Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “Jessica.” He tried to sound helpful. “I was just thinking…”

  Jessica’s smile held. “Kevin, I have to ask you to move your piece.”

  “Move it where?” he asked her.

  “Out of the gallery.”

  Kevin felt dizzy. “It hasn’t even been here three weeks…”

  Jessica waved her hand dismissively. “Darling, people don’t really get it. I have a bigger piece coming in and need the floor space.”

  Kevin looked back at the sculpture, his pulse racing and stomach boiling. “I can fix the halo.”

  She frowned and waved her perfect metallic-blue nails dismissively.

  “Sweetie, a glass saint? I gave you mercy space. I mean, there used to be a neon gallery down the street called Let There Be Neon, or something.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Where is it now?” Kevin asked.

  “My point exactly. Neon’s just too accessible. It’s… mall art.”

  Mall art.

  So this was what Art Death felt like. Words like arrows slamming through his deep tissue, piercing his organs.

  “Too accessible?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Kevin walked over to the Hoover vacuum cleaner placed on a white pedestal. He knelt down and read the card aloud, very deadpan. “Hoover, $38,000.”

  Jessica folded her arms. “Don’t be linear, Kevin.”

  Kevin saw in her blank face that she’d moved on. He stood up. It had happened just like his mother’s death. You showed up and got the news. End of story. No appeal. Now all he could do was take his Art Death like a man. Not like some mewling puke, like poor Evan on the phone.

  “Okay. Listen, Jessica. I appreciate you giving it a shot. You did a nice thing for me.”

  Jessica’s face came unclenched. She actually walked over to him and touched his arm. “You’re promising, Kevin,” she purred. “You have an eye. But this isn’t your time.”

  Kevin took off his jacket and wrapped it gently around the face of the sculpture.

  “Keep in touch,” Jessica lied.

  Kevin unplugged the saint. The humming stopped and the bright color fizzled out of the tubes. It stood bleached and frail now, a skeleton. He made sure his leather jacket fully protected Sebastian’s face and shoulders.

  He lifted the piece with great care and balanced it. Kevin’s eyes burned, but he said nothing as he struggled to cradle the fragile sculpture, eighty pounds with transformer, clutching it to his chest. Keeping the slender arrows sticking out directly in front of him so he wouldn’t crush them, Kevin fought the door, got outside, and started walking. Jaded New Yorkers, who wouldn’t miss a step walking around the bodies of a drive-by massacre piled up on the sidewalk, turned to stare at him. He shivered without his leather jacket.

  He walked uptown like he carried a six-foot egg, trying to roll on his heels so he wouldn’t jolt the thin glass tubing, glancing down to scan for dog shit he might slip on. His hands and eyes stung in the gusting wind. But he soldiered on until he reached the filthy old cast-iron building on West 14th Street, six stories high, that had been a sweatshop a hundred years before. He rang the bell labeled “New York Institute of Art and Technology.”

  Inside the closet-sized lobby, he managed to maneuver the leather strap that opened the horizontal doors to the tired old industrial elevator by pulling with his teeth and the finger of one hand, trying not to squeeze Sebastian’s arrows. He stumbled inside the elevator cage. With a groan of pneumatics, it lurched up to the trade school that occupied the sixth floor.

  Kevin opened the balky elevator door. On this floor, walls had been knocked down to create one large studio. He felt grateful for the blast of warmth greeting him from the fires that students labored over, usually oppressive even on a cold day. At twenty workbenches, students bent neon tubes into signs for bars and tattoo parlors. For protection, they wore shiny silver Mylar protective suits, welding masks, and thick gloves while they hunched over the flames.

  When he’d told his mother he wanted to study at the New York Institute of Art and Technology, he charged her up with his own thrill over “ribbon fires” and “noble gases.” Then her eyes almost popped out when she read the trade school’s tuition contract and saw the $995 payment he’d owe every month. She told him to never, ever tell anyone else. Then she co-signed.

  “At least,” she told him, “if you can’t become a priest, you can make me a Saint Sebastian.”

