The Best of Lucius Shepard

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

  I thought she was saying that she was post-operative, yet because she spoke with such offhanded conviction and not the hysteria-tinged defiance of a prison bitch, I also wondered, against logic, if she might be telling the truth and was a woman in every meaning of the word. She came to her feet and stepped around the coffee table and stood facing me. “I want to show you,” she said. “Will you let me show you?”

  The mixture of shyness and seductiveness she exhibited in slipping out of her dress was completely natural, redolent of a woman who knew she was beautiful yet was not certain she would be beautiful enough to please a new man, and when she stood naked before me, I could not call to mind a single doubt as to her femininity, all my questions answered by high, small breasts and long legs evolving from the milky curve of her belly. She seemed the white proof of a sensual absolute, and the one thought that separated itself out from the thoughtlessness of desire was that here might be the central figure in my mural.

  During the night that followed, nothing Bianca did in any way engaged my critical faculties. I had no perch upon which a portion of my mind stood and observed. It was like all good nights passed with a new lover, replete with tenderness and awkwardness and intensity. I spent every night for the next five weeks with her, teaching her to draw, talking, making love, and when I was in her company, no skepticism concerning the rightness of the relationship entered in. The skepticism that afflicted me when we were apart was ameliorated by the changes that knowing her brought to my work. I came to understand that the mural should embody a dynamic vertical progression from darkness and solidity to brightness and evanescence. The lower figures would be, as I had envisioned, heavy and stylized, but those above demanded to be rendered impressionistically, gradually growing less and less defined, until at the dome, at the heart of the law, they became creatures of light. I reshaped the design accordingly and set to work with renewed vigor, though I did not put in so many hours as before, eager each night to return to Bianca. I cannot say I neglected the analytic side of my nature—I continued to speculate on how she had become a woman. In exploring her body I had found no surgical scars, nothing to suggest such an invasive procedure as would be necessary to effect the transformation, and in her personality I perceived no masculine defect. She was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what she appeared: a young woman who, albeit experienced with men, had retained a certain innocence that I believed she was yielding up to me.

  When I mentioned Bianca to Causey, he said, “See, I told ya.”

  “Yeah, you told me. So what’s up with them?”

  “The plumes? There’s references to them in the archives, but they’re vague.”

  I asked him to elaborate, and he said all he knew was that the criteria by which the plumes were judged worthy of Diamond Bar was different from that applied to the rest of the population. The process by which they entered the prison, too, was different—they referred to it as the Mystery, and there were suggestions in the archival material that it involved a magical transformation. None of the plumes would discuss the matter other than obliquely. This seemed suggestive of the pathological myths developed by prison queens to justify their femininity, but I refused to let it taint my thoughts concerning Bianca. Our lives had intertwined so effortlessly, I began to look upon her as my companion. I recognized that if my plans for escape matured I would have to leave her, but rather than using this as an excuse to hold back, I sought to know her more deeply. Every day brought to light some new feature of her personality. She had a quiet wit that she employed with such subtlety, I sometimes did not realize until after the fact that she had been teasing me; and she possessed a stubborn streak that, in combination with her gift for logic, made her a formidable opponent in any argument. She was especially fervent in her defense of the proposition that Diamond Bar manifested the principle from which the form of the human world had been struck, emergent now, she liked to claim, for a mysterious yet ultimately beneficent reason.

  In the midst of one such argument, she became frustrated and said, “It’s not that you’re a non-conformist, it’s like you’re practicing non-conformity to annoy everyone. You’re being childish!”

  “Am not!” I said.

  “I’m serious! It’s like with your attitude toward Ernst.” A book of Max Ernst prints, one of many art books she had checked out of the library, was resting on the coffee table—she gave it an angry tap. “Of all the books I bring home, this is the one you like best. You leaf through it all the time. But when I tell you I think he’s great, you—”

  “He’s a fucking poster artist.”

  “Then why look at his work every single night?”

  “He’s easy on the eyes. That doesn’t mean he’s worth a shit. It just means his stuff pacifies you.”

  She gave her head a rueful shake.

  “We’re not talking about Max Ernst, anyway,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter what we talk about. Any subject it’s the same. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you’re here. In prison. You say the reason you started doing crime was due to your problems with authority, but I don’t see that in you. It’s there, I guess, but it doesn’t seem that significant. I can’t imagine you did crime simply because you wanted to spit in the face of authority.”

  “It wasn’t anything deep, okay? It’s not like I had an abusive childhood or my father ran off with his secretary. None of that shit. I’m a fuck-up. Crime was my way of fucking up.”

  “There must be something else! What appealed to you about it?”

  “The thing I liked best,” I said after giving the question a spin, “was sitting around a house I broke into at three in the morning, thinking how stupid the owners were for letting a mutt like me mess with their lives.”

  “And here you are, in a truly strange house, thinking we’re all stupid.”

  The topic was making me uncomfortable. “We’re always analyzing my problems. Let’s talk about you for a change. Why don’t you confide your big secrets so we can run ’em around the track a few times?”

