Then she would be gone.
Doing things, being with people. Because people were what Lasha was all about. Actors, designers, musicians. Long-haired technicians in ripped jeans with wrenches in their pockets climbing ladders to tighten the nuts on big tin-can lights. Makeup artists smoking Camels in back rooms, swathed in chenille and rehearsal socks. Government arts funders with pale fingers and obscure forms, rigid with ass-tight loopholes. And executive producers who didn’t really matter, because Lasha was in charge. She fought for every scrap of film that ever came out under her name. A bullet-proof vest might have helped her to bear the world.
We existed in perpetual deep night, and brilliant day. Lights seared the stage so it became a desert, barren and dry. They broiled the actors, who walked through The Sandbox and Waiting for Godot and No Exit. But in the cool dark, behind the sandbags and dollies, behind the folding chairs and empty beer cans, there was a richness, of furtive movement and silent cues, the smell of greasepaint and spirit gum. Costumes fluttered on racks, cigarettes glowed in ballet hands. Paper cups emoted on overturned oilcan coffee tables, and ropy wires slithered across the floor or hung like vines from impossibly high catwalks.
Lasha’s life was a spotlight. Intense. Hot. Forever struggling to spill beyond the black box eclipsing her. But, as her movies leaked into the world, cracks appeared in our warehouse, admitting strangers and fear. We saw how they knocked at the doors, and we huddled inside, in curiosity and despair, she and I.
When the work was done, and it was never done, the play began, which never stopped. The actors came off stage and into the fantasy to smoke and strip out of costume and gossip. The lights dimmed then, and candles appeared, and the bottles and joints, and the Ouija and tarot. Hands, gracefully dancing in smoky glow, gestured, illustrated, slowed. Tongues loosened and names dropped, and grand ambitions flowed. They’d trade their souls for a chance at Hollywood. And it was Lasha who summoned the séance.
Other things happened, too; secretive things, in dark corners. Love-making in broom closets or overstuffed couches or deserted kitchen tables on top of the silverware and grapes, beating the table, moaning, crying.
I watched her.
From the space between the counter and the window, beneath the hanging pots, bypassed by moonlight and candlelight, I watched her jerk to the rhythm of a faceless stunt man. She watched back, eyes on mine, fever bright. Lightning current pulsed in the space between us, sharpening, demanding, insisting, until we quivered and throbbed and burst.
A small director arrived one morning, with a Gordian script, towing an actor with a name. Through my binoculars I saw them, standing in the oversized barn doors, silhouetted, black against brilliant day. The director strutted onto our mock wooden “O” to the gravedigger’s pit where I dressed the set, and I let the binoculars fall back on their lanyard. House lights at half power glinted from his sunglasses.
“They say I need Lasha,” his words shackled, coerced, colluded. “Or she needs me.”
“We’re in the middle of Hamlet. We don’t need you.”
“‘Course you do, baby.” His smile was a fisherman’s, eyeing a fat sturgeon, calculating strategy and the worth of my atheist soul. “Or you will.” He passed his hand through the air as if drawing a curtain, and in that instant the world faded to grays and murmurs. Only the small, dark man and I existed, facing one another at opposite ends of conduit, black as Hell. Nauseous memories of my uncle in the night crawled out of my skin.
“Now, where can I find the little producer? I have a piece for her. Candy.”
He wanted Lasha?
“Lasha, that’s right.” He spoke as if we had known each other for years. As if I’d asked the question aloud.
Clammy fingers like past shame slid down my groin.
“You know who I am.”
My stomach heaved.
“Now. Lasha summoned me.” He produced the Tower of the Major Arcana by way of evidence. “And I have a gift for her. Or, shall we say, a trade.”
Lasha summoned him? For God’s sake, why?
“Why? Trapped, isn’t that what she said? Can’t get out?”
“We don’t want you. We—” The words blistered my lips.
