Chiral Mad 3 Read online

  “I’ve also often wondered if it reminded him of his mother.”

  “His mother?”

  “You know the old saying, ‘before you marry, check out the mother?’ Well, I didn’t.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette, half-finished. The ember faded.

  “I won’t go into the good times. There were plenty of good times, or else I wouldn’t have married him. He had qualities. He was well-read, knew a good bit of art history. He was smart, funny at parties. My god, he cooked! He was I guess you’d say assertive in bed and at the time I liked that, though he was adamant about contraception, he wanted no babies. He was five years older than me, a successful neurosurgeon. Spinal surgeries.

  “He was also, as I later learned, a monster.”

  She reached for the cigarette butt. He handed her the lighter. She lit it. Brushed a fallen ember from the bedsheet.

  “It wasn’t just me. Though it was me, over time. His practice was in the city of course so I’d moved in with him a few months before we married and I got a job teaching acrylic three days a week at the Art Students League. And for the first few years we were happy. The League wasn’t University but it was something, it brought in a little money—though with what he made we didn’t need it—and left me plenty of time for my own work. He was busy. He had affiliations with several hospitals in the city. Or at least he did, until certain nasty things started coming to light.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette again. She wondered how he was taking this. There was no way to know for sure. He was attentive. She guessed that for now, that would have to do.

  “Todd was hurting his patients. He was hurting them on purpose.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Yes. Purposely botching their operations. When it was over, one of his colleagues told me he’d never have believed it if he hadn’t seen it for himself, that you had to know the right thing to do in order to do the wrong thing, and Todd was consistently doing the wrong thing.

  “Two women died on his operating table. One of them bled to death. Two more emerged from surgery unable to move their legs. He left a sponge inside of one man and forceps inside another. He left one man a quadriplegic.

  “I didn’t know any of this. It took them more than a year to coordinate the cases hospital to hospital and suspend his license despite complaints from a half-dozen doctors and lawyers that my husband was a dangerous man. What I did know was that for the last two years of our marriage, while all of this was going on, he was scaring me.

  “He’d always been ready for a drink or two after dinner. Now he was going through a fifth of Grey Goose every night and I’d find cocaine residue on the living room coffee table in the morning—he wouldn’t even bother to clean up after himself. He’d stopped talking to me. When I’d confront him, ask him what was wrong he’d either clam up mumbling something about stress at work and leave the room or just as often, go at me, furious, screaming that it was none of my fucking business, that I was a prying bitch who didn’t deserve him, who he never should have married. At first I was stunned. And then I wasn’t.

  “He scared me but he never hit me. If he had, I would have left him. Probably he knew that. Most of the time we drifted through the same apartment and that was that, we weren’t anything like a couple anymore—and this went on for two years. I don’t know why I stayed. Or even how I stayed. I was very depressed. There were times I couldn’t breathe. I lost a lot of weight, I was down to about a hundred pounds. Half my clothes didn’t fit. I kept teaching, though I know my classes suffered. And I kept painting. I’d paint something and throw it away disgusted with myself as though it were trash. I suspect it wasn’t trash. But I couldn’t find me anymore in what I painted, you know? Like I wasn’t there. All of it’s gone now. All that work.

  “I still loved him. Despite me crying myself to sleep nights. I wanted to help. Our sex life was over, finished, shot to hell with all that coke and liquor but I’d still go to him sometimes, try to hold him, try to let him know it was all right to talk to me, to let me in, to let me help.

  “I did that until he tried to kill me.

  “He’d been doing coke that night and I knew that but there I was lying in bed next to him anyway and he smelled medicinal, I remember that, he smelled awful, god knows what pills he was taking and I was saying something, I don’t know, something trying to sooth him and he turned to me and put his hands around my neck and said you don’t get it, do you? I kill people. I like to kill people. That’s who I am. You understand? A killer. You don’t get that, do you? No.

  “He called me a bitch, a stupid bitch and he started to squeeze and I couldn’t breathe and I was afraid and there was this ceramic lamp by our bed and I reached for that and pulled it free of the plug and it had a heavy base so I hit him with that, I don’t how many times, over the head, until there was blood all over both of us and he got up and staggered out of the bedroom and the next thing I knew I heard the front door slam and he was gone.

  “The lamp didn’t even break. I kept that lamp for years.

  “He went to a bar called McLean’s over on the east side of town. The police asked me later if I wanted to sue the bartender for serving him. I almost laughed. I was through crying by then. But I didn’t laugh. He’d stumbled out of the bar into after-theatre traffic. The car that hit him was a red Infiniti SUV. The driver and his wife were in from the suburbs to see a show. The driver was a dentist.

  “It all came out then. All he’d done. And I stopped ageing.”

  “That’s … impossible.”

  “You think? There are benches all along Broadway between the south and northbound lanes and the next day I sat down on the one across from our apartment and smoked a cigarette, it was warm for September, and I watched the people along either side of the street going about their business, a woman with her foot in a cast, a guy walking a pair of golden retrievers, people in shorts, people dressed for work, teeshirts, ties and jackets, an old woman with a walker daring a yellow light. And I didn’t love him anymore. Not one bit. I loved me. Who I was. One of all these people. And I felt something … just lift away.”

  He reached over. She felt the sweet gentle touch of his fingertips along her cheek, tracing a line over her chin to her neck like a trail of tears.