  A wounded expression came to her face. “The reason I haven’t told you about my life is because I don’t think you’re ready to handle it.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  She leaned back against the cushions and folded her arms, stared at the coffee table. “That’s not it…altogether.”

  “So you don’t trust me and there’s more. Great.” I made a show of petulance, only partly acting it.

  “I can’t tell you some things.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I can’t!” Her anger didn’t seem a show, but it faded quickly. “You crossed the river to come here. We have to cross our own river. It’s different from yours.”

  “The Mystery.”

  She looked surprised, and I told her what I had learned from Causey.

  “He’s right,” she said. “I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”

  “Why? It’s like a vow or something?”

  “Or something.” She relaxed her stiff posture. “The rest of it…I’m ashamed. When I look back, I can’t believe I was so disreputable. Be patient, all right? Please?”

  “You, too,” I said.

  “I am patient. I just enjoy arguing too much.”

  I put my hand beneath her chin, trying to jolly her. “If you want, we can argue some more.”

  “I want to win,” she said, smiling despite herself.

  “Everything’s like you say. Diamond Bar’s heaven on fucking earth. The board’s—”

  “I don’t want you to give in!” She pushed me onto my back and lay atop me. “I want to break you down and smash your flimsy defenses!”

  Her face, poised above me, bright-eyed and soft, lips parted, seemed oddly predatory, like that of a hungry dove. “What were we arguing about?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said, and kissed me. “You, me, life. Max Ernst.”

  One day while drinking a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, taking
a break from work, I entered into a casual conversation with a dour red-headed twig of a man named Phillip Stringer, an ex-arsonist who had recently moved from the eighth tier into the old wing. He mentioned that he had seen me with Bianca a few nights previously. “She’s a reg’lar wild woman!” he said. “You touch her titties, you better hold on, ’cause the next thing it’s like you busting out of chute number three on Mustang Sally!”

  Though giving and enthusiastic in sex, Bianca’s disposition toward the act impressed me as being on the demure side of “reg’lar wild woman.” Nevertheless, I withheld comment.

  “She was too wild for me,” Stringer went on. “It’s not like I don’t enjoy screwing chicks with dicks. Truth is, I got a thing for ’em. But when they got a bigger dick’n I got…guess I felt a tad intimidated.”

  “Hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  He gazed at me in bewilderment. “The plume I saw you with. Bianca.”

  “You’re fucked up, man! She doesn’t have a dick.”

  “You think that, you never seen a dick. Thing’s damn near wide around as a Coke can!”

  “You got the wrong girl,” I told him, growing irritated.

  Stringer glowered at me. “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know who the hell I’m screwing.”

  “Then you’re a goddamn liar,” I said.

  If it had been another time, another prison, we would been rolling around on the floor, thumbing eyes and throwing knees, but the placid offices of Diamond Bar prevailed, and Stringer dialed back his anger, got to his feet. “I been with that bitch must be fifty times, and I’m telling you she gets hard enough to bang nails with that son-of-a-bitch. She goes to bouncing up and down, moaning, ‘Only for you…’ All kindsa sweet shit. You close your eyes, you’d swear you’s with a woman. But you grab a peek and see that horse cock waggling around, it’s just more’n I can handle.” He hitched up his trousers. “You better get yourself an adjustment, pal. You spending way too much time on that painting of yours.”

  If it were not for the phrase “only for you,” I would have disregarded what Stringer said. Indeed, I did disregard most of it. But that phrase, which Bianca habitually breathed into my ear whenever she drew near her moment, seeded me with paranoia, and that night as we sat on the sofa, going over the charcoal sketches she had done of her friends, I repeated the essence of Stringer’s words, posing them as a joke. Bianca displayed no reaction, continuing to study one of the sketches.

  “Hear what I said?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I guess I thought you’d say something, this guy going around telling everybody you got a dick.”

  She set down the sketchpad and looked at me glumly. “I haven’t been with Phillip for nearly two years.”

  It took me a moment to interpret this. “I guess it’s been such a long time, he mixed you up with somebody.”

  The vitality drained from her face. “No.”

  “Then what the fuck are you saying?”

  “When I was with Phillip, I was different from the way I am with you.”

  Irritated by the obliqueness with which she was framing her responses, I said, “You telling me you had a dick when you were seeing him?”

  “Yes.”

  Hearing this did not thrill me, but I had long since dealt with it emotionally. “So after that you had the operation?”

  “No.”

  “No? What? You magically lost your dick?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, I do! Hell are you trying to tell me?”

  “I’m not sure how it happens…it just does! Whatever the man wants, that’s how I am. It’s like that with all the plumes…until you find the right person. The one you can be who you really are with.”

  I struggled to make sense of this. “So you’re claiming a guy comes along wanting you to have a dick, you grow one?”

  She gave a nod of such minimal proportions, it could have been a twitch. “I’m sorry.”

