The Telescope

"You can make me bleed all you want. But I'll never scream for you."

Chloe Stone heard her lover’s wife scream this bizarre declaration at him within days of moving into a rental house on a dead-end street. It was after midnight when the wife’s bleating awakened Chloe. She witnessed the wife stumble out the front door and stand in front of the floodlight illuminating the circle driveway. The wife clutched a half-filled wine glass and a burning cigarette in one hand. She was wearing a knee-length red nightgown and white fluffy slippers. Chloe watched the wife from her bedroom window as her soon-to-be lover followed his wife outside.

“Please come inside now” she heard him say calmly to the wife. “Please don’t drink anymore”. The wife pointed a finger at Chloe’s lover with the hand holding the wine glass and the lit cigarette. “You’re the fucking devil. You’re evil!” she shrieked. “I wish I had never married you.” The wife sobbed until Chloe’s lover turned around and went back inside. Then the wife stopped sobbing, drank the rest of the wine, and threw the glass against the side of their home.

Chloe Stone is now having an affair with this volatile woman’s husband, a handsome, brilliant state attorney old enough to be her father. She has already spent many hours considering the moral implications of having an affair and determined she did not make a conscious decision to fall in love with a married man. She did not intend to purposely and maliciously vandalize another woman’s marriage. Instead, Chloe Stone believes something mysterious had drawn them together, something prearranged and unpreventable. The affair consumes her thoughts even when she is editing content for a popular online magazine called The Essayist’s Alcove. Her supervisor has already mentioned her lack of output recently. Chloe apologized and blamed her unproductiveness on personal issues. She promised to improve her efficiency.

Chloe finds herself thinking more about the wife than her lover, now that she realizes the divorce may be lengthy and contentious. Although she understands everything has been settled, that it was just a matter of implementation, she can’t help but wonder what the wife does all day by herself, in that three-story house across the dead end of the road. Is the wife plotting to run away after emptying their bank account? Does she pack and repack suitcases in preparation for fleeing to a remote destination? One afternoon, Chloe sees an advertisement for a telescope on her social media account and decides to buy one. She is certain a telescope would reveal clues that the wife is planning something sinister, something devious that only women with alcohol-induced madness can perpetuate. By spying on the wife, Chloe might prevent something terrible from happening to her lover. She feels no shame in spying on the wife with a telescope. There are obvious reasons for her suspicions.                                                                                   

Chloe cuts a round hole in the living room curtain that is the same size as the end of the telescope. The end fits perfectly. She can watch the wife with the curtains closed and no one will ever know. Initially, the telescope reveals superficial details about the wife-- a small mole on her upper lip, a small, straight nose, and flawlessly trimmed eyebrows. The wife’s eyes appear dark brown or black, contemptuous and glittering like obsidian. Volcanic activity is necessary to create such hard, black eyes. The wife must be composed of molten rock and silica to have such lifeless, one-dimensional eyes. They remind Chloe of the blind eyes of a stone statue.

The wife is either talking on the phone or disappearing into another part of the house for unusually long periods. The wife engages in daily rituals of rearranging artwork on the walls, rearranging living room end tables and chairs, and rearranging dirt in her flower garden. Chloe thinks wearing white gardening gloves to dig in the dirt is absurd. Nearly every day, Chloe watches the wife toss unearthed rocks into a pile next to a frail-looking, pink rose bush. The pile of rocks is at least three feet high now. With the telescope, Chloe can see the wife meticulously inspect the living room and dining room of her home for what Chloe assumes is dust, spider webs, fingerprint smudges, and other signs of life. Sometimes, instead of cleaning or rearranging, the wife stares at the furniture for a few minutes before abruptly receding into another part of the house.

Occasionally, the wife gets into a car with several women who look and dress just like her. Chloe imagines the wife gossiping with the women over crab salads and expensive bottled water at a five-star restaurant. They swim in each other’s kidney-shaped pools and admire perfect lawns. Considering the depth of the wife’s banality makes Chloe feel like doing something savage, criminal. She feels incredibly sorry for her lover, who has been married for over 20 years to an alcoholic and obviously mentally ill woman. Chloe finds it strange that she can’t “hate” the wife. Instead, she thinks it is pity she feels for the wife, the kind of pity Chloe might feel for a has-been, alcoholic clown who can’t make children laugh anymore.

Chloe’s lover has just slipped out the back door of her home after making love to her and now she is sitting in her kitchen, feeling impatient, wild, a dimensional aberration floating between galaxies. Thick, humid air drifts in through the half-open kitchen window. Thunder precedes the surgical dissection of the dark magenta sky by pointed blades of lightning. The night is preternaturally steamy, equatorial. Horned pagans whisper obscure incantations and prepare sacrificial rituals on such aberrant nights. Chloe is thinking about how their trysts are necessary ritual cleansings, a type of exorcism that will expunge the memory of the wife from her lover’s memory. Chloe is determined not to live in the wife’s shadow once she is the wife.

Minutes, hours pass. Suddenly, Chloe hears a scream, like a wild animal is being mauled by another wild animal.  The close proximity of the scream disorients her for a moment. She hears another scream and the disorientation dissolves into panic.

She runs into the living room and stares out the picture window through the telescope. Her lover and his wife are standing under the spotlight. She watches her lover take a step towards the wife. He grabs a gun out of her hand and checks for bullets in the chamber. Her lover hesitates a second before tossing the gun towards his wife. It lands at the wife’s feet, near the flowerbed she picks clean of weeds and stones every afternoon. The telescope magnifies the view of the wife’s fingers curling around the handle of the gun. Only then does Chloe understand the wife now possesses the gun. The wife abruptly turns away from her husband and faces Chloe. The wife places the barrel of the gun against her temple. Chloe senses time stopping to frantically gather fragments of the past into a sort of catastrophic extinction event. Nothing will ever be the same.

The trigger is pulled and the bullet enters the wife’s brain. Silence clenches itself like an unremitting fist. A paralysis of atoms freezes the scene for an unknown length of time before the wife falls to the ground like she had been a puppet and somebody sliced her strings with an invisible knife. A vast incandescence with the brightness of a million burning candles floods Chloe’s mind. It occurs to her she could be levitating directly in front of the sun, no longer restricted by the laws of physics.

 “Let’s go for a walk”. His voice is quiet and conspiratorial. “It’s a beautiful night tonight. Cops are never in a hurry to investigate a suicide. I’ve learned that from experience”.

Chloe’s lover is in her living room. He looks at the telescope and then at her face. Her lover’s eyes are filling with blackbird wings. Shadows move about his face, committing acts of subterfuge. Chloe senses her lover’s fingers encircle her entire elbow. She opens her mouth to say something, but the air tastes like atrophy. Words would decay quickly in such toxic air. They would be incomprehensible, useless, cryptic as the dark matter hypothetically responsible for the existence of the universe.