Vienna

 

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For Kathryn and In memory of Robert Waldron Kirby: father, teacher, friend

 

Much madness is divinest sense

To a discerning eye;

Much sense the starkest madness.

'Tis the majority

In this, as all, prevails.

Assent, and you are sane;

Demur—you're straightway dangerous,

And handled with a chain.

—EMILY DICKINSON

 

1

Brussels

Awake under a hollow sunrise, Justine Am sought cover behind a hangover that wasn't there. The previous night's drinking had consisted of two sips of vodka drowning in peach liqueur. She'd switched to tonic water well before the pink eyedropper of liquid ecstasy made its rounds. Not that she would've taken part. Boredom was cheaper and it unleashed the same chaos. Sprawled across a stranger's swaybacked bed, Justine still felt the subterranean echo of house electronica pacing behind her rib cage:
boom, boom, boom.
She'd fallen in with a post-tribal, post-trance, post-everything crowd. World-weary gods draped over the cherry and onyx pillows of Holler. They'd offered her a sucker's bet and she'd raised the stakes right into this bed.

Sketchy times since Prague. Pouring rain and the howl of police sirens; a lone separatist locked in the Dancing House with a vest of high explosives and a heart of rust. Security concerns caused a three-day delay, even though the standoff only lasted four hours. Local politicians didn't want to take chances of an A-list fashion model getting splattered across the electorate.

Then a two-night shoot for the Clay to Flesh project, set in front of the Národní Muzeum. City lights doubled across wet concrete. Justine in Dory McCallister's iconic drop-waist silks, posed next to a wooden manikin. She mimicked the statue's skipping stance, toes pointed and fingers splayed. The photographer's ancient camera whirred to life. Justine called up her world-famous smile, coy under lowered eyelids. Through the thin fabric across her legs, she felt the first breath of winter falling from blue-white stars.

Returning the following evening, it was bad enough Justine thought the two-hundred-year-old manikin had shifted positions overnight; worse that she'd mentioned it to her agent. Nothing good had happened in the four days since, and last night hit magnitude nine on the nothing good scale.

And yet, the wooden girl had moved between the two sessions. It'd been such a certainty at the time. A subtle swing to a more rigid stance. The manikin's tupelo smile tightening to a sadistic leer. Justine had gone as far as calling up the previous night's photos, but the manikin had been backlit to the point of being little more than a silhouette. She'd tried pointing out what she saw to James, but the more she spoke, the more she sounded as if she were trying to convince herself. James had been at his most patronizing. “Pinocchio aside, I doubt wooden dolls come to life.”

The episode had left Justine feeling idiotic. Fears barely controlled back in med school rattled loose chains. Echoes of children screaming at the pasty green cinder blocks of the Felton Gables Ward.

Am I becoming like them?

Justine opened her eyes. The yellowed plaster overhead was split by a lightning bolt fracture. She stared at the leading edge, anxious that her presence would somehow cause it to spread another quarter inch. After a few seconds, she realized someone had used a fine-tipped pencil to outline the crack with machine precision; as if cordoning off the defect. But sadness spilled over nonetheless, seeping down the ancient walls.

She remembered a rant from her Stanford bioethics professor: “Doctors don't save lives. Doctors only give life a chance. Learn the difference or get out.”

Shit.

The thin breeze coming through the bedside window smelled of lilac. Where would such an ambitious flower grow in Lower Town's acres of eroded stone? Justine sat up, pulling a threadbare sheet with her. The bed springs released her 116 pounds in a chorus of squeaks.

She hunched over by the small window. Three stories down, a fairy-tale church of arches and spires overshadowed a plaza of gray cobblestone. The building's walls were etched in soot, although a battered section of scaffolding suggested a minor restoration was underway. It looked like a hundred other churches Justine had seen, except for the doors: two massive slabs of burgundy under a Gothic arch. They told her nothing. Every other building in Brussels was a church.

The tortoiseshell glasses that had landed her here were folded on a plastic nightstand. She put them on in hopes they might allow her to read the small white-on-blue street sign posted on the church. There was no change looking through the spotless lenses.

“I need those.”

Justine turned and saw the punch line of last night's tired joke. The girl's cinnamon-brown hair, shoulder length and of that extreme fineness that would tangle over a whisper. Stone-washed hazel eyes above expressionless lips. The nose was better, a modestly upturned anime arc soon to be consumed by the Frankenstein glasses. Her skin was clear to the point of unhealthy pallor, accenting her wispy frame. Her name was something cringe-worthy—a place name.

