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Surface

Christopher Frost

    “Do it!” I screamed to a sky of rolling dark clouds, more ominous than I had ever seen in a New England sky before. In my whole life I had never seen a twister, not in person, but I had seen them plenty on the Discovery Channel. The way the sky looked as the funnel cloud began to form, how the darkness swallowed the light and then rained hell down upon the earth. One enormous tube of wind and hell with a hungry mouth for anything in its path. If preachers really believed in God’s wrath I imagined that this was what it looked like. The stretches of blue, clear skies were rapidly being eaten by this grey matter that looked like anything but clouds.
    “Come on you sonofabitch! I’m right here. COME ON!” I wasn’t even aware that I was running until my legs burned with exhaustion. What I was doing was chasing the storm, sprinting across the open field toward the darkest part of the cloud formation above my head. It began to hail. Ping pong sized hail that struck me like a barrage of bullets. One such sized ball of hail struck me just above the eyebrow and as I moved I felt the warmth of blood drooling down into my eye and blurring my vision. “Is that all you have? Huh? C’mon! You can’t kill me with balls of ice, you fool.”
    I wiped the blood from my eye but it was still difficult to see. The wind was picking up with great force and pushed at my body like a man three times my size trying to hold me back, but my will was greater than the elements. All I wanted was to die, for whatever I had done in my life to piss off the Gods, or God –, whichever may be the case. It was their hand I wanted to feel extinguish my life. This was not a suicide attempt or act of insanity. I had nothing left. Everything had been taken from me without so much as an excuse as to why. No note, no real, rational sit down to explain, not even a goddamn email or text message. So, ya, I wanted it to be a higher power that extinguished my life. Took back what I had never asked for, dammit. I deserved that much didn’t I?
    My foot caught a hole in the field and I tumbled end over end scratching the hell out of my shins on the dead wheat and scattering of twigs blown over to the field from the forest. I rolled, ass over end, but recovered and was quickly back on my feet chasing the storm as the first bellow of thunder echoed like the bass of a drum in the dwindling light. But where was the lightning? Where was the wrath of God that I had read about in the Bible and was preached about by the collared servants of God? The sky was beginning to swirl, rotating, and I believed even without knowing what to really look for, that a tornado would touch down. I could only pray that I was beneath it when it reached out to grasp the earth and tear it away to the heavens.
    More thunder, a flash of light, but I did not see an actual bolt of electricity. This mind fuck was getting on my nerves. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to chase down this storm to the ends of the earth. It didn’t matter to me anymore that my legs were screaming in agony and my bad knee buckled with almost every step I took. When she left that was hard enough, but the envelope that was placed in my hand this morning from the Sheriff had been the final straw. There just wasn’t enough strength in me to go on. I had fought for too long, faced too many battles and though I had won them all, each took a piece of my mind with every victory. I was just too tired to step back on the battle field and fight another battle in a losing war. The toll...it’s just too much –
    too much.
    It had to end today, a reward for the suffering. For whatever sin that I had committed, surely it wasn’t worth this much punishment.
    On the far side of the field stood a large tree all by itself, at least a hundred yards away from the forest, perched on top of a small knoll. It looked dead, decaying, but hanging on at the end of the top most branches were tiny green leaves. The old thing still had a little life left in it. I wasn’t even aware that I was running toward the tree when suddenly I was no more than twenty feet away. The sky cracked and a blistering gnarled white-blue bolt of lightning burned through the air and struck the tree, splitting one of the largest branches in fiery half.
    “Please – ”
    The wind grasped the branch and swung it towards me as I continued to run forward.
    “ – end it,” I whispered and closed my eyes. There was a deafening cry of screeching wind and then something struck me hard in the stomach. My body was propelled backwards and I came to land in the muddy field, out of breath and desperately trying to inhale. Only when I opened my eyes did I see the heavy branch lying across my chest and stomach, pressing me into the ground.
    I hadn’t believed her when she said that it was over. Not really. How could I when all the signs pointed to something that could never be over. Thirteen months ago she had come home and told me that we needed to talk, and from the sadness in her eyes I knew what ‘talk’ meant. It was over. She wanted out of our five year marriage and no amount of pleading, promises of change, or praying would change her mind. And yet, in that time, the eight months that it took our home to sell and for her to find her own place, we shared the same bed every night. Her arms wrapped around me, her body pressed firmly to my own, and I believed, no, I let myself believe, that there was a chance that all she really needed was space.
    How wrong I was.
