Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “You don’t really need to know.” This was not the least bit rude, merely the truth. He was another truthteller. “Hold still,” he told her as she shifted her head to watch him. “Don’t try to talk.”

  He meant to be, she intuited, merely the cloud shadow in the air through which the lightning passes. In her mind she named him Shadow.

  He finished her hair. Her head felt buoyed and receptive, as if he had somehow, painlessly, opened it.

  Bringing her his palette, he told her, “Now for the eyes I suggest Amethyst Mist, which is very popular with the Irish, very poetic.”

  “No mist.” Larque shook her lightened head. “I don’t want to see that way anymore. From now on I just want …” She faltered, trying to think how to explain the concept of the camera behind her eyes.

  Sky challenged, “Make her dare to see the truth!”

  “True Blue, then. Hold perfectly still.” He seated himself on a stool in front of her, dipped a small pointed brush, braced his elbow on the armrest of her chair, and started to paint. He painted not the lids and creases around her eyes but her eyes themselves. It did not hurt. She sat motionless and stared into the beauty of his face and met his shadow gray gaze without blinking.

  “And a little red, for daring.” He intensified a few fine veins, then looked at her with a wisp of a smile. “So far, so good,” he said. “Do you dare to see me truly?”

  But he was so beautiful, she did not want to. “Not quite,” she answered.

  Sky pointed her middle dirty finger into her own mouth and made a gagging noise.

  “It will come,” Shadow told Larque, either not hearing the doppelganger or ignoring her. “Give it time. Now, what about your nose, your jaw, your chin, your cheekbones? Do you have dreams for them?”

  “I’d like my bones to be stronger,” Larque said. She hated the way everything about her seemed to be swaddled and lost in softness.

  “Give her some courage,” said Sky disgustedly.

  Looking very serious, he molded her face with steady careful movements of his hands and fingers, drawing hardness out of her nose, her chin, and her jaw. It felt unlike anything else she had ever experienced, and very very good. She sat with eyes half-lidded, breathing shallowly, as his hands stroked her face.

  “Mouth stronger too?” he asked.

  “Just—more willing,” said Larque at the same time as Sky said, “Yes, wide. Like it could swallow the world.”

  Shadow was perplexed. “What do you mean, willing?”

  Larque said, “Ready to laugh or yell or kiss or sing or cry, whatever. My mouth gets tired too easily.”

  “Yes, I see,” he said softly, and he used both his hands and his brushes to take care of it. Finished with the face, he stood up, stepped back to look at her, and nodded.

  “Your mind?” he asked. “Any changes there? A prejudice to get rid of? A language you’ve wanted to learn?”

  Sky for once seemed to have run out of ideas for how Larque should have turned out better. But Larque said at once, “I’ve always wanted to really, really know how to dance.”

  “That is more the fundament than the mind,” Shadow said. Nevertheless, he stepped forward and laid his hands on her forehead a moment, and smoothed her eyebrows with his thumbs. “A little daring here, too,” he muttered, and with a brush and some sooty pigment he feathered them into wings. He seemed not at all tired, but went immediately on. “Now, your body. Almost always people want it younger, and a few pounds lighter.”

  “Younger and stronger. I want some muscle. And twenty pounds lighter,” Larque said.

  “Make it thirty,” Sky put in, her voice as sharp as her elbows.

  He passed his hands lightly over Larque’s body, and she felt a change, a compactness, ripple along behind his hands like poetry folding in and in on itself, like a snake coiling. Watching, she could see her flesh gathering itself like a thought, her jeans shrinking to fit her. She was smaller now, but not less. She was packed tight, all made of potential.

  “Wow,” she breathed.

  “Breasts?” Shadow asked.

  “No,” Sky said.

  Larque turned and protested, “Wait, what are you saying? Of course I want breasts.”

  “But they show through your clothes, they’re embarrassing,” Sky objected. “And you hate bras. The straps slide down your shoulders all the time, and the stupid cups cave in.”

