Demonology

by Rick Moody

  Her boyfriend had scraped the “I”off of the sign in the storefront window where they now lived together and it no longer said Madison Electric, as it had once, but now said Mad Son Electric, and that was the name of their gallery, and they had written a press release replete with art-critical language that her boyfriend had somehow acquired during his all-but-dissertation career as an analytic philosopher; the press release used liminality and numinosity and dialectic, and it referred to tactical strategies of subjectivity in postmodernism, and the Hoboken Reporter had picked the whole thing up, on the page opposite the police blotter, where the paper recorded with gusto a recent surge in arrests for public urination attributable to all the new restaurants downtown, and then on the facing page, New Gallery Brings a Touch of the Village to Midtown, featuring a photo, M. J. Powell and Gerry Abramowitz in front of the former Madison St. Electrical Corp.(He clutched a thrift-store overcoat around himself; his black self-inflicted haircut stood on end.) There would be guests, there would be drinks, there would be the wildness. No time to waste.

  —I can’t get this guy and his friends off my step, I dropped my case of sodas, M. J. called to Anthony Somebody, on the far side of Madison. —I have a party starting in an hour.

  —That’s nothing, Anthony said. —Couple of dogs, right? Pretty girl like you. Could be worse. Could be rats.

  Anthony stepped off the curb. As though stepping across the Hudson River itself, separating this Jersey side from that NYC side, but at the moment of this historic voyage from the curb there was, unfortunately, a convergence of bad luck. A pair of young guys in sweatshirts driving what was probably a stolen Camaro slowed, and the driver of this vehicle waved at Anthony Somebody, and Anthony waved back, and one of the dogs bolted between parked cars on M. J.’ side, and everything was possible in this moment, the movements of the dramatis personae, dancers upon a proscenium, all converged, another bottle of soda popped, the Camaro swerved, struck the crosstown bus, and Mrs. John J. Vincenzo of Adams Street was thrown clear, from her perch on the steps of the crosstown bus, over her walker, and onto the pavement, onto accumulations of automobile glass, and there was a muffled cry from her, and a screech of tires, and the Camaro from the ’84 model year rumpled like an expensive suit after an evening of embraces, and Anthony Somebody, attempting to wade into the street, attempting to contribute in a civic way to a dangerous congregation of hounds, fell to the curb, grasping for his leg, so that M. J. could see the comb-over on the summit of his head. At first, she thought Anthony’s injury was a bluff, a way to deny aid in the midst of civic upheaval. But Anthony had lurched forward between Hyundai and Ford Escort, Goddamn it!, collapsing onto the ground, immediately hiking up blue flannels to reveal navy blue socks of the sort that you might get at one of these haberdashers on Union Square where a guy on a stepladder served as discount law enforcement. Anthony began to rub his ankle, blaspheming softly.

  M. J. slipped across the great divide of Madison, behind a police car drawing near. —You okay?

  Anthony apparently knew from the block these kids who were driving the Camaro that had smacked the crosstown bus that had disgorged Mrs. Vincenzo, the bus which had formerly housed a dozen private school kids from the Catholic school uptown, Joey, is that your brothers car, does he know you took his car out like this, you’re out joyridingyou smack up your own brothers car? It was a customized car, too, and Joey was the younger brother of the guy at the corner grocery near her, the younger brother of the guy who owned the grocery who no longer much spoke to M. J., because, she suspected, she kept using the store address for parcel deliveries from the catalogues. One day when she strode in for a can of lentil soup, the guy and his wife were calling out to her from behind a wall of corrugated-cardboard shipping containers, from J. Crew and Tweeds, Miss Powell, could you please take some of these boxes over to your place, because were having trouble moving around in here, in the store. Blouses and sweaters and linen jackets and black leotards and jeans and swimsuits and hats. The younger brother, who had been loitering in an aisle near the canned goods, had volunteered to help carry her boxes. Joey. And Joey and his pal Mike were now out of the car (near a prone Mrs. Vincenzo) inspecting the front end, repeating their own decorous obscenities, pacing nervously.

