Over My Live Body (23 page)

“Gotta mix a new batch. You going to stand still for me?” He’s not moving far enough away for me to go anywhere. He slakes the next mixture of plaster and immediately goes to work on my left arm, slathering plaster from shoulder to elbow and then down to my wrist in long, drawn-out strokes, indifferent to the white rivulets rolling down the crook of my elbow. My skin stings on contact, like I’m being stuck by needles,
lots
of them. When he finishes the left arm, he moves to my right side. “Hold it out,” he commands. “Like
this
.” He holds his arm straight out. “You’re
not
gonna tell me you can’t hold a pose,
are
you, Delilah?”

My arm buckles under the weight of the wet plaster almost the minute he starts applying it, and noticing my discomfort, he slaps on more. Most of it drips off. He’s not using plaster gauze to hold it in place or doing any of the other things
normal
sculptors would do to cast from a live model; he has
no idea
how to make this work. “I’ll tell you when you can let it drop.” He looks down at his watch, then reaches in deep, laying it on even thicker now. “Okay, now, relax it. Just put it down by your side.” He takes my fingers and swings my arm down where he wants it, making sure I don’t make any unexpected moves. “Is that better?”

I nod.

“Hold out your fingers. Both hands. Like this.” He splays his hand in my face. I bend and unbend my fingers before offering them, palm down, like I would to a manicurist. Like I would if I were to suddenly reach out and slap him. One by one my fingers get gloved in wet white plaster. He takes a step back, then another, takes a long appraising look.

“Can I see?”

“When I’m finished,” he says, “I’ll get you a mirror. Vain bitch. Move your legs apart.” He crouches down, grabs my left ankle, and drags it across the wood floor. A splinter slides under my skin. “
Don’t move
,” he commands, not letting go of my ankle. I bite hard on my lip as I feel fingers encase one foot, then the other, then work up from the ankles to my knees, stroking my calves lasciviously, then crawling up over my knees, over my thighs. I involuntarily jerk away when I feel him approach the area I shave for-bikini-wear-only.
It’s not beach season
. He takes a handful of hair and pulls. I scream.

“I gotta
finish
,” he says. I don’t try to hold back the tears as I feel Curtis pack the plaster down there. He rubs some of it back and forth. “Feel good?” I want to spit the gravely plaster on my lips in his face. Just as I’m again expecting him to do something
else
down there, he draws his hands away and holds them up to my face.

This is it, I’m going to die.

Death by suffocation.
Every
pore sealed.
Every
part
of me. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve been wrapped with an electric blanket set on low with the heat rising by degrees every second. He smoothes the plaster over my cheeks caressingly, salon-gentle now, tracing it over my lips, my eyelids, my ears with strokes that tickle, like a lover’s first hesitant kisses. His hands roam up and down my neck, over my chin, smooth out the worry lines in my forehead.
I’m beyond worry now
. “Put your hair up,” he commands.

“I have nothing to hold it up with.”

“I do.” He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a couple of dark blond bobby pins.
The color of my hair even. He really does come prepared
. He steps behind me and yanks my hair up, like it
needs
any help at this point to be standing on end. I feel metal scratch my scalp as he secures my hair where he wants it with the bobby pins.
He could have gotten coated ones at least
. The wet plaster going on my head feels almost but not quite like shampoo. I wonder how I’m ever going to be able to get all this plaster off me.
I wonder if I’m going to live long enough to get this plaster off me
. I feel Curtis’ fingers knead the stuff right down into the roots. He ends with flourishing strokes down the nape of my neck.

He steps back and looks at his finished product and
very
unprofessionally says, “Wow.”

“Can I see?”

“Of
course
you can see. I
want
you to see. You’re the main part of the exhibit. The
pièce de resistance
.” If I had put up some
resistance
, would I be here now? Would I have been rescued? Or would I be dead? He reaches behind one of the barrels against the wall and grabs a hand mirror. “I had a floor-length mirror,” he says almost apologetically, “but it broke.”

“Well, you know what they say. Seven years bad luck.” Too lenient a penalty for him.
Life in prison with no hope of parole.
He scans me with the mirror like it’s a Geiger counter checking for radiation. I see white arms, white torso, white legs. My head looks like a blanched version of my clay Vestal Virgin. I wonder if I’d glow in the dark.

“I don’t know
how
I’m going to improve on
this,
” Curtis muses. “Have to take pictures to remember this by. Seen enough?”

I nod. More than enough.

He sets the mirror down where he got it and picks up a cheap-looking plastic camera and aims it at me. The unexpected flash blinds me. The plaster makes me not want to close my eyes.
I may never open them again
. Even
blinking
is risky business. I begin to see green spots floating in front of me as another, then
another
flash explodes in my face, then Curtis moves around for some rear views. My skin burns under the thick coat of caking plaster. I want to dig my nails in, gouge, claw my way through to flesh. And claw Curtis’ flesh for good measure.

