Velocity

Teeth at Bedtime

Inside its soft red mouth the thing had teeth of real enamel.

I didn’t like the look of those teeth. They looked hard and sharp. They gleamed white as though freshly brushed.

“What do you think of it, Will?” Mara asked me. She was looking lovely. It was the day after my birthday and we were alone together in my apartment. Mara herself made a wonderful birthday present. She leaned forward on the couch, her face glowing with expectant happiness. Her whole face smiled, making me feel warm inside. I noticed that a few blonde strands of her hair had caught in her eyelashes and been stained black by her mascara. Even that looked good.

“Well?” she pressed impatiently. “What do you think?”

What can you do when your girlfriend spends a lot of money on something weird? I took the only logical course open to me… I lied.

“It’s…uh. I like it, Mara.” I said, giving her the gladdest smile I could muster. At least I didn’t need to fake being surprised.

My birthday present sat on my bed stand. The thing was a black plastic box with a lot of touch-sensitive buttons and chrome knobs. It was a clock and a radio and self-answering telephone, and it had a slot on top to connect a player.

The only unusual thing about the device was that it had a mouth. No eyes or nose or ears-just the cheeks, the jaws and the mouth. It had a human, wet, female mouth with full red lips and a bright red tongue. Because it was grinning (it had come out of the box that way) I could see its fine set of hard, white teeth.

I thought of the locked strongbox in my closet and I blinked several times, very quickly.

What sickened me most about the mouth was that I recognized it. I knew those exposed teeth and the curve of that jaw. I knew the dark flat spec of a mole that it had on its right cheek, just above the spot where the lips met. I had kissed that mouth before. It was my girlfriend’s mouth. It was Mara’s mouth.

My mind turned back to the locked metal box that I kept up on the top shelf in my closet, next to the shoe boxes filled with receipts and hardcopies of old tax return forms. I eyed my birthday present and realized that it would never fit in my strongbox. No way.

I fervently hoped that she wouldn’t want me to plug it in before she left. I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it. Mara was looking at me funny. I could tell she was beginning to suspect the truth, that her gift had horrified me. I brightened up reflexively.

“Hey, Hon, this is going to be really great-” I picked the box up, handling it gingerly, the way you would a run-over terrier.

“I’ll just put it in my room.” I pushed my lips into a smile and walked into my bedroom. Mara followed me, making me groan inwardly. I set the obscenity on the bed stand, turning it to face the bed. Then Mara reached past me and plugged it in. I flinched and blinked, as if a foul odor had found my nostrils.

“Power failure detected,” the mouth spoke in a perfect imitation of Mara reading aloud from a dictionary.

“Linking to home system… Link complete.”

It was a high-tech horror. I hated it.

“Isn’t that great, Will?” Mara asked, flashing me with eyes that spoke of smooth thighs and soft kisses. Mara had me on a sex-leash, she charmed me with every movement of her body. I knew it, and hated it, but felt helpless. She was the most attractive girl that I had ever dated. During the last few weeks we had become a steady thing. It was no longer a question of who we were going to see each night, it was just a question of what the two of us would do together. A man could lose his senses over a girl like Mara. To make sure that I never did, I kept my pictures of her in my strongbox, along with pictures of the others I had dated in the past. Just to be sure. I had never told Mara about it, of course, as she wouldn’t have understood.

“It sure is, babe.” Maybe I could sleep on the couch tonight, away from the thing.

“Don’t forget the reunion tomorrow, Will,” Mara reminded me. Nagged me.

My face went hard, like stone, the way it does when I find dog crap stuck to my shoe or when a waitress takes too long with another customer. Fortunately, her back was turned.

“Why don’t you write down the time and the address, so you won’t forget?” Mara suggested. Her voice was soft and innocent, but there was the hard edge of control there, I could hear it. Mara had a beautiful woman’s natural expertise at manipulation. I watched as my traitorous hand picked up a pencil and wrote down the words that she dictated to me. I felt like a secretary. When I had finished, I turned to face her with a pasted-on smile.

Awaiting further instructions. Yes sir. Screw you, sir.

“Now you aren’t going to forget this like you always do, are you Will?” Mara teased me. The yellow number two pencil in my fist snapped. It did it all by itself. It just broke, I swear it. Fortunately, Mara had begun fingering the monstrosity she had given me and didn’t notice the broken pencil or the surprised look on my face. I slipped the snapped pencil into the back pocket of my jeans.

