The closet story

CW: Themes of mental health, stalking, gore, sexual content and the threat of sexual violence.

Do I know you?

She didn't scream.

I hadn't planned for that.

In my head she screamed. She always screamed. The scream was the starting gun. The shot fired. Six hours. I'd been in her closet for six hours.

Do I know you?

Three words. She stood in the doorframe of her bedroom. One hand on the light switch. The other clutching a rolled-up towel. Her hair was dripping. Water ran along her temples and down her neck. It smelled like coconut. Sweet. Clean. Too close.

I knew what that smell was. Three weeks earlier she'd filmed an unboxing of the shampoo. One of her followers had bought her entire Amazon wishlist. She was facing the camera. The smile you had to give. I'd watched the video forty-one times. I knew the sound of the cap. The angle of her wrist when she poured. The exact second the lather appears.

Forty-one times.

Do I know you?

She didn't scream. She didn't raise her voice. Three words. That's all.

She was standing in the doorframe. Wet hair. The towel rolled in her right hand. She looked at me. Then at the door handle. Then at me. Then at the handle. She did it fast. Not fear. Calculation. The handle was to her right. Me to her left. The hallway behind her. She was measuring distances. What she could reach. What I could reach before her.

Two directions. One body.

I said yes, you know me.

The word came out flat. No weight. No tone. One syllable. Six hours in the dark. In the heat of the closet. My face buried in fabric that wasn't mine. That would never be mine. I knew it. It changed nothing.

She knew it. I knew it. The room had nothing to do with it. And what she knew, standing in that doorframe, was that the handle was too far.

Six hours.

On my knees. Between the winter coats and the laundry basket. That's where I'd said yes, you know me. The laundry smelled. It smelled like her. A sweater worn all day. The cotton held everything. The warmth of her arms. Of her belly. She'd tossed it in the basket without thinking. The way you set a glass on a table. And I had come to pick it up.

I breathed in small bursts. Slowly. Not because I was afraid of being heard. Because I wanted it to last.

The first time I saw Kaylee she didn't have a face. She had feet.

Two bare feet on white sheets. Toenails painted dark red. Almost black. I don't know why I stopped. Not a face. Not a mouth. Two feet on white and that red on the nails. Something moved in my chest.

The arch.

That's where it happened. Neither high nor flat. The exact middle. A space between skin and sheet where nothing touched. That space was the end of everything. I didn't know it. Doesn't change a thing. The guy who steps on a mine doesn't know it either. The mine doesn't care.

I was twenty-two. Third year of med school. I was learning the names of bones. Calcaneus. Talus. Navicular. Cuboid. Latin words for hard things. Twenty-six bones. Thirty-three joints. I could draw a foot without looking.

In front of those two feet on white I understood nothing.

I'd paid twelve dollars for the full set.

Twelve dollars. That's what it cost. The price of a pack of Bud and a carton of Winstons. You click and you're in. And once you're in you don't look for the exit. You look for the bottom. There is no bottom.

Her name was Jade. That wasn't her real name. On the internet nobody uses their real name. Real names stay on bills. In mailboxes. In the mouths of people who knew you when you were ugly.

Her real name was Kaylee. Kaylee from Dayton, Ohio.

She worked at a pet store. She filled bags of kibble. She talked to customers who didn't look at her eyes. And then the internet found her feet. Or her feet found the internet. The order doesn't matter.

She didn't know I existed.

I was a number. A digit in a counter. Her phone buzzed while she brushed her teeth and that buzz was me. Not me specifically. Me among the others. The dozens. The hundreds of other guys buzzing at the same time and none of them weighing more than the next. A noise in the noise. That's all.

She was the center of my life.

She was in my schedule. In the breaks between classes. In sleep. Not in dreams. In sleep itself. In the way I fell asleep. The way I woke up. In the direction of my hand when I opened my eyes in the dark.

She was everything.

I was a noise.

She wrote too. A blog first. Then Tumblr. Short erotic fictions. Brief. Taut. Cut close. No lace. No haze. Sentences that went somewhere and ended at her feet.

I'd never read erotic fiction. I'd never read much of anything. My father said books were for people who couldn't handle real life. I'd swallowed that. Without chewing. Straight to the gut. It does nothing but it doesn't leave.

And then this girl from Dayton wrote something. A woman in a library. A stranger. I read it in my dorm room. Sitting on the bed. Feet in my dirty socks. The radiator making that sick-dog sound. I was hard before the second paragraph.

The way she laid words against each other. Without apologizing. Without retreating. Without that little hesitation of people who write and are afraid. She wrote the way she walked in her videos. Slowly. The whole foot set down. Every step risked something and she risked it anyway.

