Skin (29 page)

    Tears in her eyes now, hot, wanting to hit him, wanting to throw him out, get out of my house. Another memory: Bibi: he was mine anyway. And her own voice, deadly:
Get out of my house.
"What do you know about it anyway? What can you tell me about making art?"

    Silence.

    All the heat in her body gathered in her chest, around her heart like suffocation's fist. Tears shiny as the scatter of screws and nails, the warmth of the room unfresh, like a spoiled taste, like biting deep into rotten fruit. Michael gazing at her, head tilted, very lightly, to one side.

    "I'm not going to argue with you anymore," meeting her eyes, "I can't make you listen if you don't want to listen, I can't make you see." The red mouth twitching, calm pallor like a god defiled. "But I won't stand here and watch you lie to yourself and everybody around you, lie to me when you say you're serious about your work."

    "How have I lied?" but now without emphasis, she knew he would not answer. Outside a coughing drone like a motor on the verge of stalling, like smoker's lungs coughing for life. The shiver of reaction in her muscles: machine tremor, run past all warnings, all redlines, all strength. Run it till it breaks.

    "If you won't grow, you die. That's it, that's how it is. And I won't watch you make your little Skinner boxes, smaller and smaller, you're closing in on yourself, Tess. You're eating yourself alive."

    More silence but this a differing quality, the silence of scales, of things in the balance.
Were you ever mine, Michael?
Her hands were cold, cold stiff fingers as if she had already died. "Then go, why don't you? Why don't you just go?"

    "If I go," so calm, calm and beautiful, "I won't come back."

    No tears, now, as if the heat of her body had dried them, dried her inside and out. Downstairs, Nicky or somebody, the music kicking on bright and loud and the memory, dancing with Michael to Killbilly, his mouth on hers; fucking against the door, she had been happy that night. Another Bibi, is that what she had wanted? Why is your mouth so red?

    Hands at her sides: "Just go," she said, and his shrug, faint headshake as if powerless before her most useless mistake. He changed his shoes, tied around his waist a sweat shirt, black sweat shirt with the cuffs tom off; that's mine, she almost said, but said nothing, did not move as he paused before her to kiss her lips: very lightly, very cold, the way death might kiss the maiden, the way life might leave the body: faintly, like a whisper heard from the simple rebus of dark, a voice you never knew but knew to fear.

    Closing the door and Tess the sculpture now, incapable of motion, each leaving child of all the others and she did not cry, turning at last for the worktable but did not cry; did not work; sat silently sifting through the small bright galaxies of steel and whorled metal, of wire and solder and all their simple complexities, all of a piece, what they were and nothing else. Daylight to darkness, the lozenge of light overhead and finally she felt as if she might begin to weep; but did not, sat turning over and over the crooked gray haft of a screwdriver broken like a broken bone, over and over in her hand like a puzzle that she, if she were very true and careful, might in her lifetime begin at last to solve.

    

    

    

    
Welcome to the Darwinian Monkeyhouse of the Iron Scream.

    
-Norman Spinrad

    

    "-and a big black hood-thing, like an executioner, right? And he picks up this big meat mallet and-"

    "What's a meat mallet?"

    "It's, you know, a meat tenderizer. It's like a hammer only it has, like, ridges on it. Sharp ones, to pound the meat. Anyway, he picks up the hammer and starts beating the shit out of-"

    And Tess, in motion, trying hard to stay unheard but they had good ears, her students, good reflexes for a nuance and now-Nita the storyteller, Nicky the questioner, Edgar-Marc and Bryan and the others, the boys whose names she always forgot-now they were industrious, busy with their boxes, looking up with false studious nods as she entered from the hot dampness of the hall.

