by Ellen Datlow
Putter.
Putter was gone.
And Vera might as well be.
Who did I have left?
Brownie was on my porch when I finally got home. He was in my chair. The cigar was in his mouth. One thumb was hooked into his suspenders.
The plan was to ignore him, but when I opened the door, I couldn’t help but turn around. “You know, you’re causing me more trouble than you were ever worth, you son of a bitch.”
He didn’t answer; he watched the street.
“I mean, for God’s sake, you’re dead!”
“So are you,” he answered, took out the cigar, and grinned until he vanished.
Well, of course, I thought as I went inside. That explains everything. I’m dead and I don’t know it. Vera didn’t know it either, nor the driver who nearly clipped me with his convertible when I stepped off the curb by the park, or the dog that barked at me when I passed his territory.
Jesus, how stupid did Brownie, whatever the hell he was, think I was?
I woke up just before dawn.
Go away, Rich.
She hadn’t looked at me.
The driver hadn’t either, even though I’d questioned his lineage at the top of my voice.
Be damned, I thought, but I didn’t believe it.
I dressed and went to the corner grocery to pick up some bread, wasted five minutes trying to get one of the pimple-faced clerks to pay me some attention, and later, nearly got run over by a shrieking pack of little kids on some kind of outing, and not one of them apologized, not even the teacher who herded them along.
Be damned.
I guess it wasn’t heartburn after all.
So I packed, and I closed up the house, and I brought my suitcase to the porch and locked the front door one last time before slipping the keys under the welcome mat. Down the steps, then, and to the sidewalk, where I checked the house that smelled as if no one had ever lived there.
No one had.
Just me.
The living had left that place decades ago.
It was nearly dark when I reached the tracks. A ghost moon above the trees. Birds settling in the depot eaves. Something small and quick moving in the trees.
And my moonshadow leading me south along the tracks, toward New York City.
Lots of people down that way.
They see Brownie, or someone like him, they’ll figure it’s their time, even if no one believes it, and they’ll either fight it or accept it, while Brownie moves on.
But when those people see me, when I want them to see me, when they look me in the eye, when they see the Look and the loom, and maybe a little smile, they’re going to know damn well there’s no such thing as “someone’s time.”
So who do I have left?
That’s easy …
Everybody.
AFTERWORD
Sweetheart, Sweetheart by Bernard Taylor is my favorite ghost story. A novel that at once manages to be both moving and extremely unsettling. Someone, I forget who, called it a “typical English ghost story,” but believe me, it’s anything but typical. For me, anyway, there isn’t anything that beats it.
Some of KATHE KOJA’S best work explores the borderline between madness and art, in which her characters are infused with a passion bordering on obsession. Koja is a gifted stylist. Her understated prose creates powerful images and brings to life the most difficult of characters.
Kathe Koja is a Detroit-area native and lives there with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and her son Aaron. She has been a full-time freelancer since 1984, after attending the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University (thanks to the Susan C. Petrey scholarship), but has been a writer since she was four years old. Among her novels are The Cipher, Skin, Kink, and Straydog, some of her short fiction is collected in Extremities. Her most recent novel is Buddha Boy. The Blue Mirror will follow in 2004.
VELOCITY
KATHE KOJA
LINDEN; ASPEN; MAPLE; ash. A postcard setting, slant light and falling leaves, gravel switchback leading to a KEEP OUT gate, more sentry trees, a clustering clot of outbuildings—spare metal sheds, an emptied four-car garage. At the heart of the property, alone in bloody maple drift, stands an incongruous house, a hard-edged, sumptuous folly that at first glance seems neglected: dusty windows, drawn blinds, heavy bicycle chain hung across the door, front door. The chain is old; the locks—two locks—are bright and new.
Everywhere, broken bicycles.
Q: So what you’re saying is that the process is equal to the art produced? That how is, essentially, why?
