It was one of those cramped, sublet offices nestled in the back corner of a strip mall that gave the strong impression it doubled as its owner’s temporary housing. At the moment, it was occupied by a splintering wooden desk and a pull-out couch that held a struggling wedding photographer with a poorly hidden tattoo.
The wedding photographer lifted a cigarette to his lips and examined his familiar quarters as if they were a specimen he was encountering for the first time.
This, he considered, is what everyone was afraid of.
He coughed, violently, and the force of his hacking sent the precarious stack of papers on his desk spiralling to the floor.
It couldn’t have just happened, spat his inner monologue. The idea that this was just an inevitable end for them, that he had allowed them to simply slide, rung by rung, down every measure of prosperity there was, was too much for him to bear. There had to have been some moment, he reasoned. I should be able to look back and find some turning point, some specificity, and say “There! If I had done that one thing differently, I wouldn’t be here right now.” But of course, there wasn’t, and there never is. The poor darling’s problem wasn’t some unforeseeable coincidence; it was the inevitable consequence of mediocrity in a situation that demanded competence. It wasn't failure exactly--no, not quite, because everyone who knew him agreed, if only to his face, that there was nothing he could have done.
He hunched over to pick up a small picture frame that had fallen with the stack of papers. The smooth wooden square surrounded a smiling woman with the kind of genuinely effortless beauty that could have held the gaze of any man for longer than he cared to admit. Her arms were looped around a giggling child with the wedding photographer's eyes and the woman's pale ginger hair. Embracing the woman was a man the wedding photographer could barely recognize.

He closed his tired eyes and took a long, disbelieving drag.

Now doesn't that just figure. What a g------ cliché. The man in the photograph--unmarred by any court proceeding, house still standing, un-balding head filled with silly, passive thoughts about an even sillier barista--he didn't even care to be there. It had not so much as crossed his self-important mind that there was the slightest possibility the tedium of family photo-taking would be a chore he would so sorely miss. It had looked so normal to him, before; just a happy family photograph, but--Lord in heaven--he saw it now. That dumb b------ had one hand around his wife's waist and the other on his cell phone just outside the frame. You can see the glow on his face, he realized, with growing hatred towards this entirely separate incarnation of himself. The thought that his one memento of the only beautiful thing he'd ever had was stained by his own d------ indifference-- this grated on him past the point of toleration. With the futile urgency of a man in denial, he pried the Polaroid from its frame and seized a pair of safety scissors from his desk drawer. He doesn't deserve to be anywhere near them, thought the wedding photographer, with a passion which betrayed the childlike perception that this could change anything at all. He slammed the picture frame back onto his desk and began hacking away at the image of himself, trimming it slice-by-slice with uncharacteristic aggression.
He never listened.
Snip.
Didn't believe her, not for a good while.
Snip.
Didn't notice when she stopped taking her pills.
Snip.
Left poor trusting sweet uninformed Winnie alone with her.
Snip.
Loved her too much to call the police, call a psychiatrist, anyone who might have helped, even after things started going missing left and right and her ribs poked through that beautiful porcelain skin and he couldn't see the light in her eyes anymore, but some awful filtered lens that drowned out everything good and hopeful in the world and sometimes he just thought it would be better if she finally--
There was a loud knock at the door.
The craziness of what he had been doing dawned on him all at once, and in some measure of shock, the wedding photographer rose to his feet, smoothed the wrinkles out of his jacket and calmly swept away the shards of paper into a wastebasket. He heard the door come unlatched behind him, swinging open and leaving a dispersed cloud of cigarette smoke in its wake.
"Jesus," coughed the opener, fanning away whirls of nicotine from his face. It was a short, narrow-framed janitor he vaguely recognized as being named Travis. The janitor glanced at the stained carpet with exasperation, and held out an old cell phone for the wedding photographer to take. "This yours?"
It wasn't. It wasn't half as nice as his, either. But somewhere between his second glass of whiskey and his first regret-fueled temper tantrum, concern for right, wrong and worldly consequence had begun to seem futile. Years from now, a saccharine psychologist would label this behavior "sensation seeking". He nodded and slipped it into his back pocket.
