The Death of Wendell Mackey (4 page)

“Mr. Mackey,” said Dr. Thane, “it’s time to show you to your room.”

So few words, yet all that were needed to begin the downward spiral.

Wendell stood up from the wooden table, his tongue feeling like it had been dipped in sand. Besides the rainwater he tried lapping up from a downspout the day before, he couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a drink. Most likely it was the red liquid that passed for fruit juice in the institution. The nurses added sugar packets to mask the bitter drugs dissolved into it.

“Orange juice,” he mumbled. His mother, ever the face of hypochondria, used to go through a gallon a day, almost revering what she thought were its regenerative benefits. “Because Vitamin C cures cancer,”
he said. His mother had kept faith in that for years.
But in the end she was wrong, wasn’t she?
he thought. He turned and reached for the refrigerator door and pulled it open.

Time and neglect always hit the refrigerator first. The oily, rotten stench that rolled out seemed out of proportion to the fridge’s emptiness. A loaf of what was once bread, and then had spent some time bloated with furry blue mold—some of which still hid in the refrigerator’s corners—now lay petrified and marbled brown and black, sitting next to a skeleton of grape stems. The walls left evidence of some sort of pasta sauce explosion, with dried bits of red painting them. The refrigerator light flickered. On the bottom shelf, sitting on its side and wide open, was a carton of juice. What had remained had spilled out and long ago dried to the plastic floor. Of course, Wendell didn’t expect it to be stocked. But cleaned was another matter, and he recalled the county nurse commenting on the appalling state of the apartment, and Diane’s inflexibility about buying anything other than orange juice and the balms sold by some heal-thyself-at-home guru through a late night infomercial. On his last visit, only a week before he was committed to the institution, he remembered his mother screaming at the nurse, bellowing with whatever voice the cancer had permitted her to keep, about the refrigerator “stinking like my very own death,” ordering Nurse Maggie to scrub it down, stock it full of her juice, and never come back. Wendell stared at the open carton, and wondered if his mother’s last actions in that apartment were to reach for it, for that one last attempt to sanitize her innards with the insane notion that only her mind could produce.

He closed the door, pulling his tongue between his teeth to produce some saliva.

No juice. Instead he turned to the kitchen sink, hoping that the landlord didn’t shut off the water to uninhabited apartments.

“Guy probably doesn’t even know she’s dead,” he said, pulling the handle up and watching the water sputter out, then normalize into a steady stream. “But at least something’s going my way.” He dipped his head under the faucet and drank long and deep, not even noticing the slight metallic taste, or the occasional brown stream from the rusted pipes. He gulped until he forced a stitch in his side, a sign that, while uncomfortable, at least his stomach was full of something.

Screams. The hall, outside his apartment.

Wendell jerked his head up, knocking his lip on the faucet.

A woman and a man. Clearly, from the slurred voices, the drinking had been mutual, but the sexual advances were not. The woman’s shriek was soon muzzled. And then:

“No, n-no, lemme
go!
” It was met with a sharp smack. More struggling.

Wendell backed away from the sink, keeping his eyes on the front door. He kept walking backwards, feeling with his left hand for the door that led into his mother’s bedroom.

“No, please,” she moaned. Something hit Wendell’s front door. The man was pushing the woman up against it.

Lustful grunts, and another shriek muzzled. The door rattled.

“Just stay away,” Wendell said, shocked by his own voice. His left hand felt the doorknob behind him. “Just stay away from me! Get the hell outta here!”

The thumping against the door stopped. The woman whimpered.

“You don’t want none of this,” the man in the hall said.

“Just…just go away and—”

“This ain’t about you,” said the man, his voice low and strong. “Be smart and don’t make this about you.”

Wendell’s left hand wrapped around the knob. He squeezed.

Thump thump thump
. The man began to pound his fist into the metal door, taunting Wendell. Wendell heard him laugh.

“Hear that?” the man said. “You hear me?”
Thump thump
.

