Amanda Filipacchi - Love Creeps

“It’s already two-thirty in the afternoon. Don’t you think it’s a little late to get to work?”

“Better late than never.”

She then brought out a can of whipped cream. The organ music was passionate as she sprayed whipped cream on his nipples and over his pubic hair and balls and all over his penis.

“If I don’t go to work, I’ll become homeless. I’m already a beggar. A beggar for mercy. For solitude.”

Since there were no cherries in the kitchen, Lynn came back with a blueberry, which she placed on the tip of his vertical penis.

She had left his feet and the top of his mostly bald head clean. She knelt at his feet, covered them in olive oil, and started giving him a foot massage. He jerked his foot a few times because it tickled. She slid her fingers between his toes. The pleasure, which he was trying to ignore, kept infiltrating itself into his article about lawns.

The doorman buzzed. Alan and Lynn looked at each other.

“Can you get that?” Alan said.

Lynn put down his foot and went to answer the in-house phone. “Yes?” She listened. She looked at Alan. “The doorman says that Roland wants to come up.”

Alan didn’t respond.

“I’ll tell him not to let him up,” Lynn said.

“No! Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Don’t let him up?”

“No, don’t tell him not to come up.”

“You want him to come up?”

“Yes.” Alan paused. “Yeah, tell him to come up.”

“Why? Are you insane? And look at the state you’re in. He’ll be upset to see me here. He might lose it.”

“Good, let him kill us. What else have I got to live for, anyway? Let him up!”

Lynn told the doorman to let Roland come up. She opened the front door. She perched herself up on the back of the couch, behind and above Alan, her legs on either side of him, the back of his head in her crotch. She began giving him a head massage.

Roland walked in, stared at the spectacle.

Alan was glad to be covered in food, because he realized it was a testament to Lynn’s obsession, to the power he had over her. That was one way of looking at it, and he wanted that to be the way Roland looked at it.

And Roland certainly was looking. The way Lynn and Alan were sitting, she looked like his throne. Her fingers on his head were his crown. As she massaged his scalp, the skin on his face was being stretched, his eyes were pulled back into slits. Alan tried to shoo her away. But she stayed attached to him, the tips of her fingers clasped to his mostly bald head like tentacles, like a crown of clinginess.

Alan had clearly won. Nothing could have made Roland feel more defeated than this display. It went far beyond a scene of domestic bliss, which certainly would have been discouraging. Alan had become a powerful, grotesque beast, majestic. Roland blinked a few times. He had an urge to bow and leave but forced himself to stay.

“What do you want, exactly?” Alan asked.

Roland didn’t answer at first. Eventually he said, “Can I take Lynn?”

Deliver me from her, deliver me from her , Alan thought. What he said was, “I’d rather you not take anyone by force, but in principle, yes, you can take her, if she’ll go with you.”

“You’re so weak and spineless, no wonder your girlfriend dumped you,” Roland said. “It’s amazing she was with you to begin with.”

“Lynn, please go into my bedroom and bring back what is at the bottom of the third drawer from the top.”

Lynn obeyed. She came back holding Jessica’s gun.

“Kill him,” Alan said.

Roland stared at the gun in Lynn’s hand, pointed at him.

Lynn didn’t shoot.

“If you don’t shoot him, I want you to leave and never return,” Alan said.

Lynn still didn’t shoot. Finally, she said to Alan, “If I kill him, I’ll go to prison and never see you again.” She placed the gun next to Alan on the couch.

Roland rushed toward it. Alan didn’t move. He allowed Roland to grab the gun. Roland shot at Alan. No bullets. Roland tossed the gun back on the couch. “You wimp. You weren’t going to kill me.”

“That’s right, I wasn’t,” Alan said, haughtily. “Now, please, the both of you, get out.” He sounded tired.

Lynn sat next to Alan on the couch and begged him not to make her go.

“Could you please take her with you?” Alan said to Roland. “My feet are oily, and I’m afraid I’ll slip. And I’m exhausted.”

Roland dropped a paper clip, picked up Lynn, and carried her to the door, screaming.

“One moment,” Alan said, and Roland stopped. Alan got up, the sheet of plastic clinging to his butt. He approached, careful so as not to slip. He stroked Lynn’s hair, and said, “I was mildly excited by the idea that you would do anything for me. So I tolerated your presence. But you didn’t pull the trigger. I’m not the least excited any longer.” What he said was true, but one did not always utter something just because it was true. He uttered it in yet another attempt at being unappealing.

They left.

Alan fetched the bullets from his bedroom closet. He loaded the gun.

He took out a piece of paper and on it wrote Jessica’s mother’s phone number followed by the request that Pancake should be taken care of by Jessica. He added a few words: “No one is to blame for my decision to end my life. I’m just not a happy man. Mom, I love you very much. You were and are the best mother imaginable. Please, don’t be too sad. I’m okay now. Love, Alan.”

He left the note near the rat cage.

He said good-bye to Pancake. He knew Jessica would take good care of him. She was a rats-and-guns type of woman.

Alan pressed the barrel of the gun against his temple. He slid it down his cheek. He placed it in his mouth. He tasted the honey and Nesquik that had gathered on its tip. He licked it clean, then stuck the barrel farther into his mouth.

The fire alarm went off. He dropped the gun, grabbed Pancake from his cage, and ran out of the apartment. He could smell smoke. He started racing down the stairwell, cocoa powder flying off him as he ran. He hadn’t bothered closing all the stairwell doors in the building recently, and now there was a fire! He wondered who had started the fire, whether it could have been Roland. A few mint leaves flew off him like loose feathers off a bird. The Rice Krispies slowly rolled down his surface. They were still held on by the honey, but no longer crispy, and the whipped cream dribbled down his nipples and thighs. He slipped and fell a couple of times because of the olive oil on his feet. He was carrying Pancake in one hand and raised that hand high in the air every time he fell, to protect the rat.

He was surprised that nobody was in the stairwell, but since he lived on the top floor, he had always known he’d be last in line, with no one rushing past him in the event of a fire. Anyway, they were probably all taking the elevators down, the fools. They knew nothing about fire safety; they didn’t even keep the stairwell doors on their own floors closed.

When he reached the sidewalk, panting and shaking, most of the tenants were already gathered there. They were horrified at the sight of this chocolate-covered naked man holding a rat. They assumed his skin looked the way it did because he had been scorched by the fire, that his skin was burnt to a crisp and already bubbling up, blistering and doing gross stuff. The whipped cream was some weird fluid the body produced when it got burned: The groin and nipples started foaming. The mint leaves were confusing. The blueberry was long gone. Had it still been there, the tenants might have understood.

Alan reassured them that he was just covered in food. He walked through the crowd, petting Pancake to calm him, and asking the tenants where the fire was, how it had started. They didn’t know for sure. Some said it was on the fourteenth floor, but they kept changing the subject back to the chocolate covering his body. They seemed to be trying tactfully to remind him that he was naked. They asked him whether he might not like to cover himself up, but no one offered any clothing. Alan didn’t understand why his neighbors concerned themselves with such a trivial matter as his nudity. Wasn’t it clear he had been engaged in some kinky sexual game? Was it really the time to giggle about chocolate-covered nudity when there was a fire in the building? What about perspective?