  In the beginning, Max Freuhling shook with hilarity when Kevin asked him about creating a neon saint as good, in its way, as Giotto’s oils. But Max was a practical man, and warmed to the task of giving Kevin private lessons strung out to cost as much as his student could earn at dead-end jobs. Kevin was so poor, he lived in an apartment on Avenue B full of cockroaches that snapped, crackled, and popped like Rice Krispies when he walked across the dark floor at night. The bathtub in the kitchen needed to be sandblasted before he could use it.

  “Hey, Sebastian’s back home,” a student greeted him, and the entire studio body began to snicker, the floor echoing with hearty laughter.

  “Where’s Max?”

  “In the john,” a smirking girl making a sign that said, “$8 Haircuts,” told him.

  Still clutching his burden, afraid to set him down, Kevin backed into the men’s room. Soot from the studio floor covered the old sink and toilets. Max was just leaving a stall, a paperback copy of Lolita in one hand. He zipped up his fly and stood in front of Kevin, a jagged face with cool green eyes widely spaced. Max’s hair, still ice blond though he was almost sixty, stood straight up on his head in oily spikes, and he wore brown corduroy pants and a scratchy turtleneck.

  Max’s accent was heavily German, even though he had lived in the United States for more than forty years. Kevin once asked him if he went to Berlitz for German touch-ups, but Max never laughed at anything except Sebastian. Kevin put his saint down on the floor very carefully and unwrapped his jacket. The sculpture seemed to look gloomily at a point over Max’s head.

  “Jessica told me to take it out of the gallery,” Kevin said. “I guess you never went by to see it.”

  Max’s eyes flickered their scorn.

  “How could I have made Sebastian better?” Kevin asked him.

  “Look at your bends.” Max shook his head sadly. “Disgraceful. If you cannot bend, how can you make a halo?”

  “Max, I need your help now. My mother died.” He felt the hollow place in his stomach grow, regretting that he’d used his mother’s death for sympathy. “I need to make Saint Sebastian perfect so I can sell it.”

  “Are you current with the school payments?”

  “Only one behind. I can make it up out of my first check,” Kevin said. “I’ve got a new job.”

  “The school says no.” He shrugged in a European way, suggesting that he was stifled by unbending authority.

  “Max, I’ve been paying them for four years. They can cut me a little slack.”

  “Pfft. The money is not for the school,” Max said with a sneer. “It is motivation for you. When you sacrifice, you concentrate. You want a cheap education? All through the city, there are incompetent glass-makers. Go watch them make a bad fire.”

  “Max, I really need an hour with you now. Just a little time on the halo.”

  Max turned away from Kevin and walked out of the men’s room, letting the door swing back.

  “Put a suit on,” his mentor grumbled without turning back. “I’ll give you twenty minutes.”

  Kevin first put Saint Sebastian in a safe place, the room where the students kept their large pieces. He left him between a green sign for Heineken whose red star was too big, making it look like an old sign for a Holiday Inn, and a respectable neon Fat Elvis in the Las Vegas lounge suit.

  He quickly put on one of the Mylar suits, and carried a black Pyrex face mask under his arm.

  “Look,” Max told Kevin when he arrived at his instructor’s work-table. “My new pieces. Look at the bends. Pe
rfect bends.”

  Kevin studied them, but it wasn’t for the bends. As always, each piece revealed a technical perfection he couldn’t fault. Who could? They were critic-proof. A neon square. A neon circle. A neon cross.

  What dazzled Kevin was the shimmer of that subtle, elusive Max-glow that Kevin couldn’t bring to his own work. Compared to Max’s little pieces, the colors of Kevin’s saint still looked as crass as the logo for a massage parlor. He could shrug off the saint’s harshness, like Jessica Fernandez did, as “irony.” But that “irony” crap was for people who couldn’t do any better. His mom’s saint deserved more.

  “I have to make it glow like your pieces,” Kevin said before he strapped on his mask.

  “To make neon glow, you must be scalded.”

  “Scolded?” Kevin said. “I get scolded all the time.”

  “Scalded. Your heart feels scalded now, from your mutter dying, does it?”

  Mutter? His mother, Kevin realized. “Yeah, that’s how it feels.”

