Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Oh, look here. All these books and magazines and things to read. You must be a smart guy. I like to read, especially comic books. You like comic books?”

  K.T. was pleased to hear a question he could answer. “Oh, yeah. I really love comic books.”

  “Do you have any Silver Surfer I could read?”

  “Well, sure. Grab yourself a chair. I’ll find you a Silver Surfer.” He said it as if he were offering her a drink, and wondered if he should offer her a drink. But he wasn’t sure what he had. He made his way into the kitchen, pausing now and then to lift up a stack of magazines as if looking for the comic, but knowing very well where the comics were. He felt so inordinately pleased to have the exact comic she wanted to read—what were the odds of that?—that he’d forgotten there were no empty chairs in the room. With the exception of his computer chair they were all piled high with boxes of clippings, and magazines waiting to be clipped.

  He glanced over nervously to see her sitting on the edge of his bed, which he kept pretty much near the center of the room so that he might drop onto it periodically if he needed a computer break. He hadn’t made it up or changed the sheets in a very long time, and seeing it now—and when you saw things through a veil of anxiety sometimes it was like seeing them for the very first time—he could see the yellow-brown pattern his body had etched into the bottom sheet. He could detect where his arms and legs had been, and his head, lighter patterns there like a facial topography. A clear spot like a mouth open in a faded mask. Instantly thought Shroud of Turin, and with that detected a small trace of blood near one corner of the image—he remembered a cut foot—but of course it looked like something more deliberate now. This gave him the idea for a sequence of images he might construct for his web site: portraits of people but with the people peeled away, only their shadows, and the shadows of their shadows, remaining. He would play with these remaining shadows, emphasizing and distorting them, perhaps distorting the objects they fell on, creating transformations wherever they touched. It would be a hopeful sequence in its way, advancing the idea that we could be effectual, even when fading into obscurity and oblivion.

  There was orange juice in the refrigerator that smelled relatively fresh. He thought that would be the safest thing he could offer her.

  From the other room, “Hope you don’t mind my sitting on your bed?”

  What was he supposed to say to a question like that? Was she coming on to him? “Oh… fine. Wherever you feel comfortable.”

  He gave her the juice when he came back in, feeling just a little alarmed that she hadn’t yet bothered to remove the mask. As if reading his mind she said, “Tommy gave me this mask last week. He says I have to wear it all the time when he’s not there. I don’t mind it too much, but it makes it a little hard to see my TV programs with it on. I have to tilt my head some, make sure the eyeholes line up, but sometimes it slips. I tried putting a big old rubber band around my head to hold it in place, but it gave me a headache.”

  K.T. found a copy of the Silver Surfer and handed it to her with the juice. He didn’t like the way she was leaning back into the bed, her skirt riding up. And her belly looked even larger in this posture, rising up off her spine like an explosion. “Maybe you could take it off for a few minutes, at least until you’re done with your juice.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. He’d have himself a fit. And he doesn’t even look like himself when he’s mad.”

  “Most of us don’t, I guess. I mean, the skin on our faces is so thin, really. Any strong emotion is going to move the features around in some significant way.”

  “You’re a smart man,” she said, as if just deciding. “I bet you wouldn’t make your girlfriend wear a mask even after Halloween. That’s just ignorant.”

  “Well, it is a little unusual.”

  “I bet you treat your girlfriend right, don’t you?” Her voice lightly slurred the words. “I bet you appreciate her for what she is.” Before he could confirm or deny she flipped open the comic. “I really like the Silver Surfer. His face is like he’s got a mask on, but it isn’t a mask, not really.”

  “His face is like what they call a ‘neutral mask,’” K.T. replied, eager to offer some obscurity now that his intelligence had been established. “It’s a mask without any details, molded to the face like a hardened layer of skin.”

  She looked up then. Even with the mask on she appeared slightly dazed by the concept. “Well, I don’t think it’s a mask,” she finally said. “I think he’s kind of a good looking man.” She picked up the comic and started reading. “You know you can go back to your work. I’ll just sit here reading quiet until Tommy gets home.”

  The polite thing would have been to tell her he was done for the evening, then try to entertain her, ask her about her life, somehow ask her about what kind of man this Tommy was to make her wear the silly mask, but K.T. didn’t know how to do polite. Besides, he was anxious to get back into his work—this was the most he’d talked to a live person in weeks and he had no idea if he was doing it correctly or not—and she’d just given him the easy out.

  A distorted image of him stared out from his second monitor. In some ways it looked better than him, a retouch job with straighter nose, stronger chin, and firmer eyes. His eyes looked so watery and unsure, as if always on the verge of tears. He couldn’t remember having made this particular self-portrait, but then again he had made so many.

  He logged on, picked up his email (the client was more than pleased with the sow child), then went over to his web site.

  At first he thought a hacker had gotten in. There appeared to be alterations in all of the images in his gallery. Some fleshtones had deteriorated, leaving faces with a green or grayish cast. Pixels had floated out of place, outlines blurred. But not really enough damage, he thought, for it to be actual sabotage. Maybe a problem with his graphics card. Or maybe a problem with his own eyes. Fatigue can distort the curvature of the lens and…

  Something iffy had crept into the eyes of his self-portraits. Or crept out of. The flatness, the deadness was gone. The eyes, even in heads of pain, watched him.

