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.
The woman looked up, gasping as she peered into Jane’s face. The scissors slipped and cut through the face of the silhouette.
Jane ran back out into the rain. Music crashed inside her head. The storm sounded like the same music. She gazed past the gray buildings, searching, intent on returning to her apartment. The rain slackened some. She entered the park. Blades of leaves, blades of grass. Children had gathered by the north gate and were playing with a lizard. There was no sign of the man selling combs. Another bright, soft explosion, but Jane didn’t bother to look up this time. She gazed more closely at the children. Their lizard wriggled madly, nailed through its neck to a board. She suddenly burned hot with shame.
The centerpiece of the park was an arrangement of giant metal sculptures with razor-thin planes, broad fields of metal. At first glance the sculptures appeared curvilinear, but closer examination revealed hidden points, sharp edges residing within the folds of illusory soft steel and brass.
She ran past the sculptures as another bright flash almost blinded her, and suddenly a pigeon was flapping at her side, caught on the huge button of her coat sleeve. Its claws came out and dug a ridge into the flesh covering the back of her hand.
She finally shook the bird loose, crying loudly as it pecked her. No one came to her aid. The world was full of too many sharp edges. It was pointless to get too deeply involved. You risked your own death. She ran the few remaining blocks, the rain beating the blood away as it struggled to escape her cuts.
She slammed the apartment door behind her. Someone had dropped a shiny, brightly-colored magazine through her mail slot. She picked it up. Inside, nude photos of women had been scored horizontally repeatedly with a razorblade, turning their flesh into venetian blinds.
Maxwell used up all his film, and he would have loved to have had several more packs. The passion in her face as she ran away from the man with the cane, the trapped bird—he would have given anything to have had such passion directed at him. He loved her more with each stolen glimpse of intense emotion. He hoped the magazine he had left for her demonstrated just how much she made him feel, how badly he wanted to reach her, make contact, and banish his loneliness forever.
When Jane threw the magazine to the floor a note fell from its pages. She ripped the envelope open frantically, jerking the folded letter out with shaking fingers. His handwriting consisted of thin, jagged uprights, virtually unreadable. Love… sharp… you… reach: these were the only words she could make out.
A crashing in the alley. Garbage can lids banged out a crazed musical. She crept to the back door that led to the fire escape and pulled it open. The alley was silent, empty.
She closed the door and turned back into the hallway which ran the length of her apartment. She stepped on something soft and pliant. She reached down and picked up the worn leather glove. A man’s glove: who was responsible for it? It was stained here and there a dark color, a shade of red like ancient rust.
Bright neon from the hotel sign outside the window at the end of the hall washed the walls a more brilliant red. The tall curtains on either side of the window swept the floor, gliding in and out as if the window were a mouth, breathing. She knew there were sharp blades behind the billowing curtains, an erect penis behind the soft gabardine swaddling the crotch of the man who might be hiding there.
She could not stay here any longer. In her makeup mirror she paid particular attention to the jagged patterns in her eyes, but no cosmetic could smooth these. It was all a part of being in the world, she supposed, but now she did not know if she wanted to be a part of the world or not. She glanced at her clock: impossibly, it said she had been back in her apartment for hours.
She finally gave up on returning a semblance of normalcy to her face, put on her coat again, and left her apartment to go see a movie. At least she could be assured that in the movie theatre, nothing is real.
Maxwell wondered if Jane had read his note yet, if she had glanced through his magazine, if she had discovered his intentionally dropped glove. Simple things, but they had the power to agitate the imagination of those vulnerable enough to suggestion. The innocent knew that the world was a dangerous place, but they were incapable of fully appreciating the implications.
In the two hours since he had left Jane’s apartment, he had been quite busy. The close proximity of her things had aroused him, so he immediately went out looking for a substitute for her.
The woman hadn’t wanted to return home with him, but it never ceased to amaze him how easily obstacles could be gotten rid of by means of a simple act of murder.<
br />
He enjoyed dancing. It was the only time he could hold a live woman with safety. But death made this one an even better dancing partner than he was used to. He had to tie her body to his waist and legs, but once this had been accomplished she followed him perfectly, now and then rolling her head onto his shoulder in affection. A pity he was already taken.
