John Karaplis
Mausoleum
I think the most ironic thing of all about him was his name. It was the most striking aspect of who he was, and the one part that stuck with people, from the moment they met him until far after he’d left their lives.
Hero. My husband. Too noble a name for someone who looked like him. Too noble for someone who’d done what he’d done.
It’s been three days since he’s had anything to say to me. It’s been three days since he’s done anything for me, and at this point I’m a bit upset by the way things turned out.
I keep rewinding, replaying the scene that day, shot by shot, in my head. I’ve been sitting for hours, just thinking, turning back, and regressing to that point three days ago.
---
“Turn left,” I say to him. He blinks and tightens his jaw. He shouldn’t be driving, but he doesn’t know that. I tell him it’s okay and so he believes. I don’t see the harm in it; the doctors advised against him driving anything else after the accident, but I need a way to get from place to place.
“What street should I be looking out for?” he asks. I sigh.
“Hellespont Court,” I say.
He grips the wheel a little tighter and doesn’t say a word. He’s been acting strange since we left the hospital. Everything went smoothly there, so I’m not sure what could be bothering him.
I lead him along the road to the place we live: a half a million dollar house at the far end of an upscale development, farther along down the road than any of the other houses. We have a good six acres of property just to ourselves. I wanted the seclusion so I wouldn’t have to deal with our neighbors and their stares. I enjoy making people uncomfortable, which is easy given my state in life; but I enjoy doing it on my terms. Without a large property to shield myself with, I’d be asking for all sorts of uninvited stares.
We remove ourselves from the car and head inside. He is unusually quiet. I’m used to being constantly bombarded by questions, but today he isn’t giving me any reactions at all. The silence is comfortable. It seems fitting to me. We have one phone in our house, on the kitchen counter. No cell phones. I don’t need one for obvious reasons and he doesn’t need one because his social life is more or less nonexistent. We have a television, but don’t watch it often. Our bedroom is upstairs, an old Victorian room. All our rooms lock and unlock with a single key, which Hero carries with him almost invariably. I help him keep an eye on it.
Our windows are barred to prevent intruders. We don’t expect any, but I opted for precautions because of my physical state.
I’ve been sitting on a stool in our kitchen for several minutes. My husband has wandered off somewhere and I decide to use the privacy to change into something thicker. I try to avoid changing in front of him, to spare him the liberty of seeing me naked.
I get up and head to our bedroom. When he’s watching, I act like it’s a challenge making it up the stairs to the second and then to the third floor. Really it’s not. I can’t recall ever using a guardrail to help myself up stairs when I had my arms, anyway.
I hurry up the steps and find the bedroom door wide open. I head inside and close it with my foot. It’s a heavy door and make a loud crash when it closes, fitting snugly in the door frame.
Across the bedroom a bathroom is attached. From it I hear a moan.
“No, go back outside. Go back downstairs.” It’s Hero. This is where he’d gone to. It’s not like him to tell me to go away, however, and so I enter the bathroom to investigate.
The blood is the first thing that strikes me. There is a lot of it, soaking into his clothes, beginning to run down the ridges between the tiles on the floor and the wall behind him.
At first I don’t know what to say or how to react. I hadn’t expected this. I stare at him a moment. An obvious suicide attempt. He holds a hammer in his right hand. It looks as though he’s hacked away chunks of his wrist using the cleft end of the hammer head. A string of vein holds loose and his flesh is shorn deep enough to show the cracks he’d inflicted to his bone. Blood spurts from the wound.
To the left of him lies my diary. My personal book of secrets. I kept it under our bed. It wasn’t a traditional diary, as I’m obviously limited in my ability to write; it’s a voice recorder. It’s small and inconspicuous. I had never counted on him to find it.
“Leandra, no,” he stutters, mucus running from his nose to the corners of his lips. His chin is quivering and his wrists flop around like dead fish as he tries raising his hand to point at me. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident, you know it was an accident. You’ve said it was an accident. You know it wasn’t my fault. How could you not know it wasn’t my fault?”
