The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  Grace had been outnumbered by the men of history, she had neither the political strength nor the support of her own people, but she had found a way to win her freedom, and for a time she had celebrated the identity of her body as her own sovereign state. And now the land had been razed again, it was desolate, death-soil. But her eyes, those dark, solemn, prolific eyes still glimmered and said her mind had not lost that spirit of rebellion and never would. She was gathering the last few insurgents, the hardiest survivors in their caves and forest hideaways, and they were forming a pact of defiance, they were stockpiling arms. The revolt was far from over. She’d damn herself. She’d go to the gallows bloody and brutalized but unbroken if she had to.

  He knew the only pity and consolation she would accept, the only tears she would stand for, were his. He could see that in her face, the finite sympathy and tolerance for him. Her flag-maker. Her ally. The man who rewrote her body’s history. The man who loved her. She gestured to herself.

  – They moved skin from my leg to here above my ribs. They said it would die or continue to live, but either way it would protect the inside. It was not cosmetic, they tried a few things. I signed forms saying they could. I don’t know how they did this, Electric Michelangelo. It is a miracle. I had to stay covered until it was healed enough for the air – even the air can bring infection to you – or I would have come sooner. They want me to put a liniment on that will make it hard, with some kind of metal in it, but I can’t reach so well. You must stop this face now. I need your help. Here. You can do this for me.

  She took a tube of cream from the pocket of her dress and held it out to him.

  – I don’t want to hurt you. It looks so … painful.

  – No. I can’t feel it any more, sometimes an itch, but mostly it’s like this …

  She took his hand in hers and placed their two first fingers together like the steeple of a church, while the rest intertwined to make its roof. Then she made him slide his other fingers up and down the joined steeple. It was the dead-finger trick that the boys of his school had once done to make each other squeamish, the sensation was of a lifeless body part and now it seemed doubly awful. He took the cream from her, put a small amount into his palm and smoothed it as best he could over the rocky patches at the top of her legs. The skin was less absorbent than slate. Skin was supposed to drink in moisture and hers would not take a sip. She put her hand in his hair, stroked it while he anointed her. He felt his eyes begin to brim again and he pulled her towards him gently and began to kiss her stomach, her hips, the ruined abdomen and breasts, his mouth soft and damp on her, her body tough as granite until his tongue found the safer, softer channel of skin inside her. He felt her hand close in his hair and pull on it gently, mooring them closer together. She whispered a word to him, twice, which defied any liguistic pronunciation he had mastered, but he knew it was an affirmation of some kind. Kedvesem. Kedvesem. For a few moments he felt her body swaying exquisitely against him, like the lip of a wave breaking at his mouth. Her breathing became husked within her chest, constricted then ameliorated from the errata of her respiratory condition, and her head fell back. Her rhythm was overcome by a series of small jolts, electrical currents, as if her body had been shocked, her life being taken or given back by a connection of energy, and then she was still.

  – Grace … I’ve wanted to say …

  – No, just this. Dziekuje, Cy. Tell Claudia that she must have Maximus now. But I can’t take care of him any more, you see. He will like to see all of America and if they take him to California he will like to see a different ocean. Tell her there is no other horse fit to carry her but Maximus … because … because he is as magnificent as she is and she will be his queen …

  Her voice broke then, suddenly, shattering apart like glass with her last words, and for a moment all the sorrow of Europe came flooding out. Cy looked up at her, expecting to glimpse a little girl or an unmade woman, the smallest in a stack of matrushka dolls. But already that pure, hatchling, embryonic thing was gone. Grace was staring at a point in space, forcing water away from her eyes to its underground channel, sealing the marrow of her spirit back up. Then she took a step away, picked up her dress off the counter and put it on, prohibitively across her shoulders, and buttoned it up the front.

  – Tell her she can put molasses in his oats and it will keep him strong. For you Electric Michelangelo, I think you don’t need molasses. I think your heart is very strong. But I wonder if it is strong enough for just one more favour that I will ask of you before I go?

  She was saying goodbye, almost. He had always believed that knowing her would include her walking away and it was true. Soon she would be leaving and he could not ask her where she was going because he did not even know where she had come from. He wanted to tell her to stay, that he wanted her, that she had haunted him like the wind on the pavements of rock on the Yorkshire moors since they had first met. The mechanical bobsled whooshed past on its first run of the day with people laughing in its carriages and a lost hat spun down from above and rolled on the pavement as if procuring for change. And he knew if he said those things to her now his voice would be as absurd as that hat.

  Coney Island would have had her back, in all her damaged, viable glory, because of the new horror of her body even, but that she would not be taken back. And Brooklyn would have cared for her intensively as its own, always. But something in her was shifting, already travelling, as if this place was now the province of an old failed world, a nameless country that had crawled its way after her from some undesignated spot on another continent, wherever she started from, wherever she had first kicked out the camp fire and mounted her horse. Grace was a refugee again, perhaps she had always been so, with a refugee’s identity that was defiant and pliable and eternally battling just as it was perpetually saddened and disinherited, raped and stripped of its homeland wherever it went. Her ethnicity was everything and nothing. She was beyond even America in that respect. And he did not understand how she existed at all. And yet, and yet, it did not matter. She had him still.

