“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”
When one reduces one’s life to a series of meaningless obsessions, the last stage is to turn other people into obsessions.
I wish I’d been a better husband and father. I wish I’d been a better teacher and writer. I wish I’d been a better man.
Who knows? Perhaps the universe, or life, or something important that we can’t see, is a Möbius loop after all—that by sliding down one side of things we can come out on the other. Or maybe not. I’m very tired.
Finished, Dale reread the letter and saved it to hard disk. He glanced at his watch and then had to look again. It was twelve minutes before midnight. The evening and night and year and century had almost slipped away while he was writing. Dale considered printing the thing, but there was no paper in the printer and he was too exhausted to replenish it.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said aloud. If anyone was interested in finding the note, they would look in the computer. He left the machine on and went down to the basement, searching around the worktable for the bundle of clothesline he had seen there on the day he’d moved in. It was only clothesline, perhaps thirty or forty feet, but it was thick and expertly coiled. Dale wondered if it had been Duane or his Old Man who had coiled the rope with the easy expertise of someone who had worked with his hands all of his life. It didn’t matter.
Dale took the rope up to the kitchen, untied one end, and used a butcher knife to cut a three-foot length of line from the bundle. He furled this in a loop, left the main bundle of rope on the counter, and carried the knife, a flashlight, and the short loop of rope up the stairs to the second floor.
He paused as he reached the white barrier of sheets at the top of the steps, then plunged the knife into the taut fabric, ripping down and sideways as if disemboweling an enemy. The closest sheet separated with a long slash down the center, but the sheet behind that one showed only a ragged cut. Dropping the knife, and slipping the rope and flashlight into his pocket, Dale used his hands and fingernails to open the cut wider, tugging, clawing, and finally biting his way through the thin cotton like some predator chewing its way out of its own amniotic sac.
The second floor was dark and cold. Nothing stirred. Ignoring the front bedroom, Dale flicked on the flashlight and walked to the rear bedroom.
It was just as he had last seen it—the children’s rocker in the center of the room, the ungainly chandelier above it, the complicated water stain spread across the ceiling ten feet above the floor.
Trying not to think and mostly succeeding, Dale entered the room, set the flat-bottomed flashlight on the floor so that it threw a circle of light on the ceiling, and concentrated on knotting the end of the rope into a noose that would not give way. When he was done, he stared up at the chandelier. It looked sturdy enough to hold five men his weight. The spreading water stain all around it kept shifting in the yellow light, one minute looking like a fresco of warring men and horses, then curling into storm clouds, then resembling nothing so much as a spreading pool of blood. Dale blinked and looked away, sliding the rope and knot through his hands.
I’ve been wandering between worlds since the night the shotgun shell misfired. Time to choose one world or the other.
The child’s rocker held his weight as he stood on tiptoe, tossed the loose end of the rope around the central axis of the metal chandelier, made a triple knot that would not give way, tugged on it, lifted his feet and hung there a minute from his hands, then found the child’s rocker under his soles again. Even with some stretching, his feet should stay two feet and more off the floor.
Dale slipped the noose around his neck, tugged it tight, and kicked the chair out from under him. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t. . .
The clothesline cut deep into his neck at once, cutting off all air. Flashbulbs exploded behind his eyes. Instinctively, Dale kicked and flailed, reaching above him to grab the clothesline, but the slip knot pulled even tighter and his fingers skittered and slipped on the rope, unable to give him enough leverage to lift his own weight for more than a second or two before the choking began again.
The room seemed to come alive around him—shadows leaping from the water-stained ceiling into the corners, dark forms dancing around and below him like Indians whirling around a campfire. The room filled with voices, a multitude of sibilant, urgent whispers hissing at him.
Dale felt unconsciousness flapping around him like a raven’s wings, batting against his face, trying to enfold him. Then the flapping of ravens’ wings became the triumphant howling of hellhounds. He tried to grab the rope and lift himself again, but his hands had lost all strength and his swelling fingers slipped off the rope even as the clothesline cut deeper into his neck. Dale’s vision grew red and then slid into black even as he kicked and coughed.
His last sensory impressions were of great movement, of noise exploding around him, of sharp sticks or skeletal hands striking him and clawing at him, and then of flying into the night, falling into blackness.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DALE coughed, blinked, and tried to breathe. He was lying on the floor, there was something heavy lying on him, and the flashlight had been knocked over, its beam stabbing out through the bedroom door. He was getting some air, but the rope was still choking him, cutting into his throat.
Dale reached up and pried the noose looser, his own nails cutting into the already torn skin of his neck. Finally he had the constriction loose and he pulled the rope free, tugging the line through the slip knot and throwing it away from him into the cold darkness. He got to his knees, bits of lathing and plaster falling from his shoulders and hair, dust settling around him. Dale struggled to his feet, retrieved the flashlight, and shined it around the room and then upward.
The entire heavy chandelier had come down on top of him. No, most of the damned ceiling had come down around him. The chandelier’s metal cable still snaked upward into the attic and its bolts were still firmly embedded in parts of the ruined ceiling that had fallen, but the cable had played out enough slack during the ceiling’s collapse to keep Dale from strangling. Shifting the flashlight beam, Dale could see all the way to the torn and dripping interior of the rooftop twenty feet above him. The water had dripped through the ruined shingles and roof for years, decades, one drip at a time, soaking the plaster, rotting the lathing, weakening the ceiling. What had seemed like an hour of kicking and slow dying to Dale had been only a few seconds before the whole mess gave way.
He started to laugh, but the attempt hurt his throat. He ran his fingers along his neck—bruised, torn skin, but seemingly nothing worse.
“Jesus,” he said hoarsely into the darkness. “What a fuckup.” The phrase seemed so funny to him now that he had to laugh, sore throat or no sore throat. Then he began to weep. Dale dropped to his knees and sobbed like a child. He knew only one thing at that moment— he wanted to live. Death was an obscenity, and it had been obscene to court it the way he had. Death was the theft of every choice and every breath and every option the future had offered him, pain and promise alike, and Dale Stewart had always hated thieves. Death was the cold silence of King Lear; it was the never, never, never, never, never that had chilled him from childhood on. From the day Duane had died.
Dale had no idea what he was going to do next, but he was finished not only with hurrying death, but with embracing the cold and solitude in this sad simulation of death. He wanted to go home—wherever home was—but not this way, not here, not so far from any real home he might have left behind.