Has Your Husband Been Standing Still?
The woman at the door said her husband was inside my home. She was agitated, and ran her fingers through her unwashed hair.
“You have the wrong address. It’s just me,” I said, then lied, “and my boyfriend is here.”
“No, no, please, just listen to me,” she said, placing a hand on the door frame and leaning in toward me. I said I couldn’t help her, said again she had the wrong address, then shut the door. But I could still hear her.
“I don’t know what he’ll do! Let me in, let me find him!” she said, her muffled voice sharpening while her palm drummed on the door. “He stands still.”
I froze in the entryway and waited full minutes after it sounded like she had left, in case her ear was pressed to the door. I didn’t give much thought to her husband, at first. There was something off about her—how she tried to talk so calmly, even though it was obvious she was coiled tight enough to snap. She kept floating on her toes, looking into my apartment behind me. But she also didn’t seem outcast, or even neglected really. Her cashmere sweater and tapered pants told a different story.
So I searched my apartment with the crowbar I kept under the sheets in the linen closet. No one was in the front rooms, with their windows facing the street. I had been there all day, so it was impossible for anyone to have broken in that way.
Then I remembered the old dumbwaiter shaft.
It was behind the kitchen door, shut behind a hinged metal slab. To keep noise from bleeding between apartments, it was no longer an open shaft, but a dusty compartment used as a pass-through for cables. I brought along my biggest chef knife, from the drawer across from the refrigerator.
The steel panel was painted the same color as the wall and had no handle or latch. Instead, there was a small jagged hole punched in one side with several drill bit plunges. I dug a screwdriver out of the junk drawer and tried to pry it open with a single jerk, so I could step back and hold out the blade in my other hand. Instead, it swung open with a painfully slow creak, and I dropped the knife, scaring myself even more when it clattered at my feet. Without thinking, I bent down to pick it up. Kneeling on the floor, I imagined a pale hand reaching out, into my hair and skull, but when I stood up and looked inside, there was nothing there—just the dark. It was empty.
When I left the kitchen and crossed by the front door again, I saw that the woman had shoved a piece of paper in my door like a takeout menu. It was a torn envelope, like something pulled crumpled from the trash, and had written on it the words “Listen! Please.” Then I heard her whisper from low down on the door, even below where I had kneeled to pull at the scrap of paper.
“The first time my husband was around the corner from our french doors, in the hollow where my desk meets the printer cabinet. He must have been there all morning… he was standing straight up, like a sunflower, but I didn’t see him until I got up from the desk and bumped my ankle. When I looked up suddenly he was there, staring at nothing. The second time he was behind an all-glass display case in our entryway, pinched between a pane and the wall just inside the front door…”
The whispering stopped and I realized I was barely breathing. I was still kneeling and my knees were beginning to get sore. “Are you still there?” the whispered voice asked. I didn’t answer.
“He’s gotten really skinny, and goes through tubes of high SPF sunscreen whenever he is called out to a site, so now he’s white as an electric socket… he can suppress his presence and take away your intuitive sense that another person is nearby. He’s practicing… he’s getting better… he knows where your eyes land, and the spaces they slide over...”
“Go Away!” I screamed, before retreating to the farthest corner of my apartment away from the front door. It took me a while to calm down, with some TV and all the lights on. I didn’t pay attention to the show, but told myself that the woman at the door had a mental illness and a persecution complex and she wanted to pull me into her delusion.
I crept to the window and peered into the park across the street from my house. It was small and mostly mown, with a picnic pavilion and a swing set. But right across from me was a shock of forest, rising up curling and unwanted. The sun was still up, but low enough for this thicket to be dark in its own shadows. I looked for her there, expecting I don’t know what—two red eyes? I didn't see her, and opened the blinds fully.
A few families were playing volleyball down at the farthest end of the park, but it was otherwise empty. Then I caught the blue light off an e-cig. It was her, seated in a shadowed beach chair, with her legs stacked casually in front of her. I could barely see her face, but it looked as if she was staring into my windows.
I debated whether to go out to confront her, but when I turned around I saw her husband. I didn’t scream. My throat snapped shut on my breath. Through the kitchen doorway across the room I could see my dishwasher and him standing next to it, one leg against the fridge. He wasn’t standing straight, but bent forward at a right angle, his back aligned with the marble countertop. One arm was held pinned against his thigh, the other down, then the wrist up, with fingers out in odd angles.
His face pointed forward, aligned atop his body like a bullet on a shell casing, with his eyes aimed to one side of me and far away. He wore an expression of rapture on a pale face. His lips were glittering red. He didn’t move or react and showed no signs of being detected. But I still expected those eyes to swivel and land on me—didn’t feel I could move or look away until it did. I forced myself to clap, then to wave my arms, but there was no reaction.
“You!” I said, “Sir!” I added. “You need to leave!”
He didn’t react, and it wasn’t just as if he was ignoring me. There wasn’t a tremor, or breath. He stayed so still it was as if the whole world had frozen.
