Chapter 1.3 - 1.5

The only indication to whatever Mona was up to tonight was written very concisely on a pink Post-it note she placed on the back of the front door before she left; she was obsessed about these sticky pieces of paper. In any case, it read, in her wavy handwriting:

Baby, you’ll have to make your own dinner tonight, I’ve got something important to do. I’ll be back late, so don’t wait up for me!

Love, Mona

I removed the note, crunched it in my hand and dropped it into the trashcan as I made my way to the kitchen. I wasn’t totally useless around the house without my superhuman wife around. I opened the refrigerator to see if there was anything that I could make without too much hassle - Eggs, cheese, milk, jam, some apples, broccoli, lettuce, and several other vegetables I did not know the name to. As I ran the list through my head, the first dish that came to my mind was omelettes. But that fit the definition of too much hassle, so I scrapped the idea, thought twice about inspecting the freezer, decided not to, and finally went to the phone to make a call for a delivery.

A male voice, which somehow made me think of a long-haired Mike Myers in a T-shirt and baseball cap, answered my call. “Domino’s Pizza Phobos City, thirty minutes or it’s free. You’re Mr. or Mrs. Carter, right?” People always liked businesses with a personal touch, like an old friend whom you’ve not spoken to for a very long time but suddenly need to borrow their services; for an international food delivery service like Domino’s, having their customers’ names and addresses in a database helped towards building that illusion.

“That’s right.”

“Go ahead and name your poison, sir.”

Poison? I shook of the word from my head. “Alright, I’d like to order a regular thin-crust double pepperoni with extra, and by that I mean extra, cheese. Don’t be stingy with it.”

“Extra cheese,” the man - or probably more appropriately, boy - said to himself. “You sure about that, sir? Too much cheese is bad for you, y’know.”

This was new. “What are you, trying to lose a customer or something?”

“No, no, not like that, sir. We at Domino’s are always, uh.” He began to sound as though he was reading off a teleprompter or notice of some sort; slow, robotic, with pauses in between words and completely lacking of nuances. He coughed before continuing, “Yeah, we’re always looking out for our customer’s best interests. Obesity is a killer, sir. Did you know that sixty percent of Americans are overweight?” Immediately after that, I heard a muffled “We are? Whoa.”

“Look, I just want my pizza with extra cheese. I am only a hundred and seventy. If there’s anything I were to die from, it’d be from hunger because of you giving me a hard time. If you want, you can have the delivery guy make sure that I’m not one of the 60%, okay?”

“Chill, sir, I’m just doing my job to, uh, inform the masses. So you’re sure about your extra cheese?”

I gave him the most irritated-sounding “Yes” that I could come up with.

He sighed. “Let me repeat your order again, sir. Regular sized thin-crust double pepperoni with a whole lot of extra cheese.”

“I’m surprised you remembered,” I said, sarcastically.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, sir, you live in the Thornton Apartments at the Far East Side, is that right?”

“Same place since the last time I called.”

“That’s good, sir. Would you like any side orders with your pizza?”

“A bottle of Vanilla Coke will be nice.”

“May I suggest Diet Coke for a change?”

“Which part of not giving me a hard time did you not understand?”

“Hey, just doing my job here. I take that as a no.”

“Damn right it is.”

“That’ll be six dollars and forty-five cents, sir. It’ll reach your place in thirty minutes, or the pizza’s free! Not for the Coke, though. Thank you, sir, and,” he said, as insincerely as possible, “Have a nice day.”

That was by far one of the more interesting phone conversations I’ve ever had with a Domino’s guy. The times are changing. Less than a decade ago, McDonald’s and its ilk wouldn’t give a damn if you turned fat from their food. In fact, they hoped you supersized everything you bought. And we, the grossly stupid Americans with God-knows-how-much lard rerouting our synapses, are almost always inclined to do exactly that, drawn to the trap of obesity by their saccharine sweet smiles and pretty packaging.

The best part of this nationwide dilemma was that the fat people strike back. Once they’ve gone over the edge, they’d return with a vengeance, and with teams of lawyers by their sides, ready to sue the corporations to kingdom come for not warning them that binging on fast food is bad for you. People like Caesar Barber. When the corporation and the obese go loggerheads in the courtroom, it’s hard to decide who was more in the wrong - the companies that sell fattening food or the people who are caught overeating them.

An idiot could tell that I was on Ronald’s side.