A: No, I … no. I’m saying the way I make my art can’t be separated out from what I make, like a, like an egg white, OK? Christ, where do they find you people? I’m saying that when I aim a bike at a tree and crash it, that that’s part of what the piece is about. The velocity, where it hits, how it fragments—every time it’s different, none of them end up the same—
Q: Yet the process is identical. Are you willing to discuss what informs the process itself?
A: Give me a hand here. (His right arm is in a sling. He needs help to light another cigarette.) I have no idea what you just said.
Q: More simply, then: Why do you make art by running bicycles into trees? What … drives your particular mode of self-expression?
(No answer)
Q: Are you at all willing to discuss—
A: I thought you wanted to talk about my work. I thought this was—
Q: But art is a product of a human imagination, a human mind, a human body; especially your art, Mr. Vukovich. You shattered your arm while making this latest sculpture, you—
A: I don’t have to listen to this shit.
(Break.)
THE HOUSE WAS built in the early 1970s, an austere and “modern” fantasia of brushed metal and glass block. It has eight rooms, three of them very large: the living or reception room, which takes up most of the first floor; the dining room, and the master bedroom; the rest are markedly, almost painfully, small. All are spare, as in a monastery or zendo: low teak tables, white futons, stainless-steel appliances. All the windows have identical white-paper blinds. All the walls are red. The dining table is laid with service for nine.
Q: Were you pleased with the Ortega installation?
A: Sure. Mary was great. She always does a great job.
Q: She’s been your dealer for quite some time now, correct? Since you … returned from Arizona?
(No answer.)
Q: Mary Ortega is well-known—almost notorious—for her attraction to, let’s say, a certain type of painful art. Art that expresses hurtful or violent emotions, art that specifically—
A: Jesus Christ, you’re not going to get off it, are you? You didn’t come here to talk about my work at all, all you want is to talk about my goddamned father, isn’t that right? (He needs help to light his cigarette. His uninjured arm is trembling badly, almost theatrically.) There are plenty of articles about him, why don’t you go read them? Why don’t you do a search online? You’ll be fucking buried in—
Q: Your father was a famous man. And since his death—
A: He didn’t die, he killed himself.
Q:—forgive me, since his suicide, you’ve lived here alone in the house that he designed and commissioned, making art that graphically recalls the manner of his death. Mr. Vukovich, I don’t mean to be unkind or impertinent, but when a father commits suicide by driving into a tree, and his son’s art does nothing but recreate that moment, one cannot help but speculate that these things are intimately related. One cannot—
A: You think it’s some kind of, of tribute, is that it? Jesus! You think that I—
Q: What I think is unimportant. What matters are your thoughts, your ideas about the—
A: I think you better pack up your little briefcase and go. That’s what I think.
THE RED HOUSE, as it is called, is a kind of singularity, and as such, there was for a time a great demand for tours: from architecture and design professionals,
professors and students, historians interested in its provenance, cultural anthropologists, as well as all the lesser hordes that treasure celebrity and wealth. After the owner’s spectacular and graphic suicide, the estate fell hostage to legal squabbles between his first wife and current partner; the dispute was eventually resolved in the wife’s favor, but by that time she herself had died, in a fire at her horse farm in Truro. The couple’s only surviving relative, a son, himself an artist, came into possession of the house, and immediately discontinued all public tours. It was believed that he was living on the property, but his attorney’s office would not confirm that this was true.
Q: Perhaps it would—perhaps we might talk a little about your early work. In Switzerland, you—
A: If you want to talk about him, I don’t care. No, really. Let’s do it. I don’t give a fuck. (Speech today is slurred. He seems to have difficulty sitting upright. The cast has been removed from his arm, but he is still wearing a sling.)
Q: You’re sure? I don’t want to—All right, then. Your father, Edwin Vukovich—
A: The Prince of Darkness. Ed, to his friends. Of which he had none. Not even my mother. My mother used to warn me not to tell him anything: where I lived, what I was doing. If you tell him, he can use it, she always said. Don’t give him anything he can use.
