The Open Curtain (25 page)

Carefully she reached out, tugged the sheet off the clothesline. Behind it, he had torn up the wooden flooring, heaping it splintered and jagged against one wall, exposing the bare earth beneath. He seemed to have worked the earth, for it was loamy and when she stepped onto it she sunk up to her ankles. In the middle, on its back, sunk almost to the lid, was the old refrigerator.

There were, she could see, flies creeping in and out of it through a tear in the rubber seal of the door. She put her ear closer to the tear, heard a dull hissing within.

She went to the mud-caked window and broke it out with the poker, to get the smell out a little, to get more light in. She looked around. In one corner lay a pile of filthy bedding, stained and frayed. Next to it, the box he had kept in his room, sitting directly on the dirt, mold creeping up its side.

She opened it, saw again the church books. She removed them one by one and dropped them atop the torn-out flooring. Taped to the bottom of the box was the map, but she could see now, from the way it stood out in the tired light, that there was a raised rectangle in the map’s center, something hidden.

She peeled the map from the box’s damp bottom. Underneath were several sheets of paper, folded, words typed on them. The first began:

Oh Christ,
she thought. It went on like that, giving the facts of the murder and the trial, speaking too of the hitching weight Young had used to weigh down the body, some sort of high-school project that seemed to have infected Rudd’s life. The ritual nature of the murder that seemed, at least slightly, to foreshadow the murder of her parents. No wonder Rudd had gone mad, she thought; he had written about a murder and then had almost been killed in a similar fashion—it was as if he had raised the dead. More disturbing, she thought, he had begun to see her as Elling, for Elling, it turned out, was the partner in crime, the one on whom Young tried to blame the murder when caught by the police, the one the police could never find.
Like Lael,
she thought, and then,
In what sense for Rudd was I his partner in crime?

At the end of the essay was a single sheet of paper. She tugged it out. There, written in Rudd’s hand, in tiny script,

Then there was a gap, a blank expanse, at the very bottom of the page an additional verse in Rudd’s hand:

Her hands, she could feel, were shaking.
I am surprisingly calm,
she told herself and indeed in her mind she was, despite the strong tremors of her body. Her hands let the papers fall. She saw herself step toward the refrigerator door and bend down to take the handle. She popped it out of its lock and then, in a single movement, wrenched the door open.

Inside, the stink of putrid meat, the box filthy. A cloud of black flies, thousands of them, a tremendous symphony of them, bouncing against her arms and face and spinning about the room. Covered with flies, she realized she knew that it was Rudd who had murdered her parents, and knew as well that she had known this deep down for some time. The flies swirled about her and out the door, and in little more than a moment she felt herself adrift again, irrevocably and utterly alone.

But the feeling did not last. What, she wondered, was that stirring, there, in the box, rising up, now that the flies were gone?

I
t took him a long moment to understand where he was. At first there was only a gray space, featureless, unlit, as tight upon and around him as a coffin, which slowly began to congeal, if congeal was the right word, into something else. The space opened itself up, fled back and away from him until he felt he could sit up, and perhaps even stand—though he remained motionless, unmoving, the relation between his body and his mind perplexed.

He was, he could see, in a room, but a room washed out as if seen mostly in darkness. There, the edge of a cabinet, glass-fronted and snug against a wall. Furniture draped with a light tapestry, fringed at one edge. He could begin to make out the wooden frame of a bed, its stain chipped away along the edge that touched the floor, just below the tapestry’s fringe. He was lying on a plank floor that had been, he could smell, recently waxed. He turned his head and saw the gryphon-pawed legs and base of a swivel chair done up in dark leather, its back dimpled and puckered with rivets. It was sitting near a fireplace of white brick. Two narrow pillars, perhaps marble, perhaps a finely painted plaster, ran from floor to mantel. The grate was not free but rather tiled over with ceramic, the casement for a cast-iron burner bulging like a blood blister in its center. The stove was warm, he could feel from the floor, and the chair could be rotated, or swiveled rather, to take full advantage of the heat. Though at the moment the chair was facing the bed. It was conceivable, he thought, that he had fallen out of one or the other, chair or bed. More likely the chair than the bed, since he was fully clothed.

When the room seemed to have gained a certain consistency, a certain rigor, he moved his hands, which had become, in his fall (if there had been a fall), trapped beneath his body. They were tingling, and one was beginning
to ache. His nails, he saw, were jagged, broken, and he wondered if he had bitten them down himself. Was he the sort of man to bite his nails down?

He pulled himself up to sitting, turned to his knees and, groaning, pulled himself into the chair. The heavy spring squeaked, squealed.

From the chair he could see someone in the bed, a young woman, turned on her side and away from him, atop the tapestry but beneath a coverlet. Her shoulders were bare and uncovered, her hair streaming along the bolster.

