The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  The designs had become perfected over the years, since delirious sailors had first spotted them cavorting off the bow-wave or blowing kisses to the departing stern. Those voluptuous chimeras sheathed in scales. Men had eventually reduced it down to that passion, that desire for the place, that symbol of her, and the ones that chose the flash wanted to put its rudimentary marker on their flesh permanently, like the wet smell of a woman on their skin after she lifted off them. It was permanent intimate homage, a venereal badge of proclivity. It was eternal sex. When they looked at the mermaid they knew what she meant, somewhere in them, not very far down in the subconscious, was that knowledge. And Cy knew what it meant when he drew mermaids or naked women straddle-riding sea-serpents. And Riley had known all along and he’d said on more than one occasion that the reason women cried so readily was they were too full of saltwater like the sea, and he’d even put the notion of it in his dying speech. And if some men didn’t admit to knowing the derivation of the She-Fish image which they instinctively liked best on the walls of Cy’s booth, and paid him to transfer on to them, their cocks would know it and nod a little when, after the colour healed and the crust came off the tattoo, there she was in all her glory in the mirror, bright on the shoulder, top half woman, bottom half cunt-fish.

  Some days it was abundantly clear to him that men were truly still mesmerized by women, obsessed with their definition and their difference, and that all he was doing with his ink and his needle was recording the history of the female sex through the symbolic vision of another species.

  When he arrived in the greatest city on earth Cyril Parks still had with him most of the designs from the shop in Morecambe, and he would soon collect new ones in America that would adorn the summer booth or be bound in books for customers to flip through. Walking down the steep gangplank of the ship he had over three hundred designs and variations on designs, all told. He was going to be the Electric Michelangelo. He was going to be his own master. He was going to renew life, taking the best of the old and making it modern. Other than the copious flash, he had fewer possessions than ever though, it seemed, and if he tried to remember what he had once owned, those things that had been kept above the Pedder Street shop in old crates or in the Bayview Hotel on the windowsill or under the bed, his memory failed him, produced small black voids. In his scramble to get away he had brought almost nothing with him, he had left behind as much of his old existence as he could.

  He was now the falsely legal resident of a new country, his mind went out no further than his current situation in ambition, and he still was not fixing himself down with gathered material weight, not in the way that Reeda had positioned cups in her cupboards over the years, pictures along the walls, and manifest pieces of herself throughout the hotel, nor the way Riley marked his territory with eggs in a row, the last structure of skull of the birds he trained, put on his mantle like objects of art, and his thick, possessive handwriting in his vagabond books.

  The apartment in the building into which Cy moved was swabbed clean and raw and it was scented of sparse, woody emptiness like the deck of an antique ship after disembarkation. It had a chair, washing facilities, adequate space and acoustics that elaborated on tales told by the daily lives of other residents. He came to it unremarkably, indiscriminately, via a contact provided to him by the cousin of a friend of a man he had tattooed on board the Adriatic, and that was the way of New York City, a million corresponding pathways could open up from one handshake, or a meaningful cigarette shared. The building was located in Sheepshead Bay, a provincial town of Brooklyn not far from where he would soon work, a place where he could watch the fishing boats to-ing and fro-ing in the harbour, or the cranes on Emmons Avenue winching construction material on the banks, and where children sold clams and paper-wrapped fish by the water’s edge or out of wooden shacks. By the shipping lanes, in the district’s restaurants, there always seemed to be unassuming music being played, accordions and flutes and stringed instruments rhyming with each other, and it was a place of labour and banter and bustle. He paid a rental deposit to a tiny, old Sephardic Jew, a lady with hands warped and clawed and folded over like dead bird’s feet, and with spinning, white-blind eyes, and he was given a key. She put a limp talon to his chest in welcome.

  – For the dead before you here, bless this place. For the lock, turn the key against good sense.

  He unpacked his suitcase, it contained five shirts, two pairs of breeches, some shaving soap and his tattoo equipment and he took several long walks around the vicinity. He had a little money left over from the work on the ship, but he would need to find employment soon. And so he set out to explore the options. There were fish markets along the wharf and grocery stores that sold the foods of many nations, shore diners, chop and chow mein restaurants, barbershops and tackle huts. Bridges were being built and cobblestones were being uprooted to widen roads. When he looked into other dwellings in the neighbourhood he could see economical furnishings and delightful attempts to bend possessions into art, normalcy into creativity. Or perhaps there was in this country a new, incidental aesthetic to a coat hanging on a stand, a hat hung on a peg, the mosaic made against the wall from shadows of items on a table reaching too far, which he had not been aware of previously. The big houses on Lundy’s Row contained beautiful stained-glass fixtures that warmed the faces of their inhabitants. He enjoyed looking in people’s windows, he liked it even better than the infectious, inclusive conversations of neighbours on their stoops and in their gardens across the borough. It gave him a sense of serendipity, that here after all were other humans living in proximity, coincidentally and fully, and so for a time he was able to borrow the density of their lives to fill in his whittled-out own.

