This novel is going to be part of my book "Of Love and other Nightmares", out soon!
This is a true story. Or true enough, which is all truth ever manages to be.
I watched it unfold like a slow-motion car crash filmed through vaseline, beautiful and grotesque in equal measure. The man was Jamie (just Jamie, a name so ordinary it became its own camouflage). Twenty-eight, freshly excreted from university's bowels, carrying that particular strain of intelligence that mistakes its own fever for wisdom. Not beautiful, no, but persistent in the way water erodes stone, in the way madness finds its cracks.
But here's what you need to understand about Jamie: he was a blade that cut in all directions, including inward. Especially inward. His romanticism wasn't soft, it was serrated. He collected rejections like trophies, each "no" becoming another reason to press harder, cut deeper. I'd seen him destroy three women before Margaret, not through malice but through the peculiar violence of his need. He loved like a man drowning loves the surface (desperately, fatally, pulling down anyone who tried to save him).
We inhabited a corporate tumor together, our desks sutured at the edges like conjoined twins sharing a poisoned bloodstream. The fluorescent lights above us hummed their death song eight hours a day, five days a week, while we performed our pantomime of importance with spreadsheets and protocols. We were the talented ones, they said (as if talent meant anything when you're slowly decomposing under artificial light).
Margaret occupied the desk that touched his. Every day their elbows shared the same cubic meter of recycled air, the same phantom territories of almost-touch. Forty-seven years had carved themselves into her face with the precision of a master sculptor who understood that true beauty requires destruction first. She moved through our gray world like a memory of color, her perfume a dark spell that made you think of hotel rooms you'd never entered and sins you'd never quite committed.
But I knew something Jamie didn't. Margaret wasn't prey. She was something far more dangerous: a woman who had learned to weaponize her own decay.
Her husband materialized periodically (Charles, a name that tasted like money). He'd appear just long enough to remind us all what real masculinity looked like when it wasn't trying. Jamie and I studied him like anthropologists examining a superior species, desperate to decode the algorithm of his effortless dominance. He traveled constantly, doing something that required luggage and silence in equal measure.
What we didn't know then: Margaret had been mapping her husband's infidelities for years. Each business trip catalogued, each late return dissected, each trace of foreign perfume archived in the museum of her rage. She wasn't a victim. She was a strategist playing a game whose rules only she understood.
Jamie's obsession was a pathology dressed in romantic drag. He folded paper swans with the dedication of a medieval monk illuminating manuscripts nobody would read. Left them on her desk like breadcrumbs leading nowhere. He stared (Christ, how he stared), with the intensity of someone trying to set fire to the world using only his retinas.
But the staring went both ways. Jamie would follow her to the parking garage, watch her drive away, then sit in his car for hours, engine off, just breathing in the space she'd occupied. He'd learned her coffee order, her lunch routine, the exact shade of lipstick she wore on Thursdays. He kept a journal (I found it once, left carelessly open) filled with times, dates, microscopic observations: "3:47 PM - she touched her neck while reading email. Defensive gesture? Arousal? Both?"
I should have intervened. But I am, at heart, a connoisseur of other people's disasters.
Margaret tolerated him the way one tolerates a persistent rash (annoying but not quite worth the effort of treatment). But time is erosion's favorite tool. Months passed. Seasons changed through our prison windows. She never encouraged him, but (and here's where the universe revealed its sense of humor) she never stopped him either. Sometimes she'd pause at his desk, and in that pause lived entire civilizations of possibility.
Then: the husband's inevitable betrayal. Some woman from Munich or Barcelona or wherever men like Charles go to exercise their options. Margaret told us with the clinical detachment of someone describing their own autopsy. "He confessed," she said, and we thought in unison: He can afford to.
But here's what we missed in our masculine myopia: the confession wasn't news to her. It was confirmation. And confirmation was all she'd been waiting for.
By then Jamie had retreated into himself, become his own ghost. Started quoting Palahniuk and drinking like someone trying to drown something that had already learned to breathe underwater. His self-destruction was methodical, almost artistic. He'd show up to work with cuts on his knuckles from punching walls, eyes red-rimmed from sleeplessness or something worse. Once, I found him in the bathroom, pressing a lit cigarette into his forearm, watching the skin bubble with the fascination of a child discovering fire.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because she won't," he said, and I understood. He was trying to hurt himself into her consciousness, to carve his existence into her awareness through sheer negative space.
