There was a white scar, about two inches long, on Cath’s forearm, just below the elbow. For as long as he had known her, the scar had been there, a line that looked like it had been drawn with a marker that had been pressed down and bled. Four dots, two on either side of the line from stitches she’d gotten after a bad fall.
In bed, kisses trailing down her body, he would pause at the scar and run his tongue along it, that one and another below her ribs, this from surgery after she’d had a kidney removed. He had done this once and Cath had giggled, a reaction he took for a sign that she liked it though he never asked and she felt too embarrassed to correct him. It was like wish fulfillment for him, his kissing her wounds, clearly not put off, loving all of her, see, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, perfectly normal, promise.
When it came to the body, Cath had never been ashamed of anything, though he never thought to ask her about this either.
They broke up after five years, the relationship like an elastic band that had started to tear, together, apart, friends, together, talk of marriage, a pregnancy scare, together, apart, always friends, marry each other in ten years if the other wasn’t married, blissfully together again, and finally, apart once more.
Cath knew what he didn’t. This time, there would be no reunion after and possibly no conversation to indicate as much, so he helped her pack and she moved out, a last-minute embrace that led to a last-minute kiss and then a final fuck that Cath felt imparted some sense of closure even though it left him hopelessly sad, replaying the look in her eyes, the names she called him, none of it, to him, indicative of a true end.
His usual route to the office took him past her house, so he created a new one. Their mutual friends took sides, some saying they would miss talking to him but they couldn’t keep talking to him, others offering uncertain but earnest condolences. He changed Cath’s name in his phone to simply her name, no emojis or inside jokes, the picture the same as the one she used online and no longer the partially nude candid he had taken last year.
A file full of these shared intimacies, now memorabilia, love letters, screenshots of texts, plane ticket stubs, he uploaded to a cloud folder with an auto-generated strong password he didn’t save or write down.
One night, two months after Cath moved out, he dreamt of her. He had been dreaming of Cath every night since, with her as an incidental part of the dream, or her as a completely different person but with the same face and voice, or a relived memory, a splinter in the mouth of his mind.
That night, he dreamt he was her; more accurately, a part of her. At first, his field of view was mostly obscured by darkness apart from a pinprick of white at the top right corner of his vision. He had never been aware of his body in dreams before, not to any alarming degree, and he never questioned what occurred until after he woke up. Lucid dreaming evaded him and he couldn’t tell if this meant something about his character, the robustness or flaccid nature of his imagination. There, with next to nothing but nothing before him, all he could do was listen.
There were voices, two of them, one that vibrated all around him as if coming through him and another close by but detached. The white dot blinked. The voice around him was clearly Cath’s and the other was unfamiliar, a man’s, low and soft. Cath sounded tired or possibly drunk, the white dot blinking, the stranger’s voice closer now. He heard Cath moan, a bone-chattering frequency in this void, but he recognized the sound all too well, a scraping that could have been the rustling of sheets or clothing, something wet, the white dot dark, Cath’s moans louder. He tried to focus his attention elsewhere until it was over, tried to wake himself up because he had to be dreaming.
He looked her up online to see if she had moved on. He had no profiles of his own so certain apps were unavailable to him and the idea of creating one just to stalk his ex seemed as bad as it sounded. On Cath’s Facebook, just a picture, where she had gone to school, an outdated job reference. On LinkedIn, a new school program, a professional portrait of her he’d never seen before, two cities marked as her place of origin, there and Toronto, which puzzled him. On Twitter, a post from nearly ten years ago, a picture of Cath and her brother, whom she hadn’t spoken to in some time. On Instagram, a locked account, her bio stating that she wasn’t “on here much”, a profile picture of her and a man he’d never seen before cheek to cheek, laughing.
From the small image, he couldn’t tell if the man’s voice matched the one from his dream. He contemplated texting Cath, an idea that died before he could think to reach for his phone. He missed her, more than he could say, so he said nothing before even trying.
It happened again the following weekend during a nap. The dot at the upper right corner of his vision was larger this time, more a hole, irregularly shaped, like looking through a closed fist. Instead of white light, he could make out images, glimpses of a fuller picture, though barely. He was about three feet off the ground and inside a tiled room full of metal objects. The sound of breathing sucked in and out above him, the insistent scratching of something else closer at hand.
Together, walking quickly through the room, he and the body passed a row of polished metal sinks with high splash guards and tall, angular faucets. His view was just so and the metal just clean enough to reflect Cath’s form and some of her features. Scrubs, an operating room, the white scar on her arm. In the void, he wondered if he might be imagining himself as some sort of burrowing insect caught beneath Cath’s skin, but he felt incapable of any movement, unaware of any physical being at all, simply a lashed observer. Cath left the operating room and stepped into a hallway, surroundings he gleaned more from the echo of Cath’s footfalls against the floor than anything he saw through the hole. Yellow walls, room numbers, open door, closed door, the image suddenly swinging round followed by thrumming like a stretched rubber band. Cath spoke, but he couldn’t tell who it was she spoke to. After several seconds, he realized she was on the phone, leaving a voicemail. He awoke to a missed call tone in his pocket.