"Thanks, Travis."
"Thanks, Fred."
The wedding photographer's name wasn't Fred, it was Malcolm. The janitor knew this, but the janitor's name wasn't Travis, it was Terrance, and he liked to make sure people knew he was just as unconcerned with their lives as they clearly were with his. Terrance was a little insecure that way.
Once the janitor was a considerable distance down the hall--not that he really had to wait that long, he wasn't going to do anything particularly suspicious--Malcolm drew the phone out of his pocket and examined it. Thank God it doesn't have a passcode, thought Malcolm, without any trace of the excited rush he had been looking for. That would have been embarrassing. It was a flip phone from Best Buy with a cracked screen and a duct-taped back. Squinting, he scrolled through the folder marked "Photos".
Malcolm instantly liked the owner of the phone. The pictures were mostly of his kids; a boy who looked about nine, and (Malcolm knew by the photos of her birthday party) a five-year-old girl with red hair. The owner seemed involved with them like too few people were. There were strings of those playful, involuntary photos of his wife, which began with her sitting at her desk or making dinner and ended with her noticing him and laughing shot-by-shot, bashfully pushing the camera away. Malcolm imagined the owner looking through them on business trips, anytime he had to be away from her, and her knowing that even in the most mundane of moments, he found her beautiful.
Malcolm tried to remember doing something like that for Lydia.
He couldn’t. He never had.
He poured himself another drink.
There were a few pictures of the family dog, a border collie who seemed to be doing remarkably well for an animal with a tumor bulging out of its side; the occasional funny, posed shot of a drunken night out; and a cluster of pictures from a vacation somewhere in Asia that seemed considerably outside the price range of a man with a $20 phone. He opened up Facebook. Here we go. The owner of the account--and, he assumed, the cell phone--was a man named Marcin Brecht. He was, despite his choice of electronics, very successful. Something to do with insurance. Marcin was stock-photo handsome in the way Malcolm wrongly thought he used to be, and, he noticed with some irritation, was six years his junior. He’s Polish, read the wedding photographer, and was living somewhere in Texas now. His eyebrows raised with the xenophobic distrust he had been taught to harbor, but he quickly set them back down.
When he reached the end of the timeline, he was curiously disappointed. He wanted to see more, but the feeling passed. He lit another cigarette, and turned the phone over in his hand.
It gave him a strange and sought-after sense of power. He could delete all manner of data, post obscenities on any one of the logged-in social media accounts-- he could wreak havoc on this stranger with total impunity, but none of those things particularly appealed to him. What really excited him was the anonymity, and as this feature first registered with him, he had an idea. Malcolm opened up the keypad, pulse jumping as he entered a familiar number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and a cheery, confused voice spoke.
“Hello?”
It was Lydia. She sounded medicated, and from his few memories of her post-breakdown, pre-incarceration days, he knew that was a good thing. He would rather see her drowsy, dazed and complacent than lucidly insane.
"Is this . . . Hello?" She spoke again. Her breath made a crackling noise into the microphone. Malcolm realized he did not know quite what he had wanted to say. He hadn't fully expected the crabby nurses at the rehabilitation center to give her back any line of communication, but he supposed that was a sign of good behavior.
"Good morni--good evening, ma’am,” he began, and his voice was thin and papery. “This is Mr. Brecht.”
“Have we met before?” she inquired. Oh, Lydia. Yes, I believe we have. He forced what he imagined a charming, gentlemanly Texan/Polish laugh would sound like, and she laughed along with him without either one knowing why.
“Why, yah-ess,” he drawled, cringing at the insincerity. “I brought you flowers just last week.” She gasped in delighted recognition.
“Oh, that was you? Those gorgeous purple ones on the windowsill next to the hammocks?"
Malcolm rubbed his chin. He had been around enough--not that he had been permitted to actually see her; apparently she found that all kinds of triggering--to know there were no hammocks, or even a windowsill that he could recall. God, that was frustrating. It was supposed to be just one thing, wasn't it? You were a kleptomaniac or a disordered personality or delusional, and you took the appropriate pill and went on your merry way. Not Lydia. Lydia was a mixed bag. Lydia was a little bit of every kind of crazy.
