Numb

by Sean Ferrell

  Michael stopped to turn one of the cups of coffee into a mess. He slopped too much cream and sugar into it. Tan liquid spilled over the cup’s rim and settled into the saucer. He stirred at it as if beating it back and then laid the spoon on the table. A trickle of coffee trailed from the spoon’s underside.

  He lifted the cup to his lips, one hand positioned underneath to catch drips that would have landed in his lap. Before setting the cup back in the saucer he pulled three paper napkins from the serving tray. He lay them in the saucer, then placed the cup on top. He cleaned the spilled coffee from both cup and saucer. He lifted the cup and removed the napkins. He wiped the spoon and stray drops. He placed the cup in its saucer and the spoon to the side on a napkin, then threw the ball of used napkins in a wastebasket in the corner. He leaned back in his chair, and I examined the perfect still life he’d created out of his cup of coffee. The mess made just moments before gone, Michael returned his gaze to me. He’d obliterated disorder. This is what Michael does, I thought. He takes the mess away and makes things neat and organized.

  “As I was saying,” he continued, “you’ve never done more with your talent than a quick display here and there. Few people have seen it, but when they do they are impressed. Despite this, you don’t seem able to get anywhere. You feel like you’re skimming along the surface. You don’t know if you know what’s happening. You don’t know if you can trust people because you’ve been let down.”

  I was sure it hadn’t been so warm when I’d come in. “Could I have some water?”

  Michael nodded at the glass he’d already poured for me. “I know how hard it is to hear your own story from a stranger. How do I know all this? Because it’s every artist’s story.”

  “Artist?”

  “Sure. Why not? You have a canvas; it just happens to be your skin. I can see the marks of your work on your hands and neck.” Michael pointed at the window. “See the crowds out there? They don’t know they need you yet, because we haven’t made them need you. We’ll carve them up into two camps, those who hate you and those who love you. When they argue about you, you’ll be more than just a guy with pins in his skin. You’ll be your own work of art.”

  I said, “I’ll be a commodity.”

  Michael followed my eyes. “Exactly.” He drank the rest of his coffee.

  As I sipped my ice water I spotted something floating along the bottom. Something black and hard and crusty. “You haven’t even asked me where I’m from. About my past or who I was working with in the video.”

  “That’s because nobody cares. It’s not important.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Of course not.” He went to a cabinet in the wall and opened it, revealing shelves filled with cameras, carefully laid out files and pictures, and a column of drawers running up to the ceiling, each neatly labeled. He removed a packet of film from one and loaded a Polaroid camera. “You want to tell your story. I’ll help you tell it. Show me your biggest scar.”

  For an instant I thought about leaving. Then I felt myself scratching at my right leg through the stitched-up pants. Maybe there is something about wounds that makes them want to be seen; the ones Caesar gave me itched.

  Michael mistook my delay for embarrassment. “Trust me.” He locked the door. “No one sees this picture if you don’t want them to, but when I take it you’ll see what is important about your story and what isn’t. You’ll see who you can be.”

  I unbuckled my belt and lowered my pants. I showed him the scar that ran along my thigh.

  “Oh, God. That’s big,” he said. “Hold still.” He took a picture. I expected him to take more, to use up all the film from different angles and then create a file filled with my scars. Instead he took just the one, then turned back to the shelves. He put the camera back into its proper place, shut the cabinet, and fanned himself lazily with the picture, waiting for it to reveal my image.

  He said, “There’s something you’re hiding from me. What you are afraid to say to me is the stuff you want to keep for yourself and that’s fine. Don’t tell me, don’t tell anyone. If you share too much, it will start to haunt you. We’re painting a picture of you. It can look any way we want it to.”

  The room quieted a moment, and the view of the street continued to plow along. Michael stopped flapping the photo and said, “I understand you’ve been trying to locate a shop that may be the place your suit is from. How’s that going?”

  “How do you know that?”

  A shrug. “That guy selling the tapes sells more than just tapes. How goes the search?”

  “Not good.”

  Michael smiled. “I didn’t think so. You look lost. But you don’t have to be. Leave what information you have with Robert and we’ll get somebody on it. In the meantime, I want you to understand we can make you as big as you want to be.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “It is.” Michael looked at the picture. “This is the picture of you that we’re painting for the public. I think it’s a pretty amazing picture.” He handed it to me.

  Instead of a picture of my thigh, focusing on the scar, I saw a picture of me. All of me. I looked confused and tired, my pants dangling around my knees, my eyes focused up and to the left, toward the window that you couldn’t see in the picture. The light from outside illuminated me, and my hands hung at my sides. I must have been about to say something, though I couldn’t remember what, because I looked ready to speak. I was sweaty and shiny and something in my face made me think of Mal. I felt tired and scared.

  I said, “You’re always looking for new talent, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I have a friend. He’s got a great act, breathing fire and juggling. He could use an agent too.”

  Michael nodded. He avoided eye contact. “I could talk to him, see his act. I’d have to see what he can do before I could agree.”

  “Sure. But if you were my agent and he wanted to meet with you—”

  With a great smile Michael said, “My door is always open for my clients’ friends.” He took the photo back and said, “This picture is just the first that will be taken of you. Are you ready to start helping me show you to the public?”

