Speak No Evil

What was it they used to say in those old karate movies? You know… when they would try to explain to the white guy why the monks had taken their vows of silence?

Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.

Something like that, right? I know that I didn’t go about it in the traditional sense- I’m rather impulsive. But you have to believe me, I set out to do this for all the right reasons.

The neighbors, the new ones who just moved in upstairs, were screaming at one another again. I say again because I’ve already recognized a pattern. The husband screams. The wife screams. The baby cries out. Every slamming dish could be a gunshot. Every bath, a river of blood. I’m not the kind to call the cops, especially not over something as petty as domestic violence, so I smoked a joint and went to bed.

Before their arrival, I was getting steady work as a voice actor. The pay wasn’t great, and you’ve probably never seen my work; but there were countless art projects and student assignments to keep me busy. The walls here are thin, and I found myself unable to make a single recording. The work dried up.

The nights dragged on – each worse than the one before. You should have seen me, critiquing their arguments from the sidelines. I yelled up at them, like the corner-man of their boxing ring, each time there was a lull in the action. If he started to lose, I’d offer pointers- showing holes in her story that he had overlooked. If she started to lose, I’d start screaming about his father. Either way, by absolutely no fault of my own, she always lost.

I remember forgetting that this was even remotely concerning, this game that I was playing. People are so quick to form opinions and pick sides, but I was convinced that I’d found the new American pastime. We had been standing by for decades as divorce rates climbed. With each new set of statistics, the reminder of that hidden percentage. The one group of people that they don’t ask about on marriage surveys. You know- those killed by their spouses? Those more terminal cases of violent, sickly love? It’s not like we hadn’t been watching war on our televisions for our entire lives. I just wanted to bring it closer. Monetize it.

So, the couple upstairs became my experiment. I needed to know if I could do it. The couple across the street, a young couple who never close their blinds, would be my control group. At first, it was just a game. In my mind, it was the one brilliant idea that could close the door on my college loans; but you have to believe me- I didn’t think that it would actually work. For the record, it did. And for the record, I’m not proud of it.

And yes- she’s dead, and so is the kid, and, just for the record– I never laid a hand on anyone.

So, I’m yelling at the couple upstairs while they shuffle their couch into place a few inches at a time. They’re trying to find the perfect place to put it to avoid the glare from the nearby window, and each shift sends shockwaves through my ceiling. A book falls off a shelf and lands, splayed open, on the hardwood floor. The wife, she’s screaming something about Feng Shui. If the furniture isn’t right, she’s screaming, the mood of the room will be off.

So I yell out into my own empty apartment, with the same gruff, blue-collar enthusiasm, “For fuck’s sake, Diana! The mood is already off!”

What did you just say to me?

                        It’s my damn house! I’ll say whatever I like!

And, like most other nights, the initial fight only lasts for a few seconds. Diana doesn’t respond, but I hear her footsteps as she storms off into the back bedroom. I hear Paul fall onto their maladjusted couch, which sends a boom through the ceiling, and the two fall silent.

At this point, I’ve got them down to clockwork. I know that Diana only stays in the bedroom for five minutes at a time, though she has been known to come out a little earlier. I know, too, that Paul isn’t beyond following her in immediately- but that didn’t happen this day. Instead, Paul sat on the couch until she came back out of the bedroom. I was cracking open my first beer when she started in again.

“Oh, great,” she says, “so I guess we’re done moving it?”

There is a long lull here, which I always imagine is filled with Paul wiping his face.  He strikes me as the sarcastic type. He probably rolls his eyes a lot. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I know what either one of them looks like.

I don’t hear Paul’s reply as much as I hear the bass in his voice. I turn off my fan so it comes through clearer. I strain against my own heartbeat.

“Don’t call me that,” she says, “I didn’t do anything to deserve that.”

“I don’t know how else to talk,” he replies, his voice coming through just fine now, “What do you want me to do, Diana? No. No. You tell me how you want me to speak.”

