Skyscape

by Michael Cadnum

“Without trust there really isn’t going to be any future, Margaret. It’s your inability to have faith in life that is crippling you. Are you all right? I meant cripple metaphorically, but you actually hurt yourself, didn’t you? I’m so sorry. It pains me to see you suffering. I’ve got something that’ll make you feel a whole lot better.”

  He was so relaxed, and so sure, that she had to doubt herself. “I want to be sure that Curtis is still alive.”

  “Of course you do. But stop and think for a moment. Why wouldn’t he be alive?”

  There was an instant of chagrin. Red Patterson looked so confident. Margaret felt herself waver. How could she think like this?

  “This is a Ryan S-T,” said Patterson. “Built about 1937. One hundred and twenty-five horsepower. Dual controls, front and back, open cockpits. Lovely plane. Over there we have the Lockheed Vega. Amelia Earhart flew one of these. It was the holder of several transcontinental speed records. A sweet piece of work. Over there we have the Stinson 105 Voyager. Bishop’s been reconditioning this plane, but basically he never stops working.”

  He was gazing dreamily at the aircraft. Now he turned to look at her. The moth continued to worry the light, and there was another sound, somewhere off among the shadowy aircraft. A footfall, she thought. Or another moth.

  “There’s something magic about art,” he said. “I don’t mean the old, used-up magic, superstition. I mean the other kind—the kind that works. If a special work of art is destroyed we feel much worse than if several people we have never met are lost in a boating accident somewhere.”

  Patterson picked up one end of an airhose, pink rubber tipped with bright brass. He wound the hose into a tight series of circles, and hung it on a hook. “You blow up some art in Florence and people are aghast. You blow up some people and we can’t help but think that the individuals can be replaced.”

  He’s talking about Curtis, she thought.

  “We’re wrong, of course,” he said. “The people are alive and precious. But the art is sacred to us, out of another world. Not just a historical world. I mean out of the other world of the psyche, a world we don’t really understand.”

  “If I knew he was still alive,” she said, choosing not to speak his name. “If I could just see him.”

  He gave her a look of compassion. “I’ve come to an understanding out here in recent weeks, Margaret. A wonderful understanding about life, and about myself. Just as a work of art is more important than a human being, so am I more important than you are. Because I am a kind of work of art, a creation of my own time just as surely as Michelangelo’s Moses is a creation of his. As much as I love you, and Curtis, I am more important than either one of you.”

  Margaret worked the pistol out of her pocket, and held it in both hands. The weapon drew itself upward, until it aimed itself at Red Patterson’s chest.

  Red Patterson had a sudden hungry look. He lost all appearance of confidence. Even so, he could smile. “Loretta Lee’s gift to the future,” he said.

  She held the gun. She did not speak.

  “You’re going to be so embarrassed when you realize what’s been happening here. Besides, those pistols are more complicated than you think. A gun like that sometimes has two safeties, and then, if you’re lucky and you get it working right, someone’s dead. They’re horrible things, really. Put it down.”

  Curtis.

  “Margaret, do you realize what people will think if you shoot me? Do you realize how hated you’ll be by so many people, all over the world?”

  He lost that starved look in his eyes. “You won’t do it, because you know that it would be like destroying the works of Monet, say, with the squeeze of a trigger, or demolishing the architecture of Rome with the push of a button. That’s what it would be like, Margaret. You aren’t alive the way I am. And you know it.”

  “I know Curtis is dead.” She was weeping, her breath broken, but she held the gun steady.

  Patterson spread his arms casually, at ease: how do you know a thing like that? Or maybe he meant: what difference does it make?

  The blow knocked her down. The pistol made a shiny spinning blur across the floor, and Patterson stopped it with his foot.

  She tried to get up but couldn’t move. She was hurt. She couldn’t breathe.

  Bishop knelt beside her. His eyes were without feeling, looking into hers as if into a defective device. He was panting, rubbing his shoulder where he had slammed into her.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” said Patterson, soothingly.

