There has to be a knife, p.11
There Has to Be a Knife, page 11
I don’t know. It’s not like they abandoned her.
I should have felt something.
You can’t see that type of thing. The person doesn’t want you to.
That’s why we broke up.
I haven’t spoken yet about the breakup, not really, to Matthew. These six months after we broke up, I kept to myself, like a numb vulture somehow circling its own carcass.
Did she leave you a note?
Bro—
She planned it and didn’t leave a note? Come on, yo. How can you die and not want to say a few things? You don’t disappear yourself without having a few things to say.
I read once—
You read?
I read once, you know, you’re not supposed to find an answer for anything.
What the fuck does that mean?
I think it means to chill.
Yo, a note. A note. A note for me. For real? No note for me? Not an email? Not a Facebook status? Give me a fucking break.
The only thing I have to turn to is my anger and my anger is not even mitigating my pain. I can’t be mad at her for not leaving me a note: I can’t even conceive of it.
There’s a note for me. There has to be.
The callousness of her parents and their constant fuck-ups with her, hiding the note, the meander of her friends—it all makes more sense than no note. I can’t organize myself to believe that I meant nothing to her—that is impossible. I want my anger out of me and into her.
Instead, grief: the blue colour of the flame. Its hottest part.
How long you been wearing that shirt for?
Can you smell me?
You gotta change the shirt.
Anna loved this shirt. I smell my armpits hard in the bathroom. I’m looking for her in that musk. When she lay in bed with me and turned over to face me. The way we spent the day slow, small kisses, our smells warping into each other. I can’t find her in that smell.
When I come back, I tell Matthew that I don’t even know if I like Anna. I hope for him to look at me with empathy and concern, but instead, he thinks that I’ve misspoken.
You mean Kali.
I don’t want to, but I correct him: Anna.
Matthew does not say anything. The only thing I have to show how important she was to me is duration. I have no keepsakes from our time together.
Then: Do you mean because she killed herself?
No. I say it without knowing if I mean it but knowing that I want to say it and witness what it does to him.
Matthew nods a little bob.
A burst of lightning outside, and for a second, we are both lit up white. Anna throwing them down from heaven not too happy. Did Anna have any childhood friends? I know the answer. She was not like us, immigrants carved from their past by movement. Me and Matthew exactly once talked about what it would be like if we had grown up back home together, but we did not get nostalgic for lost childhood friends: they were figments of imagination. For any real purpose, they did not exist.
She had no past. Anna had refused to see anyone from before fourteen. She said little about them, except to tell me that she would not say anything: life before fourteen did not matter. I knew she was raised in Barrie, or Whitby, or some other white place, and they left because her brother had too many dark friends who were getting in trouble with him. Her father was from North York originally. Their move was treated as a homecoming. I knew when she was twelve some friends had robbed her on Halloween by inviting her over and then mugging her once she entered the front door. Not even of her candy—of her cash. They had punched her in the stomach, and also stolen pieces of her Ninja Turtles outfit. She said she went home crying to her mom, and the distress was deepened because she couldn’t go back out. Her costume was ruined. She tried to talk about it in a light tone, but I could hear her voice waver. I didn’t know if there were any happy memories or more bad ones.
Matthew is not looking at me. When I asked her about it a few days later she looked at me like I was an idiot. I asked her again and she said: I forget. I told you that? Forgetting is a tool that only some people understand. Matthew looks out the window, his index finger chattering on the table surface, his leg pumping up and down; the nerves are falling out of him and into me, making me nervous.
What’s wrong?
I have to talk to you.
We talking.
I gotta talk to you.
What’s wrong?
I saw Bernie yesterday. Matthew stops looking out the window and looks at me, but he can’t hold the eye contact. He looks out the window, again, at a passing streetcar that stops and opens its doors. No one gets off; a few people get on. Will it snow tonight, later? The bar door opens and shuts quickly and a bark of wind chills us. He gave me a note.
So? About what?
