remembering. Linen focused on his voice, gradually began following the words.
“I don’t know what I read and made such hay out of. But I experimented — myself, animals. Spent a year in a mental lock-up when I was 12 or 13.” He laughed. “Well, that was a nonsense idea. But I did think, for years and years, that it was a kind of philosophical instrument. A way to measure choice by ounces.” He looked at Linen, who was willing herself not to get up and run. Her left hand balled into the blankets. Her right fingers twitched, but she couldn’t turn her wrist — he’d severed a tendon, too.
“I don’t feel like I’m dying,” she said.
“You really are dying. That’s just adrenaline. It won’t last — but to the point, when Laura died, I stopped believing even that.”
He lay right alongside Linen, gasping for air as he hitched himself closer on his bandaged arm.
“But now I think I may have been right all along. Look at that.”
Something tingled up from Linen’s chest and hung in the air like a glowing ball of dandelion seed.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Your gift. You can have it back. I don’t want it anymore.”
A thought struck her. He’d used all his strength in their brief tussle, and still lost. A few hours before, he’d easily lifted her and spun her around. “You were hurting yourself while I was asleep!”
“It’s called factitious anemia, not hurting myself.”
“Walter — ”
“No, listen. I told you, I’ve figured everything out. I was right before.”
“I won’t take it back. It’s yours, I give it to you.” The bright puffball, obeying her intention, drifted toward him.
“You get to be selfish. And besides, you aren’t listening. Please listen. I told you from the start, it’s all right — ”
“I don’t want you to leave,” Linen cried. “There’s your selfish, you crazy impossible little man. I don’t care how wretched your life is or what kind of really cool suicide you had planned. What I want is for you to stay with me. Here — ”
The light bumped against his sternum and he felt — this is the one glimpse I ever get of Walter, his thoughts — he felt joy start right there and spread fast. It wasn’t anything magical — just Linen’s everyday life. Sunrise and sunset, mountain trails and tomatoes and the battered Klaeber.
Then Walter used that flicker of energy to hoist himself right atop Linen, legs along legs, arms along arms, his handkerchief-wrapped wound against her open ones, his cheek against hers. The bright puffball, caught between their two bodies, between Linen’s two intentions — her mind sending it Walter-ward and her body hollering life, life! — didn’t know which way to go and spread out in every direction at once.
At first his dead weight was so great she couldn’t expand her chest. Then he seemed lighter. She felt his pulse, jagged and light, fluttering at almost every point along her body. Then he was lighter still and she could breathe again and he rose and fell on her breath. His pulse staggered to a stop, caught the slow rhythm, and resumed again faint but steady.
Water sang down the icicles as they walked hand in hand down Bishop Street. Snow fell out of trees in big sloppy handfuls. Blue shadows, gold light. Their coats hung open. The stiff wind felt delicious.
At first Linen thought the Men From the Hollow Hills’ spell had landed at last and they’d slept 20 years. How else were their scars faded to the finest of white lines — crosshatching for Walter, just a couple of spider threads for her? But the cars in the street hadn’t moved, mostly, and the same asshole neighbor was cooking scrapple downstairs.
A few blocks over the houses, newer and in better repair, were set back from the road. Under bare rose thorns, a snowdrift spun down from an unpainted picket fence.
Walter dropped knees-first into the snowdrift, breaking the ice, and picked up a big chunk. He gnawed it. Linen knelt and picked up her own piece of ice. Outside it was slick and hard as watermelon rind; below the rind was an icy crust; below that, furry, thick-packed snow. Each layer had its own texture and taste. Linen had never eaten anything so good.
“Pica,” Walter said, “eating non-food substances. Honestly I could live on ice.”
Linen agreed. This was better than biscuits and red-eye gravy. They knelt there like Hansel and Gretel, gorging themselves.
I must add this is a minority opinion — I mean that they lived at all, that they went away together somewhere. I tell myself this story because I wish I’d been a better friend to Linen.