And thus, like an enormous disclaimer, fast food outlets now remind their customers to eat the healthier choices on their menus, Exhibit A: The Domino’s guy. In so doing, they are cleared of any responsibility in the event that someone grows morbidly obese. People like Caesar Barber. It reminded me of how God had told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Life, and when they did, He had every reason to expel them from Eden. It’s not as if they weren’t warned.

When my mind stopped wandering, I immediately prepared the required $6.45 in exact change and placed it on the coffee table. I took my mobile phone out, selected the timer function and set it to 30 minutes. Then I used it to make a call to Mona. There was a ringing but no answer, so I decided to take a warm shower and perhaps try calling again later.

The feeling of hot water scalding my skin after a long, cold day at work loaded me with awareness, hopefully enough to last through the evening.

The doorbell rang while I was still in the bathroom. I didn’t bother to change, wrapped the towel around my waist instead, and took the money from the coffee table in the hall and went to answer it, realised that I had set the timer for 30 minutes, went to pick up my mobile, saw the numbers 00:13:26 (it was counting down), shrugged, put the phone back down, and opened the door.

“Domino’s pizza. Mr. and Mrs. Carter’s?” the delivery guy said.

“That’s me.”

“Here’s your regular thin-crust double pepperoni with extra cheese. And your Vanilla Coke. That’ll be six dollars and forty-five cents.” He gave me the bag with everything in it, and I passed him the cash. As he did, he said, as-a-matter-of-factly, “You are thin.”

“Yeah, you go tell your friend that now, will you?” I almost rolled my eyes.

“No problemo, Mr. Carter. Good evening,” he said, tipping his Domino’s employees’ cap slightly. His job done, he promptly left.

Now I had pizza, a bottle of soda, and nobody else around. I did what anybody would do under such circumstances on a winter evening; I watched TV.

Surfing the channels, I couldn’t find anything too interesting to watch. Here’s Dr. Phil teaching people how to diet. I found it extremely ironic for he wasn’t a paragon of fitness himself. Flip. Stephen Colbert was elaborating on The Wørd of the day, “Asia”. I didn’t feel like watching political satire today; those kinds of things wear me out. Flip. Somebody was demonstrating something which replaced several other things that you would use in the kitchen. I don’t own any of those things that they claim need replacing. Flip. A drama on undertaking. Flip. A medical drama with beautiful people. Flip. Another medical drama with beautiful people, except for the boss who, from the looks of it, wasn’t just unattractive but also excessively caustic, and walked with a limp, too.

The pizza was getting cold, so I gave up on TV and indecision, and popped the Fight Club DVD into the player instead for the umpteenth lonely night this year. It never gets old, at least not for me. I found the similarities between the narrator and me more evident with each viewing, and eventually, it became an addiction, watching an incarnation of myself beat the hell out of people. And it’s also much less mind numbing, in the literal sense, than watching a talk show.

I bit into a slice of pizza. They remembered the extra cheese. I was happy.

But for reasons unknown, for I wasn’t actually too tired anyway, I didn’t make it past the scene where the narrator and Tyler Durden went to steal human fat from a medical facility. I probably fell asleep.

But it didn’t matter whether I stayed awake or not - Mona didn’t come home that night.

***

She didn’t come home the next day, either. Or the day after that. Each time I tried calling her, she didn’t answer. I became very worried. In hindsight, I might even have been delusional, because on Friday, after work, I made a trip to a police station near my apartment.

“I’d like to make a missing persons report.”

The officer on duty seemed like one of those that you’d normally find in 90s sitcoms - he was rotund, wore glasses, and had a half-eaten box of Bavarian Crème donuts on the table, exuding a vibe which screams of ineptitude. I have learned to give people the benefit of a doubt, however. “Did your kid go missing at the playground or something, mister...?”

“Carter. No, I don’t have any children. It’s my wife.”

“Your wife? Hmm… May I see your I.D. please, Mr. Carter?”

I flipped my wallet open and retrieved my identification card, then passed it to the cop. He examined it for a while, and I soon realised that he was trying to find a way to say something without appearing to insult my intelligence. He returned me my card and said, “You see, Mr. Carter, we get a lot of reports everyday, mostly kids or teenagers who go missing - they give us the most problems, Goddamn teens, especially when they start drinking, all hell breaks loose - but for adults, they have the, uh, the constitutional right to go wherever they please without having to tell you first.”

I expected him to continue. He probably expected me to reply, but I didn’t, so he gave me a very suspicious look instead.

