• • •
She took off her shirt and rolled off her jeans and her underwear, and now she was standing naked on a black plastic bag in the middle of the kitchen floor. Seventy-five years before, a man sat in a small white room and sang songs about sex and death and love and murder and the end of the world, and his voice was imprisoned, copied, and pressed onto a vinyl disc that now revolved on a spindle as the stylus tickled over the grooves and resurrected his voice here in Fred’s house.
John the Revelator, tell me who’s that writing?
John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.
Fred was fiddling with a paint sprayer at the kitchen sink. The paint sprayer was a handheld device with a plastic container for the paint that screwed onto a gun-shaped nozzle with an electric cord coming out of it and a tube with a filter that siphoned the paint out of the container and blew it out the nozzle.
Lana had pale skin and sharp hip bones and a tuft of copper-colored hair in her crotch with a trail of tiny hairs leading up to her navel. Her waist was so thin it looked to Fred like he could fit his hands around it and touch his thumbs and middle fingers together, and her rib cage showed. Her skin had that irretrievable glow and smoothness of youth. She was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette and snicking the ashes on the floor with her thumbnail.
Fred had bought some special paint for this project, which was kind of expensive and came not in a can but in a big plastic jug. Fred opened the jug of paint, mixed it, and poured it into the smaller container that screwed onto the paint sprayer. He screwed the container onto the nozzle and washed the silver paint off his hands. The wet paint didn’t look like much, just like thin gray mud.
“You got any allergies to certain chemicals or anything I ought to know about before we put this stuff on you?” said Fred. He was inspecting the side of the plastic jug of paint for a list of ingredients.
“I’m allergic to penicillin.”
“Well, they don’t make paint out of penicillin, Little Miss Louis Pasteur. This shit’s latex-based, no oil or anything, so I think it should be fine.”
“Louis Pasteur wasn’t penicillin, Fred. Louis Pasteur was milk. Like pasteurized milk. Some other guy was penicillin. Fleming. Ian Fleming?”
“No, that’s James Bond.”
“Didn’t that girl die when they painted her gold in the James Bond movie?”
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 6