Ugly Behavior (5 page)

He had a second, larger monitor rigged up next to his first. After
transferring some of his self-portraits to video, he would display them here,
now playing twenty-four hours a day. This permitted exact-size images of his
distorted head he might observe while working, talk to, stare at eye-to-eye.
Disconcerting sometimes, especially if any animation was involved. The mouth
dissolving into a smile full of bone, eyes full of charged desperation in
confrontation with the creator.

This, perhaps, was what had sparked his increased use of the
bathroom mirror. Something to touch base with periodically, an anchor, even if
K.T. didn’t always like what he saw there.

Suddenly he could feel a razor-thin line of anxiety forming at the
right corner of his mouth. It stretched across his chin and hooked into his
jaw. He scrambled out of his chair and ran into the bathroom. Stacks of images
flowing out over the rug, opened envelopes containing
uncashed
checks. A wicker basket full of unanswered bills on the floor next to the
toilet. He wondered briefly if they might cancel each other out. A sour strain
of body odor and spoiled food, but buried too far under glossy magazine layouts
to do anything about. No one knew where all the bodies were buried, despite
their claims. Children were killed everyday over the internet and no one lifted
more than a mouse-clicking finger. Children’s faces stolen and peeled away,
leaving their bodies awash in a sea of red electrons.

In the mirror: his face soaked in cold sweat, fluorescent
highlights in the whites of his eyes. He pushed closer to the glass and
examined his face for rips: a nervous twitch by the mouth, a deep crease, but
no trace of blood. He breathed a trembling sigh of relief. He looked terrible,
but it was just an image, and he of all people knew that images could be
edited.

A thunder of surround sound. The walls appeared to shake around
him, his fingers twitching in accompaniment as if typing in changes. A couple of
deep breaths to calm himself—he figured it was all a problem of sleep
deprivation; he got obsessed with the work sometimes and simply couldn’t be
bothered with sleep—but his breath tasted of dank places and bad food and
would not heal him.

A beating at the door. The infrequent visitor. He slipped back
into the living room, performing a rapid survey of cleaning and straightening
possibilities, and finding none elected to open the door anyway, not wanting
the beating to continue a second longer. A pregnant woman stood in his doorway,
weaving and drunk. He vaguely recognized her as a neighbor from across the way,
despite the fact that a purple half-mask with plumes of ascending feathers
covered the upper part of her face.

“So I heard you typing. Most nights I walk by I can hear you
typing. Are you an all night
typer
or something?”

The mouth that said these words was unmasked, but outlined in a
bright red lipstick that made it much more disconcerting than the half-mask
above. The lipstick had an aging effect. Even with the mask he could tell the
woman could be no older than thirty. The lipstick mouth added decades. It
waited patiently for an answer. “Well… I work with computers,” he said. “I hit
the keys pretty hard sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t know much about that stuff. But the thing is… my
boyfriend’s gone out again, and I’m scared being all by myself. Can I just wait
here ’til he gets home?”

K.T. heard the words, but he really had no idea what she was
saying. It might as well have been a foreign language. He couldn’t remember the
last time he’d spoken in person to a woman other than a checkout clerk. He
wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken to a pregnant woman. So he did what he always did
when someone spoke to him in a foreign language. He tried to be the polite
American. He nodded his head a great deal and smiled, even when she walked into
the room. He didn’t ask why she was wearing a Halloween mask in the middle of
July; it would seem seriously rude to show any curiosity at all.

“Oh, look here. All these books and magazines and things to read.
You must be a smart guy. I like to read, especially comic books. You like comic
books?”

K.T. was pleased to hear a question he could answer. “Oh, yeah. I
really love comic books.”

“Do you have any Silver Surfer I could read?”

“Well, sure. Grab yourself a chair. I’ll find you a Silver
Surfer.” He said it as if he were offering her a drink, and wondered if he
should offer her a drink. But he wasn’t sure what he had. He made his way into
the kitchen, pausing now and then to lift up a stack of magazines as if looking
for the comic, but knowing very well where the comics were. He felt so
inordinately pleased to have the exact comic she wanted to read—what were
the odds of that?—that he’d forgotten there were no empty chairs in the
room. With the exception of his computer chair they were all piled high with
boxes of clippings, and magazines waiting to be clipped.

