Exit Wound

by Michael Marano

  I waited, while he worked, in a place where time seemed to sleep. Then I heard the distinct click of him setting down his brush crafted from a splinter of his femur. I took fruit and mineral water from the mini-fridge in the living room—a gesture that served Art more than did entire lifetimes nominally dedicated to Art—and heard the rare treasure of him calling me by name.

  I went through the French doors, and glanced upon Beauty—the new layer added this day to the Work. It was the image of a dying knight carried to Heaven by the reputed mother of Christ. My lover had dared the ancient fresco to magnificence, finding a way for it to truthfully catch the fires of Heaven that it had before lyingly portrayed.

  He stared at the canvas as I placed the tray on the book of medieval art I’d freed from the library.

  “I can’t find it,” he said.

  I looked. The kit with which he patched the canvas sat by his brushes and gun. A lesser lover of a lesser man would have said, “It’s right there.”

  Yet I failed him in another way by saying nothing.

  “Look . . . at . . . the . . . Work,” he said.

  My eye was drawn to the scrap of eye in the painting’s far corner. His martyred iris still reflected his soul.

  “Look . . .” he said.

  I ran my eye over museums-worth of sublimity.

  And realized with a shock. . .

  . . . no patch today.

  I turned. His patching kit was unopened in its ribboned box, as I’d placed it for him.

  “I can’t find the bullet,” he said.

  Together, we ran our fingers over the wall, to see if the bullet was embedded in the plaster beside the canvas, in wood or a metal stud behind the plaster. The abattoir-perfume of the canvas made me giddy as I stood closer to it than I ever had. Yet still I kept my focus to his task.

  As one, we both looked to the floor.

  And I felt a burning migraine-like pain as he lowered his head . . . a sharp, weighty pressure atop the loam of my brain.

  The pain I felt was an echo, reaching me from his blood. The cry I let out was a leakage of the cry he held tight in his throat.

  The sudden pain that subsided in me endured in him as it made twisted branches of his body. His knees fell from under him and he held his head in his blood-caked hands.

  “It’s still inside me.”

  The days that followed still shame me.

  I was jealous of the bullet.

  Jealous of his obsessive thinking of it, of the constant circular caresses he made on his scalp as it gnawed at him from within. I hungered for the caresses he no longer gave me.

  The bullet sported in the paradise of his mind. An unthinking bit of stone had through accident attained the beatification for which I prayed. Yes, it hurt his thoughts—yet it was closer to him than I was . . . entangled in the lattice of his genius. It was an unborn half-self to him: what I longed to be, above and beyond the conjoining of blood we shared.

  And through that which is and ever shall be his Gift to me, I felt the bullet change his blood. Since he had Sired me, my own blood had the sweetness of honeyed milk in my veins.

  Now, that was tainted with metallic hurt, a sour buzzing eroded from the stone lodged in his mind. Lead infused my vision. At times, all Berkeley itself became tinted with greyish cobalt in my sight.

  My lover’s Work dried on the canvas—it took an opacity that dimmed its layers. Though still beautiful, since it failed to be renewed each morning, the Work lost vividness—rearing suns aligned in harmony became as one sun.

  And I lost something as well, no longer replenished by the exquisite spirit he granted me each time our love-making re-enacted the moment of his Siring me. Even with the taint of the bullet in him, I hungered for such renewal.

  Yet my needs were unimportant. My lover was not painting. Art was not being redeemed. That to which I’d dedicated all I ever could be was suffered into stasis. I was cut off from my own life—a bluefly tapping against the window of where I as a person should live. To re-enter, I tried to awaken his passion . . . for his Art, and for me.

  I brought him new books of art to look on and redeem.

  The person I had been might not have suffered the wound of my lover leaping from the couch and flinging into my face the damp, oil-and-blood-stained cloth that had been on his brow. The person I had been might have said what he said to me: “Why are you hurting me like this?” He grabbed the books and flung them to the floor. His teeth ground like a handful of pebbles. “You’re happy,” he said. “You’re fine. I gave you all I can of me. You have parts of me I can’t touch anymore. And you resort to cheap taunts?”

  “I want you to work.”

  His voice became like that of a sick child. “That’s very funny, coming from you.”

  “Your work is important to me.”

  “So, I should work?” Again, his voice was child-like, like that of a boy sorry he has broken the favourite plaything of another.

  “Yes.”

  “You’d just love that wouldn’t you? If another shot got stuck? Why not let me have two hot little pebbles in my head? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To be the strong one? You jealous . . .”

  He held his head, sat upon sofa. “. . . jealous little shit,” he finished. He glared at me. “‘Two hot little pebbles.’ That’s not very good, is it? Certainly not worthy of you.” He stood, walked shakily to the bookshelf and pulled from behind a row of novels the rolls of vellum-like paper on which I’d begun this account. He held them to me. “You’re the artist now? You’re trying to write like the ‘poetess’?”

  “I’m . . . trying . . . to document what you do.”

  “I gave you this.” He shook the papers that I’d made into scrolls, so they’d have the solemnity they deserved. “I gave you your words. But you can’t use them to describe what I do. I gave you all I’d learned from ‘your’ precious ‘poetess’, because you’re that important to me.”

  “You’re everything to me. . . .”

  “Then why do you bring me art to look at? You taunt me with a need to create that I can’t fulfill?” He looked down upon the art books I’d freed for him . . . looked down upon the images only half-finished by Cézanne the way a starving man would a full and steaming plate. The images seemed to hunger for my lover as well . . . desiring his vision and blood to dream them into wholeness.