  Patterson picked up the gun. The doctor held out his hand, and helped her to her feet. He turned the pistol around, butt-forward. He gave it back to her. Her hand accepted it. For a moment they both held the gun, their eyes locked.

  Then he released the pistol. Until then it had been impossible to trust him. Until then she was ready to kill him. But now, with the metal of the gun warm from her hand, and from his, she knew that the weapon might as well be a toy.

  “You win, Margaret,” he said.

  As she left the hangar, and walked through the darkness under the loud stars, she understood what she had nearly done. She had nearly killed Red Patterson, and the thought of it was nauseating.

  She left the gun beside the swimming pool, the surface of the water shivering as a creature touched it and then fled on invisible wings.

  44

  He was glad Margaret put the gun down in a nice safe place.

  The sprinkler was on again, over by the ornamental orange trees. The water came on and off, on its own. Patterson didn’t know what to do about it. The breath of the water, wafting through the air, made them all pause to let it drift over them.

  Suddenly, the sprinkler ceased its chatter, and the cool mist was gone. Everything was computerized, and the computer wasn’t working very well.

  There were never any moths out here, and yet there they were, all over the place, even over the pool, dogfighting the big knob of the light among the palm leaves.

  Patterson was feeling sorry for Bishop. Maybe Bishop missed Loretta Lee. This had been an incident-rich environment, and Bishop really was more of maintenance sort of guy, fix it and sign-off. Bishop was tagging along, far behind them, like a hound sure that his master was about to hurt someone, anyone.

  Inside, the house felt cool, almost chilly.

  After we look at the painting, thought Patterson, maybe we’ll have a celebratory drink and light a fire. He’d stack some of that cedar in the downstairs fireplace, that wood that burned with such fragrance, and add a little Georgia fatwood. And we’ll make love, actual love, not that carnal jig I used to do with Loretta Lee, that meat pogo she and I used to do. This will be an act of real love. Because there was no doubt: Margaret is going to be won tonight. Patterson knew that his accomplishment here would be incomplete without Margaret opening up and taking him in, and loving him.

  It was freezing in here, he thought. The air conditioner must be set way too low. Maybe it was broken. He’d have Bishop take a look. You send the staff away, and you are naturally going to run into a malfunction or two.

  “Do you need a sweater?” he asked.

  Margaret said that she didn’t, but she must be lying, because she was folding her arms as she hurried behind him down the hall. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a baseball shirt, and here he was in a T-shirt. It was one of those nice T’s, the ones he picked out when Vogue was going to do that story on him, and wanted him to look casual but put together. They were all-cotton and tailored, T-shirts for Olympus.

  He recognized the tune he was humming under his breath and laughed. It was an early theme for his show, a jazzy little piece that played as the credits rolled until Patterson said that applause was the only intro/outro he wanted.

  “How did you know?” she asked. “That I had left the bedroom?”

  Patterson liked the way her hesitation made the question come out in sections. He was not about to get into matters of video cameras and two-way mirrors. Those naughty studio heads—their vo
yeurism had proved useful at last.

  “You don’t know much about guns, do you?” asked Patterson, in the tone of someone sharing a joke. It was a nice way to switch subjects.

  “I’m glad I don’t,” she said in a soft voice.

  “Guns,” said Patterson, in the tone of amused disdain with which his father might have said women.

  But the sight of the gun had shaken him more than he wanted to admit. He was named after a martyr, he quipped to himself, but he was in no hurry to become one.

  His poor mother had always been out of her league. She had come out of the Midwest to act, and she had appeared as a stagecoach passenger and a girlfriend’s girlfriend, and it wasn’t the wear and tear of the movie business that made her quit, but some inner sense in the woman that she had lost something by appearing on the screen. His mother had died of the flu, an Asiatic variety that most people survived. He had her photograph somewhere, posed with one foot on the step of a buckboard beside the squinting, impatient Walter Brennan.

