Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

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.

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.