“We?” His voice flowed around me, soothing, explaining; intimate as unwanted touch. “You can’t hold quicksilver, Jim. It’s like a film. You create an artifact to play over and over until the pictures fade to nothing. But that moment between the actors? It’s gone. You should know that, baby.” His grip lessened. “You might see things more clearly if your lens wasn’t cracked.”
I swallowed, massaged my throat, tried to breathe.
“But I can help you, even to capture mercury. Bring me something of hers.” He smiled, soft pink lips peeking from his black goatee. “When you’re ready.”
The best boy slumped by and noticed the newcomers. “Need a hand?”
“Two. Clever ones.” The small man laughed, a pitch too high. His gaze shifted from me, and I fell from the nightmare as Lasha had, panting and chilled with sweat. “She wants more, Jim.” His whisper rattled in my thoughts.
“Lasha!” The boy hoisted electrical cable over his shoulder and slouched off toward her office.
I stumbled to the shower to scrub myself clean.
When she saw the actor, Lasha’s eyes grew large and dark. She wore her wild curls coiled on top of her head then, and sported fake glasses and a clip board; but she wrapped Hamlet and scheduled the new script for the following week. Funding was in place, so sets were designed and built. Pyrotechnics and mirrors appeared, thespians rehearsed and mimes mimed. Lasha’s laugh became softer for the actor, and she tossed her head more. She sprinkled herself near him, a glitter of sunlight on wet fur, and the heat of her smile left me.
“Jim, get Colin a coffee.”
“Jim, run to the store for cigarettes.”
“Jim, run the bath.”
The shower sprayed a glittering mist before a scrim of night, fogging my glasses. The tub, high porcelain sides and rolled top, perched on claw feet. Hairs like fine lines lifted from the surface to bob on the rising water, a film of grit and soap scum.
Lasha glistened like a seal, climbing out, all sheen, lampside, and shadow, my side. She toweled away the film until the tiny hairs stood out from her skin, haloed in light. She spritzed spray and gathered chiffon.
I coiled cable in the bedroom. Tonight she would star for me on the silverware and grapes and I didn’t care if it was with the big name actor. Tonight we, Lasha and I, would quiver and throb and burst.
She stepped out of the spot, silhouette against white-lit mist, her eyes picking me out of the dark. “Colin is taking me to Hollywood.”
The cables tangled about my feet.
“He has a part for me in The American Dream.”
Her words, a hammer. “You’re not an actress.”
“I could be.” She adjusted the sash restraining the springy coils on her head.
“You never wanted to be an actress.”
“I could act. I could write, do props. It’s a foot in the door. An exit.”
“You could never do props. You’d go out of your mind—”
“I’m obscured here, Jim!”
“Obscured?” I wiped the mist from my glasses but beads of moisture wept from them, blurring her.
“Shadowed. Occulted. Overcast.”
Hollywood. And what would remain? Sound stage without sound? Camera without lens? Moth without flame?
She slid into the barber’s chair, bright-lit by bare bulbs. When Lasha decided a thing, it was done.
“Well, then.” Damn her. Damn him.
“You understand.”
“I don’t, no.” Panic fingered my gut and I dropped the cables.
“Jim. No hysterics.” Cool. Cold, even. Ch
anged.
Words blanched from my tongue. I loosed the red silk tie that bound her mane and buried my hands in the masses of kinky hair, soothing my panic, finding release.
I had to keep her.
“You’ll get along. You always were the strong one.”
“No. No, not me.” I tilted the chair back and wound the sash around my hands. I laid the silky red across her throat, a gash. “All that hair has to go.”
“You think?”
“Definitely.” I tilted my head so her neck appeared broken, refracted in my left lens. My fingers trembled on the sash in a fantasy of indecision. I tugged, and it slithered into my hands.
“Eye-catching, then. I have to be noticed.”
“Cut. Short.” I used the sash to tie her wrists to the arms of the chair. “Smooth on top and spiked at the back.” The shears lay before the mirror, glinting, brilliant, honed.