  The Stephen on his birth certificate was her insistence at a touch of tradition. Patterson suspected that the martyr’s name was an attempt at something cosmetic, a dash of devotional makeup in a world of press kits and quickie divorces.

  Jesus, it was cold.

  “When I recognized what sort of person I actually was, a lot of things became very simple for me,” said Patterson. “I realized that I didn’t have to confine myself anymore behind the little structures most people erect for themselves. I was free to be what I was destined to be, and it was like arriving from a crowded, overpopulated place, out into a clean, bare fertile wilderness. I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am.”

  He paused to measure her reaction. He was telling her the truth, but sometimes the truth crawls out of the Precambrian seas with a few too many legs.

  He couldn’t read her expression. At least with Loretta Lee you could see trouble coming. He was at the door of the studio, shivering, inserting the key.

  He was careful to put the key back into his pocket. A key could be as powerful as a gun, and this one was color-coded, sporting a dot of Loretta Lee’s Carnival Blush nail polish so he could tell it from the others.

  Patterson was a little nervous. He wasn’t apprehensive, and he was confident, but still—it was the first time this stage of the painting had been seen by anyone else. Sometimes in front of a special audience you feel it, that flutter. You can’t help it. The size of the room hushed them, the spaciousness of the studio—and the sheet-draped presence at the far end of the room.

  There was the painting, under its shroud. Their footsteps resounded. The turpentine smell was strong. Even here it felt like winter.

  “He’s been painting,” said Margaret in a hushed voice.

  She was a remarkable woman, but she didn’t seem to quite understand. Perhaps he was expecting too much of her, moving too quickly. It was like that last show, the session with Curtis, great television but terrible therapy, the miracle dying, time running out.

  There at the side table was the pallet, and Curtis’s knife, the blade blistered with paint.

  “What happened here?” asked Margaret.

  He did not quite understand her question.

  “Did we just interrupt him?” she asked.

  Patterson smiled, gave her a flash of the capped teeth. It was like running through a rehearsal, the special guest not knowing how to read the cue cards, and Patterson acting calm, encouraging. Only a retard sounds like a retard on my show.

  “Curtis never leaves his paints like this,” she said, “tossed around on a table.”

  “Stand over there,” said Patterson. “Right there. That’s where you’ll get the best view.” In the TV studio they had marks on the floor; you never had to wonder where you were supposed to stand.

  He felt like a conjuror biding time as his audience filed into its seats. That’s what Paul Angevin had called him, psychiatry’s first stage magician.

  The room was getting unbearably cold, degree by degree. The entire house was stuck on freeze. At last she was following his instructions, and standing in the middle of the room. Just walk to the middle of the stage, stand on the little yellow dot, and say hello to the world. He reached up and pinched a corner of the cloth. He knew how to time his movements for the best effect.

  He waited three heartbeats. You always wait that long if you have a surprise on camera, one beat for people to realize they are alive, two to let them be aware that they are still alive, and three so they begin to wonder if anything is ever going to happen.

  He whisked the sheet away.

  The muslin billowed, rose upward, and then drifted down, where it spilled across the floor. Margaret’s hair was blown lightly by the movement of the air.

  We have a wonderful surprise for today’s special guest.

  Now she could see. She could see the painting, and all she was doing was standing there. She took a long time. Had she turned into a pillar of salt? Hello, Margaret, are you still there?

  But Patterson told himself to be patient. It took time, and Patterson had plenty of that.

  Margaret could not understand what she was looking at.

  Then she did understand, and she raised her hands to her face. She wanted to close her eyes, but she could not.

  She took one slow step after another. She reached out to touch it, but then drew her fingers back again, as though from a thing that could hurt her.

  Because the thing was dangerous. She sensed that he expected her to say something, but she could not trust herself to speak.

  “It’s not done. It’s going to develop,” said Patterson. “But I think it’s ‘coming into the room,’ as they say, don’t you?”