  The building where he lived was old by local standards, not as old as the brownstones further into the district, but it was already shambolic, as if used thoroughly by its successive residents. Its bricks were crumbling and spreading apart, and there were several long fissures in the dull marble of the foyer floor. The structure seemed as if it had once been quite grand and rather than keep up with the times it had gone gently the way of a stubborn aristocratic decline. Harder times had come its way with the influx of more and more immigrants, lowlier tenants with menial occupations had moved in as nicer buildings along Voorhies went up. It had been divided further into smaller units, as a government under pressure, and yet the building held on to a proud grace, and its tenacity did not go unnoticed by Cy. It was built five stories high in the shape of the letter H and at night there was cinema in each corner of the structure made from the light of lamps projected on to the wing walls and the casters of people, revealing the contents and dramas of each living quarter opposite. Cy was granted access into the lives of strangers as they went about their evening business, before they drew the curtains. A kiss as two silhouettes met, a soup tureen placed in front of an elderly man, an ironing board pulled out, fastened, and a bottle of starch set upright as laundry was attended to.

  Not many of his neighbours were known to him, beyond what habits and transactions the echoing pipes and slamming doors conveyed, the calls to each other in the hallway – Hey, Larry, get me some coffee, dark, twelve sugars – and the nocturnal cinematography generously provided. There were intriguing pieces of evidence which hinted at who might live inside. Letters in the foyer mail slots told him their names. Bierdronski. Vellum. Mr and Mrs Berger. Odours came from under the doors, cooking, cigar smoke, even the rich smell of the English countryside was detectable some days outside one of the first floor residences, number 104, and every time he passed by Cy paused momentarily, confused, enchanted, perhaps even a touch homesick for God knew what bucolic portion of his nation. Once he had even stopped a few minutes in the corridor, determined to define the fragrance. He bent close to the apartment door, closer than he had been to it ever before, close enough to qualify as a rudeness. It was a sweet ripe smell, stronger for his attendance, that was redolent of the marshes and the moors and the outer lying land ar
ound the bay. The scent of newly turned fields and useful earth and livestock. Inside there was a faint shuffling sound, but as you could never rely on the building’s erratic acoustics for authenticity, he was unsure if the noise was actually coming from the chamber beyond his ear. Then he heard a masculine snort, as if somebody inside was very sick with a deep chest cold. There was the rasping sound of a person perhaps breathing with immense difficulty just on the other side of the door or perhaps rubbing a beard along the wall, almost next to his ear. But he did not knock and introduce himself.

  He had been brought up in a hotel, where it was not necessary to form lasting relationships with the inhabitants of a place of residence, even though some had left lasting impressions on him, the consumptives with their wrung-out hope and Eva Brennan, who was the first girl to have drawn her name through his heart. Guests were no more than briefly fostered children, to be fed, washed, kept tolerably warm and entertained on funds provided. In truth, after the close-kept treachery of living with Eliot Riley, his inescapable, random tyranny, the perpetual evidence of his sickness and the availability of Cy as whipping boy, nursemaid and verbal punching bag to his landlord and boss, he was glad to be alone now and remote, with a simple new identity of his own choosing.

  There was a moment after he first came to the continent when he began to question the truth of what his trustworthy eyes conveyed, America unravelled, and for a short time reality departed, threw up its hands and marched out of the room. The moment passed, but it may have weakened his grip on the ordinary, the way Eva had weakened his disposition for love, and if he thought back to it, it may have led to all the strangeness, the dreaming and the madness that would occur during his time in the new world. It was a moment that he assumed all newcomers to the city must have felt at some point or another, for who could sustain a calm pace of breath or look up with an unimpressed eye or speak with a blasé tone in unwavering consistency and unaffectedness in this place? Who could get used to the set and the stage of the ongoing play? Such banality was impossible even for a lifelong citizen of New York, for whenever it felt the urge, the city itself and all its boroughs could toss up a curiosity or a peculiarity, or kilter out a hitherto unnoticed detail, or create a marvel of fiction or of fact right before the eyes to remind its residents that this indeed was New York, lest that absurd fact be forgotten, crucible of miracles and violence and spectacular wonder. These were the moments that defined the city. They were the waking dreams of a never sleeping metropolis.

