Read Apathy and Other Small Victories for Free Online Page B

am.” He was ripping up the back of his neck, digging his nails in and tearing it raw. And with the white paint all over his one hand, smearing it around, it was just making me sick.
    “I’m not sure what you mean here Bryce.”
    “I bowl on Tuesdays. Come by then. At seven.”
    I didn’t know he was a bowler. I didn’t know a lot of things. He was in the middle of either a complete nervous breakdown or a fucking bipolar episode, I knew that. But he didn’t seem grave enough to be suggesting murder, or depraved enough to be asking me to fuck his wife for $200 while he went bowling. He just seemed nervous and real sad.
    “Will you? Please?”
    The rims of his eyes had gone red. His neck was bleeding and there was that fucking white paint everywhere. His chin was starting to shake. I hate when people show emotion.
    “Tuesday? At seven? Uh, sure.”
     
    There was a good chance I was going to be murdered. Every scenario I’d imagined ended with me being dead.
    If I was there to kill her, she’d suspect it and kill me first: self-defense.
    Or I’d kill her, then Bryce would come home and kill me: life insurance.
    Or I’d kill her, and Bryce would feel so guilty he’d tell the police everything and kill himself, then the courts would kill me: justice.
    If I was just there to have sex with her, she wouldn’t know about it and think I was trying to rape her, so she’d kill me: feminism.
    Or Bryce would come home, catch me fucking his wife, and even though he’d put me up to it, he’d kill me anyway: schizophrenia.
    Or maybe he never meant for me to have sex with her, maybe he just wanted me to keep her company while he went bowling, play a board game with her or something, not fuck her. In which case he’d still kill me: miscommunication.
    Whatever happened, there was a good chance I would die. So I made a rule: I wouldn’t try to rape or kill Bryce’s wife, and at the slightest hint of danger I would run away. This was a good rule, and still is, and if more people followed it the world would be a wonderful place.
    I went to the door that Tuesday night with a plan. I would knock, and as soon as the door opened I would say, “Hello, my phone is broken.” Whatever happened, it would be said. I was fully prepared to have those be my last words. If Bryce’s bipolar pendulum had swung to homicide and he answered the door with a .12 gauge, if his keenly perceptive wife—unaware of my no-rape no-kill rule—was waiting with a can of mace and a meat cleaver, I would go down bravely, having said my piece. They would have been good last words. “Hello, my phone is broken.” That pretty much would have summed me up.
    They lived in a basement apartment on the side of the building. They had their own entrance, a side door that led out to some steps and the sidewalk where the Dumpsters were. That was where they’d toss my body after all of it was done.
    I knocked on the door, and just as I had decided to run away she opened it.
    She didn’t have a meat cleaver, or a can of mace.
    She was younger than Bryce and had dark blond hair, short and curly. She looked like someone I’d seen before, someone on a commercial, one for bathroom cleansers or soap. One of those women. She was wearing a navy blue bathrobe, maybe that was why.
    “Hello, my phone is broken,” I said, suddenly realizing what an ass I was. This was my epitaph? Fuck.
    Her face was an absolute blank. I watched her bottom lip but it didn’t move, and her blue eyes, a few shades lighter than her bathrobe, didn’t shift or waver. She had long eyelashes that beat in slow motion like the wings of a giant bird as I waited for her to pull a tommy gun from under her robe. Her face was a white sheet of paper with no words or punctuation. My paper face said, “Hello, my phone is broken” in very small type, and there was a fucking huge question mark in tiny parentheses taking up the rest of the page. The incongruity between the question mark and the parentheses