The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud Read Free Book Online

imagined them both sitting inside, in a kinder universe, adjacent to this one, where that would be a normal thing, where they both belonged in the same place. He said, “She doesn’t love me, you know.”
    She looked at him with genuine sorrow. “I’m sorry for that. If that’s true, then I really am.”
    “Does he love you?”
    She nodded. “I think he really does,” she said.
    “I do too, you know.”
    “I know you do.” She put her hand on his cheek, and the gentleness of it nearly made him cry. “I’ll see you tomorrow night, okay?”
    “Yeah. Okay.” He could feel the tears in his eyes, knew that she could see them. He didn’t care.
    She kissed him quickly, chastely. “You’re a good man, Will. Maybe the best one. Good night.”
    “Good night,” he said.
    He was anything but a good man. He knew it. He watched her pull away from the curb and disappear around the corner. Then he rested his head on the steering wheel and sat there for a while.
     
     
    B Y THE TIME he arrived back home, the sun was bruising the sky in the east. He pulled in behind Carrie’s car on the side of the road, shut the engine off, and leaned back in his seat with his eyes closed. Something big was trapped inside him, some great sadness, and he felt if he could cry, or even articulate it in speech, it would relieve the pressure and provide him some measure of relief. But he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t find a way to address it. He wondered if it would become the thing that defined him. He imagined himself in the third person, as someone observed and understood by an invisible witness. Would there be room for sympathy? Or would he be damned by it?
    The car was a liminal zone; as long as he stayed there he would not have to face either Carrie or Alicia again. It seemed an attractive prospect. He could easily go to sleep here, let the heat of daylight wake him up in an hour or two. He could think of something to tell Carrie.
    He was pretty sure he could think of something.
    His phone chimed in his pocket, and he fumbled it hurriedly out, thinking for one incandescent moment that it might be Alicia.
    It was Carrie. The disappointment was almost physical. He looked at their apartment across the street. The porch light was on, but everything inside seemed dark. That didn’t really mean anything, though.
    He accepted the call and said, “Hey. Sorry I’m so late. I’m right outside. I’m on my way in.”
    The call disconnected.
    A familiar cold tide flowed through his chest. He told himself she was just angry with him, that she had a right to be – more than she knew – and she’d simply hung up on him. That he would go inside and take what he had coming. But he knew it was something else. When the phone chimed a text received, he found himself unable to make himself look. He stared at the icon for a long time, feeling that strange, unreleasable presence swell inside of him. Finally, he slid his thumb across the screen and looked at the text.
    It was another picture. Taken from inside his house, the lights off. The perspective was from the kitchen, directed at the door to Carrie’s study, but angled in such a way that the picture did not afford a look into it. Only the cool blue glow of an active computer screen, radiating from inside her study like a heat signature, gave any hint of a human presence.
    Will crossed the street, feeling powerfully dislocated from the world. The door was still locked. He applied his key to it and it swung silently open, spilling the darkness of the interior over him. The air was warm. He stepped inside, attuned to each convulsion of his heart. He knew he should find a weapon, but the actual doing of it seemed too complicated. Easier to just walk into the black cave of his home and accept what waited there.
    “Carrie?”
    He entered the kitchen. He stood precisely in the spot the photo had been taken. There, bleeding from her study, was the blue glow of the computer screen.
    “Carrie? Are