HELL BELIEVES IN YOU

LOOKING BACK ON IT NOW, I think it was the Mormons who robbed me. The two of them had been wandering around the neighbourhood for a couple of days before it happened, knocking on doors, seeing who was home and who wasn’t. They even had little pads of paper that they made notes on. I knew they were Mormons because they wore white shirts and those black name tags.

One morning they came to my house. They were both wearing sunglasses. I couldn’t see anything but my own reflection in them. “We’d like to talk to you about Hell,” the one on the left said when I answered the door. He smiled like there wasn’t anything else he’d rather be talking about.

“I don’t really believe in Hell,” I told him.

He looked over my shoulder, into my apartment. I could smell cigarette smoke on him now. “If we could just come in for a moment,” he said.

“I’m just on my way to work,” I told them.

“When’s a good time for us to come back?” he asked.

“I work all the time,” I said.

I started to close the door, but the other Mormon stopped it with his foot. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe in Hell,” he said. “Hell believes in you.”

I ACTUALLY WAS WORKING during this time, as an enumerator. It was a temporary sort of thing I found through the paper. My job was to knock on people’s doors and register them to vote. I was working with a man named Lincoln. It was the kind of job one person could do, but they made us work in pairs anyway. The woman who hired me said that people were more willing to open the door to pairs than to individuals.

Sometimes Lincoln talked about the neighbourhood where he lived. “It’s all students,” he told me one time. “Every time I walk out the door, I’m reminded of all the ways my life has gone wrong since I left school. But the rent is cheap.”

“I could never live like a student again,” I told him.

“I don’t live like a student,” he said. “I live in the same neighbourhood as students.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

“And there are benefits,” he went on. “The woman who lives across the street doesn’t have any blinds.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“How should I know?” he said. “Maybe she can’t afford them, or maybe she just likes people looking at her. Anyway, the point is that I can watch her any time I want.”

“Does she change in front of her windows?” I asked.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” he said. “I just watch her doing her regular house stuff. You know, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, that kind of thing.”

“So you don’t watch her change?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes,” he admitted, “but that’s not really what I’m interested in.”

“There’s something not right with you,” I told him.

WE MET ALL SORTS working that job. One man invited us in for beer. He looked like the kind of guy who played hockey every week. His furniture was all black leather. We sat at his kitchen table and did the paperwork there. Some sort of Christian talk show was coming from the radio. The voices were low and soothing. The table was already covered with empty beer bottles even though it was only noon.

When I asked the man how many people lived there, he stared out the window, into his backyard. There was a riding lawn mower parked in the middle of the yard. Half the lawn was cut and the rest was overgrown.

“I’m not sure,” he finally said.

“You don’t know how many people live here?” I asked him.

“It used to be me and my wife,” he said, “but now … I just don’t know any more.”

“Well, we can only enter definite residents,” I told him, “so I’ll just put down one.”

He didn’t say anything else, didn’t even move for a moment. Then he put his face in his hands and started to cry.

Lincoln and I got up and went back outside. The man followed us, still crying. “You haven’t finished your beers,” he said through his tears. “You have to stay and finish your beers.”

“We’re working,” I told him as I went down the steps of his porch. “We have jobs to do.”

ANOTHER TIME WE walked past a man who was dying, although we didn’t know he was dying at the time. He was on the other side of the street, leaning on the inside of the white wooden fence surrounding his yard. He waved at us with a handful of mail, and I waved back, kept on walking. It was only when we went down the other side of the street, maybe fifteen minutes later, that I saw he was dead.

He was lying face down in the grass, the letters scattered around him. The wind had blown a postcard underneath the fence and onto the sidewalk at our feet. I could see ants crawling around the top of his bald head already.

“I’m guessing a heart attack,” Lincoln said, looking down at him. “What do you think?”

“I think we’d better do something,” I said.

“Do you know CPR?” Lincoln asked.

“I’ve been meaning to take one of those courses,” I said, “but I just never got around to it.”

“We’d better not do anything then,” he said. “We could make things worse.”