“Let’s play net-music on it for a minute,” she prompted, sitting on the bed and looking at me expectantly. She put her hands into her lap and neatly meshed her fingers. Each nail was carefully painted with a light orange polish. Naturally, we would have to try out the gift she had given me. The only gift she had given me. An expensive gift. Naturally. I felt out of control around Mara, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t understand women. One did not snub your honey’s birthday gift, no matter what one thought of it. Especially, yes especially when that gift was really an image of said girlfriend. You might as well complain about a holo-portrait of her that she had had digitized.

Sure, if you spent half your paycheck on the wrong type of perfume for her you might well find yourself in the exchange line at the mall, with nothing but a frown and a roll of the eyes for a thank-you. But things didn’t work that way when Mara bought a repulsive electronic image of herself and gave it to me. Not for me, they didn’t. Most women were bitches, and Mara was no exception. That’s why I kept the pictures, safe and cool, in my closet with the others. Encased in green metal with a silvery lock of stainless steel.

Approaching the object of my distaste, I knelt before it and lightly ran my finger down the tuning sensor. A liquid amber glow followed my fingerpad as the digital tuning indicator swept across the scale of stations. I watched the mouth buzz its lips together, the white noise of static emanating from it. Each time I passed over a station, the lips twitched and loosed a brief snatch of music or a few words of an announcer. I paused to hear a brief snippet of a newscast concerning the Mexican police-action, which had bogged down only 65 miles north of Mexico City’s outlying slums. A Texas senator begged the congress for justice and two more armor divisions, amid shouts of outrage from the more liberal-minded committee members. I listened for a moment without interest, nothing had changed for weeks and my birth date had already been passed by for the year by the New Plan draft board. I slid my finger more quickly, rippling through the signals, finally leaving it on the hits-only station.

I thumbed the volume control and the room filled with digital-stereo sound. A popular tune called Forget the Alamo from the latest album of the Tazers erupted out of the device. The instrumentals and backup vocals came from the secondary speakers in the thing’s base while Mara’s lovely simulacrum mouth sung the lead.

“What sound!” exclaimed Mara.

I watched Mara’s, or rather the thing’s, mouth form the words and sing with human tonal quality. My stomach curdled like month-old milk. Every move of the mouth and twitch of the cheeks were exacting copies of Mara’s mannerisms and physical traits. Unbidden, my head was punctured by the thought of Mara’s disembodied head being crammed in that box and forced to sing by computer-controlled electronic pulses jolting down her nerves to the muscles in her cheeks, jaw and tongue. I didn’t even like the Tazers.

But apparently the sight and sound of the whole thing had gotten to Mara in a different way. I felt her soft arms clasp around my neck as she leaned forward and began to lightly kiss my neck. The artificial, fruity smell of her shampoo filled my sinuses. Her hot breath blew over my left ear. I looked down over her shoulder and eyed the smooth swell of her rear in those tight, exquisitely faded jeans. But for once I wasn’t in the mood.

“Mara, babe, let’s not start anything now. You’ve got to go to class tonight,” I could hardly believe my ears, but I just couldn’t start making out in front of that thing.

Mara, if anything, was more surprised than I. “Yeah,” she said with a small, shocked and nonplussed sniff. She sat back, straightened her clothing and arched her fine brown eyebrows at me. “Right-school. Sure.”

I felt guilty immediately, but relieved. I didn’t want that thing… watching us. I stood up and so did she. She eyed me strangely, as if I had grown a beard overnight or taken on some other odd characteristic. She glanced briefly at her watch and then straightened the sleeves on her white polyester-and-cotton blend blouse. Mara was unused to rejection in any form. For just a moment, a feeling of exhilaration passed over me as I realized I had denied her something. Then it was gone and, hating myself, I moved to kiss up to her, slipping my arms around her.

She softened immediately. It felt nice. “I do need to go to class,” she said in a quiet voice. Her eyes met mine, then dropped. I kissed her.

Mara’s duplicate mouth spat a split-second of static.

I glanced at it, my upper lip curling by itself. I decided not to let the monster ruin my date with Mara. I turned away from the thing and kissed Mara again. My girl melted in my arms. A rush of red heat passed over my forehead, making my skin burn.

“Happy birthday,” Mara whispered. Again the atrocity on my bed stand buzzed its lips. It sounded as if a lightning flash had interrupted the signal. I wondered if an electrical storm had started outside. I paused for a moment, but there was no thunder.

The Tazers began thumping and twanging again in earnest. I shrugged. Mara pulled me closer. I quickly lost interest in all else. Mara missed her class.

I awoke after midnight with a start. Mara had long since gone home to her parents’ apartment. There was a phone ringing, but I didn’t have a phone in my bedroom. Confused with sleep, I groped blindly for the lamp switch. Then, for the first time I touched it. My fingers pressed into its pseudo-skin. The flesh felt soft and smooth, just the way a young girl’s cheek should feel. My middle finger found the moving lips. I was grabbing a stranger’s face in the dark.