“Your wife is an adult, right? As in, eighteen and above?”

“Is there any other way?”

“Who knows? You could be a hillbilly or something, I can’t tell. Phew. Had me going there. Well, unless your wife is, say, a retard - pardon my French - or might pose a danger to society, we won’t enter her in our database. Not even if she’s an alcoholic or something, that’s an individual’s choice, even if it’s ruining her life. So is your wife either?”

“Definitely not a retard,” I groaned. “As for being a danger to society, well, not that I know of.”

“Do you suspect foul play?”

“Yes. I’ve been trying to call her for two days, and she doesn’t pick up, it’s driving me insane. She always calls if she has something to do.”

“Two days?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Mr. Carter, I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to lodge a report yet, especially not so soon. Who knows, she could’ve left her phone somewhere and had been meaning to call you or something. She doesn’t run away often, right?”

“That’s not the point, I want to lodge a report so that if anything comes up that I should know of, the cops can call me.” I could feel my temperature rising.

“But we don’t send out cops to search for your wife just because you want us to, sir. If you really need someone to look for her, without evidence of foul play, you’d need to get a private eye.”

“So if there was foul play involved, knock wood, you’d wait until the foul playing is over before doing something about it? Haven’t you heard of prevention being better than a cure?”

“Sir, we get about ten to twenty reports like yours each day. Almost all the time, it’s some useless parent who left their children unattended in the park or in the apartment or at a neighbour’s place, and half the time these are false alarms and are resolved within the day. That’s a lot of work to cover, you know. So unless you have concrete proof of, or have every reason to believe that there was foul play involved, we can’t do anything.” He paused for effect, and then summarised his short lecture on the reasons he couldn’t help me out into a single word: “Procedure.”

“Frankly, that sounds like balls to me.”

His composure remained calm and collected, evidence of his experience in facing people like me day in, day out. “Tell you what, Mr. Carter, you don’t worry about your wife for now, give it a few days, maybe she’d come back.” Then he adopted a somewhat sinister tone. “After that, if you really feel that something has happened, and with proof, if possible, you come back here and ask for Constanza - that's me. Okay?”

At that, I could only afford to shrug.

Then I said, “I doubt that I’ve ever said or heard the words “foul play” so many times over such a short span of time before,” before turning to leave.

***

I never stopped trying to contact Mona, hoping that somehow, officer Constanza’s theory was correct. Besides, his was the more reasonable one. Now, I wasn’t sure of what to think of anymore.

It was a Sunday. It’s hard to believe how quickly I was returning to my old bachelor self, like a college student living away from his parents for the first time. Almost all my food was delivered, or packed, resulting in a diet consisting mostly of carbohydrates and fat. And I won’t eat out because I do not want to be caught eating in a posh restaurant all by my lonesome self.

The main course on today’s bachelor lunch menu was a packet of Japanese instant noodles. I was waiting for the pot of water to boil when I decided to make the ubiquitous phone call, again. It had become a routine for me, making the call and failing to get a response. My rationale for continuing this exercise in futility was based on the fact that Mona’s phone rings - which meant that it was operational, and if it had been turned on for the past few days, there’s a possibility that somebody was charging it after each use.

The call connected, and I heard a ringing sound. The one I’m referring to wasn’t coming from my phone.

Instead, I heard - or at least, thought I heard - a mild whining noise in the kitchen, soft enough that it could hardly be heard over the sound of a stove fire, like the permanent, unending hum of a muted TV.

I turned the flame off and tried to locate the sound, but by now the kitchen was already silent. Somehow, subconsciously and without logic, my mind put two and two together and I pressed the redial button on my mobile.

I could hear the whine again. It had a tune, and I recognised it almost immediately: “Tomorrow” from Little Orphan Annie, one of the songs Mona would lose herself in whenever she was cleaning or cooking or washing or vacuuming. Unsurprisingly, she used the MP3 version for her phone’s ringing tone.

With my phone still making the call, and Annie still singing ominously in the background, I frantically searched the kitchen for Mona’s phone. Drawers were opened, cupboards ransacked, cups and dishes were pushed about. Each time Annie stopped singing, I would press redial, and she’ll begin calling out to me again, a high pitched, foreboding wail, and I would follow the voice.

Eventually, I found Mona’s phone stuck in a gap beneath the refrigerator. I took more time trying to pull it out than I did trying to find it.