Q: He was an architect—
A: Architect manque. Everyone thinks he designed the Red House, you know, but that’s not true. He got this kid from RISD to make some drawings, and then he—Anyway, when I was at school, everyone thought he was like some big influence on me. Influence! He never even saw one of my installations, not one.
Q: And yet perhaps his influence was felt in other ways—?
A: Yeah. Like cancer. When I was in Berlin—fuck Berlin, when I was in Sedona, these people would show up out of the blue, these—sideshow freaks—Once, at one of my openings, this woman came up to me, she had all these pictures she wanted me to look at. Pictures of him, you know, him and her and—He was like an insect, you know? A praying mantis or a scorpion or something. He had no idea what it was like to be human and he didn’t care.
Q: Yet he was quoted more than once as saying how proud he was of your work. He even tried to purchase one of your—
A: Right. Heresy, it was one of the first things I did at Mary’s. It was like a ski run, with these little—You’ve seen it, right?
Q: Photographs of it, yes. It was an extraordinary installation. The almost insane sense of speed, of uncontrolled velocity—
A: Yeah. A good piece.—But Mary’s smart, you know. She gave him a lot of sweet talk, but she wouldn’t let him have the piece. Just like my mother said. Like voodoo. Skin cells, little bits of bone … They didn’t tell you how he used to beat my mother, did they? He’d go through her closet, take out one of her little chain belts, Gucci, whatever, and just go to town. I used to try to get between them, make him stop … . When I got older, I bought a gun. I actually thought it would help! But I didn’t need a gun, what I needed was, was silver bullets—
Q: Mr. Vukovich—
A:—or a stake through his heart. Right? Isn’t that how you kill the devil? But that’s the thing, you know? That’s the whole fucking problem, because you can’t kill the devil, not ever. Not with stakes or crosses or lawyers or—
Q: Mr. Vukovich, if this is distressing you, we—
A: Christ, my arm hurts.
(Break.)
IN THE ROOM that was formerly used as the laundry, the appliances have been removed and a small living space constructed, a scruffy human patch on the glass and steel. The items inside—a blue down sleeping bag, worn and leaking feathers; a Coleman stove; a bed tray; a scuffed plastic washtub—suggest an extended habitation. A shelf has been affixed three feet from the floor, just above the bundled sleeping bag, in easy reach of anyone lying below. On this shelf is a pink drugstore flashlight, an inhaler, an ashtray, a Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel sheared almost to the nub, and a copy of Art in America. Above the shelf is a crucifix, olive-wood, immensely old. The corpus has been replaced with two bent roofing nails.
A: When I was working on Acrimony, I kept getting these phone calls. At first I thought it was just crank stuff, some dumbshit breathing on the phone; once or twice I even talked to him. Just, you know, Are you having fun, asshole? Mary said it was creepy and that I ought to call the cops, or the phone company, or something, but I didn’t. I thought it was kind of funny … . But then he started calling me at home.
Q: You were staying—?
A: At home. At the Red House.
Q: I don’t—the number is unlisted?
A: There’re no phones in the house. No phone jacks, even. But I’d hear it ring, and ring, and ring; it’d go on for fucking hours. Sometimes I’d go sit outside just to get away from the sound. Sometimes I’d sleep outside … . Then I started sleeping at the gallery, in Mary’s office. Which helped.—You should see your face. You look like the cat that just ate shit.
Q: (Silence.)
A: When I finally got the show up, the calls stopped. Like he was trying to fuck me over, right? Get me to stop working—
A: Who?
Q: Who do you think? Mary said I was working too hard, you know, or taking too much speed.—Wait, erase that. But if it was the speed then how come I never heard it unless I was working? The phone, and the knocking on the windows—I had them come and trim the branches, just hack them away from the house. I mean, I knew what it was but I wanted to be sure, right? And I was right. It wasn’t trees or shrubs or branches, it was goddamn knocking and it was him. Just like the phone was him. Just like the guy at the bike shop, the one I always use, right? Now he won’t sell me any more bikes, he says it’s too dangerous. Dangerous! To him, he means. Because he knows. Because he gets into people’s heads, like poison gas, or something—like he did to my mother, I watched him do it. She used to be, she was so … And then he killed her. I know it was him, there’s no way that barn burned by itself. And he got Teo, too—
Q: Teo?