“He’s not breathing,” I said. “How worse can it get?”

“I meant worse for us,” he said.

“Well, we can’t just stand here,” I said. “We’re government employees. We have to do something.” I went to walk through the gate, but Lincoln stopped me. “He’s on private property,” he said. “Think of the lawsuits.” He took out his cell phone and called an ambulance. “We’ll let someone else worry about it,” he told me when he was done.

I reached down and picked up the postcard while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. The front was a picture of the Eiffel Tower. On the back someone had written in red ink: “Hi Mom and Dad! Last stop! See you soon! Love, Kathy!”

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics didn’t even look at us. They knelt beside the man at the same time the door of the house opened and a woman stepped out. She was wearing a housecoat and holding a cup of coffee in her hand. She looked at the ambulance, at us standing there, and then at the dead man and the paramedics. “Oh my God,” she said and dropped the coffee cup. It broke at her feet, and the coffee sprayed as far as the dead man. I dropped the postcard back to the ground. I don’t think she noticed me reading it.

“We’d better come back for this one later,” Lincoln said.

IT WAS ONLY AFTER we’d done a few more houses that I remembered. “Oh my God,” I said. “I waved at him.”

“What are you talking about?” Lincoln asked, looking around the street. “Waved at who?”

“That dead man,” I said. “He was trying to get our attention and all I did was wave at him.”

“How were you supposed to know?”

“Imagine that,” I said. “You’re dying, and the last thing you see is me waving at you.”

“It’s sure not what I’d want to see in that situation,” Lincoln said.

“This is going to haunt me forever,” I said.

“Well, don’t let it get you down,” he said. “We’re on a schedule here.”

IT WAS AFTER THIS that the break-ins started. I came home one day after work to find my door unlocked and a half-eaten sandwich and a cigarette butt in the sink. Neither had been there when I’d left that morning. And I didn’t smoke anyway.

I went around my apartment with the only knife I owned, a small steak knife with a broken tip. I looked in all the rooms and closets, but I couldn’t see any other signs of anyone else having been there. And nothing had been taken. Whoever it was that had broken in had made themselves a sandwich, smoked the cigarette, and then left.

I phoned my landlord. He was a lawyer who owned buildings all over the city. I’d never actually seen him, as he’d sent his secretary over to show me around the place.

“Were you in my apartment today?” I asked him.

“Why would I want to go into your apartment?” he asked.

“Well, someone was in here today while I was gone,” I told him. “They made a sandwich and had a cigarette.”

“People shouldn’t be smoking in there,” he said. “It stains the walls.”

“I’m concerned someone might have an extra key,” I said. “Or maybe the lock is easy to pick.”

“I guess you’d better change your lock then,” he said.

“I was kind of hoping you’d do that,” I said.

“It’s not in our agreement,” he pointed out.

“How much would another lock cost me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Fifty or sixty bucks, plus labour.”

“Well, maybe they won’t come back,” I said.

I WENT BACK to the dead man’s house after work one day and rang the doorbell. The same woman answered the door, still in her housecoat. Her eyes were so red it looked as if all the blood vessels in them had burst. She stared at me like she had no idea who I was until I said, “I was here when your husband died.”

She looked at me a moment longer, then said, “You called the ambulance.”

“Well, I was with the man who called the ambulance,” I said, but she was already walking back into the house. “I’ve just put some coffee on,” she called over her shoulder.

I followed her down the hall to her kitchen. The walls of the hall were lined with framed family photographs. I tried not to look at any of them.

The woman sat me down at a wooden table in the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. There was a bowl of apples in the middle of the table, with unopened letters piled around it. I saw the postcard I’d read underneath one of the envelopes.

The woman sat down across from me, picked an apple out of the bowl and started polishing it on her housecoat. I tried the coffee. It was strong and bitter, but I didn’t say anything. Fruit flies drifted around my face.

“Well,” the woman finally said. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to apologize,” I said. “About your husband’s death …”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said. She put the apple back in the bowl and took out another one. They all looked polished to me already.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said. “I meant, I wish I could have done more.”

