Give Scandal [extract iii]
No new letters, not since the third, though I can’t say I find their absence much less discomforting than their arrival. Cycles of resolution wax and wane. I am scared; I am defiant. I am bullish; I retreat. I am collected; I am spinning out.
At this point I find myself hoping for news. News? Not news. A sign. Something new to replace the memory of the arrival of their last note. I am starting to feel I have been abandoned — and so? And so, what was it for then, my fear, my excitement? I have been made to feel ridiculous. Frit. It has been … I can’t say how long. I am embarrassed.
I have not been able to forget them, the writer of the letter, not able to ignore them the way I had hoped. I have not achieved that state of mind in which I can PRETEND THEY DO NOT EXIST. Despite my occupation, despite the desire I had felt to recommit myself to the watch, to my vigil, the more time that has passed without them, without another letter, the harder it has been.
It is difficult to believe, or perhaps, rather, difficult to accept, that my interest in them, my interest in her, could have been so easily caused to waver, to fall away. Though I’m confident that isn’t yet fully the case, I can’t deny that I have found myself less and less enthralled. My focus has loosened, and with that loosening, creeping thoughts about my letter-writer have recommenced, occurring more frequent- and pressingly. When she first arrived, she arrived as a vision, now I find myself waiting on the arrival of their voice.
The paranoia — to which I know I am susceptible — has also undergone a kind of transformation. I would, in the darkness by my window, focus beginning to fray, think back on the chain of events that had put me where I was, back in the obsessive rhythms of the early days. What if, I wondered, I had been duped? What if the third letter had been intended to produce THAT VERY EFFECT. What if it had been intended to recommit me, put me back there in that very spot? Of course, in order to make sense of why they might dupe me, one would need to have an inkling into why my anonymous admirer — if indeed they admired me at all — would want me committed to my spying, that is my peeping, that is MY VIGIL.
Several reasons presented themselves over the course of my cogitations. Firstly, that I was being set up: by encouraging me, even obliquely, to return to my observations, by encouraging me, even obliquely, to return to my vigils, to extend and intensify them (which was indeed what had happened as a result of my redoubled motivation), I allowed myself to be manipulated and positioned for capture. Yes, it would have to be capture, a step beyond even notice. I would have to be seen and be caught spying, caught in the act of my perversion. Perhaps they imagined I was not prudent enough of character to take precautions were I to throw myself wholeheartedly back into my watching. They might have thought I had grown sloppy, liable to slips, to taking shortcuts I wouldn’t have taken in the early days, the kind of half-measures that only come about through comfort and familiarity. And that — by which I mean my comfort in the role of voyeur — bolstered by a certain reckless enthusiasm, would result in my apprehension. The reason why they — why anybody — might want to see me apprehended is simple: they want to see me suffer. Either through a public humiliation, or something worse.
And, of course, the corollary of being caught would be the inevitable loss (a further element to compound my suffering). My mind reeled with thoughts of Their possible reactions, from the most benign — taking more care with the closing of the shutters, installing permanently drawn blinds, keeping a look-out for me every time they passed a window — to the more extreme: boarding up the windows, emptying and locking the rooms into which I could see, abandoning the apartment. All seem eminently possible in the my most catastrophizing of fantasies.
And that is to say nothing of the nightmare of being required, compelled — even forced — to leave my own apartment (the family home!), which occurred to me as the worst possible consequence the most public kind of apprehension could bring about, whether due to irate neighbours banging on my door, the scorn and despisement of the wider neighbourhood, the involvement of the police, stories in the press about the Montparnasse Peeper — or whatever the filthy hacks would christen me! — etcetera!!
If not a set-up, other, no less fearsome possibilities came to mind. Yes, they, the anonymous writer of the letter, wanted me to be more present in vigil, but not so that I would be caught but rather so I might catch, bear witness. Yes, something frightful planned — a murder, say, or rape — which I was expected to attend at distance, to see — to see the OUTRAGE of! — with no way to intervene. This, I felt certain, was part of their perversion, the letter writer’s, the brutish, violent criminal who not only planned to enact a horror, but would take pleasure in the knowledge that he was being seen …
The depravity of the man would know no bounds, his appetites no limits. Rape and bloody murder, the desecration of the corpses. I felt as though I could taste the blood spilt on the air so (briefly) convinced have I been that the entire operation, from the time the family first moved in to the moments in which premonitions of his atrocities — the pummelled bodies of the children, the gore, the filth, the rutting among guts and severed limbs, the moans, the moans, the moaning —, had all been elements of his design, and going further back, even: my decision to stay here, the circumstances which have led to me living as I do, living here alone, my alienation from what remains of my family, my solitude, my loneliness, the losses — every one of them — each and every aspect of who I now am a function of my unwitting conscription into the coming to fruition of his demonic plan. There have been moments in which such hellacious conspiracies have not seemed beyond reason.
What else? That if I were not to bear witness to some grotesque form of violence, that I was to be made suffer by bearing witness of another kind. Perhaps, I have thought, the writer of the letters is her lover, and plans to fuck her in the window in full view, and for me, about whom he apparently knows so much, to have to see that, watch that, see him have his way; forced to watch the pleasure she would take, to see her give herself over to him in ways I could never have imagined she would. More than the kink of being watched, he would do it knowing the pain such a show would inflict, how I would suffer to see his delight at the bodily exploitation of someone I have come to love.
And why a lover even? Would it not be worse if it were the Husband who wanted to ensure my audience? — and worse still if he was doing it with her connivance! Not only to exhaust themselves in love making, outstripping any fantasies I might have harboured for myself, but luxuriating — TOGETHER — in a passion I have been denied, and has always been denied me, and is beyond me, and is impossible for me to comprehend.
This conceived of, the notion of manipulation by the couple, was refined over several days to the point where it was no longer even necessary to see them making love, or even witness their happiness. Simply being in the vicinity of their lives, their banal and contented life together, conscious of their ordinary routines, their gripes, the complications they faced, and which together they would overcome; the brief moments of respite, their brief moments of reflection: it was the finest of tortures and the most acute, fractal in each instance of my being present, a complete inhumation of my own life as a means of delighting further in their own. I would stand at the window and watch them, and watch their family grow, watch their children grow, see them turn middle-aged, see the children leave, see them return with grandchildren in their arms, watch the couple grow old, and I would waste what of life I could have called my own in envy of their mundane existence. I, found a pile of dust and bones collected beneath the window.