  It was the first time Max had ever spoken to him in a personal way.

  “Good,” Max told him. “Today, maybe you become a better liar.”

  “What?”

  “Art is a lie that makes us see the truth,” Max intoned. “You were always a bad liar, so you make crooked halos.”

  Kevin felt outclassed in their exchange, as he always did. Max had gone to art school in Europe. He used words like “deconstruct.”

  Max motioned for Kevin to switch on the burner. Kevin tightened the mask over his face, pulled his silver hood up over his head, and zipped it around the mask. He picked up a length of glass tubing for a new, improved halo. Feet apart, he faced his fire ready to bombard the tube and bend it into shape.

  Kevin’s hands didn’t work.

  Normally, his hands took over from signals his brain fed them. Today, his fingers inside the gloves felt like fat, mushy sausages.

  He tried to focus his mind to send the signals. Place the tube in the fire. Move into it, using the gravity of his body. But his body seemed to produce no gravity.

  A critical light had expired somewhere in his brain. Kevin stepped back from the workstation.

  “What is the matter?” Max frowned.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled through the mask.

  Then Kevin turned away from Max and walked out of the studio with his space suit on. He reached the freight elevator door, and as he closed it, he saw that Max hadn’t budged from his flameworking bench, his hands on his hips.

  “That suit is school property,” Max shouted in a surprisingly theatrical voice, full of fury.

  “I’ll be back,” Kevin mumbled into his Pyrex face mask.

  He knew it was a lie when he said it, but the fullness of that didn’t hit him until he stumbled onto the street. His space suit caused passersby to give him plenty of room. He felt his confusion like cement, hardening in his chest and setting into his brain. He needed to sit down at the curb.

  Inside the mask, Kevin began to cry because he just realized, in his heart, that he would never see his saint or his mom again.

  Chapter Five

  Interesting bunch of species. Colorful.”

  Sergeant DiBlasi tossed out microcomments as she peered into the fish tank in Cornelia’s room. But she never took her eyes off her, Cornelia noticed, and kept her feet fourteen inches apart at all times, ready in case Cornelia should attack.

  “Big tank, too, considering,” the sergeant said. “Like in a seafood restaurant.”

  “You have to give fish a lot of space. Usually people just crowd them together.” Cornelia got up off the edge of her bed dressed in her robe, since her wardrobe closet still had a padlock on it. She stood at the tank with Sergeant DiBlasi and pointed out the different varieties of exotic fish.

  “That’s Alice, the blue one wiggling her tail. She’s always poking around in the other fishes’ business. The big red one I call the Red Queen. See how she holds court? Other fish come to her.”

  “Alice in Wonderland,” Sergeant DiBlasi said, nodding. “You feel like Alice?”

  “Sure,” Cornelia said. “She couldn’t leave either.”

  Sergeant DiBlasi glanced around Cornelia’s room, probably seeking out telling details, though she would find none. The room was naked. Once she had personal things, the small pieces of crystal and other objects her mother had collected from Europe, Central America, Asia, all over the world.

  Then, one year ago, when she began her project, the Electric Girl had rolled up her sleeves and redecorated for efficiency. That way, she could just grab her hard hat every day and go to work with an uncluttered mind.

  She had stripped the walls and laid bare the tabletops to keep things simple and avoid distractions. She had given away her sound system, even very personal things like her yearbook from the Gramercy School. Then she redecorated in functional red and black like a car battery, for life simplification, but also to put off visitors. Cornelia left only one personal touch, a photograph of a woman with blond hair to her shoulders who pursed her lips in a little smile. The silver-framed photo sat on a metal table next to her bed.

  “Your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Divorced?”

  “She died.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” the sergeant told her, like a recording.

  Cornelia knew exactly when people she had just met made up their minds about her. Something settled in their eyes as though they had processed whatever data they needed, and would now treat her like a person they had just filed into inventory. These days, people formed their opinions about her more quickly. She observed that Sergeant Di-Blasi completed her mental file right after seeing her mother’s picture. She imagined the short form of the file would be Spoiled Nutcase with a few minor notations.

  It saddened her. At times like this, she would love to share her secrets with a strong person like Sergeant DiBlasi, who did important work and knew a lot about life.

