Chapter Eleven: The Fairytale of Acceptance
Everything he had learned about cruelty had come from his mother. She was proud, austere, educated and painfully beautiful, like a marble queen whom he was not worthy to touch. Erik's father was not present during his childhood, nor did his mother speak of him, aside from the occasional snide remark. 'Your father would have been appalled at the little freak he made.', she would say with a bitterness that could put acid to shame.
He found himself back there, in the home he grew up, with the clean, wallpapered walls and the stark white carpeting of the living room. Carpet which he was required to tiptoe around, for his mother fancied the straight carpet lines which resulted from accurate vacuuming. A single footprint disrupting the perfect line configuration could result in a beating. Instead, he would creep around the rooms with hardwood flooring. He wasn't welcome in the living room anyhow and nobody ever came to visit. Did his obsession with perfection come from her?
He needed to know why he was now standing in the oppressive walls of this dreadful place.
The house smelled the same as he recalled, of stringent cleaner and his mother's perfume, a heavy floral scent than made him feel as though it could strangle his lungs. He caught movement from the corner of his eye and, looking to his left, saw himself as a child, only seven years old, standing before his icy mother. Every hair on her head was neat, styled and curled to perfection. The elegant angles of her perfect face appeared sharper by the displeasure she wore on her expression. She was dressed in a fine black designer dress and holding a carry-on bag. Oftentimes she left town for stretches of time, a week here and there, usually with lovers. She had a parade of paramours, but none lasted for long; he had always blamed himself for his mother's ultimate loneliness.
With great trepidation, he stood and watched the terrible memory play out. He remembered this night with vivid intensity.
'Will you be gone long?', he heard the child ask in the smallest of voices.
'That really is none of your concern. I'll be gone for as long as I'm gone.', she replied curtly, her gaze was unfeeling.
The child fiddled with his fingers. Was he always so pathetic as a child? 'I'll miss you.', the child replied.
She laughed, and it was a wicked sort of laugh. 'Will you now! Good!', she mocked.
He closed his eyes to keep himself from seeing the next part of this terrible interaction, placed his hands over his ears so he could not hear, but he was given no relief. His eyes would not close, his ears could not be covered. The child was going to make the most audacious question of all and there was nothing he could to prevent himself from reliving this godawful spectacle.
'Before you go…will you kiss me? Just here?', the child gestured to the top of his head. Only days prior, while breaking the strict rules of his mother and gazing out the window, he had witnessed a woman kissing the brow of her child. Until then, he did not know it was such a thing that mothers did with their children, the books he had read only discussed kissing between men and women. The seed had been implanted and he desired one for himself.
The silence in the room became deafening as his mother processed what he had actually dared to ask.
She replied with a sneer, 'Where did you get this ridiculous idea? Don't you understand, you disgusting, rotten little thing? If I kissed you, I would die, any woman would.'
'But I love you.', the child whispered, his eyes closing tight.
She just laughed, beating him thoroughly with her fist as she did so, before sending him away to the dark little basement closet that served as his bedroom. 'I should have drowned you in the bath when you were born!', she had screamed down the stairs as the child huddled in the closet.
He never knew how long his mother's trip was, he left before she returned and never saw her again. On his own at the age of seven. A street urchin who miraculously survived despite everything.
His eyes fluttered open, the smell of his childhood prison was gone, replaced with the familiarity of his own bedroom. Turning onto his back, he looked up in the dark at the rich canopy above the bed and sighed. Dreams were so cruel but could be illuminating.
Was he as helpless now as he was as a child? Was Christine to be his new prison, a beautiful thing to be admired but never touched? He could not imagine letting her go, but it felt like agony keeping her near.
A dreadful though arose; would he need to kill her?
He tried to picture what it would be like to murder her, to wrap his cadaverous finger about her beautiful pale throat and squeeze the life from her. The skin of her face would flush red until it eventually turned a morbid shade of blue. He could almost feel her phantom pulse slamming to a halt with the stopping of her sweet little heart.
The thought was immediately so terrible that he flew from the bed and found himself gripping the cool porcelain bowl of the toilet, retching violently into it. He sputtered and gagged, producing nothing but bile.
A knock came on the bedroom door. "Erik? Are you alright?", her little voice came through the solid wooden door.
He splashed cold water upon his unmasked face, shocking himself back to reality and vowed never to consider such an unthinkable thing again.
When he opened the bedroom door, mask in place, she looked so painfully small. Her large, doe eyes met his in an expression filled to the brim with concern, it was unfamiliar to him. Nobody had ever looked at him like this before.
"Are you sick?", she asked, her sweet brow lined with worry.
"Perhaps something I ate.", he dismissed. "I will be fine."
Nodding her head, she moved across the room to sit on the sofa. "I was worried, it's nighttime now."
