“People do do things that don’t make sense. I don’t know why I’m here, Clarice. All I know is that I want to be here, you know? I liked it when you said that yesterday. But I don’t really know why. I just did, I just do. I like you. And I wish that what you told you mother were true, and not just to ‘make the old girl happy.’”
He turned to face her, thinking he’d just given a beautiful speech.
She laughed. “Been there myself. It happens to everyone. Too much anxiety, not enough sleep. And even though it was pretty bizarre, I thought it was pretty clever, getting my cell and calling yours.”
“Will you give me a chance?”
She shook her head almost imperceptibly. She finished packing her suitcase and closed the smaller one, which was now empty. She stretched her arms and torso, relaxing her neck.
“That’s not how it works,” she said. “We’d never work out. We can be friends. You’re not my type: a bit too clean-cut, too traditional. I like adventures. The wild side, you know? You’d get sick of me. And I’d get sick of you too.”
Clarice seemed like one of those women who were never going to get married: single and self-sufficient.
“There’s no harm in trying,” he said. He took a step forward and held out the present. “Look, I bought this for you.”
She unwrapped it.
“You told me you’d never read anything by her. I thought you’d like it.”
“Thanks. I’ll give it a go.” She left the book on top of the suitcase.
“Why don’t you think a bit about what I said?”
“I already told you. We can be friends.” She sounded like she was growing irritated.
“I don’t want to be your friend. I can’t—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! I’m trying not to be a bitch, but you just don’t let up!”
“You don’t understand that—”
“Take your book and forget me. Seriously, pretend we never met. Forget what I said yesterday, okay? I was drunk. I didn’t mean it. Don’t bother me anymore. I don’t want you to call me, follow me, or buy me presents.”
“Clarice, I—” The feeling of shame came back full force. “I don’t like it when you talk to me like that.” He moved forward, touched her arm.
Clarice pulled away. “I don’t give a shit if you like it or not. Fuck off! I tried to be nice, but you don’t get it! If you’ve got problems with women, go pay a prostitute or something.”
The insults kept coming. The sweet, hoarse voice was the same, the gestures too, but she was another woman. That wasn’t his Clarice.
He took another step forward, needing to shut her up. He picked up the book and slammed it down violently on her head. Clarice against Clarice. He hit her a few more times until she was quiet.
Her slender body slumped over the coffee table. Blood trickled from the back of her neck, dripping onto some shirts on the ground. The cover of the book, previously an amorphous design in pastel colors, also turned dark red. Clarice didn’t move. He took her pulse: she was still alive.
His relief wasn’t enough to stop his legs from shaking. He glanced at the door, sensing that someone was about to arrive. Footsteps on the floor. His imagination prevented him from moving. Nobody appeared. He was coherent, rational, unflinching; he’d work out what to do. Clarice’s unmoving peacefulness pricked his nerves.
He opened the two Samsonites and transferred the clothes from the larger one into the smaller one. He smashed them in and zipped it up with some difficulty. Then he placed Clarice in the large suitcase, leaving it open a crack so she could breathe. He tidied up the clothes that were left on the sofa and put her cell in his pocket.
He stood the two suitcases on end at the door and peeked through the crack in the larger one to make sure Clarice looked comfortable. Then he dragged the coffee table to one side and rolled up the bloodstained rug. He took a look outside: a few passersby, all distracted. He put the rug and suitcases in the trunk of the car and checked again to make sure Clarice seemed okay. He returned the coffee table to its place, locked the door of the house, and drove off.
5
As he tried to calm his nerves, Teo reflected that luck was on his side. His mother’s day trip to Paquetá would allow him to hide Clarice at his place until he decided what to do. And Clarice’s trip to the farm hotel in Teresópolis meant that it would take her parents a while to work out she was missing.
Teo took the service elevator up. Samson came to the door, sniffing the suitcases. He wagged his tail and barked loudly. Teo ordered him to be quiet. He laid Clarice on his bed—she looked like a crumpled angel.
The larger of the two pink suitcases, an Aeris Spinner, didn’t fit under his bed, and he had to empty out the top compartment of his wardrobe in order to put it away. He went to the bathroom to get gauze and antiseptic to treat the wounds on Clarice’s head: there was a small cut on the back of her neck that perplexed him. He didn’t really know where it had come from. Furtively, he took the opportunity to stroke her brown hair. It was so soft!
He slipped off her ballet flats, which struck him as terribly uncomfortable. He remembered her taking photographs at Lage Park: she had walked around indifferently in those same heelless shoes, which set her apart from other women, who were always wearing too much makeup and platforms.
He listened to her breathing, synchronizing his own with hers, and sat on the edge of the bed, watching her closely, but still at a respectful distance. He didn’t want to come across as sick or a psycho. With time, he’d prove to Clarice that she was wrong. He was incapable of abusing her: he lacked the animal instinct that men received at birth. This was just one of his qualities. If there were more people like him, the world would be a better place.