In her voice message, instead of a heartfelt plea to get back together, Cath said she had left a notebook at his apartment that she needed for class. He didn’t know what he expected, or, he knew but didn’t see why he thought that fantasy would come true. He texted her, said he would reach out again when he found it, and he wasn’t lying. Now, a tether had been extended between them and by no interference of his own. If the search took him longer than a few hours, he could text her to say so, gesture towards the following day when he would try again, maybe wishing her “goodnight” in the process, whether or not she said so back irrelevant because at least what he said wouldn’t be so strange, uncalled for. Perhaps.
The thought animated him as he searched his apartment, between couch cushions, under the side of the bed Cath used to sleep on, under the mattress, the dresser, even his parking space outside. It’d likely already been found and tossed, by a person or a nocturnal animal. The longer he looked, the more frustrated he became. It was supposed to be a good thing, he thought, that he hadn’t found it so quickly. Despite his attempts, he wasn’t delusional. There was nothing Cath needed from him except the notebook and nothing he could coax from her except a polite thank you. For the first time in months, the sharp pang in his chest, instead of puncturing through his memory and his hope like a stray piece of fiberglass, felt deadened by reality. After this, it was over. It had already been over, even if he was too stubborn to move on. So, there was nothing to pin on the notebook. He should be honored, he thought, that she would still reach out to him. All of her exes she hated, swore them off like a college cigarette habit. He’d been deemed worthy of staying in contact with.
He left to pick up dinner and found the notebook under the passenger seat of his car when he dropped a fry and went to reach for it. If he wanted, he could wait to text Cath in the morning and draw things out. The longer he sat there in his car thinking about it with the stale scent of dust and sweat hanging in the air, the less attractive a proposition it seemed. His dreams were trying to tell him something, or the very least, were indicative of a fixation he had to come to terms with. “Found it,” he messaged Cath. “Let me know if you want me to drop it in the mail.”
That night, he slept fitfully, but the black void and the hole he saw through weren’t there.
In the morning, Cath responded. She wanted him to drop the notebook off at her new place, but she wouldn’t be there so he could leave it underneath the doormat. He felt relieved. No telling how awkward it would be to see her again.
On his way to work, he’d swing by. Cath’s place was twenty minutes in the other direction, in the newer part of the city that was being developed. He could picture the prefab nature of the building, the fresh coats of paint in varying tones of gray, the faux wood panels on the floors in the halls that would begin to separate and form gaps in a few months, aluminum door handles, thin walls, poorly insulated rooms. Outside her door, he could see her having a welcome mat with some bright color, no text, and a number of new plants along the sill, maybe hanging from the ceiling, textbooks on the round red table she bought from IKEA, a pile of open moving boxes next to the couch and the Persian rug she’d had since undergrad, all of these things passed by as she rushed back from the parking lot because maybe she’d forgotten something on the way out. When she turned towards the kitchen, his view would swing with hers and there’d be a short breakfast bar with a used plate, crumbs, sauce that had been sitting out smeared on top, a glass of half-drunk water, a couple brown paper gift bags with yellow tissue paper that he assumed were housewarming gifts from her friends.
He didn’t want to, but he could also picture her running around the apartment, looking for her backpack, her phone, her wallet, items she’d tossed carelessly around the night before. Beneath the wallet, which was on the stand by the couch, there’s a restraining order, though Cath is moving too quickly for him to glimpse who it’s for or why it’s been crumpled up and flattened out again. She finds her phone hidden in the mess of her comforter, along with an opened condom wrapper, some of the lubricant having leaked onto her screen, the rainbow-tinted oil smearing her fingertips.
Cath passes by a standing mirror taller than she is, maybe even taller than him, and for the briefest of seconds, he sees her in her scrubs, a black windbreaker on one arm, the other free, his eyes searing but locked open, his view unobstructed, the void nearly bisected by a wider picture of all that Cath’s scar shows him. He knows he is no longer dreaming, that he is not her but trapped within her, and he begins to feel an itch. What he sees, initially the minutiae of a life he once hoped to tether to his own, curdles into a glimpse of the person he never actually knew. And he laughs at this. The itching and the scratching, the chipping away of a rusted picture. Beneath, he witnesses a different Cath, not changed, not unbidden or liberated, merely unwatched. This person, whom he had hoped more than anything to know and see and touch, this person he begins to dislike. He dodges her sporadic texts, lets her “do you have this person’s number” calls go to voicemail, until eventually she stops trying.
But still he’s there, itching, trying so hard to close his mind’s eye. As he scratches, he peels away a new layer of the dead, frozen memory of Cath. But the scar opens further, fibers of skin unknotting bloodlessly, and the hope passes through his mind that if Cath were to look down, maybe she’d see his brownish-green eye peering out at the world, floating in the darkness beneath.
He watches.
As he watches, he scratches in his sleep.
The hole, etched with the grooves of his rough-bitten nails, the sewn flesh torn where he digs, over the course of thousands and thousands of scratches, grows wider and wider. Coins to compare size, first a dime and soon a nickel until he has to cover the cavity with a large bandage to keep from falling into it. This is a gift, he tells himself, an example of their inseparable, eternal connection. This is how he comforts himself even after the umbilicus of his desire for Cath has all but shriveled up and he knows, or really assumes, that someone else must be trapped within him as well, as everyone eventually must, bodiless, suspended, a feed that learns nothing but to crave the light of consciousness.