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