  I said I was. I pulled my pants up and buckled my belt.

  four

  MICHAEL INTRODUCED ME to Hiko, a tall, slender, blind Japanese woman with large eyes, long fingers, and straight black hair she wore up on top of her head. She had a beauty mark on her upper lip exactly where Marilyn Monroe had one. Michael told me never to tell her that. “If you never trust me about anything else, you should trust me on that.”

  “Why wouldn’t she want to be compared to Marilyn Monroe?” I asked. “Monroe was beautiful.”

  “Someone told her that,” he said. “She went ape-shit.”

  Michael had been my agent for six weeks. I hadn’t gotten any work yet, but he’d put me in a hotel, the Thomas, a semiupscale retro hotel in Midtown. I’d been there, on his tab, since signing the contracts in his office. At the time he told me, “You look like hell. Get some rest, let me take care of you.” I tried to let him.

  Michael also represented Hiko and had convinced her to do a portrait of me in time for an article about her in Modern Art. “You’re so unique that chances are good they’d use photos of any piece based on you in the article. Great cross promo.”

  “She agreed to this?” She didn’t know me; neither did the magazine, for that matter.

  “First, she trusts me to do right by her. And that’s what I do, for her, for all my clients. I’m very busy doing right by my clients. Second, it wouldn’t be you in the article, it would be her art. But when she does you, it will be fantastic.”

  Michael had also warned me that she was blind. I asked Michael, “If she’s blind, how can she do portraits?”

  “You’ll see. And, when she’s done your portrait, it will get you work. Just watch. Hiko’s too hot right now.”

  Michael drove me into Brooklyn for my introduction to h
er. He picked me up at the hotel in a black BMW.

  When we got to Hiko’s she answered the door, smiled shyly, and said, “I’m so happy to finally meet you.” I believed her. She grasped my arm. Michael patted my shoulder and said, “I’ll be out here. Got some calls to make.” He walked back to his car, cell phone already speed-dialing.

  Hiko held my hand as she took me down a dark hallway and into a kitchenette. No lights were on. Sunlight struggled to reach us through half-open windows far down the hall. She drifted ahead and pulled out a chair for me. Her head tilted like that of a small bird, and her long fingers moved gently, sensitive, I imagined, to every soft movement of the air. I was not uncomfortable, but afraid to disturb her. As if I might scare her off.

  She turned to face me. “Have a seat.”

  She asked if I would like some tea. After I said yes she remembered she had none. “How about some chocolate milk?” she asked.

  I said, “Sure,” even though I don’t like chocolate milk.

  She poured us each a glass and then repeated her invitation to sit. I quietly obeyed.

  She felt her way from cupboard to cupboard. We sat on mismatched kitchen chairs in the center of a room so small it only had a center. Both chairs were splattered with handprints of orange, blue, yellow. Like scabs on the vinyl. Paint and clumps of plaster covered the floor in splotches, footprints tracked back and forth. Her feet were long and slender, and her tracks were slightly pigeon-toed. Her pinkie toes didn’t quite touch the floor when she walked.

  “Michael thinks you’re going to be a huge star,” she said.

  “Really?”

  She sipped her chocolate milk. “You don’t seem interested.”

  I didn’t know how I felt. “I guess it’s just so new.”

  “Has Michael taken you to any photo shoots yet?”

  I said, “Just a Polaroid in his office.”

  “From what he says, that will just be the first.” She was so dainty, I wondered if she actually took any milk in her tiny sips.

  Sunlight came through the window behind her. Shadows broke through and scampered up the walls as Michael walked back and forth outside. With the kitchenette below ground level, I was able to look out the window at his legs. He was still on his cell phone.

  Hiko turned an ear toward the window. “Is that Michael I hear?”

  “Yeah. He’s waiting outside.” I kept watch on the curve of her lip and the small dot above it. “I think he’s on his cell phone. I hate cell phones,” I said. “They make people act so important.”

  “I disagree.” She put down her glass and smiled, bowing her head as though embarrassed. “I think they are wonderful. They equalize everyone. When else would the wealthy walk around sharing one side of a conversation with strangers just like a schizophrenic? Next time you are on the street, pay attention to the conversations going on. People reveal remarkable details about themselves.” She finished her glass. I hadn’t started mine.

  She said, “Now, let’s get started.” She reached out to me. “Give me your hands.” Her eyes gazed above me, as if to read a thought balloon above my head, and I couldn’t help but blush.

  Hiko wrapped her fingers around my hands and squeezed them. “Make fists,” she said, and when I did she let go of my left hand and played both her hands over my right. Her fingernails scratched delicate lines on the back of my hand and circled the smooth purple blossom-shaped scars that freckled the skin between my fingers.

  She said, “I want you to tell me when I am touching a scar.” She started at my pinkie, and as she crossed over the gap between pinkie and ring finger I said, “Now.”

  “How many? Just one?”

  “I don’t know. Definitely more than one.”

  She felt farther, past the ring finger toward my middle finger, and I said, “There too.”

