[4:33 A.M.] O: ok im comin thru
I put on my headphones and went out to our tenth-floor balcony. Just a few blocks away was Toronto’s towering downtown—a deluxe crystal growth all the colors of credit cards—but the street below me was rough shit, an acned wasteland strewn with used needles, haunted by 3-D shadows and dumpster lurkers that scattered before the headlights of police patrols. There was even a dark humanish shape lying on the grass beside our driveway.
But no O. Why was she taking so long?
It was strange: when she got home, chances were we’d continue our grievous fight from before she left, she’d cry silently and I’d claw my skull, then we’d sleep back to back and avoid each other in the morning… but as I scanned the street, all I thought about was holding her and kissing her sweet head and rejoicing just because she was alive.
I texted her. It went unread.
Suddenly my music seemed stifling. I was reaching up to my headphones when someone grabbed my arm and wrenched me to one side. My heart leapt into my brain and exploded, this is it, I’m dead, and I swung around to face my executioner.
It was O. Still hauling on my arm.
“Come on! Come on!”
I resisted. Even tried to pull her down.
“Jesus FUCKIN Christ O, what’s wrong with you??”
“Come on! There’s no time!”
Then I saw she’d left our entrance door wide open, and I relented and hurried out with her.
About ten doors down, blocking the entire hallway, was one of the largest men I’d ever seen. His body looked inflated, bulging up against his hoodie and baggy jeans, while his head was tiny, a dark boil riding the massive ripple of his chest. His massive arms hung limply at his sides.
He was just far enough that I couldn’t make out his face.
O raised my hand high like I’d just K.O.ed someone.
“This is my HUSBAND, OKAY???”
I looked at her in disbelief. This dude could have crumpled me with one hand.
He didn’t answer. Not a twitch. Just the arms hanging like butchered pigs, and the bottomless stare out of a face I couldn’t see.
I hustled O inside, bolted the door and put my eye to the viewer: nothing… nothing… nothing.
O was in the kitchen drinking tapwater, long-legged in a ruffled short skirt, two big eyes visible over the cup. It had been a while since she’d looked like a priceless treasure to me. I took the glass out of her hands and embraced her tightly.
“He was in the elevator. On the ground floor. Just standing inside with the door closed.”
I drew back.
“And you got on anyway?!”
“I was so tired… I just got on and pressed our floor number. He didn’t press anything.”
“Oh my god.”
“He was looking at me the whole way up. Not saying anything, not smiling, just staring, staring… So I said, ‘Look, I have a husband, and he’s expecting me RIGHT NOW, okay?’ …No response. His face didn’t change. We reached our floor, he got off after me, I ran to you.”
“And what’d you think I was gonna do? He’s like three times my size!”
“I…”
“When you left the door open, you gave him his chance. If he’d come in… What were you thinking?”
She crossed her arms and looked at the floor.
“Never mind, I’m glad you’re okay,” I said, though I could feel our closeness already dissipating. I’d blown it again. I was unsheathing our ten-inch meat knife. “I’m going to check whether he’s there.”
In the viewer’s fish-eye I saw only the neighbor’s door and bare walls. I stealthily unbolted our door and eased it open.
He was in front of me, lying on his side on the carpet, supporting his shrunken head with one craggy hand and gazing up at me, his mouth gaping and his tongue lolling out sideways. He looked like he’d been violently lobomotized.
I waggled the knife at him and tried to say something menacing. No words came; I squeaked, then slammed the door.
He knocked.
“We’re c-c-calling the police!”
The doorknob wriggled.
“WE’RE CALLING THE POLICE!”
And he finally spoke.
It was like hearing a well speak, a toneless bass wind groaning up a long stone throat.
“Ooooookaaaaay,” he said.
When the cops arrived he was crosslegged by the elevators. Without getting up he began ponderously arguing with them. One came over smiling and asked to speak to us in our apartment.
“I arrested this guy last week. Broke into the home of a Chinese woman. Not a young one, we’re talking maybe… sixty. He found her in bed, but just… stood there. Looking at her. Watching her call us. Didn’t do or say squat. Then we come… and he goes along peacefully, no problemo. In the car, I ask him what he was doing there. What he wanted. He said… God told him to rape Asian women.”
O and I exchanged looks. She shifted over to lean against me.
The cop took details, shook my hand, patted O’s shoulder, and left. Clutching the butcher knife, I roved the apartment, checking the street, the viewer, the lock.
“I feel bad for him,” O said.
I chuckled and kept pacing until she asked me to stop and be with her. I found a safe place by our bedside to stash the knife, then we wrapped ourselves around each other and lay there quivering, with nothing to say. It was starting to get light.