The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (15 page)

Then the wall of cages was knocked cleanly to the floor, and I saw a blur of dark reddish brown fur, and then it was gone after the bird again, and I stopped watching, cast that can stuffed with rags into the middle of that melee, and then closed the door and lit a match and then lit the trail of gasoline I’d laid on fire.

I watched everything burn. I stood there and watched. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. For the fire to spread? I hadn’t come prepared to do anything about stopping a spreading fire. For someone to call the fire or police department? If that’s what I was hoping for or feared would happen, the neighbors disappointed me, for no one was called, or if called, no one came. For some signal of the beast, of its suffering, its death, its escape? After a while, as the flames consumed the house, I realized it was pointless and dangerous and foolish to stand there, and so I decided to walk back home, back to Wendy.

As I walked, all I could think of was my dream. All I could imagine was our front door torn open, the house wrecked beyond repair, and Wendy gone, stolen away, or maybe there, maybe the beast would have left her there, but only the ruined mess of her. And soon I wasn’t walking. Soon I was running. I couldn’t hear anything but my feet slapping against the sidewalk, couldn’t feel anything but the blood pounding in my ears, and by the time I stopped, I was wheezing and weak-kneed and my head and my shoulders ached, and, light-headed, I doubled over. But the house was fine. The door was fine, and inside the house was normal. Everything was normal. Wendy was there sleeping, peaceful and quiet on our makeshift bed, and I watched her sleep for ten minutes, for thirty minutes. I watched her sleep and I thought about what I could do for her and what I could do for myself, and for the baby if there was a baby, and then I pulled the scissors out of my back pocket and held them clenched in my fist. I walked back outside and set myself up on the front steps with those scissors and I waited, and while I waited, I considered all the different, painful administrations I might perform with those scissors on any creature, man or beast, that might try to push past me.

All of Me

T
he zombie in me would like to make a few things clear.

The zombie in me would like to make it clear that there is no zombie in me, per se. Would like to make it known that there is only me, in fact, and that all of me is zombie.

That’s what the zombie in me says every day, what he whispers in my ear every morning when I wake up, what he whispers as I apply the makeup I need to use every morning to bind my face-flesh together, what he whispers as I button my shirt and tie my tie. The zombie’s voice in my head is a near constant.

The zombie in me says other things as well.

“Bite her face,” for example, when I say hello to the receptionist, Barbara, as I walk past her desk on my way to my cubicle.

“Break his neck,” also, is something the zombie in me says, most often in reference to my boss, Keith, though in truth the zombie in me bears no ill will toward Keith. The comment, in other words, shouldn’t be taken personally, shouldn’t imply any personal animosity toward Keith.

Or Barbara, for that matter, with whom I eat lunch quite often, by which I mean, with whom I’ve sat in the cafeteria while she eats lunch, as I do not eat—at least, not what is served in the cafeteria.

For one, the food served in the cafeteria is very fatty and greasy and bland.

And secondly, none of it is human flesh.

As a matter of fact, I rather like Barbara. She smells like shampoo, even at the end of the day. And in the summer, when I walk past her desk on Mondays, I can always smell the lingering scent of suntan lotion coming off her skin, which reminds me of the beach, which is a place I haven’t been to in quite some time. When I smell the suntan lotion on her or when I smell the shampoo on her, my impulses are torn, for the briefest of moments, between biting her face and kissing her neck. And then, before I can do either, I say, “Good morning, Barbara” or “Have a nice night, Barbara” and make quickly for my cubicle or the stairs.

Salt water being one of the bigger obstacles between me and visiting the beach. It stings, for one, and it’s an abrasive, as is the sand.

Wearing a bathing suit being another sizable problem.

It would be much easier to take the elevator, of course, when running from my impulses or even at the end of an ordinary nine-hour day spent staring at spreadsheets and quarterly revenue reports. The stairs are bad on my knees, which, though you cannot tell through my suit pants, are held in place with a flesh-colored gauze. My knees aren’t held together by much else. The mystical quality of my existence, perhaps, but that will take a person only so far. Not to mention that our offices are located on the twelfth floor. Twelve floors, even on a good pair of knees, can be a lot to take.

But the elevator is a dangerous place for someone like me. It is a place full of urges, of somewhat violent urges. There is this urge, for instance.

Well. On second thought, no.

In fact, I’d rather not go into detail. Let’s leave it at this: It is a place for urges, which is why I take the stairs.

I like Barbara, but she is married.

That she’s married isn’t the reason why I haven’t asked her out on a date. A whole host of other problems stands in the way of my asking her out on a date, most of which I won’t stoop to the discussion of as they seem fairly obvious.

The reason that it matters that she is married, the problem in the fact that she is married, why it’s a problem at all, comes down to the simple fact that I am not that much more clever than the zombie in me.

By which I mean: “Eat his face” is what the zombie in me says when I am caught thinking about Barbara and the fact that she is married.

His face
referring most obviously and unashamedly to her husband’s face.

His name is Mark.

“Eat his face” is what the zombie tells me because the zombie knows that I am tempted. Knows that when it comes to eating someone’s face when that someone’s face is Barbara’s husband’s face, I am sorely tempted.

What troubles me more and more about the zombie is that he is, while not especially good with words, persistent. The zombie is persistent and also, only recently, only very recently, and much to my horror, very, very good at creating images, vivid, vivid images inside my head.

