Alena: A Novel (18 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
up early as usual, I walked out of my little house to find no bright blue dome—no sky at all—but rather wispy swaths of gray-white fog that had settled low and damp over everything. It was like an installation piece I had once seen in which a long room was filled with gauzy scarves and big balls of cotton and heaps of feathers and linen streamers, all in shades of white, with the sounds of fountains splashing and doors squeaking and children calling piped in.
Life on Venus
, I remember it was called—though I have forgotten the name of the artist—but it could easily have been called
Nauquasset Morning with Fog
. Standing on the crest of the dune, I couldn’t see the ocean at all, though I could hear it: the low roll of the gathering wave, the tumbling as it spilled itself onto the shore, the heavy water sighing and hissing as it dissipated into the sand.

I walked down to the beach swaddled in fog, breathing in the wet, heavy air, then turned parallel, I hoped, to the shore. The ocean was still mostly hidden, only the lacy foam of the occasional wave reaching, like a tongue, far enough up the sand for me to see. Now and then I heard a voice, but sounds carried oddly, and I was never sure if the person speaking was down on the beach or up on the dune, and the long lamenting note of the foghorn sounded its warning over the invisible world. Once I heard the jangle of dog tags, and an old Labrador trotted out of the white billows and then back into them, paying me no attention at all.

I didn’t see the old man until I was almost on top of him. There, easel set up in the middle of the fog, was the wild-looking painter I had seen before. His white hair floated around his head like the fog itself, a faded bandanna tied tightly around his brow as though it were the only thing keeping his brains from spilling out. His jaw was stubbled a paler gray than his grayish skin, his paint-stained jeans were more hole than denim, and his ropy arms were awash in faded tattoos. He was painting quickly, so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t seem to notice me. He gazed straight ahead into the fog as though—despite the beach and the sea being invisible—he could see the scene he was painting in front of him. The mute otherworldliness of the surroundings and thepainter’s unconsciousness of my presence began to make me feel disembodied, as though I were peering through an invisible mirror. I stepped farther around behind him to get a view of his canvas.

He was painting a jungle scene. Bright garish greens from acid lime to bluish olive pulsed and shimmered in the sinuous forms of leaves, vines, muck, grass, snakes, rivers. There was even a greenish tinge to the skin of the men wearing camouflage in shades of sage and pea, carrying guns—who weaved across the picture plane. And then, in the middle of the canvas, a dark blot: black smoke and red flame and redder blood that dripped and spurted from broken bits of bodies. A hole ripped in the middle of the world. The black and the red flowed into the green, and, on either side of the blot, men screamed, their stained faces painted in incredible detail, miniature portraits of agony. Across the top of the frame, in a margin of lurid sky, ghostly skeletons drifted weightlessly: finely articulated constructions of smoke. Every few moments the painter would look up and stare into the fog, his face a blind mask. Then he would look quickly back at the canvas and make a mark. It wasn’t like watching someone paint out of their imagination. He really seemed to be seeing the scene before him, as though that terrible carnage were happening
now
—as though he had access to a crack in time, a peephole to a place where men had never stopped dying in the steamy jungle heat.

Suddenly he sensed something behind him. He whirled around. “Get down!” he cried.

“What is it?” I stood frozen in the billowing fog, beyond which, I suddenly half believed, men were crouching with machine guns as bombs hissed from lurid skies.

“Don’t you see?” He gestured frantically into the fog. “It’s a massacre! How did you get here? They’ve been blasting and burning for days!”

Somewhere above us, a gull squawked. The ocean thumped and sighed, steady as breath, and the warm air smelled of decay and salt. “There’s no one here,” I said, struggling to hold this fact steady in my own mind.

He stared at me, his pale eyes laced with red. Then, cautiously, he turned his head, first one way and then the other. Blinking, he seemed for the first time to take in the fog, the quiet, the white empty world. Slowly, he took his hands out of his hair.

“Is it heaven?” he asked tentatively.

“No. It’s just the fog.”

“You’re not an angel, then?”

I smiled. “I’m from the museum.” I pointed back in the direction of the Nauk.

