The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  The sister of the women’s ward told him to go home. They did not know how long Grace would be there, she was very sick. Each day was as unpredictable as the last as far as her injuries were concerned. She told him to get back to work at the factory. He’d been courteous to stay so long but he should concern himself with the security of his job, she said, mistaking the ink staining the rims of his fingernails for perpetual conveyor-belt grime. When his lady friend got better, if she got well enough to leave, she would come and find him no doubt. Sister’s eyes were dense and shining dully like cannon shot, they said she understood he loved this poor, broken woman, but it was time to pull his life together now. She opened and closed the situation for him, and he was grateful to her for that. Sister was a tall woman that finally reminded him of his mother, thin-haired, possessed of abilities to comprehend and ignore bodily excretions beyond the capacity of her peers – she had in her hand a jar of something pale blue-grey and intestinal suspended in liquid and resting on her papers as if it were an ordinary glass of drinking water. There was a watch pinned upside-down on her uniform so she could time health as she took pulses.

  Cy had known that one day he would meet someone in the image of Reeda Parks, he’d suspected all along there were others of her kind, and Reeda had been following him around in his memory for hours, weeks, years it seemed, vying for precedence with Riley. Now she stood before him, resurrected, with a page of notes about her patients and the exact quantities of their medication pencilled darkly in a column, the essential anatomical waste in her hand, and her sufferable maternal dogma. And he knew if he really wanted this woman here before him now to be the ghost of his dead mother, this indulgent and purgatorial country would oblige him and endorse that wish, making the apparition real, come to him to shore up his soul in its time of distress. So he kissed her cheek quickly because he missed Reeda, he did, and though Sister was perhaps a little intrigued by the gesture she nodded, glad as all matriarchs are that her advice had been acknowledged, and he left her to her duties.

  He might have tattooed five hundred people that summer or he might only have tattooed five. The rest of the season was passed in a blur, with him stewing, brooding, festering, gathering all communication up in a tight knot at the back of his mind and putting the fear of God into anyone who sat in the chair for work. Nobody cared to guess at the despair behind the frown and the complete lack of verbal engagement did wonders for his reputation. Perversely he thrilled the customers with his convincing portrayal of one of the most authentic, stony bruisers in the profession, for silence is the most threatening proposition of them all, a vacuum that will hold all the fears and treachery of those it confronts and still have room for more. Rumours even went around that he had cut out his own tongue for a dare before force-feeding it to a rival. His hands cooperated, they were reliable that way, and there was more trade than ever, but the rest of him was retired. On the lathe of his rage he reduced to sawdust all the pleasantries and banter he had once laid down. He had always been inclined towards a quiet disposition, Eliot Riley had disliked it of him, and it seemed he had been forcing talk all his adult life, for one reason or another. Now he had not the will nor the encouragement to produce one single unwarranted word. His mind felt alien and hectored at Coney, the whiz-bang-boom and hurly-burly of the place harassed him, made him dizzy. There were bizarre conversations that he simply could not comprehend.

  – Hey buddy. Know where I can buy a pogo stick?

  – What?

  – A pogo stick. Where can I get me one? Pogo-pogo, everybody wants a go!

  – I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you are saying to me.

  At night he drank his fill and it wasn’t enough. He began to take a drink before work, which he had never done previously, not for pleasure or vice or venom, not even for the sake of his master who had done the very same thing to counter or further blackness of his spirit – not in Riley’s name, Amen – but just for that first reassuring sting of liquor on the tip of his tongue.