  – Yes. Of course, I’ll help you in any way I can. You know I will.

  – OK. It was a good move he made, crude though effective, but it can’t end here. Meet me tonight. The fountain at twelve o’clock. If you come, you will have to give up your sting, I can ask for nothing less. So think about it carefully. And if you can manage, don’t drink anything, it must be done cold in our minds you see. We’ll embrace now – there will not be another appropriate time.

  She kissed him on both cheeks and smiled.

  – Remember to look for that star, you will find it. And remember to tell Claudia about the horse. Oh, Electric Michelangelo. A szíved mindig emlékezni fog rám.

  She placed the fingers of her right hand gently on his chest, against the ship, above his heart, just as she had touched him within the booth months before. Then she turned away. He watched her walk carefully down the alley, her body stiff, the cotton dress soaked through at the waist, and he was unable to call out to her. He needed her to be somehow more broken by what had happened, because she was so valuable to him, and that left him silent. He watched her go and it was ordinary. Not the profound departure of lovers on the screen separating a last time, not the muted light of evening on the set of Brooklyn, not even piano music drifting down from Varga to accompany their alba. Just human blood in his veins and the shadow of the booth getting smaller as the sun rose in the sky. The smell of new grease on the runners of the bobsled coaster, onion butter from the sausage stand, and salt in the sea air.

  Only when she was gone from sight did he finally have to scream out, a lupine howl from his long upturned throat, and he slumped to the floor. His chest ached. A chronic feeling was pulling hard in him, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards. He could taste her brine in his mouth. And all he could think about was the great sucking blowing sea at Morecambe Bay, how the tide travelled in and out, in and out, relentlessly, further than almost any other piece of shore
on the British Isles, and faster than a grown man could outrun, like the maddening insolvency of love.

  That night, Henry Beausang told the police, The Avenue psychiatric hospital was unusually quiet. Most evenings there were minor incidents, such as the singing refusal of patients to take sleeping pills or a fork stuck in the back of a wrist, burrowing for artery. A man soiling himself in some kind of incoherent protest. The inauthentic laughter of the delusive as restraints were called for. But that night the corridors of the ward were hushed, the crazies all shuffled off to bed without much assistance. And he did not like that kind of quiet. No, sir. For it meant trouble later on, usually of the fiery variety or sly eluders running through the hospital grounds with their cotton gowns flapping open at their pumping backsides. He was irritable and, he confessed, he thought he’d have himself a drink to settle the nerves. Not a large one, just enough to take the edge off. He was used to eerie spells of calm with trouble squatting on their backs, hell the state of Georgia was full of them come Klan season, so that didn’t make no never mind. But something told him after this one a portion of damn hard work to put things straight would be required and he’d be as busy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Did they know what he meant by that cold quiet before the storm? One or two of the cops nodded in agreement, bewitched a little by the peachy voice. And maybe he’d had a drop more drink for good measure, said Henry, that there was his vice, you see. Anyhow, he was doing the rounds on the upper level when he thought he heard the cage elevator arriving and opening and he went to see which doctor or orderly had come up in need of him to wheel a gurney. But he was wrong, the elevator was not running, it was stuck between the first and the second floors, both lights were on and the needle was ticking its finger indecisively at two numbers. It was an old Otis service elevator with a soprano singing pulley and you could stop it with a red throw-switch in an emergency but sometimes it acted up and got a mind to stall wherever it damn well fancied. So he went on with what he was doing a few hours past midnight, which in truth was nothing much more than looking in on the strapped madmen as they rocked in their beds, thatching the ceiling with their nightmares, and tugging on his bottle from time to time. He went to the medicine station and spoke with the nurse there about nothing much, she’d vouch for that, and they took a drink together too and shared a cigarette.

  About three o’clock the hospital lights in the corridors were at their most sullen and he was well warmed by the white brandy. Piracy and crime had not yet wrought havoc on the wards and he began to relax. The upper level was all clear. No patients standing like cemetery statues at the window to be put back to bed and doubled up on meds or strapped down. Looking out of the wired window himself he could tell that it was one of those huge, heavy-moving October skies that made you feel you were on the bottom of a black ocean. The cage elevator was still stuck between floors so he took the metal fire-stairs down to two. This was the unit where Malcolm Sedak was being kept, along with about fifteen other men who had run wild about the city of New York upending lives and maiming relatives – those sick, maladjusted dogs needing to be kennelled out past the normal law. The rooms in this ward had the character of cages where animals await extermination, the smell of faecal minds, and he did not like being there. No, sir, he did not. Half of the patients were lobotomized, and half the rest were heavily acquainted with the electric tongs and the mouth strop. A sense of deliberation on everybody’s part was always present and that gave the ward a feeling of oppression. The floor had a security gate as well as locks on the individual cell doors. There was ordinarily a guard at a post there, who would operate the lock, but he was gone now and the gate was open an inch. That could just have been the man checking into the wing if he’d heard a splay noise, or maybe not. Henry had a feeling that there was some bad ju-ju on the waft tonight, so he took another slug of brandy for luck and went on through into the ward. Expecting nothing but low fluorescent illumination in the corridors he was surprised to see a little patch of orange remarking to him around the corner of the corridor. Then there was a bitter taste to the air, as when they tar the roads. At that point he got a strong sense again of wrongful interference and he was right, for he came upon the evidence. Someone had lit a damn fire in the metal bin where they dropped the waste and laundry, there was an odour of smouldering pitch in the air and there was that smoky, black-wagging tail oil gets when it burns. It was a poor attempt to bum the asylum down, that was for sure; he had known far better in his time. The fire was contained and in no danger of spreading, even while smoke lay up on the ceiling and made him sneeze.