  Cy’s first New York moment came only days after he had clutched the deck rail of the Adriatic as the tugs brought her in. He had been pouring water into the sink to wash his face one evening in his new apartment and on the brick wall opposite, slightly below his window, there was suddenly the magical shadow-house show of one of the lower apartments. A strong light at the back of the room was illustrating its contents, the shapes, and the occupants. The black profile of a woman walked past across the screen of bricks, her hips and breastplate and hair illustrating gender. She might have walked downstage but for being kept within the flat dimension. Her movements were restricted, lateral, and she was busy. She was carrying something soft that slipped in small pieces from her arms, clothing perhaps or gauze, like the filaments of an enormous blown dandelion head. In the vacuum of space all he had to go by, to differentiate by, were the textures, thickness and pronouncement of shadows. The woman dropped her load and disappeared into the black wings. And then she was followed by another puppet, something impossible, something from a pantomime. A horse moved onto the stage after her. Its cameo head tilted, paused. He could tell immediately what the shadow was from the length of muzzle, the triangular skull, the almost human brush of an eyelash. But it must have been some kind of accidental invention cast by debris and objects positioned one on top of the other, books, a vase, and something organic like coarse hair, a flower perhaps or a plant, lit from behind like a lie and moved. Just a trick of the light and a liaison between the contents of the room, or an illusion, the way children fake their hands into animal silhouettes when they find empty white pools of light or useful sunshine on the playground floor. There was equestrian stillness for a long minute so Cy could almost persuade himself that it must have been some kind of trick, simply chanced items stacked up on the shelf and misunderstood. But then the muzzle tipped up a fraction, the ear rotated half a degree, the animal bent its head to the floor and came up with the soft substance in its muzzle, which must have been hay.

  – Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! Less donkeys, more horses, Paddy Broadbent!

  Any doubts Cy had, evaporated. There was a horse living with a woman in an apartment in his building and Brooklyn was as hopping crazy as a bucket of painted frogs.

  The terrain altered. The lamp dimmed, and the horse was gone. The illusion vanished and any strange city secrets went with it. Next door’s shadow theatre concluded to no applause, just Cy’s slack jaw and his blinking grey eyes, the end of his first foray into the screwy possibilities of this realm. He brought water in his hands to his face, dampened his long hair where it met his neck. He would never again be sure that he could rely on his eyes, as he had relied on them for years in Morecambe Bay, give or take a picture of blood, a drop of drink, the odd little white lie. Because here, in this rubble-some, rimose city there were actual anomalies in life. Because below him lived a horse and a woman who blew around like a dandelion stalk in the breeze. He laughed out loud then and it sounded hollow in the sparse apartment. He had become for that moment a lunatic, delusive, he had become one of life’s apostolic madmen. In rural England, people concentrating hard on the paths over moorland as they drove carts and motor cars occasionally swore they had seen a black panther cross in front of them, or an Indian tiger. And they believed it ever after, blindly, and they would always search for spoors whenever they passed by that spot again. There was one supposedly roaming around by Moffat Ravine, a beast of the moor, sabre-toothed and with fur that was mottled exotically, living right alongside the native sheep and rabbits, though Cy had never seen it. He had come to a new city only to find that it contained all the indistinct chaos and divergence and eccentric myth of the old world he had left behind. The same batty behaviour of its citizens, the same colourful prankishness and thunderstruck chromosomes. He had been met with it convincingly. And then he knew it. He could expect no easier life here, no clean slate, no simpler version. There would be no more clarity or charity in this land of new beginnings than anywhere else he had known.

  For all the city’s obscure adaptations and unclear reveries, for all its urban confusion and impacted allegories, Brooklyn did have one uncomplicated feature. It had purity of light. The early morning and late afternoon light was appraisingly referred to as being like that found in a Dutch master’s painting. From the prehistoric-looking bridge and Williamsburg at twelve on the clock face, around the borough past the border with Queens, Canarsie and the residences along Jamaica Bay, to Coney Island at the half hour, Fort Hamilton and back to the mouth of the east river, and in all the neighbourhoods converging on the dial-pin of Flatbush, something radiant and luminous could wash over the streets and the great parks and the tall, tight-packed headstones of the cemeteries, enhancing the buildings and making shaded areas seem more profound. Or rather the light did not come from above, but Brooklyn seemed able to imbue itself, generating the energy of illumination from within. It was a quality as self-produced and collaborative as the smell of the cuisines that wafted through the streets, and for many it represented the very magic of the place. That distinctive, shining character. Brooklynites would disagree about the best month for this light, the way museum-goers argue about the best portrayals of the masters, more for mild academic exercise than from a necessity to produce the definitive answer. Some swore by November, those of a melancholy disposition who enjoyed the hue of opal along the pavements, the glimmering quality of it on the stoop railings like the glitter along the edges of carving knives and scissors after they had been
brought out by residents and sharpened by the blade grinders who came round in carts ringing bells. For these people the late fall light reflected as sombrely as the atmosphere of mournful memories belonging to so many of Brooklyn’s residents. Some said the weeks in spring were most lovely when the light woke up and had newness, silver-air, and potential, making mirrors of the standing water in the roads – that period around which Cy had arrived first on the scene. For those, it was the light of amnesty and hope, complementing the eyes of free and living souls. In these early weeks Cy loved to walk through the district for this very reason, the reason of light, when it seemed he was travelling through an expansive, expressive painting. Upstairs, Eleven Pedder Street had also seemed painterly, but so devoid of joyful illumination. It was a still-life, a place of inanimate objects assembled with meticulous and menacing care, and washed over with tension. It held its breath.