This goes on for hours with neither taking responsibility for the problem at hand, and the couch goes neglected.

The baby screams.

I’ve tried to match the baby’s voice before, just to build tension on nights that are a little too calm for my liking- but I just can’t reach that level of emotion.

On cue, I hear Diana’s voice come through the ceiling above my front door. I know exactly what comes next.

“Fine!”

She’s screaming.

“Have it that way!”

I hear the door being flung open. Slammed shut. Her shoes hit the stairs in the breezeway, and she’s gone. The SUV tears past my window, but it’s too dark to make out the driver. The couple drives a big, black SUV with a row of those stick-figure stickers in the back windshield. You know the kind? The ones where their little family is all underweight and smiling? In `this case, I doubt that either of those details are true-to-life.

These are the quiet times, where I go outside for a cigarette. I figure, business-wise, that these breaks in the argument would be good for selling light beer or erectile dysfunction medication. For a few thousand dollars a time slot, Coca-Cola could bring back those funny-looking polar bears.

Across the street, the young couple is making out on their couch. I like watching them. You can learn a lot through watching people, so long as you’re careful. And you can’t afford to be creepy about it. Only watch those who are too care-free to close their blinds. You only go to jail for taking extra steps. The couple across the street, I know what they look like when they lie to one another, as well as what they look like right before they make love. This makes things interesting at the grocery store when I bump into them. They have no idea who I am, but I know nearly everything about them.

And just as I’m ready to give up and go to bed, I hear the SUV pull back into the parking lot.

Diana always comes back calmer, as though it was actually going to diffuse anything. I hear the steady echo of her footsteps as she ascends the stairs, and can nearly feel the key being slid into the front door. I’ve lost track of Paul by this time, but I hear him come out of the bathroom. I get settled on the couch, pop a half-smoked joint in my mouth, and trace his movements. I pretend that they’re both in front of me; it makes the whole process easier.

This is when the night started to get weird, and forgive me if I don’t have all the details you were hoping for; but, typically, Paul would be the first to speak. Diana would remain quiet, listening as he antagonized the situation. Eventually, Diana would say something that caught Paul the wrong way and that’s when the real show started. That’s where the banging dishes came in, and when I could get some of my best lines out.

But she didn’t say anything, and neither did he. There was a brief shuffling of feet in the bedroom, and then a loud thud.

And you have to believe me, I didn’t put any of it together for several days. The smell was the first thing that got to me. The walls are that thin.

In a normal situation, a person would call the landlord to complain about a smell that bad; but landlords have no patience for out-of-work voice-actors. I can’t afford to get evicted, and I really can’t afford going to jail. So, I didn’t call anyone. I still haven’t. I can’t– but we’ll get to that in a minute.

About three days ago I noticed a stain in the ceiling. At first, I wasn’t bothered by the stain at all. The apartment upstairs had been quiet since the last argument, and I figured that they had packed up to go on vacation or something. I’d keep an eye on the stain and call only if it got too big, or started sagging. The stain, it’s still on the ceiling- almost dead center in the living room, about a foot from the fan. Only now, it’s taken on some strange qualities.

And it talks to me.

It tells me to do things.

Its voice is gruff, and demeaning. Blue-collar, without the affection.

It’s about three feet across, and yellow around the edges. The center of it, which I’d say is about two feet across, is where I think the voice is coming from. The center is a deep red, which seems nearly black in the early-morning hours. The way it’s mixed with the jagged pattern of the ceiling, it looks nearly like coffee grounds.

“They’re gone,” the stain tells me.

I ask it what it means.

“Diana,” the stain says, it’s voice mostly bass and anger, “and that fuckin’ mistake.”

I pull the one chair that sits at my dining table over to the center of the living room and, standing on it, I ask, “And Paul?”

There is a long pause. The stain isn’t exactly quick with its answers. It mumbles something, I have to turn off the air conditioner- even the low hum was too much. I get back on my chair, turning my head to get my ear as close to it as I can, and I ask if it can repeat itself.

