Vassa in the Night (38 page)

With all the force and control I can muster I lean back. My muscles tense: slow, taut, and aching. Those stars are sharper than anything on earth and their points draw from his flesh with brutal delicacy, fighting all the while. He trembles under my knee and a scream lifts from his throat like something taking wing.

When his eyelids finally fly open there is nothing behind them but torrential dark. I hear a terrible airy
whoop,
a vast suction, and my vision streaks with hurtling stars. Night gushes out between wide lids. Night deep enough to drown me, and with it comes sleep in heavy whorls. Sleep is larger than any night, so even the night can be lost inside it.

Have I ever been so tired?

*   *   *

“Baby,” Zinaida says, “can't you stay still? Give me just a little longer. We're almost through.”

I can smell her oil paints and see the ruby glow of lamps staining my closed lids. But with the gun in my mouth I can't answer. The bitter tang of the steel melts in my saliva and floods my throat. I swallow, choke, swallow again. My hand is made of paint: a thick, greasy impasto. But the gun I'm holding is very solid and terribly heavy, weighing on my jaw and my curled paint fingers. I remember believing, once, that the gun was just a toy, but that's not true now, and probably it never was. Not in the ways that matter. It's real and it's loaded, the trigger cold against my fingertip. I don't have to open my eyes to know that the roses behind me are white, waiting to be stained crimson with flying blood.

That's the last touch. Once I blow my brains out the painting will finally be complete. A real masterpiece.

“Vassa, sweetie, don't fidget, okay? You're messing up my shadows.” Zinaida's voice is warm and playful, and she laughs. Precarious turrets of curled hair wobble on my head, all of them made of violet paint. Stiff ruffs of painted lace bristle at my throat. “It's bad enough that you keep getting
older
. I started this picture when you were what, eight? And now you've grown up so much that I keep having to redo everything.”

She's right, I realize. I'm not the little paint girl who sat down on this brocade sofa all those years ago. I've grown up inside the painting and now I'm almost seventeen, still squashed into the same frilly dress and balancing the old absurd curls. And still composed of pigment and linseed and turpentine, no more substantial than I ever was.

My jaw aches from being held in the same pose for so long. It occurs to me that I'll have to kill myself soon, and I'll never get a chance to take the gun out of my mouth first. I'll never get to tell her goodbye. I won't even get to look at her. I can feel my hand starting to quiver. That's what she's been waiting for all these years, even if she won't admit it.

“Oh, Vassa! If you keep moving I'll never be able to finish. We'll both get old and the picture still won't be done. If you could just hang in there and be
patient
…”

Like a breath, like someone whispering in my ear, it occurs to me that there might be an alternative. Very gradually I draw back the gun. The barrel leaves my mouth with a somnolent glide like a dream slipping out of mind. I open my eyes, gazing into Zinaida's startled face for the first time in so very long. She's gotten older, too, and her illness has shriveled her cheeks. Her black hair is tied in a ponytail to keep it from dragging across the pallet. Her hazel eyes look huge, her lids worn.

I lower the gun and set it on an end table. She bites her lip. “Well, maybe it
is
about time for a break! I'll order up something to eat, and you can go back to the pose after lunch. Okay, baby?”

“No,” I say. The first flush of real human warmth suffuses my lips as I say it. “No, Mom. The painting is finished.”

“It's not finished! It's getting so close, but we're not there yet! Baby, if you would just cooperate a little
longer
 … I know it's going to be my greatest work. People will remember me in a hundred years because of this! But I can't do it without your help.”

I stretch myself and stand up. Those roses will just have to stay white, even if that messes up the composition Zinaida had in mind. With every move I make more of me becomes skin. I can feel muscles gathering, bones extending; I can feel the rumor of a heartbeat under my ribs. My body is stiff, bruised, battered, but I can't remember why.

“The painting is finished,” I tell her. “You can't keep working on it.
I'm
finished.” She's standing very close to me with her brush in hand. Her loose blue shirt grazes my arm. Impulsively I lean my head against her shoulder. “I'm sorry, Mom. But it
has
to be done now. It has to end.”

She doesn't answer at first. Her breath scrapes from her lungs, dry and labored. Then she raises her hand and starts running her fingers through my psychotic purple-paint curls. They loosen at her touch, unwinding into silky human hair. Long locks drop around my neck and I wrap my arms around her, feeling the skeleton that is much too close to her skin. She's dying all over again and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

“You know what, baby?” Zinaida whispers at last. “I think you might be right. I think maybe the painting
is
finished. I was just too wrapped up in it to realize! Any more work now would spoil it, don't you agree?”

I don't answer. Why don't we ever get to hold on to what we love?

She gently unwinds me. Clasps both my shoulders and leans back to look at me. I make myself raise my head and meet her gaze.

“So, darling, what do you think of it? Isn't it my greatest work? Do you like the way it came out?”

That makes me laugh a little. How can I look at the painting, when the painting is me? “Mom, you know I can't see it.”

“Well, I can see it,” Zinaida says. She strokes the jumbled hair back from my cheek. “I can see it. And it's beautiful.”

 

CHAPTER 25

“Vassa?” somebody says. A hand squeezes my arm. “Vassa!”

“Can't you let me sleep?” But now I'm half-awake I notice that there's something extremely hard under my side, that dull pain surges through my back with every breath, and that harsh sun glares into my face. Why am I not in bed? I reach into my pocket to hold Erg. She's right where she's supposed to be, her little wooden body stiff against my fingers. Is she asleep, too?

“I think you're off work now,” the someone says in a voice sagging with irony. “So you might want to sleep somewhere more comfortable.”

