The Watcher

1

Just before four o’clock, I get up and throw on my bathrobe. I’d stopped counting the hours and minutes I lay awake at night ages ago. It’s not even a month since the separation, and I haven’t gotten used to sleeping alone yet. I can’t imagine I ever will. On a purely physical level, I miss Peter. Even the first night we slept together, it was like our bodies had found their way home, as if they had slipped into each other’s nooks and filled each other’s crannies. I’d slept in different people’s arms before, but I’d never experienced anything like this. Peter felt it, too. “We’re like a puzzle,” he whispered into my ear, “with only two pieces.”

The staircase leading downstairs is shrouded in nighttime darkness. The steps are steep and narrow, easy to slip on if you’re not careful. I close my eyes and lean forward, feel my body’s center of gravity being sucked farther and farther over the landing. If I started walking with my eyes closed, if I let fate have its way, maybe I would make it all the way down, descending calmly and steadily. I lean even farther forward. I don’t actually even need to try taking a step, don’t need to anticipate fate. There’s another alternative: to throw myself headlong into the darkness. I can make sure to land on my head, allowing my neck to break under the weight of my body. One life extinguished in the night, one drop in the vast cosmos.

It’s not the first time this idea occurs to me. But just as before, the thought leads to my sister. To the realization that she would be the one to find me; she would be the one forced to deal with all the practical matters. Of the family that once existed, only the two of us remain. I can’t do that to her. My hand reaches for the light switch. An instant later, the light pours over the stairs and I descend, step by step.

I walk through the empty town house in a little development built around a landscaped communal yard. This place is meant to play the part of my home now, although it actually belongs to someone else. I am a shadowy figure in this existence, passing through on my way elsewhere. The rent has been paid in advance for three months. I have no idea where I’ll go after this. Maybe that should worry me, but I feel nothing.

In the kitchen I pour myself a glass of water and drink it while leaning back against the sink. The unit across the yard is dark. I see no lights on in any of the windows. The people who live there are probably asleep, like all normal, sensible people at this hour. Safe and undisturbed, with the ones they love most in the next room or in bed beside them. My borrowed twin bed awaits in the bedroom upstairs. The bed will be cool when I return. No one is keeping it warm under the covers. There will be no legs to press the freezing soles of my feet against, no one whose neck and back I can nestle up against and shape my body to.

A puzzle with only two pieces. I used that phrase once in a story. When the manuscript came back, I saw that the editor had drawn two red lines through those specific words and written “Kind of cliché” in the margin. She couldn’t have known how special those words were to me. She was just doing her job, and I accepted the edit. But maybe I should have stood my ground. Those words meant something to me. A publisher’s opinions are suggestions—usually prudent ones—but ultimately the author has final say over her own text. I’ll remember that next time. In my next manuscript, I’ll… The thought flows into nothingness. I empty my glass and shake my head. Next time, next manuscript, who am I kidding? I haven’t written a line in almost two years.

I continue moving through the house, following the same pattern I usually do during these nightly ambles, and soon wind up in the living room. It’s not a big room, and yet it contains most of what I brought when I left the home Peter and I shared. The moving boxes stacked along the walls are filled with things I haven’t bothered to unpack—meaningless objects, relics from a time that will never return. There’s only one thing here that means anything to me.

My steps slow, and I move over to the bookshelf. I reach out my arm and carefully run my hand over the densely packed rows of book spines. There are so many stories between their covers, the fates of so many lives. They relate the joy and pain of being human, the cruelties to which we subject each other. There are certain common themes in all stories, just as in all human life, and I know that I’m not alone in my adventures and experiences, although it feels like it. Oh, Mama, if you could see me now.

My hands select by themselves, moving as if they belong to someone else, as if they have a life of their own. One book at a time is pulled out and assigned a new place—sometimes on the same shelf, but more often than not somewhere else. At first it happens slowly, almost randomly, then with more and more focus. Book after book is repositioned, ending up higher, lower, closer to the middle or to the edge. Tonight I’m sorting by title, but my actual criteria are unimportant. What matters is having something to do to keep the turbulence below the surface at bay.

Some of the shelves are crowded, so I hold the books awaiting reshelving in my lap and continue working with one hand. Empty spaces appear and are filled again. One context is undone and a new totality gradually emerges. But it doesn’t help, of course. Nothing helps. When I finally stand in front of the bookshelf and survey the results, everything is different. And yet it’s exactly the same. I slowly back out of the room.

The next time I become aware of anything, it’s grown so cold. My legs feel cold on the inside. Then something extremely close to my face is beeping, and I wake up. At some point last night, somewhere in the midst of my insomniac wanderings, I must have headed back upstairs to the bedroom and fallen asleep in the bed, because that’s where I am. The blanket fell on the floor and the room is freezing. I forgot to close the window. I pull in my legs and wrap my arms around my knees. If only I could just get out of waking up one morning. There’s another beep, and I lazily reach over for my phone on the nightstand. The screen shows two new text messages from my sister. The first is four words long: You’re coming tonight, right? The second message is just as succinct, but the tone is different: 7PM sharp!

I force myself out of bed, pull on my bathrobe, and go downstairs. The same motions, bathrobe, and stairs as yesterday and the day before. The same motions, bathrobe, and stairs that await me tomorrow and the day after that. In the kitchen I put on the kettle and make tea, not that it matters whether I eat breakfast, but because that’s what one does, that’s the way a person behaves. Plus it gives me something to fill my time and thoughts with. Something different.

I sit down and blow on my tea. Between sips, I stare out the window, my gaze roaming across the little landscaped yard between the houses. A few birds are chirping in a bush. In the kitchen of the place across from mine stands a man wearing a suit and tying his tie. At the table in front of him sits a woman with honey-colored hair, drinking something from a cup. The sun hasn’t made it over the rooftops yet. A garbage truck chugs down the street. People hurry along the sidewalk. They’re on their way somewhere. Their steps have direction and purpose.

I turn my attention to the room I find myself in, and behold its drab, bare appearance: the missing bits of wallpaper, the worn handles on the cupboard doors. The furnishings consist of a table and two simple chairs. Yet another day of empty motions and artificial respiration awaits within these four walls; yet another day of silence and solitude. My sister is my only remaining link to the outside world. This is what it’s come to. This is what I’ve allowed it to come to. You’re coming tonight, right? I get up from the table and dump out the rest of my tea in the sink. I don’t know, I think. I really don’t know.