  Margaret leaped for the table, and seized the knife. It took two stabs—the canvas was tough. She forced the knife into the cloth. She ripped the painting, the paint-stiff canvas slashing with a thunderous shudder. As Patterson grappled with her she found further strength and pierced the painting again, and this time when Patterson dragged her away the knife dragged downward.

  The painting was violated with a slashed X that gradually fell open as Patterson held her, the splashes of paint giving way to an empty gap.

  Patterson buckled over, as though he had been stabbed himself, gutted with the knife.

  She held the knife toward Red Patterson, point forward. She was panting so hard each word came out separate. “Where is Curtis?”

  Patterson gazed at the painting. He turned to look at her. He hit her with his open hand. It was a loud smack, but he knew she wasn’t hurt, not yet.

  Her mind observed everything in segments, each movement a separate, hasty icon, like early cinema. He was going to hit her again, she thought, but he didn’t. He lifted one hand. He lifted the other, and the two hands joined at her throat. She had a vision of frantic eyes, white teeth, a blur. She stabbed him.

  Once—quick in, quick out.

  The knife slithered over ribs, and between them, and made a high, meaty whisper. The blade came away, and Patterson released her. He gazed down at his shirt, and at his hand. He looked at her, amazed.

  Nothing happened in a hurry. Like a man practicing an ugly tango, he reeled backward. Tubes of paint fell, scattered.

  Patterson waded, an underwater figure. Margaret retreated, until she found herself at the far wall, one hand warm with sticky fluid.

  Patterson straightened. He held onto the table, and took a breath, let it out. He did it again, his lips shaped like a kiss. He did not bother with her for the moment. All his attention was on the painting, its empty gap wide open, now, the canvas hanging all the way to the floor.

  Thank God, she thought. He isn’t really hurt—not badly. There was a rent in his T-shirt and a splash of red, but nothing worse. He’s fine. You didn’t really stab him.

  His voice was a whisper. “You hurt the painting.”

  Bishop was there, urging Patterson to sit down. “You’re going to be okay,” said Bishop. “It’s okay, don’t worry,�
�� trying to help Patterson, but the doctor waved him off.

  Patterson was not looking at Bishop, or at Margaret. He was looking at the painting. He walked like someone afraid the floorboards were rotten, and might break under each step. He touched the rips in the canvas, picking up the fallen flag of the art work.

  Patterson stayed like that a long while, studying the canvas. Bishop hurried away, and when he returned he carried a doctor’s bag, an old-fashioned black grip.

  Margaret remained where she was. She clung to the knife, sticky though it was, clotted with paint and blood.

  “Well, this has been an exciting little meeting,” said Patterson, his voice philosophical, almost lighthearted. “You gave me just a little bit of a surprise, Margaret.”

  Thank God I still have the knife, she thought.

  “Don’t you realize that Curtis Newns is the kind of man who doesn’t matter anymore?” said Patterson. He was searching through his bag. He found a hypodermic.

  Don’t waste your time talking to him, Margaret told herself. Just get out. Get out, and get far away from this place.

  Patterson held his side for a moment. He seemed to take a merely academic interest in his wound. “The knife cut into the intercostal muscles,” Patterson said. “It doesn’t hurt yet. Interesting. I dealt a good deal with knife wounds when I was starting out. You so much as nick an intestine—major problems. But other parts of the body can be stuck through and through and it’s little more than a circus stunt.”

  Margaret looked upon Patterson with a certain horror. She had stabbed him, and the wound was fairly deep, and yet there he was, giving another Red Patterson Live. “The blood is just a vast, watery organ. The only thing that really hurts me is the painting.”

  His face was gleaming with sweat, despite the cold. “Curtis Newns was an artist from the time when people thought there was a separation between the artist and the rest of us, just as people used to think there was a difference between priest and supplicant.” The needle glittered. The chemical in the hypodermic squirted, a thin probe like a hummingbird’s tongue.

  The place was icy cold and there was a hole in his side.