Like. A note.
What it say?
From Anna.
Fuck you.
Bro. Matthew looks back at me. My body freezes; it blows up from inside my stomach, up my chest, like vomit, and expands into my entire body. It cripples me—I cannot move and I stare at Matthew while he breaks eye contact again. My hand is cool on the beer glass, and then it is not, it’s hot, and I have to let go, and I put my hand in my pocket to hide the fist I’m making. Do I scream, hit, or sit here dully? Matthew’s eyes glow with tears. The tears don’t drop, and he wipes them away. He curls his shoulders into himself and is silent. Do you want the note?
Do you have it?
It’s at home.
I don’t know.
It doesn’t say much—
Don’t tell me.
Sorry.
No, tell me. Tell me.
It says sorry. It’s short. She thanked me.
For what?
Nothing special … just whatever.
My heart isn’t pounding. It is slowing down. Wheezing, barely there. I knew Bernie liked him, because Matthew always had a dark girlfriend, and so Bernie thought he wasn’t going to try and fuck his daughter. This isn’t Matthew’s fault. I don’t know. Maybe it is. I have to leave Matthew because I don’t know what to do, or what I could do. I look around the bar for something I can use as a weapon. I look for something that will puncture his skin and make all that blood come loose from his body. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry at him and my body is confused. I want to choke him and hold him at the same time. I stare at him, unable to say what I need to, and he looks out the window, allowing the silence to become thick with physicality. I wish, for half a second, that he could get angry at me, and do something about it, so I could stop thinking for a minute. I imagine a future girlfriend asking about my past and looking at the internet for a trail, discovering that my longest girlfriend killed herself. Across from Matthew, I lick the yellow glue on the paper and close the joint. I take the table candle outside and light it, inhale a gulp, let my eyes drop when the smoke sinks into my skull.
How close was Matthew to Anna, exactly? Before I can contain my thoughts they start sliding in a slippery chain—why did he feel so deeply when she died, anyway? Why did he pull himself out from my life so quick when she died? I want to crumble or cry or something as the streetcar makes its way up Spadina. When me and Anna broke up I guessed Matthew would have to choose friendships; I mean, he had known her for as long as I had, and they would talk too, they went way back, he would talk to her about his girls. I remember them together in the summer, at Dance Cave, dancing while I swayed at the side, too faded from drink, his hands on her hips and the way she moved comfortable with him: I was proud of myself for being so fine with that. They had known each other for ten years. Same as me, same as me. It was so hot in there that night, with so many people, and I never brought it up because I didn’t know what I had seen. I had seen nothing, no, not really. Their bodies close, the aura of familiarity, friendship, both moving basically on beat. The way his hands stayed on her hips, the muscles in them, the tendons; finally, when he moved his hands away from her hips, they stayed together while one song phased into another. He leaned into her ear and spoke—she didn’t tell me what he said.
The next night, in her bedroom, I wanted to ask her while she rolled a joint, but I was hungover, it was late. I never asked Matthew. She seemed so comfortable with his body, his aggression, the way he moved in unison with her. Maybe it was the booze. We would go to the pool together that summer, before that night, and they would play together in the water, their bodies becoming slowly and slowly familiar. I never questioned it. I liked having a best friend that I didn’t question—I liked having two best friends. I would tell Anna again and again that she was my best friend without stopping to think about it.
Once, after the pool, after a blazed day, and her skin red, her soaked bikini on the ground, she started kissing me, and she asked me if I was bored with her.
What do you mean?
We’ve been together for so long.
