On Halloween, Samantha insisted to Sam that the “white girl inside of her” wanted two things: to go trick-or-treating, and pumpkin-spice beers. Samantha was white, so to say there was a “white girl inside of her” was redundant, and Sam told her so. Samantha said he was being sexist, and her eyes began to overflow. Sam sighed as loudly as he possibly could, and looked at the floor as if it had gotten him into this predicament.The radiator was weeping water onto the hardwood floors of their duplex in Worcester.

Costumes were for children, he insisted, and adults who dressed up like children remained children. It was a form of pretending, akin to a belief in Santa Claus. Samantha told him something she had read on Instagram: all the world was a big stage, and everyone was an actor, like Mark Wahlberg or Meg Ryan, and there was a movie being filmed. Halloween was just like that, she said, a chance for everyone, once a year, to be Mark Wahlberg or Meg Ryan.

“I will not march around in a costume!” Sam yelled.

“I won’t be yelled at! I will leave you if I have to!” Then she lay face-down on the floor and began to cry. The threat of abandonment triggered Sam’s bowels, and he ran for the bathroom, airing expletives to cover his flatulent exit.

 He had increasingly found himself running away from social situations and towards a bathroom. Though he could not say so to Samantha, he worried that he had cancer. He worried that he would be a victim of a prolapsed rectum. A nurse, she had commented that he was “going to the bathroom too much” and “ought to see a doctor.” Sam had countered with dignity that he “knew how to go to the bathroom.”

He tried to gather himself on the toilet. If she left him, then he would be left. Afterward he would be alone, and that would mean there would be no one around. The terror he was feeling, he reassured himself, was temporary, a blip on the cosmic space-time spectrum, as was he. As was Samantha. She didn’t care for him, but no one cared for anyone else. Not only would he die alone, clutching his own chest, so would everyone else.

Somehow Sam did not feel reassured. 

The one therapist he had seen for two sessions five years ago told him that his fear of abandonment went all the way back to his childhood, to the time when his mother had fallen from a ski lift to her death, her little legs wobbling out of the snow like newly sprung saplings. Sam had thought this was patently ridiculous, of course, as seeing his mother die had not made him afraid of abandonment, it had made him afraid of heights and chairlifts. He thought of the ski lodge, the chatter, the warmth of the fire. The EMT had promised that his mother was up there, watching over him, alongside all the other people “who had died on this mountain.” He used to dream when he was younger that her ghost followed him everywhere, weeping.

Directly across from the toilet was a framed sign that Samantha had bought at a TJ Maxx that said “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” Though he would never admit it to Samantha, he had come to depend upon her exhortations to wake up in the morning. He’d lost his job selling health insurance for calling a rude client a bitch, and his prospects beyond Samantha were not good. He was ugly, and he had been too ugly for other women before. He had a squashed pumpkin for a face. While both Sam and Samantha had gotten quite a bit larger in the course of their relationship, Sam had definitely packed on more pounds.

He was self-aware, as he liked to remind himself, and that meant deep down he was a good person. But it wasn’t enough to be a nice guy anymore. Samantha wanted more: she wanted him to “take initiative” and “provide” and “do the dishes three times a week,” when Sam was not sure most days if he would even make it out of the bedroom.

He tried to be contrite once he came out of the bathroom. He called their argument “symbolic of her—our—difficulties” and “totally my bad.” He even promised to get into the spirit of things. Samantha asked him to promise not to get too drunk tonight, and Sam even assented to that.

Samantha then demanded he go as Super Mario. Insulted that she would try to pick his costume, he suggested he instead go as a taco, or that they go as a marimba band.

“Naughty, sweetie, not racist.”

Sam tried one last thing.

He had read that morning on the news that several young women had disappeared in the suburbs the last few nights. There was even a suspect: a middle-aged white man named Richard Mites, a local schizophrenic who had recently run off into the woods, according to his mother, as the news anchor put it. “We suspect Richard fled into the woods in order to kidnap women,” a husky detective mumbled during the press conference. When a reporter asked how he knew that, the police officer said “In my experience, it’s usually the guy in the woods.”

Sam laid it on thick: authorities said the man had been sighted in the same wooded area the missing girls had gone camping! How could Samantha go out on a night like this?