  Lord, yes, Larque remembered training bras, how they had made her life wretched, and bras in general still drove her nuts, though she filled them now. The elastic always hurt before the day was half over. She wished she didn’t have to wear them.

  “Maybe smaller breasts,” she suggested. It would be nice to jump up and down and have breasts that stopped when she did.

  “You don’t want breasts at all ever!” Sky shrilled. “They’ll get in the way of everything.”

  Such as what? Well, such as … everything. Working in a dildo factory. Flagging traffic. Running away and being a cowboy. It would be hard to bust broncs when part of you bounced worse than the horse.

  Shadow said smoothly, “May I suggest detachable breasts? They feel and react just the same as any breast when they’re on.”

  It certainly seemed like the thing to do at the time. Far better than the compromise she had suggested. “That sounds great,” she agreed. He made another careful gesture, and her chest lay smooth, flat and hard.

  “Get yourself fitted with detachables at the Lace Place once we’re finished,” Shadow told her. “Hands?”

  “Stronger,” Larque said. She wanted to be able to get the lids off pickle jars. “Sexual dexterity,” she added. She had some aspirations about Hoot’s pickle too.

  “Able to do things,” Sky said with scornful emphasis. “Fix cars. Shoot guns. Fight.”

  Larque looked at her. “You mean, hit people? Punch them?”

  “Of course, hit people. Bad guys. Punch them in the face and knock them silly.”

  What a great idea. Larque wondered why she hadn’t thought of it herself.

  “That will take black polish,” Shadow said.

  “Fine.” Since she had come into this place Larque had felt steadily rising excitement, a sense that her whole life could be different. She was ready to go along with almost anything. “Take the ridges out of my fingernails?” she added.

  “Certainly.”

  He massaged her hands section by section from her wrists to her fingertips, pressing them somewhat wider, pulling them a little longer, packing the muscle more firmly around the bones. He smoothed her stubby nails as he had said he would, then painted crescent moons of black on their tips.

  Then he got up and turned a handle on her chair so that it tipped and elevated her feet. He pulled her boots off, and she lay there and let him, not even embarrassed by the humid smell as he peeled off her socks as well. “Besides dancing,” he asked her, “what dreams do you have for your feet?”

  “Make them able to run,” Sky said. “Fast.”

  “Adventure,” Larque said. “Exploring.”

  “Just make them good for running away.”

  “No,” Larque contradicted softly. “Make them good for standing up for things I believe in.”

  “Stronger,” summarized Shadow in a neutral tone, and he set to work, stroking his way from the ankle down, bone by bone. “Nail polish?” he asked as he worked.

  “Sure,” said Larque.

  “No,” said Sky.

  He applied some, electric blue, in lightning streaks, then stood back, still supremely beautiful, still expressionless, when he was done.

  “That concludes your Magic Makeover,” he told her. “Is there anything you want to change before you get out of the chair? Have you always wanted the ability to play the piano? Do you struggle with dandruff? Anything at all that you can think of?”

  She and Sky eyed each other. It seemed to Larque, facing the level gaze of the child, that all the important attributes were in place. But Sky said slowly, “Code of hon
or?”

  “You mean like, convictions to have the courage of? I think we’ve got that.”

  “Okay … okay. You look okay to me,” said the child firmly.

  It felt good to see light in Sky’s eyes, to merit the child’s approval for a change. Larque nodded at the man in black, who cranked down the chair to let her off, then stood back, gesturing her toward a mirror. Full-length. She stood in front of it and looked.

  A handsome adolescent boy looked back.

  “Caramba,” Larque whispered, utterly startled at first, and then, in the same bone-deep way, delighted. The change felt both strange and ineffably right. Her hard young male muscles promised everything she had always wanted and never had, the confidence, the endurance, the entitlement to go and see and do. They buoyed her up, even just standing there in front of the mirror they seemed to carry her higher by the moment; she wanted to shout. She did shout. “I need a cock and balls!” she exclaimed.

