“It’s amazing.”
“Wait’ll you see Lucien’s place.”
We began walking up a narrow gully. I was glad I had the boat hook to help steady me against the slick rocks underfoot. As we climbed, the gully widened into the remnants of a road.
“That story you told me before,” I said. “About Denny’s girlfriend. The one who died.”
“Hanner.”
“Right, Hannah.” The gale picked up. I looked back to where the Northern Sky bobbed in the water like a gull at rest. “Those masks everyone made—did she have one? Did she have a totem?”
“I don’t think so. I think she just went along with whatever Denny did.”
“Your totem animal? It was a frog?”
“Yeah. Because they’re amphibious. They live on the land and the water both. Like me.”
I hitched my bag from one shoulder to the other. “What about Denny? What was his totem?”
“Denny?” Toby drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “Good question. It was a long time ago, but—”
He pinched the cigarette out between his fingers then flicked it onto the slick stones at our feet. “I think it was a snapping turtle.”
22
Lucien Ryel’s house showed what you could do with Ray Provenzano’s scrap-metal ethic and several million dollars. It resembled an ancient temple crossed with the remains of a lunar lander, built in the lee of a granite dome above the ocean and surrounded by a stand of massive pine trees and withered rosebushes. A cantilevered deck made of steel girders and I beams ran the length of the building, all glass and weathered metal, inset with blocks of carved granite: huge feathered wings, a colossal arm, an immense, preternaturally calm face. Solar panels carpeted a roof bristling with satellite dishes. The windows were pocked with silhouetted cut-outs of flying birds.
“First summer Lucien was here, we had so many dead birds we had to pick ‘em up with a shovel.” Toby paused to catch his breath. “They’d fly right into the windows. So he put those stickers up. Kind of messes with the view.”
The road wound toward the back of the house. Two large propane tanks were set alongside the wall. I stared at the roof. “He looks pretty plugged in.”
“That’s nothing. Lucien comes all the way out here and then he never leaves the house, just spends all his time in the studio or online. He got a digital switch so he could get high-speed Internet. Paid a bundle to run it here. He keeps talking about getting a windmill, but right now everything’s powered off batteries. I’ve got to make sure they haven’t drained. Denny’s supposed to check them, but he forgot once. He comes up here to use the phone and Internet but never bothers to check the goddam power.”
He stopped and stared at a small outbuilding tucked into the trees. A modular utility shed, its doors flapping in the wind.
“That shouldn’t be open.” Toby walked over to peer inside. “Huh. He took the tractor out too.”
He shut the doors and fastened them with a padlock. “Okay. Now we can get inside and maybe get you warm again.” He pulled out a key ring. “Eureka.”
After the onslaught of wind and cold, inside was eerily silent, save for a soft, rhythmic ticking sound.
“Solar batteries,” said Toby, shucking his rain gear.
We were in a long, open room, its vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by steel I beams. The polished wooden floor shone like bronze. No rugs, no cushions, but a lot of 1980s furniture made of welded copper and steel. The standing lamps resembled carnivorous insects. A Viking stove lurked behind a wall of industrial glass, along with a free-standing wine closet. The effect was of being on board the battleship Potemkin.
“So.” I wandered over to the window. “Did he really build all this? Or was it delivered directly from the gulag?”
Toby dumped his toolbox on the floor. “You wouldn’t believe what this place cost.”
“Yeah, I would. Taste this bad, you have to be so rich no one ever argues with you.”
“It’s very fuel efficient. See that south-facing window? You get incredible passive-solar gain from that.”
“When? On the Fourth of July?”
“No, really—it stays pretty warm in here, relatively speaking. Speaking of which, I got to go drain the water tanks. You try and warm up, I’ll be back up in a bit.”
“Here.” He fiddled with a dial on the wall. “That’ll make it easier. Heat.”
He got his tools and went downstairs. I peeled off my anorak, then my boots and wet socks. My feet felt like frozen lumps of meat. I warmed them as best I could with my hands, found some dry socks in my bag and put them on. I stuck my boots on top of the heater and set off on a quick circuit of the house.
It wasn’t exactly a party pad. The wine closet was locked. Other rooms contained yet more minimalist furniture, a plasma-screen TV, small recording studio. A powder room—no medicine cabinet—where I tried to clean myself up. The water was brackish, but it was warm. Right then I wouldn’t have traded warm water for the best sex or drugs I’d ever had.
I emerged feeling, if not appearing, a bit more human. I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror, staring at a face that looked more like Scary Neary than it ever had. I resembled my own skeleton, tarted up with bloodshot eyes and wind-burned skin.
I bared my teeth in a grimace and wandered into the master bedroom suite. It seemed to float among giant pine trees. Lucien Ryel had sunk a ton of money into building this place and heating it all winter long, not to mention keeping a caretaker on retainer.
Now I understood why.There was a fortune in artwork on those bedroom walls. And not the usual stuff your aging rock stars collect, Warhols and Schnabels and Koons and Curtins.