That's when the tectonic plates shifted. Margaret began watching him (not looking, watching, the way predators study prey that might also be predator). But now I wonder: was she studying him, or was she calculating? Had she already decided to use him as the knife for her own surgery?
The kiss happened beside the office fridge on a Friday when the building had emptied of everyone but ghosts and janitors. She initiated it (this detail matters). What followed, I know only through Jamie's confession, delivered in whispers over warm beer while his hands shook like leaves in a storm nobody else could feel.
Her apartment: a museum to the life she'd planned before life happened. Everything coordinated, nothing breathing. But Jamie noticed things I'm sure she wanted him to notice: the wedding photo turned face-down, the men's clothing still hanging in the closet like ghosts of better times, the bed (king-sized, excessive for one person) that seemed to wait for betrayals.
They undressed with the solemnity of people preparing for surgery. Her body was real in ways that made mockery of the word (soft where life had touched it, scarred where it had bitten). The small crescent near her hip that asked questions. Breasts that gravity had negotiated with rather than conquered. She moved like someone who'd made peace with every mirror's betrayal.
But Jamie saw more. The way she positioned herself so the light hit her just right. The calculated vulnerability of her sighs. How she whispered Charles's name once (just once, but loud enough to ensure he heard). She was directing this scene, and Jamie, in his desperate hunger, was too consumed to realize he was merely an actor in her revenge play.
And then (because the universe is nothing if not a comedian with a sadistic streak), just as her thighs opened like parentheses around everything he'd ever wanted, Jamie's body staged its rebellion.
The hernia wasn't just inguinal. It was existential. His groin became a universe of wrong, every nerve a copper wire being chewed by invisible rats. He collapsed (not gracefully, not quietly) but with the theatrical agony of someone whose body had chosen the worst possible moment to betray thirty years of reliable service.
"Wait," he gasped from her Persian rug. "Call an ambulance."
She didn't laugh (which was somehow worse). She stared at the ceiling and said, "What the fuck," in a voice that had traveled beyond anger into the arctic territories of pure disbelief.
But here's what Jamie didn't see through his haze of agony: the slight smile that played at the corners of her mouth. The way she reached for her phone with deliberate slowness. How she made sure to text someone (Charles? A friend? A carefully selected witness?) before calling 911.
He dressed in pieces, each movement a fresh humiliation. She watched from her bed like a judge who'd already delivered the verdict. But just before he left, she said something that would haunt him more than the physical pain:
"Charles never had this problem."
The door closed behind him with the finality of a book nobody would reopen. The ambulance took twenty minutes that lasted twenty years.
Later, much later, after too many drinks and too many silences, Jamie would tell me the rest. How she'd called him the next day, voice honeyed with false concern. How she'd visited him in the hospital, bringing flowers and wearing the perfume that had started it all. How she'd leaned close to his bed and whispered:
"My husband will love this story. I'll tell it at parties. The boy from work who literally burst trying to fuck me."
They repaired his hernia the next day (I've seen the photos, the swelling was magnificent in its malevolence). We laughed about it once, briefly, the way you laugh at a funeral when someone mentions the deceased owed them money. But Jamie never laughed. He understood, finally, what he'd been to her: not a lover, not even a distraction, but a weapon she'd sharpened against her own life's disappointments.
Jamie quit three weeks later. But not before I found him one night, very late, at his desk with Margaret's paper swans spread before him like evidence of a crime. He was burning them, one by one, with the focused intensity of someone performing an exorcism.
"She won," he said, watching the paper blacken and curl. "She won everything."
But sometimes, when the city holds its breath and the night feels like a mouth about to speak, he texts me:
"I still think about her legs."
And I respond with the only truth I know:
"She's still thinking about your hernia."
Because here's what Jamie never understood: the universe doesn't trade in karma or justice or poetic irony. It trades in the peculiar mathematics of humiliation, where every desperate reach toward transcendence gets met with the democracy of our animal bodies, our hernias and heartbreaks and the terrible comedy of trying to be more than meat that dreams.
And Margaret? She's still at that desk, still wearing that perfume, still arriving each morning with the satisfied air of someone who successfully performed surgery on their own life using someone else's heart as a scalpel. Charles never left her. Why would he? She'd proven herself capable of cruelties that matched his own.
This is a true story. Which is to say, it's the only truth we deserve: that in the end, we're all just wounds looking for the perfect knife, all just knives looking for the perfect wound, and if we're very lucky (or very damned), sometimes we find exactly what we're looking for.