Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  It always takes some getting used to, when they leave. Readjusting to an apartment whose occupancy has just been halved. A loft apartment with seemingly acres of open space, and panoramic brick walls and burnished wood floors, with endearing nooks and crannies and skylights. Doesn’t take much of a push for it to feel very big and very empty, and in a hurry.

  I settled onto the pit group that made up my sofa and used the television remote to conjure company. Shutting down the higher cranial functions and filling dead time. Blank, numb. Wretched until the coming dawn, too long away.

  But that’s the price demanded of those of us who have perfected the crime of the carnal hit-and-run.

  Lisa was officially past tense. As expected, as was the norm, she still had her key and used it a couple days later to let herself in while I was away directing my micromasterpieces. She cleansed the loft of her belongings, an orderly exorcism of herself from my life.

  Occasionally the wounded ex has wanted to enact a little revenge. Symbolic vandalism sometimes. Twice I had come home to discover large electrical toys missing, a TV or stereo swiped out of anger or a sense of entitlement. One of the especially clever ones rigged my phone to continually redial a recorded message in Zurich, and so it did for the whole of one workday. These I endured without much complaint. If it helps them purge the bile from their systems, it’s worth it.

  Lisa, to my surprise, gravitated toward retaliation.

  But for her to have instead left something behind … now there was a new twist.

  At first I wondered where she had gotten them all. Because there were so incredibly many, no two alike. But then I realized that a department store heiress could pull this off with ease. She would have the connections. The resources. The money.

  I had just never expected anyone to come up with such a graphic reaction to the situation, such a vivid editorial comment on what I was inside.

  And Lisa was, after I’d had a chance to consider it, so damnably on target.

  It must have been a week later when Kristen dropped by to check up on me. Wondering how the latest amputation had gone. Wondering about the fresh scar tissue. Wondering, I suppose, why she just hadn’t heard from me.

  “I’ve been kind of preoccupied,” I said quietly, standing in the doorway and blocking much of any view of the inside of the loft. “You know. Busy.”

  Her cheeks glowed with the climb up the stairs and general robust health. A wide-brimmed thrift shop hat perched jauntily atop her head. “You don’t look so great, Derek. Are you feeling okay?”

  I nodded, shuffled my feet. I wore jeans, a T-shirt, socks. Nothing else. Oh, a five-day beard, if that counts.

  “Can I come in?” Her voice was starting to get that edge it honed when she was creeping toward vague unpleasantries as if they were land mines angled to spray shrapnel into her face.

  Should I let her in? I asked myself. Let her in, the first visitor to this brand new environment and fellowship in which I lived? Would jealousy rear its hideous head? Oh go on, I decided. We were, after all, friends.

  “Come on in. I’m sorry.” I stepped out of her way, let her by.

  A couple steps in, she stopped, frozen in her tracks. I barely had room enough behind her to swing the door shut again.

  “Derek?” she said. “Is this … from one of your commercials?”

  “No,” I said. “They’re all mine. Or I’m all theirs. A special delivery from Lisa. She has a definite flair for this kind of thing, don’t you think?”

  Kristen could not answer, but stood gamely trying to take it all in. She was as vacant-eyed and slate-wiped as I’d been on first walking in a week before and trying to comprehend such an extravagant display of anger and hurt. And while Kristen gave it her best shot, I walked in and took a seat on the floor in the midst of my latest soulmates.

  She didn’t get it, I could tell by her eyes. But then, she hadn’t had my week of introspection. And you must admit, the sight of someone’s home populated by dozens of mannequins takes some time to grow accustomed to.

  But there they were, in perfect frozen poise, staring with their unblinking painted eyes. All different, with long wigs and short wigs, blondes and brunettes and redheads, wearing business suits and formal wear and swimsuits and lingerie and casual clothing. Standing with motionless grace. Reposed onto the pit group. Seated at the dining table.

  All unique … on the outside. And yet identical on the inside, for they were all so very hollow. In her one-of-a-kind way, I think what Lisa was saying was that I was just as plastic as they.

  She wasn’t far wrong.

  Still, that wasn’t the worst of it.

  “Derek…?” Kristen said, her voice slow and faraway. “Why didn’t you just get rid of them?”

  I smiled and spread my arms wide, bumped into one of the still-life legs. The mannequin wobbled, an eternally slender blonde with blue eyes and thin pink lips that never lost their smile. I’d named her Livvy. I steadied her, absently traced a finger down one hard thigh.

  “I can’t. They’re what I always needed. I think Lisa recognized that even before I did.”

  Kristen still didn’t get it. What I think she was starting to get was worried.

  “Whatever I’m in the mood for, there’s one here who fits the bill. I just have to look. And there aren’t any hurt feelings anywhere. It’s a smorgasbord, and I don’t have to pretend anymore.”

  Kristen’s look, I knew that look. He’s finally snapped, that’s what it said. With it, I felt a curious liberation in my tongue, in what I could continue to divulge. A little more wouldn’t hurt.