“Just stop…” Wendell felt nothing but the doorknob in his hand, and saw nothing but the front door.

“You want this to be about you, don’t ya?”

“No,” Wendell whispered.

“All about you. All safe and sound behind this door. So how ‘bout I tear down this door an’ I eat what I see? That means
you
. You got me friend?”

The woman cried, or laughed. Even she was too drunk to know.

Wendell squeezed the knob harder. “You just…just get outta here and… Look, I don’t wanna—”

“Don’t wanna what?”
Thump thump thump
. He sounded gleeful.

Squeezed
harder
. Something stirred in Wendell.

“C’mon man, don’t wanna what?” the man said. “Don’t leave me hangin’. Don’t wanna what?”

Thump
. The man stopped pounding. He laughed.

Something stirred, deep and pulsing. The hairs on Wendell’s neck stood up as the muscles along his torso became rigid.

“This’ll hurt buddy,” said the man, “real bad.”

Wendell heard the woman, just barely, whimpering, whispering, “Please no, please no don’t, please just please just please just don’t…” But was she giggling too?

The man laughed louder.

Wendell’s vision pulsed with his heartbeat.

The woman began to laugh.

“Buddy,” the man said, tapping lightly on the door, “hellooooo? You still bein’ a tough guy in there? You ready for me? ‘Cause this door’s gonna hafta come down.”

What stirred in him wasn’t Wendell. He felt the blood rush to his arms.

Thumps became pounds, and the door rattled on its hinges. The man was using both fists and feet.

The lock or the hinges would give and the door would come down. Wendell saw it happening in his mind as he watched the door shake. He saw the hinges burst off the frame and he saw himself rushing to meet the shadow entering, wholly unprepared for Wendell. It was all terrifying and, oddly enough, exhilarating.

But then the pounding stopped. It became quiet, like the entire floor was taking a collective breath.

Don’t move a muscle
, Wendell told himself.

Wendell heard another door in the hall open. He heard another woman’s voice, quieter, but insistent and angry. Her words were abrupt, though Wendell couldn’t make them out.

Then footsteps, and silence. The man and his whimpering girl were gone. Somewhere, no doubt, an apartment awaited a rape.

“He’s gone. You’re safe,” said the new woman’s voice. Wendell heard her door close.

He relaxed, his heart still racing. He dropped his hands to his sides, but somehow the doorknob was still in his left hand. He looked down to understand. It had been ripped from the door, metal tearing from metal, the jagged edge of the knob’s stem peeking out from between his knuckles. He opened his hand to see the rest. On the bottom of the knob was a thick indentation where his middle finger had been pressing. Next to the knob in his palm was his middle finger’s fingernail, like a blackened seashell. That he had squeezed so hard that an already loose nail came off wasn’t surprising. But the violence done to the knob was something else entirely. Wendell walked back to the table and examined the knob under the ceiling light. He turned it around in his fingers, picking up the nail with his right hand and flicking it onto the floor absently.

Outside the apartment, a door opened again; Wendell assumed it was the woman who chased the couple away. He paused, the knob in his hand, straining to listen. Nothing. After a few moments, the door closed again. He dropped the knob, which rang loud and dull as it hit the floor. It rolled in a lazy semicircle, hiccupping every time the indentation hit the floor.

“What just happened?” he whispered.

Confusion and shock muted for the moment the desire for revulsion, the
need
to be revolted. It was that need, to be horrified, to be appalled, that in the coming days would fight to keep his former self on the scene. Wendell kicked the doorknob towards the refrigerator with his bare foot. It skidded along the wood and wedged itself in the space between the fridge and the wall. Immediately he winced; the jagged edge had cut a line just below his big toe. Biting his lip, he sat down at the table and pulled his foot up into his lap to inspect. The blood—little as there was—hung to the edges of a cut where the skin had all too easily peeled back like aluminum foil. Within the cut was skin too dark to be healthy, rigid and black like burned wood.

“I’m gonna need socks.”