"Yeah, hon, those. And we had lunch before, remember? You know me. We're good old pals." A note of annoyance had crept into his voice. He knew he didn’t have to try particularly hard.
“Oh, yeah, we did. Old pal,” she echoed.
“Have I told you you’re very pretty, Liddie?” She giggled, and he could imagine her tucking a strand of hair behind her left ear like she always did when he flirted with her, when they first started seeing each other and every odd habit and idiosyncrasy was fresh and endearing and new. He hadn’t heard that giggle in a long, long time.
“You ladies’ man! I barely know you,” she teased. “Lets you and me play a game.”
Malcolm knew where this was going, and it made him smile. She had used this line on him before, and he had found it scintillating. Hearing it again . . . hearing her again . . . it was like bandaging a wound he didn’t know he had.
“I’ll bite.”
“Spectacular. You get to ask me one question, and no matter what, I have to answer honestly. And I get to do the same for you.”
“And if one of us lies?”
There was a short pause.
“Why would anyone do that?” There it was, peeking through again. Her tone was just a little too bothered, a little too loud. She had a habit of doing that, he noticed. Veering just a tiny bit outside what people could write off as sane.
“Good point.” He could hear her relax again. “You can go first.”
“All right. Do you think you’re going to heaven or Hell?”
Malcolm paused, drew the phone away from his ear and glanced at it affrontedly. This was nothing like the question from the first time-- some blatantly self-referential inquiry about who was his type. He didn’t think she had ever been religious.
“I . . . hadn’t given it much thought,” he considered. “Can’t there be some kind of middle ground? Purgatory, or something?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. People are either good or they’re bad,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Which one are you, hmm?”
The next few seconds were filled with the buzz of static.
“Well, I don’t. I think people can spend their whole lives trying to be good and still do things that screw everyone over in the end.” He could hear her foot tapping rhythmically on the other end of the line.
“Is that what you do?”
“I’d like to think it’s not the end yet.”
“Then you’re golden,” she announced. “If you try to be a good person, you are one. It’s automatic. That’s what they talk to us a lot about in here.”
“Is that right.”
“I used to think I wasn’t one either,” she continued. “Almost no one here does, but I do now.”
“And why is that?”
She drummed her nails on the speaker. “Is that your one question?”
“Sure.” He had dropped the accent.
“It was because of things that happened before I got here. They were, you know, what got me thrown in here, but I don’t think it was even really them, I think it was more,” she took a rapid, deep breath. “More the fact that I didn’t really understand what was going on while it was going on.”
“What things?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She crossed her free arm over her chest.
He laughed, just a little bitterly. “No, you can’t break your own rules. You have to answer my question.”
She squirmed, just a bit. “It was like-- you know how in horror movies, you can have the same scene and it’s just something really everyday going on, like a person walking around their house?” Deep breath again. “And if you watch it with the sound off, it’s normal, but if you turn the volume up and you’re listening to all the scary music, soundtrack or whatever, you have this totally different idea of what’s about to happen?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Well, thats why I did them. Because everyone else saw the world with the volume off, and I didn’t. And I never realized it, completely, until it was, you know, a little late.”
He said nothing.
“So, since I have to tell you what happened, I will.” The drumming of her nails sped up with her speaking. “I had this husband, and I had a daughter, too. Named Winnie. I think she lives with my sister now. And before, you know, everything, we lived together in the suburbs.”
He gripped the edge of the couch and pursed his lips.
“And I was really happy at first, but I guess I’ve always been a little bit off--brain chemistry or something, is what my doctor says--and I thought I wanted to stay at home with Winnie, because I thought that’s what happy people did. And I don’t think that anymore, either. I think everybody has their own brand of happy.”
“Keep going,” he reminded. He noticed the medication seemed to be wearing off.
“And when I realized that I wasn’t happy, and that I didn’t seem to be doing mothering or wifeing or housekeepering right, I started trying to make these little changes. And later on people said it was stealing, but I wasn’t trying to do that at all. I just had this idea in my head-- and I just knew it was right, because it felt right, you know? This idea that if I could move things around, just random things, in the universe, than other things would start to change. Like my life would get better. I would feel better.”