He cursed under his breath. "I've left you for so long, I apologize.", he murmured as he tried to catch his bearings.
"You must have been very tired.", she sighed in lamentation, "I've taken your bedroom. I should be sleeping on the couch."
"It is only temporary", he quickly replied "You'll need a comfortable space for the process you are preparing to make."
Her eyes closed; her expression pained. "I took the last pill an hour ago."
Gravity seemed to pull on the room with a significantly greater force, the effect of her words was palpable. He was still standing in the doorway of the bedroom, as though he were lost in his own home. She needs me, she has nobody else and she need me, he realized. This experience was foreign.
He found himself sitting adjacent to her on the couch and considering her with a grave seriousness. "Have you done this before?", he asked.
She shook her head, "I just had the two Narcan experiences.", she admitted. "And a couple of times I couldn't afford anything for a couple of days, I was shooting it though and it was pretty bad."
"This won't be as extreme,", he assured her, recalling his own experience, "You haven't injected in a few weeks and you've been tapering. Have you had a terrible flu before?"
"A few times."
"It will be similar. You will feel quite awful. I wish there was way to tell you otherwise, but I must prepare you."
Her legs were tucked beneath her, giving her an even more childlike appearance, and he could see the stark fear in her eyes. It was a fear he understood, for he had lived it at one time. As if she read his mind, she softly said, "I'm scared."
She had every right to be. 'A terrible flu' was sugarcoating it, the physical effects of opiate withdrawal could vary, but it was only half of the picture. He had intentionally neglected to tell her of the mental battle, how the mind will scream for what it is being denied, how unwanted emotions would come bubbling up to the surface like methane in hot tar. They could mitigate the physical effects, physical dependency was one thing, but addiction was more than just that.
"It doesn't need to be scary", he lied with great ease, anything to keep her calm.
"I'm afraid of the things I will feel, the emotions…" Her fingers flew to the bite mark, which was still appeared as a malevolent mark upon the creamy column of her throat. "Was it my fault?", she her voice was a heavy fog of shame. "Did I do this to myself? Did I allow this to happen to me?"
"Why would you think such a thing?", he was almost furious at her question. To his ears, it made no logical sense.
Her body curled in on itself, as though she could somehow disappear that instant. "I'm a drug addict.", she shrugged pitifully, as though her illogical reply was explanation enough.
She blamed her lifestyle for what had happened. Looking at this waif of a woman, nearly curled into a ball on his large sofa, with a broken, tragic sorrow in her eyes, he felt a piece of himself break inside. Comfort her, you coward, his head screamed, reach out your hideous hands and hold her. The tips of his fingers itched with anticipation and his palms felt clammy with just the thought of pulling her tight against him. She was sitting before him, bleeding profusely from her soul, and all he could do was helplessly watch her exsanguinate.
Instead, he rasped, "It is not your fault, it could never be your fault. The fault is his alone.", he was growing too uncomfortable with his own shortcomings, his inability to offer proper solace. His insecurity was running through in his mind like a raging bull in a china shop. He needed to do something to escape this impuissance he was feeling. "Would you care for supper?", he asked with a lightness that must surely sound bizarre after the heaviness of their conversation's tone.
She gave him a smile, weak, but sincere and nodded. "I really don't know what I would do without you."
It was the second time she had told him this, not that he was counting. It is just an expression of gratitude, he reminded himself.
"I find that I am lacking adequate supplies in the kitchen.", he rose to his feet, "Would you be comfortable if I left you alone for a few minutes?"
In response, she stood and moved towards the large collection of books and records lining his wall. "May I play music?", her fingers skimmed along the spines of the albums and he could almost feel it himself, like a phantom tickle moving up his back, as though the spines she touched was his own. Strange, how music can feel like such a private, intimate thing in just the right context.
"It is yours to do as you wish.", the words sounded almost desperate as they left his mouth. He wanted to assure her comfort, but there was also a plea hidden inside. Please, I am open bare, I have no protection against anything you may do.
He quickly strode to the door, relieved to escape the tension of the room.
"I don't eat pork or beef.", she said, as he was opening his apartment door. "I'm not vegetarian, or anything, I just…won't eat those two things."
It piqued his curiosity, but he decided to ask later about her reasons. Curtly nodding, he exited the apartment and went to his garage.
He placed his order as he drove the several blocks to the restaurant, demanding its readiness within twenty minutes and listed his specifications for delivery to his awaiting vehicle. The kitchen staff would have never seen his black mask and he felt far too raw to endure the shocked glances.
Instead, he sat in the interior of his Tesla, thrumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for the bag of food to be delivered to his window. His thoughts drifted to Christine, how small she had looked this evening, how wounded her gaze had been as she confessed her own feelings of guilt for what had happened to her. He was confused by her logic, but he had witnessed her pain and doubt and saw the validity of her feelings. Death had claimed the one responsible for the crime, but it failed to solve anything. The woman in his home was still wounded.
