The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  Bobby channel surfs, settles on CNN, which is alternating between an overhead view of Ground Zero and a studio shot of an attractive brunette sitting at an anchor desk, talking to various men and women about 9/11, the war, the recovery. After listening for almost half an hour, he concludes that if this is all people hear, this gossipy, maudlin chitchat about life and death and healing, they must know nothing. The pit looks like a dingy hole with some yellow machines moving debris—there’s no sense transmitted of its profundity, of how—when you’re down in it—it seems deep and everlasting, like an ancient broken well. He goes surfing again, finds an old Jack the Ripper movie starring Michael Caine, and turns the sound low, watches detectives in long dark coats hurrying through the dimly lit streets, paperboys shouting news of the latest atrocity. He begins to put together the things Alicia told him. All of them. From “I’ve just been to a funeral,” to “Everybody’s ready to go on with their lives, but I’m not ready,” to “That’s why I come here…to figure out what’s missing,” to “I have to go.” Her transformation…did he really see it? The memory is so unreal, but then all memories are unreal, and at the moment it happened, he knew to his bones who and what she was, and that when she took the shoe, the object that let her understand what had been done to her, she was only reclaiming her property. Of course everything can be explained in other ways, and it’s tempting to accept those other explanations, to believe she was just an uptight careerwoman taking a break from corporate sanity, and once she recognized where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with, she grabbed a souvenir and beat it back to the email-messaging, network-building, clickety-click world of spreadsheets and wheat futures and martinis with some cute guy from advertising who would eventually fuck her brains out and afterward tell the-bitch-was-begging-for-it stories about her at his gym. That’s who she was, after all, whatever her condition. An unhappy woman committed to her unhappy path, wanting more yet unable to perceive how she had boxed herself in. But the things that came out of her on their last night at the Blue Lady, the self-revelatory character of her transformation…the temptation of the ordinary is incapable of denying those memories.

  It’s a full week before Bobby returns to work. He comes in late, after darkness has fallen and the lights have been switched on, halfway inclined to tell his supervisor that he’s quitting. He shows his ID and goes down into the pit, looking for Pineo and Mazurek. The great yellow earthmovers are still, men are standing around in groups, and from this Bobby recognizes that a body has been recently found, a ceremony just concluded, and they’re having a break before getting on with the job. He’s hesitant to join the others, and pauses next to a wall made of huge concrete slabs, shattered and resting at angles atop one another, holding pockets of shadow and worse in their depths.

  He’s been standing there about a minute when he feels her behind him. It’s not like in a horror story. No terrible cold or prickling hairs or windy voices. It’s like being with her in the bar. Her warmth, her perfumey scent, her nervous poise. But frailer, weaker, a delicate presence barely in the world. He’s afraid if he turns to look at her, it will break their tenuous connection. She’s probably not visible, anyway. No Stephen King commercial, no sight of her hovering a few inches off the ground, bearing the horrid wounds that killed her. She’s a willed fraction of herself, less tangible than a wisp of smoke, less certain than a whisper. “Alicia,” he says, and her effect intensifies. Her scent grows stronger, her warmth more insistent, and he knows why she’s here. “I realize you had to go,” he says, and then it’s like when she embraced him, all her warmth employed to draw him close. He can almost touch her firm waist, the tiered ribs, the softness of a breast, and he wishes they could go out. Just once. Not so they could sweat and make sleepy promises and lose control and then regain control and bitterly go off in opposite directions, but because at most times people were only partly there for one another—which was how he and Alicia were in the Blue Lady, knowing only the superficial about each other, a few basic lines and a hint of detail, like two sketches in the midst of an oil painting, their minds directed elsewhere, not caring enough to know all there was to know—and the way it is between them at this moment, they would try to know everything. They would try to find the things that did not exist like smoke behind their eyes. The ancient grammars of the spirit, the truths behind their old yet newly demolished truths. In the disembodiment of desire, an absolute focus born. They would call to one another, they would forget the cities and the wars…Then it’s not her mouth he feels, but the feeling he had when they were kissing, a curious mixture of bewilderment and carnality, accented this time by a quieter emotion. Satisfaction, he thinks. At having helped her understand. At himself understanding his collection of relics and why he approached her. Fate or coincidence, it’s all the same, all clear to him now.