Ryel had a taste for the art equivalent of rough trade, or what had been considered rough trade up until about ten years ago, when, like bondage equipment, outsider art became mainstreamed. There were two Chris Mars canvases, a Joe Coleman, paintings by artists whose names I didn’t recognize but which were the sorts of things that would give you bad dreams, if you’re susceptible to them.
The stuff was amazing. Some, like a Lori Field collage of women with animal heads and pencil-thin limbs, were ethereal. Others, like a Nick Blinko drawing of a skeleton eating its own skull, were nightmarish.
There were photographs too. A couple of eerie Fred Resslers where you could faces in the trees. An early Mapplethorpe portrait of Patti Smith. A vacant lot by Lee Friedlander. Works by Brian Belott, Branka Jukic … I would have been happy to take whatever could fit into my pockets, if I’d had room.
Then I saw the photos beside his bed.
There were three of them. Oversized color prints, handmade frames, no glass. Monotypes, like the photos at Ray Provenzano’s place and Toby’s apartment. All three had the same childish signature.
S.P.O.T.
Nothing else to identify them. No title. No song lyrics.
Yet I knew they formed a sequence with the others. And even though I still couldn’t pin down what these were photos of, I knew they were linked, somehow, with the older photos I’d seen in Aphrodite’s room—those crudely manipulated SX-70 prints—and Toby’s picture of Hannah Meadows.
I couldn’t tell how they fit. The pattern was there, but because it wasn’t my own craziness I couldn’t put a finger on what held them together. But I knew they were all images of the same thing.
What?
From some angles it resembled a body, from others an island, or the humped form of some kind of animal. The colors were murky greens and browns and viscous blues, shot through with glints of red and orange. Like the others, these used handmade emulsion paper distressed with a needle or fingernail. In spots the dyes had flaked or been rubbed off. Stuff was embedded in the layers of pigment—a fly’s wing; hair; shreds of newsprint. Messy, but it gave the prints a strange depth, as though they’d captured some of the real world the photo sought to hold on to.
They reminded me of daguerreotypes. When you look at one of those head-on, even the darkest parts throw
light back at you, so you get a reverse image. It’s like a photographic negative and positive, all in one.
But then you tilt a daguerreotype just right, and the shadows and light fall into place, and what you’re looking at becomes a 3-D image. It’s an effect impossible to reproduce in a book or print, or even with computer imaging technology: the purest example of generation loss I can think of. A daguerreotype portrait always seemed like the closest you could come to actually seeing someone who had died a century and a half ago.
I tried to puzzle out the scraps of newsprint embedded in the photos.
U S T 2 SEE
EN
The letters reminded me of the ransom-note typography on 1970s album covers and band posters.
ST 29
Street 29? Saint 29? Maybe it wasn’t an address. Maybe it had some bizarre religious meaning. I took the first photo from the wall and sniffed it.
I gagged. That same sick, rank fishy odor combined with the worst dead skunk you can ever imagine.
“Uh, Cass?” Toby stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Come here. I want you to smell this.”
“What?”
I handed him the photo and went to the next two.
“Whoo boy!” Toby thrust the print back to me. “That stinks!”
“No shit. These do too.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He tugged his pigtail. “Did they go off or something? Can a photograph go bad?”
“I don’t think so.” I hung them back on the wall. “I think it’s something in the pigments he used to make the emulsion.”
“Do they use stuff like that? Stuff that spoils?”
“Not usually. Not at any photo lab I ever hung out at, anyway.”
Toby peered at the prints, his nose wrinkling. “It smells like, I don’t know—cod liver oil or something. Only worse. Like a skunk.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“Is there a kind of fish that smells like a skunk?”
“You tell me.”
He wandered the length of the room, looking at the other paintings. “I forgot he had this stuff. Kind of dark for my taste.”
He stopped by the window, stared out at the sea then glanced at his watch. “It’s getting pretty late. We’re not going to make it back tonight, not if we don’t hurry. I still have to check a few things here. And I need to go see Denny…”
He sighed. “I don’t want to be the one to tell him about Aphrodite, but I guess I’ll have to.”
“Were they still close?”
“No. But I think that makes it worse. Gryffin—”
He fell silent and looked away.
“We better keep moving,” he said at last.
He left. I hurried to a nightstand, rifling the drawers till I located a piece of stationery. Then I got out John Stone’s pen and my film canister with the stolen pills and removed four Percocets.
proud to serve read the pen, and it did. I rolled it back and forth on top of the pills, pressing with the heel of my hand to crush them to a powder. When I was done, I scraped the powder into the slip of folded paper and stowed it carefully in my pocket.
I was almost to the door when I saw a bookshelf nearly hidden behind a metal bureau. Its oversized art and photography books were organized by size, not artist, but I knew where I’d find Dead Girls, lined up neatly between Untitled Film Stills and Roberta Bayley’s Blank Generation. I pulled it out and looked at the title page.
For Lucien
A shot in the eye! This one’s the REAL THING.
Denny
I left without looking at Denny’s photos again. I didn’t want to get any closer to them than I already was.
23
Toby was in the kitchen, putting away his tools. I sidled toward the counter.
“You mind if I give that rum and Moxie thing another try?”