I called 911, of course. The operator urged me to get out of the house as quickly as possible. I stayed on the line with the operator, but there was nothing left to say. My only way out was past him. Acid filled my stomach. There was no way I could cross that room. I considered tossing something at him. Or attacking him. But there was nothing more dangerous than a TV remote nearby.
The operator said something about officers on the way, and my phone slipped from my hand in my rush to bring it back to my ear. My eyes never dropped from the husband, who didn’t flinch when my phone crunched on impact, then clattered across the floor and under the couch. I lowered myself to my hands and knees and considered crawling over and reaching under, until I realized it would put him out of sight. It was better to escape. Maybe I could crawl by him without touching him and he’ll stay frozen. Or would he just grab me when I got close? I didn’t have a choice.
At the threshold between hardwood and tile I looked down at my hands on the floor and when I looked up he was gone. But it was only for an instant, because suddenly I could see him again just in front of me—he hadn’t moved. My eyes had let him go and struggled to find him again, like he wasn’t where I had expected, or if I had somehow forgotten him.
The arms holding me up shook so violently that I pitched forward, landing on the side of my face with a smack. I landed right at his feet, but didn’t touch him. Pushing back on the heels of my hands, I rolled backwards and slammed into the cabinet behind me, hard enough that I heard the fiberboard crack inside the door.
I could crawl by him now, but first watched him for any sign of movement. He was in a khaki t-shirt that didn’t quite match the wood cabinetry or stand out from the white refrigerator at his back. Nor were his dark pants much of a match for the brushed chrome of the dishwasher, though I could see he had a sliver of something shimmery silver, like a lanyard loop, hanging out from his pocket. I don't know how he could have disappeared from my sight. But he didn’t seem to notice me.
I strained to keep an eye on him over my shoulders as I crawled past, until I couldn’t move slowly any longer. I scrambled to my feet, tumbling into a standing position, then into a headlong run, where I couldn’t tell my heartbeats from the pounding of feet on the floor. After struggling with the lock, I finally squeezed through my front door and shut it behind me without looking back.
The police came, searched my apartment, found no one. I tried to explain that he might still be there—that they just hadn’t seen him. But they wouldn’t come back in with me. They wouldn’t search the park either. They were annoyed I wouldn’t go back inside, but eventually left.
I didn’t have my phone and didn’t know where to go, so I wandered out of my building in a daze. It was dark out now, but the night air felt good. I saw a car double-parked, but didn’t pay it any attention until the woman pushed open the passenger side door from the driver’s seat and waved me over.
I’d be embarrassed to describe the horrible things I said to her. But she was calm and composed—she knew how to handle her husband standing still—and was nothing like the woman who first confronted me on my doorstep. I don’t want to give her real name, so I’ll call her Flora.
“I’ll teach you to see him,” was the first thing Flora told me, once I was able to listen. I didn’t want to see him, or to go anywhere with this person, but I didn’t know what else to do. She drove me far outside of the city, until I could see stars over a sprawling suburbia. Somewhere nearer the highway, where duplex condos faded into industrial parks, she turned into a multi-acre construction site. It was all blonde dirt, scraped and marked by bulldozer treads. At the center was a cinder block frame that might one day grow into a big box store.
She turned off her headlights and suddenly the feeling I had ignored—in favor of her serene understanding of my situation—could no longer be ignored. I was struck dumb with fear, my sore muscles protesting at being called back to alert. Had I met a couple working together?
But she kept talking reasonably, kept her instructions simple, and I found no moment to protest. Instead I followed her; even let her take me by the hand and pull me, in a circuitous path, out into the center of the standing blocks. She laid out a picnic blanket and urged me to lay on my back next to her with a friendly pat. Inside I was screaming.
“We’re in the middle of one of the dimmer meteor showers that doesn’t get headlines,” she said. “But we can see one every few minutes if we know how to look.”
Men who stand still, she told me, can’t be searched out like a bird among branches, or a face in the crowd. That is a search for specificity. Even if you could live in a state of constant scrutiny, where every pixel of reality is examined, you would not often find these unmoving men. They slip into your scotoma and escape your attention, because they are no longer objects to be found.
“There was one,” she said, pointing to a part of the sky. “Did you see that one?” I hadn’t.
“Because you are darting around, looking for shooting stars,” she said. “Instead of looking at the surface of reality.”
Her husband had receded into the sky of our day-to-day existence, she said. When standing still, he wasn’t an object to be found in space, but had shut down every part of himself to become permanent. She taught me to make my eyes flat, and to search without an idea of what I wanted to see. To see them, you can no longer want anything from the sky, she said. You have to deaden yourself to know what surrounds you. I laughed when I saw the first shooting star, and forgot about my terrible day. Then there was another and another.
“Now, please, please, don’t be afraid,” she said, sitting up and placing her hand on my goose-pimpled forearm.
I looked around with my meteor eyes. There were men standing in strange shapes, pressed against the cinder blocks, and standing in the mud at bent angles, and even across the street, holding themselves straight.
“I see them everywhere now,” she whispered. “There are so many of them standing still.”