It dawned on Malcolm that he had never asked her why before.
“So I would take things from the house and I would put them in different places. Sometimes I would bury them, or give them away, or leave them at the mall. Or I would take them from the mall or the supermarket, and put them in the house. I didn’t think, I just didn’t-- what’s the word-- associate it with stealing.”
“And I started spending less and less time with Winnie and less and less time with Malcolm-- that was my husband’s name; he isn’t my husband anymore. And I would leave her by herself and, you know, I would forget to eat, too, so I would forget to feed her, and then she wasn’t happy anymore, either. But I loved her, I swear I did. Do.”
“And I loved Malcolm a lot, too. And I guess that’s why it never really got through to him what was going on at home, because I just didn’t want to, you know, make him mad at me, or disappointed.”
Malcolm interjected. “Did you think he wouldn’t love you if you made him mad? Did you think he was going to leave you?” He tried to keep the sense of urgency out of his voice.
“No,” she said simply, and Malcolm let out a long breath. “I just really wanted him to think I was perfect. If he thought I was perfect, then I was perfect, you know, in reality. Because he was the one who was always grounded like that. But yeah, whenever he was home, which wasn’t really often, I would kind of pretend. I would hide all of my moved things.”
“But then there was this one Tuesday, and I remember that because it was the week before Mardi Gras, and I thought it was Mardi Gras that week instead of the next one. Which was kind of disappointing. And I woke up that morning and two police officers were standing at my door, talking to the neighbor. So I went downstairs and asked them what they were doing there, and they said they had been ringing my doorbell for a good half hour and I remember thinking that was odd, too. And they told me that they wanted to come in and look around. I said no. They said they had security footage of me taking things from stores, the ones in the mall. And I didn’t realize it was illegal, but I denied it anyway, so they wouldn’t get mad at me. But they got mad anyway and they said they were going to come back with a warrant and take me to jail, and I wouldn’t get to see my Winnie anymore.”
She took another sharp breath, and continued, wading through her words to try and be precise. “So I thought I had to do something drastic. I thought if I could move something big around, make a big physical change, then my life would change too, you know? So I dropped Winnie off at Malcolm’s office, and he never questioned why. And then I went home and I grabbed a couple of jugs of spare gasoline we kept in the basement and I walked around pouring it on everything. And then I moved Winnie’s favorite stuffed animals out, because I knew she would want them. And then I went outside, and I struck a match--you know, it’s funny, I expected it to take a few tries, but houses are just incredibly flammable-- and I set our house on fire. And I don’t really remember what happened after that.”
Malcolm did. It had involved a tranquilizer gun. She wasn’t as calm as she remembered being.
“I never got to give Winnie her stuffed animals, though,” she recounted sadly. Malcolm knew he had to go. His car was going to get towed. He would be lucky if it was still there when he went outside.
“Thank you for telling me that, Lydia. I think I need to go now,” he said robotically. He hadn’t realized how raw this all still was.
“Wait!” she exclaimed, a characteristic overreaction. He stayed, a smile brought back to his face, suspended on the line. “I like you,” she whispered, as if she were afraid someone would overhear. “Are you going to call me again?”
He smiled. He knew it didn’t matter how he answered; some combination of meds and psychosis would sweep Marcin, no matter how much she liked him, into that foggy, unreachable realm of Lydia’s consciousness by the next day. Still, the idea was appealing-- he didn’t care about her abnormalities, as long as she was safe from them (which she was). He still loved her, that much was beyond doubt. This kind of anonymous veil might be the only way he could still love her.
He chose the easy option.
“Of course I will.”
“Good, good, good.” She sighed contentedly. “Goodnight, Mr. Brecht.”
“Goodnight, Lydia.”
The wedding photographer rested, calm and still, on the frayed couch, letting the last sounds of her voice soak into his memory. He stared at the cell phone for a short while, then tossed it down in between the couch cushions, and flicked the lights off on the way out. The janitor would take it away in the morning.