“Go ahead.” He smiled wearily. “Help yourself.”
“You want one too?”
“Thanks, yeah. Not too much rum.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m going out to have a cigarette. Lucien doesn’t like me smoking in the house. Right back.”
I found a glass in a cupboard and tipped the crushed pills into it. I could see Toby through the window, smoking on the stone steps. I poured a shot of rum into the glass then filled it with Moxie.
I sniffed and took a tiny sip. The stuff tasted so foul to begin with, I couldn’t tell any difference with the Percocet chaser. To be on the safe side I added more rum.
I needed this to work fast if it was going to work at all, but I didn’t want to kill him. Toby was a decent guy. He was also my only ticket back to Burnt Harbor.
Someone told me once that there’s no such thing as luck. You make decisions all the time without being conscious of it—like, you move before you realize you’re darting to avoid an oncoming truck. Or you walk toward a car before you realize the voice you hear is a stranger’s, and it isn’t whispering your name.
So maybe these things aren’t accidents at all. Maybe they’re just the beginning of a long chain of events that you set in motion yourself. Maybe you set it in motion before you were even old enough to remember. Playing in the car while your mother’s driving. Hearing what happened next. Opening your eyes when they should have remained closed. Seeing something you should never have seen. Moving when you should have stood still. Standing still when you should have run.
I watched Toby through the window. When he put out his cigarette I grabbed another glass and sloshed some Moxie into it.
“Hey,” I said as he walked back in. “Here—”
I handed him the doped glass. He looked approvingly at my nearly empty one.
“See? It grows on you.” He took a sip. “You know, it’s going to be an hour or two till I get back from Denny’s. If I’d thought this through better I wouldn’t have drained the hot water tank. You could’ve taken a shower.”
“That bad?”
He smiled and drank some more. “No, no. I just thought, you must be tired. I know you’re cold.”
“I’m better now.” I looked around and tried to determine which piece of barbed-wire furniture would be the most comfortable for someone to pass out on. I decided on a chaise that looked like a head-on collision, pulled a chair beside it and sat. “So where does ol’ Denny live?’
Toby settled on the chaise. “Other side of the island, past the little quarries. His place is by the biggest one. Maybe a mile. There’s an old road where they used to haul granite down to the harbor.”
He pointed toward the empty beach. “Hard to believe now.”
“Mmm.”
I waited impatiently. I was so wired I felt like smashing through those nice big windows. That would fit right in with Ryel’s aesthetic. I choked back a mouthful of Moxie and poured myself some Jack Daniel’s.
“Cheers,” I said, drinking. “I’m reverting to type.”
Toby finished his cocktail. “You sure you don’t want to take a nap?”
“Toby,” I said. “Listen to me: I don’t want to take a fucking nap.”
I prayed those Percocet weren’t controlled-release. Best-case scenario, Toby would start feeling drowsy within a few minutes. I banked on the alcohol boosting that.
“You’re the one doing all the work,” I said. “Rowing and stuff. Why don’t you chill out for a few minutes? I’ll wake you.”
Toby leaned back on the chaise. “Too much to do, if we’re going to get back to Paswegas tonight.” He yawned.
“Go on, rest for five minutes,” I urged. “I will if you will.”
“Yeah, okay, maybe. But…”
He looked at me, dazed. Faint comprehension crossed his face. “Hey. This is kinda…”
He tried to stand then sank back, staring at me with glazed eyes. “You.”
“It’s okay, Toby.” I poured myself some more Jack Daniel’s. “I can wait.”
He closed his eyes. I waited.
It didn’t take that long. When I thought
he was out, I crouched at his side.
“Hey, Toby,” I whispered then raised my voice. “Toby, man, wake up.”
I shook him gently. He snorted, and I lowered him onto the chaise.
Down for the count. I folded my anorak and slid it under his head. His eyes fluttered open. He gazed at me blankly then began to snore.
I looked outside. It was almost three o’clock. The sun would set in an hour. I had ninety minutes before nightfall, tops. I went into the kitchen and yanked open drawers and cabinets until I found a flashlight. I pocketed it, got some water and swallowed one more Adderall. I only had two left.
My instinct was to bring the Konica. But I didn’t want to risk losing it. If I made it back safely I could retrieve it then. If not…
I stood and zipped my leather jacket. I pulled on the orange watch cap, grabbed the boat hook, and headed for the door. As I did, I caught a glimpse of myself in a dark window: a gaunt Valkyrie holding a spear taller than I was, teeth bared in a drunken grimace and eyes bloodshot from some redneck teenager’s ADD medication.
“Hey ho, let’s go,” I said, and went.
24
Christine once showed me a quote from Nietzsche: “Terrible experiences give one cause to speculate whether the one who experiences them may not be something terrible.”
“That’s you.” She shoved the book at me. “What happened to you in the Bowery that night—”
“Shut up,” I said.
“I’m right! You know I’m right! You can’t let go of it, you can’t even think of letting go of it or grieving or doing any goddam thing that might help! So you better just hope nothing else bad ever happens to you. Because you know what, Cass?”
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