Willful Creatures

by Aimee Bender

  “Don’t you try that again,” warned the big man, head taking up the north wall of the cage entirely.

  “Please,” said the little man, whose eyes were no longer dewy but flat. “Sir. Have some pity.”

  The big man wrapped the little man up in masking tape, all over his body, so his feet couldn’t kick and there were only little holes for his mouth and his eyes. Then he put him in the refrigerator for an hour. When he came back the little man had fainted and the big man put him in the toaster oven, at very very low, for another ten minutes. Preheated. The little man revived after a day or two.

  “Please,” he said to the big man, word broken.

  The big man didn’t like the word please. He didn’t like politesse and he didn’t like people. Work had been dull and no one had noticed his new coat. He got himself a ticket to Paris with all the miles he’d accumulated on his credit card, but soon realized he could not speak a word of the language and was too afraid of accidentally eating veal brains to go. He did not want to ask the little man to translate for him as he did not want to hear the little man’s voice with an accent. The thought of it made him so angry. The ticket expired, unreturned. On the plane, a young woman stretched out on her seat and slept since no one showed up in the seat next to hers. At work, he asked out an attractive woman he had liked for years, and she ran away from him to tell her coworkers immediately. She never even said no; it was so obvious to her, she didn’t even have to say it.

  “Take off your clothes,” he told the little man that afternoon.

  The little man winced and the big man held up a bottle of shower cleanser as a threat. The little man stripped slowly, folded his clothing, and stood before the big man, his skin pale, his chest a matted grass of hair, his penis hiding, his lips trembling so slightly that only the most careful eye would notice.

  “Do something,” said the big man.

  The little man sat on the sofa. “What,” he said.

  “Get hard,” said the big man. “Show me what you look like.”

  The little man’s head was still sore from hitting the table leg; his brain had felt fuzzy and indistinct ever since he’d spent the hour in the refrigerator and then time in the toaster oven. He put his hand on his penis and there was a heavy sad flicker of pleasure and behind the absolute dullness of his mind, his body rose up to the order.

  The big man laughed and laughed at the erection of his little man, which was fine and true but so little! How funny to see this man as a man. He pointed and laughed. The little man stayed on the sofa and thought of his wife, who would go into the world and collect the bottle caps strewn on the ground from the big people and make them into trays; she’d spend hours upon hours filing down the sharp edges and then use metallic paint on the interior and they were the envy of all the little people around, so beautiful they were and so hearty. No one else had the patience to wear down those sharp corners. Sometimes she sold one and made a good wad of cash. The little man thought of those trays, trays upon trays, red, blue, and yellow, until he came in a small spurt, the orgasm pleasureless but thick with yearning.

  The big man stopped laughing.

  “What were you thinking about?” he said.

  The little man said nothing.

  “What’s your wife like?” he said.

  Nothing.

  “Take me to see her,” the big man said.

  The little man sat, naked, on the floor of his cage. He had changed by now. Cut off. He would have to come back, a long journey back. He’d left.

  “See who?” he asked.

  The big man snickered. “Your wife,” he said.

  The little man shook his head. He looked wearily at the big man. “I’m the end of this line for you,” he said.

  It was the longest sentence he’d said in weeks. The big man pushed the cage over and the little man hit the side of the sofa.

  “Yes!” howled the big man. “I want to see your children too. How I love children!”

  He opened the cage and took the little floral-print couch into his hand. The little man’s face was still and cold.

  “No,” he said, eyes closed.

  “I will torture you!” cried out the big man.

  The little man folded his hands under his cheek in a pillow. Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom. “No,” he whispered into his knuckles.

  With his breath clouding warmly over his hands, the little man waited, half dizzy, to be killed. He felt his death was terribly insignificant and a blip but he still did not look forward to being killed and he sent waves of love to his wife and his children, to the people who made him significant, to the ones who felt the blip.

  The big man played with the legs of the little armchair. He took off the pillow and found a few coins inside the crevices, coins so small he couldn’t even pick them up.

