appearance then, the difference in their age now was visible in the smoothness of their skin, in the size of faces, waistlines, the lack of double chins, as if marriage itself were a fattening before the slaughter. He found file folders of letters they’d written to each other, a form of communication as dead as the dinosaur, as film in cameras, David tickled by their banality, by Alice’s girly-girl print, an innocence in the very morphology of the letters themselves: the harmless roundness of her little b’s and d’s, a sweetness in the disproportionate contours of her a’s and g’s. O’s like those wouldn’t hurt anyone, he reflected, and z’s like Alice’s aimed to please. She was a good woman, a loving wife, and he needed to track her down to find out what happened next, so he kept tearing through the place. He took down tins she’d marked XMAS, the strings of lights tangled no matter how carefully she’d spooled them the year before, the cords that came out of storage as coiled as snakes in a den. And boxes marked DECORATIONS, with at least one ornament in each mysteriously shattered, no matter how delicately it had been put away; even untouched things could break. He dumped out her personal files from file cabinets: job applications and professional correspondence and old papers she’d written in college that he read now with interest, page after page revealing the shape of her mind but leaving no tracks to wherever she was now. He looked through legal pads stuffed between phone books in their kitchen cabinets, tried to decode notes she’d scrawled between messages left for him, numbers without names circled between age-old shopping lists and doodles and to-dos. He looked through her lesson plans but found no secret plans, pulled down books from her bookshelves and checked the margins of novels for notes that might provide hints, finding only observations too cryptic to decode or too general—Yes! she wrote, or True!—to be considered leads but that spurred him on to read the underlined passages themselves. A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. Yes! David thought. True!
Until, at his wit’s end with so many dead ends, he began to tear the apartment down. He pulled the drawers from the bedside tables, kicked the furniture to kindling, then searched through the contents he’d poured into a pile: kite tails of condoms and spent tubes of K-Y jelly and berets and spools of thread and sewing needles (sewing needles?) and safety pins and pennies black with age or lichen green. In her bedroom dresser, in the very back of her top drawer, he discovered a cache of conditioners and creams from hotels, her favorite things to filch, a collection of combs, a brush webbed with her hair, dead pens, even love letters he was touched she’d saved in an envelope he’d once addressed to ALICE. (He read those as well.) He pulled out those drawers too, checked their bottoms and backs, then stacked them up, and with the dresser lightened now, within his strength to lift, he pulled it from the wall and heard something fall to the floor, the small jewelry box Alice thought she’d lost years ago, the diamond earrings he’d bought her (and replaced) still there, pinned in that limbo between furniture and wall. “Found it, Alice,” he said aloud. He looked under the bed and pulled the things they’d stacked there out from a moonscape of congealed dust beneath the place they slept: a mirror and a poster of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Then all that was left to search was the bed itself. He removed the comforter and sheets to reveal the naked challah braids of the mattress’s skin. With a butcher knife from the kitchen and a power he didn’t realize he had, he hacked a gaping wound in its center, burying his arm up to the shoulder in the hole like a farmer helping a large animal give birth, feeling around its spring-and-foam guts for something he knew was here—but nothing was. That left only the box spring beneath. He went to the toolbox for a saw, prepared to dismantle