  And Coney Island looked sick to him. Overnight it seemed as if the fairground had morphed from a potentially ugly thing into a hideous creature, a full-blown monster, like a wyvern wriggling from a rotten egg. He looked around the place and it was skewed with disparagement, whole screens of groaning amusement arcades seemed to be lit now by an eerie, holocaustic Brooklyn light, or seemed reflected in distorting funhouse mirrors. It was all wrong. Occasionally, on afternoons that were less hectic or when he became fed up with work and with the rumpus of the parks, he slipped back into the animal pit of the Luna circus to see Grace’s horse. Claudia had been paying for his stabling since the incident, she would not hear of him being sold on and she paid extra to the zoo hands to exercise him daily and treat him well. There were amazing animals behind the tents and domes, many of which seemed lessened in their tame proximity to each other, their relegation to part of a collection, as if they were only suited to independence within broad khaki expanses of native land. Tigers rolled lazily about in their cages, yawning like house cats. The pair of giraffes had thick scabs on their knees as if from endlessly practising their curtseys. None of the beasts seemed real. They were fading under their old paint and needed sparkle. Maximus always seemed very still in his stall. After Grace’s complaints Cy expected him to be feisty. It would take the animal a second or two to come over to him and then he would rest his head on the gate while Cy rubbed his nose.

  – Hello, boy. Got some peppermints for you, don’t tell the missus. She hasn’t forgotten about you. You’re still her favourite boy. She’ll be back for you soon. Then she’ll ride you up to Canarsie and back, I promise.

  The horse’s eyes were inordinately sage and sorrowful. They always had been, it was the mark of the species, but now, in this place, and with all that had happened, the animal seemed more human to him than beast, and its eyes acted like a tripwire on his softer emotions. It was difficult to leave Maximus; Cy would spend an hour just petting him and interpreting the evolutionary sadness of the creature. There was a gentle therapy to the visits. The inner stillness of him that Cy had first seen pictured on the brick wall of the building where he lived was present at all times and acted like a salve. So often since the attack Cy had felt on edge, or angry, storing malignancy within himself instead of venting it outwardly. And Maximus calmed him, helped him to relax. So that when he left the tusk-light of the circus stalls he would, for a while, feel better, until the hoary, rakish atmosphere of the exceptional present began to rub his nerves raw again. And the biggest amusement parade on earth sucked him back into its frenetic supernova, collapsing his energy and his sanity along with it.

  In daytime the light of the sun seemed to be wasted over the glaring place, and when night came and the horizontal shadows took the legs off the piers, told them they did not exist any more, the garish floodlamps created rubbery cartilages and tissues of muscle underneath Coney that seemed to keep the entire island afloat on a large falsely illuminated lip. But it wasn’t only the Island that chilled him and set him on edge. Coney was just the exotic pet of an eccentric owner. The sickness went beyond it. Everywhere it seemed there were potential madmen and acts of sensibly plotted perfidy or fundamentally corrupt faith waiting to occur, and he did not know how people could stand it, how they could live day to day with that kind of potential in their back yard. Society was suddenly filled with loose hinges and smouldering fuses and he barely felt able to leave his home. Even in the tepid streets of Sheepshead Bay he felt he wanted to look over his shoulder. At any minute there might be weapons produced or chloroform gags or speeding vehicles revving their engines in alleyways ready to throw off their emergency brakes. Because where had Malcolm Sedak come from? He was just a face in the crowd, a darn in the fabric. He was just New York. He was just America. He had stepped out of its undergrowth with his plan and his pledges to God and his diabolically limp cock in order to tear Grace down, to dissolve her. And Cyril Parks hated him, wanted to hate him, had to, he aimed ev
erything he had at the man. He fell into it with determination. But the hating seemed not to have an end or a floor and he kept on falling, his hatred escaped the confines of a single repulsive being, spreading systematically outwards, outwards. He hated the venue of Grace’s demise and got more and more tense within its walls until he fought with a complete stranger one night who had done nothing more than ask the sisters about that fateful evening in passing while smoking a cigar, and Valerie kicked him out. He hated the Island and was spiteful to his customers. He hated the stale smell of the subway and the meritless citizens who rode it and the ensigns of the country. So that more and more things were to blame.

  Cy’s mindset was not helped by the compulsory and continual updates of Malcolm Sedak’s hospital incarceration by Henry Beausang, who worked in the institution and had access to all kinds of information. Like the crazy’s unrepentant stance. Like his cock’s happily restored ability to function. Like the colour of his supper plate. But Cy had to know about him, to feed his anger and his spite, to assure himself that Grace’s enemy was contained, and had not dissolved through a wall only to re-form in the outside world, like an old disease, like the plague.