Would her experience play out as Meg's had? The little ballerina could no longer dance, her love for the art had been crushed by an odious stagehand. She was unable to enter the theatre without traumatic memories replaying.
'It happened too close to the stage.', Antoinette had said, 'Dancing was her world and it's been taken from her.'
He turned over his hand and traced the scar running along his palm. At one point, he too, had considered something almost as unthinkable as rape. Would he have followed through with her imprisonment had he not seen the wild panic in her eyes that day? The number of lines he had crossed in his lifetime were countless, but what variables must come into play to cause him to cross the threshold into that sort of wickedness.
The rapping on the car window shook him from his thoughts and he accepted the brown bag through the lowered window, catching the confused expression on the face of the bus boy the parcel exchanged hands.
Music was trickling out of the speakers as he entered his home with his delivery of French cuisine. Christine was sitting cross-legged upon the plush Persian rug, her face in a daze as she listened to the sounds which resonated from the spinning black vinyl disc before her.
He fetched a plate and cutlery from the kitchen and neatly arranged the contents of the takeout boxes upon the plate. It was an assortment of small, elegantly dressed dishes which was nearly impossible to transport from box to dish without disrupting their delicate constructions.
Carrying her plate into the living room, he placed it upon the coffee table, artfully arranging the silverware by its side.
"I see you have discovered Múm.", he said, pulling her from her reverie.
"I picked it randomly.", she confessed. "I've never heard of them, but…I wish I had."
"They're an experimental Icelandic group. This is the only album they have produced that I will own, it's the only one I truly care for.",
"Her voice is…"
"Haunting?", he asked to her immediate nod.
Not as haunting as yours, he thought. His golden eyes glowing down at her with strange longing.
She stood and turned off the record player and he gestured to the plate of food, which considered with a sort of intrigued wonder. They looked like tiny works of edible art.
"The only meat on the plate is quail and duck.", he offered, gesturing to the two neatly assembled dishes in the center of the plate.
"This looks amazing, thank you.", she shyly replied as she began to try bites of each dish, while he sat like some sort of creepy spectator. It was a gorgeous site to watch her do something as simple as ingest food. Every movement she made was humble, gentle, almost mouse like in an endearing way. Her eyes caught his, "You aren't eating?"
"I am not hungry.", he replied.
"You haven't eaten all day.", she pointed out.
"Pork and Beef.", he replied. "Why do you eat others and not those?"
She huffed at his changing of the subject but began to absentmindedly stab at a neatly curled carrot. "When my father and I were traveling around the country, we stayed in a farmhouse for a few weeks. They slaughtered pigs and cattle, I watched it happen a couple of times…I still remember the smell of the blood when I see a hamburger. I know it's silly, that somehow I can justify eating a chicken and not a pig, but…I can't handle blood and the memories have always been there."
What would she do if she knew what you did just last night?, the voice in his head said. He did not need to respond; he knew the answer already. She would not be sitting so close to him if she was privy to that knowledge.
She was a good, kind, decent person who had only ever looked at him with anything save kindness, regardless of the mask he wore. Christine was the epitome of everything he was not and that made him want her all the more. He longed to know her intimately and completely.
Struck with the sudden desire to know more, he began to ask her questions about her childhood, a place with pleasant memories of her father. Despite her mother's death, her childhood was still full of love and happy memories. Travel was a constant, which made her feelings of isolation seem normal. 'When you'are uprooted all the time, it's hard to make friends. Instead, papa was my one and only confidant, my best friend.', she had said wistfully.
Some of her tales were full of humor and laughter, as she regaled a story about a pigeon who had become trapped in a motel room, her eyes lit up and she was giggling. He found himself smiling with her, he could feel her joy at a situation which she found to be comedic. The sunny feeling warmed his cold bones.
Other tales explained of the poverty her and her father had endured, a consequence of a musician living between jobs. She spoke of getting by on very little, of washing her clothing in the bathtub because they could not afford a laundromat, of eating nothing but peanut butter and jelly for weeks, of all the miles they had walked because they could not afford bus fare. She said she knew how guilty her father felt for forcing her to live in such conditions.
"Then came Raoul.", she said softly with a sigh. "Papa thought he would be my golden ticket."
His eyes briefly closed at the sudden discomfort that sunk in his belly at the mention of a man.
"Raoul was my first and only boyfriend, I had dated guys before, but nothing long term, not until Raoul.", Christine said as she sunk deeper into the corner of the sofa she had migrated to during the hours of storytelling. "He came from old money, I mean, like, his ancestors probably owned slaves, kind of money. He was from New Orleans, but his family originated in France, they come from a long line of aristocrats. The kind that they would have beheaded during the revolution. My father was certain that Raoul was the answer to his prayers. He wanted a man to come in and save me."