  “You can’t … your face, your skin …”

  “I can prove it to you, Colin. I’ve gone through five different doctors since then. I’m not invulnerable. I’m not immortal. I get sick. I get the flu. My lower back goes out from time to time, you know that. I’ve broken this damn big toe of mine twice. Look, it’s practically deformed.”

  She wiggled it at him.

  “I have all my medical records. I need to move around, doctor-wise. You can understand why. I’ll get them for you.”

  She got out of bed and her body told him it was a lie.

  It had to be.

  He heard her in the study, a file drawer sliding open and then closed, heard her light footsteps in the hall and then she was sitting beside him on the bed again and handed him a thick heavy folder.

  “Look at the dates,” she said. “Read.”

  He did. She sat quietly and watched him, aware of her heartbeat, aware of the weight of loving him, the silence in the room broken only by the crisp hiss and slide of pages, her life seeming to her like the pages paper-thin, in his hands and out of her own.

  Was it a half-hour? More? He closed the folder.

  “Tell me everything,” he said. “Tell me all you’ve done, all you’ve been.”

  The time’s gone so fast, she thought. Paros, Naxos, the Amalfi Coast, St. Bart’s, St. John. She saw him always in the light. On this patio beyond this window, sketching in the summer sun. The two of them together, sketching in the summer sun. On the lawn tossing the ball to Rufus, their Golden, gone these four years now. In the morning light, the two of them sprawled across their bed.

  This bed.

  He lay there now.

  So pale. His fine curly hair disappeared.
The dome of white skull bone seeming to wish to break through its thin sheath of blue-veined skin. The shadows beneath his eyes sliding ever down.

  “Colin? Can you wake up for me? Can you wake up for me now?”

  His eyelids stuttered, opened.

  “You’re here.”

  “Of course I’m here.”

  He licked his lips.

  “I thought so,” she said. She tilted the straw from the water glass to his lips. He sipped.

  “Thank … you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She stroked his face, his chin.

  “You need a shave. You know that?”

  He smiled. Light flickering in his eyes.

  Yes. Go ahead. Shave me, he thought. Why not? She took her hand away, rested it lightly on his chest. The cancer there inside him. As though her touch could stay its crawl.

  “Do you think you could eat something?”

  ‘No.” And then, “sorry.”

  She felt his breath hitch beneath her hand. Short bursts of breath. His fists clenched at his sides.

  “Colin?”

  Should she call for Maggie, their hospice nurse? She’d sent her off to the kitchen for lunch. It was as though he’d read her mind.

  “It’s … okay,” he said.

  And it was. There wasn’t any pain. The morphine was taking care of that. This breathing thing was incidental. He didn’t have to breathe. Why the fists should clench he didn’t know. They relaxed on their own accord and that was better. That was fine. In fact he felt good now, really, truly good. He could sleep again and it would be a simple thing and welcome. But she wanted him awake. And he wanted to see her. Watch her tuck her hair behind her ear as she was doing now.

  So beautiful. Just as he had met her thirty-six years before. Lovely years. Their paintings on the walls attested to that, attested to one another. Watching her he felt a kind of euphoria, a sense of rightness, of balance. She held his hand awhile.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  Was she? She wasn’t sure.

  And then she was.

  “Then go, my love,” she said.

  He closed his eyes. Moments later she felt his grip slide away beneath her hand but she held to him anyway and watched his chest rise and fall, his breathing even. It was perhaps an hour, perhaps more, before his breathing paused and stopped and she knew that he was dead, knew it in the creak and ache of her bones, in the withering of her skin, in her thinning hands and the clouded vision of her eyes and she felt her own release, simple and gradual as a leaf in the waning sunlight of Autumn as they fell together to the earth.

  ‒ Thanks to Kevin Kovelant

  Table of Contents

  Also by Written Backwards

  Copyright

  OBSERVATIONS ON HORROR BURNOUT

  THE POETRY OF LIFE

  FAIR

  THE LAST RUNG ON THE LADDER

  FAIL-SAFE

  A RIFT IN REFLECTION

  FOLIE à DEUX ( THE MADNESS OF TWO)

  WINDOWS, MIRRORS, DOORS

  REFLECTING ON REFLECTIONS

  PRAYER

  MIRROR IMAGE

  THE AGONIZING GUILT OF RELIEF ( LAST DAYS OF A READY-MADE V I CTIM )

  BLACK RIVER #1

  THE BLACK CROW OF BODDINSTRAßE

  PRESCIENCE

  A FLASH OF RED

  THE SPEED OF SOUND

  RED RUNNER VS. THE SURGEON, ISSUE 18

  WELCOME HOME, DARLING

  THE DEAD COLLECTION

  WHISPER #1 ( A WARNING )

  WATCH ME

  WHISPER #2 ( A PROPHECY )

  THE BIGGER BEDROOM

  PUT ME TO DREAM

  THAT PERILOUS STUFF

  RECOGNIZING TREES

  KNOW YOUR CODE

  ARBITRATION

  3-DOT PEOPLE

  BLACK RIVER #2

  SILVER THREAD, HAMMER RING

  REFLECTIONS THROUGH THE RAVEN’S EYE

  THE OFFERING ON THE HILL

  BEYOND SYMMETRY

  THOSE WHO WATCH FROM ON HIGH

  FOLIE à PLUSIEURS ( THE MADNESS OF MANY )

  BLOOD DUST

  INSOMNIA IN REVERSE

  THE WHIPPING GIRLS

  PROMISE

  SECONDS