  “You can take care of that at the Penis Place,” Shadow said without looking up. Standing behind the counter, he was writing something—the sales slip, maybe.

  Without sitting down Larque was able to pull on her socks and boots again. She loved the new balance and sureness in her body—she would never have been able to do such a simple and satisfying thing before. Whatever the cost, it was worth it. “How much is this going to set me back?” she asked Shadow.

  “You’ll find out over the course of time,” he said, and for the first time he smiled, the wry knowing smile of a truthteller. Then he looked at her, and his smile slipped. “Wait,” he said. “Get back in the chair. I forgot to do your soul and your heart.”

  But she shook her head, because now that she was standing on her own two feet, she no longer wanted him messing with her. There was magic in his beauty, but she was starting to see him truly, and she was no longer in a mood to submit to his manipulations. Her heart and soul were her own.

  “I’ll work on them myself,” she said. “Thanks. Send me the bill.” Then with Sky at her side she went out, for no reason leaping up to whack at the world’s ceiling.

  SIX

  SHADOW STOOD AT HIS AWNING-SHADED FRONT WINDOW and watched her go.

  She yearned to fight for justice. Clung to a code of honor. Wore anachronistic work boots. Wanted to punch out the bad guys. Wanted to ride into the sunset.

  There was a reason why he had slipped up, forgetting to perform the most important steps of her transformation, failing to complete the job, and it was this: she was entirely too much like Argent. Touching her had shaken him silly, taking him back like riding a stormwind to that first night with Argent in that tawdry little room.

  Even remembering, now, he felt the sexiness and splendor and astonishment of it all shivering him like pouring hot oil on ice, like finding a snake in the cupboard with a jewel shining between its eyes. The power tingling in his long, strong hands—not yet knowing what it meant, half-thrilled and half-frightened, Shadow had fought it at first, holding it back. But when the clothes came off and Argent lay naked on the bed, there was no holding back. The knowledge of who Argent really was burned, burned in his fingers, and the lust for that person burned in his loins, and he touched—he touched this ordinary man’s balding forehead with his fingertips, and in that moment it became the brow of a god. He touched the man’s lips, and they were the lips of a god. He kissed them, and stroked with his thumbs the man’s lidded eyes, and they opened, looking up at him, and it was like falling into a molten turquoise sky. He gasped, but could not stop, his hands moving inch by inch from the crown of that sun-god head down. Argent gasped harder. What he must have been feeling, the fear, the delight, the physical sensations as his shoulders broadened, belly lay flat and firm, buttocks bunched high and tight—Shadow still could not fully know or imagine how it had felt. He did know—and trembled, remembering—that when he reached the juncture where his lover’s heart and body and soul all crowded into the same small tower, when he caressed it, Argent screamed, not with pain but with ecstasy, and turned to him transfigured, with a tool worthy of Apollo. After that he was unable to recall what his hands had done apart from the rest of him. That night had been an apocalypse, a dark quaking mountainpeak, a tide of fire surging in him, through him, pouring out of him, racing him along and Argent along with him. He and Argent clung to one another as if they were falling, as if they might drown. For hours afterward they clung naked to one another, panting and speaking in fumbling sentences with long respites in between.

  “It was like sex squared,” Argent whispered. “No—sex to the nth power. It was immense.”

  “I didn’t know.” Shadow felt humbled, more so than anytime he could remember before or since. “I knew—there was something about you, but—I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  “It felt—like dying, or being born—I can’t say what it felt like.”

  “Do you understand what I’ve done? Have you looked at yourself?”

  “I don’t need to. I know.” Nevertheless, Argent sat up briefly to stare into the motel’s cloudy mirror, then snuggled down next to Shadow again. “I’m nearly as damn-doodle good-looking as you.”

  “It was in you.”

  “Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

  “It was! In you all along. I couldn’t have found it out otherwise. Argent—listen, I have no idea—”

  “Whether you can turn me back into a bald, chinless, potbellied toad? I don’t want you to.”

