“A walk?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know you’ll find him?”
“He kept asking me where I lived. He asked me if that was my blue bicycle parked outside. He touched my hand when I was refilling his coffee, said ‘you didn’t jump. I like that.’ So I’m pretty certain he’ll be out there,” she said.
“Be careful. Call me when you get home.”
“Okay. Don’t worry,” she stood up to leave.
“I hate artists.”
“I know you do,” Elora said. “Bye.”
49.
She grabbed her coat from its peg and swung her camera around her neck. She knocked on Stan’s office door. If you could call a larger than average broom closet an office. He was hunkered over his books and chewing his tongue. A green desk lamp was on a small table.
“God, I wish I still smoked,” he said and glanced up at her.
“You look like Mr. Scrooge.”
“Mr. Scrooge is the taxman, not me. I just want to feed people,” he put down his pencil. He had a goatee like a small upside-down fire on his chin.
“So more of a Jesus figure then,” she smiled.
“Pah!” He spat in surprise. “Yeah, that’s me. Jesus. Let me show you what I can do with a fish,” he laughed.
“I’ll pass. Listen, can I still take Smitty for a wander?”
“You bet. Lead’s on the peg. I’ll be here for another hour or so.”
“Okay. See ya,” she said and he grunted a goodbye.
She walked up the stairs and went out the back door.
“Smitty, here honey,” she handed the dog a half-eaten burger she’d saved in a napkin and attached her leash to her collar.
From the alley you could see the bike rack on the sidewalk under a streetlight. Sure enough he was out there, leaning against the light with his foot on her wheel. He hadn’t seen her yet. She walked down the length of the alleyway. He heard her footsteps and turned. A huge grin slashed across his face. Then he saw Smith.
Elora bent down and unattached Smitty’s lead.
“Sic’em,” she said to the dog and the dog leapt like a snarling, barking bullet.
The arrogance in Romeo’s face dropped like a curtain and terror reigned. That was the first photo Elora took. Within seconds, Smitty had him pinned to the ground and was rag-dolling his jacket. The shots she got of him pleading were the best. The one she chose to hang in her studio gallery was of him shielding his face with his hands. The streetlight makes his skin drop off below the cheekbone. Only one eye is visible and it juts out, huge as a bouncy ball. His ear looks like a wet slug. A grilled street drain shines under his head and his defending sleeve is torn.
That was right before Smitty broke skin and Elora called her off. It took a while to attach the lead. Romeo jumped up, scrambled and ran away. Smitty calmed down and eventually looked around, tail wagging, like nothing had happened. Nobody had passed. The street was still a street, and yet, she’d done something to transform it. She felt wild and impervious. There was no sign of the kicking bag in her stomach.
“Good girl. Now let’s go for that walk,” she scratched Smitty behind the ears and Smitty shook and splattered the drool from her muzzle.
Elora walked exuberantly into the night. She was high as a kite. She loved to capture a person’s visceral. It was a powerful feeling. The power of one who breaks the lamp and captures the genie.
That night she developed the photos. Each time she agitated the tank, she remembered his face, his arrogance. He reminded her of Arlo and she wanted him dead.
In the morning she walked to the diner for breakfast. An ambulance and police cars were parked outside.
“What’s happened?” She asked a newsagent.
“They found a stiff by the bicycle rack,” the newsagent said. “Apparently he was attacked by stray dog and had a heart attack. It was a lucky break as the police have been after him,” said the newsagent.
“For what?”
“The officer wouldn’t say,” he said, “so you know it’s serious. One less criminal nut job in the Windy City is a blessing.”
Now she knew it was absolutely not a coincidence. She knew that having had Jacques inside her, having carried his child, meant that she had resurrected inside his realm.
The cat in its bag kicked all the way to the surface.
Kicked her throat.
What had she done? She had taken a life.
And why didn’t she care?