I open my eyes to see bare brown legs sticking out of cut-off shorts—but the cut edge of the fabric looks stiff and reddish black. The sun stabs at my vision and I shut my eyes again.

“Vassa?” a second voice says. “Please wake up. I'm here to take you home.”

“Chelsea?” I say. I try to sit up, and arms catch me and cradle my aching shoulders. “Chelsea? It's really you?”

“It's me, li'l sis. And boy do you need a bath! And an epic breakfast, and maybe a choir of trained psychologists to sing you lullabies afterward. Anyway, I am definitely staying home from school today to look after you.”

I manage to keep my eyes open now. Chelsea and Tomin are both holding me, their concerned faces gleaming in the brightest morning light I've ever seen. I'm not feeling too good, so Chelsea's plan sounds pretty appealing.

“Hey,” Tomin says. The sleeves of his canvas jacket are missing, too, the collar and shoulders dark and brittle. Right: that's his blood, and I must be one impressive mess myself. “I remember what happened now. Everything. You saved my life.” He says it kind of aggressively, like he's accusing me of something.

“Well, I also got you murdered, so that all works out. Right?”

Chelsea's face is, as they say, a study.

“You may notice,” Chelsea says, “what remarkable restraint I'm showing in not asking you—
yet
—what you're talking about. Or about what happened here.” Her head tips to indicate the shattered orange block that was BY's, detritus spilling out of its wounded windows and onto the pavement, its chicken feet withering in the sun. “But it's hard not to think that you might have had something to do with all this?”

I gape at the mess, remembering. We're getting back to issues that are awfully hard to explain. “I—didn't have
nothing
to do with it. I mean—a lot happened, Chels.” I stroke Erg's back, wondering what she's thinking about all this. I can't understand why she won't wake up. “Oh—and the nights should go back to normal now. I'm pretty sure that's fixed.”

“I see. And I suppose you also had not-nothing to do with fixing the nights?”

Chelsea's voice is so laboriously calm and reasonable that it makes me crack up in a sputtering laugh. Total insanity is not her natural milieu. I pull myself to my feet and she clutches my arm, obviously afraid I'll fall; it's sensible of her, really. “I helped with that part, yeah. I really did.”
You did it, Vassa.
I'm conscious enough now that I look around for the motorcyclist. If there was a corpse nearby wouldn't Chelsea say something? Just a few feet away there's a pile of strange garbage that looks like an explosion at a rummage sale, but it's not remotely humanoid and I turn my head, still trying to find him.

Then realization jolts through me, and I look back at the pile. There's an old-fashioned cookie tin decorated with a scene of ice skaters on a pond. There are two taxidermy ferrets, a carved wooden duck, a tape deck and a few volumes from an encyclopedia, teapots and music boxes, steel pipes, a needlepoint footstool. Curved slabs of painted metal. Large bones, quite possibly of human origin. Control panels from obsolete electronics. Black leather scraps—lots of those.

Two motorcycle tires. And a black globe printed with the constellations.

Perched on top of it all is a jet black silk lampshade with a silvery fringe.

Can that be called a man, Vassa?

The amazing thing, really, was that it almost could. I mean, Erg is just a chunk of wood and she is emphatically
somebody
. She's one of the strongest personalities I've ever known. If Chelsea and Tomin weren't right here I'd pull her out to look at the mess. I'd say,
Wow, doll, you knew this all along?

Then I remember. My knees pleat under me and both Chelsea and Tomin grab me hard.

I want to scream out for Erg, shake her, tell her she has to come back to life. Tell her how utterly I need her and that she's not allowed to die on me.

Begging people not to die has never really worked out for me, though. I squeeze her empty body as tight as my hand will go and darkness seethes in my head.

“Can I help you get her home?” Tomin asks Chelsea. In the corner of my eye I see her dark curls bobbing affirmatively. We're walking across the parking lot, and I know that I can step beyond its borders without anything happening to me. The severed heads stand watchful and silent on their stakes, and there will never be any more of them. I've served my time here. Three nights, just like Babs said. I've succeeded in my last task, too: the one I finally gave myself. Erg and I, we did what we had to do, even if the cost of doing it was almost more than I can contemplate.

“One moment!” a voice yells. “Please, if you please, one moment! We have certain official notifications to impart before Miss Lowenstein goes on her way.” There's the rapid scratch of conical claws on asphalt, the pad of shoes on not entirely human feet. Chelsea's mouth goes wide with shock, and I turn to see Picnic and Pangolin scampering toward us, brass plaques flashing in the sun.

“Listen.” Chelsea's mastering herself. “Vassa has been through I don't know what, and she is in
no
condition to—”

“I'm better, Chels,” I say. It's true. I'm holding myself straight, not sagging against her arm anymore. “And these are—my good friends. Picnic, Pangolin, thank you for coming to see me off.”

Picnic grins and bobs in silence and Pangolin flusters. “We wished to inform you that our case against BY's has been unambiguously won. In the court of possibilities. There will be no more of their circadian trickeries, and no more unfortunate, shall we say, sapiens terminations. And not only at this
particular
establishment, my dear. The entire organization has conceded and all the franchises ceased operations last night. A splendid victory!”

“That's awesome,” I tell him. I could have figured that out on my own, though. “Congratulations. Really.”

Pangolin has a new file folder with him and he shuffles through the pages inside with a look of perplexity. Shiny new glasses glint on his snout. “And as for you, Miss Lowenstein—your formal obligations to—to certain other-than-quotidian forces—are now entirely discharged. You are quite free. And our congratulations are owed to
you
.”