Clarice would wake up soon and ask to leave. She’d stomp down the stairs, indignant, left hand pressing on her wound, nervously puffing on a Vogue menthol cigarette in her right hand. She’d swear at him, wary of any new attack. He’d be arrested, execrated publically. In enormous print, the newspapers would call him a kidnapper.
He felt bad: it was the first time he had thought of himself as a villain. By stuffing Clarice in a suitcase and bringing her home, had he become a criminal? It hadn’t been premeditated, nor was he interested in a ransom. He just wanted what was best for Clarice. The blow to her head had been an absurd, impromptu gesture. He was genuinely sorry. Perhaps he should tell her that. Say he was sorry.
But what if she didn’t forgive him?
He couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t let her leave until he knew how she’d react. Even if she didn’t go to the police, she’d avoid him—and that would be unbearable too. The idea of killing her wafted past, but he immediately dismissed it.
He whistled a melody out of impatience or nervousness. Samson wouldn’t stop barking, his long paws scratching at the bedroom door. Teo didn’t want the dog to sniff Clarice or her suitcases. He left the room, locked the door from the outside, and shut Samson in the laundry room.
He washed his face in the bathroom and felt his stress drain away with the water. Looking in the mirror, he found himself unexpectedly good-looking, as if Clarice’s grace had rubbed off on him: his pale face had a distinct handsomeness, in harmony with the smile at the corner of his mouth. He rummaged through the medicine in the cupboard until he found the box of Hypnolid, the tranquilizer his mother took to sleep.
When she got home, Patricia would suspect something if she found Samson barking. Better to sedate the dog so he’d wake up the next morning, by which time Teo would have worked out what to do with Clarice. He opened the dog’s mouth and shoved a pill down his throat. Ten minutes later Samson was quiet.
Teo went back to his room but opened the door slowly, considering the possibility that Clarice was now awake and waiting for him, ready to attack. He immediately chided himself for the violence of the idea. As his eyes slid down her neck in a delightful
game of counting freckles, she moved a little. She half opened her eyes woozily, and he didn’t know what to do. Should he apologize or act unflappable? Sympathetic or dictatorial?
She frowned, brushed her hair off her face with slow movements, and scanned the furniture. She moaned with pain. Teo raced to the bathroom and tapped two pills into his hand. He crushed them up and dissolved them in a glass of water.
“Drink this.”
Her face clouded over, still groggy. She seemed frightened too.
“It’s for your headache. It’ll make it better.” He avoided long sentences, because he didn’t like lying to her.
Clarice drank it. She placed the glass on the bedside table and moved her lips, lisping a question. Her voice faltered and she tried again.
“What are you doing with me?”
Her tone made him sad. He left the room, saying he wouldn’t be long. In the living room, he paced back and forth. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. When he went back, she was asleep again.
The sex shop was three blocks from his building, on the corner of Hilário de Gouveia and Avenida Nossa Senhora. Teo had always been curious about it. He thought it funny that the place—with posters promising stripteases and erotic films free of charge—was right next to the church he attended with his mother on Sundays. Sin and redemption side by side.
He knew he was going to regret it the minute he walked in. He could imagine what they sold there—and his imagination alone was already making him queasy. That’s why he had always put off going there, and he’d have done so forever if it weren’t necessary.
He avoided looking at the wall of vibrators and plastic penises in a range of sizes, colors, and thicknesses—all terrifying—and walked down the aisle, surrounded by leather strap-ons, whips, and skimpy costumes. A skinny shop assistant asked if she could help, and he feigned indecision. He let the woman show him around the shop: penis rings, lubricants, fruit-flavored condoms.
“We also have chocolate, sir.” She squeezed two drops of the edible gel onto the back of Teo’s hand and told him to try it.
“Do you mean lick it?”
“Yeah.”
The woman listed off the qualities of the product as if she were selling a household appliance. He didn’t want to touch that goo with his tongue. What if it made him sick? He tasted it, watched closely by the shop assistant, and asked to see handcuffs. He looked at a number of different models and chose the most resistant, with an extra key and no safety catch. The shop assistant didn’t care that he seemed like a sadomasochist.
He asked if they sold gags.
“We have several. There’s a ball gag, there’s one with a wooden bite. We have one with an O-ring to hold the mouth open, you know? For oral . . .”
He was shocked at the creativity that went into the things.
“We’ve also got a face harness with a gag,” the shop assistant went on. “You adjust it at the back of the neck with a buckle. And we’ve got a padded gag too, of course. Here it is. To make her really submissive, you see? The padded bit goes in the mouth, as far as the throat. She’ll be quiet and all yours.”
“Right.”
“There’s also the collar. It’s a thick collar with a gag. The women love it. I’ll get it from the stockroom.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Which one do you want then?”
“I’ll take the last two. The one with the harness and the padded one.”
“Handcuffs?”
“Six.”
He noticed that the quantity impressed the shop assistant.
“What about the gel?”
He bought one, to change her focus. When he was at the cash register, he noticed a contraption with two rods covered in leather, with cuffs at the extremities.
“What’s that?”
