Leonard Haskin was scared; he might even go so far as to say he was terrified. He was terrified of a number of things on a semi-constant basis, but never more so than on his way home from a late night at work. Unfortunately, this was becoming an all too common occurrence and it was with no small amount of trepidation that Leonard found himself exiting the revolving doors of his office into the cold midnight air of an empty downtown street. It was only a few blocks walk from Leonard’s office, where he attempted to sell life insurance with limited success, to his new apartment complex and he made the trip at a hurried pace. He kept his coat collar pulled up, not just to keep out the cold, but also for the small amount of security he felt a lack of peripheral vision afforded him. As he walked, per his therapist’s recommendation, he made a list of the things that frightened him. By the time he reached the door to his apartment the list included: homeless men hiding in dark alleys, empty buildings with lights on inside, dogs, cars driving around late at night, particularly tall passersby, particularly short passersby, and the bald man from 5A who always seemed to be smoking late at night.
He was fully prepared to breathe a sigh of relief as he shoved his way through the apartment doors, but the list only kept growing once he made it inside. He realized in the lobby that he did not trust overflowing mailboxes. What could one person be doing with so much mail, what sort of sinister correspondence could they be engaged in? When the elevator arrived, he began to think how much an empty elevator looks like an open mouth and he started to worry that the machine might eat him alive. He decided, instead, to take the stairs but by the time he had reached the 5th floor he realized that tight stairwells were too claustrophobic, and the way a person’s footsteps echoed all the way down from the very top floor made him feel like he was being followed. He was afraid of someone appearing at the end of the long hallway leading to his door. He was afraid of someone chasing after him as he fumbled with his keys. He was again afraid of the bald man from 5A who had mysteriously managed to finish his cigarette and be upstairs first and now closed himself into his apartment for the night, but not before giving Leonard what seemed to be an exceedingly long and menacing look.
Leonard was sweating by the time he finally managed to turn the key to his one-bedroom apartment. He was practically hyperventilating as he leapt for the light switch, and he was cursing his therapist through the duration of his nightly intruder check. He moved with great caution, reaching his arm around corners to turn on lights as stealthily as possible. He checked the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, both closets, and finally his bedroom, sweeping the handle of a broom under his bed to flush out any hidden threats. Finding all corners of the apartment secure, he quickly changed into his pajamas, went back to the living room and turned on the TV. He went into the kitchen to prepare a bowl of cereal, opened the cupboard and found a woman’s face staring back at him.
“I’m sorry, it’s late and I think I misheard you, could you run that by me again Leonard?” The voice on the phone sounded annoyed.
“I said there’s a woman in my apartment Chuck.” Leonard whispered hurriedly. He was, after all, standing in his unnervingly long hallway wearing only pajamas and he was quite sure the man from 5A was listening, and probably smoking indoors, in clear violation of his lease. He silently added “burning to death in an apartment fire” to his list.
“What do you want me to say Leonard? Congratulations? Because if you’re calling me to brag I swear to God I-”
“She’s, uh, she’s in my cupboard actually.” Leonard interrupted. Chuck was always quick to jump to conclusions.
“I’m sorry, what now?” For a moment the line went quiet. “Leonard have you been taking your medications?”
Oh, you would go there you ass, of course you would go there.
“Of course Chuck, I’m not hallucinating. I’m not just being paranoid.” He only wants what’s best for you, Leonard reminded himself, doing his best to slow down.
“Well you are paranoid Leonard. I mean, you literally are,” said Chuck. “Listen, I’m just trying to help here. You’re my brother, and well, damn it, I worry about you. Women don’t just hang around in cupboards you know?” Chuck sounded genuinely concerned, and despite his somewhat dismissive attitude, Leonard could not deny that he had always been a voice of reason.
“I suppose they don’t,” Leonard had to agree, “but I’m not crazy Chuck, I swear.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy Lenny. I just think you’re a little worked up is all. It’s late, you’ve had a long day, maybe you freaked yourself out. Go back inside and get some rest, okay? I’m sure whatever you saw in the cupboard won’t be there in the morning.”
“But Chuck you don’t understand, you didn’t see her!” Leonard pleaded. “She had this long black hair, it looked all greasy, like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. What if she’s been living in there this whole time? Right under my nose…” Leonard’s mind began to wander; he could picture the woman skulking around his apartment while he was at work, rummaging through his trash for scraps. He shuddered just thinking about it. “And her eyes, Chuck I think there’s something wrong with her! Do you think I should call the police maybe they could-” Chuck gave a small sigh.
“No,” Leonard could see there was no point in arguing, “no, I guess I’ll just try to forget about it.” Leonard gave a mumbled goodbye, and hung up.
