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Useful Instincts

Matt Spencer

I wake up on the couch. It’s cold in here, but I don’t tug the blanket closer. I need to get sharp, and the cold helps with that. There’s no real reason I have to be sharp. It’s another few hours ’til I have to be at work. It’s an old instinct that comes and goes. It’ll wake up in me, want to be useful again, not let anything convince me it’s not ’til it sleeps again. This is my living room, and the bedroom with its big warm bed is just a door away. But I had one of those nights where everything in me rebelled against the bed, the thought of it, like it would eat me if I lay down on it. Some nights I can’t even sleep on the couch. Instead I’ll lie flat on the floor, hands folded over my chest like a vampire in a coffin. Sometimes I’ll use the half-empty beanbag chair as a pillow, sometimes I’ll let the back of my skull lie like a rock rolled to a stop. In times like that, this whole apartment feels unnatural around me, this wide, clean space for which I pay five hundred a month without much trouble. Why complain? Plenty of folks would gladly trade. Maybe I should go make one of them an offer, except I guess I’m addicted. So here I am trapped in one addiction, writhing in withdrawal from the alternative. Whatever wandering bum I traded with would have to take my steady job, too, or one like it. After a year, would they notice themselves going soft from it, feel the leash tightening on their neck like I do?

Through the half-open patio blinds, the world is white except for the shaded beams of the railing and the innermost shrubs. If I crane my head a little further back across the side of the couch, I can see the bricks of the building across from mine. I stand up and stretch myself into proper erect posture, which I don’t do much anymore. It feels weird, like I’ve become impossibly tall. The cluttered coffee table and the couch seem miles beneath me, like I’m dangling from a towering cliff. I still have on my jeans and wifebeater from last night, and my muscles feel thicker and tighter against the inner fabric than they did when I fell asleep. It must be the cold. I look again at the snow, and I realize I’ll have to leave early to get to work on time through that mess. So it’s a good thing I’m getting myself together early.

I walk outside all bundled up, keeping my posture good, masturbatorilly enjoying the temporary return to form. There’s a girl bundled up thicker than I am. She carries out a bundle of some things, puts it in the backseat of her car, then she scrapes snow and ice off her windows. At first I can’t tell a thing about her, except that she has very thin legs wrapped in faded jeans that are soaked at the ankles. She probably wears longjohns under the jeans, and her legs probably look even thinner without them. Her bulky coat above those petite legs creates an incongruous effect, like a shaggy tree with a spindly trunk that’s about to break from the weight in the wind. I can’t see her face thanks to the giant, low-hanging hood. Then I spot a pair of bright eyes with giant batting lashes, surrounded by the smooth skin of a pretty young face, the mouth wrapped in a blue scarf. I walk slower as she climbs into her car and guns it to life. The rear tires spray snow, but the car stays put. I walk to the front, dig my heels into the snow, grip the rim of the hood, and put all my sinews into the shove. It feels futile at first, then the car slides away from me. I draw up sharply so I don’t fall on my face, as the car swings around and settles on snow that’s been packed down tight by all the other cars that have made it out of this parking lot in the last few hours.

She rolls down her window and she peers out at me. “Thanks a lot,” she says with a big, bright, embarrassed smile that’s so shaky, it’s almost a nervous laugh. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, no problem.” She’s trying to get a sense of me, so I do my best to make my eyes and smile bright and winning as hers. “I just hope I can get to work on time.”

“Are you walking?” she asks incredulously.

“Yeah,” I say, smile widening with good-humored embarrassment.

I must be pathetic enough, or dashing enough, or somehow both, something she decides is non-threatening, because she says, “You need a ride somewhere?”

I tell her where I work and ask if she’s going that way. She says she’ll drop me off, and I climb in next to her. Her hood’s pushed back now, and she’s pretty as I thought. Her face is long with a pointed nose. Her coat’s open and pushed back because she has the heat on. When she leans forward I see that her back is very toned, very smooth and flat beneath her neck. For some reason this feature makes me drool the most. I glance in the back seat at the bundle she brought out. A stack of formal documents has slid partly into view. I think they might be medical documents for some reason. They look crumpled and old. I make some small talk, but she eyes me stranger and stranger.

“You’re familiar from somewhere,” she says.

“You’ve probably seen me around the building,” I say.

“I don’t live in the building. My boyfriend does.”

“Oh. So how come he wasn’t out helping you get your car free?”

“He has a leg injury. He has to walk with a cane. This weather’s been hell for him, and he goes outside as little as possible.”