I stare down at him, crumpled in a pile on the ceramic tile of the bathroom floor and I follow the trickle of blood from the grooves in his forearms to the grooves in the floor and its inevitable course to the soles of my feet. I take a small step back. I have nothing to say.
“ You think you were the only one who lost anything in that crash? You didn’t lose anything. What did you lose? What? Your arms? Your arms? You didn’t even lose those. You didn’t lose anything. You got me. You had me. I sacrificed myself for you. I had to. I had to, I had to.” His head is hung low, the color draining from his face and emptying onto the floor. His eyelids are fluttering like a moth whose body is too heavy for its wings and his eyes are small and rolling. “I had to,” he cries again, saliva dripping from his gaping mouth like puss from an oozing wound.
“You were obligated to,” I snap, leaning a little ways toward him. “You were the driver. If you weren’t as careless as you were-“
“I don’t give a damn about how careless I was! I can’t fucking remember how careless I was,” he spits. Saliva mixes in with blood as it’s launched from the snap of his neck in my direction. His head is cocked down and to the side, but his eyes are unwavering. He is looking at me now, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been struck by him. He holds the look for a second, and our eyes connect, both unblinking. I can tell he is trying to clench his fists, but the sinew under his skin keeps giving up on him. “I can’t remember hardly anything since we got in the car that day.” Again, but slower this time, his head falls back on the hinge of his neck and hangs there like an old, forgotten blazer. His right eye is wide, but the left has a persistent arrhythmic twitch. Both of them look foggy and glazed, and he is no longer holding my sight.
I consider saying something about the doctors already telling me he hurt his head; I know his brain was injured during the accident. I know that since then he's had trouble transferring short term to long term memory. I know that every day it gets worse because of the irregular blood flow from his damaged heart. And so I consider saying something. But I know it won’t do any good. It’s been a while since the accident. I’ve learned how to deal with him.
And then he starts a slow drawl: “You don’t know what it’s like, to live behind my eyes. I needed you just the same that you needed me. You didn’t have your arms, but I needed you because I didn’t have my mind. I was losing it, I could feel it. I can still feel it. You said no, I didn’t have to marry you, but I did. I needed you to stick with me, in sickness or in health. Or else I would have been lost. You can’t realize what it’s like to wake up every morning and not know what happened the day before; to not remember whether or not you ate breakfast, when the taste of it is still on your lips. You can’t know what that is, to have to rely on someone else to tell you when to, when to eat, when to breathe, when to piss. I have these shadows in my head- these, these dark spots, and I can tell there’s something missing, but what the hell is it, what the hell is it? I don’t know, do you? Do you know? Can you tell me? Have you been telling me? Have you told me? I don’t fucking know, I can’t remember. What am I missing? What are you hiding from me?” Throughout his speech he is quickly rocking his head, like he’s trying to answer all his own questions with a no. I listen to his labored breaths for half a minute before he continues.
“I remember how bad the crash hurt, but I can’t remember what I was doing right before, or right after. I remember they said it wasn’t my fault. I remember that’s why we got all that money, all that payoff from insurance. We weren’t liable. I wasn’t liable. The truck driver was.” He stops for a minute and swallows. His tongue is white, like his taste buds are all dead.
“We made good off that, didn’t we? That’s how we got this house, isn’t it? That’s how we got all of this. You gained so much. I remember before the accident, I remember everything. We never had anything like this. Now you have so much. I need to be reminded every morning about what I have, what I have to do. You have me scripted, but I have my shadows. I have my empty in my head. I have the spaces and I can’t fill them in, but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe I was meant to die and you were meant to keep on living. Maybe that’s why we all ended up the way we did. Maybe that’s why I don’t have a mind, I don’t have a soul. I’ve just become your body. You’ve been using me, you’ve been using me like a marionette with your words the strings. You took advantage of what happened to me. You’re a terrible person, aren’t you? Were you always? I don’t remember you being terrible. Not before. Not till now.”