I gave a yell and rolled out of bed on the opposite side, thumping into the bedroom wall with my shoulder. I snapped on the light and there it was, on its sixth ring, mouth opening to expose those hard wet teeth that glistened between its red lips. As the ring died away, the lips relaxed, slipping down to cover the white teeth again. Shaking a bit and blinking the sleep from my dehydrated, sluggish eyes, I pressed the button to answer the call.

“Hello?” I asked tentatively.

“Hello,” replied a soft, sultry voice. I smiled and relaxed a notch or two. It was Mara. Then I stiffened again. Was it really Mara, or did the thing just use Mara’s voice for phone calls? No, that didn’t sound right, Koreans wouldn’t think like that. I rubbed my face and smoothed back my tousled hair. The rush of adrenalin was fading. I sank back down to sit on the bed.

“Hi Mara. What’s up?” I asked, feeling that strange ache you get when your mouth wants to yawn but you are trying to hold it back. I glanced at the digital clock on the thing’s front panel. It was 1:17 a.m.

“I want you to kiss me,” Mara said. She gave a girlish giggle.

“I want to kiss you too, babe. I’ll make a point of it tomorrow. Why are you calling so late?”

“I’m calling because I want you to kiss me,” here she gave another giggle, sounding like a fourteen year-old sharing secrets. “I want you to kiss me right now.”

I had been staring at those moving lips while she said this. The effect was mesmerizing. Those cheeks, the way they swelled up when she smiled and the way the teeth parted when she giggled. It was unsettling. How did they keep it so wet-looking in there? Was there really some form of moisture? It had felt wet when I had accidentally touched it a few minutes before. Automatically, I rubbed my forefinger against my thumb and wiped my hand on my pants.

“Come on… Kiss me.”

“What?” I asked a bit hazily, but already my heart had quickened a bit in alarm. Slowly, it dawned on me. She wanted me to kiss the thing.

“You mean…?”

“ Kiss me, William,” the thing said. It made horrid puckering motions that I would have thought cute and enticing, if Mara had been making them.

“I can’t do that!” I blurted. For the first time I let my real feelings of disgust creep into my voice. The puckering and giggling faded immediately.

“Don’t you like my gift, Will?” Mara asked.

“Ah… Of course I like it. No, I love it, babe. How could I-”

“You hate it.”

“No, no Mara. I think-”

“Then kiss me, dammit.”

So that was it then. I was stuck. It was like knowing that you were going to get your teeth pulled today. There weren’t going to be any more excuses or postponements. The surgeon had started gunning his drill to tooth-burning speeds and set his robot’s-paw lamp to shine directly on your mouth. This was it. I looked at the false female mouth on my bed stand. The sight of it brought weird thoughts to my mind, thoughts of (Phone Sex. Just have your Visa ready, and a voice called Candy will talk you into ecstasy) rubber dolls and kissing robots.

The thing needed to be locked up. I needed a bigger strongbox. My lips curled and my eyes squinted closed in disgust. I decided to get it over with.

I knelt in front of the thing and bent to kiss it. It was like sinking into the dentist’s chair and clipping on the bib. I kept telling myself that it was only plastic. The thing puckered horribly, and I kissed it. It was just like giving Mara a quick smack, except that the realism boys in Korea had forgotten one thing. It felt like flesh, it was smooth and soft and pressed in like flesh, but it was cold.

Mara’s, that is, the thing’s, lips were cold like those of a puckering corpse. I nearly screamed. Jerking back, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand repeatedly and quelled the urge to spit. Stomach acids burned the bottom of my esophagus.

“Ahh… That was nice, honey,” said Mara, sounding satisfied again.

“Sheez,” I exclaimed as it hit me. I cuffed myself in the forehead with my open palm. What an idiot. What I should have done was make some kissing sounds up close to the receiver. I hadn’t needed to really kiss the thing. Damn.

“Isn’t this great? Now we can kiss anytime, we never have to be apart.”

Dream on, woman.

“Yeah, right,” I answered. I scratched my head. Funny how your head always itches when you get out of bed. A jingle from a dandruff shampoo ad ran through my mind.

“Bye, bye babe. Go back to sleep now.”

“Goodnight babe.”

The phone clucked, the tongue hitting the roof of the mouth and making an unnatural sound. The connection was broken.