I flipped the clamshell phone open. The words on the screen told me that it had received 64 missed calls; most of them were probably from me. I played with the buttons on the phone for a moment, trying to figure out my next course of action. Then I decided to check her voice messages. I dialled the number to retrieve them, and a little menu appeared on the screen, listing each message along with the date and time it was received. I selected the most recent one (Friday 11/18/05, 17:21):

“Hey, Mona sweetie. I hope you get this. Well, if you do, that means you’re alright. I hope. Please, please, call me, okay? And come home. Love ya.”

I cringed at the sound of my own voice. I selected the next on the list (Wednesday 11/16/05, 12:10):

“I’m coming home for dinner tonight, hope to see you soon. You scared me shitless last night, did you know that? Well, whatever. Call me if you get this, okay sweetie? Bye.”

The last message on the list caught my eye, because it was the only one received on the day Mona stopped coming home (Tuesday 10/16/05, 14:42):

“Mona,” a male voice said very loudly, with a hint of pretentiousness and an accent I couldn’t place. The voice became much softer after that. “Some people are not happy with what you did. Very bad people. You were warned.”

Needless to say, I became utterly confused and unnerved. Panicking, my mind was invaded by thoughts, each of them trying to spin a story from that single, short, voice message. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining Mona being kidnapped, being raped, being killed, and in more ways than one. Scenes of my naked wife being passed around a dirty room by men, of her being slapped and punched and beaten, of her being shot in the head at point blank range, materialised deep in the recesses of my brain, refusing to go away, dancing and mocking me like a vile jester who had stolen the king’s crown, and who had insisted on keeping it. The jester’s laughs boomed in my ear, I dropped Mona’s phone and with my hands pressed hard against my ears, trying to block the laughter out, and succeeded only in keeping it in.

I crumpled to the floor, against the kitchen wall, screaming. My heart was pounding against my chest, and I couldn’t tell if it the pain was real or not.

Could it have been a prank? Or was it one of her friends, just trying to be funny? I tried to assure myself that all was okay, but who was I kidding, this was completely uncharacteristic of my wife, she never does these things, Goddammit! The images continued to fade in and out of my sight, so very vividly, still smirking, mocking. The men had become clowns, in children-friendly, colourful costumes, a nightmarish contradiction to the obscenities they were performing on my wife. Closing my eyes to stop myself from seeing the terrifying sight was as futile as trying to stop the jester’s laugher, for it blocked out reality and made the imagined more intense.

I could feel the warm tears rolling down my cheeks, although I didn’t remember crying at all.

Then I remembered the foul play spiel I received at the police station, as well as Officer Constanza’s advice. And just as suddenly, everything became clear again. The images disappeared as instantaneously as they came, and my racing heart slowed down. I wiped the tears from my eyes, took a prolonged breather, shook off everything that just happened and got up to call the police.

“Hello, Phobos City Police Department, 42nd Precinct, how may I help you?” It was a lady.

“I need to speak to Officer Constanza.”

“Constanza? And to whom am I speaking to, sir?”

“Tell him it’s Mr. Carter, the guy who’s missing his wife.”

“You hold on a second, sir.”

The all-too-familiar ragtime tune was played as I was put on hold. This made me believe that a tenth of all phones with the ability of putting people on hold played “The Entertainer”, while another tenth opted for “Für Elise”.

“Constanza speaking. Mr. Carter?”

“Yes it’s me.”

“Crap, I was wondering when you’d call. I sort of have a lead for you.”

“A lead?”

“Oh wait, you must be calling because you either found some evidence of foul play or your wife came home. Please tell me it’s not the first.” His intonation was that of a man doing the vocal equivalent of crossing his fingers.

“I wish it wasn’t. I’ve been trying to call my wife all this while, but it turned out that she left her mobile lying around the house.”

“And?” he said, expectantly.

“I listened to one of the voice messages that some guy left on her phone. It sounded like a threat.”

There was a short pause before Constanza replied. “When did you get this? I mean, when did the guy leave his message?”

“Tuesday afternoon, the day my wife stopped coming home.”

“Are you sure it’s not a prank?”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d be able to help me decide, if it’s the real deal or just a very stupid, scary joke.” Then I recalled that he was trying to tell me something earlier. “What was that you told me about a lead?”

“Well, it’s this, um,” he trailed off. “Look, just come down to the station, will ya? Before I get off work, it’s a Sunday, y’know. Oh, and bring your wife’s phone along, it might be useful.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen.”

“See ya.”

I hung up the call. To borrow the clichéd line: I had a very bad feeling about all this.