“But still red; red, and orange and burgundy.”
“Crimson.”
Lasha lay back, eyes closed, tendrils falling from forehead to floor. Her throat gleamed, white in the brilliant light, naked to her breasts. “Asymmetrical,” she said. “You have to be unique in Hollywood.”
I opened the scissors, gripped a blade against its handle and felt the edge bite my palm. Razor pain to relieve anguish. I knelt beside her. Pain. That was what was needed.
Her hair smelled of violets.
The open blade pressed into the flesh of her neck and the soft skin yielded. My eyes stung. “This short?”
“Do it.” Her voice was low, seductive. “Here, on the barber chair.”
A drop of blood wrung from my hand appeared on her chest. She arched her back, pressing herself into my wrist and the red trickle snaked between her breasts. She turned to look at me, twisting her neck into the blade. Eyes, black, all pupil. Lashes inked with kohl and mascara, lips ruby, a blurring together of Lasha and remembrance of Lasha.
Leaving.
A half-moan slithered from my throat and I had to push myself with a force of will to stand astride her, hard up against her hips. She lay in the chair, bound, unresisting.
“Fuck me.”
And would she stay, if I did? Renege on her contract with the director?
“Do it to me, Jim.”
I drew the point of the shears down her chest, tracing the red line.
Her back lifted, nipples erect. “Once. Before Hollywood.”
I leaned over her, took the rope of her hair, my creation, and pulled her head hard against the head rest. In one shear, I snipped the strands from their roots. “This short?” I backed from her, arms upraised, trophy in one hand, bloody scissors in the other.
“Do it!”
“On the silverware and grapes? Like the stunt man?” The scissors clattered to the floor.
“Why won’t you fuck me?”
I clamped her severed mane in a clip. “On the catwalk stairs, like a gaffer?”
“Jim!”
I traced a stain of crimson down her torso with my slashed hand. “On the bar from Virginia Woolf, like a patron?”
“Finish it!”
“And spoil what’s special between us?”
She tugged at the sash at her wrists.
I knelt beside the barber chair and the down of her shoulder brushed my cheek. “This is not goodbye.” I clipped the letter “A” into the scalp above her ear. “Asymmetrical,” I whispered, and left to clean the blood from my hands.
But in the studio below, the sound technician blasted the cast with In-A-Godda-Da-Vida. The small director planned his cuts; the actor with the name read blockbuster scripts; the carpenter hung flats; the stage manager counted headsets; the bookkeeper tallied sums; the actors promised undying fealty; the bit players hugged one another; and the best boy lit a joint.
The costume girl looked for Lasha, and finding her, untied the red silk around her wrists.
I hid in the sound booth and beat on the silent glass. Lasha was leaving. I caressed the shank of hair. Lasha was leaving.
In the empty night, Lasha came to where I sat alone on the edge of the unmade bed, her carpetbag in the doorway. She looked at me with pale lamp eyes, bare of kohl and mascara. “I’m going.”
“You’re stepping under an arc light.”
She picked up her shaggy coat woven with wools of llama and goat, with raw fleece and herb-dyed down, and pulled it over one shoulder.
I struggled to cry out, to stop her. As easily try to put the stars out of joint.
She left, and the rooms we’d lived in let out a breath like a spotlight cooling after the spectacle is over and the playgoers have left the theater for another life. Moonlight dripped through the cracks in the skylight, fluorescence dying.
For, what was the warehouse without her? What was the soundstage, the paint cans, the dimmers, the front office, without her? What was the moonlight without her?
What was I without her?
I picked up used paper cups.
The shadows followed me.
I dusted the prop shelf.
The candles flickered and went out as I passed.
I stacked brooms in the closet.
The warehouse sighed.
And, so, now in this hour before dawn, when all secrets are kept and revealed, I climbed the ladder to the catwalk, knowing where to go as certainly as I knew the ending of Hamlet. Up, to the rafters, to deliver the mane of hair.
