Upright Beasts Read online

  “Cut them,” he orders. “Cut them all.”

  “Paula?”

  “Oh, I didn’t see you there.”

  “I was waiting for you. I have things I have to tell you. Things about you and about me. Weird things, wobbly feelings in my chest that I’ve started to discover.”

  “Oh no, not now! It’s too late now.”

  Two tears begin to form in the corners of her lovely eyes.

  Disaster! My assignment on the state of our education has been found. I’m dragged through the coldly lit hallways by two ex-linebackers. Although I’d stopped working on the essay a long time ago, I couldn’t destroy it. There was some small hope glimmering in the back of my mind.

  The ex-linebackers toss me on the equipment room floor. Clint Bulger sits on the coach’s chair. To the right, Timmy Thomas whispers into his ear. To the left, Lydia flips the pages of a magazine with her delicate fingers. She doesn’t even look down at me. Why had I ever imagined the possibility of a connection between us?

  In front of me lie the crumpled pages of my assignment and an old teacher’s tie that I had saved from destruction.

  “What do you have to say about all this?” Bulger bellows.

  “How did you get my locker combination?”

  Timmy chuckles. “Did you think I’d forget about your precious essay?”

  “You know that worship of the false teachers is forbidden,” Bulger says. He stands up, holding an aluminum baseball bat as his staff. He picks up one page of my essay and smooths it out.

  “The goal of our education is to afford us the skills needed to graduate and pursue further education at greater institutions.” He snorts. “What does that even mean? That our education never ends? That we’re trapped in a hell of infinite schools?” He crumples the page back up and tosses it on the floor.

  “The concept of the teachers is absurd. What kind of teacher would leave their students? Such a teacher would be no teacher at all. So, we must conclude that the teachers are a false tale that students tell themselves to avoid facing the real struggles in their lives. They’re a myth, and a harmful one.”

  “If that’s true,” I say, getting to my knees, “then who do you think is in the black lounge?”

  “Silence!” Timmy yells.

  Bulger merely laughs.

  I’m being held in the equipment cage. My guard passes me Gatorade and granola bars through the gaps. Clint Bulger comes to see me, to ask if I repent. I say nothing.

  “You know,” he says, sitting on a kickball, “you look very familiar to me.”

  “Yes!” I say, hoping to appeal to his sense of fraternity. I crawl closer to the wire grid. “We used to ride the bus together. We both sat in the back row. We were almost friends.”

  “No,” Bulger says. He sighs and rises. “You still don’t understand. There never was any bus.”

  I’m napping on a pile of gym mats when I hear a voice softly say my name.

  “They let me see you,” Beanpole Paula says. “I said I’d reason with you.”

  She slips me a chocolate chip cookie through the gap. Her hand brushes mine as she does.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Paula is silent as I take a bite.

  “Do you really want to leave the school so badly?”

  “I could stay,” I say, leaning against the cage. “I could stay with you.”

  She gives me a look that feels as if it is traveling to me from some vast, cold distance. Then she turns her head away.

  “I’m with Timmy now. You know that.”

  “I don’t know what’s true and what’s false. I only believe there must be a better, more important place than this.”

  “Then I hope you find it,” Paula says. She starts to say something else, but instead turns away with her mouth partly ajar.

  Past crushes, friends, rivals, and strangers alike jeer and shout as I’m dragged through the hallway. My head pulses as it hits the tile floor. A little stream of blood trickles out of my nose. When I raise my head, I see the dark teachers’ lounge towering over me.

  “This heretical loser has turned his back on all of us,” Bulger shouts. The student body has assembled on the different floors overlooking the cafeteria. They are silent and watching. “But we aren’t unreasonable people. In fact, we want to give him a choice. He may repent and return to his clique, or he may live for the rest of his days inside his sacred lounge.”

  The shouts of the students fall around me. I look up at the different faces staring down. Some are sympathetic, some seem angry, but most are simply bored. The most venomous face belongs to Timmy. He spits on the tile floor.

  Paula is next to him, and her eyes are red. I look into them, hoping, perhaps, for some sign. I think that maybe she will leap forward and block the entrance, telling the whole school of our love. But she doesn’t move. She looks back at me with resignation, as if she is reminiscing about those lost, carefree recesses spent swinging together on the monkey bars.

  I turn back to the looming walls of the lounge.

  “If he has nothing to say, so be it,” Bulger says. “Boys, open.”

  The ex-linebackers jam crowbars into the door of the black lounge. It takes four of them to finally swing it open with a loud crack. The inside is the blackest black I have ever seen. As the doors are pulled open, everything turns silent. I can no longer hear the heckling or shouts of my fellow students. My friends and enemies fade away behind me. The only thing before me is the darkness of the lounge.

  I’m on my knees in front of the doorway, holding my assignment out in my hand.