  He took a quick look about, escaped patients had a way of taking blunt instruments with inhuman force to the back of the heads of orderlies when their attention was turned. But there was no one else in the corridor. Then he heard a shuffling muffling sound coming from the storeroom. He opened the door and inside was the missing guard, gagged and trussed up like a rag dolly stolen by some little thing’s mean older brother. Now, Henry had no particular enjoyment of this fellow, that was the truth, he confessed. The fact of the matter was the man had got Henry cautioned for drinking on the premises not a month earlier, so he thought on it a while and decided he was best left bound a moment until he extinguished the fire and investigated the situation further, least that would be his story if asked at a later date, which he was now being. Henry winked at the policemen then, comfortable within his own yarn, knowing the tale of his imperfection and incompetence was winning them all over. He did, however, slip down the man’s gag to find out who had gotten to him. Two of them, one big, one smaller, faces covered like bandits, he was told. They had taken the keys to the cells, so surely it was a bust out, said the man, he should secure the main gate.

  Quickly Henry checked the doors of the rooms, but all were tight, there appeared to be bodies in every one of them. He took a fire blanket and threw it over the metal bin. Curiously, there was a metal fire iron sitting up against the side of the cylinder that he had not noticed for the leaping flames before. It was only later that night this object took on any significance, turning the stomachs of the cops as they bagged it up for evidence. The other orderlies were called, doctors were summoned, and the usual protocol for lockdown began. They opened up the doors on level two one by one to check the patients and see who, if anyone, had been liberated and replaced with a phoney made of rolled-up bedding. In the ninth cell was Malcolm Sedak, there was a strong smell of smoke in his quarters, and, yessir, in a way an exchange of bodies had been made. He had not been belted in to sleep since his arrival at the hospital, it was not compulsory procedure, and he had never struggled against the nurses to truly warrant it. In fact the man had been one of the calmer crooks in the hospital. He’d maintained an air of accomplishment, dignity and satisfaction, which had truly offended Henry, particularly as his crime was brutal and against a lady, he had heard. But when they pulled the sheets back off him they found the buckles and straps were tight across him. Dear Lord, sweet Jesus, but it was not the same man that had been put to bed a little after sundown. There was a stained pillowcase over his head – not tied so Henry did not think there had been an attempt at suffocation, just slack on him like a redneck hunting hood. His nightgown had been slit off with a knife or scissors around his body and it was lying on the floor next to the bed. Had they known of the extent of his facial injuries they might not have brought the pillowcase off him quite so quickly as they did for he began to moan hellishly as it took patches of wet yellow skin away with it He had been burned severely around the cheeks. Worse stilt when the cover was fully removed from his head, they saw that the man’s eyes had been put out by some kind of branding device, and he was blind.

  Having finished his tale with drama and emphasis, Henry pulled out his almost empty bottle and took a swill and he held it out to the nearest policeman. Oh and the cell keys, incidentally, he said, were hanging tidily back up on a hook by the gate, as if someone had only been fixing to borrow them all along. Nobody h
ad even thought to look for them where they belonged.

  Charles Henry Beausang the Third spent four hours lying to the police about possible suspects and mapping his whereabouts in the hospital all evening for them. The elevator’s switch had been thrown between floors and the hatch opened and the cops had a hard time believing that this had not been brought to the attention of anyone earlier. One or two other points did not add up. Nobody had been roused by the smoke in the corridor. And, given the time the fire began, and when the injuries were perpetrated, there should have been more smoke. None of the doors on the lower level had been forced and the night watchman, well acquainted with the sauce as he was too, had seen nobody entering or leaving by the reception door. Yeah it was fishy, said the inspector, fishy, fishy, fishy. Then again if the hospital was run by drunks and half-wits, what could you expect. There followed some severe lectures about the inappropriate imbibing of alcohol on duty and the fact that this establishment housed some of the region’s rankest criminals, put there by the hard work of the city’s police department. All this Henry took with credible humility and shame, the bloodless blush of a professional flim-flam man. He did not know how long it would take the police to find Malcolm Sedak’s records in order to piece together the puzzle of who might have been involved with the crime. The man himself was incomprehensible when he spoke. He babbled like a child with night-terrors and kept trying to touch his missing eyes behind the bandages.