Chuck was right though, as he so frequently was, but Leonard did not have to wait until morning to search an empty cupboard. In the instant between opening the door and slamming it shut again, Leonard found the woman sitting on his couch, her dark eyes fixed on the doorway. It was almost as if she had been waiting for him to come back in. He did not even have time to add this new fear to his list as he sprinted full speed back down the stairs and towards his office. He spent no time at all wondering if an unmarked van across the street was spying on him, or if the alleys he passed were home to any potential murderers waiting to drag him to an early grave. Rather than duck down a side street to avoid a crowd of rowdy teenagers, he forced his way through them, nearly tripping over their shoes and collapsing on the pavement. Entering the lobby of his office building he began to think an open elevator looked almost inviting. It might even be nice to be swallowed up, he told himself. There were, after all, worse things in the world than finding one’s self safe and snug in the belly of some enormous mechanical beast. There were worse things, by far, sitting on his living room sofa. He took the empty elevator upstairs, curled up under his desk and passed out.
It was fortunate that Leonard kept a spare set of clothes in one his desk drawers at work. He had always been afraid that he might spill coffee on himself before a big meeting, or that he might get caught in heavy rain on the way over in the morning. So, when he woke the next morning to the sounds of the early-bird employees pouring their first cups of coffee and exchanging pleasantries, he was able to quickly slip into the bathroom and out of his pajamas. In fact, Leonard figured that it would be several days before he needed to go back to the apartment at all, and even then, he did not plan on staying. He would simply make a quick dash to the shower, grab some clothes from the dresser, and escape. If he just kept looking ahead, he might not even have to see the woman, as long as she hadn’t left the couch. He could just go back to sleeping in his desk for a while, until he found a new place to live.
It was a good plan, and Leonard opened the door with every intent to follow through with it, but on entering the apartment, he found it quite empty. There was no sign of the woman in the living room. No overturned chairs, no broken picture frames or eerie static coming from the TV. Even the couch looked completely untouched.
Perhaps it was morbid curiosity that drove Leonard to search the apartment further; perhaps it was some unconscious bitterness at the possibility of Chuck being right, that this whole thing might just have been the product of his frenzied imagination. He opened the cupboards again and found them empty of any ghastly apparitions, the plates and cups exactly where he left them. The lights were still on from a few nights ago, so there was no need to fumble with the switches, just the simple matter of peeking around a few corners, scanning a few rooms, all of which he found to be unoccupied. While he knew he should have felt relief, he felt instead a strange sense of disappointment about the whole thing.
As planned, he showered, but he took his time, lingering until the whole bathroom had filled with a thick cloud of steam. Maybe if I wait long enough she’ll fling the curtain open. For the life of him he could not explain why he would think such a thing. He was equally unable to explain the brief sigh he emitted on not seeing her reflection behind him as he wiped the film of steam from his bathroom mirror.
“You were right,” he told Chuck that night on the phone and there was a hint of sadness in his voice, “As always. I was just spooked.”
“What did I tell you?” Leonard pictured the smug smile that must have instantly appeared on Chuck’s face. “You’ve got to stop doing that buddy; you’ll give yourself a heart attack. You know what you need to do? You need to get out and start meeting people. Start talking to people in the office, or introduce yourself to your neighbors. Hanging around your apartment alone all the time, it’s bound to get to you.”
It was easy for Chuck to say, he had always been outgoing. For some reason it never seemed to bother him that statistically there was one in one thousand chance that any person you meet was a mass-murdering psychopath. Chuck did not mind at all that any passerby might be carrying some deadly flu variant. Or tuberculosis. Or Ebola. And, of course, Chuck had never seen the man in 5A. “Sure,” said Leonard, “that’s probably a good idea.”
“Damn it,” Leonard sighed as he curled up in bed some time later. Maybe she got bored waiting for me to come back, he thought, maybe if I’d just come home sooner. He really could not explain why he felt so crushed by the woman’s absence. If he told his therapist about it, she would simply tell him that it all stemmed from his childhood issue of abandonment and she’d make him talk about his parents or his dead dog or some ridiculous forgotten trauma. Then she would make him recite his list for her and shoot down every single point on it. Why bother.