  “Yo, Bobby!”

  It’s Pineo. Smirking, walking toward him with a springy step and not a trace of the hostility he displayed the last time they were together. “Man, you look like shit, y’know.”

  “I wondered if I did,” Bobby says. “I figured you’d tell me.”

  “It’s what I’m here for.” Pineo fakes throwing a left hook under Bobby’s ribs.

  “Where’s Carl?”

  “Taking a dump. He’s worried about your ass.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “C’mon! You know he’s got that dad thing going with you.” Pineo affects an Eastern European accent, makes a fist, scowls Mazurek-style. “‘Bobby is like son to me.’”

  “I don’t think so. All he does is tell me what an asshole I am.”

  “That’s Polish for ‘son,’ man. That’s how those old bruisers treat their kids.”

  As they begin walking across the pit, Pineo says, “I don’t know what you did to Calculator Bitch, man, but she never did come back to the bar. You musta messed with her mind.”

  Bobby wonders if his hanging out with Alicia was the cause of Pineo’s hostility, if Pineo perceived him to be at fault, the one who was screwing up their threefold unity, their trinity of luck and spiritual maintenance. Things could be that simple.

  “What’d you say to her?” Pineo asks.

  “Nothing. I just told her about the job.”

  Pineo cocks his head and squints at him. “You’re not being straight with me. I got the eye for bullshit, just like my mama. Something going on with you two?”

  “Uh-huh. We’re gonna get married.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re fucking her.”

  “I’m not fucking her!”

  Pineo points at him. “There it is! Bullshit!”

  “Sicilian ESP…Wow. How come you people don’t rule the world?”

  “I can’t believe you’re fucking the Calculator Bitch!” Pineo looks up to heaven and laughs. “Man, were you even sick at all? I bet you spent the whole goddamn week sleep-testing her Certa.”

  Bobby just shakes his head ruefully.

  “So what’s it like—yuppie pussy?”

  Irritated now, Bobby says, “Fuck off!”

  “Seriously. I grew up in Queens, I been deprived. What’s she like? She wear thigh boots and a colonel’s hat? She carry a riding crop? No, that’s too much like her day job. She—”

  One of the earthmovers starts up, rumbling like T-Rex, vibrating the ground, and Pineo has to raise his voice to be heard.

  “She was too sweet, wasn’t she? All teach me tonight and sugar, sugar. Like some little girl read all the books but didn’t know what she read till you come along and pulled her trigger. Yeah…and once the little girl thing gets over, she goes wild on your ass. She loses control, she be fucking liberated.”

  Bobby recalls the transformation, not the-glory-that-was-Alicia part, the shining forth of soul rays, but the instant before she kissed him, the dazed wonderment in her face, and realizes that Pineo—unwittingly, of course—has put his grimy, cynical, ignorant, wise-ass finger on something he, Bobby, has heretofore not fully grasped. That she did a
waken, and not merely to her posthumous condition, but to him. That at the end she remembered who she wanted to be. Not “who,” maybe. But how. How she wanted to feel, how she wanted to live. The vivid, less considered road she hoped her life would travel. Understanding this, he understands what the death of thousands has not taught him. The exact measure of his loss. And ours. The death of one. All men being Christ and God in His glorious fever burning, the light toward which they aspire. Love in the whirlwind.

  “Yeah, she was all that,” Bobby says.