    There were no ‘good-byes’ said when she left. But the moment that she walked out that door, I was no more than an after thought while she was never out of my mind. Some nights – the worst – after twelve or thirteen beers and two packs of cigarettes I would walk to front door where my keys hung on the keychain and lift them off. Wobbling drunk I would march to my truck, open the door, and plant my ass in the seat. The cold metal key would slide perfectly into the ignition and the instrument panel lights would illuminate my dark unshaved face and pallid dreary red eyes. All I had to do was turn over the ignition. My trembling fingers clasped around the key wanting to make that clockwise turn and that was when I thought to myself What the hell are you doing? What the fuck are you doing? And I knew that I couldn’t. Because if I got in the truck and I drove to her apartment a cycle would start. Stalking? Maybe some would call it that, and maybe that was what it would become? But the real reason that I never got behind the wheel and drove the seventeen miles to her apartment was because she was happy now.
    Because I was no longer in her life.
    “Why?” I asked her as we had sat at the dining room table, me trying my best not to cry though I could feel the tears welling at the corner of my eyes. Her tears were flowing more freely (I even got up to get her a handful of paper towels to blow her nose and wipe her tears) as she looked into my eyes and said, “I’m not happy.”
    I’m not happy she told me. All I had ever wanted was her happiness and once upon a time, like every fairy tale begins, she was the beautiful princess filled with life and passion and...happiness. I had taken that away from her.
    When I was alone and could let go, I finally did cry. Amid the smell of oil and gas fumes in the garage, with the door closed, I unleashed my rage on the punching bag that hung in the corner. I hit that damn thing until my knuckles bled and then I hit it and continued to hit it, as if seeing each blood stain on the fabric of the bag was a little of my pain freeing itself from my body. All the while thinking of every mistake I had ever made in our marriage. It was almost comical that if someone had asked me a day before what I had done wrong in my marriage I may have only been able to come up with a handful of things, maybe not even enough to count on my fingers, but as I struck the heavy bag and it swayed around on the chain stained with my blood, I could remember every mistake I had ever made in vivid quality. In my mind the mistakes, the moments that I had taken her for granted, the stupid fights, and tiny idiosyncrasies that got under my skin, all played like a movie reel in my mind. Layers and layers of mistakes that pressed down on me and began to smother me, as though a person were holding a plastic bag over my head to suffocate me. What a terrible fool I had been.
    What a terrible fool.
    “It will get better with time.” My friend Shellie had told me over the phone while I drank and piled the beers in rows atop the coffee table in the cloudy, smoke stenched living room. I was determined not to let the depression take me back to the dark place. Borderline Personality Disorder is what the doctors had diagnosed me with and that had led to the cutting. My arms, chest, and thighs, even a good sized scar down the left side of my cheek tattooed my body. I was sure the cutting was another reason, along with the many others, for her departure from my life. My dear sweet Eve.
    I failed you.
    I failed you.
    I failed...
    I...
    “I’m sorry.” The words escaped my lips in no more than an audible whisper or maybe my lips were only moving and the words were being spoken in my mind. There was so much pain. Too much to live.
    Rain showered on me and I blinked repeatedly as I struggled to open my eyes. At least the hail had stopped, but the storm had yet to pass. Had I missed the tornado? Did it even happen? I hoped it had not. I wanted to stand in all its glorious power as it raced toward me and enveloped me in its deadly spiral. To feel the last second of life as the air was ripped from my lungs. My prayers answered by the gods. While I proudly thrust my middle finger to the heavens.
    Instead there I lay on the ground with a damn tree branch the width of a telephone poll across my chest with one of its offspring branches buried in my thigh. How deep I couldn’t be sure and didn’t really care. As my eyes surveyed my body I knew that I was not long for this world and an unconscious smile stretched my face.
    My fingers dug into the wet ground and began to pull. I started to drag myself from beneath the mighty tree branch and felt my skin open as the smaller branch tore through my flesh and opened a long line down my leg. It was brutally painful and exhilarating at the same time and it reminded me of...cutting.
    Oh God, no.
    A promise had been made, even though she was gone. I had promised to never cut again. The promise was made to try and convince her to stay, the motive had been selfish but it was still true and I swore to never cut again for the rest of my life regardless of her choices in the end.
    It’s all coming to a final conclusion.
    The curtain is falling on the final act.
    She would never know what I felt in these final moments. That a tree branch eviscerating my leg felt like the edge of razor against my skin as I drew lines across my body in bloody rows. But I would know. And there was that promise that I made.