I said no, I said no, never, and she said, Not even after all these years? She was wet and tired and sun-drunk. Did we have anything to drink that day? We tried for a beer on a patio, but it was useless; the beer was too heavy and the sun was hanging low and angry, smog everywhere in the daytime. She laughed and asked me if it would be fun to bring someone into bed and I said no. Then I said who? And I asked her who she wanted to fuck, and she said, Anybody, nobody, it doesn’t matter, I’m joking, and she kissed me on the lips and I asked her, maybe I was drunk, I don’t think so, I asked her if she wanted to fuck Matthew and she said, What! And we had this normal conversation while I slid into her, still half-hard, but filling up, and she was wet, and she said she didn’t say that, that’s not what she meant, but her head moved back and she let me kiss her on the neck, a thing she generally didn’t allow (she was afraid of marks), and didn’t ask me to stop and I asked her to think of Matthew fucking her with me and as quickly as I started she must have been drunk because she told me to cum in her and she asked for it again and again, which I was so unused to and she clenched onto me and started asking for me to please do it and I came and I lay on top of her after and stayed in her, which she did not allow; usually by now she would be rushing to squat over the toilet and watch my sperm drop out. I don’t know how long it had been or how loud we had been, but we lay there and didn’t say anything. We didn’t fuck for a month after that—I saw her once a week, we talked almost every day, said good night in texts, but her body went away from me.
A raccoon comes down the side of the building, fat boy clanking on a metal ladder I can’t see. The moon is big and hot tonight, beaming like the white eye of God. The raccoon’s wobble stops. He looks at me, his belly just above the ground, aluminum foil flecked in his mouth. I’m outside our old apartment building at Yonge and Eglinton. Tender brown and yellow bricks, and when I look up at the topmost windows, our old apartment on the fourth floor, I see the same wide-open windows to let the heat out. It’s an old building and when the first, second, third floors turn their heat up, it rises to suffocate the fourth floor, even in the winter. The windows have to stay open. When it snows outside, it boils inside.
Bernie owns this building. It is old and rotten. The first four months me and Anna lived here I did not know that it was a family-owned thing. I gave her $650 on the fourth of every month in cash, and she paid the person she called our landlord. He was our landlord, correct—she lived in this kind of slippery crevice of language. I came home early one day and the two of them were in our kitchen, whisper-fighting, a pot of tea cooling on our breakfast table. The rain was hammering outside and towels were stopping a leak near our window. I remember his yellow teeth matched his zip-up sweater. I’m scared of rich people who don’t fix their teeth. Rich people who can’t accept their wealth.
Bernie: Oh … I didn’t know Anna had guests …
I looked at the key in my hand, and Anna left the kitchen without speaking and stuck her head out the window, pretending to source our leak. I didn’t say anything to Bernie, reminded Anna that the leak was going to create more water damage, and shut myself in our bedroom. This was my house and that was my right. Our shoulders must have touched as I made my way past him.
You didn’t even tell him to take his shoes off? I said to her later.
I had slippers for guests that cost me twenty dollars. She was gasping for air. She reverted to this panic attack in moments like this, and I knew that they could be fake, the way they activated the moment she needed them to, to get away from me.
I’m still on his health insurance. He had to drop something off. He owns the building.
The walls of our apartment began sweating with this revelation. Her head was still outside the window and she took in big chunks of piercing air. I grabbed her by the belt and pulled her in. She sat silent. All this would be hers someday: my rent was going towards a mortgage that, on his death, would be given to her. I don’t know how many other properties they owned, but even one building in midtown Toronto had to make them millionaires, on paper, even if Bernie was the type to claim his “liquid cash” was tight. When she sat quiet my anger surprised me by moving on.
At least now I’ll marry rich, I joked.
I didn’t think to ask what medication Bernie was bringing her. I knew of at least three pills that her doctor was trying in combination. She had emergency benzos. She had a daily pill. She had an evening one, for sleep. She could disappear into the bathroom and reappear a different person. I wondered what Anna would be like if the doctor managed to extinguish the flame that was scorching her, but I didn’t think I had the capacity to enquire. I hope the note she left me revealed it all in detail.
Outside the building now, the memory of her as violent as anything real, I remember going through the prescription bottles in the bathroom, the long science names making me feel ESL again. They were like spells and if I could pronounce them accurate they would reveal something about her.