“He had a bad heart,” she said. “There’s nothing anyone could have done.”

“He waved at me,” I told her. “I didn’t know what he wanted.”

She paused in polishing the apple for a second, then resumed, but slower. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I just waved back,” I went on. “I didn’t know.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I could have saved him.”

She put the apple back in the bowl but didn’t take another one.

“If I would have known,” I said.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Get out,” she told me.

“I just wanted you to know I wish I could have done more.”

She got up and came around the table. I thought she was going to hit me, but instead she picked up my coffee cup and went over to the sink with it. “Get out,” she said again and emptied the cup into the sink.

AT NIGHT I DREAMED about the people we’d enumerated that day. Only now they were all dead, like zombies. They opened the doors to their houses and shuffled down the sidewalk after me, worms writhing in their eye sockets. And when they met each other in the street they fought, tearing into each other with their teeth and ripping each other’s limbs off. The streets ran with blood. It was so deep I had to wade through it. And the more they killed each other, the deeper it got, until it was flowing into their houses and threatening to drown me.

It was the same thing every night.

THE SECOND TIME my place was broken into, they made sandwiches again, but this time they also took all my CDs and videos. I went around the apartment but couldn’t find anything else missing. I called the police this time.

A single cop showed up an hour later. He wandered around the apartment, making notes in a little black book and looking at all the photos on my wall.

“Aren’t you going to dust for fingerprints or anything like that?” I asked.

“For some CDs and videos?” he asked and shook his head. He stopped by my bookshelf and studied the books on it.

“How are you going to catch these guys then?” I wanted to know.

“We usually don’t,” he admitted. “Unless you have an idea of who might have done it?” He looked at me.

“If I knew that,” I said, “do you think I would have called you?”

“Well, you’ll probably want to change your locks,” he said. “Sometimes they come back.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I told him.

ONE OF THE HOUSES in the neighbourhood we worked was home to a psychic. It was an old Victorian house with a hand-painted sign in the window — Palms Read, Fortunes Told. Lincoln stayed on the porch, smoking a cigarette, while I went inside.

The room I walked into looked like an office. There was a white leather couch under the window and a wooden desk and chairs on the other side of the room. A crystal ball sat on one corner of the desk. There was another door behind the desk but it was closed.

I sat on the couch and waited, but no one came into the room. After a few minutes, I got up and went through the closed door. There was a kitchen on the other side. Rows of dirty glasses sat on one side of the sink, stacks of dirty plates on the other. Pizza boxes covered the table, and a man’s voice came from the radio on the counter. “The signs are all there in the Book of Revelations,” he said. “There’s a purging fire coming, my friends, but those who do the right thing in God’s eyes will have nothing to fear.” The air smelled of mould in here.

A toilet flushed somewhere nearby, and then a door I hadn’t noticed near the kitchen table opened. A woman with grey hair and jowls came out of the bathroom. She wore the kind of dress that only old European women wear. She closed the door behind her and then stopped, looked at me standing in her kitchen.

“I need to ask you some questions,” I told her.

We went back into the other room and filled out the enumeration forms. When we finished, Lincoln was smoking another cigarette. I kept sitting there, and the woman asked, “Is there anything else?”

“I’m having some problems at home,” I said. “I was hoping you could help me.”

She reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a deck of tarot cards. “Problems with your love life? Financial problems?”

“I want to find out who’s breaking into my apartment,” I said.

She put the cards back in the drawer. “I can’t answer that with these,” she said.

“What about that?” I asked, pointing at the crystal ball. “Can you see who’s breaking into my apartment with that?”

“This?” She picked up the ball and shook it. The inside of it filled with snow. “This is just a prop,” she said.

“Well, what can you tell me then?” I asked.

“I read fortunes,” she said. “I can tell you what’s going to happen to you in the future.”

“Like if I’m going to die?” I asked. “That kind of thing?”

“Of course you’re going to die,” she said. “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

THE THIRD TIME they broke into my apartment, they took everything, even the furniture. The place was completely empty, not even blinds for the windows. It was like I had never lived there at all. I couldn’t even call the police because they’d taken my phone.

