The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [25]
Standing before the mirror now, she tries to duplicate the smile she gave Cabaj and his entourage downstairs as she said those things about Ivy. The smile looks as false as it is, making her entire face seem arbitrary, haphazard, slapped together. She thinks of Ivy’s face, her new, insane face, a palette with all the colors mixed, bleeding into one another. Pieces of smile, of frown, of pout, of glower, emerging briefly in an eyebrow or a bent lip or a delicately thinned nostril before sinking back into the undifferentiated confusion, like a tumor growing bits of tooth and brain and hair and liver and skin all jumbled together. What are those bits of brain thinking? What are those bits of skin feeling? Whenever she visits Ivy in the hospital, she has to resist the urge to put her fingers on Ivy’s face and physically resculpt her lips into their usual gentle pout, her cheeks into those adorable balls they used to form when she smiled.
Which cheeks?
She pulls open the cabinet mirror. Cabaj’s shelves support a variety of colognes, antacids, antidiarrhea pills, an electric nose-hair trimmer, an electric razor, an electric toothbrush, a box of multicolored condoms. She takes the toothbrush and rubs it under the rim of the toilet. Then she unscrews a bottle of Drakkar Noir, douses the bristles with it, and puts everything back in place.
Still not ready to go back downstairs, she walks down the hall and cracks open a door at random. Cabaj’s study. Bookshelves lined with bound reports and neatly labeled videocassettes. A small, chartreuse vinyl loveseat kitty-corner to a mammoth TV and stereo console. A silvery fiberglass desk against the window. She closes the door behind her and walks to the desk. His computer whiles away the time with a screen saver showing a cartoonish Middle City getting trampled by Godzilla and King Kong. She slides the monitor to one side, then clambers onto the desk, stands, and presses her forehead to the windowpane.
For some reason these few extra feet make all the difference. The altitude becomes something palpable. The city ceases to be an innocuous array of baubles and takes on depth: a spiky, glittering chasm. It has to do with how the window now spans from head to toe, how the wall disappears. If the pane dislodged or broke along some invisible fault line, she thinks, she’d be taking a swan dive, eight hundred feet, into a sidewalk puddle.
Of course, there are people who fall farther—fall from airplanes, even—and live.
Then again, there are people who fall five feet, having slipped on a stair, a spent condom, a patch of ice, and split their skulls open like watermelons.
All that glass, all those windows. Behind each one she imagines some loser like her, staring out the window with muted outrage, thinking about all the talents she possesses, all the capacity for loving, for shining, for doing things both uncommonly great and commonly good, thinking about all the ways those personal talents and capacities are squandered in this world, never put to use. Ursula sees it vividly, sees all of them, the millions, the isolate, seething hordes of one, in offices, standing on desks, foreheads pressed to a windowpane, putting their whole frustrated, useless weight against it, waiting for it to dislodge, waiting to plunge into the chasm, and statistically, some will, they will fall, and they will think to themselves,