Ugh! That was when he’d hung up. But it was fine with him; now they should leave him alone. He doesn’t like the thought of risking himself at a job anyway. He had almost come undone at the agency interview, and that was nothing.
They’d given him forms on which to answer a great many personal questions. He had raced through them, neatly slashing the sections concerning work history. Then he had come to the tricky part: essay questions.
“What would you do in this situation? Your superior comes into your office complaining that you scheduled her for two crucial meetings at the same time.”
His neck itched with sweat; the office air-conditioning chilled him. He felt as if he had swallowed a mouthful of monosodium glutamate: throbbing spine, burning cheeks, torpid muscles.
He scrawled: “Apologize.”
“Your supervisor makes a mistake on a memorandum and you are blamed for the error. What would you do?”
Is it a man or a woman? he thought, as the fluorescent lights began to strobe. He carefully penciled: “Explain to my supervisor’s supervisor.”
From somewhere in the walls or acoustic-tile ceiling of the office, sweet voices sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” as though it were a hymn. So sincere, so saccharine.
“For the third time in a week, a mail-room employee delivers your mail to the wrong address. You call him into your office and he claims that your handwriting is illegible and he cannot read the destination. What do you do?”
The Bacharach tune drove pins into his brain. Three times this week, he thought. God, that Muzak!
“I ask him if he has seen the view from my window, and while he is looking away I hit him on the head with a marble ashtray. Then I lock the door. I take the saws out of my briefcase, spread plastic on the floor, and cut him up as quickly as I can, even working into my lunch hour to get the job done. I wrap the pieces separately in the plastic, cover them in brown butcher paper, type out address labels, and drop them in the mail.”
An advertisement for secluded retirement homes rescued him from committing this response to the agency files. He crumpled the form, staggered to the desk with hands dripping, and asked if he could have another. The secretary had stared at him as if he were an ape from the zoo: he felt enormous and ungainly, surrounded by polite clerks. “I made a mistake,” he said.
The second form took hours to complete because he worked only during commercial breaks in the Muzak.
And why had he gone to all that trouble in the first place? Because Mother had insisted. She had money, plenty of money, but she said a job would do him good. He had gone thirty-five years without a job; he saw no reason to start now. Besides, he had his own work to pursue. Sometimes it paid in cash, but the true rewards were hardly monetary.
“More oatmeal, Donny?”
“No, thanks, Mom. I’m stuffed.”
“You just go watch TV. I’ll do the dishes and come join you.”
“Okay, Mom.”
He slouches into the living room, turns on the VCR, and takes an oft-handled cassette out of the rack. It is labeled: “The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings,” a title he was sure would never interest his mother when he glued it to the cassette. He slips it into the player, turns on the set with the sound down low, listens to the dishes clinking in the kitchen. The remote control stays in his hand, in case Mom should come in at a bad time.
And in this movie, all times are bad. Outside of a fever dream, the Care Bears could never have found themselves in a land so devoid of human or ursine sentiment as the one on the screen. Images swim out of his memory, merging with the light that plays across his eyes. It’s only a movie, he tells himself. What have we here? Cross sections of red meat, stumped limbs or trunks? No, it’s the infernal sun, with flares strung out and heaving across the void—the raw stuff of violence on a cosmic scale. The sight of it makes him feel significant, attuned. His breathing comes swiftly, in shallow gulps. The miasma of night begins to gather in his eyes and the pit of his gut, as if he’s about to black out. He can hardly see the TV anymore; the volume is turned down so low that his mother’s Muzak overwhelms the ominous sound track. Strings and synthesizers sigh; a chorus of castrati whimpers, “Please, mister, please,” as Texas Chainsaw Massacre buries itself in his eyes.
“Donny, how about some iced tea?”
He jerks and switches from video to live TV. A news anchorwoman mouths at him, apparently concerned for his wellbeing.
“What was that?” she says.
“Ad for some shocker, Mom.”
“Oh, those horrid things. I swear I don’t know what the world is coming to.”
“Who does?”
To the left of the newscaster’s head, bright letters appear beneath a stylized cartoon toilet bowl whose rim is stained red: basin butcher. He taps the volume control slightly, until he can hear the TV over his mother’s voice.
“—fifth in a series of apparently linked murders. Police say the body of another unidentified male was cut into pieces, wrapped in Mylar, and embedded in cement inside five antique porcelain sinks.”
“Did you know that someone set fire to Gracie’s poodle? The poor little thing, really. First the poison bait and now this.”
The TV news team switches to field coverage, the same it showed last night. He sits up to appreciate this replay; Channel 2 has the best footage. Policemen scramble down a dusky shore of the bay, stumbling among concrete blocks and rusting wrecks of old cars. The camera zooms in on five gleaming white sinks, standing out like porcelain idols against the choppy water. Sea gulls dive to peck hungrily at the basins. The taps and handles gleam in the light of the setting sun, and so does he. An ambitious trick, but not as neat as the tub will be. The toilets had been a coarse guffaw of a murder, an attention-getter. Soon he will run out of the fixtures left over from his father’s business; after one more tub, the next stage of his work will commence. There are dozens of statuary molds waiting to be filled with his homemade cement-and-flesh porridge, and more than enough cement powder to fulfill his dreams for the indefinite future. He need never expose himself by purchasing supplies.
“I hear that another poor woman was mugged at Safeway yesterday—right at the checkout counter,” his mother says.
“The search continues for the person or persons responsible for the killings. Police seek information regarding a vehicle seen in the Bayshore area Wednesday night. An old-model truck with wooden paneling—”
He switches the channel quickly, unnerved, and looks at his mother to make sure she hasn’t been paying attention. She watches him steadily over her bifocals.
“What’s wrong with you, Donny? You haven’t been yourself lately.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mom.”
“You don’t talk to me anymore. You’re a stranger. You’re tuckered out all the time and I never see you when you’re working. What are you doing out there, anyway?”
“I told you, Mom, it’s a surprise. You’re not supposed to know.”
She smiles, a prim expression that reassures him that she won’t press any further, never fear. He gets up and gives her a kiss on the cheek. “I love you, Mom. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll bring you some iced tea.”
“Would you? What a darling. All right, I’ll plump my fat old fanny down and take a rest.”