There was a pamphlet from the Mormons in my mailbox. Sorry We Missed You. The words were superimposed over a picture of a burning lake with hands sticking up through the flames.

I WENT OVER to Lincoln’s place after work one night for a game of poker. There were four of us playing: Lincoln, myself, a man named Wylie, and another, older man named Butler. A fifth man, Sinnet, had called and canceled. “He’s having problems with his wife,” Lincoln said when he put down the phone. “She said she was going to have an affair if he went out tonight.” He laughed, like the idea pleased him.

We were playing at Lincoln’s kitchen table. It was low-stakes poker, quarter ante. The highest pot so far had been five dollars, which I had won on a straight. Lincoln had to tell me I’d won, because I still didn’t know which hands were higher. I’d come over with twenty dollars and now I had thirty, but most of it was in change. Lincoln had a big jar full of quarters with which he made change for the bills. It looked like the kind of jar they store fetuses and dead animals in.

I was telling everyone about the dead man we’d seen. “He was just lying there,” I said, “like he was sleeping. I was going to give him mouth-to-mouth or something, but Lincoln stopped me.”

The other two men looked at Lincoln. “The guy was dead,” he said, dealing a fresh hand. “There was no point wasting energy on him.”

“Well, if he was already dead,” Wylie said.

“I still wanted to try and save him, though,” I said. “So then I could say to people, well, at least I didn’t just stand around and do nothing.”

“You would have been sued,” Lincoln said.

“Why would someone sue me for that?” I shook my head.

“Why wouldn’t they?” Wylie said.

“I thought I was having a heart attack once,” Butler said. “It was just some sort of weird palpitations, though. But my wife, she didn’t do a damned thing. Just sat there and watched. When it stopped, I said, what the hell are you doing? Were you waiting for me to die?”

“Was she?” Wylie asked.

“I don’t know. She told me she was paralyzed with fright.” He shook his head. “I was the one who was goddamned well paralyzed with fright.”

“Which wife was that?” Wylie asked.

“Does it matter?” Butler said.

“You in or out?” Lincoln asked me.

I looked at my cards. I had a pair of tens, an ace, and a pair of kings. I had no idea if that was good or not. There was ten dollars in the pot.

“I’m in,” I said.

“Then add your dollar.”

I did, and so did Butler, and now there was twelve dollars in the pot.

“I saw a cyclist get killed once,” Wylie said. “Had his head down and rode straight into a bus that was turning. Cracked his head wide open. You could see his brain.” He shook his head. “I’m not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of dying stupidly.”

“What did his brain look like?” Lincoln asked.

“Just like on television.”

“Did he have a helmet on?” I asked.

“Does it sound like he had a helmet on? Besides, the impact broke his neck. He would have been one of those — what’s the term for it?” He looked at Butler.

“A quad,” Butler said.

“Right.”

“But at least he’d be alive,” I said.

“I’d sooner have people looking into the inside of my dead head,” Wylie said, “than staring at my drooling, twitching face.”

“I think I’ll call,” Butler said.

We all laid our cards on the table. Butler sighed.

“Looks like you win again,” Wylie said, leaning over to look at my cards.

“Looks like you need another beer,” Butler told me and went over to the fridge. He never got the beer, though. Instead, he stopped by the kitchen window and said, “Your neighbour is on fire.” He stayed there, looking out the window.

“What?” Lincoln and I asked at the same time. Wylie was in the middle of lighting a cigarette so he didn’t say anything.

“The place across the street,” Butler said. “It’s on fire.” He turned the kitchen sink tap on and let the water run, like that would help.

The rest of us stood up and went over to the window. We looked through our reflections at the house across the street. All the lights were off, but there were flames shooting through the blinds in one of the second-floor windows.

“Is that where the woman you watch lives?” I asked Lincoln. He didn’t answer, though, because he was already running for the door. The rest of us followed him.

“What do you mean, the woman he watches?” Butler asked as we went outside.

“It’s hard to explain,” I told him. “And I’m not really sure I understand it anyway.”