    A Skinbound show, last night:
Last of the Dancing Chickens
, someone had been thoughtful enough to paper the outer doors of her building with flyers: big clown mouths etched in acid-green, silvery dust of feathers sprinkling down on the silhouette of a woman's nude body, the neck grossly elongated, both arms triply jointed in a way less frightening than purely obscene; the body was not

    Bibi's, but the face, even in silhouette, was unmistakable. On with the show; no questions of her students, who's going, who isn't; and she, alone, had slept to dream of Bibi, of coming home to find her curled asleep on the bed, pulling soft at the concealing covers but finding, when they were gone, a body but not Bibi's face at all, no face, nothing but blackness pure and absolute. Until it smiled: all blood and teeth, all conscious as the whistling arc, and so happy to be alive. And moving, flesh-dummy rising up from the bed with no human motion and Tess, then, waking with eyes wide open like an infant with night terrors, to find she had pissed herself, tiny warm dribble slick as ejaculate on the tight planes of her thighs. Shivering in the too-hot bathroom, washcloth loose in her fist and she wept, head against the bowl of the sink, wept until she felt she might sleep again but slept only poorly until Nicky, knocking, waking: come back in half an hour and he did, with Nita, and Edgar-Marc, and coffee. And talk they would not talk in front of her.

    Now: leaning on the worktable, gaze on no one as they bent to their boxes: "So how was the show?"

    Silence.

    "Come on," smiling, how awful her smile must look. "I just want to know."

    More silence until Nita, finally, clumsy with discomfort: "It was okay. I got there late, I guess there was some kind of ritual first, couple people from the audience got piercings."

    Edgar-Marc, subdued: "I heard cuttings."

    "Maybe, I don't know. Anyway they had like a dance? Like a tribal dance, Bi- they said. Everything was supposed to mean something, but if you didn't know what it was supposed to mean then you didn't really get it." Frowning. "I guess. Anyway then they hung this one guy up in a bondage harness and people took turns doing cut tings on themselves underneath him. And then he cut himself. On the chest, a big design like a stop sign, kind of. And this woman read like a statement, all about people getting skinned, that you had to skin them upside down." No one asked why; her circling gaze seemed to Tess to ask permission to continue; Tess, nodding, hating herself briefly for the authority to do so. "You have to do it that way so the blood stays in the head, like blood pressure? It keeps them conscious longer." More silence. "I guess that's supposed to be good."

    Finally, Nicky: "So what about the meat-hammer guy?"

    "Oh, yeah. That was earlier. He started beating up this big piece of, like, meat, like a skinned animal but they said before that they bought it, you know, at a butcher shop, that it wasn't really real. And while he was beating on it this other guy said a poem about power in the knife. It was really intense."

    No one spoke, then: "Beat your meat," from Nicky and everyone laughed, Tess's smile less for the joke than the tone, the moment of relaxation; and then the show was seemingly disposed of, they went as if by common consent onto something else. Exhaust breezes heavy through the open windows, Nita's fisty grip on the soldering gun and Edgar-Marc asking Tess why the pneumatic hand in his cast-iron box did not work. Poor Edgar-Marc, his hopeful croak and he was doomed, she knew, to be forever derivative, to be less even than a filter of the ideas he saw; she was careful to spend much time with him, more even than with Nicky, time most likely wasted but she owed it to somebody, some debt; she would help the ones she could, her students, living buffers between herself and the silence.

    The new box, there, covered coyly with the corner of a blue tarp but she did not feel coy, felt as if she nurtured in secret a living monster and must protect it from the light; but it had to be done: all teeth, smiling teeth, box like a mouth, like the hole in the ground from which issues the devil, the devil's secret grin pointing like a gun in your face when you raised the lid, flimsy lid and cheap black lacquer, she was working harder than ever now, Michael would call it obsession.

    More silence, now that Michael was gone; and why, in retrospect, had it taken him so long to go? His own strange duplicities an anchor, maybe, but what about her? Weakness, tiredness, simple lethargy? Could it matter? What mattered now was work. She had not seen Michael once since he left, although Jerome had seen him removing his possessions; with heartbreaking courtesy had not mentioned it directly to Tess but caused himself to be overheard, so she might know that the danger of confrontation was safely past; she need not see Michael again. Gray eyes. Under the bed she found one of his shirts, soiled at the neck and chest, gluey little crusts like dried mucus; in heavy Goth lettering obscured by much washing, vengeance is mine. She threw the shirt away. She was missing three of her books. She used to think it could not get any worse than those days, those early Bibiless days after Paul's death and the death of the Surgeons; now those thoughts were worth less than a laugh, her brief smile unamused: like remembering a toothache during a stab wound,
I didn't know when I was well off
. Now she had lost them both. Sleep like riding over rocks, jounced to near-constant wakefulness by this noise, that quiet creak, the gross amphetamine pounding of her own heart; eating little; working every conscious hour, with her students or alone, informed with dry ferocity and all of it symptomatic of a permanent despair; but what else to do?