I didn’t feel guilt when I eyed those bottles and their long names. She had left me out of the decision, just telling me that her sex drive would bounce up and down. Instead, a coalition of family and Emina and others persuaded her to see a psychologist. When I touched the orange plastic bottles, I wondered what they did, what power they held over her, but I didn’t ask. I realized I had not signed a lease, and none of the furniture in this apartment, except a dresser, was mine. The pills seemed to work: she slept regularly. The one side effect she complained about was night sweats.
Did she stop taking them? I don’t know. Again, I didn’t ask—I wanted the medication to quiet down what was raging in her, because it meant she would have enough energy left to soothe me. If she began a new medication, I knew, because she became sleepy for a month, taking two-to-three-hour naps in the middle of the day. Her day would be divided in half by these. She would be sound asleep when I left for work at three p.m. and startling awake at two a.m. when I got back. She would ask me to cook for her, and it was enough if I pan-fried some dumplings. After the last new pill, when I still lived with her, and her sleeping schedule came back to normal, I finally asked if they were working. Anna grabbed my cheek with her hand and then clutched my chin. It began to hurt.
Of course they are.
I moved out for the last time two months later. I packed three pairs of Nikes, a duffle bag full of clothes, and that was it. I left in the afternoon, while she was in class, and felt no urge to leave an explanation. She would understand. I texted Emina to let her know what I was doing but was too scared to outright admit that me and Anna had not spoken about it.
Her parents’ house is long and narrow, two windows up top, two windows on the main floor, and a tiny crack of chimney on the right side. A kid’s drawing. A puff of smoke. Their lawn is brown-green and cut badly, short near the roadside but tufted near the windows. One-car drive with a black Lexus that I squeeze past. The wooden gate to the back has no clasp; it swings lightly. The side window over the kitchen seems like a good entry point: the motion detector light near the side door comes on. I wait. My breath in the air, and I’m sure there’s a raccoon somewhere I can’t see. No shadows, no movements. I move again.
The kitchen window looks large enough to fit me. I look around for something to stand on. The light has gone off, but when I move, it pops back on. I convince myself that nothing will happen. It’s okay. It’s cool. I flip over the empty recycling box and look at the window. A small wooden block in place to prevent it from being opened. It has not been slotted correctly, and with a little nudge I could move it, but it’ll fall into the sink and make a noise that will travel upstairs.
I watched a few YouTube videos on lock-picking. I don’t want to break the window or cut the mesh: I want to be a ghost, to visit Anna like she is. There are no cars on the street. It doesn’t matter. I look to the sky and ask who’s watching. I’ve been to this house a few times before and a small memory tumbles at me. It was an awkward dinner, a birthday party, I think seventeen, and she introduced me to her parents as her friend. We had emailed about this—I was warned—but a shot of pain came at me anyway. Her parents allowed us to drink beer in the basement (only beer, no hard liquor), and I swallowed five straight. She drank nine and puked, evergreen. I held her hair over the toilet until Bernie came down and asked me to leave. Her hair was matted to her skullskin by all the hot sweat that appears when a body moves with sickness. I held her nape when she puked, and even then I wanted to kiss her. I wanted her father to see that—to know I wanted to fuck his daughter; I didn’t want to hide anything, I wanted that revenge of desire, for him to know that I had fucked her.
The YouTube videos are gone from my memory. Too long and complicated for my nerves. I have no idea how to pick a lock. My brain tried to pay attention, but I didn’t have the small tool you need, and instead, I snake a small screwdriver from Nathan’s tool box into the keyhole. I wrote down these notes on how to pick a lock on my phone, but the light hurts in the pitch black. A raccoon moves big in the backyard. I do remember the diagram of the lock, the pistons inside the metal case moving up or down depending on how you twisted the tiny criminal rod. I kneel in front of the door and blast cellphone light. I wiggle the screwdriver: nothing. I twist and hope for something, but the lock does not indulge. Allah, please, I ask, but he’s not interested. He’s up there sipping martinis with Anna.
