Lewis sat on the edge of the bed and, although he tried not to, began to cry. After three deep sobs and four deeper breaths, Lewis went into the bathroom, where he wiped his nose and tried to figure out how to make things tactile. He asked himself what he felt inside. He told himself to stop thinking, stop talking and became perfectly still. When he did, he remembered a winter night seventeen months after they’d married, when they were still in Halifax and in their fourth year of art school.
For six weeks they’d been arguing, although he was unable to remember what the fight was about. All he knew was that he’d decided to leave, but Lisa had convinced him to spend one last night. They slept together one last time, and it was so boisterous and gymnastic that Lewis fell asleep immediately afterwards. While he slept, Lisa took a steak knife, went outside and slashed all four tires of his car.
In the morning, Lewis was carrying a box filled with his most precious possessions when he noticed that all his tires were flat.
Furious, Lewis stormed back into their apartment, accusing her in the kitchen. She did not deny it. His initial reaction was that she was crazy, and it validated his decision to leave. But he soon reinterpreted the gesture as a sincere display of affection. On the condition that she paid for the new tires, and that she do so before the end of the week, he decided to stay.
It was only now, standing in the bathroom of the second-best hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that Lewis realized how much more her actions had meant. At that moment, when the honeymoon glow had completely faded, when he was exhausted from the fighting and disheartened by the wet Halifax winter, he would have left her. Had Lewis been able to drive away, he would done so, and he wouldn’t have looked back until it was impossible to return. With four simple thrusts of a kitchen knife, Lisa had made this impossible, saving not only their relationship, but him.
Lewis looked up from the bathroom floor at his reflection. He couldn’t believe he’d made her pay for the tires. “There,” he said to himself. “That’s a great example of you being an asshole.” He walked out to the living room, where he plucked the steak knife from the dishes he had yet to set in the hall and left the suite.
It was in the elevator, descending, that Lewis crystallized the plan: he would deflate all four tires of a car. If that didn’t make things tactile enough, he would deflate all the tires on another car. He was prepared to stick his steak knife into as many tires as it took. However—and this was very important to him—the destruction couldn’t be completely random: whether they were all hatchbacks, or all had headlights that folded down, or all had out-of-province licence plates, the cars needed to be somehow related. Lewis wanted destruction, but it had to have a structure, a guiding principle, some semblance of order.
Lewis walked through the lobby and nodded to Beth. He was three streets north of the hotel when he decided the theme would be cracks in the windshield, primarily because he was passing a BMW that had a long horizontal crack in its windshield. Lewis knelt down at the right back tire of the car. He put his hand on the bumper, which felt very cold. He pulled the knife out of the inside pocket of his jacket and, with considerable effort, pushed it into the tire.
Doing this made Lewis feel very happy. He listened to the air escaping and pushed the knife up and down so it exited faster. When the tire had visibly flattened, Lewis tried to pull out the knife. The knife resisted. Only after several attempts did Lewis succeed in removing it. Keeping the knife in his hand, Lewis circled the BMW, slashing each tire as he passed it. He stood in the middle of the street, turning the steak knife in his hand. He watched as the other three tires deflated, and then began to search for another car with a crack in the windshield.
Winnipeg was a Prairie town, surrounded by gravel roads and farms, and Lewis had anticipated that cars with cracked windshields would be common. But after searching for forty-five minutes, he hadn’t found another one. Lewis was about to change the theme when he turned right onto Wolseley Street and his eyes focused on a white Honda Civic. Even from half a block away he could see the crack that started in the middle of the windshield and travelled upwards towards the left-hand corner. Lewis ran towards the car, then crouched at the back right tire. He pulled the steak knife out of his pocket. He heard the driver’s door open and became very still.
Lewis had assumed the car was unoccupied but had not checked. His mind reviewed his options. They seemed limited. He was still trying to decide what to do when he saw a green foot step onto the pavement. The right foot, which was also green, soon followed it. Both feet were webbed and began walking towards him. Continuing to squat, Lewis set the knife on the ground and looked up. A green-skinned woman with gills in her neck looked down. Lewis recognized her immediately.
Lewis could not believe he was staring at the same creature that had nearly T-boned their limo in Toronto. He looked from her hands to his—that his were neither green nor webbed seemed somehow inappropriate.
“Mavbe vou could velph me?” it asked.
“I think I know you,” Lewis said.
“I von’t fink sooh.”
“Yeah, I do. You almost crashed into a limousine I was in.”
“Fat was vou?”
“I was in the back.”
The creature needed directions, which Lewis couldn’t provide. They exchanged pleasantries about the weather and then she seemed to remember something.
“Please vait here?”
Nodding, Lewis watched her walk awkwardly away. When she returned, she held out her right hand. He was scared to touch her, not because he was repulsed, or afraid of her green skin (which did look a bit slimy), but because he knew that once he touched her the reality of her existence would become forever undeniable. After some moments, Lewis reached out his arm. Her skin felt cool and dry. She handed him a set of keys.
Lewis did not recognize them until he turned them over. There, on the back of the E.Z. Self Storage key chain, was a picture of Lisa, no older than twelve, with her family. Although Lewis was having trouble absorbing it, there was no denying that a green-skinned woman in the middle of a city he’d never been to before had just handed him a picture of his dead wife.
“Cav vou please make saue fese get back tau her?”
“I will.”
“Verv impaurtant.”
“It’s unbelievable.”
After she drove away, Lewis, still stunned, looked down and saw the steak knife on the pavement. The blade was slightly bent from where the Honda had driven over it. Keeping the keys firmly grasped in his right hand, Lewis picked up the knife with his left and tucked it between his belt and his pants. He sat on the curb for several minutes. On his way back to the hotel, he slipped the knife between grates in the sewer.