  Jailwise

  During my adolescence, despite being exposed to television documentaries depicting men wearing ponytails and wife-beater undershirts, their weightlifter chests and arms spangled with homemade tattoos, any mention of prison always brought to my mind a less vainglorious type of criminal, an image derived, I believe, from characters in the old black-and-white movies that prior to the advent of the infomercial tended to dominate television’s early morning hours: smallish, gray-looking men in work shirts and loose-fitting trousers, miscreants who—although oppressed by screws and wardens, victimized by their fellows—managed to express, however inarticulately, a noble endurance, a working-class vitality and poetry of soul. Without understanding anything else, I seemed to understand their crippled honor, their Boy Scout cunning, their Legionnaire’s willingness to suffer. I felt in them the workings of a desolate beatitude, some secret virtue of insularity whose potentials they alone had mastered.

  Nothing in my experience intimated that such men now or ever had existed as other than a fiction, yet they embodied a principle of anonymity that spoke to my sense of style, and so when I entered the carceral system at the age of fifteen, my parents having concluded that a night or two spent in the county lock-up might address my aggressive tendencies, I strived to present a sturdy, unglamorous presence among the mesomorphs, the skin artists, and the flamboyantly hirsute. During my first real stretch, a deuce in minimum security for Possession With Intent, I lifted no weights and adopted no yard name. Though I wore a serpent-shaped earring, a gift from a girlfriend, I indulged in no further self-decoration. I neither swaggered nor skulked, but went from cell to dining hall to my prison job with the unhurried deliberation of an ordinary man engaged upon his daily business, and I resisted, thanks to my hostility toward every sort of authority, therapy sessions designed to turn me inward, to coerce an analysis of the family difficulties and street pressures that had nourished my criminality, with the idea of liberating me from my past. At the time I might have told you that my resistance was instinctive. Psychiatrists and therapy: these things were articles of fashion, not implements of truth, and my spirit rejected them as impure. Today, however, years down the line from those immature judgments, I suspect my reaction was partially inspired by a sense that any revelation yielded by therapy would be irrelevant to the question, and that I already knew in my bones what I now know pit to pole: I was born to this order.

  While I was down in Vacaville, two years into a nickel for armed robbery, I committed the offense that got me sent to Diamond Bar. What happened was this. They had me out spraying the bean fields, dressed in protective gear so full of holes that each day when I was done, I would puke and sweat as if I had been granted a reprieve and yanked from the gas chamber with my lungs half full of death. One afternoon I was sitting by the access road, goggles around my neck, tank of poison strapped to my shoulders, waiting for the prison truck, when an old Volkswagen bus rattled up from the main gate and stopped. On the sliding panel was a detail from a still life by Caravaggio, a rotting pear lopsided on a silver tray; on the passenger door, a pair of cherubs by Titian. Other images, all elements of famous Italian paintings, adorned the roof, front, and rear. The driver peered down at me. A dried-up, sixtyish man in a work shirt, balding, with a mottled scalp, a hooked nose, and a gray beard bibbing his chest. A blue-collar Jehovah. “You sick?” he asked, and waggled a cell phone. “Should I call somebody?”

  “Fuck are you?” I asked. “The Art Fairy?”

  “Frank Ristelli,” he said without resentment. “I teach a class in painting and sculpture every Wednesday.”

  “Those who can’t, teach…huh?”

  A patient look. “Why would you say that?”

  “’Cause the perspective on your Titian’s totally fucked.”

  “It’s good enough for you to recognize. How do you know Titian?”

  “I studied painting in college. Two years. People in the department thought I was going to be a hot-shit artist.”

  “Guess you fooled them, huh?”

  He was mocking me, but I was too worn out to care. “All that college pussy,” I said. “I couldn’t stay focused.”

  “And you had places to rob, people to shoot. Right?”

  That kindled my anger, but I said nothing. I wondered why he was hanging around, what he wanted of me.

  “Have you kept it up? You been drawing?”

  “I mess around some.”

  “If you’d like, I’d be glad to take a look. Why don’t you bring me what you’ve been doing next Wednesday?”

  I shrugged. “Sure, yeah. I can do that.”

  “I’ll need your name if I’m going to hook you up with a pass.”

  “Tommy Penhaligon,” I said.