She started running. She sprinted all the way back to her apartment and up the stairs where she closed the door and locked the dead bolt. The only sound in the room was her loud breathing. She stood staring at a windowed square of sunlight pooling across the floor. It almost reached the opposite wall. She didn’t want to walk through it, so she sat down on the floor and waited for the cat to stop banging.
The only way to truly understand and, therefore, control her ability was to try it on herself.
Could she die?
50.
Her memory was full of images, each one hung like a dress from a clothesline that stretched endlessly over the contours of her mind. At any time she can walk up, choose a dress and put it on. It plays around her body like a mist. Stepping in and out of her history like this keeps her separate from it, keeps it from becoming skin.
The images of her past life hung alongside her current life. She toured through herself when she walked around her gallery. She was everywhere, yet, she was missing. There wasn’t a single aspect of her existence that she had chosen. Photographing herself felt like an opportunity to own her new life.
She waited for inspiration to come and when it did it came from an ordinary thing like it usually does.
The neighbor’s cat had left a rabbit’s kidney on their doormat. Elora didn’t think they would mind if she collected it, so scooped it up on the back of an unopened electricity bill. It reminded her of a fetus. She left it on the countertop, grabbed a plastic bag and walked outside to find some grass.
She took a black top hat down from a shelf in her wardrobe, and then glued tiny mirrored stars all over its crown. She placed the grass in the dip at the top and laid the rabbit’s kidney inside of it. She put the hat on her head so that it completely shadowed her face. So that the viewer recognized the hat was inhabited only after close inspection, and she took the photograph.
She didn’t know if she’d choose life or death when she developed the photographs of herself. She had killed and felt shock, then comfort, not repentance. Her old self recognized this behavior as psychopathic and wrong. Her old self thought that perhaps she ought to be released from her being, so it surprised her when she chose life, resounding life, as she dipped the negatives into the solution.
“It is decided. This is the life I choose,” she said. “So be it.”
It wasn’t one that her father or Arlo or Jacques had chosen. It was hers and she saw her photographs for what they were.
Her photographs had been surges of emotion that merely reflected an intensity she could not stir in herself. It was as though time had lacquered her and circumstance had soaked its stain into bone. Her subjects were strikes against her rigidity. That’s what she was building, creating, a tool to use to block a haemorrhage. Would she ever be anything other than cold? And did it matter really, so long as the record of feeling was there? Of course it mattered. She wanted to be a better person. An artist.
And the thing sacrificed again and again? Love. And its various coats. Sex, passion, longing, patience, obsession, she drew them to her just to slay them away.
It was around this time that Gilbert appeared and she realized that she had the ability to feel guilt.
51.
Gilbert came regularly during a month of morning shifts. Stan had nicknamed him Mr. Clockwork. After a few weeks of sunny side up and strawberry jam, he unexpectedly took her hand.
“I’d like to introduce myself,” he said.
“Go on then,” she said and snatched her
hand away.
“I’m Gilbert,” he said.
She felt a flair of disappointment as the name wasn’t definitive enough for her love. It hung in the air like a limp banner.
“Hello, Gilbert,” she made her voice snap at the ‘t’ and it sounded like she was scolding him.
He smiled. “Can I take you out for lunch?”
They sat in the park eating sandwiches. He was an art student and reminded her of some noble painting of a skinny boy with shoulder length wavy hair, wearing brocade and posing with a terrier. He had the aristocracy and thinness of regality. She was always asking him if he was cold. The dark colors he wore made him appear sickly and he curled into her like a child. It was obvious that she’d break his heart. It was her intention. She needed obsessive love in her gallery, someone as infatuated as she had been, before she contacted Jacques. Breaking Gilbert’s heart would protect her. He was the only relationship she had after Jacques, and after a while it became clear to her that she was just using him to test her level of control. She should have ended it then, but she needed to know how her gift worked. She was just waiting for the means of the photograph to expose itself, which it eventually did. In a thrift store window she saw a pair of gothic candlesticks. She bought them and rang Gilbert that night. They had been dating for a few weeks.
