New purpose – by Alex Bennetts
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
On returning to her apartment – emptied, lease nearing its end – Riga penned a to-do list:
groceries
cut hair
find a new purpose.
She tried her hand at pottery, indoor rock climbing, bonsai. Her palms showed the work of these dalliances, but they always, in tangential ways, recalled the honeymoon. The smashed vase on the bathroom tiles. The unnaturally-biceped man inviting the newlyweds to his room; her husband’s fury. The fronds of the trees that she stood under, waiting for a bus that never arrived. Stems of island ferns cracking in the storm.
The apples she bought were half-priced and bruised. She regretted the fringe she gave herself. Her face looked no more or less a stranger’s than before.
When a job offer came in from an unknown number, she replied: OK. It would not be an ordinary role, the stranger reiterated. Riga replied: that’s fine.
Riga met the security guard in the carpark behind a major supermarket. He reminded her of a boar, his wrists and neck covered in thick, black hairs.
‘This pays in cash?’
‘Every Monday.’
He handed her a swipe card and gestured to an innocuous, industrial door.
The workspace looked like the interrogation room from a cop movie, complete with a one-way mirror that peered into a second room. Riga’s room was dim and sparsely furnished. A chair, a simple wooden desk and two plastic filing trays: in, out. The room she was to surveil was cell-like, lit by a single halogen fixture. The entrance was flush with the white walls around it; when someone entered, she did not know where from.
Riga picked up the small printout sitting in the in-tray, labelled with the heading EXPECTATIONS.
The job, she learned over the coming days, seemed to consist of watching women who were unaware that they were being watched. They pirouetted, paced the carpet, looked deeply at their own reflections. She watched as they pulled at the skin around their eyes, picking out a stray eyelash, a grain of sleep. They yawned. Riga stared at their gums.
She only had one deliverable, as the printout noted. On a lined legal pad, Riga would write what came to mind as she watched. She wrote:
tall, tall
my mother’s fair skin
a dancer, potentially ballet
I want her to yell at me, I want her to yell at me until I’m crying, and so is she, and we’re both on our knees, embracing, and her tears are warm on my cheeks.
Her unofficial therapist – a phone sex operator whose direct line Riga had earned through repeat business – listened to Riga describe her work. She sighed.
‘Honey, is this a sex thing?’
‘I don’t know. I think it’s for…you know, maybe an application process for those dating apps for the super rich.’
‘So, it is a sex thing?’
‘I think everyone is content – like, contented. They’re willing. But it’s not porn, I think. It seems consensual. Sometimes a person with a camera enters the room – they dress in all black, like they’re wearing a sock over their whole body – and they take a few photos and leave. So, they must know someone is watching.’ The interloping figure looked like a stagehand, she explained. ‘What else would a giant mirror be for? Maybe the women are signing up for something. Maybe it’s a hazing ritual, some initiation. Maybe it’s for politics.’
‘So,’ her therapist said. ‘Sex thing.’
The subjects turned out to not exclusively be women. Though less frequent, the men were more predictable. They would enter the room, unbutton their clothes, and contort themselves into new shapes. After a few minutes, there would be two firm knocks on the door. The slim figure in all black would enter. The figure brought with them a set of instruments which would be applied to the men. Weights, straps, orbs. Everyday things, too: reams of paper, the Bible, reusable coffee cups.
Riga watched. Kept notes. She enjoyed seeing these men turned into furniture; she enjoyed watching, anonymous. It gave her a sense of unfamiliar power.
On the third day of the third week, a lumbering figure entered through the white door. There stood a man she had known intimately. His arms still bore the tan he had worked for. She was caught off-guard by the wedding band he still wore, shimmering gold. Clinging to his finger like a bur to a foot.
Riga stifled a gasp. She looked at her hands – she’d instinctively begun to write. Her handwriting conformed to no straight line:
I want to throw up
I want to throw up
I quit I quit I quit.
She looked away.
Riga touched the chalky wall beside her, the small lamp. The in-tray. The out-tray. Grounding herself.
She looked back. He was still her husband – by technicality, if nothing else. The man she had left midway through the honeymoon.
The act unfolded how it always did. He stood on all fours, as motionless as she’d ever seen him, and closed his eyelids. If it stopped here, she could have pretended it was yoga. But then entered, as always, the black-clad figure holding a wooden box. On her husband’s lower back – still waxed, still glistening – the figure placed a simple glass vase. From a small jug, they filled the vase with water; next, a pair of pastel pink lilacs. Then came the ceramic dinner plate, the cutlery, the folded napkin. The black figure looked at their work and nodded.
He had wanted to be adored, her husband. He had wanted to be Mr. Worldwide. Now, he was a dinner table.
Riga tore off the topmost page. Now, she wrote neatly. She filled two pages with her mother’s recipe for pumpkin lasagna. His favourite meal.
Her heart rate was easing. When she looked up again, a house of cards had been assembled on his back. At the apex of this house was balanced a steak knife, just like the ones from his apartment over the river. She thought she could see a familiar defect in the knife’s black plastic handle. When the tower collapsed, the tip of the knife caught the side of his shoulder. His skin swelled with a line of red. It began to trickle.
The figure in black shook their head, replaced each prop in the crate and left. All Riga could see was the wedding ring, dulled by the blood.
A week later, her swipe card stopped working. ▼
Image: Rodion Kutsaiev - Unsplash
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