He hadn’t caught her name before, but he preferred making up his own names anyway. “Janice,” for this one, as she was to be Jane’s substitute for the moment. With the wound in her face, Janice was completely possessable: a marred masterpiece, a “second” available for a reduced price, reduced effort. But she remained a great work of art for all that.
As the music rose to a crescendo, he recalled the moments of Janice’s creation: how he had heard her heart in his head, beating, struggling to escape the point of his knife (but not Jane’s knife—he would never betray Jane in that fashion), how again and again he had thrust the point into the center of her beating, until the sound had faded from his head.
She had struggled, but all too briefly. She had kicked a bit; as if in a dream he had felt her high heels puncturing his flesh, marking him in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Now the dance was over. The music ran down. Maxwell grasped the knife handle still protruding from Janice’s chest. He pulled down on the knife. Her flesh split like rotted silk. He gasped with pleasure as the blade sliced through blouse, slip, skin.
He gasped again and again, louder than the music screaming in his head.
As she walked to the movie, the passersby whispered among themselves, too loudly for comfort, in fact far more loudly than was possible.
She might have gone to the police, but what could she tell them? She’d received a garbled note, a damaged magazine, and someone had lost a glove, someone had stolen a knife from a local restaurant. Her co-workers would be questioned, and they would talk about how nervous “Poor Jane” had always been, how high-strung, how no one in the office really liked her. She would be embarrassed in front of the police; they would be disappointed in her.
She put on her glasses before entering the movie, intending to wear them for the rest of the night. She’d always felt protected behind the thick lenses. Even when she witnessed something terrible—a workman’s hand slashed open on a dagger of glass, a young boy stabbed just above the groin in a schoolyard fight—she felt shielded by that thickness from the full weight of these incidents. They could not touch her on the other side of the glass. The images would not adhere to the filmy surface of her eyes.
But there was also this accompanying sense of danger: glass that so shielded her might break if the images came too close.
The theatre darkened; the previews came up with amplified color and volume. What little light remained reflected off all the sharp edges hidden in the theatre. A few minutes into the movie she realized she had seen it before, but she knew she wouldn’t be watching the screen anyway. Instead, she gazed at the backs of people’s heads, the placement of their arms on companions’ shoulders, their small open displays of affection, and observed how they reacted to the murders taking place on the screen.
Maxwell had always enjoyed the company of mannequins. So intent on looking a certain way for their male customers, they did not speak back. He envied their makers.
He bundled Janice, the mannequin he had created, into a bag and brought her back to Jane’s apartment during the movie—he had passed Jane on the way over, and followed her until he was sure of her destination. If he worked quickly, he knew he could be outside the movie theatre when the film ended.
The lock on the apartment door had jimmied easily. Poor, naive Jane. Her lack of informed caution filled him with a renewed tenderness toward her. On the bed, blood dripped down the mannequin’s arm, paused in the openness of the relaxed palm, then leapt from the forefinger to the carpet below.
He took the Polaroids he had made of Jane and spread them carefully across her dining room table. He laid one against the other, matching patterns, shadows, stances, expressions. He permitted one image of her to kiss another image of her. His fingers lingered over her glossy surfaces. He meditated on the silkiness of her image. He took a pair of scissors from the drawer and laid one blade across a photograph, bisecting her face. He moved the blades together until her head disappeared. He raised one of the photographs, poised the twin points of the scissors over the image of her breasts, and pierced them simultaneously with one quick jab. He then began cutting through each of the photographs, disassembling each image of her until he had a large pile of shiny pieces. A bottle of bright red nail polish, retrieved from her vanity, sat poised on the edge of her fragmented poses. He took this and began painting the pile of clippings with red swirls, arrows, and bright red hearts.
He picked up a meat cleaver from her kitchen counter and used it to dismember the graceful lines of the bed stead, the side table, the dresser. He slashed through the bed clothes and started on the contents of her closet. He arranged the mannequin within the destroyed womb of her bed, then began hacking on it as well, imprinting it with all his secret signatures. Then, seeing himself in the mirror of the vanity, the glittering blade in his upraised hand, he started smashing his own image in the mirror.