“Gill,” she called him. “Come now. I need you,” she said and hung up the phone.
She felt like the harlot of some horrid movie, but set about preparing the room anyway. It was dusk and there was a train in the distance. It made her think of things far away and moving from her uncontrollably. She took out a pen from a drawer and wrote the word ‘uncontrollable’ on a piece of paper. Pigeons were cooing and flapping their wings like a signal from the otherworld.
She pushed open the window and leaned outside, arching her back like a figurehead. She could see him at the top of the street. She could tell it was Gilbert because he moved lithely. Lithely, she said to herself and went into her black room to light a circle of candles. She took her shirt off. She had on a Pendelton Turnabout skirt with blue cranes all over it. Her bra was standard and white and she tossed it on the floor. She heard him coming up the stairs and her stomach lurched. With her camera around her neck she opened the door.
“I’m not wearing shoes,” she said as she wiggled her red toenail, lifted her leg and placed it around his waist. The scene was purposely cliché and cringing, for it was time to end it.
He groaned and buried his head in her neck. He smelled like a damp city. She took him into her black room and sat him down in the middle of the candles. She straddled him, his leather jacket was cold against her chest and she shivered while she kissed his large Adam’s apple and all the way up to his small lips. His mouth tasted of sleep and his hair was rumpled.
“Gilbert,” she spoke into his mouth, kissed his top lip and he hummed in answer.
He traced the outline of her shoulder blades and ran his fingers up and down her spine. She put her finger on the shutter of her camera like a trigger.
“Gilbert,” she breathed into his mouth like an incantation. “I can’t see you anymore. It’s over,” she leaned back and the flash blinded him for a moment.
She quickly stood and started taking rapid pictures. He went from broken to baffled to angry in seconds. She circled him taking pictures. He stood up and looked around at the other photographs pulsing in the shadows like people in an audience. It dawned on him that he’d been set up.
“You bitch,” he said in a whisper. “You organized this? You did this? What are you?”
How could she answer that? A nonbeing?
He was too shocked to shout. The darkness, the constant flash, the candles and the faces of her other photographs had stunned him. He opened the door and the severe light of the corridor made him furious. He started kicking the wall.
“Good,” she said. “That’s good,” as though she were instructing a model.
She circled around him taking photographs; she was fearless, as though the camera were a shield. When his anger wore out, he lumped in the corner near the scuffmarks his shoe made on the white wall and started to cry. Excellent, she thought and continued snapping the shutter. He looked up at her incredulously, stood and walked down the stairs.
She immediately began to develop the photos she’d taken of him. She willed him to live as she agitated the developing tank. She instilled strength in him as she dipped each photo into the solution. Would it work even though her subconscious found him weak and annoying?
In the morning she found a note slipped under her door that read: ‘Rot in hell.’ With relief, she attached it to the last photograph with a safety pin. She made a movie reel of photos beginning with the first and ending with Gilbert walking down the stairwell. Around the frame she glued ticket stubs.
She felt a small amount of guilt because she understood his pain, but he would recover, and now she knew for certain that the willpower to override obsessive love was in her image armory.
It was time to find Jacques.
52.
They used to play this game.
“Hold out your arm, palm up, and close your eyes,” Jacques would say. Then he’d softly move his finger from Elora’s palm up to her armpit.
“Say ‘now’ when you think my finger has reached the inside of your elbow,” he said. When Elora shouted ‘now’, his finger would stop and she would open her eyes to find it far from her inner elbow.
“Let your skin be sensitive,” Jacques would say, “you need to soften.” He’d shake Elora’s arm, “soften and receive things.”
Elora lay on her back and raised her arms into the air. She gently stroked them one at a time. “Now, now,” she’d say aloud as she passed her inner elbow. Her skin was so thin that she could see two thick purple veins running from wrist to elbow. She stopped stroking, placed her right forefinger on the thickest artery and waited to feel her heartbeat.