  He dropped the scrolls and fell to his knees, touching the books. He sobbed the way I had when he rewrote my blood. I tried to hold him, to help him to the couch.

  He pushed me away, then pressed his hands against the back of his head.

  “You’re worse than the fucking bullet.”

  I returned to work. I rode the train from Berkeley to my empty job, which seemed all the more hollow now that it had no purpose than to support our basic living. The drudgery I endured had once served the redemption of Art. Now it served the mere paying of rent. I sat surrounded by drones never touched by the sublime as I have been. I looked to the empty faces my lover’s Work would have touched with fire. I pitied them. They were not ready to receive the Work that would free them from their prisons, that would bring to them the higher plane for which they were too afraid to reach.

  And I pitied myself. I was suddenly in fact that which I had mimicked.

  I tried to read a newspaper. The words blurred to a wall of grey. Yet as I tried to read, the roar of the train . . .

  . . . took a solidity . . .

  . . . that stood upon the loam of my brain. The sound of the train became the buzzing of the bullet in my lover’s mind; it compressed itself into an impacted tooth of metal in my thoughts.

  Sublimation . . . the passing of a thing from one state to another. Isn’t that what my lover’s blood does? What Art itself does? The pain at the back of my head was the call of my body for the bullet—just as the dull eyes of those around me was the call for the semblance of life my lover’s Art would bring. The bullet’s sound, its
sourness, its pain, infused me through my lover’s blood. Could it not crystallize into me? Could it not flow as solution to me and metastasize in my mind? Drawn as gold was once believed to be from base lead?

  Thus, could my lover be freed to create his Art?

  I changed platforms at the next stop, and returned home to realize I’d no idea we owned so many mirrors.

  That was the thought that jangled in my shattering mind as I arrived to tragedy and desecration.

  My lover had taken the mirrors from the bedroom, from the medicine chest, from the hall, even a shaving mirror I’d forgotten we owned, and placed them on easels of varying height so he could see reflections of reflections of his newly-shaven head as he brought the electric hand-saw I used to make his canvas frames to the base of his skull.

  The buzzing in my mind externalized itself; it left me to become the light-strobing buzz of the hand-saw as it lay jammed with a thumb-sized shard of skull. In that strobing light, my lover writhed, unable to raise his hands to the shark-bite wound he had inflicted upon himself and gouge the hated nugget from his mind.

  I knelt to him, held him as the Madonna held her Son in the pieta my lover had once amber-trapped in his blood.

  Spray had geysered the studio that was no longer a studio, now that my lover’s blood and tissue had haphazardly smeared the Work. His palsied hand, unlike the sure hand that brought the gun to the loving smooth roof of his mouth, had plashed gaudy rain upon the canvas. The translucent layers had blended into each other, had made the Work appear nothing more than cloth dropped on the floor of a slaughterhouse.

  I unplugged the saw. The lights above stopped strobing. The buzzing fell silent. I replaced the shard of skull from where it had been torn.

  “Don’t speak,” I said. “Don’t say a word.”

  In that place where time held itself hostage to our plight, I knew what martyrdom he wished.

  A woman screamed upon seeing us, apparitions smeared with what she could only know as “blood.” Yet it was also our Gift—our shared legacy. I’d not let anyone steal or sully it.

  It was wasteful to spill our Gift upon the train platform. My lover, his head bandaged with duct-tape and dishtowels, paid the mid-morning commuters no heed as we shoved past them. All we could focus on was the oblivion promised him upon the track down which eighty tons of careening metal rushed.

  I stood to his back as he dove before the train as if into pure and cleansing waters.

  I knew joy, and release, as my lover was pulped to moist, red clay . . . as he found the sublimation that would free him. No one could steal his Gift, now that the Art it allowed him to create had been taken from him. No lesser talent would ever desecrate or appropriate his blood for their own revisualizations. He’d not become paint for lesser talents, not while his flesh and blood and marrow were dispersed so thinly. I smiled to know he was free.

  And I split along that smile, casting my blood upon the wind-swift metal canvas of the train. I shattered along my skeleton as the first flesh from which my lover had crafted me burst upon the track. My dissolution had none of my lover’s fire, had none of the profundity of his Art.

  I hoped to ascend, to find myself in the sublime heaven my lover had painted with that Gift from which I’d been conjured.

  But I found myself earthbound by a small metal nugget with the weight of a thousand suns. I . . . my lover’s least creation . . . reached to him through the liquidity that joined us, through the blood-spirit-thought that defines our Gift and that now forms my words.

  We cooled together, two careless smears, blended as are cheap pigments by the hoses of those who washed us away.

  For Marian Anderson (1968–2001)—neighbour and friend during the dark years. You left us to endure darker years without you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Marano is a former punk rock DJ, bouncer, and the author of the modern dark fantasy classic Dawn Song, which won both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards, and which will be reprinted by ChiZine Publications in 2013, to be followed by two sequels. For more than 20 years, his film reviews and pop culture commentary have been a highlight of the nationally syndicated Public Radio Satellite System show Movie Magazine International. His non-fiction has appeared in alternative newspapers such as The Independent Weekly, The Boston Phoenix and The Weekly Dig, as well as in magazines such as Paste and Fantastique. His column “MediaDrome” has been a wildly popular feature in Cemetery Dance since 2001. He currently divides his time between a neighbourhood in Boston that had been the site of a gang war that was the partial basis of The Departed and a sub-division in Charleston, SC a few steps away from a former Confederate Army encampment. He can be reached at www.michaelmarano.com.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  “Exit Wound” originally appeared in Queer Fear II (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002). Reprinted on Gothic.Net, January 2003 issue.