Ugly Behavior (17 page)

The music in the restaurant was high-pitched, discordant. For some
time Jane had intended to eat here—it was only a few blocks from her
apartment building. Now she was sorry she’d ever stepped foot in the place, but
lacked the will to turn around and leave. What would people think if she did
such a thing? People smiled at her, their eyes reddened by the harsh, crimson
neon that was a major component of the decor, neon in primary greens and blues
casting mutant shadows around their hunched forms. Some colors might have been
surgically removed from the spectrum here: yellow, orange, other tones she
couldn’t quite put her finger on, making flesh tones darker than they should
be, shadows deeper, the air thicker. The acoustics in the restaurant could not
have been more harsh. A loud, screaming song under laid with raspy, asthmatic
whispering filled her head. She kept smiling, as if to distract her face’s need
to wince from the pain.
 

She sat where the blank-faced host directed her, only his teeth
gleaming in his dark blue and green face. He led her through a series of
patios, past several sets of sliding doors with knifelike edges. Her silverware
looked wrong, as if designed for a slightly different species of human being.
She sorted through the silverware looking for familiar instruments as the music
rose to a bleeding screech in the background.

Bright red and green clouds of light descended around the table.
Softer whispers swarmed out of the night, drawn into the bright colors. A man
in a dapper dark suit rose at a table a few feet away and began making his way
toward her. Nearing her, he looked down and smiled. He leaned over. And stole
the knife from beside her plate, slipping it into his coat pocket. She was too
shocked and embarrassed to say anything. He grinned a sharp-toothed grin and
leaned closer. She imagined she could smell the blood welling to the surface of
his warm, pink tongue. He clicked his teeth as if he was going to bite her. Her
teeth sawed on the inner surface of her lower lip. His tongue was like a
snake’s. Her face suffused with heat so quickly she thought she might faint.
She closed her eyes. And felt the caress of a blade gliding up her upper arm
and slipping just under the edge of her short sleeve, pausing there to tease
before turning and gliding out again. She did not realize he had cut her until
the sharp stinging began that snatched her breath away. When she opened her
eyes again, the man was gone.

In the car Maxwell fingered the edge of the table knife. A session
with the whetstone would make it much keener. He brought it up to his nose and
sniffed: the rusty bouquet of blood, mingled with perfume reminiscent of
lilacs, and a heady, day-old sweat. This was his first gift from her, but he
knew there would be many others. And he had many gifts for her as well. She was
so naive, so… uninformed. She did not know, yet, that human bodies were
thin-walled, fragile, prone to leaks, vulnerable to even the mildest prick from
earrings, the rough edge of a necklace, the awkward slip of a comb. A few cuts
across the eyeballs would make her see the things she always ignored.

He waited until she left the restaurant, then followed her to her
building. The angular trees outside the entrance provided him with cover while
he observed which of the mailboxes just inside the door she opened for her
mail. A quick peek at the box after she’d gone upstairs, and he knew her exact
name and address.

Jane worked as an entry-level secretary in a large corporate law
office downtown. It was a job which did little to alter her basic anxiety at
being in the world. People were so demanding there, so difficult to satisfy.
Every day she felt like more of a failure, less able to please the people she
worked for and the people she worked with. She didn’t understand what they
wanted from her. She didn’t know what she had to do to get them to like her.

She might have enjoyed her job more if it hadn’t been for all the
paper cuts she kept getting,
criss-crossing
her fingertips
in delicate, almost beautiful patterns. Their number increased with her
fatigue, certainly, but there were days in which sharp edges seemed intent on
her, lying in wait on tabletops, in letter trays, and in her desk drawers.

“Jane! Watch out!”

Jane screamed once in shock and pain. The dangling earring on her
left side had caught in the file drawer, pulled through the hole, ripped
through the ear. The file room went dark, highlighted in shades of red.

Someone had put a pillow under her head. The whispers of her
co-workers grew harsh and garbled above her. They seemed to rise and fall in
volume with her pain, eventually blending into an overwhelming,
physically-based melody.

A man in a bright blue coat crouched over her. His smile was too
broad and thin to be natural. She was embarrassed to have him see her like
this. She worried about her dress, her hair. He held up a syringe as if
measuring it with his eyes.

As if on its own, the needle reached out and pricked her.

The needle was so thin it became invisible as it entered her
flesh. If all edges were so very sharp, perhaps she wouldn’t have minded. She
wondered with the pleasant vagueness of dream if sunlight had such a super
normally sharp edge, if, in fact, it stabbed you to release your darker colors.

She fantasized asking one of her friends in the office to drive
her home, but then realized she didn’t have any friends.

At home she lay back into her pillows and stared out the window
which pressed against the side of her bed. Her ear was covered by a small oval
bandage like a cap. These clear glass panes were her only safe windows to the
world. And yet, if they were to break she’d surely slash her throat on their
edges.

Altogether the room felt less safe than at any time she could
remember. Shadows in the room seemed somehow keener than they should have been,
even when cast by soft, rounded objects such as pillows and bed corners. She
dozed off and on, and every time she opened her eyes the room felt
sharper-edged. The surfaces of the pillows were dusty, grittier with each new
awakening. She turned her head: angular edges of ceiling littered their
primary-colored cases. She glanced up: cracks in the ceiling, edges peeling,
falling.

A hard, rhythmic scraping was working its way through the bed and
into successive layers of her skin. She glanced down at her hands: her fingers
frustrated, attempting to rip the sheets with her chewed-away nails.

The sudden screech of the doorbell cut through the thick bedroom
air. She staggered into her robe and down the stairs. Her ear felt wet, as if
it had started bleeding again, but when she raised her hand to the stiff
bandage her fingers came away dry.
 

