Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

McTeal waddled on.

I kept a safe distance behind him, but he never once looked over his shoulder. I was nervous but thrilled. The biting cold made me conscious of my wound again, for my temple began to throb. The muddy green jacket might have disguised me a little, but it provided poor insulation from the weather. I began to think about Vanessa Somerset; even though she had deluded herself into liking me, she began to settle warmly inside of me. I wanted to see her again. Perhaps she hadn’t deceived herself in the slightest bit. After all, Vanessa was a grown woman with a string of past relationships, heartaches, and lusts, so undoubtedly she was old enough to know what she wanted, and experienced enough to know how to maneuver her way around me. Perhaps I was the one who was transparent and deluded because I was oblivious to the extent to which she’d charmed me. Noticing the loops of tiny colored lights in a window, I briefly imagined myself buying Vanessa a Christmas present.

McTeal turned a corner and stepped out of sight.

I hurried forward. I had a new idea that maybe I would discover the man in a little pigpen of debauchery, and I could turn him over to Dr. Ferguson and the intense black man. Somehow, by sacrificing McTeal, I would be rewarded. I wasn’t looking to be a hero, but simply to be granted immunity. At the moment, as I strode toward the corner on this quiet, snowy evening, I neglected to consider that the authorities would wonder how I knew about McTeal in the first place. I would have been tying myself to the pervert.

When I came to the end of the block, I was standing in the full glare of a streetlight, so I approached the corner slowly and peeped around the edge of a wet brick building. Besides a woman in a purple overcoat who was fishing in the trunk of her car, nobody else was in view. I looked down and saw McTeal’s footprints. Cautiously, I surveyed the area, fearing that maybe he’d known all along that I was following him and he was now crouched behind a car or in a doorway, ready to spring out and bludgeon me over the head. I tracked the footprints for roughly twenty yards, at which point they sharply turned and ceased at a large closed door.

I stepped back and looked up, wondering which window belonged to McTeal; at any moment, he would turn on the light.

“Get the door, sweetie.”

The woman in the purple coat was stepping toward me, carrying several plastic grocery bags in each hand.

Without saying anything, I turned the handle and pushed the door open.

Stinking of cigarette smoke, the woman shuffled past me into the building.

“Merry Christmas,” she said.

“You too,” I responded, a little off-guard by her cheerfulness.

The woman bypassed the staircase and continued down the hall, walking dead center on the matted runner, heel to toe, as if she were on a tightrope and using the bags for balance.

The warmth of the building compelled me to step inside.

I had no idea what I was doing, and I figured that I had lost track of McTeal. Even so, I stood in the corridor, thinking that the instant I went back outside, I wouldn’t know where to go. Although I hadn’t seen the interior of any of the apartments, the building seemed nicer than where I lived.

The woman set down her bags, dug her hand beneath the collar of her coat, and pulled a strap over her head, from which dangled a set of keys, like some gaudy amulet.

I stepped aside in case she looked over and saw me lingering by the door. I heard the jangle of her keys, the sound of her bags being lifted, one by one, and dropped onto the floor of her apartment, and at last the shutting of her door. When I looked back down the hallway, I saw that her boots had left little clumps of snow on the runner.

Because McTeal was wearing flat-bottom shoes, he apparently didn’t leave a trail of snow for me to follow.

The staircase not only went upward but also turned and descended into a brightly lit basement. I bent down and touched one of the steps leading to the second floor. A spot on the coarse, gray carpet was damp, presumably from McTeal. The steps creaked as I started upward. Most likely, I was only going to arrive at an empty corridor, as well as the pointless option of continuing on to the third floor, yet I wanted to follow McTeal until the trail ran completely dry. Part of me recognized the absurdity of my entire pursuit, but somehow by making this offensive move, by taking a little control, I was ridding myself of the threat of McTeal to some minor degree. I felt as though I were somehow pinning him down, fixing him in a little box, and limiting his strength. Of course, I wasn’t fully disarming him, but merely dulling his weapon. Perhaps seeing the man’s home would simply make him more human.

At the top of the flight of stairs, I wondered if I should continue upward or retreat. Save for a fire extinguisher attached to the wall and a pair of little black boots on the floor beside a door, the hallway was empty.

I looked up the staircase leading toward the next floor, the succession of steps seemingly ending at a white wall.

My chase appeared over.

As I turned to go back downstairs, I saw that less than ten feet from me, a door suddenly opened wide, and without pausing an instance to see who was about to emerge, I wheeled around and mounted the steps toward the third floor. There, midway on the staircase, I gripped the railing, crouched down, and listened.

The door closed.

Realizing that I would have been discovered already if the person were heading upward, I started back down the steps. I stooped and peeped into the corridor. The little boots and the fire extinguisher were still there, but nothing else

It appeared to be a false alarm; my chase was over.

Even so, when I turned the corner of the staircase, ready to leave the building and venture back out into the cold night, there was my madman again, waddling down the steps, this time carrying a plump navy blue sack over his shoulder and holding in his other hand a bulky red container with a blue cap.

I froze on the steps and watched him. He reached the bottom and lumbered out of sight.

I waited, listening for him to leave the building, but I couldn’t tell where he’d gone, save for the obvious fact that he was going to do his laundry. I remembered from the photographs, his “love letters,” that he used to change his sheets all the time, causing me to speculate, in that elaborate character study that I’d been compelled to destroy, why he changed them so often, what did he do off camera to make them so dirty?

Now that I knew where the man lived, there was no reason to follow him any further, merely to spy on him sitting on a bench and separating his whites from his colored clothes.

One day, from a safe distance, perhaps when McTeal was just beginning to forget about taking his revenge on a man who had inadvertently intercepted his love letters, I might send him a brief note in the post or maybe even slip it under his door. I could rewrite our whole conflict, making myself the victor:

Dear Fruitcake:

Consider this: The whole time I knew who you were and where you lived. Now has come the moment for me to alleviate your fears and disabuse you of your misconceptions. I never spoiled your campaign to woo my bloated neighbor; she disliked you of her own accord. I never burned your insipid little photos, nor considered them anything but loathsome. But I did make copies of them. As you read this note, everyone dear in your life — from your employer to your mother — is opening up a manila envelope, marked “Photos. Do Not Bend.”

I walked over to the door to McTeal’s apartment, to get the room number: twenty-two, which was easy to remember: the second door on the second floor. Although I had a pen, I didn’t have anything to write on; otherwise, I might have crafted him a little note on the spot. However, it was probably better to wait a while. The surprise of hearing from me would be more disarming once he’d stopped thinking about me. I had a vague idea that I could pull a similar kind of joke on my landlord.