I could smell the smoke as soon as I was outside, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Fires always made a lot of noise in the movies, but this one was so quiet I could hear someone laughing in one of the houses next door. I followed Lincoln across the street and up the house’s steps, to the front door. He had his cell phone out and was calling 911 now. I knocked on the door, then tried the handle when there was no answer. The door was locked.

“What are you doing?” Lincoln asked, putting the phone back into his pocket.

“I was checking to see if anyone was home,” I said.

“If anyone was home,” he said, “I think they’d be putting out the fire, not coming to see who was at the door.”

“Well, we can’t just stand around doing nothing again,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“This is our chance to do something right.” I kicked the door just underneath the handle a couple of times, and there was a loud crack as the frame splintered. I pushed the door open and went inside, Lincoln following after me.

We were in a living room with stairs running up one wall. I could hear the fire now, burning somewhere near the top of the stairs, and the air was hazy with smoke. Lincoln turned on the light, and I paused a moment to look around. There was a framed Warhol Marilyn Monroe on one wall, dozens of framed photographs along another.

“Hello?” I called. “Anyone home?”

When no one answered, Lincoln asked, “Now what?”

“Give me a hand with this,” I said, going over to the television. I was coughing from the smoke now.

We carried the television outside and set it down on the lawn. Both Butler and Wylie were standing on the sidewalk, watching. Neither one of them moved in our direction. “Help us out here,” I said, but they just shook their heads.

“That place is on fire,” Butler said. “I’m not going in there.”

“It’s not safe,” Wylie added.

“I’m going for another beer,” Butler said. “Anyone else want one?”

“You might as well bring them all,” Lincoln said, coming out with the telephone and a handful of CDs.

Thick smoke was starting to flow down the stairs by the time Lincoln and I carried the couch out, and we could hear sirens in the distance. Most of the woman’s living room was scattered around the front yard by this point. Wylie and Butler were sitting on the coffee table, drinking the beer they’d brought from Lincoln’s place. There was still no one else on the street, but I could see faces looking out at us from the neighbouring houses now that the flames were coming out of all the upstairs windows.

“That’s it,” Lincoln said, dropping his end of the couch and sitting on it. He couldn’t stop coughing, and his skin was black with ash and sweat. “I think I’ve reached my limit here,” he gasped.

I started moving the furniture around the lawn, dragging the couch and chairs into the same arrangement they’d had inside the house. That was when the fire truck arrived. Two firemen wearing oxygen masks and carrying axes walked over and watched me for a moment. “What the hell are you doing?” one of them asked.

“I’m just trying to help,” I said.

“Get the hell out of here!” he shouted, waving his axe at me. I went over to stand beside Butler and Wylie, who had moved from the coffee table to the sidewalk when the fire truck pulled up. Lincoln stood up from the couch and then bent over, started vomiting on his feet. Wylie handed me a beer. “They’re a little warm,” he said. “On account of the fire.” I drank half of it down in one swallow, then the three of us watched the firemen drag hoses into the burning house.

By the time we’d finished the beer, the fire was out. The firemen came out of the house and sat on the bumpers of their truck while a cop sealed off the entrance of the house with yellow tape. I went over and sat beside Lincoln on the couch.

“I don’t think I’m going to make it into work tomorrow,” he said. His chin and the front of his shirt were streaked with a mixture of vomit and soot.

“Well, that’s all right,” I said. I put my feet up on the coffee table and looked around the yard. “We certainly did a good job here.”

“We did,” Lincoln agreed.

“Redemptive, even.”

“I don’t know what that word means.”

“She won’t even be able to tell the difference when she comes home,” I said.

“I’m not so sure about that.”

I sat for hours on the couch after the others went back inside to finish the poker game. I was waiting for her to come home, so I could tell her that I was the one who’d brought everything outside and saved it from the fire. I kept on waiting even after Butler and Wylie drove away with a wave at me, and after Lincoln’s lights went out. But she didn’t come home that night. She never found out what I did.

© Peter Darbyshire

 
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