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.
So they weren’t about to give him a second look. They could not imagine anyone who looked like him working for them.
“It is a nice coat,” he said. “I don’t get many chances to wear it.”
“Well, you should wear it more often,” she replied. “Hey, maybe you could take me to the movies sometime. You could put that nice-looking jacket on and take me to the movies.”
“I bet Tommy wouldn’t be too happy with that.” K.T. felt as if he had said something quite bold, but she didn’t appear to react.
“Hey, you got a TV? Maybe there’s a movie on now. You got your jacket and I got…” She held up her glass half full of juice. “Refreshments.”
K.T. stood up, giddy with an odd sort of excitement. He hadn’t felt so playful with a woman since before his older sister left home. She lived in Florida now, three kids, and they hadn’t spoken in years. He went to the foot of the bed and started peeling away items from a pile of dirty clothes. “Ta da!” he said, revealing a dusty TV screen.
“Turn it on and come sit by me,” she said, holding up her juice glass again. With a flourish K.T. slapped the “on” button, grabbed the sports jacket and slipped it on. It bunched at the shoulders, spoiling the gesture, and he had to pull and tug to make it feel right. Then he threw himself onto the bed beside her, thinking she would either run or laugh and in fact he didn’t really care which, as long as she reacted to what he’d done in some way.
The TV came on in the middle of an old war picture. K.T. recognized some of the actors—he was pretty sure they were all dead. More and more this seemed to be the case for him: watching movies full of dead actors. What was worse, he suspected anyone younger than he wouldn’t even know these actors were all dead—the notion would never cross their minds. The way they were in the movie would be the way these actors would be forever.
“I bet Silver Surfer would make a good movie-type hero,” she said, close to his ear, almost whispering, slurring her words. “They should make a movie about him. Mr. No-face.”
For just a brief moment he thought she was referring to him, that in his playful rush his face had slipped off and was now lost within the anxious clutter of the room. He pulled sweaty hands up to his mouth and nose and felt around, then jerked them away in embarrassment. “Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “He’d make a great one all right.”
She held the juice glass up to his lips. He was so close to her now he could see inside the eyeholes of her mask. Her eyes looked red, heavy and drugged. They would not fix on him. “Wait.” She pulled the glass away. She took a small liquor bottle out of a big pocket in her dress, unscrewed it, and poured some into the juice. “Just to freshen it,” she said, pressing it again to his lips. The glass was hard and cold and the liquor made his own eyes burn—she’d obviously been adding stuff from the bottle to the juice the whole time she’d been here. He closed his eyes and let her pour it into him. The edge of the glass bit like a hard cold kiss and then the warm fluid tongue inside his mouth and her hard swollen belly pressed up against him, nose filling with the perfume and the stench of her, and with his eyes closed he was seeing the both of them inside his monitor, trapped inside the tube, falling out of their clothes and then falling out of their faces until they were just this liquid descent of electrons down the screen and off the edge into nothing.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” he murmured into her neck as he moved up to kiss her, and feeling the fullness of her beneath him he couldn’t help thinking of the sow with the frightened boy’s head and the babies sucking and feeding and there’s nothing the little boy can do to escape. “Jesus,” he said again, more softly now as if to pray that terrible image out of his head, and wondered not for the first time if now and again he brushed against monsters.
She clung to him with a desperate strength that frightened him, and when he finally opened his eyes to tell her that they should be more careful about the baby, because he really was worried about the baby, frightened for her baby, he could see that her mask had slipped, more of her face was exposed, and the rows of circular cigarette burns like tiny ruined mouths all around both of her eyes.
“Tommy says I’ve got to wear my mask,” she whispered huskily, and refitted it to her face, and tried to draw him back into her, into her smell and lips and eyes, into skin thin as desire, brief as a flash of phosphors on a smoked screen, but all he could think about was how was she ever going to market this, how was she going to sell this, how was she going to put the best face on this, and, at least for the moment, this was no longer a place he was prepared to go.
Hours later he could hear them across the courtyard of the mews arguing, and if there had been screams he would have gone over there and stopped them. He would have played the Silver Surfer in his mask that is no mask, and he would have stopped whatever was going on.
But there weren’t any screams that night. Perhaps there had never been any screams.
Instead he stood and waited in his doorway, listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of their argument that might not be an argument, studying the tree that had never been a tree, admiring the way the cool halogen of the streetlights washed the rounded stones of cast concrete.
When he finally went back inside, he went first to the bathroom where he washed his face a very long time, then shaved away at the rough stubble of his beard until blood had welled in numerous nicks. The face that stared out at him was both terrible and new, one he had never seen before, and most likely would change to fit the given situation. It was the kind of face he had always wanted, it was the kind of face that might win him jobs and women, but he knew that at least for a few nights he would sleep with one eye open, a knife ready in hand for peeling the image away at the first sign of rebellion.