The small director waited. “As I said.” My horn rims peeked from his breast pocket.
“You need a hand. I heard.”
“Two. Clever ones. Good with scissors.”
I held out my arms. He took my hands and turned them over. “One is damaged.”
“It works.”
He shrugged. “Very well.” He squeezed. “For my collection.”
My hands vanished. Shocks seared my forearms, pierced to my shoulders and shot down my back. I fell gasping to my knees.
“The pain won’t lessen, but you’ll get used to it.” He reached into a pool of shadow, produced a box and laid it before me. “I keep my promises, if not my word.”
I gathered the smooth, white cardboard, whispering and heavy, into my arms. My gift for Lasha.
“Pity.” The voice whispered in the air around me, or in my mind, but the director had vanished along with my hands.
I brought the box, in arms that ended in jagged, wrinkled scars, to the ghost-gray light that fell onto the center of our bed. I nudged the unruly sheets away and sat at the edge of the halo to slide the lid back.
I poked the white jacket from the tissue and spread it across the bed. Hand stitched. My hands. It glowed in the moonlight, silky threads winding their way across the sheen. I touched the ivory buttons, my buttons, and ran my stump across the lining, downy as a baby’s velvet crown. I crushed my face into the collar, soft with the curls of red I had stolen. I breathed in Lasha’s scent, after the lovemaking, after the wine, after the cigarettes, when her eyes were black and wet, and she was yielding and mine.
And so. She returned to me.
A step on the floor, the perfume of her breath on my neck, her hand on my shoulder. I felt the bedsprings creak; she pressed her body into mine.
“What did you give him, Lasha? For Hollywood?”
But I knew the answer. “Love.” She blinked and turned to me with the expression of one who fought her way up from the depths of a dream. “I gave up you, Jim.”
I smiled. Because she hadn’t given up love at all. She was back. I turned and gave her the jacket. Drew it around her shoulders and crossed the long sleeves over her waist and fastened them behind her back.
Her eyes were bright and distant, lingering for one wistful, uncomprehending moment on the skylight, then gone again to another
plane. I didn’t mind. We all had a price to pay. The padded shoulders looked fine on her. She needed them to bear the world.
Rocketship Red
Michael R. Colangelo
Eagan runs through a field of wheat. A long string tied at his wrist traces away from him and vanishes into the sky, ending in a bright red kite.
He often daydreams that he’s up there, that his kite is not made of fabric and bound together with vinyl twine. It is, in fact, a bright red rocket made of steel and he’s not Eagan the sixth of eleven farming children. He’s Captain Eagan, an American rocket pilot.
But then Mother calls him for dinner off the back porch of the farmhouse. They’re having soy again. Her shrill call distracts him and the kite loses its jet stream.
It falls to the dirt and he hurries inside. They’re a soy farm. He’s always eating soy.
There are men from the city that drive out to Eagan’s farm to buy soy from them. Two of these men are from the United States Air Force. They’re interested in supplying soy-based food products for their boys and their colonization efforts in space.
One of the men, Captain Campbell, is unfriendly with Eagan. But the other, Captain Sampson, is tremendously pleased to talk with him about joining the Air Force.
Captain Sampson used to fly a rocket in space, but now he works behind a desk. He laughs off the blood pressure cuff that he wears beneath the sleeve of his uniform and his ever-shaking hands.
He’s handsome enough to be in the movies, which is why they use him in the commercials. He tells Eagan to look him up in the city once he turns seventeen. That’s the age that boys can go to rocket flying school.
Eagan solemnly promises Captain Sampson that he will.
When he does turn seventeen, he hasn’t forgotten the conversation. There’s some static from his family about his decision. His Dad doesn’t understand. He is, after all, a proud soy farmer. The farm is doing very well. There’s plenty of work and money to go around for Eagan and all of his siblings.
Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories Page 3