“Yes,” the stain says, “Paul is gone, too.”

I didn’t know what to make of this information, as I didn’t exactly know my new neighbors, and so I asked why it was telling me all of this. That’s when the stain said that they were dead. Well, Diana and the baby were dead. Paul’s status, according to the stain, was a little more complicated.

And I know how it sounds- but I was almost happy to get the news. Across the street, my control couple was sharing a cigarette on the porch. They sipped coffee and held hands and pretended that their experience was any different than the one unfolding upstairs.

I was the difference. For the first time in my life, I’d made an impact.

“Congratulations,” the stain says to me, “I guess you got what you always wanted.”

Only, hearing it that way, I wasn’t so sure that I had.

“Have you called the police?”

“No,” I say, “but I will, if you’d like.”

“No,” the stain replied, “not yet. I’m not ready for that yet.”

The conversation stopped there, but the stain kept growing. I watched it out the corner of my eye while I cooked dinner. It loomed over me as I changed the channels from commercial to commercial on the television set. It was silent for several hours. I was in my bedroom, folding a wide assortment of monotone clothing, when I heard it call out again. It didn’t refer to me by my name. I don’t think it knows who I am.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I did,” I replied, throwing my voice toward the living room, “I talked to them every day.”

“No,” the stain said, “I mean- why didn’t you say anything to anybody else?”

And so, we get to what I was talking about earlier.

I wish I could tell you how it all happened, but the only things that remain are shattered memories. I can sort through the pieces, like so many fragments of broken glass- but I doubt that I’d be able to do it justice. Never underestimate the persuasive powers of a dark secret.

The only thing that I can say with any certainty is that it hurt.

That, and you’ve got to be gentle with the tip of a paring knife- or you’re likely to make a pincushion out of the inside of your cheek. About half-way through the whole process, when my tongue was just some quivering alien inside of my mouth, the stain started laughing. It was a detached sort of laughter, the kind that carries the same rhythm as grief. It was colder than the blade as it passed through my flesh. At this point, I was more pulling than cutting. It was sickening. I passed out.

When I awoke on the kitchen floor, my shirt was an open V of red; the blood caused the fabric to cling to my concave chest. The paring knife laid on the hardwood, small beads resting on the blade. I was exhausted, and freezing. Above me, like some demented god, the laughter continued. There was no telling if I had been out for minutes or hours, but the laughter was there regardless. As I looked around, trying to gather my surroundings, I saw the pinkish-grey mass laying on the kitchen counter next to the coffee pot.

I didn’t know what else to do. I started laughing, as well.

Only, my laughter sounds different now. It’s a hollow, wet thing echoing in the space where my tongue used to rest; as though it wants to change direction and return as a scream.

“Did you do it?”

And I try to speak, but my voice is nothing but vowels. I think of Frankenstein’s monster and a million Zombie-Movie extras.

“Good.”

And you have to believe me- I tried to call the police after all of this happened, but they couldn’t understand what I was trying to say. It may have been the first time in history that dispatch has hung up on a caller. Maggots have started to feast on the stain, but that doesn’t seem to bother it very much. It hasn’t stopped speaking to me, despite my inability to answer it.

Now, the stain talks all throughout the night. It tells me stories about the family that used to live upstairs- about the beautiful wedding between Paul and Diana, about the birth of their child. The child, his name was Victor, was only about a year old. The stain tells me about the first time that Paul met Diana, and how turbulent the two were right from the start. The passion, the stain explained, was the only thing holding the two together- damn the consequences. They moved to my apartment complex because they thought a change would be good.

So I’m writing to you because, as you can see, I have no other option. The stain blames me for things. Taunts me. It tells me that if I can only stomach the thought, the melon-baller in the drawer beside the stove would be perfect for removing my eyes. That way, it says, I won’t have to look at it anymore. That way, it says, I won’t have to sit as a passive witness. I try to explain that I can’t- but the stain is persistent.

I just didn’t want you to be disturbed by the state of me, when someone finally comes to help.