I should have felt something.
You can’t see that type of thing. The person doesn’t want you to.
That’s why we broke up.
I haven’t spoken yet about the breakup, not really, to Matthew. These six months after we broke up, I kept to myself, like a numb vulture somehow circling its own carcass.
Did she leave you a note?
Bro—
She planned it and didn’t leave a note? Come on, yo. How can you die and not want to say a few things? You don’t disappear yourself without having a few things to say.
I read once—
You read?
I read once, you know, you’re not supposed to find an answer for anything.
What the fuck does that mean?
I think it means to chill.
Yo, a note. A note. A note for me. For real? No note for me? Not an email? Not a Facebook status? Give me a fucking break.
The only thing I have to turn to is my anger and my anger is not even mitigating my pain. I can’t be mad at her for not leaving me a note: I can’t even conceive of it.
There’s a note for me. There has to be.
The callousness of her parents and their constant fuck-ups with her, hiding the note, the meander of her friends—it all makes more sense than no note. I can’t organize myself to believe that I meant nothing to her—that is impossible. I want my anger out of me and into her.
Instead, grief: the blue colour of the flame. Its hottest part.
How long you been wearing that shirt for?
Can you smell me?
You gotta change the shirt.
Anna loved this shirt. I smell my armpits hard in the bathroom. I’m looking for her in that musk. When she lay in bed with me and turned over to face me. The way we spent the day slow, small kisses, our smells warping into each other. I can’t find her in that smell.
When I come back, I tell Matthew that I don’t even know if I like Anna. I hope for him to look at me with empathy and concern, but instead, he thinks that I’ve misspoken.
You mean Kali.
I don’t want to, but I correct him: Anna.
Matthew does not say anything. The only thing I have to show how important she was to me is duration. I have no keepsakes from our time together.
Then: Do you mean because she killed herself?
No. I say it without knowing if I mean it but knowing that I want to say it and witness what it does to him.
Matthew nods a little bob.
A burst of lightning outside, and for a second, we are both lit up white. Anna throwing them down from heaven not too happy. Did Anna have any childhood friends? I know the answer. She was not like us, immigrants carved from their past by movement. Me and Matthew exactly once talked about what it would be like if we had grown up back home together, but we did not get nostalgic for lost childhood friends: they were figments of imagination. For any real purpose, they did not exist.
She had no past. Anna had refused to see anyone from before fourteen. She said little about them, except to tell me that she would not say anything: life before fourteen did not matter. I knew she was raised in Barrie, or Whitby, or some other white place, and they left because her brother had too many dark friends who were getting in trouble with him. Her father was from North York originally. Their move was treated as a homecoming. I knew when she was twelve some friends had robbed her on Halloween by inviting her over and then mugging her once she entered the front door. Not even of her candy—of her cash. They had punched her in the stomach, and also stolen pieces of her Ninja Turtles outfit. She said she went home crying to her mom, and the distress was deepened because she couldn’t go back out. Her costume was ruined. She tried to talk about it in a light tone, but I could hear her voice waver. I didn’t know if there were any happy memories or more bad ones.
Matthew is not looking at me. When I asked her about it a few days later she looked at me like I was an idiot. I asked her again and she said: I forget. I told you that? Forgetting is a tool that only some people understand. Matthew looks out the window, his index finger chattering on the table surface, his leg pumping up and down; the nerves are falling out of him and into me, making me nervous.
What’s wrong?
I have to talk to you.
We talking.
I gotta talk to you.
What’s wrong?
I saw Bernie yesterday. Matthew stops looking out the window and looks at me, but he can’t hold the eye contact. He looks out the window, again, at a passing streetcar that stops and opens its doors. No one gets off; a few people get on. Will it snow tonight, later? The bar door opens and shuts quickly and a bark of wind chills us. He gave me a note.
So? About what?
Like. A note.
What it say?
From Anna.
Fuck you.
