bikini top, like the one she’d lost to the floor of 14B. The lamp thudded as it landed on the red shag carpet. In her mind, it wasn’t carpet but red ants. They swarmed, sweet and insane.
She looked at the hula girl’s flesh-colored skin and imagined it was Jayne. Idiot Jayne, who thought an orca was a dinosaur. Beirut, a band. Indians from Iran. Blithely happy Jayne, whose job at L’Oréal was probably forty-year-old copy girl. Of course she could stay up late getting drunk, dating grandpas, and hanging out in coke bars; nobody gave a shit whether she showed up at all. Infuriating Jayne, who didn’t know she ought to be miserable.
The hall was quiet. Not a sound. The overhead light blinked and buzzed like a locust. She looked at the brass letters behind her: 14B.
She knew it was wrong, but the compulsion was strong. Fragile grass skirt. Little fingernails painted red. Idiot dimpled smile, just like those monstrous children. In her mind, the red-carpeted hallway glittered like an artery, coursing with blood.
She looked down at the lamp and saw herself do it. Played the image over and over again until it became inevitable, like a thing already done. Finally, she stomped on the ceramic girl with both feet.
Muffled by the carpet, the sound was delicate, like eggshells cracking, or Jayne’s bones. One! Two! Three! Four! And Audrey makes five! She did it again and again. Imagined Jayne’s face beneath her feet, cut up and marred by ceramic shards.
Dumb Jayne, who would accidentally stumble into the better life that Audrey had been scratching for with both hands. A year from now she’d be running down the aisle with the old guy while redheaded bridesmaids in tacky pink taffeta threw rice. Strolling into never-never land, where fucking bluebirds chirped. And Audrey would remain trapped here in 14B, watching television in the dark.
As she stomped, she remembered a tub. Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre! But that wasn’t the right order, was it? No, first had gone Keith, then Kurt, last Olivia, who, in her terror, had squeezed the baby too tight, so that by the time it got to the water, it was already still.
…How did she know that? No matter; the truth is the point. Olivia. Clara. Jayne. Betty. Jill. These needy bitches always squeezed too tight.
She smashed again. Again. Again. Until the wires separated, and hula girl’s face became flecks of flesh-colored sand.
The sound didn’t carry, soft as a secret. You’d never know what was happening unless you were out here, watching. During her time with Saraub, she’d missed her secrets. At least now that it was over with him, she could stop pretending that she was happy, or even that she’d ever loved him. That love was anything more than a lie people needed to believe, to keep from slitting their own throats. The world was idiots and dope fiends, and if you weren’t one, you’d better be the other.
The lamp sliced the soles of her shoes, but she kept going. Ground her feet so that they bled. Didn’t bother pulling out the shards from her wounds. The pain was evidence of her devotion. A gift to The Breviary.
When she was done, she looked down at the mess. A red, dusty paste with wires running through it, and a broken lampshade. She imagined Jayne coming home and finding it, and for a moment, her senses returned. “Oh,” she moaned in quick remorse, and bent down to lift the shards, but quickly reconsidered.
Twittish Jayne and her dependence on the kindness of strangers. Someone ought to teach her to stop knocking. “Fuck you, Jayne,” she shouted down the hall, then punched the elevator button. Feet bleeding, she slammed the iron gate and headed down.
If she had glimpsed along the hall, or stopped panting long enough to hear the tenants’ emphysemic wheezing, she might have reconsidered her course of action. Checked herself into a mental hospital, or called the police. Perhaps even joined Saraub in Washington. But she did not look, or see the cold eyes behind shut doors all down the fourteenth floor, that watched through the man-made slits of their skin.
After the elevator descended, the tenants opened their doors and began to clap.
26
Some People Burn Their Own Wings
Monday morning, at the same time that Audrey’s phone buzzed in her pocket, Saraub Ramesh looked out the window of an American Airlines 767. His camera assistant Tom Wilson squeezed into the seat next to him, packed tight as compressed styrofoam. They were