  When the first September chill came in off the Atlantic and refused to budge one morning, Claudia and Arturas came to see him and told him this would be their last season at the Island. Since he had not seen them in Varga owing to his banishment it came as a mild shock. They were going to California, by way of an enormously varied land mass. The beaches along the coast were golden and ripe with bodies awaiting ornamentation, Arturas said. And perhaps Claudia might try her hand at the movies, she could act lines or silently terrorize peroxide-blonde actresses with her sheer zombie size or as Frankenstein’s sutured bride.

  – They better have good hotdogs in Los Angeles. It’s all I can say. Will you join us, my English friend?

  – No. I’ve been thinking of joining up. Going back over. May as well be of some use.

  Arturas gave Cy a look that was set painfully between disbelief and hazardous comprehension. As if something latent between them, a tiny, precious, unifying thing, which they had both always tried to protect in the middle of a nest of unmentionable conversation, in the middle of their professional rivalry, and in the middle of a grotesque and sundering war, had now been broken. Turo took Cy’s offered hand and shook it, and with his other hand he reached for the back of Cyril Parks’s neck, pulling him forward until their foreheads met.

  – We will have a drink then in Varga, for old time’s sake?

  – I can’t. I’m barred.

  What he wanted to do was take hold of Grace’s hand and into it pass something of his own heart, but instead he held back, and he found himself watching her remove a cotton dress, a garment softer than candyfloss from a spinning machine which some friend or nurse had been thoughtful enough to get for her, to cover the fraught body. She unbuttoned it down and open through the front, making it into one long piece of material, and she slowly peeled and unwound herself out of it. Then she was naked in front of him but for her shoes. She had not put on underwear, her breasts and pubic region had been included in the savagery of the acid and were still healing. Before he could harness his horror, Cy was crying openly, an uncontrollable weeping that forbade neither his voice nor his face from expression. Grace stood before him, on the sidewalk next to his booth, with her dress in her hand and her scars open to the sky. She stood there as if she were a peep-show whore in a film about the undead. Or one of Coney Island’s monsters. Litter tumbled past them with an insistent, autumnal breeze behind it, empty wrappers, paper bags and cartons once containing food. And there amid the trash she was extraordinary against the familiar background of the alley but no less ruined.

  She had walked with absolute care up to Cy as he was opening the booth, like someone recently woken from a spell of being knocked unconscious, and it was further than she had walked in three months, from the station to the end of Oceanic Walk, though he did not know of her small victory. He had not seen her once during the period of rehabilitation, having recoiled from the effort of trying to get to her as hard as he had initially made it. He was removing the lock from the hinge of the booth when he turned and saw her walking towards him, at first not recognizing her, for she moved like an old lady with well-retained posture and rheumatic difficulty. Then it was her hair with its traces of red and the dark features of her face that gave her away, and his blood froze for a moment before lurching forward again.

  – Grace? My God, is that you!

  She was almost to him when he spoke, treading with rigid care on the pavement, so even before she revealed her body to him he knew the damage must be extreme. And without a word she stood before him and stripped away her clothing.

  If her eyes said love, if they said it to him then in accompaniment with the gesture, his clamouring heart and the racket of his blood drowned the message out, so he would never know for sure. He could not fathom the bravery of that exposure, somehow stronger than the twenty men and the team of Clydesdales it look to drag that ridiculous runaway motorbus from the sands of Morecambe Bay when he was a boy, after its steering pin had snapped and it had careered through the prom wall, decapitating passengers on its tumble. Stronger than the brawniest arm in the fairground slamming the mallet down on to the Beef-o-Meter to ring its bell. Stronger than diamond or atomic propulsion or wrought iron. Her. Naked. Scarred. The boards of the booth were not even fully down yet to provide her with some privacy inside. But her expression said that the landscape was irrelevant, she might have been lost in a desert or on the presidential lawn or on the moon for all she cared.