His memory of me hadn't suffered the same fog as his others. I think it's because he knew me before the crash; things he knew before stayed with him, but he lost most of what came after.
“But I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not doing your game anymore, I’m not playing by your rules. It’s not my fault what happened to you happened. You know that. I didn’t even invite you to come with me that day. You wanted to. I didn’t even want to take you, did I? This is the same now. But it’s different now. I’m doing this myself now. I don’t need to know what happened, I don’t need to know everything that happened between then and now, just that time has passed and you’re a terrible person. I’m doing it my way now. I’m using these hands, your hands, to take away your body. I’m killing myself to kill you.”
He stops and stares at the shower for some reason I can’t figure out.
“Unless, unless…” his eyes fall closed and I think he’s done. I swallow. My throat is dry. His eyes open once again. “You did this on purpose. You led me here. This is your plateau. You led me here, you made me do it. You don’t have your arms, but you have mine. I am your arms. You were my mind, I was your body. You led me here, you made me do it. You did it on purpose.” He looks up at me again. His face is long: drawn and pale, his mouth hung open with the caking of spit at the corners of it. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”
Despite our breaths, we are silent. I can hear a bird chirping merrily on a branch outside our bedroom window.
I look at him with as blank an expression as the one he’s giving me and I roll back my shoulders to straighten my back. He isn’t blinking, and his breathing is very light; as limp as the Pieta, yet with enough strength left to hold his head up.
“Yes.” I tell him. For a moment his expression doesn’t change: the same blank, dopey look holds fast. And then the contours of his mouth turn up and the mucous crust on his face cracks as he begins to laugh a coarse laugh. He looks down, at his arms, and then up at me again. And he still laughs.
And then he looks up, and that bit of strength in his neck gives out and his head falls down onto his shoulder. The laughing stops.
“Leandra, no,” he says. “It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault. It was an accident, you know it was an accident.” The words seep into his shoulder, muffled against the fabric of his shirt. And then his shoulders slump down towards the ground and his entire body collapses into a fleshy pile.
I watch him for a few seconds longer; gazing at the sanguine flow like it’s a thin river in a secret bonsai garden. He’s dead, and I feel empty. I thought I’d be happy, but I don’t feel anything at all. No sorrow, no joy, no regret or longing. He’s dead and it all just feels inconsequential to me.
I turn and head back into the bedroom. Everything here is neat and orderly save for the unmade bed, though the place where the bedroom carpet meets the bathroom tile is seeped a deep, dark red. I stop for a moment to look at it, and then continue on.
I decide I’d better go down to the kitchen and call the police. Nearing the door, I raise one foot to turn the handle. My toes wrap around it at an angle and I try to twist it. It doesn’t budge. I hop to gain a better balance and I try again. Still no turning. It feels as if something is stuck in it.
Oh Christ.
---
I keep rewinding and replaying the scene. I have nothing else to do. After I realized that the door was locked, I sat on the bed and stared at his body for hours.
It’s been three days. That oaf husband of mine must have locked the door from the outside and forgot to close it. I closed it. He left the key on the wrong side. No phone upstairs, no way out. I took the last of the pills in the bathroom cupboard, a few painkillers that I didn’t think would do the trick.
No way out. A barred window in the bedroom; even if I could fit through, only a fool would jump out of a third story window. I imagine if our bodies were ever found they’d think that one of us had killed ourselves after the death of the other, and that was the last thing I’d want to be the memory of me. I don’t regret his death. I regret the timing of it.
I’m done. There’s no one here to scream to. There’s no one here to ask for help. I killed him by my hands, like he said. And while the right hand held the hammer my left hand plotted the steps for my own grave, my own resting place in this makeshift mausoleum.
If you’re listening to this, know that it was my choice. It was my choice to be in the car. It was my choice to control this man. It was my choice to close the door to this room behind me. It was my choice to live the way I’ve lived since the day I became the mind for a man who gave his body up for me. And I still don’t care at all.
I've made one last decision. I have nothing left to do but wait.