  “Gee,” I said with thick sarcasm. “It’s kinda like a fairy tale, isn’t it?”

  “It’s true!” She put a hand to her forehead, collecting herself. “When I meet someone new, I change. It’s confusing. I hardly know it’s happening, but I’m different afterward.”

  I do not know what upset me more, the implication, however improbable, that she was a shapeshifter, capable of switching her sexual characteristics to please a partner, or the idea that she believed this. Either way, I found the situation intolerable. This is not to say I had lost my feelings for her, but I could no longer ignore the perverse constituency of her personality. I pushed up from the couch and started for the door.

  Bianca cried out, “Don’t go!”

  I glanced back to find her gazing mournfully at me. She was beautiful, but I could not relate to her beauty, only to the neurotic falsity I believed had created it.

  “Don’t you understand?” she said. “For you, I’m who I want to be. I’m a woman. I can prove it!”

  “That’s okay,” I said coldly, finally. “I’ve had more than enough proof.”

  Things did not go well for me after that evening. The mural went well. Though I no longer approached the work with the passion I had formerly brought to it, every brushstroke seemed a contrivance of passion, to be the product of an emotion that continued to act through me despite the fact that I had forgotten how to feel it. Otherwise, my life at Diamond Bar became fraught with unpleasantness. Harry Colangelo, who had more-or-less vanished during my relationship with Bianca, once again began to haunt me. He would appear in the doorway of the anteroom while I was painting and stare venomously until I shouted at him. Inarticulate shouts like those you might use to drive a dog away from a garbage can. I developed back problems for which I was forced to take pain medication and this slowed the progress of my work. Yet the most painful of my problems was that I missed Bianca, and there was no medication for this ailment. I was tempted to seek her out, to apologize for my idiocy in rejecting her, but was persuaded not to do so by behavioral reflexes that, though I knew them to be outmoded, having no relation to my life at the moment, I could not help obeying. Whenever an image of our time together would flash through my mind, immediately thereafter would follow some grotesquely sexual mockery of the image that left me confused and mortified.

  I retreated into my work. I slept on the scaffolding, roused by the mysterious cry that like the call of some grievous religion announced each dawn. I lived on candy bars, peanut butter, crackers, and soda that I obtained at the commissary, and I rarely left the anteroom, keeping the door locked most of the days, venturing out only for supplies. When I woke I would see the mural surrounding me on every side, men with thick arms and cold white eyes pupiled with black suns, masses of them, clad in prison gray, crowded together on iron stairs (the sole architectural component of the design), many-colored faces engraved with desperation, greed, lust, rage, longing, bitterness, fear, muscling each other out of the way so as to achieve a clearer view of the unpainted resolution that overarched their suffering and violence. At times I thought I glimpsed in the mural—or underlying it—a cohesive element I had not foreseen, something created from me and not by me, a truth the work was teaching me, and in my weaker moments I supposed it to be the true purpose of Diamond Bar, still fragmentary and thus inexpressible; but I did not seek to analyze or clarify—if it was there, then its completion was not dependent upon my understanding. Yet having apprehended this unknown value in my work forced me to confront the reality that I was of two minds concerning the prison. I no longer perceived our lives as necessarily being under sinister control, and I had come to accept the possibility that the board was gifted with inscrutable wisdom, the prison itself an evolutionary platform, a crucible devised in order to invest its human ore with a fresh and potent mastery, and I glided between these two poles of thought with the same rapid pendulum swing that
governed my contrary attitudes toward Bianca.

  From time to time the board would venture into the anteroom to inspect the mural and offer their mumbling approbation, but apart from them and occasional sightings of Causey and Colangelo, I received no other visitors. Then one afternoon about six weeks after ending the relationship, while painting high on the scaffolding, I sensed someone watching me—Bianca was standing in the doorway thirty feet below, wearing a loose gray prison uniform that hid her figure. Our stares locked for an instant, then she gestured at the walls and said, “This is beautiful.” She moved deeper into the room, ducking to avoid a beam, and let her gaze drift across the closely packed images. “Your sketches weren’t…” She looked up at me, brushed strands of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t realize you were so accomplished.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, so overcome by emotion that I was unable to react to what she had said, only to what I was feeling.

  She gave a brittle laugh. “Sorry that you’re good? Don’t be.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No…not really. I thought by coming here I would, but I don’t.” She struck a pose against the mural, standing with her back to it, her right knee drawn up, left arm extended above her head. “I suppose I’ll be portrayed like this.”

  It was so quiet I could hear a faint humming, the engine of our tension.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “If you’re so glad, why are you standing up there?”

  “I’ll come down.”

  “And yet,” she said after a beat, “still you stand there.”

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Do you want me to lie? The only reason I can think of for you to ask that is you want me to lie. You know how I’ve been. I’ve been heartbroken.” She ran a hand along one of the beams and examined her palm as if mindful of dust or a splinter. “I won’t ask the same question. I know how you’ve been. You’ve been conflicted. And now you look frightened.”