Samantha accused him of “making a crockery of her favorite holiday,” so Sam heaved a dramatic sigh and drew a mustache on with a marker and had several more beers. As he drank, he imagined telling Samantha to go screw, abandoning her, and then the tape kept playing forward: drinking alone, in a basement apartment somewhere. He would have to get a cat, for companionship, but it would be one of those cats that was totally aloof. He would die early of a heart attack, or drink himself to death.

He found he was drinking at a pace that surprised even him. His mood improved slightly. Samantha made quesadillas. It was nearly seven o’clock. He was counting his beers, which meant he was in control. Samantha was shouting across the kitchen island into the living room about things Sam couldn’t pretend to care about, like her job and her family. She was a suicidal nurse, though she certainly would not have described herself that way. She had been a psychiatric nurse and now she was working in a burn unit, which, she chuckled, was “burning her out.” Sam began to drink more aggressively. He stopped remembering.

 

His consciousness found him again in the dark. He was lying on his back. Samantha was sitting next to him. He recognized the gravelly sonority of her labored mouth breathing. Sam did not remember getting dressed as Mario, but he could see he was wearing suspenders and red clothing when he opened his eyes, which he only did very briefly, because when he did he felt like vomiting.

He sat up and vomited, mostly avoiding soiling his own person. He found he felt a little better. He looked around. A graveyard. The grave next to him said Sgt. Sam “Saltlick” Williams, 1918-1975. He looked at Samantha. She had procured herself a hot dog costume, which struck Sam as sexually provocative, and he said so.

“Aren’t hot dogs a little, you know, phallacious?” Sam asked, the words rolling out of his mouth like marbles.

“I’m a Halloweenie.”

“I hate you,” he said under his breath, but just loud enough that he hoped she would hear him.

But she did not. They were next to an unfamiliar street lined with sagging Victorians. The smell of must rolled off the graveyard, reaching even Sam’s occluded olfactory. A child somewhere screamed. A parent yelled. A dog barked. Sam belched and felt a twinge in his gut. The loam beneath him was wet and had gone all the way through his overalls.

He slipped in and out of consciousness. They were walking toward a house. It was dark. He felt intense hunger, felt around in his pockets, and found quite a lot of candy. He ate some. He was leaning on Samantha. Samantha, laboring under Sam’s drunken heft, was talking about a patient who had told her that he thought she looked like she had a “fat clitoris underneath it all.” Sam tuned her out to focus on his walking, because he was struggling to put one foot in front of the other.

She said that while she was very offended by the man’s remark, she could not hold it against him, as he came from another era. She looked to see if he was listening, and when she could see he was not, she thought of all the Xanax crouching in her mirror cabinet.

Sam stepped onto the porch and slipped on something soft. He fell hard, backwards, and hit his head. He was so drunk it didn’t even really hurt, but some nearby, stifled laughter registered on his Richter scale.

“Hey!” Sam yelled, standing up and looking around wildly. His shoe felt squishy. He hopped around trying to hold it up to smell it, and finally discovered shit of unknown provenance.

There were the kids, three or four of them, right there, running away.

“What are you, a gay plumber?” one of them screamed.

“Why did you do this to me?” Sam asked, turning on Samantha.

“I just don’t know,” she said ominously, which seemed to Sam an answer to a question he had not asked. He could see even through the film of his drunken torpor that what she’d said was both an answer to his question and to one she’d posed in the privacy of her own mind. Sam’s bowels began to churn like the Cape of Good Hope.

He started walking without speaking to Samantha. They turned up onto a hill. Samantha asked him to slow down. As they climbed, the street became more and more sparsely populated and the trick-or-treaters disappeared. He needed to find a place to go, and quickly. Empty lots with disused garbage cans and tires resting among chest-high weeds. He imagined squatting over one of them. He did not know this part of town at all. Sam figured if he had to, he could sprint off into one of the houses with some excuse.

Then, down the block, he saw a house that looked totally abandoned. A Victorian with a sagging porch. Samantha would not want to go in, and he would not have to ask anyone to use the bathroom. It was perfect. The yard was full of weeds and tires and other trash. He picked up his pace, and Samantha asked if something was wrong. A tricycle crystallized among the weeds. A deflated volleyball. A miniature plastic Hess truck. Sam set off at a run. As he got closer, he saw half a flag fluttering on the gable. Paint was missing in huge chunks. A taped-over window.

