Caroline Eriksson - The Watcher

I need to tell about the days I spent in bed, how night and day blended together until the black gradually had streaks of red in it. The fantasies about blood and revenge. The speculative book I bought, the shady internet searches, the secret jogs, my surreptitious weight lifting, the muscles I tensed to the breaking point, the fantasies that grew increasingly violent, that felt more and more real. I needed to tell my sister about all of it. My throat grows dry and rough, and my eyes wander over to the stack of pages that is lying on the counter now. Or maybe I don’t need to describe anything at all. Maybe that’s exactly what I’ve already done.

“Simply put, I wanted to kill him,” I say hoarsely. “I felt more and more like I could really do it.”

I finger the base of the wineglass.

“And this time, Mama wasn’t by my side.”

No Mama to put her arms around me, hold me, help me hold on. No Mama who wouldn’t lose faith in me, who would continue to love me no matter what.

My sister takes another olive. I wish we didn’t have to go through all this, but there’s no other way around things that are painful. Not if we’re going to find our way back to a relationship built on genuine communication and intimacy.

“Earlier today you were talking about what it was like before Peter and I separated. You said you could tell that something wasn’t right between us, that when you called and asked, I changed the topic and started talking about something else. It’s true, but that renovation in the stairs, it was… it was maybe more important than it seemed.”

She pulls an olive pit out of her mouth and sets it on the edge of her plate.

“I’m listening,” she says.

Then I tell her about the elevator. Because of the building renovation, the elevator was temporarily out of order, but the engineering inspection would later show that there was something loose in the elevator doors up at the top, on the eighteenth floor, our floor. When Peter went to work the next morning, he happened to forget all the notices about the elevator being out of order, and he pressed the button out of habit. The door slid open, and he stepped forward. He didn’t notice until he was already standing on the edge that the only thing underneath his feet was an empty elevator shaft.

The room remains silent for a few seconds. Then my sister stands up and walks over to the counter to retrieve the stack of printed pages. She flips through them until she finds what she’s looking for. Then she reads aloud.

“I’m teetering on the edge. I turn around and our eyes meet, hers the same ones that once looked into mine at the altar in that picturesque little village church. They were filled with tears and emotion then, but now they’re black with the hatred of revenge. This whole time I’ve been worried about her… Suddenly I realize that I should have been afraid for myself.”

She raises a quizzical eyebrow, as if to check whether she’s at the right place in the text. I nod, and she leans over the table. The glow of the tea lights flickers over her cheeks.

“So what actually happened?”

I turn to look at the neat row of olive pits on her plate.

What happened was that I stood inside the door to our apartment and observed Peter through the keyhole, just as I did every morning. He didn’t know I was standing there, couldn’t feel my eyes on him, but as soon as he walked out our door, I staggered over to it. Every time he left, I wondered if he was really going to work or if he was actually on his way to meet her . My eyes were glued to his back. I could never tear myself away from the keyhole until I had seen him step into the elevator and go on his way. But on this specific morning, something else happened.

“I saw the elevator doors open, saw Peter take a step forward and then freeze, midmotion. That same instant, I happened to think of the renovation and remembered that the elevator was going to be out of order. The next instant, I’d flung open the door and was heading toward him. It all happened so fast…”

I stop. The silence grows between us. Finally my sister picks up the stack of pages again and continues reading aloud. Maybe she thinks it’s easier this way. Maybe the text provides some sort of distance to what we’re talking about, even if it’s all my words.

“Everything happens so quickly, and yet the moment stretches out and lasts for an eternity. She comes closer, is right up next to me. She raises one hand, then the other. Soon I’ll fall. Soon I’ll be dashed to pieces. Soon it will be over. Three, two, one. Now.”

She looks up.

“So Peter thought you were willing to murder him to get revenge, that you rushed out into the stairwell to push him into the elevator shaft?”

The edges of the Brie have softened, and the wine remains untouched, even in my sister’s glass. I force myself to look her straight in the eye.

“What do you think? What do you think I was planning to do?”

My sister sets down the stack of printed pages and looks away for a fraction of a second. Then she looks up and, in a steady voice, says: “I know you, Elena. You would never kill anyone.”

My sister puts her hand over mine and squeezes it cautiously. I stare at her fingers.

“No,” I say, “I wouldn’t.”

There are so many things I’m not sure about. I don’t know what would have happened if my mother and father hadn’t come home early that night fifteen years ago. I don’t know if my sick body would have carried me all the way to Thomas’s new girlfriend’s house or whether I’d have been able to put my plan into action. I’ll never know if, when it really mattered, I would have been capable of using the knife and the hammer for anything other than threats. Nor can I fathom how it was possible for me to cut and stitch up my own flesh—that the thought ever occurred to me, that I managed to do it without fainting from the pain.

Then there are the things I am sure about. I know that what I did to myself was something gruesome, verging on barbaric, and I will always live with the white marks on my skin that serve as a reminder. After Peter admitted to cheating on me, I fantasized about injuring or even killing him, and I know that those fantasies took an increasingly realistic and frightening form. But I also know that when I saw him by the elevator doors that morning, helpless and vulnerable on the edge of a precipice, there was only one thought in my mind: I needed to save him. The look in Peter’s eyes as I rushed toward him, on the other hand, revealed that he believed something totally different.

My sister pushes away the wineglasses and pours us water. I bring the glass to my lips and drink several gulps.

“So this whole text, that you wrote it at all, is this some kind of… I mean, is this an attempt to…”

My sister’s hand rotates in the air, seeking, searching. I turn to the window and look out across the yard. The light is off in the kitchen opposite us now. Leo and his father are no longer visible.

“I started writing because I saw some things, the kind of things that reminded me of what Peter and I had been through. At first I wasn’t really going anywhere with the text. They were just words that came to me that wanted out. But then… then it turned into something else.”

My sister checks to see what I’m looking at, and I realize that all my ramblings about the neighbors are fresh in her mind. She raises her hand and cautiously touches the bandage on my forehead, finally asks what happened, where I went tonight. But I can’t get into that now. My bewilderment, confusing my own life with what was going on in the house opposite me… I can’t explain that. I don’t really even understand it myself, not yet. I need time to let the whole situation settle, let all the parts fall into place.