“That sucks. I hear it’s supposed to clear up by the end of the weekend.”

“I hope so.”

She drops me off and drives away. Now I think I know where she’s seen me. I laugh nervously and maliciously. No wonder I didn’t recognize her, bundled up like that. It was back in August, and the girl I’m thinking of had on a white tank-top that was too small even for her and a pair of green shorts that barely covered her ass, hair pulled back in a ponytail. I was walking home, past the tennis courts between work and the apartment, and the heat was doing nothing for a mood that was already foul. The tennis courts in the summer are full of hot girls like that, which always made for at least something pleasant about the trudge home. I miss it in fall and winter. I spied her through the fence, swinging a racket, wearing what might have been a cheerful grin or a grimace of exertion. At the other side of the court was one of those preppy, slick-blonde assholes in a T-shirt with elbow-length sleeves, made of thick white material that looked hot as a parka in that weather. But it was expensive material and you could tell by looking at it, which I guess is what mattered to him. I stopped thinking about either of them because I realized I needed to piss. I crossed the grassy mound between the tennis courts, past a picnic table towards the stone structure with the bathrooms for the players.

Somehow Preppy-Boy fouled a shot horridly, and the tennis ball flew wild and bounced off my head. My skull rang a little, then I saw the ball bounce in the grass close to my feet. I let out a growl, snatched it up, and chucked it hard back at Preppy-Boy. I missed him and the ball bounced off the fence next to his head. Maybe I shouted something like watch it, asshole. And he shouted something back like what the fuck was my problem?

I realized it had been an accident, that he’d have shouted apologies instead otherwise, so I called listlessly, “Sorry… I’ve just had a really shitty day.”

But he was storming towards me, and his girl ran up behind him to try to hold him back. It didn’t work. “Yeah well, your day’s about to get a lot shittier.”

His tan, toned arms were tense, and one of them cocked back to swing. It was an embarrassingly calibrated move. I forgot my charitable notions, said “No, yours is,” and sent a sharp kick straight into his kneecap. Bone and cartilage gave under my heel, and his leg bent back unnaturally. His girlfriend started screaming. The sound disagreed with my head almost worse than the tennis ball had. Other people were looking around in confusion. It had all happened too fast for them to know what was going on. I concluded “Me, I’m feeling a hell of a lot better all of a sudden.” and walked off. I could find somewhere else to piss. No one came after me. I guess they were too busy with the guy whose leg I’d busted. For the next few weeks, I took a different route to work. When I found my way back onto the old one, I never encountered anyone who recognized me from that day.

But it doesn’t make sense for it to be the same girl. Her injured boyfriend lives in my building, she said. I haven’t seen anyone in the building walking with a cane, or crutches beforehand for that matter. Someone like that would be hard to miss, especially since he’d surely recognize me. I get a funny mental picture of him coming at me again, this time swinging with his cane like a pissed off geriatric chasing kids off his porch. Work’s busy, though, and I forget about it by the end of the day. A co-worker gives me a lift home, and I’m glad to find the parking lot shoveled. I see the girl’s car parked where it was this morning. At least I think it’s the same car. I watch for her as I head to my door, but she’s nowhere around. Once I’m locked inside, I sit on my couch and almost want to lie down, but I’m too restless. It’s the old instinct, insisting that I be restless. And for once in too long, I have a reason to feel restless, or I think I might, and yes, that feels good, reassuring.

I don’t jolt when someone knocks, but I stand up very purposefully. I look through the peephole and it’s her. Now that I’ve spent some time replaying the tennis court incident in my mind, I open the door and I’m sure it’s the same girl. I could have painted her face on the memory, but I somehow don’t think so. And I see in her eyes that she knows I’m the guy who crippled her boyfriend because I was having a bad day.

“Hi. Can I come in?” She says it like someone’s been chasing her, but I know it’s just the cold of the hallway she wants to get away from. I’ve turned the heat on in my place, but it isn’t much warmer yet.

“Sure,” I say and step aside. She walks past me and lets her coat slide off her shoulders. She hangs it on the barstool I keep next to the counter between my living room and the kitchenette. The shirt beneath has no neck, hangs loose, and I see that smooth, flat back like the spine stops beneath her neck and starts again somewhere inside the shirt. “What’s up?” Then I decide to revise it to “What do you want?” Then I feel bad and revise it again to “Can I get you a beer or something?”

