I carried the pipe into the bathroom and held it out to her. She raised an eyebrow.
“Is this my birthday present?”
“No! God, no! I was just wondering if you knew where this came from?”
She shook her head. “No clue.”
I took the pipe back to the office and set it down where I found it, but it bothered me too much. I stared at it for a moment. Of course, I assumed it was Valentina, fucking with me, but no matter how ridiculous the joke was, I couldn’t stand being in the same apartment as that object. So I took it four flights down, out of the building, and threw it in the dumpster. By the time I returned upstairs, breathless from the climb, Beth was in bed, applying lotion to her legs and looking sad.
“I had a really wonderful night,” she said, sulking.
I waited for the rest, but she simply looked at her toes.
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said carefully. “What’s wrong?”
She looked up. “Nothing.”
“What? Tell me.”
“I just.” She closed her eyes. “Nothing.”
“Beth. You’re a terrible actress. Please tell me why you’re sad.”
“Don’t think I’m ungrateful for the party,” she began, taking her time between words. “Because I’m not. I really loved it. And the food. The people. Everything was perfect. Thank you.”
I waited. “But . . .?”
She grimaced, then finally answered. “I had hoped you would get me a present. Like a tangible present. But I know it’s materialistic and silly and ungrateful and awful and God—I’m the worst.” She winced. “Please forget I said anything. The party is more than I could ask for. I’m being insufferable.”
I smacked myself on the forehead. The pipe had distracted me from the birthday gift! Gift giving is her number one love language! “Beth! I’m such an idiot!” I ran to the office, retrieved the letters, and presented them to her in bed.
She was beside herself. She loved them. She loved me. She wept, said she’d never received such a moving gift aside from my love. And so forth.
Next thing I knew, I was waking in a gasp and a cold sweat from a nightmare that I had killed Beth with the pipe in a ballroom in Vermont. Blunt trauma to the head.
Never had the cause-and-effect of an action been so transparent to me. Never had a cause been so effective. I was shaking for a week. This was the beginning of my Hell.
I had hoped finding the pipe was a kind of hallucination. But a few weeks later, I found a cord of rope in my desk drawer. At the beginning of May, I found a candlestick I’d never seen before in the liquor cabinet. Then: toy revolver in my nightstand. Plastic dagger wedged between two fresh towels in the linen closet. An unfamiliar monkey wrench in one of my boots. Fortunately, I was the one who found all these objects.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the game of Clue, these are the possible weapons: candlestick, revolver, rope, wrench, dagger, lead pipe.
I didn’t tell Beth about them because I didn’t want to scare her. I stopped going to soccer games. I stopped getting drinks with the guys after work. I told everyone I was stressed. I tried to maintain a normal sex life with Beth, but it was impossible. I was so terrified of hurting her that I could no longer get aroused. Stress, I insisted. So, so stressed. Of course, she was herself—kind, patient, accepting. She tried to massage me, but I shrugged her off, saying my skin hurt. It did.
By the end of May, I truly believed Valentina might be plotting Beth’s death, or mine, and I wanted to go to the police. Even if it was a joke, Valentina had gone way too far and exhibited undeniably sociopathic behavior. Right? After I found the pipe in the linen closet, I vowed to call the police first thing in the morning.
But that night, a haunting discovery changed everything, and this is the most fucked-up part of this funhouse of fucked-uppery: when I checked my debit card statement online, several purchases that I could not account for appeared. When I looked into the transaction history, I found evidence of each item—each weapon from Clue—apparently purchased by me, at three different stores, in the month of March.
I told myself that Valentina had Iago’d me just like she had Iago’d Jandro. Told myself not to panic. She had taken my card, obviously, made the purchases, and then planted them around our apartment at the birthday party. But the explanation didn’t fully hang together: I had been using my card consistently. It had never been stolen. Had Beth possibly purchased the objects, hoping to use them as some kind of party prop? But no—she hadn’t recognized the pipe. So had Valentina hacked into my account? Maybe she had taken photos of my credit card when she was in my office. It was possible.
But the unspeakable horror of the remaining possibility prevented me from investigating fraud in any official way, and it also prevented me from contacting Valentina. I needed to figure out what was happening to me. I recalled all the instances in which I had rebooted back to consciousness in a hardware store. Recalled the escalating, irrational fears and compulsions. Was I losing it? Did I have a brain tumor?
It was during this period of brain fire that I tagged the cement near the tennis courts.
Meanwhile, the nightmares got worse. They became gruesome and detailed. They still are. In the nightmares, I never derive any pleasure from killing Beth—I am horrified, sick, screaming at myself to stop—but I can’t keep myself from doing it. Like I’m possessed.
It got to the point where I was so afraid of having a nightmare I could no longer sleep. In July, the nightmares graduated to visions, hijacking me while I was awake. (The word for a scary dream is nightmare, but what’s the word for a scary fantasy? Fantasmare?) I started working in the kitchen through the night. Stress, stress, stress, I claimed. People never question stress. You’d be amazed by how much abnormal behavior people dismiss if you tell them you’re stressed. I exaggerated the pressure and the deadlines from work. I started gripping my belt loops or sitting on my hands whenever I could. I avoided television, newspapers, the elderly, women, children, and animals. Of course, Beth and I stopped having sex entirely. It was painful for me to be near her at all—I was always terrified that I would injure her. She became very worried about me and kept saying I should quit if work was making me this crazy, but in truth, my job was my last source of respite.
Last week I became so afraid of harming Beth that, one afternoon while she was out shopping, I threw away all the cutlery. But it wasn’t enough. I proceeded to throw away anything that could be used as a weapon. The lighter. Her hammer. Cast-iron skillets. Glassware. Electronic cords. Scissors. Nail clippers. Cleaning chemicals. Silverware. Plunger. Belts. Razors. Agate bookends.
Once everything was safely deposited in the trash bins three floors below, I started having visions of killing Beth with my own hands—strangling her, suffocating her, beating her—and I was so horrified that I think I would have actually removed my hands from my arms had I not thrown away all the blades we owned—and by the time Beth arrived home to find a substantial portion of our belongings gone, and me, sobbing and hyperventilating on the rug, beating my hands against the wall, she panicked. I was sweating, sleep-deprived, thrashing—I surely looked like the dangerous man I was.
“Are you on drugs?” she demanded, dropping her grocery bags on the welcome mat. She was clearly terrified of me—wouldn’t step off the mat. Wouldn’t even close the front door. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
I didn’t know what to do, so I lied. I told her I was having an affair. I told her I wanted nothing to do with her, and she shouldn’t try to find me or contact me. I told her she disgusted me. I told her I had packed up my things and I was moving out. I was really dramatic about it. Her name is Diana! I screamed. I don’t know why I said that. My middle school girlfriend was named Diana, and I worshipped her—she was always winning state competitions for math and flute and stuff—but after I held her hand at the ice-skating rink, she called my family’s landline to break it off. Things were moving too fast between us, she explained.
I fled from the apartment without anything but my wallet, the clothes I was wearing, and my electronics.