  “So you think I’m pretty?”

  He’d been so zoned he’d forgotten she was there. He looked up at her, the young pregnant lady stretched out on her back on his bed full of signs and indications, mask obscuring the upper part of her face, bright red lipstick alerting him to where her mouth would be if he wanted to come over and try it out. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, do you think I’m pretty?”

  Definitely someone else’s life. But he could play along—he’d watched enough television, gone to enough movies. “Well, yes. Of course,” he said, delivering his line.

  “Why, thank you.” She cozied back into one of his hair oil-spotted pillows. “I don’t get too many compliments anymore.”

  Her pleasure saddened him. For the first time he noticed how faded her simple cotton dress appeared. The spots, the worn places. “Everyone needs a compliment now and then.” His eyes went back to the monitor. One by one his images were slipping off the sides of the screen, leaving video noise in their wake.

  “Well, ain’t that the truth. Even if you know you’re ugly, and you know the other person is lying through his teeth just to get into your panties, well, you still like to hear that sweet stuff.”

  He could feel his face flush, tried to will it another color, perhaps just a hint of Caribbean tan. “I don’t even think I believe in ugly anymore,” he said. “It’s all just one image set up against another. Some looks get marketed better, that’s all. Sometimes you can change your marketing, and sometimes you can’t. That’s the scary part, I think. You feel so damn helpless about it all. All these damn images of beauty and success and happiness that’ll fit inside a frame and stay there while you look at it, admire it, covet it. And if you aren’t careful, it all becomes this minefield that nobody ever gets out of alive. That image is a killer—it’s got all our need and fear balled up in one place—it’s a terrible thing and
yet even the smartest of us think that’s all we are.”

  Her head was bobbing, but it was because she was looking around at the clutter of his living room. He wasn’t sure at what point he must have lost her; he hadn’t been paying that close attention. But lost her he had.

  Suddenly he felt acutely embarrassed for the way he lived. The place was like some skid-row trash heap and he was just the fly that landed there. He looked down at his stained T-shirt and shorts. He hadn’t even been aware what he’d been wearing when she came to his door. He could’ve taken a bathroom break and washed and changed his clothes before coming back out but it seemed too late for that now. She could see how he lived and what he’d become.

  “That’s a real nice sports jacket,” she said, oblivious to his musings. “Did it cost a lot? I bet it did and I bet you make good money doing this typing thing.”

  He tried to follow her line of sight, saw the sports jacket sprawled across an end-table where he’d thrown it after the last disastrous job interview. He could have done the job, of course—he never applied for any job he couldn’t do—but the thing was trying to convince an employer that someone who looked like he did could do the job. And acted like him. He wanted a job outside these walls, thinking it might save him from this continued craziness of solitary existence—a solitude that just had to kill him one day, he was sure—but he’d been like this so long it was difficult for anyone he met to picture him any other way. When he got back from that last interview he’d taken this long look at himself in the mirror and realized he hadn’t a clue how he appeared to other people. He’d gone into that interview with dirt under his nails and white stuff at the corners of his mouth, and he hadn’t even seen those things even though he’d made a studied self-examination before entering their building.

  So they weren’t about to give him a second look. They could not imagine anyone who looked like him working for them.

  “It is a nice coat,” he said. “I don’t get many chances to wear it.”

  “Well, you should wear it more often,” she replied. “Hey, maybe you could take me to the movies sometime. You could put that nice-looking jacket on and take me to the movies.”

  “I bet Tommy wouldn’t be too happy with that.” K.T. felt as if he had said something quite bold, but she didn’t appear to react.

  “Hey, you got a TV? Maybe there’s a movie on now. You got your jacket and I got…” She held up her glass half full of juice. “Refreshments.”

  K.T. stood up, giddy with an odd sort of excitement. He hadn’t felt so playful with a woman since before his older sister left home. She lived in Florida now, three kids, and they hadn’t spoken in years. He went to the foot of the bed and started peeling away items from a pile of dirty clothes. “Ta da!” he said, revealing a dusty TV screen.

  “Turn it on and come sit by me,” she said, holding up her juice glass again. With a flourish K.T. slapped the “on” button, grabbed the sports jacket and slipped it on. It bunched at the shoulders, spoiling the gesture, and he had to pull and tug to make it feel right. Then he threw himself onto the bed beside her, thinking she would either run or laugh and in fact he didn’t really care which, as long as she reacted to what he’d done in some way.

  The TV came on in the middle of an old war picture. K.T. recognized some of the actors—he was pretty sure they were all dead. More and more this seemed to be the case for him: watching movies full of dead actors. What was worse, he suspected anyone younger than he wouldn’t even know these actors were all dead—the notion would never cross their minds. The way they were in the movie would be the way these actors would be forever.

