David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” said Mitchell. Trudy and Stefan stopped and looked him up and down, then Stefan laughed. “I can see that,” said Trudy, smirking. “Go on,” said Stefan. “Use the one upstairs. It’s quieter.”

Mitchell left them in the kitchen. He passed the dining room table where there were more canapés laid out and he took a cracker with some brie cheese on it. In the living room, the Media Centre was off the news. Now the screen was filled with a security camera picture from the basement garage, looking at the elevator they’d come up in. The bald man and the woman with paint on her toenails were sitting on the couch. Her feet were in his lap, and he was giving one of them a massage while she twisted the other this way and that at the ankle, like she was stretching it. They watched Mitchell pass by and climb up the spiral staircase to the second level, and didn’t take their eyes off him until he went into the main bath.

Mitchell closed the door behind him as the lights flickered on. He lifted the toilet seat and unzipped his fly. He stood there for awhile like that, then zipped up and washed his hands. He caught himself in the mirror, leaning forward, his hands held together under the thin stream of warm water. His eyes were open wide, his mouth small and slack and round, like he was always saying “oh.” His dark hair was too long and fell over his forehead, which was still pimply. There were the beginnings of a beard growing on the chin, but you could still see the big pimple underneath the left side of his lower lip. Mitchell looked at his face and thought: what would I see if I saw me on the street? At school? He thought about that, and thought again: a sad boy . He made a smile, and looked, and thought: a happy boy . He brushed the hair aside from his forehead, and stood up straight, and kept smiling and he thought about that, but finally thought:

Who knows ?

Mitchell found a hand towel and dried off, then went out. He heard the sound of another door closing downstairs. He stepped to the railing and looked down, as the rectangle of hall light narrowed and vanished on the first-floor tiling. The couple on the couch sat up, and from the kitchen, Stefan said: “Lesley!” and Trudy said: “How’d it go?”

“Fucking nightmare.”

Mitch looked down and saw the top of Lesley Woolfe’s head and her shoulders, as she made her way to the couch. She twisted her head on her neck so that Mitch could see her throat, wisps of dark hair mingling with body art that was emerging from the collar of a simple white blouse. With one arm, she flung an overcoat onto the chaise lounge by the downstairs powder room. “Fuck,” she said again, drawing the syllable out this time, “me.”

She sounded sad, but what did Mitchell know?

“Nothing went wrong, did it?” said Trudy.

“Traffic,” said Lesley, “was the shits. Wouldn’t move faster than a slow walk south of Tenth Line. I was afraid it would wear off and she’d wake up at a red light.”

“But it didn’t,” said Trudy. “She didn’t.”

“Would I be here if it did?”

Stefan came out of the kitchen with a tall glass of wine. Lesley took it and sipped at it. “The cameras?” she said.

“All taken care of,” said Stefan.

“And—?”

“Upstairs,” said Stefan. “Right above you.”

Lesley started like something bit her, and looked around and then up. Her eyes were wide, then narrow. They weren’t smiling. “Hello,” she said after a few seconds. She held up her wine glass and tinkled it back and forth. “Want a sip?”

“He doesn’t drink,” said Trudy.

“I didn’t ask you,” said Lesley, not taking her eyes off Mitch. “Well, Mitch? How about it?”

Mitchell moved to the spiral staircase and climbed down. He stood face-to-face with Lesley Woolfe. She stood five inches taller than he did and she still did not smile. But she offered him the wine glass, and he took it by the stem. He swirled the red liquid, looked at it, sniffed it like he’d seen rich men do on television. It smelled a bit rotten, but Mitchell sipped at it anyway. It tasted sharper than it smelled, but it wasn’t so bad. He took another sip, bigger this time.

“Now,” she said, her eyes widening and her nostrils flaring, “we both die.” She paused for a heartbeat. “Poison,” she said. “Very painful.”

Mitchell dropped the wine glass. It hit the side of a table then clinked on the tile floor, and somehow it didn’t break. Mitchell stepped back, staring at the wine spill spreading along the skinny grout lines, holding onto his chest, drawing a breath.

Lesley finally smiled. Smiling, she threw her head back, so the dark geometries etched on her throat were in full view, and laughed, then twisted her head to the side and she smiled even more, and looked back at Mitchell, and said:

“Mmmm, look at him. So scared of dying.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” said Trudy. She looked at Mitchell. “She was kidding.”

Mitchell had worked that out. About the same time that he worked out that he hated Lesley Woolfe. He bent down and picked up the wine glass, and looked around. The faces looking back at him might as well have been smooth skin, no eyes or mouths or noses, staring in blank, blind disapproval. Like mannequins.

One of the mannequins came over with a roll of paper towels and bent to his feet, spreading them over the spill so the wine stain blossomed in fractal majesty over the bumps and divots. The mannequin turned its head and presented its blank face to Mitchell. Then it swiped up the paper towel and crumpled in its hand, and replaced it with a fresh one.

“What’s going on with him?” said a mannequin from the living room.

“I think,” said the voice of Stefan, “that he’s having an episode. Good fucking going, Les.”

Another voice: “Is this, like — dangerous?”

“Of course it’s dangerous,” said Lesley fucking Woolfe’s voice. “That’s why we chose him. Delectable Delilah. For Dangerous Mitchell. That’s the point.”

Someone giggled. Someone else said, “Shut the fuck up,” and someone else said, in a whisper, “Will you fucking look at him?” and then the mannequins fell quiet.

Mitchell took a breath and closed his eyes. This had happened before: often enough that he’d been to doctors for it. They had tried drugs and other therapies but mostly drugs, until Mitchell started gaining weight and breaking out and doctors started worrying about his penis maybe not developing properly. His mom finally went to a woman who taught transcendental meditation out of her basement, and Mitchell had learned a mantra, and at bad times he found that helped. So he started to say his mantra, which was a secret, and he said it again and again with his eyes closed until he thought he could open his eyes.

Stefan looked back at him from a dining room chair that he’d pulled over. The rest of the mannequins — the people — were gone. But Stefan was there, arms folded over his skinny chest, hard to say whether he was smiling or not.

“Where did everybody go?” asked Mitchell.

“Lesley took them across the hall.”

“Mr. Piccininni’s apartment.” Mitchell didn’t know Stefan had a key. “What for?”

“A little show and tell,” said Stefan, “before the show. You doing okay now?”

“What are they looking at?” said Mitchell.

Stefan motioned over his shoulder to the Media Centre. Mitchell looked. It was a view from another security camera. But this one wasn’t in the lobby — it looked to be mounted on the ceiling of a bedroom filled with nice dark furniture and with the painting of a waterfall on one wall. There was a big double bed on the far side of the room, covered in a thick comforter. Something was moving under it, just a little bit. Mitchell stepped closer to get a look, but the picture was fuzzy and then someone stepped in front of it and he couldn’t see the bed. Then other people stepped around the bed: Shelly, the bald guy… Lesley Woolfe, her arms crossed and chin pressed down against her collarbone so it wrinkled and puckered… Trudy.