He glanced over nervously to see her sitting on the edge of his
bed, which he kept pretty much near the center of the room so that he might
drop onto it periodically if he needed a computer break. He hadn’t made it up
or changed the sheets in a very long time, and seeing it now—and when you
saw things through a veil of anxiety sometimes it was like seeing them for the
very first time—he could see the yellow-brown pattern his body had etched
into the bottom sheet. He could detect where his arms and legs had been, and
his head, lighter patterns there like a facial topography. A clear spot like a
mouth open in a faded mask. Instantly thought Shroud of Turin, and with that
detected a small trace of blood near one corner of the image—he
remembered a cut foot—but of course it looked like something more
deliberate now. This gave him the idea for a sequence of images he might construct
for his web site: portraits of people but with the people peeled away, only
their shadows, and the shadows of their shadows, remaining. He would play with
these remaining shadows, emphasizing and distorting them, perhaps distorting
the objects they fell on, creating transformations wherever they touched. It
would be a hopeful sequence in its way, advancing the idea that we could be
effectual, even when fading into obscurity and oblivion.

There was orange juice in the refrigerator that smelled relatively
fresh. He thought that would be the safest thing he could offer her.

From the other room, “Hope you don’t mind my sitting on your bed?”

What was he supposed to say to a question like that? Was she
coming on to him? “Oh… fine. Wherever you feel comfortable.”

He gave her the juice when he came back in, feeling just a little
alarmed that she hadn’t yet bothered to remove the mask. As if reading his mind
she said, “Tommy gave me this mask last week. He says I have to wear it all the
time when he’s not there. I don’t mind it too much, but it makes it a little
hard to see my TV programs with it on. I have to tilt my head some, make sure
the eyeholes line up, but sometimes it slips. I tried putting a big old rubber
band around my head to hold it in place, but it gave me a headache.”

K.T. found a copy of the Silver Surfer and handed it to her with
the juice. He didn’t like the way she was leaning back into the bed, her skirt
riding up. And her belly looked even larger in this posture, rising up off her
spine like an explosion. “Maybe you could take it off for a few minutes, at
least until you’re done with your juice.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. He’d have himself a fit. And he doesn’t
even look like himself when he’s mad.”

“Most of us don’t, I guess. I mean, the skin on our faces is so
thin, really. Any strong emotion is going to move the features around in some
significant way.”

“You’re a smart man,” she said, as if just deciding. “I bet you
wouldn’t make your girlfriend wear a mask even after Halloween. That’s just
ignorant.”

“Well, it is a little unusual.”

“I bet you treat your girlfriend right, don’t you?” Her voice
lightly slurred the words. “I bet you appreciate her for what she is.” Before
he could confirm or deny she flipped open the comic. “I really like the Silver
Surfer. His face is like he’s got a mask on, but it isn’t a mask, not really.”

“His face is like what they call a ‘neutral mask,’” K.T. replied,
eager to offer some obscurity now that his intelligence had been established.
“It’s a mask without any details, molded to the face like a hardened layer of
skin.”

She looked up then. Even with the mask on she appeared slightly
dazed by the concept. “Well, I don’t think it’s a mask,” she finally said. “I
think he’s kind of a good looking man.” She picked up the comic and started
reading. “You know you can go back to your work. I’ll just sit here reading
quiet until Tommy gets home.”

The polite thing would have been to tell her he was done for the
evening, then try to entertain her, ask her about her life, somehow ask her about
what kind of man this Tommy was to make her wear the silly mask, but K.T.
didn’t know how to do polite. Besides, he was anxious to get back into his
work—this was the most he’d talked to a live person in weeks and he had
no idea if he was doing it correctly or not—and she’d just given him the
easy out.