  Early passers-by slowed to see if this was some kind of radically casual, unorganized treat, a show of Coney’s titillating spontaneity, shameless when it came to human dignity and the rules of physical conduct. Perhaps she was one of the ugly bodies they had been promised they would see, escaped from the big top. But Cyril Parks knew this show was for one man alone and no carnival barker would call a roll-up, roll-up. She gave him a full, wordless minute to see her, while his mouth contorted and he wiped at his eyes and tried to control himself.

  Her stomach was tight and hard as wood ash, collected in lumps and ridges, so she would never be able to bend over and slip a strap through the buckle of her shoe again, she would always have to retrieve a dropped item by bringing her upright body down on bent legs, blind to whatever was underneath her. Her pubic hair was mostly gone, just a few strands remained below a bald patch, so she looked like a little girl. He could see the slit line of her against a stripped membrane. Her left breast was made smaller than the right by the acid, which had swept through fatty tissue with abandon, and the nipple there looked like a piece of misshapen rock, chipped glass. The tattooed eyes on her torso had been erased in places, in others they had washed together in bizarre, nondescript patches of concentrated dye. Green from the largest ruptured iris on her abdomen had collected above her appendix, and it seemed in comparison a beautiful emerald seam against the strip-mined earth of the rest of her. No. She was like a fresco with a jar of paint stripper knocked over her. She had run, dried and hardened. Several of the eyes on her arms, legs and back had survived, but otherwise she was as streaky as an abstract painting. She put a hand up to his face and moved his tears away with the heel of her palm. She gave him those moments before she spoke, she had probably not in any case known how to prepare him verbally for the sight. Nothing she could have said would have cleared the way.

  – So. The doctors can move skin around on your body now. From here to here, they cut it off and put it back on. This is called a skin graft, they can only just do this thing. Mostly it still doesn’t work. It is amazing that they can do that, I think.

  Cy took a chestful of air and nodded, his diaphragm shuddering. He put his hands on his hips and tried to breathe calmly through gritted teeth, he felt as if he had been running fast for the last few minutes. But he did not look away from her. And then she reminded him of something. Her vo
ice with its different, unlocated accent and the dark white and grey body with its patches of green – she was like a thing which he had encountered only twice as a boy from the train window as he rode to his Aunt Doris’s house, and he had thought it haunting and raw even then. It was the rock pavements of the Yorkshire moors where the earth’s bone surfaced in bands and petrified rivers against the swaying grass and the living ground. She was now in part dead, like the stone of the moors, while regions of her still grew, and her tone was the dirge-like song of the wind.

  A man in front of them on the other side of the street whistled in their direction and crossed over to get a more intimate view of the nude woman.

  – Turn around girly-girl, let’s see your better side.

  Grace obliged him, turning around inanimately like a gigot on a spit, and the man stopped coming and took his eyes off her. He adjusted his collar and hurried away.

  Cy took the boards of the booth down quickly, his hands shaking as he stacked them, and they both stepped into the small enclosure. He offered her a seat and she shook her head.

  – It takes too long. Up and down. Not worth it any more. But, I’m finding ways.

  He sat down on the stool. He had to sit. He had to remember to breathe, to tell his lungs to operate. He was now in a direct line with her midriff, the region of the worst damage. There was amazing detail to the scarring. The hospital gauze had left cross-hatching on the plateaus of skin. There were peaks like miniature mountain ranges, black gullies. Those wounds! She had always said it would be about body, hadn’t she, that the battleground had been chosen by others and a war would be fought there, and won or lost? Hers had been the site of an almighty uprising, on a territory mapped out and claimed by an administration that had every intention of preserving empire and dictating the law of the land to its colony. So all she could do was find a way to overwhelm the government with quick wits, a trick of the light in battle using shields and mirrors and superb body armour, blinding them for long enough to disable their forces and vanquish them. And for a time the victory flags had flown across her body. How must that have felt for her, he wondered. Like a full brass plate and a cheer from the crowd? Like Liberty’s fiery torch? And he had known what she was up against all along, hadn’t he, him with his booth walls drowning under images of sex and stylized female bodies? Yes, he had known.