Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  I am prone on the very spot where I was born. It is the very spot that has tied me to this city full of the desperate and the wounded—this city full of those incomplete souls whom I could not leave once I knew them and loved them as my kind. I could not leave this city, even after I had left them who have lived in this house as a commune for decades, who have been held together as a clan by their quest to reclaim me . . . the lump of flesh that came stifled and silent into their world, and that now draws shallow breaths upon the very spot where it had nearly suffocated at birth, the very spot on which I had been born sheathed in skin that is not my own.

  Nell sees me draw breath like a grounded fish, sees me trying to speak and to warn and to plead. There is pity in her eyes, and beyond her eyes, which in this candlelight seem as brown as those of her sister, there is the terrible beauty of rage. The rage half-expresses itself in the play of candle-shadows on her face. The shadows are like a portrait of her splintered fury and sorrow. Her pitying face is silent. The amber glow makes this unspeaking face look like that of a North German Madonna. The anger-shadows scream, distorted as a face painted by Munch. They bellow and they wail. And dimly, as if from underwater, I hear the amber-shadows speak what the pitying face of Nell does not. Deafness and all its mercy partly fall away.

  I try to squeeze Nell’s hand, to let her feel just slightly what I feel, the way her sister always could. My grip is weak; my hand has less strength than does a dying kitten.

  The man who had accosted me on the street looms between Nell and me. He grunts as he leans his saggy bulk forward and runs his acrid, food-greased hand over my face. Up close, I see that he has the ugly ogre’s teeth of one who has sucked his thumb into late childhood.

  “It’s good you got a shave this afternoon,” he says smiling, as his younger self smiles with teeth less yellow, that are lit by the sunlight that had once streamed through the window behind Nell that is now painted black. “We don’t want to damage anything important,” he says.

  “They said you knew what Marie would do . . .” It is Nell’s fury that speaks. The words are nearly muffled, but are so loud to the faculty through which I have never truly heard before, it tears at my mind. I long for the sweet deafness I am losing.

  “You brought this on yourself,” says the man, happy now that I must hear his prattle. “Not sharing has made you incomplete. It made you cling to incomplete people that you used to feel complete. You’re wounded. That’s why you use the wounded. It’s time to heal. Time to grow.” Two layers of ogre’s teeth speak at once, out of sync, looking as if they will crack against each other.

  “And you didn’t stop her, you shit!” Nell screams at me without breath, with the airlessness I will soon know.

  The man’s two faces are joined by a third. The space where his two faces now squat takes a face from the past, spectral—that of the untrained, self-appointed midwife who cut the bloody tether between my mother and me, when the commune this place had been had taken in my mother during the ninth month of her carrying me. And after the self-appointed midwife had cut the tether, she had raised the steak knife to my throat and face and peeled away my bloodless relation, the amniotic skin that through the ages has been a blessing to others.

  “They told me,” bellows the shadow of Nell as her nails cut my already skinned palm. “They told me you could see her ghost if you wanted to. You could let me say good-bye to her, but that you wouldn’t!”

  The silence of the pitying face of Nell gives greater volume to the part of her that so wordlessly shouts. That of Marie which has haunted me stirs. It hears its sister’s voice. It cries out in my mind, and I wish to comfort it.

  More of them stand around me, looking down. They . . . the ones from whom my mother fled. The ones who have harassed me from the moment they were aware of my still living in this city and of my inability to leave. They who have harassed me from the moment they could steal part of my sight, just enough to know what I saw while they hunted me. They who were able to partly steal my sight through the thing they have owned over these many years, the thing that had belonged to me before I had owned anything on this Earth.

  “You owe me. You owe Marie. You owe us our good-bye.”

  Against my will, the memory of holding Marie’s hand, the scents of her hair and skin as worn by her sister, pulls Marie close. I call her as would a medium, as would a spiritualist. She is caught here in this place. The trace of Marie that has haunted me has been caught here, trapped in the home of those who murdered her, bound by the needle that killed her, that hangs from the ceiling above me like a reliquary on black thread spun from strands of hair stolen from her brush. The dangling syringe glints as it did in the sun, when I saw it as a phantom buried in Marie’s arm. It is now not lit by the sun, but by an imprisoned light that should no longer be in this shitty world.