  IF IT WERE ANYONE ELSE

  A bald man buddied up to me in the elevator, but he was no buddy of mine. He was much older than me, yet more or less exactly as tall, not counting my hair. He was holding a brown paper bag over his crotch.

  “Does this go all the way to the roof?”

  I made a big show of putting my newspaper down and turning my head. “What the hell do I know about the roof? What would I do all the way up there?”

  We stood still as we moved up the building.

  “Just a friendly question.” He licked the bottom of his mustache with the tip of his tongue. “Hey, do you like candy beans?”

  There was no one else on the elevator, and then the doors opened and a woman in a green pantsuit stepped in. She looked at us and moved to the other corner.

  “Who doesn’t?” I hissed.

  The man opened his paper bag and dug around. He offered me an assortment in his palm. I took four of the red and six of the purple.

  I got out two-thirds of the way up. The building I worked in was very tall, more or less exactly as tall as the tallest building in that part of the city, not counting the antenna. I often forgot how tall the building was because I kept the office blinds half-closed. If I opened them, I would get unnerved by the eye-level workers looking back at me from the building across the street.

  My company occupied four floors of the building, but they weren’t consecutive. Between the lowest floor we owned and the third-highest floor we owned, there was a snack company. I had been working at my company for some time. I now worked on the top floor of the floors we owned, but I had worked on the lowest floor, and also the floor above the snack company. I had never worked on the floor that was two floors above the snack company and one floor below my current floor.

  The snack company often had sample bowls set up for new products they were testing. I liked to go down there and unwrap a few when I could get away for a bit.

  The older bald man was sitting in a red leather chair near the elevator. He turned and smiled up at me as I pressed the down button.

  “How was the roof?” I said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t get all the way to the top. I got pretty close though. It was real nice, even not quite at the top. You could see the park and everything.” He was nodding agreeably.

  “Do you have business on this floor? Those red chairs are for people
who have business on this floor.” We had four red leather chairs around a coffee table in the hallway. There was also a tall, thin plant that I was pretty sure was plastic.

  The man looked up at me with a cautious smile.

  I looked at him in his ugly, unbuttoned suit. The top of his head shone under the fluorescent light. My face must have shown my disgust.

  “Okay,” he said with an exaggerated frown. “I get it. You’ve got work to do. Maybe some other time.”

  I didn’t live in the city proper; I lived in one of the outer boroughs. You couldn’t see it from my office window, on account of all the tall buildings. The buildings were much shorter in my borough.

  I spent a lot of time traveling over and under water. There were many bridges and tunnels connecting my borough and the city. I didn’t like going through the tunnels. Sometimes the subway would stop deep underground, and I’d close my eyes and try to think of something other than water rushing in and drowning everyone in the car.

  I’d taken the blue bridge on the subway to get to work. After work, I walked back along the brown bridge. It was a nice day, and the bridge was crammed with people. There were lots of children throwing scraps of food over the railing and down into the water.

  About halfway across the bridge, I thought I saw the bald man, and I turned quickly and tried to duck. A biker was biking past me and shouted out, “You’re going to kill everyone!” He started wobbling but didn’t tip over. A few people yelled at the biker while he was yelling at me.

  I stayed crouching for a few moments. I could see the cars whizzing by beneath me through the slats. There were millions of people in the city, but you just never knew.

  I thought I saw the bald man again that evening. The man I saw was shouting in my direction from up the street, but he had a fedora pulled down low on his head, so I wasn’t sure.

  I stepped into a new cookie shop that had opened on my corner. Before that, it had been a macaron shop, and, when I had first moved in, a cupcake shop. But it had originally been a cookie shop. Things always came around like that in this part of the city.

  I was wrong about the man on the street. He must have been shouting at a cab. The bald man I’d been ducking was inside the cookie shop with a whole stack and a two-thirds empty glass of milk.

  “Wow,” he said. He jumped out of his chair. “Now this is a coincidence. This has to mean something, right?”

  I thought about leaving, going to the brownie shop next door, but I didn’t want him to think he had that kind of power over me.

  He walked up beside me at the counter. “Hey buddy, I got an idea. Do you like ballgames?”

  The woman at the counter was asking for my order. Her eyeballs rolled in their sockets.

  “Sure,” I said. “Everyone likes ballgames.”

  “Let’s go to the ballgame. You and me. Just two guys watching a ballgame. What’s wrong with that? I got an extra ticket.”

  I didn’t look at him, but I felt his hand on my shoulder. I could tell he was going to keep bothering me. He was like a stray mangy dog I’d unthinkingly fed scraps to.

  “Just this once,” I sighed. “One ballgame.”

  The man slapped his hands together and walked toward the door.

  “Not now. I want to finish my snack. I came here to have a snack,” I said.

  The man had the door open, and he started to close it. “We’ll miss the first inning,” he said. He looked surprisingly annoyed, but then he cheered up. “That’s okay. The team never gets going until the second or third. Okay. Yeah. I’ll be sitting over there until you’re done.”