  She made a soft, thoughtful whisper and I said, “You know, I have scars between each of my fingers. And my toes. And some other parts of my body.”

  She opened up my fist and squeezed the skin between my thumb and finger. “It’s so soft.” She stroked it quietly. “It feels like a flower,” she said. Outside, Michael laughed, presumably into his phone.

  She ran her hands up my arm, stopping occasionally when she met a bump or ridge. “Are all of these scars from performing?”

  “No.” I blushed again. “I can be a little clumsy.”

  She laughed. “You’re joking. How could you trust that you won’t really hurt yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”

  She reached up to my face. “If this makes you uncomfortable, let me know.” She pressed her fingers against my chin, my cheeks, up my temples, and across my forehead. “You have some lines up here,” she said. “An old scar?”

  “Yeah. That’s nearly gone. You can barely see it.”

  “What’s it from?”

  “A door fell on me.”

  She smiled. Her eyes moved around me but rarely rested on me. Sometimes they went through me. Michael had told me that our first session would be for introductions. When Hiko said that I should come back the next day, I wasn’t surprised. I was surprised, though, when she said, “I hope you don’t mind working nude.”

  “For the portrait?”

  She laughed. “Yes, for the portrait. I do all my work as nudes.”

  I assumed she meant only I would be nude.

  I WENT BACK the next day at midafternoon. The clouds of the previous day had turned to a thunderstorm overnight and the streets in her neighborhood smelled steam-cleaned. There were still puddles along the curbs and under cars. I found Hiko on her front stoop. She looked as if she were staring across the street and it didn’t occur to me that I might startle her when I stopped.

  She must have heard my footsteps halt because she tilted her head, and her sightless eyes shifted. “Hello?” Her voice was strong, but just underneath hid a quiver.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  For a moment she didn’t say anything, and I imagined she ran through a list of denials, but finally she said, “Only a little.” Her voice and smile were both soft.

  She stood and followed the handrail down into her doorway. She knew just when to duck her head where a low-hanging pipe drooped above the entrance.

  She showed me a back room where examples of her work covered a wall. They hung in sturdy frames; she called them “three-dimensional paintings.” Most of them were gray and covered with massive amounts of detail and texture. There were faces, some body parts, and many abstracts.

  “You can see I don’t concern myself with color.” Some of the sculpture-paintings were thick clay; others had paint. Some were layers of many colors, scraped with a knife. Others were just one or two tones. Blue-green. Canary yellow. Or gray, or white. Color was mostly an accident of material, of white plaster or gray clay, though sometimes it appeared as if she’d added dyes to the mix.

  “I either have someone pick out the color for me or do it at random. I don’t worry about it because I think color is arbitrary anyway.”

  I said, “They’re beautiful.”

  She stood in the hallway, her head to one side, her large black eyes locked on nothing. She thanked me and followed the wall into her workroom. She took off her jacket and sandals and said I should strip down as far as I felt comfortable. “I’ll get clay on you. If you’re wearing something you don’t want ruined, take it off and put it in the closet.”

  I removed my shirt and shoes. I had my pants open when I thought she might be offended. I pulled them back up and cringed as I tried to keep my fly from making a sound she might hear. She stood in front of me, her eyes roaming the room.

  “If it’s okay with you, take off your pants,” she said. “I’ll need to check out that famous scar of yours.”

  My pants went in the closet with my shoes and shirt. Feeling silly in boxers and black socks, I pulled the socks off too.

  “You can sit on the chair. Read, or I can turn
on the radio. Try to be comfortable.”

  I sat on a paint-splattered chair, knees quaking and stomach clenched. Hiko laid out chunks of clay and a bucket of plaster. She called this “sketching.”

  “What sort of pose do you want?” I had an image of Greek statues, Olympian feats or godlike poses.

  “I don’t work like that. I just read you here and I feel you. I’ll do different casts of your body. That’s why you’ll have to come back several times. If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.” I had nothing else to do.

  She prepared chunks of clay, lay them in rounded hills on the table, covered them with wet cloth. “Those are for tomorrow.” She ran her hands under the faucet and said, “Come here, please.”

  I came as asked and, when we were close, her eyes fell onto my face. They couldn’t see me, but it didn’t matter. My heart stopped for a moment. She held out her hand, palm up, and very quietly said, “Put my hand on the scar.”

  I took her hand and looked down at my leg where the shiny purple lines ran from the middle of my right thigh up and under toward my crotch. I began to lower her hand toward them. The moment she touched me I felt naked.

  “Don’t be nervous,” she said. “I’m not sharp.” She laughed.

  Her hand stayed for a long time on my scar. I wondered what she read through it. She laughed to herself and then said, with a sense of awe, “I want to do a full body cast of you.”

  I grew claustrophobic at the idea.

  “We’ll work up to it,” she said. “I’ll start with your chest and back.” This would, she said, allow me to move my arms and legs. I would be able to breathe normally. Just some plaster bandages draped over me. Like a spa.

  She asked me to lay a quilt on the floor with plastic tarps placed over it. The quilt looked made up of old, ugly neckties that individually would make you nauseous but together created a sense of home. I wanted to feel the old, worn silks but they were under the clear plastic. It looked like a museum piece.