  Gerry got the idea for the gallery in a certain bar on Second Avenue. In Manhattan. They used to go there after thesis recitals at Tisch. One girls performance involved a relation to dirty laundry; she had brought out a laundry bag and put on a tape of a song featuring miserably chortling synthesizers, and, amid kinesthetic combinations that resembled the process of giving birth, she scattered laundry across the stage, halter tops, underwear, tights. No dry-clean-only items. It was after this piece that Gerry got the idea. Probably soon after. He had moved in, she had just invited him to move in, and he remarked that the gallery scene in the East Village had been indispensable, and with so many musicians living in Hoboken now, so many artists, there was a real scene, there was Maxwell’s and there were all these bands, and things were really happening, it was the right time for a gallery, in Hoboken, a gallery, a samizdat kind of thing, that would reflect the local artists, like there were definitely some great artists out there, and there was all the loft space, and they could sort of serve as a hub, a nexus, for all of these artists, and maybe there would be a Hoboken style, like there was southwestern style. M. J. had taken some art history courses in school; she’d taken this one course where, on the final exam, she’d compared Piet Mondrian’s reduction of the vocabulary of classical painting to the way a student on a final exam attempts to reduce the movement and vocabulary of the semester’s work down to a single essay question, and she had received an A for the paper and therefore for the term. She then elected to reuse this idea, a semester later, for the mid-term on the Abstract Expressionists and Their Era, this time receiving a C minus. Where the hell was Gerry, while policemen hovered over Mrs. Vincenzo like the mob in deposition paintings; while Joey and Mike argued with the driver of the crosstown bus; while the children who’d been on the bus were spilling out onto the street, Five dollars on the black lab! That’s not a lab! Gerry didn’t know too many artists. He’d dated a woman from Barnard who painted portraits of her wealthy family in the style of court paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and he’d approached her for the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala. M. J.’s cousin Nicky Jarrett, who’d gone to Cooper Union and who specialized in sculptures featuring balloons with smiley faces on them —shunts and fuses and tubes housing balloons which then inflated and uninflated, circularly —had also refused. The artists she’d known years before were not artists anymore. They were graphics designers. What was art, but something that you could get into a bank lobby, or something that a large law firm or junk-bond brokerage boutique acquired through a committee on decorations to sell later at a profit; or, as Nijinsky said, Ifelt disgust and therefore could not finish the ballet. The Mad Son Electric Gallery had made more progress with the Hoboken Reporter, in terms of media penetration, than it had made with the artists who might show upon its walls. Gerry had begun to call frantically around town asking if anyone knew any artists at all who worked in Hoboken, any artists who worked in the loft spaces over in the midtown section of Hoboken near the projects, and sometimes, at dusk, he wandered the streets, gazing in windows.

  In the meantime, M. J.’s studies in physiognomy and sports medicine and the Alexander Technique made her ideal for the diagnosis of Anthony Somebody’s ankle sprain. His large, homely ankle was up on her thigh, and she was pulling delicately on it, examining. Anthony’s eyes: woeful, as though he’d been driven off twenty yards from some game of boys, lifelong, watching myopically from a distance, as boys called out, No fat kids allowed.

  —A sprain is basically a pulled tendon. Diagnosed by a history. Ever sprain it before? Rest, ice, compression, and elevation. That’s your road to recovery. After the swelling goes down after a couple of days, you should do range-of-motion exercises, like balancing on the aff
ected foot. Or you could try tracing letters of the alphabet, easy ones first. H. Or L. That way you avoid joint instability.

  —If you could just help me get up on my feet, Anthony said.

  He was worried and distant.

  —I’m not sure you should be walking on it. That’s what I’m saying, M. J. said. —I mean, you probably don’t have a fracture, because that would be obvious. I saw a girl fracture her leg once.

  Anthony wrestled his foot out of her control. He began to stand.

  —Joey, get your butt over here, Anthony called.

  —The Camaro in the eighties will never be like the Camaro in the seventies, Joey was mumbling.

  —Or what about that ’67? With the V-8 and the 350 cubic inches, Mike, his friend, observed. —Sweet on that.

  —Parts. That’s your whole problem.

  —Something goes bad.

  —Look, I’m leaking.

  —Oil pan. Definitely.

  —Joey!

  A policeman sauntered over, from where Mrs. Vincenzo lay upon a bier of shattered glass; the sun dipped below the rim of Union City; M. J. plucked off her sunglasses; holiday lights, blinking holiday strings, which Gerry had laboriously hung in the window of the Mad Son Electric Gallery, were by timer engaged, and in these lights it became clear that the dogs had disappeared, had fled; and so the way to the gallery was free, and the interpenetration of all these people, all these events, caused by dogs, seemed for the moment to be just a mistake of interpretation, nothing more. M. J. felt better. She could just go inside now and get busy with arranging soft drinks (the case of wine was already inside), cheeses, and maybe these pratfalls of the afternoon would be part of the coverage of the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala: an old woman on a walker stretched out flat on Madison Street, her voice declaiming irritably on the matter of sciatica, a car totaled on the rear of the crosstown bus, kids sitting out on a sidewalk with a portable radio blasting a tune about basketball sneakers, Hispanic men getting out of cars trapped in the snarl up the block, car horns like monarchical cornets, because of dogs. Joey and Mike, wearing black tour T-shirts, each with a long, narrow ponytail snaking down his back, hoisted Anthony to his feet. All M. J. had to do was open the door to the building. She was tired. An ambulance came up the block from the wrong direction. Its muffled siren. And before her in the street lay a pristine bottle of orange soda. She scooped it up and went back to make a gift of it to Anthony.

  —Sorry for the trouble.

  As though he had never met her.