Jane felt a heightened self-consciousness leaving the movie theatre. She thought they must see her awkwardness, the wrongness in her. The crowd seemed subdued, as was often the case when people departed this sort of entertainment, as they attempted to extricate their thoughts and eyes from the webs and tendrils of fantasy. She felt as if she herself were too well-defined today, her terror too palpable against the crowd’s backdrop of oh-so-gray emotion. It made her too-involved, vulnerable, an easy target.
A dark murmuring in the crowd off to her left, but Jane was determined not to look. She and the others around her crunched through powdered glass on the sidewalk, no doubt the remains of some wino’s refreshment.
Soon she was at the edge of the park, an unusually bright streetlight mounted on the entrance above her. The sharp edges of light dropped painfully through the narrow, dark tree branches. In the distance, she could see women running away from the park. Beyond the sharp sculptures, Jane thought she could hear women screaming in windows.
He saw her stumbling through the park toward him, drawn along like a fly on the web of his personality, her face contorted as if from some massive, internal noise. He enjoyed the feel of insects blown against his skin, scratching across his arms and face, dancing. He withdrew the table knife from his pocket, its blade sharpened to a thin blue edge. He stroked it slowly, ready to make contact, ready to make love to her.
Jane saw him standing in front of the sculptures, their metal edges surrounded by clouds of dark insects as they attempted to tear holes in the sky. People were fleeing the park. Why was she just standing there? It was the dapper older man from the restaurant, the one who had stolen her table knife, the one who had been pursuing her. She wondered if perhaps a kiss, or even just a hug, might satisfy him and make him leave her alone.
His teeth gleamed. She turned and ran. Away from her apartment, away from the park, and as he pursued her, running ahead of her here, heading her off there, she realized she could only go where he wanted her to go.
She ran down an alley with the man pacing steadily behind her. She barked her left knee against a torn metal drum; dampness spread rapidly down her leg. Cats scattered madly as she escaped the alley, as she crossed one street and then another, as she entered a shattered block of buildings, all condemned for the cinema complex to be erected there soon, a third of the buildings already gnawed into submission by the parked machinery.
She made her way through the jumbles of debris which filled the ruins, tormented by wood splinters and insect bites. Nails protruded from raw wounds in the wood, anxious to match their scars with her own.
She stopped, staring into the night in front of her. Suddenly his eyes peered from two holes carved out of the darkness. She spun right and broke through a flimsy door, i
nto a building with dim yellow lights in its cracked windows, the only such lighting on the block.
Mannequins littered the hallway. Pieces of clothing hung from scattered plastic arms and heads. A battered hat. A leather glove. A red rain coat. A stocking mask.
She ran through an open door, into a bedroom. Several lamps affixed with colored bulbs burned before a mirror on the large dressing table. A cat moved listlessly across piles of broken plaster toward her. It seemed to have unusually short hair; then she realized it had been shaved down to tissue-thin skin. Under the colored lights, the shaved cat’s skin looked blood-red. She leaned over and stroked it—it was too drugged to purr. She could see veins laboring just under the surface of the skin. A diagram had been drawn in black permanent marker under its torso, like a butcher’s chart.
Four naked cats lay near the dusty red bed (a bed for lovers, she thought), their tiny throats cut.
And then she heard him out in the hallway, whispering his love for her.
She crashed through the next door into an old kitchen with its piles of rusted silverware and broken plates and cups—smeared with dark, blood-like stains—littering the gray linoleum floor. Her feet, now bare, scraped across the shattered edges. The walls echoed complexly. She imagined them riddled with secret doors and passages, but more likely it was the effects of generations of rot.
She passed through another door into a hall a bit more barren than the first. Most of the ceiling bulbs in the hall were broken, their curved jigsaw pieces breaking under her bare feet like deadly eggshells, barbed edges gleaming under the remaining yellow light.
A loud noise behind her and she fell into agony. She scrambled up and stared at her left arm: a sharp shaft of bone jutted from her broken skin.
She leapt back across the hall and slammed the door into the kitchen, painfully turning the old-fashioned latch. A knife blade suddenly appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb, working its way down toward the latch. The man laughed softly, whispering love songs as he worked.
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