No one understood, no one seemed to grasp the fact that the world was simply a scary place. That the things on his list were real and frightening and that he did not want to stop being afraid of them, because the moment he stopped thinking about them was the moment one of them would get him. The one day he didn’t check all the rooms in his apartment would be the day that some murderer had snuck inside. The one day that he didn’t eye the bald man in 5A with suspicion, as if to say, “I’m on to you,” would be the day that he followed him up the stairs and clubbed him to death in the cramped stairwell or burned the apartment complex to the ground with a misplaced cigarette. And the woman? Well she was there, and that was enough. She wasn’t some mysterious man across the hall, or some hobo in an alley doing God knows what, she was a woman and she was sitting on his couch, and that was the one thing he could say with all confidence was wrong. But now she was gone, now she was just another on the list of nebulous fears, “dark-eyed women on my couch.”
So, it was out of both terror and a small amount of joy that Leonard found himself screaming that morning when he woke to find the woman staring at him from the foot of his bed.
“Oh God, oh God, I’m sorry,” he stammered as he fumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him. Wait, what do I have to be sorry for, he thought as he peered through the keyhole and tried to catch his breath. But he knew even before asking the question. He was sorry for making her wait so long.
Despite the pounding in his chest, and the uneasy feeling in his gut, he found himself unable to remove his eye from the keyhole, afraid that if he stopped staring at the woman in his bedroom, she might disappear again, this time for good. She was a sadly pretty creature, with her long, dark hair hanging messily over her face, her pale skin nearly the same color as what appeared to be the tattered remains of wedding dress she wore over a sickly thin frame, and, of course, those eyes. Eyes like bits of coal stuck inside her head, pupil-less and black, staring unceasingly at the bathroom door. Leonard couldn’t be sure, but he felt confident that she was staring right back at the keyhole, right back at him. She did not move, she did not speak, she did nothing but stare. An hour passed with no movement from either party. Well, thought Leonard, if I’m having company, I guess I’d better take a shower.
The woman had left the bedroom by the time Leonard finished in the bath and there was a moment’s panic as he wondered if she had disappeared again, but relief set in after a quick search of the apartment revealed her to be back in the living room, sitting on the couch as before. Leonard busied himself in the kitchen, turning around every so often to check on his guest. She never moved, she simply watched him quietly from the couch. He wondered if he shouldn’t offer to make her breakfast, but he did not know what she would like. He ate at the kitchen counter, watching her. She, in turn, watched him. Very rarely, she would open her mouth and emit a strange hissing sound. It was very soft, and not all together unpleasant, almost like white noise. This went on for roughly an hour before Leonard had to leave for work.
“Don’t go anywhere, OK?” he said to his guest. She said nothing in reply, but made another little hissing noise, which Leonard thought was probably good enough.
Work went by in a blur, and despite a mountain of paperwork to muddle through, Leonard could not bring himself to stay late. He had more important things on his mind than graphs and spreadsheets. He had company, and he could not leave her unattended. That would be rude. He did not even think about his list on the walk home. The man from 5A was smoking as usual, but if he eyed Leonard with malicious intent, or took a particularly lengthy drag from his cigarette, Leonard did not notice. He found that he did not care whether or not the mail had piled up. He took the elevator rather than the stairs, even though it was empty. He hurried to his door, but not out of fear of some unknown assailant. This time he was excited.
Excitement was a new sensation for Leonard. He was used to anxiety, but this? This was something else. His stomach felt strange, but not in a sickly way. What was the expression? “Butterflies in your stomach”? Yes, that was exactly it. It was strange because, of course, Leonard knew he should be terrified. He should be huddled under his desk or calling Chuck in a panic. Yet here he was, actually giddy to see this strange woman. Why?
Because she was real, that’s why. She’s real, he told himself as he changed back into his pajamas, not even bothering with his nightly apartment check. Because if she was in the apartment, then how could anyone else be hiding there? What could be worse than the creature on his couch? There in his living room was everything he had to fear, and she was just sitting there. Well, now she was watching the nightly news, but she was real.
Leonard curled up in the chair opposite the couch and munched away at his nightly bowl of cereal. He stared at her as she gazed intently at the screen. After some time had passed, he worked up the courage to speak.
“Do you, um, do you like this show?” he gave the woman an awkward smile.
The woman turned her head very slowly to stare at Leonard with her obsidian eyes. She gave a little hiss. Or maybe it was more a moan. He wasn’t sure.
“I know how you feel, I mean, there’s so many channels but nothing to watch you know? Sometimes I wonder if maybe the government is using all these satellites to monitor our brains, to see if we’re thinking dangerous thoughts. But then I wonder if thinking that is a dangerous thought, and if maybe that puts me on some kind of list. I have a list you know. Of things I’m scared of. My therapist says that it’s good to make list. She says that it helps me take control of the things that frighten me. I don’t really know if it works. My therapist’s name is Julie. Do you have a name?” Leonard punctuated the question with a large spoonful of cereal, which he began to chew patiently as he waited for a response.