She became acutely aware of small details as she passed through
her apartment: the triangular pattern on the dishes, the swirling topography
left by the vacuum in the rug, the colored bits in a Teddy Bear’s glass eye.
After a long day away she focused on such things with every return trip to her
apartment, but this afternoon they seemed to be demanding increased attention.

On the other side of the door was a man in a cap, a bundle in his
arms. The peephole brought her a reassuring slice of him: bland, sunshiny,
smiling face, a florist’s symbol on the cap, a bundle of flowers in his hand.
She opened the door a minimal amount. “Miss Jane Akers?” She nodded; she took
the flowers.

It was after she closed the door firmly behind her that she felt
the pricking around the stems, and discovered that sharp wire bound the flower
arrangement together, short sections of it twisted together as on a barbed-wire
fence. Her fingers grew sticky where they’d been punctured; juice from the
stems made them sting. There was no card.

She thought she heard a throaty whispering in the apartment which
disappeared every time she tried to focus on it. But for several weeks there
had been a continuous thread of barely-detectable whispering, murmured beneath
taped music, within the background static of phone conversations, between the
lines of television commercials, so to hear it today, after so much trauma,
should not have been surprising.

She didn’t want the flowers—she despised them. But she
couldn’t just throw them in the trash. You weren’t supposed to throw flowers
away; you were supposed to put them in water. So she did. She wondered if the
barbed wire would rust. Feeling she could not stay here another minute, she got
on her coat and opened the door, intent on walking out of her anxiety.

Maxwell watched the florist’s van pull away from the front of her
apartment building. It had been easy enough to find a young man eager to make
the extra money, without asking embarrassing questions. Maxwell had stood by
the outside door and witnessed the entire transaction, and had been touched by
the way she’d pulled the flowers into her arms so desperately, as if starved
for affection. It made him love her even more.

She was shy, yet eager for love—he could sense this about
her. She was his discovery. He was sure he could make contact with a woman like
this—he was convinced she was reachable, unlike so many other women who
frightened him. He could make contact—if not with his heart, then with
his knife.

Now she was leaving the building, walking briskly down the street,
her chin pushed forward as if in defiance. He smiled and checked the Polaroid
camera on the seat beside him, the extra film cartridges in the box beside it.
He started the car.

Jane had no particular destination in mind, but she would know
where she was going when she got there. She stared at the far away trees, the
gray outlines of buildings reaching into the dark city mists. On the face of a
distant tower, giant clock hands sliced through the misty air, releasing its
toll like a damp explosion.

She passed a black metal fence, its vertical bars spinning by her
like film frames. The sharp points along the top of the wrought iron leaned in
her direction, aiming at her soft flesh.

People lounged along the edges of the sidewalk and on the grassy
verge of the park spreading out in front of her. Were they waiting for her?
Their noses showed the sharp profile of cartilage. Their jaws were blades,
their chins the points. They stared at her with their thin, sharp smiles. She
wanted to say something that would make them like her, but she didn’t know the
right words.

A lizard crawled out of the grass directly in front of her, as if
to divert her attention. She thought of stepping on its back, shuddered, and
moved away from it.

At the north gate of the park a man had set up a table and was
selling brushes and combs. A succession of combs lined a tray covered with
black velvet. He grinned at her as he brushed his fingers across their fine
teeth. “A lovely comb for the lovely lady?”

He scared her, but it would be rude to hurry past. “They’re so
pretty,” she said, looking down at the pitiful selection. “How much is that one?”
she asked, pointing to the cleanest looking one.

“For you, a buck.”

She gave him a dollar at the end of trembling fingers. He touched
the dollar, but then his whole hand moved up to clutch her arm. “Such a pretty
girl.” She smiled nervously, on the verge of tears. She wanted to scream, but
what if he was really nice? He bent down and kissed her fingers with lips that
felt slick and oily. “Have a nice day,” he said, letting go of her arm and
handing her the comb. She made herself smile again, then walked away, rubbing
the back of her hand on her coat, trying to wipe away the feel of his lips.

She approached a row of storefronts. Soft explosions of brilliant
light occurred behind her, but when she turned around there was nothing there.
She looked up at the sky: dark clouds were piling one atop the other, their
edges rubbed shiny where lightning had gathered.

She looked into the window of a hardware store: an axe, shovel,
shears. Then several clothing boutiques: black gloves, black lace. Sexless
beings dressed completely in black: hats, gloves, black leather coats.

She imagined she could hear the sounds of zippers snagging flesh
from deep inside these shops, the customers weeping softly.
  

She was vaguely aware of someone taking photos of her, but when
she turned around no one was there.

She had to step over an old man in dark glasses, lying with his
german
shepherd, both of them sprawled across the middle of
the sidewalk. The old man’s cane came up, pointing at her like an arrow. The
dog turned and bared its teeth, then lunged for the pasty flesh of the man’s
wrinkled hand. The man yelled. Blood sprayed in a mist across the sidewalk.

She looked past the wounded man at another man standing in a
doorway. His damp lips and glistening eyes, watching her. His hands clutching,
as if they held the stolen table knife. But she knew this wasn’t the same man.

Thunder crashed behind her. For a second the city skyline appeared
to be on fire, a giant camera scorching it as picture after picture was taken.
Rain began, then suddenly became a downpour.

Even through the heavy rain she could see them all staring at her.
Jane found sanctuary beneath a large store awning. On the other side of the
glass, an elderly woman was cutting shapes out of black paper, demonstrating
silhouette portraiture. Jane thought she recognized the profile the old woman
was working on as her own.