Upright Beasts (4 page)

And yet. Abusive boyfriend? Failed acting career? A mother who refused to hug them as a child? It does make you wonder.
Patricia calls them “cries for help.” I don't know. Sometimes it's just something to do on a Friday night.

My Fridays are fairly laid-back. I cook spaghetti with garlic bread, and after Patricia gets off work, we eat and stream a movie on
TV
.

Patricia and I don't make love too often these days. Our schedules are out of sync. She leaves in the morning when I'm still groggy in bed, and if we talk it's only to fight. This morning it's about the new flatscreen I bought. Something popped in the old one, and the upper left corner was turning everything green. Patricia wasn't around to discuss it. She works late hours as a cultural advisor to the mayor, deciding which artists to shake hands with at press conferences and the like. It doesn't pay as well as you'd think.

“Can't you think about us, not yourself?” she says.

“We both watch
TV
,” I say, but she's already out the door.

I chew my grapefruit and do my push-ups. Spick claws at my calf, and Span stares out the window at the birds chirping in the trees.

Afterwards, I put on my tie and walk downstairs to Earl's apartment. It's a bright day, and the sun pours into the hallway. Earl's door is partly open.

“Earl,” I say, walking in, “I'm trying a new Thai recipe and was wondering if you had any sweet paprika that I could—dear god!”

Earl is standing on the kitchen table, beer cans rolling around his feet. An extension cord has been tossed over the revolving fan. The end is tied around Earl's neck.

“What the devil are you doing?” I ask.

“I've decided to end it all,” he says. “I can't just keep waiting for nature to do it for me.”

“No, Earl, you can't do this! Think of your family. Think of the butcher and the barber who depend on your patronage. Think of your dogs, the happy wagging of their tails.”

“Yes, there are those considerations, but is that enough? Life is so very hard.”

The revolving fan twists slowly with the weight of the orange cord, pulling it tighter around Earl's neck. He's standing on the toes of his leather boots. He looks ready to drop off the table.

“Life may be hard,” I say. “Yes, life might be a rash on your anus, but there are always things on the horizon to wait for. There are balloons and candy bars, if you like candy bars. There are cloudless days and bottles of sunscreen. There are many things I've forgotten about but will tell you later. And then there's love in the end, yes? The great hope? Love in the end.”

Earl's face is contorted in shame. I think I see tears peeking from the edges of his eyes. “I never thought about it like that,” he says.

He gets down and slips a five-dollar tip into my hand, asks me if I want some coffee. Earl is one of the ones who likes to talk afterwards. We discuss the weather, the recent home team's victory against the visiting team, politicians and the interiors of their bedrooms.

The routine varies.

In bed, Patricia tells me how the people in the city aren't happy, and the mayor is nervous. The election is only months away. The mayor spends his days shouting into the red telephone.

“Paul, you have to get me out of this one!” he says. “Stephanie, you're my spin queen. Spin it for me, baby, please!”

Patricia says she commissioned a study that reached a tentative conclusion: the people in the city feel detached from
their surroundings. “More and more, people are sticking to themselves and only staring into their screens,” Patricia says.

“The city is an alien thing,” I say. “If it weren't for my job, I wouldn't even know my neighbors' names.”

Patricia clicks off the light, and we go to sleep.

Soon the mayor creates a plan for “aesthetic interactivity” to bring people closer to their city, their home. Patricia sets up the whole thing. She orchestrates a network of cameras and projectors to display the images of the people on the street onto large screens draped between the buildings. This way, people can't help but view themselves as part of the city's ecosystem.

I don't leave my apartment much, yet I wonder how the people take it. Do they like watching themselves as they go about their chores? Do they wave and perform? Do they see their images in the sky and think of themselves as stars? Most are probably caught unaware.

At night, our cats meow out the window. The image of a young woman angrily hitting her lover with a handful of flowers is projected from the street onto a screen right outside. Autumn has begun, and leaves disrupt the picture as they fall.

With the election looming, Patricia has been called on to work longer hours. Most days I'm awoken by her clicking shut the door.

I have my regulars in the building, but people always come and go. After lunch, I have a new customer who marks herself down for razors. I make a turkey and cheddar sandwich with too much mustard and crack open a tin of tuna for the cats. I eat the sandwich as I climb the stairs to the fifth floor. When I knock no one answers.

I figure this girl doesn't know the rules, even though they were explicitly spelled out on the consent form. Either that
or she got a date with a cute boy and has given up on the suicide drama.

“Fuck it,” I say, and almost turn to head back to my room. Instead, I sigh and use an old debit card to jimmy the door open.

The apartment is a clean one, with blue walls and bright light pouring in through the blinds. I don't see my client anywhere. I close the door and go through the act, say, “I'm just the power man casually checking the meter.” I don't hear any response.

“Daphne Bankhead?” I say. It's moments like these that remind me why this job was open and how lonely even attempting human contact can be.

Then I find her draped over the toilet with red trickling across the floor. She's wearing a green dress, and her hair is pulled back with yellow barrettes.

I rush over and lift her off the toilet. I yank off two wads of toilet paper and press them to her wrists. She gives me a little smile.

“I thought you were supposed to be here at two thirty,” she says.

“You put down three.”

“My bad,” she says.

I lean her against the side of the bathtub and grab a washcloth to wipe away the blood. The wounds are thin slits across her wrists, although not in the right direction to finish her off. Not unless I'd left her bleeding there for a week or so. Still, the whole thing puts me on edge.

“You're not supposed to go this far with it,” I say. “I'm not licensed in any medical capacity.”