  —Thanks. He unscrewed the lid fast. Orange soda was fountained. He brushed a dribble off himself.

  —We’re having a little art opening later. Come on by.

  —Uh, prior engagement.

  Back on her side of the street, a guy sat himself on the hood of a station wagon, in front of her building. He too drank her soda. Her Diet Coke. What kind of operation you running here, huh? He gestured at the gallery. She let it all go, headed for the door, and the three steps seemed steeper, more demanding, as if this were part of her performance and the audience behind would be watching. She loved her boyfriend, at least right now she loved him, even if he didn’t seem to have many friends, even if there were nights when she would come home from school and she would find him alone in the house, with the videocassette recorder fired up, the one that they’d gotten from her parents, beside it a sequence of horror films that he loved since his childhood. Who are we going to invite to the gallery opening? she asked. Don’t worry about that. That’s the easy part. They had addressed a few invitations, maybe thirty, but would any of those people actually come? There were a few people he knew from his day job in the city, as bibliographer for the Encyclopedia of the History of Religions. He would get a dozen index cards with names like Mercia Eliade or Rein-hold Niebuhr on them; he would go down into the maze of stacks at Columbia, see what he could see, a Festschrift published in The Hague, some old numbers from the Religious Anthropology Quarterly. Akhenaton’s or Moses’ conception of monotheism. If he did enough of these cards, hourly, he’d have enough money to pay, temporarily, for his long distance calls, in which he invited friends from Austin or Burlington to come to Hoboken for the show. She searched deep into the recesses of her purse. Nope, not in that front pocket, maybe in the zippered pocket in the front, and, okay, if not there, don’t panic, they’re in the back pocket, she never put them in the back pocket, okay, shit, where are the keys, she had no pocket on her skirt, of course, women weren’t supposed to have pockets, but she checked nonetheless, absurdly patting down her front and her rear as though there were pockets, then back around again, the entire sequence, front pocket, back pocket, interior pocket, glancing toward the mayhem on Madison Street, where the hellwas Gerry, and why weren’t her keys in here? Her mind rushed back over the last half hour. When she was fighting with the dogs, did she have them then? Had the keys fallen out when she had stumbled on the sidewalk? Was there a snapshot in her recollection of a purse overturned, a glint of her silver key chain on the sidewalk? She tried the knob, an old rusty thing on the metal door. It didn’t give.

  Across the street, Joey and Mike, helping Anthony down the sidewalk.

  A homeless guy had shown up from a squat in one of the nearby industrial buildings. The homeless situation was expanding here in Hoboken, M. J. believed; once there had been these hotels down by the terminal, the Hotel Victor, for example, a hotel that existed as a satellite business around the Irish bars, watering holes where floozies and drunks who had lost the weeks wages on dog races would console and antagonize one another. These were the hotels where these men lived, beside immigrant women and their children; anyhow, when that garish restaurant opened next door, the one with the loud sound system and the waitresses with silicone implants, well then, the hotels had to close, couldn’t afford the upwardly adjusted rents, these people couldn’t afford to live where they had always lived and so they were going to have to leave. Some penniless adventurer had spray-painted protest language on the door of the Hotel Victor, Where will these men go? And there were multi-colored T-shirts appearing in town, with this language upon them, with the dingy Victorian façade of the hotel and its sign, and beneath, Where will these men go? But even the adventurer who had spray-painted the hotel was worn down by the futility of political opposition in the medieval town given entirely to political patronage, under federal investigation for the worst public schools in the state, and the men who lived in the Hotel Victor were loosed upon the street, and it was about that time that she started to notice one of the midtown homeless regulars, Aaron was the guys name, or at least that was what people called him, a delicatessen owner told her, and Aaron, the interesting thing about Aaron, in addition to the fact that he usually wore a hockey helmet which was to keep in his brains, the unusual thing was that he was, she believed, a gay homeless person, which you didn’t encounter every day, although she imagined, after all, that problems like mental illness struck in equal percentages across demographic categories. Underneath the grime and the strawberry-blond beard and the hockey helmet, Aaron seemed delicate, fine, frail, a scarecrow, and his gestures were balletic, as with the male dancers she knew. Iwant to write poetry. I want to compose ballets. I am God, as Nijinsky said. She could imagine making a piece for Aaron to dance, and it would have a lot of Nijinsky’s word associations for Aaron to recite while dancing. Aaron was frequently darting around bus stands pointing frantically at things and people who were not immediately apparent, and waving a half-empty bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. There were perfectly sane homeless people, of course, and unlucky homeless families, but Aaron wasn’t one of these. He was a deinstitutionalized homeless person. It would have been difficult to get him to perform combinations properly, though maybe he could have been videotaped, phrase by phrase, as in the abstract videos of Cunningham that M. J. liked; and what was he doing here, at the head of Mrs. Vincenzo’s prone body, as she regaled paramedics?