He didn't say a word, only morbidly curious to how this story would play itself out.
"He was really sweet, very outgoing, the life of the party, all golden and bright. I liked him immediately, because he was always so sincere, but I always felt so out of place in his world. My clothes were cheap, often stained or starting to fray. When I met his family for the first time, I had a coffee stain on my shirt. His mother commented that I must have had a spill that morning…that stain had been on my shirt for over a month.", Christine let out a sigh, as though the memory still brought shame.
"You should hardly feel shame for being poor.", he pointed out as though it was obvious.
"At the time, it was hard not to. I saw the way his family looked at me, like I was a vulture who was coming in to feast upon their son. Raoul though he could solve all the problems I had with a wave of his magic money wand, but he didn't understand how uncomfortable it made me feel. He helped my father and I pay for the rent on our apartment.", she sighed. "It wasn't just that though, there were other problems. He took me to the opera once, because his family has a patronage there and he fell asleep in the first act. It was one of the most phenomenal experiences of my life and my boyfriend wasn't enjoying it. Raoul was really good at business, but he didn't understand music, he listened to top 40 radio, you know, with autotune? He thinks Kanye West is the greatest musician who ever lived."
Erik inwardly cringed.
"Anyways," she continued. "He didn't understand how important music was to me. Maybe I'm like my father, I would rather be doing what I love than living a stable life…", she shook her head, as though she herself was still trying to piece together the puzzle of her own life.
"You should always do what you love, the rest will follow.", he told her. "What happened to the boy?", the last word left his lips with a bitterness and disrespect that he could not hold back.
"We broke up," she replied with a dullness to her voice, "We were together for a couple of years until my father got sick. Raoul wanted to get married, to have children, but I couldn't agree to his proposal and then, when papa died…", her eyes squeezed shut, a solitary tear leaking out between the creased fold and rolling like a smooth glass marble down her cheek. He wanted to capture it, to place it in his mouth so he could share her sorrow. "I started to use the morphine he had left behind, the same drug that eased his pain when he was dying. I used it to kill my own pain. I grew distant and I broke up with Raoul, I couldn't even do it in person so I did it over the phone, I was so afraid I would change my mind. I was so scared of losing myself in a shallow love more than I was of losing myself to drugs.", she looked up at him, "Have you ever had to break someone's heart before?"
He considered her carefully before shaking his head. Her question was almost flattering, as if he was desirable enough to have broken the heart of another.
"Did someone break yours?", she asked, her brow preemptively furrowing in sympathy, as though anticipating he would answer in the affirmative.
Suddenly he couldn't breathe, she was crawling into his suit of armor and touching his soft, vulnerable flesh now. He quickly gave a wordless reply with the shake of his head and simply tapped the mask as though it were explanation enough. A man in his early forties was confessing to having never known the agony of heartache, of having never known the pleasures of a romantic relationship. She looked at him with such pity that he nearly opened his mouth to scream, instead he gritted his teeth.
"It is growing late," he said, "You should sleep now, you may be quite restless for a few days. It will be better for you to sleep tonight if you can."
"You'll be here if it gets too hard?", she asked, as she rose from the couch, she seemed embarrassed for having garnered such a shameful personal detail of which he had ownership.
"I will always be here.", he replied coolly as he watched her cross the room towards the bedroom.
She stopped in the doorway of the bedroom and looked over her shoulder. "I would rather see your face than the mask, Erik. I'm not shallow. I'll accept you."
And with that she stepped into the bedroom and closed the door gently behind her, leaving him to completely unravel from the force of her last words like unspooling thread.
He knew she was merely being kind, she was not professing love of any sort, but the mere implication that she could look at his face with acceptance was suffocating in its intensity. Not even he could look upon his face with anything but disgust, after all, there were no mirrors hung in his home. Daroga had been the only one to look in his eyes unflinching when the mask was not in place, but Daroga was also as immune to the horrors of death as he was.
He wondered what Christine's fingers would feel like, caressing his naked face as she beamed up with him, a smile on her adorable face. A smile for him alone. It was a joyous image he carried with him as he later executed the unenviable chore of disposing of Brad's body and cleaning the mess of the chamber.
Even after the macabre tasks were complete and he began his diligent work on the new bedroom, he removed his mask to continue his fantasies of loving hands upon his face. Imagining the cool air was her sweet touch and contemplating such a thing as being loved for himself.
That pretty fairytale carried him through the entire night.
The album by Múm is called Summer Make Good. It is quite haunting. I'd like to imagine modern Erik would be into experimental groups like that.
(I love their entire catalogue, but that album is the only one I can picture Erik enjoying.)