The woman gave another little moan. Or maybe a gurgle. Yes, that was it, a gurgle.
“Well how about I call you Mary? Would you like that? I mean, I feel like I should call you something if you’re going to be staying here,” Leonard paused to allow for another hiss, moan, or gurgle that he might indicate confirmation, but Mary was silent, “you are staying…right?”
Hiss.
Leonard was positively beaming, and he stayed that way for the rest of the night as he told her all about his list. He told her about the man in 5A and his cigarettes. He told her about all the alleys between the apartment and his office, and all the different vagrants he had seen occupying them. He told her about various diseases he thought he might have and how his doctor didn’t seem to care about anything but his “anxiety”. It went on like this for hours, and Leonard could not help but notice how very good he was feeling.
Mary was an excellent listener, far better than Chuck had ever been. She didn’t mock him, she didn’t call him “crazy”. She just took it all in, all the fears and worries, and she offered no judgment, only the occasional moan of agreement, as if to say, “Yes, it is strange for a car to be driving around the streets after midnight, surely they must be up to something.” She was even better than his therapist, who, for all her good intentions, was still so dismissive, still so keen on having him overcome his fears rather than offer to do anything constructive herself. Yet here was Mary, a receptacle for all his woes. And when it had gotten late, and Leonard had grown tired, he could rest easy in his dark bedroom for once, safe in the knowledge that Mary was there, standing at the foot of his bed and staring with her cool, black eyes, watching him as he slept. It was the sort of feeling Leonard imagined people had for their dogs: a mutual respect, a sense of loyalty, of companionship. Of course, dogs did not have lovely hair that looked so desperately in need of a gentle placement behind her ear. Leonard scoffed at himself. Now that’s a funny thought, why should I be thinking that?
Fortunately, it seemed as though Leonard had all the time in the world to ponder his new friend. In no time at all, he had run out of existing things on the list and had to begin coming up with new fears, terrible things he had never had time to think about before, things like meteors colliding with the Earth, or global warming. Yet something felt different. With every new item discussed he felt a weight lifting off his shoulders. Now when he passed an unmarked van, he did not fear that he was about to be kidnapped. When he saw a homeless man in an alley, he would manage a small smile rather than cross the street. He hardly ever looked over his shoulder as he walked down the hallway anymore.
“Thank God for you Mary,” he exclaimed, his mouth still full of the evening’s bedtime snack,” I know you don’t mind carrying all this for a while, what could scare you?
He thought about taking of a photo of Mary to send to Chuck, just to prove how wrong he’d been, but, he thought, it would be rude to just take a photo without her permission. What if she did not want to be seen? And what’s more, what if Chuck wanted to come talk to her too? Mary was his, his and no one else’s. She had chosen him after all; surely she hadn’t come to his apartment by chance. And he wouldn’t tell Julie either, she’d probably say Mary was a figment of his imagination, she might try to take him away from Mary. He couldn’t risk leaving her alone like that. And frankly, what did he even need a therapist for now?
It was several days before Leonard worked up the courage to touch Mary. Things had been getting a little more serious as of late. He took to fixing plates for her of whatever meal he was eating, as well as leaving the television on for her when he went to work, just in case she got lonely. He even began sitting on the couch next to her instead of retreating to his separate chair. Then one night, after a lovely conversation about the danger of chemicals in the drinking water, it just sort of happened. One minute it was all “fluoride” this and “mind control” that, and the next Leonard found himself struck utterly dumb, unable to take his eyes off her. He had been wrong when he called her “almost pretty”, for she was certainly more than that. Her creamy skin, her raven hair, that faint but intoxicating smell that seemed to emanate from her, what was it? Dishwater maybe? It didn’t matter, Leonard loved it. Leonard loved her. He was shocked to find himself thinking it, but he knew it was true the moment that he did. She’d done so much for him and now…now he wondered.
“You know Mary, those of eyes of yours,” Leonard struggled to find the right words, “they are really something.”
Mary was silent. He knew he should have phrased that better.
“It’s just that, these past few days,” he pushed on, “well, they’ve been really great. Really, uh, special…to me…A-and I hope they’ve been special for you too. I just feel like we came into each other’s, uh, lives for a reason, you know? Gosh this is hard, I guess we can add ‘talking about my feelings’ to the list huh? But we’ll get to that later. Plenty of time.”
Mary gurgled quietly.
“But right now, there’s something I, something I need to do.” He took a deep breath and inched closer to her on the couch.