A distorted image of him stared out from his second monitor. In
some ways it looked better than him, a retouch job with straighter nose,
stronger chin, and firmer eyes. His eyes looked so watery and unsure, as if
always on the verge of tears. He couldn’t remember having made this particular
self-portrait, but then again he had made so many.

He logged on, picked up his email (the client was more than
pleased with the sow child), then went over to his web site.

At first he thought a hacker had gotten in. There appeared to be
alterations in all of the images in his gallery. Some
fleshtones
had deteriorated, leaving faces with a green or grayish cast. Pixels had
floated out of place, outlines blurred. But not really enough damage, he
thought, for it to be actual sabotage. Maybe a problem with his graphics card.
Or maybe a problem with his own eyes. Fatigue can distort the curvature of the
lens and…

Something iffy had crept into the eyes of his self-portraits. Or
crept out of. The flatness, the deadness was gone. The eyes, even in heads of
pain, watched him.

“So you think I’m pretty?”

He’d been so zoned he’d forgotten she was there. He looked up at
her, the young pregnant lady stretched out on her back on his bed full of signs
and indications, mask obscuring the upper part of her face, bright red lipstick
alerting him to where her mouth would be if he wanted to come over and try it
out. “Excuse me?”

“I said, do you think I’m pretty?”

Definitely someone else’s life. But he could play along—he’d
watched enough television, gone to enough movies. “Well, yes. Of course,” he
said, delivering his line.

“Why, thank you.” She cozied back into one of his hair oil-spotted
pillows. “I don’t get too many compliments anymore.”

Her pleasure saddened him. For the first time he noticed how faded
her simple cotton dress appeared. The spots, the worn places. “Everyone needs a
compliment now and then.” His eyes went back to the monitor. One by one his
images were slipping off the sides of the screen, leaving video noise in their
wake.

“Well,
ain’t
that the truth. Even if you
know you’re ugly, and you know the other person is lying through his teeth just
to get into your panties, well, you still like to hear that sweet stuff.”

He could feel his face flush, tried to will it another color,
perhaps just a hint of Caribbean tan. “I don’t even think I believe in ugly
anymore,” he said. “It’s all just one image set up against another. Some looks
get marketed better, that’s all. Sometimes you can change your marketing, and
sometimes you can’t. That’s the scary part, I think. You feel so damn helpless
about it all. All these damn images of beauty and success and happiness that’ll
fit inside a frame and stay there while you look at it, admire it, covet it.
And if you aren’t careful, it all becomes this minefield that nobody ever gets
out of alive. That image is a killer—it’s got all our need and fear
balled up in one place—it’s a terrible thing and yet even the smartest of
us think that’s all we are.”

Her head was bobbing, but it was because she was looking around at
the clutter of his living room. He wasn’t sure at what point he must have lost
her; he hadn’t been paying that close attention. But lost her he had.

Suddenly he felt acutely embarrassed for the way he lived. The
place was like some skid-row trash heap and he was just the fly that landed
there. He looked down at his stained T-shirt and shorts. He hadn’t even been
aware what he’d been wearing when she came to his door. He could’ve taken a
bathroom break and washed and changed his clothes before coming back out but it
seemed too late for that now. She could see how he lived and what he’d become.

“That’s a real nice sports jacket,” she said, oblivious to his
musings. “Did it cost a lot? I bet it did and I bet you make good money doing
this typing thing.”

He tried to follow her line of sight, saw the sports jacket
sprawled across an end-table where he’d thrown it after the last disastrous job
interview. He could have done the job, of course—he never applied for any
job he couldn’t do—but the thing was trying to convince an employer that
someone who looked like he did could do the job. And acted like him. He wanted
a job outside these walls, thinking it might save him from this continued
craziness of solitary existence—a solitude that just had to kill him one
day, he was sure—but he’d been like this so long it was difficult for
anyone he met to picture him any other way. When he got back from that last
interview he’d taken this long look at himself in the mirror and realized he
hadn’t a clue how he appeared to other people. He’d gone into that interview
with dirt under his nails and white stuff at the corners of his mouth, and he
hadn’t even seen those things even though he’d made a studied self-examination
before entering their building.