Chapter 14

Then, inevitably, the anonymous women in your imagination begin to acquire your wife's face. You picture her standing beneath the red lights in the dress she wore to dinner last weekend, looking bewildered by the grotesque surroundings. You imagine her turning toward you as Mangler Max approaches, searching your eyes.

You hear yourself telling her that everything is perfectly safe as the enormous figure takes her by the arm. She looks back at you with a nervous smile that gradually disappears. At first, she allows herself to be led forward, glancing around at the spectators with an expression of embarrassment. Then Max's enormous gloved hand tightens around her throat, and she instinctively tries to pull away.

He does not release her. Instead, he turns her toward the audience, displaying her as though she were some prize he has claimed. She stiffens beneath his touch, and you imagine the sickening realization dawning upon her that this monstrous stranger is not asking for her cooperation. Your wife attempts another nervous laugh, but it dies when Max forces her to her knees with a sudden, brutal movement.

The spectators remain silent, watching as she struggles to regain her footing, only to discover that his grip is immovable. She looks toward you again, no longer smiling, her expression caught between disbelief and growing panic. You imagine her waiting for you to laugh and reveal the joke, to call out that the performance has gone far enough, but you remain frozen among the spectators as Max slowly turns his featureless mask toward you, almost as though he is daring you to object.

You imagine her protesting, demanding to know what is happening, and then calling your name when nobody answers. The thought of her, genuinely terrified, makes your stomach tighten, yet you cannot prevent the scene from continuing. You imagine the dreadful moment when she realizes that you do not know how to stop what you have set in motion.

Your thoughts grow darker as you consider what might happen if Max refuses to release her. You picture yourself struggling against attendants while your wife is taken violently. You imagine the spectators returning to their drinks. Perhaps they laugh at your panic, reminding you that you came precisely because you wanted to see how far Mangler Max would go. You imagine watching the minutes pass while every terrible possibility becomes more vivid.

You try to dismiss these images, but your imagination has acquired a momentum of its own. You picture returning home together in silence, your wife sitting beside you in the car without speaking, her face turned toward the darkened window. You imagine reaching for her hand and feeling her withdraw it.

You imagine the bedroom you have shared for years becoming a place of unbearable distance, every familiar gesture poisoned by the memory of that night. Perhaps she would leave you. Perhaps she would remain, and the punishment would be worse because you would have to witness the slow destruction of her trust.

You begin to understand how Mangler Max might ruin a marriage without ever setting foot inside the couple's home. He would have only to give the wife a memory she could not escape and the husband a sin from which he could never be redeemed. Yet the most disturbing realization is that these possibilities have not extinguished your fascination or arousal.

You are horrified by the thought of your wife suffering. Nevertheless, you continue imagining the scene, returning again and again to the instant before everything goes wrong, when Max stands before her and the outcome remains unknown. You wonder what terrible secret lies beyond that moment, what the husbands witnessed, and what their wives endured that left so many accounts unfinished.

You recognize that your desire to know has become dangerously entangled with the fear of discovering the answer. Somewhere in the darkness of your imagination, Mangler Max is still waiting, and the woman standing before him, like a piece of meat on a butcher's block, is no longer a stranger.