M. Hobson: Domovoi

“Please stop.” The words come from behind him. He turns slowly.

She looks much thinner now, her face sleek and shining. Her hair is smoothed back from a soft, placid face. She’s wearing a suit of grey silk. He looks her up and down, approvingly.

“It hurts,” she says. “Please stop.”

“I’m too far along now,” he says. The words make her wince visibly.

A vague premonition of worry crosses his mind. What is the pain in his chest, what is the ineffable regret? He doesn’t understand it; he dismisses it with a curt gesture of his hand.

“You’re just afraid of change,” he says, more harshly than he intends to.

“It hurts,” Winnie says again.

“Good things sometimes hurt,” Ryan says, careful to make his tone soft. He wants her to understand, he wants her to stop fighting. He wants her to let him have her, to give him access and permission. “Medicine hurts. It hurts, but it heals.”

“You are not healing me, you are killing me,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I know what you are.”

“I hate you,” she whispers, tears gleaming slick in her oil-colored eyes.

Ryan smiles down at her sadly. She doesn’t hate him. He knows it, just knows it. She doesn’t hate him. She can’t hate him.

“You hate the idea of changing,” he says. “You hate the idea of being changed. You hate the idea of letting someone else help you.”

“I never asked for your help,” Winnie says.

“But you did. By decaying, by getting old, by letting yourself fall to ruin,” Ryan strokes her hair. “But I will make it better. I will take care of you.”

“It hurts,” Winnie says finally, and then she’s gone, and Ryan’s arms encircle nothing.

After six months, the renovation is complete. The Windsor Machine Works rehab is finished. It is clean, sterile, perfect. There are no secrets left.

Every item on the punch list has been checked off, and the Russians have been paid, even if there are other bills that never will be.

There are five vast condo lofts on the top floor, each with a prime view of the surrounding neighborhood. The ramshackle houses that haven’t been painted in years, the rusting cars in their driveways and side-yards, the drug dealers and prostitutes in their blue Camaros. Who said there wasn’t a viable retail component?

Ryan has had a dozen calls from the real-estate agency he usually uses to broker his properties. They’re trying to back out. They want nothing to do with marketing this one. He enjoys listening to the voice mails, how they get progressively screechier.

There is 15,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, lease ready. The blonde wood floors and cool white lighting are perfect for the Starbucks and the Gap and the Old Navy that will never come.

Ryan takes one last walk through the building, but he does not enjoy it. He feels so strange. The familiar joy, the pride and feeling of completion, the post-orgasmic relaxation of tense energy pleasantly spent, is nowhere to be felt. Instead he feels keyed up, anxious and annoyed. Frustrated. Stifled. Twitchy.

He comes into the room where he last saw Winnie. This is the display model; it has been decorated so that perky sales agents can inspire prospective residents with visions of the kind of life their exorbitantly high mortgage can purchase for them. The walls have been painted a soothing shade of mint green. There is a comfortable arrangement of camel-colored suede furniture in one corner. One chair is draped with a fuzzy, avocado-hued chenille throw. Ryan tries to imagine getting comfortable in this room. He can’t. The thought gives him a headache.

There is also a large white bed, a cast-iron four-poster looped with gauze that (Ryan knows from experience) will have to be washed every goddamn week to keep from getting dusty. More meaningless garniture. More curls of shaved beet. He imagines making love to his fiancée in that bed, in that engulfing marshmallow-soft nest. Imagines her yielding body, her blank eyes staring up at him.

What is wrong with him? He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. These things sell. These are what people want. Why should they annoy him so? Why does he suddenly long for the smell of motor oil and rust and honey?

“Winnie!” he whispers loudly, looking wildly about the room. “Winnie, for God’s sake!”

Then, she is there. Sitting on the bed.

The transformation is complete. She is slender and sylphlike, with a delicate face and vacant eyes.

She looks, Ryan notices with sudden horror, exactly like his fiancée.

She is staring out the window, thinking unfathomable thoughts. Her hair shines, her face is perfect, her nails gleam, her skin is smooth as glass. She is perfect and perfectly self-contained.

“You know something strange?” she says distantly, her face wrinkling in a pretty frown. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

That night, Ryan burns it down.

Burns it all down; the bamboo flooring, the soothing mint-green walls, the new plaster. Everything. He storms through the dark virgin rooms with a five-gallon gasoline can. He lights the fire by putting a ripped piece of rag into the mouth of a bottle of vodka. Then he stands across the street and watches her burn, brilliant greens and oranges, deep mysterious flickers of blue, black billowing smoke that makes the sky weep.

He sits across the street, watching the fire trucks cluster around like busy insects. Dawn breaks, the sun rises, and no one notices him, no one knows who he is; he is just another man, sitting silently, watching something go up in flames.

He waits until the firemen have gone, leaving behind nothing but yellow tape and the smell of death and her gray, hulking, empty skeleton, charred and angular.

Crawling through the yellow tape, sneaking like an animal, he moves around at her feet, through her hot shadow. With a shaking hand, he fills a galvanized bucket with damp gray ash. There are pieces of wood mixed in with it; wood like bone.

He places both hands on the side of the bucket, closing his eyes. There is a warmth banked within, the warmth of pudding encased in a heating blanket, the warmth of rage and retribution and desire.

“Come with me,” he whispers, pleading. “Stay with me. Please.”

He puts the bucket into the trunk of his green Lexus.

He visits the gals at the County Assessor’s office. They are surprised again, because he smells like smoke and his face is streaked with ash and tears. But they take his check gladly and issue him a receipt with a formal red stamp on it.

And so he reclines with Winnie in the warehouse by the river. In the rain. On a stained mattress, drinking vodka from a bottle with a torn label.

Ryan’s appraising gaze shifts to the brick wall instinctively, out of habit. Once painted glossy white, now it’s grimy, smudged with old black handprints. How many layers of paint hide beneath there?

I should strip that paint , he thinks. Expose the brick. People like exposed brick .

As soon as the thought crosses his mind, pain sears through him, tearing his heart into little throbbing bits. He gasps for air.

“The secrets stay,” Winnie growls.

Ryan presses both palms flat against the sides of his head, as if he can press the pain out his ears.

“How did you . . .” he begins.

“You breathed in the ash when you were scattering it,” Winnie says, taking a drink from the vodka bottle. There is a long silence while she lets Ryan absorb the implications of what she has said. Then she looks at him with cool, unblinking, oil-colored eyes.

“You’re a murderer and a rapist,” she says again.