“It’s starting to set,” Curtis says, prodding my midriff, the spot the plaster has been for the longest, with a fingertip, the way I do when I’m testing cookie dough. He checks his watch and smiles. “Time for this to bake.”

You don’t fire plaster. I don’t see a kiln or anything resembling a kiln in this room. This was once a meat freezer. Nothing was
ever
cooked in
here
. He picks up his watch and pulls it back on his wrist, releasing it with an impatient snap, then looks at it again, in a big hurry to clear the area now.
He’s rigged something to go off very soon to bake me
. I don’t hear ticking. I wouldn’t. He’d
make sure
I wouldn’t. It’s all part of
artist’s ego,
which in artists sometimes borders on
super
ego and obliterates the
id
.

Take
this
, ego
! “I’ve got to…scratch!” I cry out as he walks toward the heavy steel door. “It itches
so much
.” I bend my fingers. Shards of caking plaster pelt the floor like hail. I reach under my arm and scrape along the curve alongside my left breast, consciously scooping as much plaster as I can with my stubby fingernails.

“Look what you’re doing!” he shrieks.

“I can’t help it! I can’t stand it! It itches so much!””

Curtis comes closer. “Don’t fuck it up,” he warns.

Or else what
? “It
itches
,” I protest. “This one too.” I go to work on the other side. “It itches
all over
!” I claw at the plaster indiscriminately. Curtis runs over and slaps me. “Stop it, bitch!” he screams. “You’re
ruining
it!” How much of
it
does he expect to survive an explosion? I’m ruining his perception of what he’s done, that’s all, turning his success into a last-minute failure he’ll remember as long as he lives. I bite my lip as he puts his hands out to hastily smooth everything over the way it
was
. He doesn’t see it coming, my sudden swipes across my nipples where he layered it on so thick, my swift jabs to his eyes, blinding him to his
objets d’art.
“
Bitch
!” he screams, flailing around the room, a shipwrecked pirate groping helplessly for a life raft, a way out. My tacky hands stick to the metal handle. I lurch backwards and wrench it open. Curtis staggers toward me, shrieking, “Don’t close it…
don’t close it
…I’ll be…”

Well done.
I thrust my weight against it until I hear a reassuring
click
, like the snap of a camera. I don’t know how much time I have left or what kind of sound is going to follow. I lumber up the stairs, leaving sticky white footprints, tripping on the uneven steps, scraping my knees, stubbing my toes. I hear desperate thuds echo from the gallery of horrors, Curtis pounding his fists on the steel door. Someone will be back to see him when he’s done, but it won’t be me. My feet skim across the damp floorboards. I stop in front of the glass-paned door and thrust it open as the floor rumbles under me. The force of the aftershock catapults me outside. I look around me, dazed. There are blue-and-whites and unmarked cars and fire emergency vans parked from corner-to-corner and wall-to-wall cops looking in doorways and windows. They suddenly stop what they’re doing, turn in my direction, and stare as if they’ve just seen a ghost.

Which is what I must look like to them.

I take a few tentative steps toward them before they break position. My legs wobble. I fold my arms over me, a useless shield against the cold and all those eyes looking in my direction. I’m suddenly conscious of my nakedness under the  wet plaster suit I’m wearing, aware of how aware
they
must be as they come closer. I spot Quick in the crowd. He intercepts me before anyone else can lay their hands on me. “Get a blanket over here,” he barks, easing me down to the ground. “Is he still in there?”

I nod. “Downstairs,” I murmur, trying to wipe some of the guck off my lips, only making matters worse. “The door’s locked. He set something to go off. I think it already
has
gone off…” I watch as a contingent of cops approach the building, guns drawn. Quick waves them back and radios for the bomb squad. I overhear one of the uniforms say, “Thought she was Venus when she came out of there.”

“She got arms, though.”

“She got
all
her working parts. Lucky for her.”

“Yeah, just needs to be treated for overexposure.”

An EMS paramedic in an FDNY jacket brings over a blanket. Quick nods and backs off, giving the paramedic room to crouch next to me. He  covers me while another hauls a stretcher out of the van. I keep staring up at Quick. His laserlike eyes burn right through me, diverting my attention from the paramedics busily poking around at my arm. I have no idea what they’re doing to me until the sharp sting of an IV needle tips me off. Quick’s stare doesn’t give
any
thing away. He exchanges a few words with the EMS crew out of my hearing range and nods. My heavy-with-plaster eyelids feel even heavier. I hear Quick promise “I’ll be by to see you later,” before the ambulance door slams shut and my lights go out.