“Wait! Maybe we should go back,” Samantha said, catching up and breathing heavily.  “I don’t want to go into that house.”

He went up the steps and knocked hard on the door, which rattled a little. A cloud of dust rose on the porch around him. Sam pushed on and through.

The house was empty. Flipping a switch did nothing. Sam found a bathroom and sat down on a rickety toilet only to find he’d already evacuated into his cover-alls. Cursing, he pulled them back up and wrestled with the straps. When he had secured them, he stepped out into the hallway.

He did not fall all the way through the floor. In fact both of his legs fell through, but he ended up supported by a beam that slammed into his crotch. Tremendous pain went racing up and down his torso. He felt a sharp stabbing in his inner thigh where it felt like a nail had punched through.

Samantha, who had been looking at TikToks with the hashtag “#NurseswithBorderlinePersonalities,” was waiting outside and shivering, and came in to find him groaning. She was disappointed. She had been thinking about how her two options were to kill herself or leave him, and now she would not be able to do either tonight. Sam, who had not seen Samantha enter yet, yelled hoarsely for help.

“Oh my god, Sam,” she said. She pulled her phone back out of her pocket and turned on the screen. A nurse on TikTok said “whenever I feel like screaming at a hospice patient” before Samantha flipped away in order to call an ambulance.

“What are you doing?” Sam said. “Don’t call anybody. This is just a situation.”

“But you screamed.”

“I can climb out. I’ll be ready any minute now.”

Sam was not as sure as he tried to sound. In fact, the pain in his leg was getting worse. His thigh felt warm and numb at the same time. Every time he tried to move, pain raced up and down his leg.

“I’m calling,” she said, stepping outside. He was like one of her male patients, saying he could go to the bathroom himself, and then evacuating all over the floor so someone else had to clean up for him. A line from one of the TikToks came to her: Why were they called patients when they were anything but? She was the patient one, and she was sick of being patient.

When the ambulance arrived, fright seemed to have sobered Sam some. Samantha went out to talk to them for a minute. The two EMTs and her walked in just as Sam was in the middle of trying to push himself up and out with his arms. He cried out again.

“Sir,” one of the EMTs said, “we’re going to need to foist you. Is it okay if we foist you?” She was shorter than Sam, but muscled and serious, with a crew cut.

“Are you Mario?” the other EMT asked.

“I didn’t consent to any of this! She called you, not me.”

“Sam,” Samantha said. “Let the technicians foist you.”

“I don’t want any fucking doctors.”

“We’re not doctors,” the muscled, small EMT continued. “Your girlfriend here says you cried out in pain. Can you tell me about what’s going on down there?”

Sam panicked. What if they took off his pants and found out what he’d done? He couldn’t afford an ambulance ride.

“Sir, I know you’re terrified. Tell me about what’s going on with your legs.”

The other EMT, a tall, wiry man with a cowboy mustache, was tapping his foot. “You’re gonna let us foist you,” he said. “It’s that or you sit there on your hobby horse for the rest of the night.”

“Matt, don’t talk to him like that, for God’s sake, or I’m going to go to the supervisor.”

“What, Pat? What did I say?” Matt asked.

“Look, sir,” Pat said, ignoring Matt. “We don’t like to leave people like this, and not just for liability reasons. It weighs on us. I don’t want to spend the rest of the night wondering why the head and torso on St. John’s Street was in so much pain. We want to help.”

Sam felt a rush of gratitude, which he immediately suppressed.

“This is just a situation.” He tried to look away, but he could not twist his torso. Samantha put her face in her hands and began to cry. Pat sighed loudly.

They came back with several forms indicating that Sam had refused service. Sam signed them, wincing all along. His legs had both gone numb. When the EMTS had left, Samantha crossed her arms and gathered her courage.

“I don’t know if this is going to work anymore.”

“It’s okay, I just need some leverage. Can you look around for some rope? I’m thinking you tie it around my neck . . . or maybe my waist . . . and then when you pull, I’ll be able to foist myself.”