  “What do you do in the police department?” she asked her.

  “Armed robbery interdiction. Professional crews that hold up stores.”

  “Don’t they shoot at you?”

  The sergeant gave her a hard look. “Only if you let ’em.”

  Yes. She admired Sergeant DiBlasi. Especially the way she spoke, in clipped sentences to avoid superfluous chatter. She smiled, seeing both sides of the Alps in the sergeant’s face. She had a Germanic squareness to her features, but her coloring was olive, Italian, and her lips rather full. Her hair was clean and glossy, worn without any particular style.

  “Grounded tonight.” The sergeant smiled tightly. “See a problem with that, Ms. Lord?”

  “No.” That much was true. She would have no problem with Sergeant DiBlasi. “But please call me Cornelia.”

  She felt a passing wave of guilt for what she was about to do.

  Chester and Tucker Fisk settled into old club chairs, each angled slightly toward the fire O’Connell had built in Chester’s study.

  Tucker sipped mineral water. Then he flipped open the disk drive of his custom laptop, made by their business partner, Koi Industries. He intended to put on a show for Chester. With visuals.

  Chester watched Tucker’s agility on the laptop, feeling a ping of jealousy tinged with fear. The same model always jammed or crashed when he fumbled with it. He felt a clammy discomfort with the way they relied on their computers, Tucker’s generation of cyberfiends.

  Tucker’s laptop computer was an unfathomable mystery to Chester. Made of tungsten with an eerie, almost extraterrestrial haze, it was flatter than a comic book. When Tucker popped it open by punching his personal code into the secret clasp, the wafer-thin halves revealed a flat, heat-activated keyboard on one side, marked with letters and symbols so microscopic Chester would have to fish out his tortoiseshell half-glasses to read them. Even then, many of the coded commands made no sense. But Tucker played his machine like an accomplished musician, making incredibly sharp and detailed pictures
spring up on the silvery screen.

  Only Tucker knew about Chester’s technophobia, that he would fire up a space shuttle sooner than he would switch on a computer. He kept it one of Lord & Company’s darkest business secrets. Investment bankers were expected to be comfortable with technology. In reality, Chester imagined himself a dumb and frightened turtle, head pulled back in its shell, attempting to cross the superhighway of global data. Without Tucker, he would be a flattened turtle.

  Chester marveled at how easily Tucker Fisk controlled things. He studied his twenty-eight-year-old protégé, whose veins coursed with the ancient blood of Anglo-Saxon warriors. He was dressed in an Armani Black Label suit. The fine fabric was a bit vain for Chester, who took a certain pride in buying his suits off the rack just as he had in college, even though he could afford suits of spun gold if he chose. Tucker’s blond hair, darker than Cornelia’s, was brushed back in waves from a face with a heavy, pleasing coat of flesh that revealed little in the way of bone structure.

  More than anything else Chester envied about him, Tucker knew how to take risks without hurting himself. At Yale, he had made quarterback on pure fearlessness. He wore an oversized protective helmet pumped full of air so he could wait that extra second to snap the ball without getting hurt too badly when they knocked him down. Chester searched his poker-player eyes, sharp as industrial metals.

  He thought of the way those eyes danced on the day Tucker plowed through Lord & Company for Chester like a delighted Grim Reaper, the smug executives who had sneered at Chester begging to do exactly as he and Tucker instructed them. What a triumph, walking through Lord & Company and for the first time actually feeling like the boss. Tucker had created that moment for him, this boy who could forge mega-deals and intimidate older executives. With the magical tungsten wafer on his lap, Tucker could handle any problem.

  With the exception of Cornelia.

  “Perhaps you could explain,” Chester finally asked him, “how she wound up in the Plaza fountain.”

  “She has a wild streak, but I’m working on that,” Tucker explained in his careful baritone with its faint edge of Young Man In A Hurry. “I arranged a special Saturday for us. No pressure on her. I invited my college roommate, Tony, and his wife along. Corny didn’t drink, and I thought I saw her take her medication. Anyway, she seemed okay. We all drove out to the airport to go dogfighting.”