  “They say that faith can move mountains,” I told her, my voice dropping like that of some bewildered prophet. “Love and laughter? Those release chemicals in your body that add years to your life. Stress eats ulcers into you. Some people get caught up in such religious ecstasy that stigmata open in their hands and feet. But did you ever wonder about hate, and pain, and betrayal, just how much they can do? Because you’ve got to admit, they’re the most intense of all.”

  I held my hands out to indicate the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The mannequins. Hoping she would see.

  Kristen wanted to come farther in, I honestly believe she did. But it was as if this plastic battalion held her at bay and turned her back and repelled her out the door, by simple virtue of its presence. This quiet museum of variable perfection. They’re formidable at first glance, all right.

  But perhaps, in time, Kristen would understand. Understand that they were teaching me, and I had no choice but to bend to their imparted lessons, lessons I so desperately needed to learn. And I made a receptive pupil.

  I had to be. I was so vastly outnumbered.

  I had been an emotional parasite. Taking and taking and taking, but giving only what I found easy to spare at the moment. I soaked up love and pissed out indifference in return.

  I hadn’t counted them, didn’t want to. But something in me, a new kind of instinct perhaps, told me that there would be exactly one mannequin for every woman I had ever wronged, ever hurt, for all the wrong reasons. The number would come out a perfect match.

  Just as I was a perfect match for them.

  I live with the mannequins easily enough, now that I’m used to them being around. They’re quiet. They make no unreasonable demands. They have no needs. They ask for no commitments. And I’ve long since dismissed neuroses and psychoses as the cause for when I look at one and notice the perceptible change in the tilt of a head, the bend of an arm, the stance of a leg. The depth in an eye.

  It’s ideal.

  Except…

  At night, when I lie awake in the darkness, the skylights admitting just enough of the moon to turn my home into a garden of shadows, I listen. And hear the most minute of shuffling footsteps. And I can hear them conspiring in whispered plastic voices, a message passed along one to another to the next, like solitary inmates tapping code onto adjoining prison cell walls.

  Those sounds … they’re the stuff of
midnight paralysis, of breath uselessly locked in the throat. Of sweaty palms and dampened sheets. And the only thing that frightens me more is the thought of what they might do should I try to remove them, one at a time, from the premises. Or vacate it myself.

  They will not be denied their due.

  And I know that some morning, come first light, I will awaken to discover that they have formed that inevitable gauntlet I have long since learned to expect.

  Our Lady of Sloth and Scarlet Ivy

  So it’s come to this: wondering each day what it will be like the moment you overhear them deciding to kill you, to make their erasure of your existence complete. That it’s coming seems inevitable — they aren’t that stupid. It will have to occur to them that by now it’s their only option if they expect to get away with anything. The strangest part of it is that you can’t predict how you might react to the news. With relief? With a fierce resurrection of your will to live?

  Or instead with gratitude that after all these months something interesting is finally about to happen.

  Their conversations often carry through the ductwork to the basement, where, beside the furnace, you listen as though tuning in some distant radio broadcast. They do a lot of their talking in the kitchen, if the background clinks and clangs are any indication, and there must be some handy vent nearby that draws in their words and funnels them down to you. From the bathroom too, sometimes. Less successful have been your attempts to eavesdrop whenever they’re in the living room, although you’ve concluded that whenever they’re in there, the TV commands all of their attention. Its sound seems to only rarely mingle with the familiar timbres of their voices.

  “From now on, anything else that needs doing for her, you can just do it yourself.” There — that’s Nelson, whom you’ve figured for the younger of the pair by three or four years. The one whose idea this hasn’t been, who only went along with it. He has a little brother’s petulant tendency to yap. “I’m not going back down there and see a thing like that, and you can’t tell me to.”

  “Oh come on. Get real, why don’t you.” And that’s Galen. “I mean, let’s say you’re right about this. Not that I’m saying you are.” Galen speaks more slowly, and lower in volume, as though he weighs every word before turning loose of it. The schemer. “What if I have to be gone somewhere a day or two, and she needs food and water. You’d just let her do without, is that it?”

  “In that case, you’ll have to plan ahead, I guess, won’t you? And make sure she understands to ration it out.” You picture Nelson up there banging around the stove, busy in his nervous way, a hive of energy. “You don’t think she needs a doctor? Sure looks like it to me. Who’s the one letting her do without that?”

  Galen now, the voice of calm and reason; he could be hiding anything: “She doesn’t need any doctor.”

  “A thing like that coming out of her, and she doesn’t need a doctor? I don’t know if you’re blind, Galen, or just dumb.”

  “Besides, have you heard her complaining?”

  “No. I sure haven’t.” Except Nelson sounds as though some point has already been proved for him. “And that doesn’t worry you either?”

  “The reason it doesn’t worry me is because her not complaining is the surest sign there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  Whatever physical appeal you’ve managed to retain after all this time, you suppose you’ve been counting on it being enough to preserve your life. That despite your not once during captivity having taken a proper shower — you can only wash in a basin — or been touched by the sun, Galen will still manage to see in you whatever it was that first drove him to kidnapping, imprisonment, worse.

