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Stories

The Sixth Commandment

Amine Ben Aniba

It was December, and not quite freezing outside unless it was night and the wind was blowing. Andrew was in the house, and he bit his fingernail and was feeling nervous. His mood prevailed and was combined with despair and developing psychosis. The room was light because there were two sliding glass windows across one wall and the afternoon sun shined in through them and fell on the comfy couch and pictures on the walls. These were all the touches of Andrew's wife Sarah, and she vacuumed at least twice a week in addition to cleaning and folding the clothes. Andrew left his bright surroundings to go for a coffee at Starbucks downtown. He knew the road into Georgetown because his father used to own a restaurant there, sometimes taking him to work in the kitchen or at the host stand where he would smile with a mouth full of braces and greet then seat the customers. Snowflakes began to fall on the car windshield and when he focused on them he drifted out of his lane and almost hit another car. Inside the car it smelled of cigarettes and that reminded him to light up another one. He thought well when he was smoking a cigarette and it calmed him when he thought about what he planned to do. He thought of how everything in his life was in order the way it was because of Sarah and that without her he was just the shell of a man. But he stopped his thoughts with another one. I think too much about Sarah. Just then he found a parking space one block away from the coffee shop, reversed into a space and then turned the engine off. He always did it the same way and checked that everything was as it should be before he got out the car. But then once he was inside Starbucks he would think about possibly getting a parking ticket or leaving the lights on. This kind of paranoia or lack of self-confidence was obvious in other things Andrew did as well. He ordered a tall vanilla latte, spent half an hour finishing it then walked back to his car. He didn't want to see anyone he knew, and that's why he went half an hour away from home for a coffee not that he would have bumped into anyone locally, but you never know. Andrew only had two friends and he kept to himself spending the entire day thinking about killing his wife. Andrew was not happy at all, rather he had moments of happiness but they inevitably ended up in despair. He had no job and that was bad. He recently reduced from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day to one after having quit for two months, and some would say that was not good at all. He didn't know what to do with his children so they watched television all the time he was around them, and he was insanely in love with his wife. However, he couldn't stand other men talking to her, looking at her or touching her. He dreaded these things because he knew what he thought about other women when he looked at them. These were sexual thoughts about which he thought all men were controlled by and he dared imagine what he would do if his wife acted upon them in a favorable manner. The next day was about the same. It was cold in the morning and began to flurry in the late afternoon. Andrew had to conceal from his sociologist his intention to kill his wife and he felt if he could con her then he was safe from any other interrogation. He thought at first he could deftly avoid the issue by bringing up the subject of his anger toward his father but then thought she might sense that was not the issue and try and nail him. He had to think of something new. Then he thought he would say whatever came to his mind thinking he acted best when he was spontaneous. So he tried to put the subject out of his mind and tried to think of something positive, but whenever he tried to do so he became overwhelmed with a sense of guilt over what he contemplated and wondered how his life would be without Sarah. Certainly there was the issue of the kids, but he could just place them with his parents on the pretext that he wasn't capable of providing for them. They could keep them until he had an income he could say. Then there was the issue of being sexually satisfied. He thought he was good looking enough to attract some young woman who would sleep with him if he established a short-term relationship. But Andrew did not want anything meaningful. He could not tolerate living with another woman who would smile and touch other men because there was no such thing as in a friendly way. Just then Sarah asked Andrew to get some toilet paper for her. She was sitting on the toilet seat and couldn't get up so Andrew went to the furnace room to get some. I must act normally with Sarah so she doesn't suspect anything and go for help. He walked back to the bathroom, handed her the roll, and said, "I want to kill you." She wiped herself, got up and flushed the toilet. Then she turned on the faucet to wash her hands and said, "I want to kill you, too. Your smoking is killing me." Andrew knew that the reason he told her was because he hadn't yet come up with his method to kill her. He wanted her to know what he wanted to do to her, and wanted to know how she felt about it. And since she wasn't taking him seriously it would be easier for him to plan and go unnoticed. After months of debating how he would execute his plan, Andrew finally decided to leave it up to fate. He would wait for an opportune moment and take advantage of it, and sooner than later that day arrived. While his parents watched the kids, he and Sarah took the metro into the city to see a movie. It also coincided with the beginning of Andrew's psychosis and when the film showed rain going into the gutter he imagined his life also going into the drain. And as the movie played he watched no longer but instead imagined where the rain, his life was going the long voyage through canals and eventually into the ocean where it became insignificant. They entered the underground railway station, and it seemed as though they were the only ones there. Sarah was standing by the blinking lights that bordered the platform and a train was approaching. Andrew wanted to hug her, but instead pushed her into the train just before it met them and then took a step back stricken with grief that was more like horror. The image of her smiling at him, then at other men, entered his mind while people began to gather out of nowhere. As other people began to take control of the situation he thought about the image of the rain entering the gutter in the movie, and he wept. A security guard asked him, "did she slip or, I hate to ask you, jump?" "She must have slipped," Andrew said, then looked down at the floor where there was a penny tail side up. He imagined this to mean he was about to become very unlucky, and he was. As all the affairs in his life were being put into order he was slipping more and more into psychosis and now beside his thinking he was also behaving abnormally. He began to move objects around the house believing they had influences on people he knew. Some he wanted to harm and others he wanted only good for them so he placed the objects accordingly. His fate was sealed when he tried to hand deliver a Christmas card to the White House. He was arrested and upon questioning he was found to be delusional. He was transported to Memorial Hospital's Psychiatric Ward and remained there for fourteen days. Andrew was not getting any better even on the medications he was placed on and the therapy he underwent was unsuccessful. He started going around saying, "I killed my wife, I killed my wife," but the psychiatrists determined this was due to separation anxiety and didn't attempt to pursue any line of questioning. Andrew sat on the floor of his padded cell and imagined the rain slipping into the gutters, then imagined he was a fish breathing beneath the water and swimming to the safety of the ocean, but he never got there. Instead there was the constant torment of the dark tunnels he had to negotiate, the foul smell, and garbage surrounding him. Each obstacle was an ill omen that he went recklessly crashing into that jarred him with fright every time he came up against it. He howled and no one came, and then he curled up into a ball in one corner of the cell and shivered. He feared his wife would return, leave him in the mental hospital, and start a new life with another man. His thoughts were no longer controllable with a cigarette and he was unable to change subjects at will. It was one bad trip after another, something he always had inside him and was not responsible for, and Andrew effortlessly avoided reality. He was self absorbed, consumed by the reality of his actions that led him to believe he was indeed waste, garbage that was becoming more and more insignificant. Twenty years passed, and while Andrew was behind the closed doors of his room in the state mental hospital eating his lunch, a woman appeared through the window at the door. He choked on his potatoes and whispered, "Sarah." Then she disappeared. The vision of Sarah at the window, looking as young as the last day he saw her, would not leave his mind. He imagined her out there in the world, remarried perhaps with more children, with another man who touched her and spoke gently to her. At the admissions desk Julie, Andrew and Sarah's daughter now 27 years old, signed papers to transfer Andrew to a private mental hospital in Vermont. She was as beautiful as her mother and possessed the same high cheekbones and full lips, and with make-up could be her twin. She would not go and see her father because she knew the truth of the cause of her mother's death. And while she would not disclose it to the police, because she loved her father, she vowed never to visit him. Sarah left a diary that disclosed Andrew's intention to kill her, and specifically mentioned his words to her, "I want to kill you" that day in the bathroom, December 3, 1983

©Amine Ben Aniba

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