I look at her face, trying to decide if I've seen her in the building before. A thin sheet of sweat is making her forehead shine. I
grab a handful of Band-Aids and wrap them one by one around her wrists.

“I guess I got carried away,” she says. “I used to be a bit of a thespian in high school.”

Outside I can hear dogs barking and cars honking by. Daphne smiles and lifts her face to mine.

I might have made a miscalculation earlier. There were certain facts I hadn't taken into consideration: the French calling the orgasm “le petite mort” or “the little death,” certain theories of Freud's, autoerotic asphyxiation, and so on. Sex, which is in some sense life, is forever caught up in the struggle with death.

Daphne, with her eyes like fistfuls of diamonds, was yet another mistake.

Patricia in a blue dress. Patricia making me cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off for lunch. The cats, Spick and Span, rubbing against her leg as Patricia feeds them the crusts. Patricia with her slanted smile teaching me to dance. Walking down the street arm in arm, an old friend, “Patricia!” Patricia taking cooking lessons. The phone rings, I pick it up: “Patricia?” Patricia fed up. Patricia fed up with my fucking drinking. Patricia: “I know all about it, you asshole. I know all about that fifth-floor slut, Daphne.” Patricia with a suitcase. Patricia with a large yellow suitcase at the door. The door closing. Patricia. Patricia. Patricia.

I lie in bed most nights, thinking of things.

This suicide problem is becoming a real crisis. Especially with the recent deaths (human error crops up everywhere).

I myself am dragged before a judge after Mrs. Murmur finally succeeds. I've been drinking since Patricia left, and when the
alarm went off, I punched it off the bedside table. A few hours later, I stumbled into Mrs. Murmur's room, and she was turning blue, her hairdryer's power cord snug around her powdery neck. Her eyes were still open and staring at me.

The judge asks me how I let this happen after all my training.

“Training, Your Honor?”

“For your certification.”

“Certification, Your Honor?”

I lose the job and am sentenced to five months of community service at the homeless shelter. It's pretty much the same gig, except it doesn't pay.

My absence doesn't stop things. Two days later, Upstairs Jack is in the hospital getting his wrists stitched up. My job is reinstated under the table.

This kind of thing is happening all over the city. People are taking matters into their own hands. The countryside seems immune to the problem, but the city is slowly falling apart. You can't even turn on a talk show without hearing competing experts shouting their different theories.

The election is looming like a wolf at the gates. The mayor has to do something. When he appears in public, he yanks his tie.

Interrupting a college football game, the mayor announces a plan that I know is Patricia's. The mayor talks about a great entrepreneur named Dr. Sam. “Dr. Sam has a stunning new product to innovate his native city,” the mayor says. “He will use a series of chemicals to turn our great river into a chromatic display of the city's emotions. An algorithm will squirt the chemicals into the river based on our citizens' social media activity. It will create a mood ring flowing all around us.”

Dr. Sam takes the stage wearing a lab coat over his polo and jeans.

“Imagine the innovative rainbow of our collective emotions disrupting the stagnant waters of our beloved river! Samples of the river rainbow can be purchased in-app for $29.99. City Hall will even throw in a free tote bag.”

I turn off the
TV
and head to my mandatory community volunteering.

The whole city has gone to hell. My cereal is soggy, the citrus is sour. I get lonely. The cat, Spick, meows constantly. Patricia took Span with her, along with the computer and most of our books. She left me the flatscreen though.

The workload is unbearable as more and more people sign up. Now, when I make my rounds, I say, “You idiot! You big dumbo! Stop that, just stop it right now!”

Sometimes Daphne comes to my door. “I was wondering if you wanted to go to the ceremony.”

“Which one?” I say.

“At the Remembering Day Memorial Bridge. Dr. Sam is going to perform the river trick today.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Then,” she says, “perhaps I'll see you there.”

“Perhaps.” I clink the ice in my glass until she closes the door.

By the time I get there, the bridge is packed as tightly as a supermarket shelf. I sip a flask of whiskey as I listen to the recycled speeches and watch the middle school talent shows. Finally, a woman in a sparkly dress cuts the ribbon with three-foot scissors.

Everyone around me looks nervous. I look for Patricia but don't see her. Dr. Sam yanks the large lever, and the blue chemicals jump free into the river. Everyone grows silent. Several mothers hoist their babies high in the air.

We fidget and wait.

The river begins to glow a bright yellow.

There are reports that where the yellow river crashes into the sea, seagulls fly away in fear. There are reports that fish near the river's mouth leap out of the water to die on the rocks. These reports are not considered credible, and only 40 percent of people polled believe them. Still.

It should be no surprise that timelines and status updates are filled with jokes at the expense of the “yellow river,” but I don't find them funny. I find the whole situation sad and take to drinking even more.

Time passes in that way it likes to pass, without you even wanting to notice. I do my job for the people who want it, but many move on to more intense experiences. Daphne moves to another city by another river. The mayor is defeated in the election by a younger man with a bigger smile. The new mayor's mood doesn't transfer to the citizens though. The river slowly turns back to its traditional brown as the chemicals drain away.

Then one day I run into Patricia as I'm walking alongside the river looking to buy some tomatoes. She looks a bit older and a bit sadder.

“Hello,” she says.

“Long time,” I say.

We walk together up the riverside, reminiscing. We talk for a long time about this and that. Up on the bridge, I can see many people with wide-open eyes. I can almost make out the fear in those eyes, and the tears glinting in the sun. The people carry armfuls of bricks or old appliances to weigh them down. I see Earl and Upstairs Jack standing on the rail. Earl gives me an embarrassed wave.