I read everything she'd written. I reread. I reread in places I shouldn't have.

The anatomy lab for instance. A cadaver open on the table. And me. My phone. Twelve inches from the open thorax of the sixty-seven-year-old man who died of an aneurysm. The dead man had better posture than me. The dead man held up better. The dead man at least was where he was supposed to be.

The platform opened up. The stories spaced out. The photos began.

Paid messages. Custom requests. A subscription. Add-ons. "Just for you"s. Three words you pay for with money.

Something gave. Not all at once. Not like a rope being cut. A thread. A single thread.

A missed exam. It's nothing. It's a morning. The alarm goes off. You stay. The ceiling above you. You below it. Nobody moves.

An excuse to the professor. Sir I'm sorry. Next week.

A late rent. The envelope you don't slide under the door. You put it on the table. Then on the shelf. Then you stop seeing it.

Coffee replaced by water. It's a detail. You drink water. You drink it standing. Water tastes like nothing. Not bitter. Not sad. Empty. Just water.

One night delivering pizzas. Then two. Hot boxes against the chest. Addresses. Codes. Doors opening onto people in socks. Not a person. A mechanism. A thing that carries and leaves. Not the worth of a guy who studies. Not the worth of a guy becoming a doctor. The worth of a guy who carries.

From the outside it held together. A guy going through a rough patch. People say that. Rough patch. As if it passes. It's in the name. It's made to pass. It didn't pass.

The threads were going. One by one.

My mother called every Sunday.

At first I picked up. Standing in the kitchen. Phone against my ear. The pot forgotten on the stove. Yeah I'm fine. Yeah it's hard but I'm fine. Yeah I'm working. The words came out on their own. She wanted I'm fine. I gave her I'm fine.

Then I let it ring.

Every other Sunday. The phone on the table. The screen lit up. Her name on it. Me beside it. I watched the name vibrate and I did nothing. A living thing you decide to stop feeding.

Every third Sunday.

I called back late. When her voice was already in bed. Already on the other side of the day. I spoke to her in polite sentences. And then one Sunday the phone didn't ring.

The screen stayed black. I looked at the screen. The screen looked at me. Nothing vibrated.

They told me colon.

One word. That's all. The kind of word that doesn't wait for you to be ready. The kind of word that's been standing behind the door for months while you're doing something else. While you're delivering pizzas. Paying for images. Going down the gentle slope. And when you open the door the word is there.

Five months. That's how long it took. I wasn't there.

She left me ten thousand dollars.

Ten thousand. I turned the number over in my mouth for days. Ten thousand is a lot if you count the Sundays she called and the Sundays I didn't pick up and the Sundays I called back too late with my polite voice. Ten thousand is what it's worth.

Ten thousand is nothing.

Ten thousand is nothing when you've got a hole in your gut and the hole eats everything.

I know that now. In this closet that smells like Kaylee's dirty laundry. Ten thousand dollars from my dead mother were going to become skin. The screen was going to become skin. The pixels were going to become skin. Warmth. Breath. I could finally touch.

I wrote to Jade. To Kaylee.

I want to meet you.

Direct. No conversation. No preamble.

I'll pay five thousand dollars for one hour.

She said no.

No. The word on the screen. I looked at it. It's a small word. It fits inside nothing.

I said ten thousand.

All of it.

She said I'll think about it.

Think about it.

Then she said yes.

A Starbucks in Columbus. Public. Daytime. One hour.

I bought a suit. Gray. Two buttons. The salesman said it looked good on me. In the mirror I looked like a guy who had a job.

I arrived twenty minutes early. I drank three glasses of water. My mouth dried out as fast as I filled it.

The suit looked good in the store mirror. The salesman had said so. He was smiling when he said it.

In the Starbucks the suit didn't look good.

The fabric pulled across my thighs when I sat down. I tugged at the crease. The crease came back. I left it. The fabric knew things about me the salesman had chosen not to know.

The shirt stuck out at the wrists. Too much or not enough. I couldn't tell.

Nobody was wearing a suit. A guy in a hoodie was ordering a cold brew. A girl in leggings was typing on a MacBook. Two students in caps had set their bags on the floor. Everyone looked like they'd walked in here without thinking.

I looked like I'd come here for something.

A woman looked at me. Baby on her hip. Frappuccino in the other hand. Her look lasted less than a second. It was enough.

The barista called a name. Stacy. Nobody moved. He said it again. Stacy. A girl got up and took her cup and walked out. A name. A cup. Nothing else.

I had the ten thousand dollars under my elbow. In a kraft envelope. As new as my suit.

She walked in. Not alone.

A man with her. Tall. Square jaw. He sat down beside her as if he owned everything. The table. The chair. Her.