Bro. Matthew looks back at me. My body freezes; it blows up from inside my stomach, up my chest, like vomit, and expands into my entire body. It cripples me—I cannot move and I stare at Matthew while he breaks eye contact again. My hand is cool on the beer glass, and then it is not, it’s hot, and I have to let go, and I put my hand in my pocket to hide the fist I’m making. Do I scream, hit, or sit here dully? Matthew’s eyes glow with tears. The tears don’t drop, and he wipes them away. He curls his shoulders into himself and is silent. Do you want the note?
Do you have it?
It’s at home.
I don’t know.
It doesn’t say much—
Don’t tell me.
Sorry.
No, tell me. Tell me.
It says sorry. It’s short. She thanked me.
For what?
Nothing special … just whatever.
My heart isn’t pounding. It is slowing down. Wheezing, barely there. I knew Bernie liked him, because Matthew always had a dark girlfriend, and so Bernie thought he wasn’t going to try and fuck his daughter. This isn’t Matthew’s fault. I don’t know. Maybe it is. I have to leave Matthew because I don’t know what to do, or what I could do. I look around the bar for something I can use as a weapon. I look for something that will puncture his skin and make all that blood come loose from his body. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry at him and my body is confused. I want to choke him and hold him at the same time. I stare at him, unable to say what I need to, and he looks out the window, allowing the silence to become thick with physicality. I wish, for half a second, that he could get angry at me, and do something about it, so I could stop thinking for a minute. I imagine a future girlfriend asking about my past and looking at the internet for a trail, discovering that my longest girlfriend killed herself. Across from Matthew, I lick the yellow glue on the paper and close the joint. I take the table candle outside and light it, inhale a gulp, let my eyes drop when the smoke sinks into my skull.
How close was Matthew to Anna, exactly? Before I can contain my thoughts they start sliding in a slippery chain—why did he feel so deeply when she died, anyway? Why did he pull himself out from my life so quick when she died? I want to crumble or cry or something as the streetcar makes its way up Spadina. When me and Anna broke up I guessed Matthew would have to choose friendships; I mean, he had known her for as long as I had, and they would talk too, they went way back, he would talk to her about his girls. I remember them together in the summer, at Dance Cave, dancing while I swayed at the side, too faded from drink, his hands on her hips and the way she moved comfortable with him: I was proud of myself for being so fine with that. They had known each other for ten years. Same as me, same as me. It was so hot in there that night, with so many people, and I never brought it up because I didn’t know what I had seen. I had seen nothing, no, not really. Their bodies close, the aura of familiarity, friendship, both moving basically on beat. The way his hands stayed on her hips, the muscles in them, the tendons; finally, when he moved his hands away from her hips, they stayed together while one song phased into another. He leaned into her ear and spoke—she didn’t tell me what he said.
The next night, in her bedroom, I wanted to ask her while she rolled a joint, but I was hungover, it was late. I never asked Matthew. She seemed so comfortable with his body, his aggression, the way he moved in unison with her. Maybe it was the booze. We would go to the pool together that summer, before that night, and they would play together in the water, their bodies becoming slowly and slowly familiar. I never questioned it. I liked having a best friend that I didn’t question—I liked having two best friends. I would tell Anna again and again that she was my best friend without stopping to think about it.
Once, after the pool, after a blazed day, and her skin red, her soaked bikini on the ground, she started kissing me, and she asked me if I was bored with her.
What do you mean?
We’ve been together for so long.