Vienna.

Even in the morning sun, she seemed nothing more than a lesser poltergeist. Bound to her forgotten crypt with no television, no computer, no MP3 player. No phone. Only a single stack of old hardcovers, their spines tight against the wall. Justine handed Vienna the glasses.
Why would anyone wear nonprescription lenses?

“Do you want breakfast?” Vienna asked. Her British accent sounded like a cheap imitation. She'd looked a timid twenty in last night's glittering lights. Justine found herself praying for eighteen.
What was the age of consent in Belgium?
Followed by the most dreaded cliché in the business:
Did the blogs already have pictures?

And when had Vienna drifted out of bed anyway? Justine felt the pinpricks of her flight reflex, kicking in eight hours too late. “What are you making?”

“Eggs, orange juice, strawberries, and tea.”

It sounded harmless. “Do I have time to shower?”

Vienna nodded.

“Have you seen my BlackBerry?” Justine asked.

“You left it in the bathroom.”

“I need to check for messages.” Justine stood, the thin sheet falling away.

“Heather!” Vienna darted around the bed, averting her eyes and yanking the shade across the tiny window. Her movement was subtly stuttered—exaggerated in a way that suggested either phencyclidine abuse or a developmental disorder. Then she was gone, out to the small kitchen. Justine was left feeling unaccountably self-conscious.

Why did I give her my real name?
She pulled the top book in the stack away from the wall enough to see the title on the spine:
Methods of Political Assassination in Nazi Germany.

Justine kept her eyes open in the standing-room-only shower. As if Vienna might sneak in, wielding a knife like Anthony Perkins. It seemed fitting that the shower curtain was a perfect set piece. Flat gray, with no tropical fish, no blooming flowers, no unicorns. Justine looked closer. Not even a textural pattern in the plastic. It might have worked in modern design, but here, where a splash of color would have been blessed relief, it hung off the bar like a funeral shroud.

Water hissed against the plastic as Justine straightened. She closed her eyes and heard static pouring from her grandfather's ancient radio. Minor league baseball wavering over Montana from somewhere in Colorado 
… hanging slider … out of the park …
Words lost in a crescendo of pops and crackles. Lord help you if you touched the tuner. A decade gone and it felt more real than this bleak apartment.

Justine frowned. More wicked Prague karma.

That stupid manikin.

Followed by an even more dreary thought:
I had sex with a woman last night.

Well, sort of. Vienna had approached lovemaking like a blind girl playing connect-the-dots: every step planned and executed with painstaking attention that was endearing for two minutes and tedious the next forty. You would at least think another woman would know what worked and what didn't.
Another myth shattered.
It wasn't as if Vienna was a virgin. Justine had felt compelled to check after the first fifteen minutes.

And that's the extent of what I know about her.
That, and the fact that Vienna didn't smell like anything. Not perfume, or deodorant, or shampoo. And not, thank goodness, the vinegar reek cultivated by a handful of Europe's old-school bathing deniers. Nothing. As if she had been scrubbed in an alpine lake and sealed in her black shirtdress. It didn't fit anywhere on Justine's organizational chart of social status.

Justine absently rubbed the sleek lizard tattoo on her left hip. A reminder of choices made, some worse than others.

Out of the shower, she took her BlackBerry from the tiny vanity. The first call had to be to her agent, still hanging on her shoulder. Making certain his prize mare wasn't losing her head; asking every five minutes if she was okay, or if she needed rest. Or if she was seeing any other statues move.

James Hargrave was his usual triple-espresso alert. Justine described the church—it had to be near the Grand-Place de Bruxelles, as they had walked through that ancient mall with the glass ceiling. There had been a sculpture of a well-endowed cat on a bicycle along the way.

James asked her what the hell she thought she was doing.

“I'm not your daughter, James. I'm fine. Go back to New York.”

“I will when you stop seeing manikins dance around.”

“It was a joke,” Justine said.

“Uh-huh.”

He said he would send a car when he had the church pinned down, and that there was a surprise waiting, and she had to be in the chair by 9:30 for the second day of the Brussels Clay to Flesh shoot, and she had to give Bernoulli an answer for his winter show at Carrousel du Louvre by three at the latest as she had already put him off once, and London called for a
Vogue
cover and they were offering an ungodly amount of money, but Sandra Bennet just had to have Justine Am for next fall's fashion issue and they already confirmed Smyth and Weston for hair and face, and they were going to be in London for the next stage of Clay to Flesh anyway, so why not do it?