For instance . . . Let’s not for instance. Let’s simply say that these images are graphic and appealing and horrifying and leave me confounded and hungry and bloodthirsty.

Though there is one image, one the zombie has begun to lean heavily on.

It is an image of Barbara. It is a surprisingly calm and pretty image of Barbara.

She is with me and we are holding hands and we are near the beach, but not on the beach. We are on a boardwalk walking along the beach. I’m not in a bathing suit, but I’m not in my normal clothes, either. I’m wearing rags of my normal clothes, and it’s clear in this beautiful, ridiculous image just who I am. Just what I am. And the image plays on and there is no sound, only the picture of us, the two of us, hand in hand, and it’s lovely, and it plays on and it plays on and then Barbara leans her head on my shoulder and then she turns her face to me for a kiss, and that, right then, right before the kiss, that is when the zombie ends the image, and suddenly, in my head, I’m eating Mark’s face off.

Don’t think I don’t understand the meaning of the zombie’s play with images.

I’ve been introduced to Mark twice. The first time being on the day of their wedding anniversary, when Mark arrived at the office accompanied by a violinist and with a bouquet of roses. The other time being only recently, the time after she caught him with another woman, the day after that day, actually, which was the second day Barbara had called in sick to work and the phones were being covered by another woman, a temp, a temp who smelled like camphor, unpleasantly like camphor. Barbara had called in sick and hadn’t come to work, but apparently she hadn’t gone home, either, which was why he came looking for her at our office, which was when he found me.

“Nathan, right?” he said to me.

“Um, actually, no,” I said.

And he said, “So, Nathan, has Barbara made it in to work, today?”

He said, “Is she here? Is she hiding in someone’s cubicle?”

Then he said, contemplatively: “Cubicle.”

Then he said, “There’s something slightly sexual, isn’t there, about that word,
cubicle
?”

To which I said, “No. I don’t think so, no.”

Mark is not a big man, but he acts disconcertingly bigger than he has any reason to act. He is somewhat threatening, in fact. Short as he is, small as he is.

He leaned in close to me, much closer to me than most people lean in, much closer than I am comfortable with, and said, not in a threatening way, not in a way that was particularly threatening, physically threatening, but threatening in a conspiratorial way, he said, “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“To the bottom of what?” I asked.

“This whole cubicle thing,” he said, and then he laughed and clapped me hard—too hard—on the shoulder and said, “Okay, well, if you see her, let her know I came around, will you?”

Then he left.

His breath smelled like deli counter ham, I would like to point out.

The reasons why I don’t feel comfortable with people leaning in close to me are many, of course, even aside from the deli counter ham smell. The main reason being that I’ve always felt discomfited by unnecessary intrusions into my personal space, though I don’t think this is a zombie-based peculiarity, don’t think it is out of the ordinary, that I am the only one who feels this protective of his personal space. The other reason being, of course, the fact that I am never fully certain how much scrutiny the makeup binding my face-flesh together can withstand.

Not very much scrutiny, if you ask me. Hardly any scrutiny at all, I’d say, but then I’m somewhat biased.

The zombie in me, of course, feels the exact opposite, welcomes, in fact, the close scrutiny of others, welcomes even the soft stench of deli counter ham, welcomes all of this because, for one, the zombie is tired, is sorely tired of the charade, and secondly, because of all the pieces of human meat the zombie likes to eat, the face is perhaps the zombie’s favorite.

By necessity, I have established coping mechanisms.

For instance, I like to throw things. For instance, I sometimes feel a great and desperate urge to throw things.

Mechanisms, of course, by which I hope to cope with the painfully obvious.

The throwing of things being just one example of what I do in lieu of eating off the faces of my coworkers or snapping the necks of my bosses or breaking in half the spines of the husbands of certain women I feel an unfulfillable attraction to.

The throwing of things being, surprisingly, one of the more successful coping mechanisms I’ve devised, so successful that I have devoted an entire room of my home, which is not a very large home, which is not a home with a lot of rooms in it to spare, yet I have devoted an entire room for the sole purpose of throwing things in it, an entire room that was until just very recently ankle-deep in the various shards of the various breakables I have thrown, composed mostly of cheap glassware bought in secondhand stores, boxes and boxes of these glasses, which are stacked in my garage waiting to be thrown. This spare room, with the shards of glass covering the floor, this room is the same room I mentioned to Barbara, jokingly, or half-jokingly, after she finally came back to the office and took up answering the phones again, that if she wanted, of course, I had a spare room and she’d be more than welcome to use it. Mentioned all of this knowing, of course, that she would have other friends, that if not friends she would have other coworkers, and if not coworkers, family, she would certainly have family, not to mention any number of nicely outfitted hotels, with whom or at which she could stay. Mentioned all of this knowing, of course, that she would never take me up on the offer.

That she took me up on the offer, then, explains why I left work immediately after lunch, rushed to a nearby Salvation Army, bought what amounted to a poor representation of guest-bedroom furniture—a scratched, mirrorless vanity, a wrought-iron twin bed frame, a weak-looking sagging mattress, a large black beanbag chair—and then rushed back home to clear the room, to set it up, to make it look livable, to make it look lived-in, to make it look as if it had not recently been employed as a room in which I violently threw glasses and plates and other breakables as a means of curbing my hunger for human flesh.