I said no, I said no, never, and she said, Not even after all these years? She was wet and tired and sun-drunk. Did we have anything to drink that day? We tried for a beer on a patio, but it was useless; the beer was too heavy and the sun was hanging low and angry, smog everywhere in the daytime. She laughed and asked me if it would be fun to bring someone into bed and I said no. Then I said who? And I asked her who she wanted to fuck, and she said, Anybody, nobody, it doesn’t matter, I’m joking, and she kissed me on the lips and I asked her, maybe I was drunk, I don’t think so, I asked her if she wanted to fuck Matthew and she said, What! And we had this normal conversation while I slid into her, still half-hard, but filling up, and she was wet, and she said she didn’t say that, that’s not what she meant, but her head moved back and she let me kiss her on the neck, a thing she generally didn’t allow (she was afraid of marks), and didn’t ask me to stop and I asked her to think of Matthew fucking her with me and as quickly as I started she must have been drunk because she told me to cum in her and she asked for it again and again, which I was so unused to and she clenched onto me and started asking for me to please do it and I came and I lay on top of her after and stayed in her, which she did not allow; usually by now she would be rushing to squat over the toilet and watch my sperm drop out. I don’t know how long it had been or how loud we had been, but we lay there and didn’t say anything. We didn’t fuck for a month after that—I saw her once a week, we talked almost every day, said good night in texts, but her body went away from me.
A raccoon comes down the side of the building, fat boy clanking on a metal ladder I can’t see. The moon is big and hot tonight, beaming like the white eye of God. The raccoon’s wobble stops. He looks at me, his belly just above the ground, aluminum foil flecked in his mouth. I’m outside our old apartment building at Yonge and Eglinton. Tender brown and yellow bricks, and when I look up at the topmost windows, our old apartment on the fourth floor, I see the same wide-open windows to let the heat out. It’s an old building and when the first, second, third floors turn their heat up, it rises to suffocate the fourth floor, even in the winter. The windows have to stay open. When it snows outside, it boils inside.
Bernie owns this building. It is old and rotten. The first four months me and Anna lived here I did not know that it was a family-owned thing. I gave her $650 on the fourth of every month in cash, and she paid the person she called our landlord. He was our landlord, correct—she lived in this kind of slippery crevice of language. I came home early one day and the two of them were in our kitchen, whisper-fighting, a pot of tea cooling on our breakfast table. The rain was hammering outside and towels were stopping a leak near our window. I remember his yellow teeth matched his zip-up sweater. I’m scared of rich people who don’t fix their teeth. Rich people who can’t accept their wealth.
Bernie: Oh … I didn’t know Anna had guests …
I looked at the key in my hand, and Anna left the kitchen without speaking and stuck her head out the window, pretending to source our leak. I didn’t say anything to Bernie, reminded Anna that the leak was going to create more water damage, and shut myself in our bedroom. This was my house and that was my right. Our shoulders must have touched as I made my way past him.
You didn’t even tell him to take his shoes off? I said to her later.
I had slippers for guests that cost me twenty dollars. She was gasping for air. She reverted to this panic attack in moments like this, and I knew that they could be fake, the way they activated the moment she needed them to, to get away from me.
I’m still on his health insurance. He had to drop something off. He owns the building.
The walls of our apartment began sweating with this revelation. Her head was still outside the window and she took in big chunks of piercing air. I grabbed her by the belt and pulled her in. She sat silent. All this would be hers someday: my rent was going towards a mortgage that, on his death, would be given to her. I don’t know how many other properties they owned, but even one building in midtown Toronto had to make them millionaires, on paper, even if Bernie was the type to claim his “liquid cash” was tight. When she sat quiet my anger surprised me by moving on.
At least now I’ll marry rich, I joked.
I didn’t think to ask what medication Bernie was bringing her. I knew of at least three pills that her doctor was trying in combination. She had emergency benzos. She had a daily pill. She had an evening one, for sleep. She could disappear into the bathroom and reappear a different person. I wondered what Anna would be like if the doctor managed to extinguish the flame that was scorching her, but I didn’t think I had the capacity to enquire. I hope the note she left me revealed it all in detail.
Outside the building now, the memory of her as violent as anything real, I remember going through the prescription bottles in the bathroom, the long science names making me feel ESL again. They were like spells and if I could pronounce them accurate they would reveal something about her.