“Sheesh,” I repeated to myself. I got to my feet and headed for the bathroom. I could still feel the cold press of those dead lips on mine. I washed my face and dried it, rubbing hard with the towel. Then I brushed my teeth and washed my face a second time. I headed back to bed and just as I was switching the light out, I noticed that the thing’s lips were puckered up again. I paused for a moment, frowning fiercely in the dark. Then I switched back on the light.

The thing’s mouth had relaxed. It was bland and expressionless. I shook my head, switching the light out again and climbing back into the sack. I did not fall asleep for perhaps an hour.

When I finally did slip off, I dreamt of Mara’s funeral. She lay in a casket in a Southern-style service, where they often kiss the dead. After I had kissed her, the cold touch of her lips lingered forever, a taint that could not be washed away.

The next morning found me lazing in bed, as I am fond of doing on the weekends, contemplating the day ahead. The prospects were not pleasant. It was Saturday, the day of the reunion. Every time I thought of it, a groan sounded in my mind. A tortured groan. Truly, it was going to be torment to spend a perfectly good Saturday afternoon with Mara’s relatives.

Shaking hands and mouthing greetings. Smiling, even as the flood of new names is being instantly forgotten by all. Uncle Larry from Utah with the bad foot. Cousin Paul with the headphones and the complex handshakes. Aunt Edna with the innumerable surgical scars, ancient stinking pets, blue-rinsed hair and liver spots.

They were bizarre, every one of them, and yet they were all so typical. It was going to be a long afternoon of paper plates loaded with potato salad and deviled eggs. I hate deviled eggs.

It was 8:30 a.m. and as I had not slept well I decided to catch another hour of sleep. I recalled the brush of those cold pseudo-flesh lips and rubbed my mouth disgustedly. I fingered the radio to a station that featured soft music with few commercial interruptions and set the timer for an hour of music followed by an alarm signal. Performing perhaps its first useful service quite well, the box sang quietly, and as long as I averted my eyes from the moving lips on the bed stand, I found the music quite pleasant. I soon drifted off.

I awoke to the sound of the doorbell buzzer. Immediately, I had an uneasy feeling that I had overslept. The soft music station was still playing. I glanced at the clock. It read 11:02. The door buzzer sounded again as this sank in. I was supposed to have picked up Mara at 10:30.

“Damn it.”

I climbed from bed and grabbed up a pair of shorts. When I had one leg in my briefs and was struggling with the other, shaking sleep from my head, an impatient pounding began on the door. It had to be Mara. In another twenty seconds I had the door open.

“Hi babe,” I greeted Mara with a weak grin.

Arms crossed and eyes storming, she looked me up and down and without a word walked past me and seated herself on the couch. I could tell she was too pissed to talk. Great. The frigging box she had given me couldn’t even be trusted to keep time and now I was going to have to kiss up for being late. Wonderful. My neck muscles pulled painfully taunt. I tried to relax, but couldn’t.

“Something must have gone wrong with the alarm. I overslept,” I said. I stepped back into my bedroom and eyed the distasteful machine. The settings were indeed wrong. The alarm mode was off, and the radio was on. No sleep-timer function, it was just on.

“That’s wrong!” I shouted, my voice loud and indignant. “I didn’t set it that way!”

“What?” asked Mara, sounding irritated, but curious as always. She appeared at the doorway.

“This thing has switched modes by itself!” I accused, jabbing a finger at the hideous box.

“You’ve really been acting oddly today, Will. Here you are, standing in your underwear and claiming that an inanimate object switched its own alarm off.”

I hate lectures. I could sense one coming. I decided to cut it off right here. “Let me just get dressed and we’ll go.”

Mara left with an exaggerated sigh. When she was safely out of sight, I let the box have it. I hit the top of it with a downward stroke of my clenched fist. It felt good, the way it had felt to knock the cat a good one behind my mother’s back when she played a little too rough and hooked me with one of her claws.

“Cheap Korean crap,” I muttered. I dressed quickly, skipping the shower. I shaved and started brushing my teeth.

“Don’t you think we’re late enough, Will?” called Mara from the other room. My cheek twitched, the way it does sometimes when I am having a bad day. My brush slipped because I was pushing too hard. When I spit, the white foam had turned pink, tinted with blood. As I left I gave the box a last hateful glare. I froze.

There was a single drop of liquid running down the thing’s cheek. I knew what it was immediately. A teardrop. But where did it come from? Crying? Just why in the hell and how in the hell was it crying? Did the goddamn thing have eyes up there in the housing? I shuddered and turned to find that Mara had already left. I followed her out the door, walking fast.

Two steps behind, my mind whispered.