Covering the wound up might keep it from getting worse, he thought. But what did he know? It could have been gangrene under that skin, or even cancer. Likely it was something far worse. But with socks, at least he wouldn’t have to see it. Wendell stood, limping slightly, and walked to the bedroom door, turning the jagged remains of the knob, gingerly with thumb and forefinger, to open it.

He flipped on the light, and saw old memories through new eyes.

This is where we hid
, he thought,
from them
. The other them. Lives ended and upended, long before the institution. These were from a different world, this other set of
them
, and these had been without the analytical demonism of the white coats at the institution. It had all been raw, chaotic. He saw the night stand, the bed post, the rectangular window—now, like the apartment’s other windows, nailed shut with drapes drawn—that had let the moon pour in that night, as if it had insisted on watching, as if it had tacitly approved. And they—he and his mother—had listened, damnation made real with every noise.

The dead were buried. Both of them, Mom and Dad. And in a sense, the apartment was a tomb, a tomb without a body, or just waiting for another one. But a tomb nonetheless, for her food, her brown plants, for any memories of Wendell’s distant life seen back through time as if through a telescope. He walked into the bedroom, assuming the dresser drawers were empty, and moved to the closet. Inside were an assortment of naked hangers and a few shoe boxes, stacked neatly at the back. Inside the top box was tissue paper wrapped around a cracked ceramic vase. In the box below it was a single black pump in a pile of old ties. The bottom box contained pairs of underwear rolled into logs and women’s socks balled into pairs. Seeing no need to be picky, Wendell picked a tan pair of socks, thicker than the others and absent of holes, then sat on the floor and pulled them over his feet. He turned to the right side of the closet, to a pile of clothing odds and ends: the other black pump, a pair of belts, a few moth-eaten sweaters and a dress having never seen neither iron nor hangar. Hiding at the bottom was a beaten pair of sneakers.

Wendell smiled. “High school,” he said. He had been seventeen the last time he had worn them, probably the only thing still in the apartment that was his. He pulled them on, satisfied at the fit. Then he pulled his legs up, wrapping his arms around his knees, examining the bedroom.

It had surprised Wendell that his mother’s apartment hadn’t been cleaned out by the landlord, even though she had been dead for some time. Apparently no one wanted an apartment still smelling of mildew and old woman; or perhaps the landlord didn’t even know that she was dead, her bank account still full enough to pay her rent electronically. That was highly unlikely, but it didn’t matter; it was all to Wendell’s advantage. The spare key had been where it had always been: three inches down into the soil of the flower pot—the one with the wilted roses—second down on the right from the front doors of the building. It wasn’t exactly a safe hiding place, as if there could ever be such a thing in a building like that. But that was mother, foolish to the end. He didn’t know how he remembered its location. He remembered little of his approach to the building, in fact. But there it was, in his hand when he awoke that morning, sprawled out on the kitchen floor. He had put the key on the top of the refrigerator, as his parents had always done. Now, he sat on the floor and watched the bedroom, a little apprehensive, as if he expected the walls to move in on him.

It was more dust than furniture, but what stood as furniture was pitiful enough to never make the showroom floor at any secondhand store, with the short leg on the night stand propped up with a phone book, the dresser chipped and water-stained, and the easy chair in the corner misshapen with a broken spring, all looking like mutants collected in the same cage. It was quiet in the darkness, all the past arguments and laments cold and buried. And in the darkness it still looked much like it did when he was a child, save for the weight of dust and time. For what remained, everything still looked to be in place.
Always in place
, Wendell thought. Even his father had learned not to change the order of books on the shelf, or leave the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, or move the edge of the foot locker at the foot of the bed out of the rectangular indentation that its weight made in the carpet. “Better to play along,” his father would say, “than get the heat.” A fair warning to a child born nervous to a moody mother. But his apprehension signaled that, even though the arguments and laments had died, some memories did not. He looked back up at the bed post, and remembered that night from his childhood when everything changed.