He could feel her body heat. Well, not heat, more like the opposite honestly, and not cold either, a sort of absence of warmth. He put his hand on hers. It tingled. It felt like so many years before, when, as a child, he would place his fingers on his parent’s TV and the static would creep onto his fingertips. There was a dull pain in his hands, the way the nerves cry out at first warmth on a cold winter’s morning. He gave her fingers a squeeze and it felt as though at any moment they might slip out, not so much that they were slick or slimy, it was as if they were hardly there at all. He inched closer. He touched her cheek. She let out a gentle hiss. Leonard’s heart leapt in his chest. I’m in.
He brought his face to hers, gazing into the voids that were her eyes, like an astronomer staring off into the dark infinity of space. He could feel his palms beginning to sweat. He was nervous, and he was excited, and he was utterly terrified. The list sped through his mind. Here, the possibility of a mega-tsunami. There, biological warfare. But through it all he saw Mary, a beacon, and he sailed toward her. A few days ago, he would have run, he would have locked himself away in his room, but today would be different, today she was here, and there was nothing to fear at all.
A spark. Their lips touched with electric fire. Numbness moved over Leonard’s face like a wave, inched its way through his skull, down his neck, into the core of him. For an instant, he felt his heart stop. Then came a burning, an itching, a pounding in his bones, his nerves, his skull. His muscles cramped, his stomach whirled, his vision blurred. Images passed through his mind like a movie, but all the scenes played out of order. A young woman on her wedding day passed into a child running in the park and changed again and again: now young, now old, now young again. All at once, he felt the collective ache of an unhappy life, the crying out of a soul in pain, and then there was only darkness, the abyss, and in that place the festering of loneliness into hatred, of unhappiness into rage and it all seemed so familiar, for he had seen it so many times now, in Mary’s eyes.
He awoke on the floor, covered in a cold sweat. Mary looked down at him vacantly, hissing. “Wow,” was all Leonard could muster.
The next day, Leonard knew it was his turn to wow her. He spent the entire workday planning. He left the office early again, walked the dozen or so blocks to the store, hardly even thinking about the fact that he had left his familiar route home, and spent an exorbitant sum on supplies. He thought only of the evening. There would be wine, and atmosphere, and romance. He would take Mary into his arms, feel that strange coolness against his chest, the electric sting of her lips, the bitter stab of love marching its way through the depths of him.
Mary was not in the living room when he came home, but he was used to this. He did not know where Mary went when she disappeared like this, but she always came back, she would never leave him now. Really, this was for the best, this way it could be a surprise. He went to work in the kitchen, slaving over the stove to produce three elegant courses of food. He set the dining room table for the first time ever. He lit the candles, he dimmed the lights, and he put on some soulful music. He put on his finest shirt and tie, poured two glasses of wine and waited. He waited for an hour, then another, and still another, but Mary did not appear.
Perhaps she wasn’t ready for the dining room yet, Leonard told himself, maybe she wasn’t used to seeing him there. He checked the bedroom, perhaps she thought the dimmed lights meant it was time for bed, but she was not there. He opened both closets, hoping to find her staring absently at the walls as she sometimes liked to do, but it was no use. Finally, he opened the cabinets hoping, desperately, that she would be waiting to surprise him there, just like the first time they met. He found them empty, all the cups and dishes exactly in their usual places.
Leonard sat at the table silently, late into the night. He told himself that she would be back, that she was just hiding somewhere, but he knew. Abandonment, he thought, that’s one for the list alright. Loneliness, there’s another. His heart was heavy in his chest and his breaths came unsteady, he choked back a sob with every exhalation.
“Well now I know what’s on your list Mary,” he said to no one in particular, “Yes sir, I guess we know something that could scare even you: commitment.” Then the tears came. And stayed for some two months.
It was a difficult time for Leonard, but it was also, looking back, a learning opportunity. He did a great deal of thinking in his lonely little apartment. He started seeing Julie again, although he never told her about Mary. He never told Chuck either, it was simpler that way; he did not want to relive the experience by talking about it. As time passed, he began to wonder if perhaps he had mistaken friendship for attraction, or simply come on too strong. Maybe he was simply too forward or too eager, seeking out love when it was not there. Really, Leonard was sure, it was a mix of things, and he had accepted that.
So, it did not bother him when, three months after she disappeared, he saw Mary again. She was sitting on a couch, as usual, but not his couch. He caught a glimpse of her just as the bald man in 5A was heading back inside from his nightly smoke. It was only for a second, but he would have known those eyes anywhere. For a moment, just a moment, he was sad to know they were not staring at him, but as the bald man closed the door with one last suspicious look across the hall, it hardly hurt Leonard at all to see that Mary had moved on. Honestly, he was glad that she had done so, because he had moved on too, that morning in fact, when he had found a man in his shower.