“An arm and leg spreader,” she said, “with hand and ankle cuffs.” She handed it to Teo. It was pretty heavy. “There are padlocks, which you adjust with buckles. Each of these rods is thirty inches long. And it’s very versatile. You can use it as an arm and leg spreader, but the hand and ankle cuffs can also be used separately. See, you clip them on with these snap hooks. A kind of X with two rods.”
“I’ll take that too.”
He put the face harness with the gag on Clarice. He laid her out on a gym mat, as he didn’t want her to have a lot of aches and pains afterward, and pushed her under the bed, cuffing her ankles to its legs. He changed the sheets and arranged the bedspread so that the handcuffs couldn’t be seen. Then he wrote his mother a note.
He drove to the university pathology lab. He got his cage of lab mice from the animal house and headed for the research room, where there were other students. In the refrigerator, he found three ampoules of Thyolax, an anesthetic used for intraperitoneal injections in mice, much more efficient than Hypnolid. He hid the ampoules in the sawdust of the cage and, for twenty minutes, pretended to be recording results. When he left, he made sure no one was in the corridor and hid the ampoules in the pocket of his lab coat.
A short while later he was home. Patricia had arrived and was watching TV. She told him her day had been tiring and that she needed to go to bed.
“Do you know where I left the Hypnolid, darling?”
He chided himself for having forgotten to return the box to the cupboard. In his haste to tend to Clarice, he had left it on his bedside table. He imagined what might have happened if his mother had decided to look for it on her own: she could have gone into his room, maybe even looked under the bed. He was lucky she was confined to that wheelchair.
He told her he didn’t know anything about the Hypnolid.
Patricia turned off the TV and said she was going back to Paquetá the next day with Marli—their neighbor was exhibiting her paintings at an arts and crafts fair. He locked the bedroom door and lifted Clarice back onto the bed.
It was four a.m. by the time she looked like she was going to open her eyes. Teo approached her with the syringe. He found a vein in her right arm and injected the Thyolax solution. Clarice became inert almost that instant: sleeping beauty. Until he worked out what to do, he’d have to keep her sedated.
6
Teo awoke with a fright. He’d had a nightmare in which he was chasing Clarice through a dark forest, and the images were still very vivid in his mind. He looked at her on the bed and took her pulse. Clarice was still asleep, indifferent to chases in unfriendly settings. The sheets were laced with her scent. It was delicious, magical. They had spent their first night together.
Patricia turned the door handle and, finding it locked, knocked. “Open the door, Teo.”
She sounded hurried and weary. He hid the Hypnolid in the cupboard with the suitcases and returned Clarice to the gym mat under the bed. He decided not to put the cuffs on her; it was highly unlikely that she’d wake up now. He opened the door a crack with a sleepy face and kissed his mother on the forehead.
She was wearing a purple dress and gold hoop earrings. “Why did you take so long?”
“I was asleep, Mother.”
She craned her neck to see into his room. “You never lock the door. What’s going on?”
“I must have woken up during the night and gone to the bathroom or something. I guess I accidentally locked it when I came back.”
“Accidentally locked it? How strange.”
“Strange?” He took two steps out of the room, forcing Patricia to wheel back toward the living room.
“You’re acting weird,” she said. “And Samson is so slow today. I’ve never seen him like this. I offered him some dog biscuits, but he barely got up. He just lay there staring at me with watery eyes.”
“Do you think he might be sick?”
“I don’t know, but I wonder if he got hold of my Hypnolid.”
Samson had a whole history of such incidents weighing against him: he
had already chewed up correspondence and destroyed sandals.
“Don’t exaggerate, Mother! Where did you last leave it?”
“In the bathroom cupboard, I think. Now I’m not sure.”
“I’ll help you look for it.”
“I had a bad dream last night. I dreamed that something awful was happening to you. Something really bad, darling. I couldn’t get back to sleep afterward.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t remember.”
Teo stroked his mother’s dyed hair and told her to not to worry. “I had a bad dream too. But it wasn’t about me,” he said. “In fact, it was no big deal. Most dreams are nothing.”
“I know, but . . . I feel empty. This huge emptiness, darling. I don’t know how to explain it. All I know is that it’s inside here. And I feel it.” She was looking at him in a very unpleasant way. “Don’t do anything foolish, Teo. For your mother, who loves you.”
“I love you too,” he said because he had no choice.
Samson came into the hallway, still a little groggy. He curled up by Patricia’s legs and licked her calves.
“Okay, okay, I’ve got Samson too.” She smiled, drying the tears from her eyes. “But the worst he can do is eat things around the house.”
“I’m not going to do anything, Mother.”
Samson went to the door of his room and gave a little yelp, then another and another. He growled and bared his teeth.
“Are you hiding something in there?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I want to go in.”
“Trust me.”
“I want to go in your room. Can you step aside?”
He shook his head.
“Get out of the way. I want to see what’s in there.”
“No, Mother.”
“Teo, I don’t have all day. What are you hiding from me?”
Perfect Days Page 4