A: Her horse. They found them together, she was all—And then he tried to do it to me. In Sedona, Berlin, where-the-fuck-ever, doesn’t matter, never did. You think being dead is a problem for him? Hell, no! It just makes it easier, you know? It just makes everything easier.
Q: Mr. Vukovich—Mr. Vukovich, when you were working on Calefaction, Mary Ortega was quoted as—
A: Don’t change the subject! Don’t change the subject! You said you wanted to talk about him, well that’s what we’re talking about! Are you afraid? Is that it? “Speak of the devil and the devil appears”? But he’s already here. He’s already right—
Q: Mr. Vukovich—
A: Stop saying that.
(Break.)
AS PER THE trust, the Red House and its grounds are serviced on a seasonal schedule. Mowing, raking, bundling brush, blowing snow; repairing the depredations of weather; replacing the furnace filter, caulking the cracks; there is a lavish budget set aside for these things and they are always faithfully performed.
The former laundry room is rigorously avoided, unless there is actual damage within it needing repair. When the lawn crews arrive the broken and discarded bicycles are carefully removed to the garage; before the crews leave, the parts are restored to their earlier approximate positions. This is not part of the trust’s directions, but there is a sizable rider to the maintenance contract to ensure that these things are done, or not done. Money, as always, is neutral, and efficient in its demands.
Q: You have a new show opening soon?
A: I’m not—Yeah. I guess. I don’t know the dates, you better ask Mary.
Q: It’s titled The Erl King, is that right?
A: Yeah. Mary doesn’t like it, the title, but that’s just too fucking bad. I know what I’m doing.
Q: Mr. Vukovich, you—would you rather not continue today? You seem very—
A: I don’t seem like anything. I am. You would be too. Maybe you will be. He doesn’t like me to tal
k to you, you know. So I was up all fucking night last night, listening to him crawl through the pipes. I was afraid to, to take a shit, you know? Because what if he decided to crawl inside me? I wouldn’t put it past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him.
Q: Perhaps we ought to reschedule our—
A: Perhaps you ought to shut the fuck up and listen to what I’m telling you … listen … did you hear that?
Q: Hear what? I didn’t—
A: Oh yes you did. You wanted to know all about my art, my homage to his suicide or whatever you called it—
Q: I—
A:—like it’s some weird oedipal thing, but the fact is, I just have to keep doing it, you know, until it sticks. Until it works. Man, you think I like to keep doing the same piece over and over? Think I like hurting myself? breaking my arm? and my shin, and my fucking heel bone, which still hurts, they never did set it right—But I have to. I don’t need that guy at the bike shop, I can order anything I want, they don’t even have to know it’s me. Because if he’s in the pipes today, where will he be tomorrow? Huh? Up my ass, that’s where, and crawling out of my mouth! You think I need that? I’d rather break my neck on a bike! I’d rather—
Q: Mr. Vukovich, you’re very upset. We’d better stop this now, we’d better Just—
A: You see this gun?
Q: I—oh my God. Look, I’m, I’m leaving now. I can’t—
A: No, take it. Take it! And hold it on me. Like this. Like this! Hold it! … that’s right. You sit there and you hold it. And if he crawls out of my mouth, you shoot him. Hear me? Shoot the motherfucker in the head.
BECAUSE OF THE way the Red House is constructed, because of its placement on the grounds, and the arrangement of the trees and shrubs around it, it owns a peculiar radiance in the early evening sun, a deep and affecting glow as if the house were lit from within, like fire in the depths of a jewel. Visitors are not always aware of this phenomenon, and are sometimes confused by the house’s name, seeing only its gunmetal-gray-and-glass exterior. But if one arrives at almanac sundown, the house will indeed be glowing, its inner nature made proudly manifest, as hot and red and chambered as a beating heart.