She said: this is Kyle.

Kyle looked at me. One second. He saw the suit too new and the shoes too shiny and the three empty glasses and my hands laid flat on the table like dead things.

A customer. That's what I was.

I remember her hands. A silver ring on the index finger. Thin as a thread. She spun it with her thumb while she talked.

I wasn't buying a meeting. I was buying the right to look at someone who didn't want to be looked at by me.

I handed the envelope to Kyle. He didn't say thank you.

That day I went home and I didn't take off the suit. Taking it off meant saying it was over. And I didn't want over.

Two weeks later I drove to Dayton. Her building. Brick. Parking lot. Metal staircase. I parked across the street. Engine off.

Her window. Second floor. Yellow light. From where I sat she was nothing but a shape behind a curtain. Someone at home.

I was closer to her in that car than I'd been at the restaurant.

I came back the following week. And the one after that.

In January it snowed. I came with chocolate and flowers. I sat on the steps. The snow soaked through the pants. The cold settled into the bones. The chocolate softened in my pocket, warm and limp. The flowers froze.

She came home at six. She saw me. She walked around me. No anger. No panic. The fatigue of someone who refuses to add one more thing to her list. The door closed.

A flower head snapped when I stood up. The snow took it.

Kyle found me the next time. T-shirt. Jeans. No coat. He crossed the street without looking. Two knocks on my window. I rolled it down. A patch of shaving cream under his left ear. His breath came in. Beer and toothpaste.

If I see you here again I'm calling the cops. You understand. I'm not asking.

I left.

The screen went dark. I lost the apartment. I slept in my car. I lost the car. I ended up on the street. I dropped twenty pounds.

One day at the library I stumbled on one of her old stories. A public computer. A yellow screen that hummed. A text from before the photos.

The closet story.

A woman alone at home. A sound. The closet creaks. She opens it. A man is inside. He's been breathing her clothes. He comes out of the dark. She doesn't scream. She pulls him toward her. In the story she wants him.

Kaylee had written the closet story.

I reread. The librarian said sir we're closing. I reread anyway. I closed my eyes. The words stayed printed behind my eyelids. I took them with me.

On Route 35 heading out of Dayton there was a gas station.

The guy behind the counter sold above and below. If you looked at his eyes you were buying tobacco. If you looked at his hands you were buying something else.

The bag had a logo. A gorilla. A gorilla with multicolored eyes and a wide grin. The bathroom had no lock. A neon buzzed. The tiles had been white.

The powder was white with gray flecks. I placed it under my tongue.

It burned and all at once there was no difference between thinking a thing and doing it. I stood in the gas station bathroom under the buzzing neon and I felt the world shrink to its simplest form. Kaylee. There was nothing else.

Her building had a back door. The lock had been broken for months. I knew that.

I knew the locks. The hinges. The schedules. The days she worked. The time she came home. The mornings she took the trash out in socks on the concrete.

The Fridays Kyle came up. The Sundays nobody came.

I pushed the back door. It gave without a sound. It was a Sunday. A Sunday without a name.

The closet was small. Hot. Black.

A winter coat on the left. Heavy wool. The laundry basket on the floor.

I closed the door.

In the dark time doesn't go straight. It loops.

But I was there. Sweat ran cold between my shoulder blades and warm in the crooks of my elbows and I couldn't feel the difference anymore. My body couldn't feel it either.

Six hours. The smell of dirty laundry climbed into my sinuses like a living thing and inside the smell there were voices and the voices told me her body. Her skin. Every pore. Every grain.

I heard the front door.

Keys. A bag set down. The sounds of someone coming home believing they're alone. Real sounds.

A drawer. Water. The shower.

Water behind the wall. Water on a body. Her body.

I didn't move. I barely breathed.

The water stopped. The curtain. Footsteps.

On the cheap laminate of the hallway. A soft sound. Someone walking barefoot at home.

Her feet.

Her pretty feet.

Each step closer. Each step more real.

The light came on. Dark then white.

The coconut smell arrived half a second later.

I came out of the closet.

Time was mine.

She stepped back. Her heel caught the doorjamb. The towel slipped.

Her eyes. The black pupil blown so wide it swallowed the room. And green around it. On the screen the green had been a dead green. A green that had traveled through cables and servers and arrived flattened like an animal on the road. Here the green had blood in it. The green moved.

The green trembled.

She opened her mouth.

Do I know you?

My hands found her shoulders before the scream found her throat.

I touched her. Not the screen. Not the glass. Not the fabric in the laundry basket. Her. Her skin under my fingers. Wet from the shower.

Real.

The handle was there. Three feet away. A million years away. A promise made to no one.