You’re alive, she said, I’m coming.
*
To leave a place is simply to turn direction, for it only feels as if we are moving forward because of our relationship with time, but often we leave in order to reenter the past and attempt to correct it. The mind knows no difference; the mind is a compass needle that points in the direction of growth. To reach him she will follow the river.
*
She was due some vacation time, but Stan still wasn’t happy about her decision to take it right away. She didn’t want to explain that she was going to find Jacques because she knew that Stan would tell Birdie. She wanted this secret all to herself. Ros took the majority of her shifts and promised to water her geranium.
She packed her artwork between blankets inside the trunk of the car. She had rented a Buick Skylark, just like Birdies. It would be less conspicuous when she drove into Callisto.
All of her clothes fitted in a single suitcase. The cigar box was underneath the bed. It was black and the size of a book. It wasn’t heavy; she could hold it with one hand. She’d always kept pieces of herself inside it like flowers pressed in a dictionary: that delicate. Like the little abbreviated notes people make to themselves: that personal. Like the leftover shapes of a cut paper snowflake: that random.
The carving of Callisto was inside the box.
When Elora first arrived in the city she dumped the contents of the box onto the bed and ran her hands over them for the first time since the river. The objects seemed to belong to a different person. Touching them seemed to initiate a need to do something destructive and fierce. She began jumping up and down on the bed as hard and as high as she could, knees to chest, then slamming her feet against the mattress. The bedsprings barked like beaten seals. The relics crashed against the sheets like wreckage inside white waves. She was a storm.
Elora thought she would go through the floorboards and pictured her femurs splitting as she pushed like a drill through the ground. She wanted it. She wanted the pain.
“Come on!” she shouted. Higher and harder she ju
mped, until her hands could smack against the ceiling, until her breath spiked her lungs and she had to quit in order to breathe. Her collection had been flung and scattered across the room. Quickly she jumped down on the floor, scooped the items into the box, slammed it shut and pushed it under the bed.
From then on, whenever the box entered her mind, she immediately shoved it out, though sometimes it wouldn’t leave graciously. Sometimes it beckoned her to sit upon the bed with her knees under her chin, perched like a hawk, over her evidence. She could feel it burning under her. See? You were there. You were there, it seemed to say. There is proof that you existed in another light.
She put her hand under the bed and moved it around until she reached its cool hard surface. She pulled it out, dusted it off with toilet paper and carried it like a baby in the crook of her elbow to the door.
She stopped and looked in the mirror, with one hand she pinched her cheeks until they went pink and then pressed her fingertips into her eyes for a few moments. When she opened them she saw fuzzy black spots, she waited to regain a clear picture of herself, before she slammed the door shut.
53.
The café was crowded but she needed to eat breakfast. She poked her fried egg with her fork and its sun spilt a golden puddle across her white plate. She looked out the window at the other windows, each as gray-rimmed and shadowed as tired eyes. The city pushed its steel wave against her.
A garbage truck beeped while empty bins bounced back to their places on the pavement and drivers shouted unrecognizable words. Chains scraped and clanked against the concrete. In the café, sausages and pancakes sizzled. People murmured and newspapers opened, shook, folded and tucked under arms in tan overcoats. Someone coughed a phlegmy cough then lit a cigarette. The waitress rustled as she walked, her thick knees rubbed in their pantyhose. She wiped her thumb across her blue apron, the smudge like a red cloud against a dusk sky. Water hit the burner and the coffee pot popped.
Elora held her cup with both hands and blew. Steam entered her nose. Steam reached her empty stomach before the coffees acidic swish. She leaned over and ate her egg. The morning’s light was different, it was a bright washed yellow, and the sky had cleared. After so many days of hot suffocating rain it felt revolutionary. She lifted her finger and ordered toast.
The Carving Circle Page 17