  He put his face close to the cage of his little man.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Four days later, he set the little man free. He treated him well for the four days, gave him good food and even a bath and some aspirin and a new pillow. He wanted to leave him with some positive memories and an overall good impression. After four days, he took the cage under his arm, opened the front door, and set it out on the sidewalk. Unlocked the cage door. The little man had been sleeping nonstop for days, with only a few lucid moments staring into the giant eye of the big man, but the sunlight soaked into him instantly, and he awoke. He exited the cage door. He waited for a bird to fly down and eat him. Not the worst death, he thought. Usually the little people used an oil rub that was repellent-smelling to birds and other animals, but all of that, over time, had been washed clean off him. He could see the hulking form of the big man to his right, squatting on his heels. The big man felt sad but not too sad. The little man had become boring. Now that he was less of a person, he was easier to get along with and less fun to play with. The little man tottered down the sidewalk, arms lifting oddly from his sides, as if he had wet hands or was covered in paint. He did not seem to recognize his own body.

  At the curb, he sat down. A small blue bus drove up, so small the big man wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking at foot level already. The little man got on. He had no money but the bus revved for a moment and then moved forward with the little man on it. He took a seat in the back and looked out the window at the street. All the little people around him could smell what had happened. They lived in fear of it every day. The newspapers were full of updates and new incidents. One older man with a trim white beard moved across the bus to sit next to the little man and gently put an arm on his shoulder. Together they watched the gray curbs passing by.

  On the lawn, the big man thought the bus was hilarious and walked next to it for a block. Even the tires rolled perfectly. He thought how if he wanted to, he could step on that bus and smush it. He did not know that the bus was equipped with spikes so sharp they would drive straight through a rubber sole, into the flesh of the foot. For a few blocks he held his foot over it, watching bus stops come up, signs as small as toothpicks, but then he felt tired and went to the corner and let the bus turn and sat down on the big blue plastic bus bench on his corner made for the big people.

  When his bus came, he took it. It was Saturday. He took it to the very end of the line. Here the streets were littered with trash, and purple mountains anchored the distance. Everything felt like it was closing in, and even the store signs seemed too bright and overwhelming. He instantly didn’t like it, this somewhere he had never been before, with a different smell, that of a sweeter flower and a more rustic bread. The next bus didn’t come for an hour so he began the steady walk home, eyes glued to the sidewalk.

  He just wanted to see where they lived. He just wanted to see their little houses and their pets and their schools. He wanted to see if they each had cars or if buses were the main form of transport. He hoped to spot a tiny airplane.

  “I don’t want to harm you!” he said out lou
d. “I just want to be a part of your society.”

  His eyes moved across grasses and squares of sidewalk. He’d always had excellent vision.

  “In exchange for seeing your village,” he said out loud, “I will protect you from us. I will guard your front gates like a watchdog!” He yelled it into the thorny shadows of hedges, down the gutter, into the wet heads of sprinklers.

  All he found was a tiny yellow hat with a ribbon, perched perfectly on the yellow petal of a rose. He held it for a good ten minutes, admiring the fine detail of the handiwork. There was embroidery all along the border. The rim of the hat was the size of the pad of his thumb. Everything about him felt disgusting and huge. Where are the tall people, the fatter people? he thought. Where are the aliens the size of God?

  Finally, he sat down on the sidewalk.

  “I’ve found a hat!” he yelled. “Please! Come out! I promise I will return it to its rightful owner.”

  Nestled inside a rock formation, a group of eight little people held hands. They were on their way to a birthday party. Tremendous warmth generated from one body to the other. They could stand there forever if they had to. They were used to it. Birthdays came and went. Yellow hats could be resewn. It was not up to them to take care of all the world, whispered the mother to the daughter, whose yellow dress was unmatched, whose hand thrummed with sweat, who watched the giant outside put her hat on his enormous head and could not understand the size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart.

  At the party I make a goal and it is to kiss three men: one with black hair, one with red hair, the third blond. Not necessarily in that order. I’m alone at the party and I have my drink in a mug because by the time I got here, at the ideal moment of lateness, the host had used all her bluish glasses with fluted stems that she bought from the local home-supply store that all others within a ten-block radius had bought too because at some inexplicable point in time, everybody woke up with identical taste. I see two matching sweaters and four similar handbags. It’s enough to make you want to buy ugly except other people are having that reaction too and I spot three identically ugly pairs of shoes. There’s just nowhere to hide. I know the host here from high-school time and she likes to invite me to things because for one, she feels sorry for me and for two, she finds me entertaining and blushes when I cuss. It’s how we flirt.