  I speak the words, “They killed her,” yet make a sound no more understandable than a death rattle.

  The Jar is brought forth . . . the vessel I have always been aware of, because of its decades-long housing of part of my awareness. That of me that they have owned is passed from one hand to another in a circle around me. I do not know with which sight I see the caul I was born with floating in its preserving brine. I do not know if it swims in the brine with true physicality, languidly flapping as would a manta ray.

  “It told us of its loss,” says the man who followed me. “What it lost was you.”

  And I know what they have always believed to be true is now true enough for them to make real: that I was not born with the caul that gave me sight—the caul was born with me. They have prayed and hungered this into reality.

  Free of the Jar, it lives in their hands as they pass it wetly to each other, as they invest themselves with that which they once thought could grant them cosmic insight of what will come, but which they only desire now in order to accrue material wealth. It is returned to my face, dropped like a shroud after it has been pulled into the shape of one. The last breath my lungs draw becomes a still pocket in my chest.

  The mercy of deafness, the mercy of muted hearing, is fully stripped away. I hear the cacophonic indifference of the universe. Marie’s trapped ghost speaks through my smothered mouth. The taut skin makes sounds as would the buzzing of fly wings. Nell pulls away her hand and slashes my palm with her nails. She is screaming as I fall into Marie’s sky, full of cruel seraphim and their awful songs.

  EXIT WOUND

  Though I know he hates when I watch, each time my eyes drink the glory of him taking the gun to his mouth, it excites me.

  What contrition do I owe, if he does not fully close the door of his studio?

  And though it excites me, I also know the betraying thump of remorse to see him committed to anything I am not. His attention on anything but me severs me from myself. The weakness in my knees and the glutted emptiness in my loins are born of famishment for his gaze.

  The shot that flies apart his head flies apart my heart. In that smothered limbo, my consciousness burns as would shadow-eternal flesh in sunlight.

  I share the music of the red fog in which he drifts, his song of self-killing from which he wakes to begin his Art while the thunder-shot he limits through his Will lingers in my hearing.

  Thus, do I share his Art. But never completely. His creativity defines my heart. It is right that I shatter for it, that I die during his hymns to immortality. I leave him to his Work as he replaces the gun, still oozing blue smoke, on the table before him; I leave him to the earth-marrow pigments and scabbing shade-forms he has freed.

  And afterward—when he has done taking brushes crafted of his own hair and bone to what the shot has thrown of him to the canvas, and he has patched the hole made by the bullet as it passed through the canvas—it excites me again to come to him . . . to taste gun-oil on his lips and powder-burns upon the back of his scalp and to kiss coagulate paint from his fingers.

  Often, in the studio perfumed with cordite, I reach down to find hi
s Art has given him release. I touch him as if I have brought him release, and claim by proxy the beauty of his Work. To taste the gun-oil distilled through his blood into the saltiness of his release is to hold his Art upon my tongue and take it as Communion.

  It is only after I have given him chilled fruit and mineral water to cleanse his palate that I dare a horizon-glance upon his work. My cleansing comes as I am burned by the russet fires the bullet has cast as layered vistas upon his canvas . . . the passions of his vision risen as living earth-tones. At times, the exaltation from the back of his head strikes the canvas so that, with a few brush strokes, working this day’s red vibrancies into yesterday’s browns, he creates swirling infinities that breathe, as if the paint still pulsed as it had within his body.

  November dawn-fire dims to ash all that surrounds it. The white of the studio walls becomes smoke-stained and sad beside his Art. It scalds my eyes.

  “It’s beautiful,” I wish to say. I’d not let my words sully air through which his vision has just warmly flown, even if I could free my voice from the snare my throat becomes before his Work. The canvas is a well of genius. Images overlap, at varying depths.

