“These never leave the shelf, they never get unwrapped,” I said. “If you wanna read one of them, tell me and I’ll get you a copy, or xeroxes.”
“Cool,” she said in a disinterested whisper, pulling off her boots, long, sleek things that suggested she should be carrying a riding crop.
She leaned back on the futon in exhaustion and put her hands behind her head. There was an elegant and casual muscularity to her tattooed limbs, a pliability that I would later come to know under entirely different circumstances.
Kimberle had not been installed in my apartment more than a day or two (crying and sniffling, refusing to eat with the usual determination of the newly heartbroken) when I noticed that Native Son was gone, leaving a gaping hole on my shelf. I assumed that she’d taken it down to read in whatever second I had turned my back. I trotted over to the futon and peeked around and under the pillow. The sheets were neatly folded, the blanket too. Had anyone else been in the apartment except us two? No, not a soul, not even Brian Eno, who’d been out hunting. I contemplated my dilemma: how to ask a potential suicide if they’re ripping you off.
Sometime the next day — after a restless night of weeping and pillow punching which I could hear in the bedroom, even with the door closed — Kimberle managed to shower and put on a fresh black T, then lumbered into the kitchen. She barely nodded. It seemed that if she’d actually completed the gesture, her head might have been in danger of rolling off.
I suppose I should have been worried, given the threat of suicide so boldly announced, about Kimberle’s whereabouts when she wasn’t home. But I wasn’t, I wasn’t worried at all. I didn’t throw out my razors, I didn’t hide the belts, I didn’t turn off the pilot in the oven. It’s not that I didn’t think she was at risk, because I did, I absolutely did. It’s just that when she told me she needed to be stopped, I took it to mean she needed me to shelter her until she recovered, which I assumed would be soon. I thought, in fact, that I’d pretty much done my duty as a friend by bringing her home and feeding her a cherry-smoked ham sandwich.
Truth is, I was much more focused on the maniac whose quarry was still bounding out there in the wilderness. I would pull out the local print-only paper everyday when I got to the smokehouse and make for the police blotter. I knew, of course, that once the villain committed to the deed, it’d be front-page news, but I held out hope for clues from anticipatory crimes.
Once, there was an incident on a hiking trail, two girls were approached by a white man in his fifties, sallow and scurvy, who tried to grab one of them. The other girl turned out to be a member of the campus tae kwon do team and rapid-kicked his face before he somehow managed to get away. For several days after that, I was on the lookout for any man in his 50s who might come in to the smokehouse looking like tenderized meat. And I avoided all trails, even the carefully landscaped routes between campus buildings.
Because the smokehouse was isolated in order to realize its function, and its clientele fairly specialized — we sold gourmet meat (including bison, ostrich and alligator) mostly by phone and online, though our bestseller was summer sausage, as common in central Indiana as Oscar Mayer — there wasn’t much foot traffic in and out of the store and I actually spent a great deal of time alone. After I’d processed the orders, packed the UPS boxes, replenished and rearranged the display cases, made coffee and added some chips to the smoker, there wasn’t much for me to do but sit there, trying to study while avoiding giving too much importance to the noises outside that suggested furtive steps in the yard, or shadows that looked like bodies bent to hide below the window sill, just waiting for me to lift the frame and expose my neck for strangulation.
One evening, I came home to find Kimberle with my Santoku knife in hand, little pyramids of chopped onions, green pepper and slimy octopus arms with their puckering cups arranged on the counter. Brian Eno reached up from the floor, her calico belly and paws extended towards the heaven promised above.
“Dinner,” Kimberle announced as soon as I stepped in, lighting a flame under the wok.
I kicked my boots off, stripped my scarf from around my neck and let my coat slide from my body, all along yakking about the psychopath and his apparent disinterest this year.
“Maybe he finally died,” offered Kimberle.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought when we were about fifteen, ’cause it took until January that year, remember? But then I realized, it’s gotta be more than one guy,” I said.
“You think he’s got accomplices?” Kimberle asked, a tendril of smoke rising from the wok.
“Or copy cats,” I said. “I’m into the copy-cat theory.”
That’s about when I noticed Sapphire angling in unfamiliar fashion on the bookshelf. Woolf’s Orlando was no longer beside it. Had I considered what my reaction would have been any other time, I might have said rage. But seeing the jaunty leaning that suddenly gave the shelves a deliberately decorated look, I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach. I was still catching my breath when I turned around and saw Kimberle. The Santoku had left her right hand, embedding its blade upright on the knuckles of her left. Blood seeped sparingly from between her fingers but collected quickly around the octopus pile, which now looked wounded and alive.
I took Kimberle to the county hospital, where they stitched the flaps of skin back together. Her hand, now bright and swollen like an aposematic amphibian, rested on the dashboard all the way home. We drove back in silence, her eyes closed, head inclined and threatening to hit the windshield.
In the kitchen, the onion and green pepper pyramids were intact on the counter but the octopus had vanished. Smudged paw tracks led out Brian Eno’s usual route through the living room window. Kimberle stood unsteadily under the light, her face shadowed. I sat down on the futon.
“What happened to Native Son, to Orlando?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Did you take them?”
She spun, slowly, on the heel of her boot, dragging her other foot around in a circle.
“Kimberle. .”
“I hurt,” she said, “I really hurt.” Her skin was a bluish red as she threw herself on my lap and bawled.
A week later, Native Son and Orlando were still missing but Kimberle and I hadn’t been able to talk about it. Our schedules failed to coincide and my mother, widowed and alone on the other side of town (confused but tolerant of my decision to live away from her), had gone to visit relatives in Miami, leaving me to deal with her cat, Brian Eno’s brother, a daring aerialist she’d named Alfredo Codona, after the Mexican trapeze artist who’d killed himself and his ex-wife. This complicated my life a bit more than usual, and I found myself drained after dealing with the temporarily housebound Alfredo, whose pent-up frustrations tended to result in toppled chairs, broken picture frames and a scattering of magazines and knick-knacks. It felt like I had to piece my mother’s place back together every single night she was gone.
One time, I was so tired when I got home I headed straight for the tub and finished undressing as the hot water nipped at my knees. I adjusted the temperature, then I let myself go under, blowing my breath out in fat, noisy bubbles. I came back up and didn’t bother to lift my lids. I used my toes to turn off the faucet, then went into a semi-somnambulist state in which neither my mother nor Alfredo Codona could engage me, Native Son and Orlando were back where they belonged, and Kimberle. . Kimberle was. . laughing.