The glaringly white walls in the room I wake up in make me have to shield my eyes, adjust to the light slowly. As I draw my hand away, I see that it’s flesh tone, marred only by the bulls-eye of a bruise where the IV needle stuck me. I don’t remember any of the deplastering and wonder if and how it all came off.
I remember everything that came before
.

A nurse sticks her head in the door. “How are we doin’ in here?” she coos in a soothing Jamaican accent. I nod, but before I can say anything, she ducks back out. I hear voices in the corridor, her soft voice lilting like a song, interrupted by a male voice that makes my heart beat so fast that its defibrillations would soar off the top of a cardiac monitor if I were hooked up to one. Quick steps into the room and gives the white curtain a yank even though the bed next to mine is unoccupied. The dark circles under his eyes look like bruises. He looks like
he
could use some emergency care. “You doing okay?”

I nod
. “
Was he…Curtis…
”

“
His name was actually Curtiz
,
Curtiz Szabo
,
and yes, he’s dead,
”
Quick affirms. “He planted a pipe bomb under the floorboards. When it blew, it took him down with it. Him and a
whole lot of
meat. That’s how we traced his whereabouts, the lab tests we ran on some of our blood evidence was IDed as nonhuman, specifically beef blood. He gave it up to us some more the last time he left a voice mail message by calling you a piece of meat. But none of this should have happened, at least not the way it did, and I’m sorry about that.” He clears his throat. “The Ten-Thirteen, it caught us off-guard.”

“What was…oh, the injured officer?”

He nods. “Someone was supposed to stay in the building
no matter what,
but in the rush to get him to Bellevue while we thought he still had a chance…
”

“How is he?”

Quick looks away from me, toward the drawn curtain. “He didn’t make it.”

I bite my lip. “I’m sorry.”

Quick’s left hand squeezes the side rail of the bed. When his knuckles stop showing white, I look up at him again. “The antigen testing wasn’t the only thing that led us to his door. You left some clues for us,” he says, his hand dipping into his pocket. He pulls out the pencil I picked up from the floor in the drawing studio
and
my zig zag saw
and
my cut-out tool. No fettling knife, no sabre saw;
they
must be lost forever. He holds them out to me.

“They must have fallen out when he lifted me out of the trunk,” I say.

“This helped us close in on his location. This and some guys working in the meat plant down the street who said they thought they saw someone take a hooker into one of these buildings.”
Thank God I
did
decide to wear a dress
.
Never mind
what
they thought I was.
The corners of Quick’s eyes start twitching. “That didn’t jibe. They were talking good-looking female hooker, and this isn’t an area known for hookers any more and when it was, they were males in drag. You came out before we even had a chance to come in after you.” He gazes at me in such a way that I feel I’m still that plaster goddess. “How’d you manage to get away from him?”

I feel blood rush to my cheeks and look down at the rumpled bedclothes piled high on my chest. “Things came to a head. The opportunity just presented itself. I…I don’t remember exactly…”

“You did good. You’re
alive
.”

I nod. “Oh, uh, by the way, how’s your sister?”

His jaw tightens, and I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing. “Holding her own. I’m getting her checked into an inpatient facility,” he says. “Right here in Manhattan. Better supervision and it’ll be easy for me to stop by and see her. She’ll be okay.” I can tell by looking at him that he might as well add,
I hope.
“I’m sorry about how
that
worked out
too
.”

“I guess it could have been worse.”

“Yes, it could have.” He turns to go, then stops. “Delilah,” he says, wheeling around to face me, holding my sculpting tools up in front of me like he would if they were going to be Exhibit A and B in some criminal trial, “what the
hell
did you think you were going to be able to do with
these any
way?”

I shrug. It’s a safe bet I’m not getting them back from him.
I don’t need them any more
. “It’s a
good
thing you didn’t decide to get a
gun
to defend yourself with,” he says. “You would have been in
big
trouble.”
As if I weren’t in trouble enough as it is
. I flush, recalling Heidi Obermeyer’s after-hours target lessons. I
could
have shot Curtis; he
wasn’t
a work of art. I would have done
any
thing to survive.

“You can’t be upsetting her.” The Jamaican nurse’s sing-song voice hits an off key as she brushes by Quick, carrying a draped tray. “I was just leaving,” Quick says, backing away from my bed. He gives the side rail a pat. “Take good care of her.” He watches as the nurse strips the towel from the tray with an abracadabra smoothness and swabs at the crook of my elbow with an alcohol pad. Watching his retreating back upsets me more than anything he said or could have said to me, hurts more than the prick of the needle piercing my skin.
I don’t need him any more either.
I wonder if
he’s
thinking this
too
.