  About half the people here are in couples. I stand alone because I plan on making all these women jealous, reminding them how incredible it is to be single instead of always being with the same old same old except tonight I am jealous too because all their men are seeming particularly tall and kind on this foggy wintery night and one is wearing a shirt a boyfriend of mine used to own with that nubby terry-cloth material recycled from soda cans and it smells clean from where I’m standing, ten feet away, and it’s not a good sign when something like a particular laundry detergent can just like that undo you.

  From here, against the wall, I can survey the whole living room. TV, couch, easy plant. The walls are covered with pastel posters of gardens by famous painters who rediscovered light and are now all over address books and umbrellas and mugs. Is it really worth it to dead earless van Gogh that his painting now holds some person’s catalog of phone numbers? Is that what he wanted when he fought through personal hell to capture the sun in Arles? I used to paint and I would make landscapes that were peaceful and my teacher would stroll through the easels and praise me and say, “What a lovely cornfield, dear,” but she never looked hard enough because if you did you would see that each landscape had something bad in it and that lovely was the wrong word to use: I made that cornfield, true, but if you looked closely, there was a glinting knife hanging from each husk. And I made a beach scene with crashing waves and a crescent moon and then this loaded machine gun lying on the sand by a towel; and then I made a mountain town with quaint stores and tall pine trees and people walking around except for that one man wrapped in dynamite walking over to the guy with the cigarette lighter standing by the drinking fountain.

  The terrible thing is that the teacher never figured it out. And she saw all three paintings. She actually thought the guy in dynamite was wearing some strange puffy suit and that the corn was just very glinty. She said the machine gun was a nice kite. When the evaluation sheets came around, I said she was useless and should be fired.

  The couples are shifting positions and I’m ready now and I find that redhead first. Lucky for me he is drunk already and sitting in a chair with pretzels and he’s talking to no one because he’s on break from being social because he is so drunk. I saunter over and ask him to help me look for my purse in the bedroom. “I lost my purse,” I say to him. “Help.” He blinks, eyelids heavy with the eye shadow of alcohol, and then he follows me into the bedroom which is covered with people’s items: twenty-five coats and half as many purses. I am rich but I consider stealing some of the stuff because they are so trusting, these people, and I feel like wrecking their trust. But where would I stash a coat? We are looking around for my make-believe purse because I don’t use a purse at all; when I go out, I just carry keys and slip one one-hundred-dollar bill into the arch of my shoe and let the night unroll from there. We’re mumbling in the bedroom and I pretend I’m drunker than I am and then I ask him, right there, among all the coats, if he thinks I’m pretty. His eyes are bleary and he smiles and says, “Yeah, yeah.” We’re standing by the bed, and I lean over and I kiss him then, really gentle because at any minute he could throw up all over me, and his lips are dry and we spend a few minutes like that, gentle kisses on his dry lips, and then he starts to laugh and I am offended. “Why are you laughing?” I ask, and he laughs more, and I sort of push him and pick up one of the better coats on the bed, with a shiny lined inside of burgundy, and I put it on for a second even though I’m not cold and I ask him again why he laughed and he says, “We went to grade school together,” and I say, “We did? We did?” and he tells me his name and then he tells me my name and I apologize because I don’t remember him. “I remember you because you were the one with the inheritance,” he says, and I tell him I was really good at painting too and he says, “Really? I don’t remember that.”

  So I am through with him.

  I take off the coat and throw it back on the bed and then head to the door.

  “Wait, why did you kiss me?” he asks, and I know it is taking a big effort for him to string this sentence together because he is so drunk. “Let’s go out sometime,” he slurs. “I just laughed because it’s funny, it’s funny. To kiss someone you knew as a kid. It’s funny.”

  I turn around and he looms above me and I can see the freckles on his collarbone and that means he has a chest of freckles and a back of freckles and knees of freckles and freckled inner thighs and I was the best artist in grade school for several years until that dumb girl moved here from Korea, and he is laughing more because he knew me as a little kid and is remembering something and I barely remember what it was like to be a little kid so it seems rude that he would recall something about me that I couldn’t myself. If I can’t remember it, then it should mean no one else can either.

  “No,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go out with you, ever.”