    The effort to sit up made the world flutter in and out of darkness. I could feel myself wanting to pass out and fall back in heap against the muddy ground. Somehow I was able to stay conscious. What I had thought was the whole telephone poll tree branch pinning me down was actually only the piece that was imbedded in my leg. I tried to lift the branch, to force it out of my leg and again the world fluttered in and out. There wasn’t enough strength in my body to pull the tree branch out. I searched around for some type of lever, maybe another thick branch that I could use as a fulcrum to get the wood out of me. There was nothing. Then I spied a rock, just heavy enough to maybe hack away at the wood until the branch broke free. My fingers reached out and grasped the slippery object. I brought it up with both hands and began furiously chopping at the wood, splinters spraying around me, some striking me in the eye dulling my vision as my eyes closed to try and clean out the foreign object. I continued to strike at the branch until I heard a crack and wrenched my leg free. Blood spurted in an arc that struck my face and painted me crimson. I must have looked like a monster.
    I began to crawl. To where, I had no idea. I could no longer see if I was at the center of the storm and at this point, as I slowly dragged my ruined legs across the field and bled out, it didn’t matter. Time was not on my side.
    Soon I would find peace, and she would be free from my mind. Free from me and be able to live her life with the happiness that she deserved. There was a life insurance policy, that I took out a few weeks after she had left, when I was certain that I may accidently drink myself to death or take too many of the pills the therapist had prescribed to help with the night-terrors and the anxiety. There was never an intent to kill myself of course, that would have made the life insurance policy null and void, but accidental overdose? Well people could understand that. Even the suits at the insurance company. These things happened. As for the policy, I took out just enough to make it not look suspicious, $325,000, enough to pay off the credit card debt, the vehicles, and enough for her to live a better life that didn’t involve living paycheck to paycheck. Fools that pulled insurance scams always took out too much, millions. That was just dumb. Anyone that watched any of the plethora of crime dramas on television could figure out that that was just idiotic.
    When my fingers reached out to grasp at the ground they splashed and closed around a handful of water. Dragging my body forward I found myself gazing into a pond, at my own reflection. I had imagined that I might have looked like a monster, my reflection mirrored exactly what I had thought. My face was bruised from the hail and scattered scratches and deep gorges of wounds that dripped with blood only solidified what I had imagined.
    I wasn’t aware that I was laughing and crying at the same time, hysterical really, until I could see it with my own eyes and then I could hear it. The laughter ebbed away until crystal tears paved down my cheeks through the desert of blood painted on my face.
    “Oh God, what have I done?” She would know. That much I was certain of. Eve would know what I had done even if the police ruled it an ‘accidental death’; my sweet Eve would know the truth.
    Why do you care?
    I heard a voice. Where was it coming from? I searched the field and saw that I was alone. Far away, no larger than a Matchbox Car, was my truck perched on the top of the hill. Delusions were common when one was dying weren’t they? That was what this was, a delusion.
    “No, no,” I found myself saying to the emptiness of the field, “She knows I come here. Eve, knows how I like to watch the storms. She will think I just got caught in one. She won’t think...” She wouldn’t think I killed myself. She wouldn’t. Right?
    I’m sure you are right Gabrial...
    “Stop it!” I screamed. Just stop it, please, I thought. I was peering at my reflection when it began to change and all my features vanished to reveal the image of a woman in the pond with black hair and grey skin. Her hair was swept over her face but her mouth I could see and it was moving, talking...to me.
    Come with me...
    “What are you?” I asked.
    Come with me...it isn’t death that you seek, only release and –
    I looked at the image and could see more than just a face. Just beneath the glass still water and the circular wake of the falling rain was a woman. She was treading water beneath the surface, wearing a white gown that flowed around her like wings. Her nipples were perk, dark circles beneath her dress that stood out, beckoning to me. I imagined – it had to be in my mind, it just had to be – that I could smell her arousal as she treaded beneath the surface, her hands folding between her legs, pressing the material of her dress between her thighs.
    “And what?”
    Revenge, Gabrial...
    Come with me...
    “No, no, I don’t want revenge.”
    Ahh, but you do. I can smell it. Her hands pressed over her body until they grasped her breasts and then clawed back down her abdomen, her tattered dress floating around her.
    “This isn’t about revenge,” I told the woman beneath the surface.
    No?
    “I just wanted,” I stumbled over my words. It disgusted me that I was crying. In the time since Eve left I had hid my emotions from my friends and family, never breaking down, never letting them see me cry. Even when I held the summons for the divorce in my hand, I didn’t weep.
    What? she said. What is it that you want?
    “To be loved.”
    Her hand pressed against the surface of the water as though she were behind a pane of glass. For a moment I only studied that hand. If only I could see her eyes. What was she promising me?
    Love, she said, reading my thoughts. Love, Gabrial.
