A Chilling Cold

The Raddison Ballroom overflows with grey-haired men in classic black tuxedos who, swirling and twirling coiffed companions, create a blur of satin and silk jewel tones. It’s the annual Dance Club Holiday Ball and no expense has been spared.

Couples swing past tables laden with large shrimp, succulent roast beef, mutton, towering red, white and green cakes, spiked, cinnamon eggnog. Sweat mingles with activated perfume.

You wave and waltz with your bewitching wife of 38 years, spinning her into a continuous pivot, intent on making those turquoise eyes sparkle. She is never more lovely than on the dance floor. You know you are the luckiest man in the room, as she turns heads in your direction.

Savoring this, you find yourself in a slow, rigid fall backwards towards the marble floor. You try to bend at the waist, to collapse your knees, anything, to soften the fall. But your body doesn't respond. The back of your head smashes into polished rock with an explosion that sends stars across your eyelids, like a Beetle Bailey cartoon. You would laugh but you fear you are dead.

How can this be? Two months ago you had a thorough physical, enabling your insurance company to up your wife’s payout. You are an exceptionally healthy man of 60, the report enthused. The Company approved an increased death benefit: double the original payout.

Foul play, they now cry.

Enter their sleuth. She appears mousey, as women in this profession do. You don’t generally stereotype. You are religious. Just imagine dishwater blond hair in that greasy, straight mode; not sexy; some refrigerator salesman’s wife, working because she has to. Your wife deserves better, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s focused on the autopsy.

You know the autopsy isn’t going to explain a thing. This is an inside job. Your employment was seedier than her imagination. Engineers are bottom feeders.

Where to begin?

Was it mere coincidence your head smashed to chards mere hours after your top secret Saturday briefing at corporate headquarters? East Berlin agents from the mid-l960s joined you for a lunch of potato salad, brats and Dortmunder Gold. Some were happy to see you, and you them. Others spat tight-jawed Guten Tags like daggers racking your high cheek bones.

And your wife! Of course you would never suspect her. Though she did have most to gain. But no, never your wife. Though she claimed she hadn’t time to prepare dinner and for the first time, served you one of those god-awful tv dinners, urging you to eat fast, you didn’t wish to be late. She knew high sodium and fat acerbated your family history of heart attacks. Nah, couldn’t be her.

There are those in the Dance Club who wanted to bring him down. Men with lusting eyes focused on his wife. Women who would kill for his wife’s infamous ginger cookie recipe. Or a chance to see her suffer. The world can be a menacing space.

You always had a bad feeling about Harry Vanachek, for example. The guy was competitive on the dance floor, three-stepping during a two-step, double-hop polkaing during an obvious schottische. Drooling as your wife moved in and out of spins and turns, graceful as a chess pawn.

What was it Herr Heinrich suggested at the office in Hanau? You loved to quote it. Neitsche, right?

“If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

You hadn’t meant to kill innocent Cambodians and children with cluster munitions. It was a government contract. You believed if you designed them precisely, they would explore where intended. You hadn’t been to war. You didn’t understand battle fatigue nor desperation nor the kind of fear that left your bones cold.

Except now you did understand that deep, chilling cold. How could you have known? Was this retribution? Karma?