  Ristelli wrote it down on a note pad. “Okay…Tommy. Catch you Wednesday.” With that, he put the van in gear and rattled off to the land of the free, his pluming exhaust obscuring my view of the detail from a Piero della Francesca painted on the rear.

  Of course, I had done no drawing for years, but I sensed in Ristelli the potential for a sweet hustle. Nothing solid, but you develop a nose for these things. With this in mind, I spent the following week sketching a roach—likely it was several different roaches, but I preferred to think of it as a brother inmate with a felonious history similar to my own. I drew that roach to death, rendering him in a variety of styles ranging from realism to caricature. I ennobled him, imbued him with charisma, invoked his humble, self-abnegatory nature. I made him into an avatar among roaches, a roach with a mission. I crucified him and portrayed him distributing Oreo crumbs to the faithful. I gave him my face, the face of a guard to whom I had a particular aversion, the faces of several friends, including that of Carl Dimassio, who supplied the crank that kept me working straight through the nights. I taped the drawings on the wall and chuckled with delight, amazed by my cleverness. On the night before Ristelli’s class, so wasted that I saw myself as a tragic figure, a savage with the soul of an artist, I set about creating a violent self-portrait, a hunched figure half buried in blackness, illuminated by a spill of lamplight, curled around my sketch pad like a slug about a leaf, with a harrowed face full of weakness and delirium, a construction of crude strokes and charred, glaring eyes, like the face of a murderer who has just understood the consequences of his act. It bore only a slight resemblance to me, but it impressed Ristelli.

  “This is very strong,” he said of the self-portrait. “The rest of them”—he gestured at the roach drawings—“they’re good cartoons. But this is the truth.”

  Rather than affecting the heightened stoicism that convicts tend to assume when they wish to demonstrate that they have not been emotionally encouraged, I reacted as might a prisoner in one of the movies that had shaped my expectations of prison, and said with boyish wonderment, “Yeah…you think?”, intending by this to ruffle the sensibilities of Ristelli’s inmate assistant, a fat, ponytailed biker named Marion Truesdale, aka Pork, whose arms were inked with blue, circusy designs, the most prominent being a voluptuous naked woman with the head of a demon, and whose class work, albeit competent, tended to mirror the derivative fantasy world of his body art. In the look that passed between us then was all I needed to know about the situation: Pork was telling me that he had staked out Ristelli and I should back the fuck off. But rather than heeding the warning, I concentrated on becoming Ristelli’s star pupil, the golden apple in a barrel of rotten ones. Over the next months, devoting myself to the r
efinement of my gift, I succeeded to such a degree that he started keeping me after class to talk, while Pork—his anger fermenting—cleaned palette knives and brushes.

  Much of what I said to Ristelli during that time was designed to persuade him of the deprivation I faced, the lack of stimulation that was neutering my artistic spirit, all with an eye toward convincing him to do a little smuggling for me. Though he sympathized with my complaints, he gave no sign that he was ripe to be conned. He would often maneuver our conversation into theoretical or philosophical directions, and not merely as related to art. It seemed he considered himself my mentor and was attempting to prepare me for a vague future in which I would live if not totally free, then at least unconstrained by spiritual fetters. One day when I described myself in passing as having lived outside the law, he said, “That’s simply not so. The criminal stands at the absolute heart of the law.”

  He was perched on a corner of an old scarred desk jammed into the rear of the art room, nearly hidden by the folded easels leaning against it, and I was sitting with my legs stretched out in a folding chair against the opposite wall, smoking one of Ristelli’s Camels. Pork stood at the sink, rinsing brushes in linseed oil, shoulders hunched, radiating enmity, like a sullen child forbidden the company of his elders.

  “’Cause we’re inside?” I asked. “That what you’re saying?”

  “I’m talking about criminals, not just prisoners,” Ristelli said. “The criminal is the basis for the law. Its inspiration, its justification. And ultimately, of course, its victim. At least in the view of society.”