    For so long I had been empty. So alone. All I had wanted was for Eve to give me another chance, to see that I could be the man that she had loved so long ago. I had survived the battle with my mind and come out stronger and with her I would never let it win again, would never succumb to the dark place. As I looked down into the darkness of the pond and the woman that treaded beneath its glassy surface, I was able to comprehend what it was that I truly wanted. She was right, I didn’t want death. Only to be loved. But not her love, not any other woman’s love, I wanted Eve’s love.
    The woman in the water floated toward the surface and as her hair washed away from her face I saw Eve. For a second I almost believed that it was her, trapped beneath the watery surface, and my hand darted forward. I was an inch away from grasping her hand to pull her out of the water, when I saw those cold dead eyes. The woman in the water may have looked like Eve but she was anything but.
    I can be, Gabrial.
    I can be anything that you desire.
    Come with me...
    She – it – looked just as Eve did. And if Eve wouldn’t have me –
    The water was cold as ice as the tips of my fingers touched it, and then sank beneath its depth to reach out for the woman below. Her smile held a sense of warmth and foreboding as her hand reached for mine, and there was something unsettling about her eyes, not just their appearance but what was behind them. As her fingers laced with mine there was a startling pain in my chest and my mouth opened unable to inhale. My muscles had atrophied and I was being pulled into the water, first up to my elbow and then my entire body was being dragged beneath the surface.
    Below, in the depth of the dark pool of the pond, the woman who wore the guise of Eve wrapped her legs around me and placed her lips to mine. It wasn’t a kiss of passion, but I could feel her excitement as her nipples pressed against my body and she rubbed herself against my crotch. She broke the embrace and smiled at me as she treaded away deeper into the depths of the pond, into an eternal darkness below the water.
    “Wait,” I cried, not comprehending that I could speak beneath the water, that I wasn’t drowning in this pool of murk.
    Gabrial?
    “Where are you?” I treaded back and fourth, unknowing if I was up or down. It was so dark.
    Gabrial?
    “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” Where had she gone? I had done as she asked, as she had pleaded. I had gone into the water with her, and she had told me that she would be anything that I wanted. There was only one thing I wanted, the one thing that I could never have above the surface and now that too had abandoned me.
    “Gabrial?” The voice was so clear now. I could hear the direction it was coming from and turned my head to meet it.
    I was looking up from beneath the surface of the water at myself. Unharmed in the same pair of jeans, black tee shirt, and leather jacket that I had been wearing when I fell into the pond. When I looked down at my own body my clothes were still around me, floating around my skin.
    What? What’s –
    The other me. The one above the surface in the field with the storm raging around him and rain running in lines over his face, was kneeling down and looking at me. Those eyes, so familiar, not because they were my own, but because they weren’t. They may have been the same color but behind them was an emptiness as though there were no...soul.
    Oh Jesus –
    “Afraid not,” it spoke in my voice. “But I’ll still answer all your prayers, pal.”
    What are you talking about?
    “Revenge, justice, whatever you want to call it.” The thing that wore my skin smirked. “I’m free now and I can’t thank you enough. Now those that scorned us will have to suffer as we have suffered. Mmmm, can you smell it? A brand new day.”
    No! I cried and swam toward the surface only to hit it like a wall. My fists began to pound against it, trying to crack the barrier between myself and world above the pond. Let me out. Let me out. LET ME OUT!
    “Can’t do that, pal,” it said, and its appearance began to change. The beard and unkempt hair that I had ignored since being Eve left me, faded away to a cleanly shaven person with styled hair that didn’t seem effected by the elements. “I’m doing this for you, doing what you couldn’t and others like us, the forgotten, the scorned, the ones that were left behind by those that we loved.”
    Eve, I didn’t say it but the image of her flashed in my mind.
    “Don’t worry, pal, I’ll start with her.” I hadn’t spoken her name. How did it know? How could it hear my thoughts?
    No! Leave her alone. That isn’t what I wanted. Don’t hurt her.
    The other me stood up and placed its hands in the pockets of its jeans. It pulled out the set of keys to my truck and a pack of cigarettes. He, it, me, tossed the smokes into the pond and I watched as they drifted beneath the surface and reached out to grasp them, the only tangible thing I could feel in this void of murk and darkness. There was a splash and the lighter floated down next.
    “Those things’ll kill ya,” it said in my voice. “Well, I should get going, got a play-date to keep.” It was looking at my watch, the one that was still on my left wrist and on its.
    Nooooooooooo!
    “See ya around, pal. I’ll give Eve your love.” The last words I heard as the thing that wore my body walked towards my truck at the far side of the field behind a wooden fence.
    Eve...I thought as I sank deeper beneath the surface of the pond with only the cigarettes and lighter as a companion. I crumpled the pack of smokes as I sank deeper into the abyss.
    Eve...
    Eve...
    EVE –

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