The reunion was worse than my blackest fears. I endured the long afternoon, maintaining a jovial front, while Mara continually humiliated me in front of her family. She pulled every trick in the book, obviously feeling that I owed her tribute for having been late, snubbing me to talk with cousins and aunts, ordering me to get her things from the picnic table and even taking the last folding chair so that I had nowhere to sit but on the grass at her royal feet. She offered to give me her chair, but I refused of course, hating myself for it almost as much as I hated her for offering.

She even scolded me for having too much beer. I felt like a punished serf. I dropped her off at her parents’ apartment, receiving only a slight peck on the cheek for my troubles. And no invitation to come in and talk.

“I’m sorry, but I really need to get some housework done, Will,” she explained. Her eyes flashed at me, a sexual promise. She saw the look that twisted my face for a moment then vanished and her own soft face creased with worry. I felt a pang of regret. I didn’t want to cause her any discomfort. A stray blonde hair slipped down over her eyes. She pushed it back. I remembered that she was trying to grow her hair because I liked it long. She was beautiful. She kissed me, a light brush of the lips that made the skin on my cheeks tingle.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t look too happy.”

“Nothing,” I said, making an effort to smile. My lips twitched upward a bit.

“You aren’t upset about anything are you?”

“No, of course not,” I lied. Suddenly, my mind was burning hot with alcohol and rage again. As if she didn’t know. She was playing me for a patsy and I hated it. I had to stand there and act like I was being loved. A small dog doing tricks for table scraps. I left and returned to my apartment in a foul mood. I got a can of Budweiser out of the fridge and popped the top. I gulped half of it while standing with the refrigerator door open and cool air blowing softly over my lower body. The beer felt good going down my throat.

Somehow, the alcohol strengthened my resolve. Without conscious thought, I turned and strode directly for the bedroom. I sat on my bed. There it was, waiting for me on the bed stand.

Mara’s face. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I rose and struck the box for the second time today. Sure enough, another tear ran down (her) its face.

I had had enough. It was on my mind too much lately, it sat on my brain. It mixed with the alcohol in my blood and made fire. The thing disgusted me. A man should not have to live with a thing that disgusted him. He should not have to sleep with it, for God’s sake.

I took another hit from my beer and rage seared my mind. I reached a trembling finger out and brushed the teardrop from the thing’s cheek with my knuckle. The skin was still as cold as death, but it felt just like Mara’s cheek, Mara’s cheek as it might feel on a February morning just as she arrived at school to meet me for an eight o’clock class.

For just a second, I looked at the thing and it seemed to me that it was Mara. It was Mara’s face and it was mocking me. I could stand it no longer. I stood, dropping my beer can onto the carpet where it spilled out its foamy contents audibly in a growing dark stain.

I stepped to the window and twisted the lock too hard, so that the cheap aluminum bent and would never close quite right afterward. I shunted the panel aside with a shove and cool air flushed over my sweating face. Then I turned and advanced on the box. I could see, as I grabbed it up from the bed stand and gave it a savage tug to rip the cord from the wall socket, that more tears had fallen down from the black recesses above its cheeks. The power cord held through the first tug, like a weed might hold to the earth through the first ripping pull a man might give.

The second tug was a little weaker, as I had the thing with my arm curled around it and had to twist my body at a bad angle, but it caused a momentary power glitch that made the thing’s lips shoot static and buzz together. It sounded as if it were being strangled. I felt a light spray of simulated saliva on my bicep. The third tug brought the cord loose from the wall, bending the tine on the plug and tearing the insulation so that the copper filaments gleamed red-orange. There was a short blue arc as the connection was broken.

With its last moments of life-giving capacitance, the thing spoke in Mara’s voice, “…Love…you…”

With eyes popping in rage and murderous determination, I stepped to the window and threw the box out. I watched her drop to the concrete five floors below. She smacked into the sidewalk with the sound that an over-ripe melon or a suicide case jumping head-first might make. Milky, bluish-white fluids flowed out of the cracked black case to soak into the porous surface of the concrete. Her lips of plastic flesh gave one last tremor and froze forever in death. Far above, I ducked my head back into the window and stepped back, breathing hard. A sudden surge of exhilaration shook me. A choked laugh escaped my lips. I stood in my bedroom, grinning and red-faced. I had destroyed the thing.

Like the snapshots encased in steel and hidden away in my closet, it was now harmless. Muscles that had long been pulled taunt like vibrating wires now loosened. My pulse slid down from a furious pounding to a pleasant steady drumbeat, sounding in my head like a man’s footsteps on gravel. My fingers quietly unclenched themselves, changing from a white-knuckled fist to an open palm, like a morning glory as it is touched by the first light of dawn.

I felt safe. Very safe.