  And I’m back in the main room. I return to the same wall. The redhead follows me out and collapses back into that chair, staring, but I ignore him and look at the table of food instead. The guacamole dip is at half, and there are little shit-green blobs on the tablecloth. The brie is a white cave. The wineglasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom. I go refill my glass and the redhead closes his eyes in the chair. One down.

  The blond is next, and he is someone I used to date and in fact only broke up with around three months ago so I think it’ll be easy; I find him in the corner talking to two other guys and I glide over and because I am me I am wearing an incredible dress tonight; this one looks almost like it is made of metal; it has this slinky way of falling all over my hips and I feel like an on faucet in it and of course
I am the most dressed up at the party, I always am, but that’s the whole point, so when the host inevitably looks down at her everybodyownsthemjeans at the front door and says, “Oh, but it’s not a formal party,” I smile at her with as many teeth as I can fit and wink and say, “That’s fine, that’s fine, I just felt like wearing this tonight.” Inevitably, the next time I see that same host she has more lipstick on or a new glittering necklace her mother bought her but lady she is dust next to me inside this silverness. I am now almost right behind the blond man who broke up with me because he didn’t feel loved and it was true, I did not love him, but he is the type to never go out with someone for a long time anyway so we would’ve broken up soon regardless and I just gave us a good excuse. I am next to him by now and I tell him we need to talk and could we go in the bathroom? He is confused for a minute but then agrees, and says “Hang on” to his friends who shake their heads because they remember me well and think he’s being stupid and they’re right but we go into the bathroom and I say, “Adam, I have a goal to kiss you tonight,” and he says, “C’mon, is that what this is about?” and I tell him to come here but he has his hand on the doorknob but also he’s not gone yet. “You’re incredible,” he says, shaking his head, and I feel mad, what does he mean, it’s not a compliment, and he’s out the door. And he’s out the door, then. I’m alone in the bathroom and I’m sitting on the sink and my butt is falling a little into the sink part, faucet on faucet, and I turn around to myself in the medicine-cabinet mirror and check my teeth and they are bright and white because last week I bought a new tooth cleaner and it’s working and my eyeliner isn’t smeared because I bought the new eyeliner that swears it won’t smear or you can sue the company, and I’m sitting there plotting my next blond when Adam comes back into the bathroom with determination and closes the door firmly. “You’re just playing with me, aren’t you?” he says, and I say, “Yeah,” and he sighs a little. “At least you’re honest,” he says, and I say, “Thanks, I try to be honest, I do, that is one of my good qualities.” He waits there by the door and I hop off the sink to go to him, stand and face him, and he’s not running away so I’m moving in and then we’re kissing, that easy, and his lips are the same ones I know well, in fact he was my longest boyfriend so I know his lips better than anyone’s, and his upper lip is much thinner than his lower lip which I always liked and I kiss that pillow at the bottom and we kiss and it gets more, we keep kissing and I remember just what it’s like and I am suddenly feeling like I miss him and I am remembering everything of what it’s like to be with him and I am forgiving him for everything and we’re still kissing and his teeth and his smell and we’ve been kissing too long now, it’s gone on long enough, so I pull away. He has lipstick on the edges of his mouth. “Okay,” I say, “thank you, okay.” He looks shook up but also wants more and he has the same feeling I do; he felt the room change into a different room during that kiss but I’m trying to get it back to being the first room, the one where I know it all. His hands are all over my silver dress slip-sliding around and the bathroom door opens, it’s some lady who wants to use the bathroom and she sees us and blushes and I’m glad I don’t know her because I don’t want the whole party to know I’m in the bathroom kissing a blond while I still have a black-haired man to finish the night with. Adam is wiping the lipstick off now and his hand is still on my dress, on my hip; “You’re a cold woman,” he says to me, and then his hand is gone and he leaves and I am left in there again and I know I am not a cold woman because the whole point of why it was hard for him to leave just then is because I am a not-cold woman but I resent the lie anyway. I check myself in the mirror again and my skin has sharpened and the teeth and eyeliner are all still good and I am thinking about him for a minute, thinking about how when he came inside me and I came outside him he would say something like “This is it,” and I’d think, It’s the end of the world, and then we’d finish up and be sweating and hot and the world would still be there, like it had swung up and met us. And when we slept then it was so deep it really could’ve been the end of the world with sirens and megaphones and panicked TV people and I know at least for myself I wouldn’t have even noticed.