She shivers and inches sharply further from me, like she’s annoyed to exchange the cold air for my cold manners. “Do you have coffee?”

“Sure. I’ll brew some. Have a seat on the couch.”

I set the coffee brewing watching her over my shoulder and the counter. She sits with her legs pressed together, head hunched, hands rubbing together, eyes darting left and right like she hopes to find a comforting idea about me from the sparse furnishings. I walk over and sit on the other side of the couch. “So how’d you know which door was mine?”

“I saw you go in.”

“Oh.” I wonder where she was watching from, but don’t ask. I watch the shirt with no neck draped over her bony shoulders above that toned back. I’m polite on my side of the couch, when what I really want to do is pin her flat on the floor. Maybe I have the wrong idea, and this is a booty-call, and I’m being rude by not attacking her. I’ll feel things out first, though. “So what do you want?”

“I’m… not sure how to say it. This is weird.”

“So just say it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It never feels like it is, does it?”

She laughs in spite of herself. “No, I guess not. It’s about my boyfriend.”

“Oh. So you told him you found the bad man. Is he pressing charges?” I know that’s not it. If it was, I’d just find a court subpoena next time I checked my mailbox.

“No. This is the part where it’s hard to start. You used to work in a soap factory in Virginia, didn’t you?”

I stare blankly. “Yeah. Well, I wasn’t a steady worker there. I was a transient then, and I signed up with a labor service that sent me there for a week.”

“Yeah. So was my boyfriend. He signed up with the same people and they sent him there.”

I almost say That preppy snot used to have to work factory jobs? All I manage instead is “I don’t remember him.”

Maybe she reads my mind, because she says, “You wouldn’t. He’s a completely different person now, I know. He was a junkie back then. He’s cleaned up his act a lot, has a nice office job and everything. You should have seen him when we met. He was still pulling himself together. Sometimes he tells me he’s gone soft, but I tell him he’s being too hard on himself.”

I remember that sloppy punch he started to throw, how he didn’t see my move coming and squealed like a little bitch when I dropped him, and I want to tell her she shouldn’t give him false encouragement like that. Instead I put some guilt in my tone and say “Oh. So how’s he holding up now?”

“He missed a lot of work.” Strangely, I don’t sense any venom. Maybe she dealt with all that before coming to see me. “It was a good thing he had so much sick time saved up. He’s missing more work, now that it’s cold. But it’s not really his injury keeping him in. Something else broke in him besides his kneecap that day.” She stares at me with something stranger than anger. “He remembers your face. He didn’t realize it ’til he was down and staring up at you from the ground.”

“He remembers me from the soap factory?”

Her eyes drop, then return to me. “No. That was my hunch. I didn’t think you’d have been one of the laborers, though. I thought you’d have been a foreman or something.”

“Why would you think that?”

She takes a deep breath. “Did you ever hear what happened to that place?”

“I heard something about them being shut down. I’d moved on by then, and barely recognized the name of the place. Something about the ingredients in their soap being fucked up, causing bad reactions in people.”

“Did you ever use any of the soap from the place?”

“Yeah. At the end of one day, they handed out plastic bags full of samples. I used it in the shower that night at the cheap motel I was staying in. It made my skin itch like crazy, so I threw it away. I thought that was just me, though, at the time.”

“You were lucky. I don’t know what chemicals they were putting in that shit, but a lot of people had it a lot worse than you.”

“People like your boyfriend.” She nods. “What happened to him?”

“Something in the soap soaked into his skin, and it went to his brain. It started when he was asleep, and at first he thought it was just nightmares. Then he woke up, and the nightmares were still there.”

“Sounds like LSD.”

“Yeah, that’s what he thought, and he figured one of his junkie buddies had dosed him with something. Then he kept using the soap, and it kept happening. It was the doctors in the ER who finally helped him figure it out.” Some weird kind of pride floods her voice. “My boyfriend was one of the people in the class action lawsuit that brought the place down. That’s how he got the money to start over.”

Since the soap didn’t effect me like that, I wish I’d kept up on all this at the time. I could have gotten in on the action, pulled some of that money. “Good for him.”

“Not really. Those chemicals are long gone from his system, but they permanently affected his neurological system. He still has nightmares from the hallucinations. He says demons are tearing him apart, and the demons have human faces. Some of them are old junkie friends from back then. Most of those guys are dead now, and I can’t help being glad about it, even though that’s horrible of me.”

“No, it’s perfectly natural.”