  Here—painted upon rough fabric and branded on the rough gel of my eyes, the oft-painted “house of the suicide” is reclaimed by my lover’s light. Here—the folded, churning clouds of trite dusks over the Hudson are infused with the depths of desert canyon walls. Here—a lily in a French garden flowers the colors of both new and old scars, floating on a pond of iron-rust. Here—cloaked like the images hidden within the game-pictures children love, a Starry Night made a Starry Twilight . . . with a firmament of red-crystal flecks.

  Life and movement, granted by his drying blood. The blood of his life, the blood of his Art. The skill of his long and nimble fingers summon Truth. Patches of singed hair give texture to waving copper grass. Bits of teeth are pebbled to fairy-land cobblestones. A spiral of skin dances with cochlea. A scrap of eye, the pupil and iris, had, on one marvelous day, struck the far right corner of the canvas, so that the painting became a kind of mirror (so he explained), able to gaze back at the viewer with the reflexivity unique to great Art.

  While he sips mineral water and tastes fruit, I clear the art books that have offended him as I would dirty dishes . . . the collections of images done by mediocrities whose work has been lauded as masterpieces over the ages . . . images my lover salvages, then unfetters with his vision and Will. Fools would call my lover’s Work “pastiche”—the taking of images into himself, so he can reuse them his own way; I rightly call it “redemption.”

  It is my art to serve him and his Art.

  As he showers the powder and flecks of himself from his hair, I clean his brushes and his gun. I then go to work . . . and so ensure him the solitude that gives the world such Beauty, even though the world is not yet ready to see it.

  He met me on his porch.

  The porch was his, though others eddied there as they fumbled with keys to mailboxes and to the converted house’s front door of moulded wood and fine leaded glass.

  He parted my loneliness and asked, “Do you wish to be sired?”

  His first words to me, swimming stars in my awareness, burning through years of smothered want. I’d made coming to Berkeley my pilgrimage to find myself . . . that my self could find me seemed too impossible to hope for.

  Desire for him rewrote me. His question pushed all I’d been before coming to Berkeley into dream. My history, my life, became soft-edged and distanced-fogged. I was afraid.

  A patch of sunlight had drawn me to his porch—I’d found it an attractive place to read of those dark angels for whom the sun is destructive. The light of this moment scattered the ash of what I’d been as would wind. I held up the book, invoking a barrier of the mundane (despite the profound truths the book itself held), so he and I could chat as if we’d met in a café, speaking in hushed, awed tones of the passions within the book. Muddy flirtation, to candle-dim the incendiary terror of that moment, to hold on to the dust-cool world in which I’d lived, because leaving it seemed too frightening.

  “We won’t talk about the book,” he said, blocking my parry, sitting next to me. “And we won’t talk about the movie. Do you wish to be sired? Do you wish to take the Gift of my blood . . .”

  ‘. . . into your blood?’ would have been a more complete asking of his question. More complete, yet less True. The Beauty of the thought lay in my completing it . . . and thus allowing my mind to touch his as our bodies would touch while he sired me.

  I drew a breath to speak my Completion when the rough tread of one of his neighbours intruded. The thud of work boots approached the door of moulded wood behind us. I glanced over my shoulder. A brutish head was framed in the leaded glass.

  I dropped my worn paperback shield as the door scraped open and I muttered, “I should go.” I walked away as the oafish neighbour clodded onto the porch. He who would become my lover smiled as I fled to a familiar landscape of want.

  “You know where to find me,” he said. As I backed away, his neighbour gave him the quizzical look the ignorant so often throw at artists.

  I waded into Berkeley, my Promised Land whose Promise I’d forsaken. I let Berkeley huddle me as a vixen would her cub. Berkeley’s hills and her trees were diamond-sharp in my sight, now that my past had become so dream-diluted. The foundations of my existence seemed no stronger than the floss of long-dead spiders.

