Page 56 of The Quiet Tenant

If this is it, then he will be the last person to see you alive. The lastperson to see you blink, swallow. The last one to watch your chest rise and fall like a metronome.

If you choose to speak, he will be the last person to hear the sound of your voice.

Is there anything you need to get off your chest? Anything you need someone to hear before it’s too late?

He starts the truck.

I had a mother,you could tell him.I had a father. Like your daughter. I had a father. I had a brother. I was born on a stormy summer night. My mother was so done being pregnant. She was relieved I finally came into the world. Happy, too, but mainly relieved. My birth marked the end of a period of great unpleasantness.

You never saw it, but I used to love my life. It wasn’t perfect. It was comfortable, but it wasn’t always easy. My first boyfriend hurt me and I hurt him back, one voice mail on his answering machine, a furious exclamation mark bringing young love to an end. My brother hurt himself, twice, and then I hurt him, too.

I searched for my place in the world. Sometimes I felt I had found it, but then I worried it would be taken from me. A stranger hurt me—not you, another one before. You weren’t the only one. You don’t know this. You never asked and I never told you. But I knew what it was like, before you found me. I knew what it was like when someone you don’t know, someone you have never met, decides a part of you will forever belong to them.

That was your one mistake, the day I met you. You thought you would surprise me. You thought you would be the first bad thing to ever happen to me. But I knew how it worked. I was born in the city that killed Kitty Genovese; some people heard her scream but were scared of speaking to the police, or they were confused, or they didn’t think calling would do any good. What Kitty Genovese taught me: when the world doesn’t look out for you, you can’t look out for others.

I took my first steps in a park where, one morning in August of 1986, the body of an eighteen-year-old girl was found, hours after she’d left a bar with a boy she knew. Across the street from the same park was where the singer was gunned down in 1980, by a man who had in his pocket a paperback of my favorite novel when I was a teen.

So no, when you found me, it didn’t surprise me. Of course you found me. You had to happen to someone, and you happened to me.

The truck comes to a halt. The engine stops.

The year of my birth: 1991. I looked it up on Wikipedia one day, the things that happened that year. Like a horoscope. I wanted to know under what auspices I had been born.

Maybe you remember. The Giants won the Super Bowl. Dick Cheney canceled a fifty-seven-billion-dollar contract for some type of military aircraft. A killer jet, a stealth bomber, a machine designed to annihilate. Do you see where I’m going with this?

That year, the woman—you know the one: Charlize Theron played her in a movie—confessed to killing seven men. They beat her, she said. They tried to rape her. She had no choice.

It was a time of turmoil. Operation Desert Storm in the background. A grand jury indicted Mike Tyson. The police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer. In Europe, the Soviet Union ended.

The world, it was so wretched. So chaotic. I loved it then and I love it now. That’s the one thing you never took from me. I stopped loving others. I stopped loving myself. I stopped loving my family when loving them became too much. But I never stopped loving this big, absurd, beautiful ensemble we all form together.

I don’t know why you took it so personally, like an offense to you and your beliefs—the statistical improbability of human life on earth.

There is a sigh and the click of his seat belt. Footsteps outside, going around the truck. The passenger door opens. He frees you from the vehicle. You can’t see, but you remember the woods—your favorite spot before he took you, the tallest trees, the softest grass.

This ground isn’t soft. You land on it with a thud. Your skull explodes against something—roots, a tree stump, maybe a rock. All you know is your head is burning and your scalp is gushing and it all hurts so much.

It seems unnecessary, to make it hurt this way.

But you don’t make the rules. Never have.

This is where you end up, a quivering shape on the ground. Soon it will all be over. He will do what he has to do and then you will go. Finally.

You never realized until now how much energy it takes to stay alive. How tired you are from clinging to your beating heart, your breathing lungs, when the elements keep conspiring against you.

It’s time to go.

You hear the click of a gun. The grass ruffles next to you. His hand cradles the back of your head. You feel the warmth of his body next to yours, a cold rim of metal against your temple.

Is this how it happens? You always thought the gun was for show. You figured he did it with his hands, pressing down, waiting, watching, listening for gasps, the hissing sound of air leaving a body, never to return.

Maybe you’ve angered him so much he doesn’t have the patience for that. Maybe he, too, wants this to be over as fast as possible.

He shifts. His breath finds your ear, hot and frazzled. He whispers something you can’t hear. You wait for it. You imagine a bang, fireworks behind your eyelids, a flash of pain shattering your skull in half. You wait and you wait and it doesn’t come.

There is a thud. Both of his hands are on you.

A thought pushes through you.

---