“I’m talking about the relationship. I’m going crazy.”

“Right now, you’re doing this? You bitch.”

Samantha began to cry again. She dropped her head and her hair fell over her face.

“You bitch,” Sam said again. “Not like this. You cunt.”

She snorted up the mess in her nose and spat a heavy glob at him which barely made it out of her mouth. It dribbled over her costume and landed on the floorboards, in front of her. She turned and left.

She went all the way home crying. She climbed the stairs into their apartment and clambered into bed and pulled the covers over her head. When the tears stopped, some other feeling she could not name at first rushed in to take the place of sadness. She heard rain pattering on the window and pulled the covers off in order to look at it. She recognized the feeling as freedom. She realized she hadn’t thought of the Xanax crouching in the cupboard that whole time she was coming home.

Then, a wave of guilt crested. She wondered if she ought to call another ambulance, or go back to Sam, but she had put her phone on her desk across the room. A whole night alone in that house, in pain. He probably hadn’t even had his tetanus shots. Maybe he didn’t deserve tetanus. Maybe he deserved a night alone in that house, but not tetanus. Regardless, she had a shift tomorrow full of burn victims, twelve hours of bandage-changing and moaning. She needed sleep. With reluctance, she got back out of bed and got on her phone. She dialed 911 and hovered her finger over the call button.

She imagined a night in the hospital, Sam whining the whole time that she’d abandoned him to die. The thought enraged her, but the rage burned less hot this time, and almost immediately faded. When it had, she was very tired.

She began to get sleepy and climbed back into bed with the phone, telling herself she would call an ambulance once she’d shut her eyes for a little while. And what was the point anyway? They would just tell her they’d already sent an ambulance. They would say, we were told we were not wanted.

 

Sam waited in the dark for Samantha to come back. He called out to her. He apologized. He said he’d been frustrated and lost control. That he hadn’t meant to hurt her. She was right outside the door, he knew it, just waiting for him to say the right thing.

He thought of his mother, with her legs in the air. Broken matchsticks. When the officer had brought him the hot cocoa and told him his mother was dead, he had not believed him. Then the man had asked him if he had pushed his mother, by chance. Sam burned his tongue, and the officer had to take him out of the lodge’s main room because his crying was disturbing the ski lodge patrons. If Samantha came back to him, he’d tell her all about that day. He would emphasize how he hadn’t been able to get to her because the ski lift had been carrying him away. He’d tell her how he’d had to identify her body. He’d say her head had lolled to the side while he was in the cold morgue room with her.

This traumatic experience, he would tell Samantha, changed me. He would see a doctor, and a psychiatrist. I am grateful that I am alive, he would tell her, I am grateful to be with you. As he imagined giving her this speech, he began to believe it himself. He was a good man, capable of more. He was capable of so much he couldn’t even articulate what he was capable of.

If she would just come back, he would tell her. He called out some more. He wiggled and began to bounce up and down a little, to try to get himself free. He shouted as if she were right outside the door. He screamed for her, starting to really be afraid. She had abandoned him, she really had. He had not wanted to go trick or treating, he had not wanted to go skiing. He told her that she was a terrible nurse and that the reason her patients were rude to her was because she was bad at her job, and he didn’t need her or anyone else. Even if those dumb doctors had foisted him, Samantha would have never been able to forget the sight of him squatting there on the beam, totally emasculated. She would leave him and tell her friends about the idiot she’d once dated who mutilated his testicles falling through a floor on Halloween.

 He beat his hands on the floor in rage, and dust went up around him again, and he heaved himself up with all the strength he could gather. For a second he thought he was going to make it, but then he fell backwards again, the rotting beam he was on crumbled, and he fell into the basement. On his way down, a jutting nail passed through his neck and punctured an artery.

He coughed as blood entered his windpipe. The scrabbling of upset rats. A warm rushing down his neck. They will find me in this stupid costume, he thought, and then the pain again, and Sam, exhausted with fear and pain, passed out.

When he’d stopped moving, the mice in the basement around him approached with caution. They waited some time for him to move, but he did not. Finally they sniffed him and went through his pockets, found his candy, and began to work at the plastic with their teeth to get at the chocolate. Others went to the edge of the pool of blood that had formed around his head and began to sniff.