“Maybe. But the rest of the faces are people from that factory. He wasn’t sure, but I listened to him and suggested that, and he realized, yeah, some of them. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Now he’s obsessed with finding out what happened to everyone who had a hand in running the place, like it’s some demon conspiracy puzzle he can piece together, like he’ll find Satan himself at the center. He’s been having me use my job connections to track down all sorts of records about the place, about the case.”

Oh, I think. That must have been those files I saw in the back of her car. “And I’m one of the demon faces he always sees in his nightmares, even though he has no idea where he first saw me. Then the mean old face out of the past pops out of nowhere and kicks his ass one day, and now he’s convinced that it’s not all hallucinations, and I’m a demon in the flesh come to chase him around.” I recite it all in a sing-song way.

She looks annoyed at first, then turns away embarrassed. “That’s pretty much it.” Then quickly, “He always had a loopy streak like that, but he kept it in line, never let it effect how he saw reality. It’s just since… well…”

“Since that little fight with me.”

“Yeah. Since then, he’s been more and more isolated, and that loopy side gets more and more prominent, and he is letting it shake his hold on reality.”

It sounds to me like he’s long since shaken that off like fleas from a dog. “How many people has he been going around blabbing this shit to?”

“Just some of our friends. He kept it together well enough when he was still at work, but even they started hearing him say strange things.”

Great. I wonder how many people she means by some of our friends. “So why are you here telling me this?”

“I thought you had a right to know. He’s getting weirder and weirder, and I don’t know what he’ll try when he feels more mobile.”

Considering how it went when we all met, this doesn’t worry me too much. Still I ask, “You didn’t tell him about running into me, did you?”

She sighs. “I did. I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know why I did. I knew it was a bad idea even before I said it. Then he got really weird with me, and I had to get out of there. He’s still up there, huddled in his apartment, still jabbering about you at the walls for all I know. I haven’t been back there in hours.”

“But you came back and waited for me to get home.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, if you’re really scared, maybe you shouldn’t be here at all. It sounds like he’s a pretty sketchy guy to deal with.”

“Yeah, but I really thought he’d gotten better, that he’d keep a grip. Then what happened, happened.” A pause. “You don’t seem like you’re all that stable yourself.”

“Me, I’m harmless.”

“I know that’s bullshit.”

“Look, about that day… I was already pissed, and I felt stupid for chucking that ball back at him. I tried to apologize, but he was looking for a fight.”

“So were you.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who at least tried to keep one from actually starting.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.” I put a gentle hand on her shoulder. It startles her, but she doesn’t pull away. “Sounds like you’ve been having a rough time lately. You deserve to have someone give you a break.”

“Thanks. You’ve been really patient with me. I know how weird all this must seem.”

I nod. “Like I said, it’s OK. I’ve seen weirder.”

“Back when you were a transient, like Jeff?”

“That your boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Look, you know he probably only set eyes on you once or twice, and your face stayed in the back of his subconscious ’til the soap chemicals gave it something to do. I don’t think any of this is your fault. Just so you know that.”

“Thanks. My name’s Rob, by the way. Rob Harris.”

She laughs a little. “My name’s Natalie. Good to meet you, Rob.”

“Good to meet you too, I guess. I think that coffee should be ready by now. Still want any?”

She nods enthusiastically, so I get up and pour two cups. She wraps her hands around the cup like she still needs to thaw out, even though the heater’s filled the place by now. Finally she drinks it. We make more small talk to defuse the rest of the tension. When I touch her shoulder again, she leans in and kisses me. I start to slide my arms around her, and she pulls back.

“I’m sorry,” she says sharply. “I really didn’t come over to – Look, it’s just –”

“I know, and it’s OK.” I lean in and kiss her again. At first her lips are still against mine, then hesitantly, she starts kissing me back. I kiss her deeper, pull her close for more, and she stiffens. “What?” I ask.

She puts a gentle but firm hand against my chest. “I’m sorry. This is just too weird.”

“I know. I shouldn’t have –”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just…” She looks around the apartment, then at the ceiling. “Can we get out of here? I don’t like this building right now. It’s too full of his craziness, all the crazy shit he’s been babbling at me.” Now she’s being honest with herself about him, I think. I like this side of her, the new side I hear in her voice. “Can we leave, like… maybe go back to my place?”