I’ve started talking with my neighbors more, and most people around here think Walter carried Linen off into the woods somewhere. Threw her body down an old mine shaft and jumped in after her, maybe.
They also said, and I believe, them, that everyone knew Walter was bad news. He did something in high school, tortured animals, and had to go to a place for crazy kids. Only got out because his dad was a judge, they said. Like I told you, we all should have talked to the locals more.
But to carry her out of town, into the woods and all the way to the nearest abandoned mine? He didn’t have a car or any friends who would loan him one. That’s miles of walking with a full-grown woman to drag. It would have been bright daylight and then some. It doesn’t make any sense.
Besides talking with my neighbors more, I stopped dating losers and paid more attention to my career. I started working on Marion Zimmer Bradley and occult influences in late-20th-century fantasy writing. Well, you know how that turned out. Worse than Crowley. My career was in the early stages of a long decline, back in the aughts. But I was trying.
Early the summer after Linen disappeared I walked the trail beside the railroad track out of town. I found the pump-treatment facility and the path across from it up into the mountains. I followed the path to the high meadow and waded through deep grass tangled with purple vetch up to the top of the meadow, where someone had erected an altar, just one stone on top of a stone.
[Note: You might think Linen is my character. Or even the Divorced Adjunct, my narrator. Nah. Walter’s my ringer. I’ve been anemic for as long as I’ve been an adult woman. If I go to the emergency room the docs there assume I’m there for a blood transfusion. Family medicine docs try to set me up for a hematology consult. It’s kind of cool, to be honest.
Walter has to induce anemia through bloodletting; I just ignore the medicine I’ve been prescribed and avoid red meat and keep having murder-scene periods every three weeks. Nature does most of it; I just prod her along a little.
But then after 25 years, in a choice I still don’t understand, I started taking iron like I’d been told to all along. Folks, you have no idea. I am a different person. My cognition is different (and not all in good ways). My energy is different. My skin color is different. I inhabit my body differently. I even smell different. I no longer enjoy my very favorite food in the whole wide world: ice.
I really, really miss the old me.
So I decided to write about anemia, about a chosen illness, before I completely forgot what it was like to be that person, to experience life as she did. I have some practice with anorexia, which gave me a start in the right direction, but that wasn’t enough.
And then I thought about Walter.
For 20 years, on and off, I had trouble falling asleep at night. I was so depressed, you see, that I dreaded waking up in the morning. So I conjured up an imaginary boyfriend, at first just a voice, and had him put me to sleep every night. Sometimes a morphine injection, sometimes bloodletting, all kinds of nonsense. He didn’t have much personality, just an unresonant voice reciting bit of hypnotic patter: “You’ll feel as if you’re falling. I’m here, I’ll catch you. It’s all right.” There were three or four more lines of it, I forget what, but I always feel asleep before he got to the end. Worked like a charm.
Then I gave him a story and a personality and a street address and a daily route for walking, for riding the bus, so I always knew when I’d run into him. Gradually he became one of my most constant friends. He was rarely kind, and he was usually desperately sad. It wasn’t his fault. I created him like that. But sometimes he was the sweetest person alive.
Later I was happy and I didn’t need Walter, so I put him away in the toy cabinet. And now when I need him, he’s there with his bleeding bowl, an evil little Velveteen Rabbit, well-worn but alive.
So you see, it’s his story, with his name on it.
“It is interesting, isn’t it, how people make choices? And unless you’re completely a moron, a piece of furniture, you keep making them, right? Even if it’s the same choice, the circumstances keep changing.”
He’s talking about himself.
Darling Walter, my imaginary boyfriend, my fellow anemic, my fellow anorexic (well controlled). I gave you all my mental health issues and a pile of worse ones just for fun, then made you kill me over and over and never told you why. It’s no wonder you’re unhappy and vicious and cruel. I miss my anemia, and yeah, I miss you. I hope this story is good enough.]