He looked about. Had he been here before? Yes, he thought he had been there before. Was this his room? No, surely not. But how did he know it was not his room? He knew. Yes, but how did he know? He simply knew; wasn’t that sufficient?

It is my father’s apartment,
he thought, and for a moment this seemed the right answer, but then a moment later,
No,
he realized,
my father is long dead. A suicide.

Then whose room? The girl’s?
How could he tell if he did not know who she was? Yet something stopped him from walking around the bed and looking her full in the face. Perhaps simply the fact of her bare shoulder. Was this a woman he knew, perhaps intimately? It was not simply his wife, of that he was certain. He had not seen his wife for some time and the terms upon which they had parted could hardly be considered amicable. One does what one can but one occasionally makes mistakes, even errors that acquire a certain difficult gravity. Yet what was a wife for if not to understand one, to accept one despite one’s foibles, to help one strive for betterment?

Or was he in fact correct? Why was he having such difficulty, then, remembering not only his wife’s face, but her name?

He cleared his throat. The woman in the bed did not shift. He cleared his throat again, louder this time. She was a sound sleeper.

He allowed his gaze to wander the room. A very simple moulding near the ceiling, a runner of painted wood interrupting the flatness of the upper wall, above it a slight curve, a rounding, just at the jointure of wall and ceiling itself. It relaxed the eye. Lower, a closed, narrow door leading perhaps to a closet. An open doorway, leading into a kitchen, a tiled floor, one edge of a skirted sink.

“Miss?” he said. He cleared his throat, stared at the back of her head. “I fear I find myself in something of an embarrassing predicament,” he said. “My memory has deserted me. I must admit I am unsure of where I am or even of who you are.”

The woman still did not respond.
Perhaps,
he thought,
she is deaf. Or perhaps she is doing this purposefully as a means to punish me or drive me away.

“If I do know you,” he said. “Might I ask you to turn toward me and pay a little heed? I have no doubt that the right word or phrase, the right gesture from you, will propel me to a speedy return of my senses.”

When the woman still did not respond, he began to be very afraid.

He stayed still for a moment, regarding her back. Then carefully he reached out and with a finger and thumb took hold of the top edge of the coverlet, tugged it carefully up and over her shoulders. The woman seemed to settle slightly against the bolster, the movement almost imperceptible but enough to cause him to withdraw his hand. In pulling the coverlet up, he saw, he had freed her foot, which lay sole upward at the extreme of the bed, curled.
Like a dead fish,
he thought.

He made his way slowly around the bottom of the bed, stooping forward and skew to see her face. Yet even before he was all the way around he could see that he had been right to be afraid. He could see through her hair something wrong with her forehead: blood matting together strands of her hair and puddling in her eye socket.

He turned the coverlet down and saw she was naked to her waist, then folded it to render her bare from head to toe. With the flat of his hand, he pushed her shoulder, turned the body face up. The skin was lukewarm and rubbery and it held the imprint of his hand where he had pushed. Beneath the body the tapestry was stained dark with blood and he could see her left temple caved in and soft, dribbling both blood and brain. Her belly too was neatly slit, the gash almost long enough for him to slip his fist into, he thought, and then wondered,
Why would I think a thing like that?

So,
he thought,
not her apartment. At least no longer.

Shocked at himself, he reached out and touched her neck, though he already knew she was dead. On the bedside table was a vial, empty. There was a knife on the table as well, an ivory-handled stiletto, its blade sword-shaped and sharp on both sides.
Why,
he wondered,
do I remain so calm?
He reached out and brushed the woman’s hair back and tried to recognize her, despite her broken skull, and thought perhaps he did but could not force a name onto her. Picking up the knife he examined it more closely, the blade four or five inches long and well-milled, its bevel even and careful.
No,
he thought,
I should not have picked that up, the police shall want to see that and just where it lay.

And then thought, suddenly,
Suppose the murderer is still here?

Carefully he made his way to the smaller door in the room. He turned the handle with little noise then threw the door open with a single, taut gesture. Save for shirts and coats, a top shelf of starched collars, the closet was empty. The rest of the bedroom too. In the kitchen, the space under the skirt of the sink was bare save for a small tin of white powder that he took for lye. The cabinets were empty as well. A sitting room just off the kitchen was equally empty.

Still carrying the knife, he went to the apartment’s front door, opened it. It led onto a landing paneled in dark wood, a white honeycomb tile lining the floor, a set of stairs descending to a street door. Only when he saw the street door did he begin to hear street noises, muffled, as if they hadn’t existed before the door had been perceived. There was another apartment on the opposite side of the landing, a door identical to his own. To the right, the open door of a bathroom.