  Berkeley carried me till evening, when I’d next meet him in a way that could not be called Fate, as “Fate” implies a thing from which one can charade an escape. I found myself at a reception honouring an artist whose work honoured his own caricature. I understand that, now. I’d then been impressed by all art, no matter how facile.

  I wasn’t “drawn” to that small gallery. I felt as if I’d refracted there, an illusion suddenly visible to my own perceptions.

  Yet once in the gallery, I was drawn to a group of beautiful men who stood about, talking. I was drawn by their looks, the musk of their bodies and the scented oils they dabbed. I was drawn by the confidence they exuded and the sweet smoke of clove cigarettes woven into the clothes they wore, by the knowledge that these were men who could create . . . who could give the gift of what they saw with their hearts to the entire world.

  I stood within ear-shot of them, wanting to be desired by at least one of them. To be wanted so would be a trinket to replace the life-treasure I’d lost that afternoon.

  A lovely man, ashen-skinned, with green eyes, spoke to a man with golden hair. “You’re obliged to keep a journal,” he said, “for the sake of those who will study your work. Your life is your art.”

  The golden-haired man said, “No! I’ll not make the study of me or my work less of a challenge for anyone. Even myself. My work is my journal.”

  The other men listened with the solemnity of oaks. The looks that they breeze-cast to one another were a web of intensity in which I longed to be entangled. I wanted to be taken into that emotional matrix that has existed among artists and their lovers throughout history, and that has defined subsequent eras of creative thought.

  I stepped toward that grove of men and felt something unfold behind me. If was as if a rose the size of a cloak had unfurled. My imagination told me such a miracle had transpired, yet when I turned, I saw a miracle of another sort.

  He whom I knew would become my soul-mate stood before canvases that suddenly seemed drab. No great rose had unfurled. Just his hand, extended. To me.

  “Your red hair was how I found you,” he said as we walked to his home. “Your red hair and your green eyes. They’re a beacon. You called me. I answered. Now things must be finished.” His hand gripped mine tighter. “Now you must be finished.”

  To be finished . . .

  . . . a prize much greater than what I’d just sought within the web of artists I’d left behind. An eternal moment of fulfillment, like the interrupted moment in which I had, in my mind, finished his questio
n to me: “. . . into my blood?”

  Completion.

  “I . . .”

  “Don’t say anything,” he said. “Don’t say a word.”

  We took the steps to his porch. The paperback I had no recollection of dropping was left there like a small altar. It filled me with something like nostalgia. I’d spent many hours holding it as a totem. Yet when had I first opened it? Did it have the smell of a new book, or the musk of a used one? I reached through the dream-floss of my memory just as my hand was let go. My companion snatched up the book. He flipped through it. Smiled.

  Then moulded wood was pressed against my spine. The small spaces in the leaded glass caught the hairs on the back of my head as he followed the fluid motion of seizing me and pressing me against the front door with the cupping of his mouth over mine, with the rubbing of the back of his hand that held the book against my crotch.

  His beautiful face came back into the focus; the rapture that had blurred him had also made the trees on the halogen-lit street a backdrop of velvet-green.

  “Seized first . . .” he said.

  He shook me in reply to my silence. The hand that held the book pressed harder against my crotch.

  “Seized first . . .”

  “. . . then . . . sired.”

  An instant of Completion that brought stem-drops of pre-ejaculate from me.

  His apartment was home. The jumble of canvases was welcome in my sight as would be the faces of family. Each canvas was blank. I loved them for what I knew they would wear, and the depths they’d acquire.

  “Do you see?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I need you to see more.”

  He showed me the studio that had been a kitchenette before he had sheathed the space in rubber foam and clear plastic. The Great Canvas, for I knew what it was despite the tarp draped over it, leaned against a far corner. Like a magician producing a card by sleight of hand, he drew forth a postcard promoting the reception we’d left. The card reproduced a painting I’d seen at the reception: a lifeless portrait of a lifeless face. It had no character, for the subject had no character—I suspected it to be a self-portrait.