  The man led me to a damp parking garage deep underground and unlocked the doors to a beige sedan. He looked at me and started to say something, but he stopped himself. He faced forward and turned on the ignition.

  “Let’s just take it slow. One day at a time,” he said.

  “Sure, whatever you say.”

  We drove up the slanted cement. I stared ahead.

  “I only thought we could go to a nice ballgame. Do you like rock ’n’ roll? Let’s listen to some rock ’n’ roll.” At first we were still a few floors too far underground. Then the static broke into clear guitars as we drove onto the street.

  There were bits of trash all over the floor of the car, old snack wrappers and the like. “This is a pigsty. Do you live in here? How old is this car, anyway? It still has a tape player. They don’t even make tapes anymore!”

  His face and head started to turn a reddish color, and his knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. I saw his chapped lips count quietly down from ten. “What do you think about our bullpen?” he said after a minute. He tried to smile. “Let’s talk about the bullpen.”

  The ballpark was in yet another borough. The road was flat all the way there. It was a brand-new ballpark that had cost the team and the city a lot of money. It was large and open. The breeze could come in and out, and there were all sorts of food and snacks being sold, even sushi. I went to this ballpark pretty frequently with clients. I never knew where my company’s seats would be. Sometimes the clients and I were way at the top, overhanging the field. Other times, we were down low, almost level with the players.

  When we pulled up, there were no other cars in the parking lot. There was no one walking up and down the stadium. It was just the quiet and the man and me in a dirty old car.

  He turned off the gas and hung his bare head. “The game must be tomorrow,” he said after a bit.

  I gave a laugh. I reached out and calmly placed a hand on his damp, bald head. “Isn’t this just perfect? You dumb schmuck! Harass me all day and take me to an abandoned ballpark.”

  The man got out of the car, and I got out after him. He tore off his suit jacket and rolled it into a ball. He pressed this against his mouth and yelled into it.

  Gray pigeons walked around us, knocking their heads down at fossilized pizza crusts. It was quiet and peaceful.

  I got up behind him and grabbed his shoulder. He dropped the jacket on the pavement.

  “Hey,” I said.

  We were getting somewhere now.

  THE RIVER TRICK

  Upstairs Jack uses knives, Mrs. Murmur prefers pills, and Lloyd drops electrical appliances into his bathtub. We all have our vices. I, for one, drink heavily. I try not to on the job though, because timing is everything with suicides.

  Patricia and I moved into this apartment complex four months ago. We had been having a hard time making it in the city, and after I lost my job driving subway cars, we could no longer afford the rents. It isn’t so bad on the outskirts. We have a nice building made out of solid brick. There’s a small garden in the back, and we can take our cats, Spick and Span, outside to dig around in the flowers. Patricia has a longer commute, but I get to work from home.

  My various neighbors try to kill themselves at least twice a month. They’re not very good at it. Upstairs Jack’s kitchen is stocked with plastic utensils. Lloyd doesn’t bother plugging in the toaster and sometimes doesn’t even fill the tub. Mrs. Murmur fails to realize you can’t overdose on sugar pills; the placebo effect just doesn’t reach that far.

  In the mornings, I saw a grapefruit in half and pour a bowl of cereal. If I can, I exercise. Twenty push-ups, twenty pull-ups, and a twenty-minute run. It’s easier to remember that way. Afterwards, I check the queue from the Apartment Wellness Committee website listing the who/what/when/where. I lay out my schedule, squeeze my neighbors into their proper slots.

  Of course, sometimes the clerk forgets to log an appointment, or else I sleep through my alarm and rush down the hall to find Tina Okada crumpled on the floor with a broken piece of twine around her neck, glaring angrily at me.

  Mix-ups, complications; these are the inevitable kinks in the hose of human operations. Yesterday, Patricia burned my toast while talking on the phone with her sister. I understood.

  It isn’t anything sexual, the suicides. I feel I should make that clear. I was raised in the country, a full-fledged farm butting
right up against our backyard. When I visit my family, they ask about this.

  “We hear people in the city do weird things in bed,” they say.

  “We hear they’re perverts, every last one.”

  “We hear of acts that aren’t right to speak about in proper company.”

  “Well,” I say, “it’s a crazy world every which way you look.”

  But as far as I can tell, the suicides are not part of this. My customers don’t seem to be in any erotic throes. I don’t find them with wet latex hanging from their limp organs or flecks of fake blood dotting their exposed nipples. They’re always properly dressed, with faces curled in pain, not pleasure. I know there are people who believe sex is an extension of death, but I’ve never experienced this. Things are what they are and not other things.

  I’m not here to judge anyway. I do my job, and afterwards I live my own life. If I see my neighbors when I’m swapping my wet laundry into the dryer, I make the necessary small talk. I don’t think of them lying in their bathtubs, beds, or on their living room floors. I try not to even speculate as to their reasons.

  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.