  “I bet Silver Surfer would make a good movie-type hero,” she said, close to his ear, almost whispering, slurring her words. “They should make a movie about him. Mr. No-face.”

  For just a brief moment he thought she was referring to him, that in his playful rush his face had slipped off and was now lost within the anxious clutter of the room. He pulled sweaty hands up to his mouth and nose and felt around, then jerked them away in embarrassment. “Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “He’d make a great one all right.”

  She held the juice glass up to his lips. He was so close to her now he could see inside the eyeholes of her mask. Her eyes looked red, heavy and drugged. They would not fix on him. “Wait.” She pulled the glass away. She took a small liquor bottle out of a big pocket in her dress, unscrewed it, and poured some into the juice. “Just to freshen it,” she said, pressing it again to his lips. The glass was hard and cold and the liquor made his own eyes burn—she’d obviously been adding stuff from the bottle to the juice the whole time she’d been here. He closed his eyes and let her pour it into him. The edge of the glass bit like a hard cold kiss and then the warm fluid tongue inside his mouth and her hard swollen belly pressed up against him, nose filling with the perfume and the stench of her, and with his eyes closed he was seeing the both of them inside his monitor, trapped inside the tube, falling out of their clothes and then falling out of their faces until they were just this liquid descent of electrons down the screen and off the edge into nothing.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he murmured into her neck as he moved up to kiss her, and feeling the fullness of her beneath him he couldn’t help thinking of the sow with the frightened boy’s head and the babies sucking and feeding and there’s nothing the little boy can do to escape. “Jesus,” he said again, more softly now as if to pray that terrible image out of his head, and wondered not for the first time if now and again he brushed against monsters.

  She clung to him with a desperate strength that frightened him, and when he finally opened his eyes to tell her that they should be more careful about the baby, because he really was worried about the baby, frightened for her baby, he could see that her mask had slipped, more of her face was exposed, and the rows of circular cigarette burns like tiny ruined mouths all around both of her eyes.

  “Tommy says I’ve got to wear my mask,” she whispered huskily, and refitted it to her face, and tried to draw him back into her, into her smell and lips and eyes, into skin thin as desire, brief as a flash of phosphors on a smoked screen, but all he could think about was how was she ever going to market this, how was she going to sell this, how was she going to put the best face on this, and, at least for the moment, this was no longer a place he was prepared to go.

  Hours later he could hear them across the courtyard of the mews arguing, and if there had been screams he would have gone over there and stopped them. He would have played the Silver Surfer in his mask that is no mask, and he would have stopped whatever was going on.

  But there weren’t any screams that night. Perhaps there had never been any screams.

  Instead he stood and waited in his doorway, listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of their argument that might not be an argument, studying the tree that had never been a tree, admiring the way the cool halogen of the streetlights washed the rounded stones of cast concrete.

  When he finally went back inside, he went first to the bathroom where he washed his face a very long time, then shaved away at the rough stubble of his beard until blood had welled in numerous nicks. The face that stared out at him was both terrible and new, one he had never seen before, and most likely would change to fit the given situation. It was the kind of face he had always wanted, it was the kind of face that might win him jobs and women, but he knew that at least for a few nights he would sleep with one eye open, a knife ready in hand for peeling the image away at the first sign of rebellion.

  On his web site the self-portraits had apparently disappeared for good, broken and scattered into the ether. Just before dawn there was email, and an attachment: a picture of a fattened, battered cat with his face, so professionally done as to be seamless, so much of the cat in the line of his jaw and the tilt of his head, so much of his own terror as the feline head shifts to see the thing in fast pursuit.

  The Cough

  A tickle like the sound of a truck rumbling in the distance, felt in t
he chest, where bones join tissue and there are quantities of liquid for lubrication. Something was coming. Something was clearly out there. Something he didn’t want to know about.

  He’d had the cold for weeks. Three, four weeks. It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem natural. Weren’t colds two week affairs? His wife had told him that at some time or other. He remembered the time last winter he’d been moaning and groaning, thinking he was going to die, angry because she wouldn’t take care of him, wouldn’t even sympathize, and she’d said, “Two weeks and it’ll be gone. It’s just a cold. Drink your orange juice.”

  Women had little sympathy for men. That had always been true. It was a way at getting back at their ill treatment under a patriarchy, he supposed. It was a man’s world, and women had little sympathy. He really couldn’t fault them for that, but it felt bad just the same.

  Suddenly his body exploded into a fit of coughing. His face felt flushed. He could feel himself filling with fever. He could feel the tube of his throat constrict as he coughed, twisting at its root, trying to rip itself out of his body. Something was coming from a far distance. Something that didn’t agree with him.

  He spat something milky into the sink. His wife would have hated that. “Men have such disgusting habits,” she used to say. He leaned over the sink and looked at what he had coughed up. Men did that, too—periodically they felt compelled to look at whatever came out of them. The globule in the sink was creamy, yet somewhat solid, like a small bit of half-digested flesh.

  He wondered if what he was suffering from was akin to what they called “consumption” in the old days. He had no idea. But he was a man. Naturally he felt consumed. Men had a lot of things on their minds.