Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

Jenny disappeared from the top of the mountain of cars.

A door panel shifted under Jefferson’s foot. A side mirror in his hand broke off and he dropped it to the ground. Glass began to crack softly like ice thawing as more metal moved and slipped and the contours of the rusted mountain underwent a subtle change. He struggled slowly to the summit and looked over. Jenny stared up at him from an empty aisle just beyond the mountain. She turned and ran.

“Jenny!” he screamed, and reached out his hands.

The mountain trembled as the topmost stones which buttressed it slipped from their perch and crashed onto rusted brittle hoods and quarter panels, slamming through partial windshields and changing the perspective of the overlapping vehicles stacked beneath Jefferson’s uneasy feet. He looked once again at Jenny’s distant running form and thought to hug himself instead as he fell back off the summit and was folded again and again as the mountain unraveled and seven decades worth of cars descended with him.

For a brief sliver of time he thought how he might embrace himself fully, his skin bonding to his own skin and the heart of him becoming so compressed that it was hard and invulnerable to even the strongest touch, and then all the stones and wrecks of time came down upon him and his thought was squeezed to nothing.

Jane spent hours shaving her legs, despite the fact that the act tangled her in anxiety. Even in her nervousness, however, the results never failed to fascinate: the warm pink smoothness of the legs, the skin scraped so thin one might have seen the blood pulsing just beneath the surface. Then there were the occasional nicks: in particular the granular abrasions around the heel and ankle, where the skin came so close to the bone it appeared painted on. When first cut open her pale skin pinkened, as if suffused with a new liveliness, then the tiny beads of blood oozed out onto the surface, and Jane found the look and smell of them oddly comforting, like milk for a baby, confirming for her that this life was, indeed, real. Although beneath the surface pleasure, a profound terror lurked.

Jane had many such terrors, and her psychotherapist believed that if she faced the smallest among them first, the grip of her more dramatic fears might begin to loosen. She wasn’t sure about this, but would never think of arguing with him. Besides, shaving her legs was important to her appearance.

So when she shaved with the razor she held her breath. It steadied her hand. But there were still the inevitable slips, the skin torn, the pale flesh of the calf washed with a translucent spread of blood. She’d gasp and run to the mirror: staring eyes dilating rapidly in the high polish of the glass. And each time, behind her in the clouds of steam from the shower, she could see the knife blade easing aside the crisp plastic curtain.

Maxwell sawed carefully through the hollow handle of the cane, inserting the narrow knife in one opening and carving out the other end to create a close, smooth-fitting sheath for the blade. He supposed you could purchase such a device, but he felt more comfortable making his own. He doubted his particular version could kill, but killing wasn’t what he was after with this instrument. It was intended merely to probe, to produce seemingly accidental scratches, evidence of all the sharp edges a young lady might discover in the standard urban environment.

In the park, conveniently crowded that afternoon, he created a long vertical tear in a young woman’s calf as she passed him jogging. Because of her exertions, the shrouding effect of oxygen depletion, he imagined it was several seconds before she felt the pain and by then he was safely around the bend and stepping briskly down another pathway.

In the local supermarket, obscured behind an elaborate tropical fruit display, he was able to spear a much larger woman in her left buttock. He left the store halfway through a long harangue as she threatened the manager and anyone else in view with legal action. Maxwell had been pleased by the symmetry of the blood stain flowering across the back of her dress.

In similar fashion he continued into the evening, poking, prodding, raising the vaguest signature of blood on women of all ages. Although his escape was uncomfortably narrow at times, he felt no real threat to himself during these activities, for he was simply playing the flirtatious tease, the bashful lover. He was seeing who bled and who did not, and how much. Later, much later, and after extensive courtship, he might open their many mouths for a bright red kiss. But such revelations had to be approached slowly. He had always understood that women were shy creatures, reluctant to give up their secrets, which made what they withheld all the more important. Women were men’s complement, their supplement, their completion and their explanation. Open up a woman and you might finally know her, and find the missing pieces of yourself.

Maxwell had left his special cane in the car during dinner at Catalina’s, a local restaurant sporting an atypical European diner theme, when he saw Jane enter and take a booth a few feet away. As was his habit, he looked to her fingers first, which were a brighter pink near their ends than on the shafts, with very little nail. He assumed she must chew on her fingers to an obsessive degree, and later observations only confirmed this. He would often wonder during their relationship whether her fingers bled much, and if she sucked this blood, and whether she waited for a large amount to well up before licking, or sucked her fingers constantly, taking the blood before it had the opportunity to stain her pale skin.

Although there was nothing particularly dazzling about this young woman in her twenties, she had a pleasant face, long reddish brown hair which was immanently touchable, and people noticed her. He had no immediate explanation for this, but patrons turned their heads when she entered, looked up at her and smiled, and invariably she smiled back, even to the scruffiest of diners. This was dangerous behavior on her part, he concluded after watching these exchanges for several minutes. Obviously people could see that she was the sort of person who would sit down next to a Charles Manson to chat if a Charles Manson were only to smile at her with even vague politeness. She had this pitiable need to please everyone she met. She was soft, vulnerable, a pale Riding Hood in the woods. She was the kind who walked barefoot on a beach strewn with broken glass, not out of bravery or even foolishness really, but simply out of a sense that this is the way one behaves, however wrongheaded her senses might be. Maxwell was immediately drawn to her.

The music in the restaurant was high-pitched, discordant. For some time Jane had intended to eat here—it was only a few blocks from her apartment building. Now she was sorry she’d ever stepped foot in the place, but lacked the will to turn around and leave. What would people think if she did such a thing? People smiled at her, their eyes reddened by the harsh, crimson neon that was a major component of the decor, neon in primary greens and blues casting mutant shadows around their hunched forms. Some colors might have been surgically removed from the spectrum here: yellow, orange, other tones she couldn’t quite put her finger on, making flesh tones darker than they should be, shadows deeper, the air thicker. The acoustics in the restaurant could not have been more harsh. A loud, screaming song under laid with raspy, asthmatic whispering filled her head. She kept smiling, as if to distract her face’s need to wince from the pain.