  Now, though? Now even that slim guarantee is likely to be lost. Love is blind, everybody knows that, but realistically, just how much is it prepared to ignore? You’re starting to feel as though you bear less and less resemblance to the woman who was originally carried down those stairs.

  You had a name once.

  It was written down here somewhere, two days into captivity, scratched into the gray block wall with a pebble pried from the waffled sole of your shoe. Words alone couldn’t have fully explained the compulsion you’d felt to do that. It arose from someplace deep and instinctual, as if knowing that one day, stripped of a future and your past becoming the ghost of someone else’s life, you would need a concrete reminder of something as basic as your name.

  You had a job once, too.

  Not a lot of prestige had come with it, but it had been secure. Good pay, good benefits. Seven hours of every shift of eight you got to be completely autonomous. Got plenty of exercise from those walks between the van and people’s doors. On summer days, your legs, already tautly defined, would gleam a golden brown.

  A few dozen times each shift you became a force for happiness in the world. You were proof that civilization worked, that it ran on time. Nobody ever displeased to see you, everyone always eager to open up, to sign for their package. Then, just as suddenly, they would gently shut the door on your back as each of you went your own separate ways. It had been such a clean existence, such a nonentangling sequence of daily interactions. It gave you a kind of invisibility — you and the people on the other side of the doors smiling at each other, even meaning it, while five minutes later they wouldn’t even remember your face.

  Or so you thought. In this house, at least, you must’ve left more of an impression that you’d ever imagined.

  Pressed blue shorts, pressed blue shirt, both of them a perfect fit since the express service frowns on slobs — early on, you joked with herself that for Galen and Nelson it must have been your uniform that had driven them crazy for you.

  He’d professed love, Galen had, during those first weeks, and you figured he even believed it. Believed himself capable of such an emotion. But a man doesn’t put someone in a basement for months, for a foreseeable lifetime, unless he’s picked up some awfully perverse ideas about love.

  You know nothing about their childhoods, have only imagined that with names like Nelson and Galen they probably got their asses kicked on a regular schedule. The only other thing you’ve surmised is that Galen has derived his ideas about relationships from fairy tales. That his eyes see a world in which it’s perfectly acceptable to imprison a woman for as long as it will take for her to love him back. And if he doesn’t have a tower to lock her in, then a basement will serve as well.

  No windows, not even barred. Just one stairway, one door, and four stone walls. The Ross brothers’ house is an old one, solid, built in a time when people had needed coal chutes to get through their winters, but the iron hatch inset high along one wall has been welded shut, maybe even since before you were born. Early on, you would run your fingertips along the bubbly metal seam and imagine that it might dissolve beneath your fever to be free. Early on, you tried squeezing yourself nails-first into minute cracks in the blocks and mortar separating you from good natural earth. Early on, you would recall every story you ever heard about wonder-workers who were rumored to have walked through walls, and try to figure out their secrets.

  The good old days, those were — before you exhausted the basement’s supply of challenges. Had you cared enough to take that pebble with which you wrote your name and put it to more ambitious use, you could have charted the course of what the basement has done to you: terror giving way to rage giving way to a slow, general apathy.

  Oh, go ahead and kill me, why don’t you, you might direct upstairs, like a grim prayer. Or … don’t.

  It all feels the same anymore.

  Probably they possess all kinds of tools to do the job. Not just standard home and garden utensils, handy in a pinch, but truly dreadful implements of pain and destruction made expressly for lethal outcomes. The irony, of course, is that you were the one who brought them straight to their door.

  Until you first regained consciousness down here, awakening on the pallet and mattress where you’ve been sleeping ever since, Galen and Nelson Ross had only seemed a little sa
d to you. From a year’s worth of stops along your route, you’d been just familiar enough with them to believe them harmlessly odd, disinclined to getting out very much. Two thirtysomething brothers still living together in a hand-me-down home — pitiable, really.

  Their packages were nearly always heavy, and always merchandise they’d ordered, never anything sent by someone who might’ve been construed as friend or family. The shipping labels and manifests originated from mail-order businesses whose names suggested home security and self-defense and espionage on shady neighbors. The pair of them never struck you as being survivalists — neither ever answered the door in military garb, and you even had a tough time imagining them willingly getting dirty — just suburban paranoids.

  In all this time, you’ve never seen the upstairs, except for the same dim slice glimpsed through the open doorway while standing on the front porch as Galen secretly succumbed to the most possessive kind of love. From that recurring glimpse you’ve constructed the rest, overall not much more inviting than this musty, raw-walled basement: the kind of house you imagine has stayed exactly the same for decades, because that was how their mother always kept it, and now that she’s dead they can’t bear to have it any other way.

  “You ever think it’s just your mind playing tricks on you?” Galen is saying. “Like, she just found something down there, some old plastic flowers of Mom’s or something, and had ‘em stuck in the front of her shirt.”

  Nelson isn’t buying it, you can tell from the way he slams cutlery. “Why would she do something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you always burn my eggs even though you know how long they take to cook? Does everything always have to make perfect sense? I just know I didn’t see anything different about her, not tonight or any other night.”