    And Nita, now, diffident smile and Tess,
I think I'm done
; like a child with a crayon drawing:
come see what I did.
Irregular planes of rusted steel, covered and stretched with thornlike hooks, with razor wire: big and heavy, easily a meter square; she liked to work big, Nita, every inch a mile; Tess's old territory but now things were so entropic, black hole's suction pulling everything tighter and tighter, closer and closer to implosion's greedy lip; what then? Past the threshold, what kind of-

    "-think, Tess?"

    "What?" Too startled, then, half a murmur, "I'm sorry. I didn't hear, what did you say?"

    "I said do you think this is good enough to show? Like at a, you know, at a gallery?"

    Nicky's sneer immediate, "Galleries're for shit," and knocking gently at the heavy steel skin, "but you should still show it. Somewhere. Where should she show it, Tess?" Without thought, "At one of the Zombies shows," and Nicky's pleased instant nod, sure, why not? "We got a show coming up pretty soon, 's like a big warehouse-type place. There's lots of room, we could all show our stuff." Cautiously, "You, too, Tess. If you want," and both, all, knowing she didn't, knowing the offer was courtesy only; Tess accepting as such, a smile, no thanks. She did not want to show anymore, ever, was not even fully comfortable with showing her work to her students, but after all they had to see to learn, what she did as well as how she did it; that was inevitable, and acceptable as such; further viewing was not. Work was the thing that mattered, the distillation, the capture unconscious of the living form, the subtly moving edges of pain; when it's done, look at it: is it good? Good. Now put it away and start something else.

    They left her early, they had plans to make, down in the Zombie Birdhouse and Nicky in charge-the parallels inescapable, she tried not to think of that, either, but it was hard not to remember: heat like a second skin and Bibi's feral glee infectious, egging her on, the both of them working in opposite tandem, as if their yoked thoughts rose to meet like vapor combustible, gas for the engine that drove the show, that drove them all, that drove Paul to death oh God why think of it again? Raelynne's scream, valkyrie in the falling metal; Bibi's devouring selfishness, even then-was it?-chased with the puckering glaze of corruption. He was mine, anyway; what kind of a mind thinks that way?

    
You loved her.

    
You still.

    "Stop it!" aloud, half-wild and shaking head as if by force to drive the thought away. Breathing hard through her nose, carefully around her students' work, tarp-covered and now: begin.

    And so on; into the night, heavy with the rhythms of a slumbering drunk, smells assorted as garbage through the windows and still the air hot and close as the inside of a very small room, the chamber of an arrhythmic heart: metal burning bright and small and an observer, looking up from the street, might have seen the sparks and flashes, the gouty glare and presume from it weaponry, street armor in the service of chaos, and never know how, inside, the sweat beaded and ran, weary eyes behind the masking glass as fingers moved, crooked and sure and resistless, desperate as prayer at the bedside of incurable pain.

    Now: new flyers beside the Zombie ARThouse blacks-and-reds: Bibi, too, was planning, working on another show, again someone had been thoughtful enough to gild her door. Michael? Why not, it was his style. Slouched on the curb, soda can rolling cold against her wet throat, gazing at the flyers' slippery blacks and browns, the lettering austere, all of it very professional and for some reason this brought half a laugh, dry as a cough into the small echoless depth of the can. More sweat on her forehead, God what a horrible day.

    Down the street a car, small red car coming too close to the curb and Tess on her feet before the car lurched to a nervous stop and Bibi, out, not bothering to slam the door behind.

    Seen at once in the hammering instant, Tess's first jumbled thought: she's metal: sun washed like animate light across the curves and slippery planes, the dangling lines strung like cobwebs from a spider made of steel. Still that hideous waspwaist, strapped black and so tight it hurt to look at, the whole of her more firmly sculpted yet somehow very much a work in progress, as if beneath her clothing her bones performed their own precision roundelay, hooking, unhooking, rejoining in new and secret ways as if she might at any moment turn and smile, arms waving like an insect, mouth restructured in the staring instant to the long mandibular sweep; I'll eat you up. Heavy scars pale as wax around her mouth, eyes hidden behind sunglasses unwieldy as welder's goggles: "Tess," one hand out, deliberately too far away to shake, to touch. "Hi."