My ethical side taps the breaks, thinking of poor old crazy Jeff upstairs, Jeff who used to work in the same crooked soap factory as me when we were both down and out even though we never knew each other. It’s not his fault he got the worst of the poison soap and it fucked him up so bad he had to turn all the way into a yuppie with a chipped shoulder just to climb out of hell. And it’s not his fault he was still so crazy deep inside that his girlfriend’s looking for comfort on the end of the dick of the man who crippled him, a man he thinks is a demon out to get him. I guess I wouldn’t want Natalie as a girlfriend, but I feel her, taste her, smell her, and I’m not thinking about long-term plans. I follow that smooth toned back of hers towards the door ’til she slides the giant coat on over it, then I follow the giant coat. We get in her car, and the nice neighborhood falls away. She drives us out through snowed over cornfields, along roads that haven’t been plowed so well, and we have to go slower over the ice and slush. It feels less and less like civilization or respectability. It’s more and more like the days when I drank a bottle of cheap scotch behind a gas station with a guy claiming he used to be a tattoo artist, trying to convince me I should get a tattoo of a demon fucking a nun up the ass. He spilled his guts about how his wife had kicked him out and he was gonna go shoot her and her lover. We finished the scotch, I made the wrong comment about his cheating wife, he attacked me, and I wouldn’t have been able to beat that man twice my size unconscious if it hadn’t been for all that pure, savage, wonderful adrenaline burning the liquor in my veins. I don’t know if he ever woke up, because that’s when I skipped town and ended up working in a soap factory in Virginia.

I look Natalie over and the waiting is killing me. I’m on fire with more than lust, things that make the lust burn hotter. I’m not just off to get laid… I’m sneaking around with a haunted woman hiding from a delusional prick who probably wants to kill me, and I’m about to give him one more reason. Now I know why I woke up feeling like I needed to be sharp, and it’s almost better than sex.

We pull into the shoveled driveway of a little house I guess is hers. She opens the front door and lets me walk in first. Seated on the couch is the man whose kneecap I busted months ago, and he’s really gone to shit, pale and jittery and thinner with bugged-out eyes like he was in the factory, and I think, Oh right. That guy.

I look back at Natalie as she closes the door behind us. She smiles at me, then at her boyfriend. “I brought him for you, honey. He was even easier than I thought.”

So the crazy guy got himself a woman who was just as nuts. Figures. I feel more pissed and agitated than scared, more inconvenienced really, more like slapping myself than either of them. Jeff gets up, one hand leaning on his cane, the other holding a .38 revolver that he points at me. I know better than to stare and get hypnotized by the little black hole at the end of the barrel like most people would. I look right into his bug eyes, and I know he’ll shoot. His hand tightens and the revolver’s hammer leans back. I rush him, swatting his cane with one arm, my other arm knocking his gun as far from my face as possible. The shot snaps somewhere behind my head, a second before it falls from his hand, and I don’t think it sounded that loud ’til I feel my ears ringing, a lot worse than they did when his tennis ball hit me. Jeff and Natalie both scream and Jeff falls on his ass. He stares past my legs, and I turn around. Natalie stands looking at us, eyes dull with shock, quickly going pale as her boyfriend. Her left arm dangles by a strand of flesh that stretches like silly-putty, because her shoulder’s been completely blown off. Jeff must have carved dum-dum crosses in his bullets. I think I just bum-rushed a gun full of dum-dum bullets, and a cold flush mixes with my rising nausea. There’s a growing puddle around Natalie’s feet like someone who’s pissed themselves, except it’s dark red, almost black in the dim light. She sits down in it, then lies down, breathing slower and slower.

When I look back at Jeff, he’s still staring at her. Then he looks back at me, leans over and picks his gun up. I know just the thing for him. I wait ’til he aims, watch the hammer ’til it leans back again, then I move faster than I ever have, twisting his wrist so the next dum-dum bullet goes off into the side of his head. I turn, stagger away from him, and puke in the middle of the floor. Once I collect myself, I find his phone and I call the police. This woman took me back to her place to have sex. Her boyfriend was waiting to catch her cheating, and he turned the gun first on her, then on himself. Just like that crazy tattoo artist might have done, I think. Down at the station I fill out a statement, and it takes all day for the case to open and shut. I don’t know why Jeff didn’t shoot me, but I don’t complain about that part. The police take me home. Once I’m alone, I remember the files in the back of Natalie’s car. I wonder how deep the police will dig into Jeff and Natalie, and if I should think of getting scarce. Probably not, but I sharpen for the possibility of the run, just in case.

Night falls, and I sleep like the dead in my nice, warm bed.

Copyright(c) 2007 by Matt Spencer

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