I didn’t feel guilt when I eyed those bottles and their long names. She had left me out of the decision, just telling me that her sex drive would bounce up and down. Instead, a coalition of family and Emina and others persuaded her to see a psychologist. When I touched the orange plastic bottles, I wondered what they did, what power they held over her, but I didn’t ask. I realized I had not signed a lease, and none of the furniture in this apartment, except a dresser, was mine. The pills seemed to work: she slept regularly. The one side effect she complained about was night sweats.
Did she stop taking them? I don’t know. Again, I didn’t ask—I wanted the medication to quiet down what was raging in her, because it meant she would have enough energy left to soothe me. If she began a new medication, I knew, because she became sleepy for a month, taking two-to-three-hour naps in the middle of the day. Her day would be divided in half by these. She would be sound asleep when I left for work at three p.m. and startling awake at two a.m. when I got back. She would ask me to cook for her, and it was enough if I pan-fried some dumplings. After the last new pill, when I still lived with her, and her sleeping schedule came back to normal, I finally asked if they were working. Anna grabbed my cheek with her hand and then clutched my chin. It began to hurt.
Of course they are.
I moved out for the last time two months later. I packed three pairs of Nikes, a duffle bag full of clothes, and that was it. I left in the afternoon, while she was in class, and felt no urge to leave an explanation. She would understand. I texted Emina to let her know what I was doing but was too scared to outright admit that me and Anna had not spoken about it.
Her parents’ house is long and narrow, two windows up top, two windows on the main floor, and a tiny crack of chimney on the right side. A kid’s drawing. A puff of smoke. Their lawn is brown-green and cut badly, short near the roadside but tufted near the windows. One-car drive with a black Lexus that I squeeze past. The wooden gate to the back has no clasp; it swings lightly. The side window over the kitchen seems like a good entry point: the motion detector light near the side door comes on. I wait. My breath in the air, and I’m sure there’s a raccoon somewhere I can’t see. No shadows, no movements. I move again.
The kitchen window looks large enough to fit me. I look around for something to stand on. The light has gone off, but when I move, it pops back on. I convince myself that nothing will happen. It’s okay. It’s cool. I flip over the empty recycling box and look at the window. A small wooden block in place to prevent it from being opened. It has not been slotted correctly, and with a little nudge I could move it, but it’ll fall into the sink and make a noise that will travel upstairs.
I watched a few YouTube videos on lock-picking. I don’t want to break the window or cut the mesh: I want to be a ghost, to visit Anna like she is. There are no cars on the street. It doesn’t matter. I look to the sky and ask who’s watching. I’ve been to this house a few times before and a small memory tumbles at me. It was an awkward dinner, a birthday party, I think seventeen, and she introduced me to her parents as her friend. We had emailed about this—I was warned—but a shot of pain came at me anyway. Her parents allowed us to drink beer in the basement (only beer, no hard liquor), and I swallowed five straight. She drank nine and puked, evergreen. I held her hair over the toilet until Bernie came down and asked me to leave. Her hair was matted to her skullskin by all the hot sweat that appears when a body moves with sickness. I held her nape when she puked, and even then I wanted to kiss her. I wanted her father to see that—to know I wanted to fuck his daughter; I didn’t want to hide anything, I wanted that revenge of desire, for him to know that I had fucked her.
The YouTube videos are gone from my memory. Too long and complicated for my nerves. I have no idea how to pick a lock. My brain tried to pay attention, but I didn’t have the small tool you need, and instead, I snake a small screwdriver from Nathan’s tool box into the keyhole. I wrote down these notes on how to pick a lock on my phone, but the light hurts in the pitch black. A raccoon moves big in the backyard. I do remember the diagram of the lock, the pistons inside the metal case moving up or down depending on how you twisted the tiny criminal rod. I kneel in front of the door and blast cellphone light. I wiggle the screwdriver: nothing. I twist and hope for something, but the lock does not indulge. Allah, please, I ask, but he’s not interested. He’s up there sipping martinis with Anna.