  “But—you had a life, presumably—”

  “Not much of one. Wife from hell. If she would get angry, or hurt, that I could handle, but she just smiles like a nun.” For years this was all Shadow learned of the woman. Argent never spoke of her again, and he never asked. A cowboy is one who runs away from his mother and his family; no real cowboy has a wife. And after he and Argent had been together a while, it came to seem that there was no past beyond the one they shared.

  They lay there on the rumpled chenille in silence again, and then Argent burst out, “Shadow, I—you joystick, don’t you see what else happened to me? You’ve got me on a chain. On a short leash, trotting along at your heels.”

  Only then, sliding from the shared mountainpeak into the valley of his ineluctable loneliness, did Shadow begin to understand: it was not just the bodily form of Argent that he had changed with his formidable hands. He had tampered with the man’s heart and soul as well.

  So they had stayed together. Argent had phoned his wife to inform her he was leaving her, that he would sign over to her everything he owned. He could have simply disappeared into his new body. He could have been a missing person. But he wanted the divorce—so that the woman could not pose as a tragic figure, Shadow decided as he got to know Argent better. There was a certain charming vengefulness in Argent.

  They slept under bridges on the outskirts of Soudersburg the first few days. Rather, Argent slept; Shadow spent the nights and most of the days learning to use his hands. He was filled with an urgent need to know the limits of his personal mystery, and coolly experimented on Argent while the man was asleep, finding that sexual arousal was a pleasant but optional accompaniment to his new skill, finding that with practice he could turn his lover back into the plump, anxious-eyed, middle-aged man he had first met, the one who was there waiting in Argent just as surely as Argent had been waiting in him. Some French philosopher had once said something about every human consisting of two souls in a single breast, chest, whatever—often more than two, Shadow sensed, taking an informal poll of the people he managed to touch every day, shaking hands, tapping a shoulder, brushing fingers against a leg in passing. Two souls were the fewest he counted. He sensed a profound division, a cleavage, within nearly everyone he encountered—except himself.

  Wanting then to know himself, he had reached a limit. Watching Skylark O’Connell Harootunian leave his shop and leap toward the sky, he knew no more about himself than he had known the day he let Argent wake up and find himself turned back into “a bald, chin
less, potbellied toad” again, for a joke. He had thought at first that Argent would not forgive him, even though the transformation was a big help in getting the divorce papers signed, even though he had made him beautiful again afterward and had given him a solemn promise. He had thought Argent would leave him.

  He had not been able to figure out whether he cared.

  But Argent could not leave. Argent was over his head in love of him.

  Years had passed. It was a small step from finding out the otherside of a man to finding out the otherside of a town, Soudersburg. The otherside of a wrong-side-of-town street. A place for the otherness in all those who acknowledged it.

  Years had passed. Argent adored him no less than before. The two of them did everything together, shared dreams, shared an apartment, shared Popular Street. Shadow came to feel warm affection for the man, wanted him at night, needed him even, and certainly he did not care to venture outside the safe zone they had made themselves, certainly he did not desire to risk AIDS. But still there was that essential loneliness he wore, his soul wore, like a black wide-brim Resistol that never came off. Occasionally Shadow wondered what it was like to fall in love. He wondered what love was.

  Years had passed. His hands kept Argent hard and young. How was it that he, Shadow, had grown no older?

  Years had passed. His hands were still long and strong, their skill controllable and predictable now, a Popular Street barter-system pay-me-someday livelihood, with sexual apparatus marketed at a safe distance and on the side, for the sake of Argent’s peace of mind. Respectability was no concern of Shadow’s, but Argent’s happiness was.

  Maybe he loved the guy after all.

  Who was this woman who had just skylarked down the sidewalk to buy herself a penis?

  Maybe he knew; maybe he would never know. The past twenty-seven years had been peaceful. Argent tended to keep life quiet, and Shadow had come to like it that way; most of the time the quietude felt good. Shadow had nearly given up always needing to know everything.