He squinted. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “You’re not the fat one, and you’re not the thin one, and the other one is . . . gone. Hush, though, don’t tell.”

“I’m new,” I said. The fat one would be Agnes, I supposed, and the thin one would be Sloan, and Alena would be the one who was gone. But what was I not supposed to tell—that Alena was dead? Did he think people didn’t know? “I’ve seen you painting here before,” I said. “It must be hard with the wind and the damp.”

“Hard?” he repeated. “No. Do you know what’s hard?”

“What?”

“Dying. And it doesn’t even matter how—whether you’re shot or blown up or drowned or set on fire—it doesn’t make any difference!” He moved toward me, his white bushy eyebrows rising as though in surprise, his eyes as blue as fire.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I’m sure that’s true.”

“I don’t want to die,” he said. “And I don’t want to go back to Brockton!” Taking another step, his foot sinking deep into the soft sand, he aimed his brush at me, the red paint on the bristles wavering. “I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “I didn’t see, I really didn’t.”

“I’m sure,” I said, not knowing what I wanted him to think I was sure of: that he didn’t see, that he wouldn’t tell, that he didn’t want to go back to Brockton, wherever that was.

“I keep my promises!” he said. “You can ask Denise, she’ll tell you.”

“Who’s Denise?”

“My sister. She takes good care of me. Don’t move!”

He lunged, his hand coming down hard on the side of my head. “Don’t touch me!” I yelled. Something dropped to the sand.

“I didn’t hurt you! I didn’t hurt you! I told you not to move!” He pointed wildly with his paintbrush at something on the ground.

I looked down. At my feet lay a big dead horsefly. Its green eye bulged, iridescent and strangely beautiful, among the empty shells.

Sporting an artificial arm and leg, Morgan McManus picked me up at ten in his black Jeep. He wore faded cut-off jeans and a ribbed wife beater in desert camouflage, a leather boot on his real foot. Even though they had been mostly hidden by a button-down shirt and dark trousers the first time we had met, it had been the gaps in his body that had held my eye, the absences, the place flesh became air. Today, with so much more of him exposed, I could see raised scars around his collarbone, the pink ridges where his prostheses attached to his limbs, and, when the wind blew back his thick black hair, the delicate remains of what had been an ear. As I got in, he laid his hand on my thigh. “I’m looking forward to this,” he said.

I didn’t jerk away this time but sat awkwardly as his broad palm burned through my skirt. “Me too.” I cleared my throat, and he smiled his handsome, crooked smile and took his hand away to turn the Jeep around, but I could still feel the imprint on my skin.

I had wondered how he managed driving, but it didn’t look so hard. He had his good leg for the pedals and his good arm for the steering wheel. His prosthesis—the arm one—worked fine for manipulating the turn signal and, presumably, the wiper blades when he needed them, and for punching the buttons on the radio. I had never seen anything like McManus’s prostheses. There had been a girl in my chemistry class in college with a stiff plastic arm several shades tanner than the rest of her, and I’d seen a piece on the TV news about a famous skier with a shiny steel-footed rod that attached below the knee. But McManus’s were different. The arm was a bright jade green, a straight tube from where it attached near the shoulder tapering to a kind of flat paddle, like the end of an oar, where the hand would have been. An assortment of appendages stuck out from the paddle like the attachments on a pocket-knife—one shaped more or less like an index finger, one with a flat ring on the tip like a bottle opener, and one with a sharp skewer. The arm itself was carved—or, more likely, fabricated to look carved—in the manner of a totem pole, with strange squat figures in raspberry pink and turquoise stacked on top of one another. These figures had big staring eyes and peculiar limbs that, looking closer, I saw were depictions of the very limbs McManus was wearing—self-referential self-portraits, then, in a primitivist style, of a new race of prosthetic men. Each figure had a fat red quill slashed across its middle that I took at first to be a knife. But then it came to me that it wasn’t a knife at all but an erect phallus—a priapic animus—a defiant symbol of potency engraved into the inanimate limb. The leg, harder to see from where I sat, was made out of something dark and shiny.

As we reached the bottom of the lane where the gates were, he put the car in neutral, set the parking brake, and leaned over me to fumble something out of the glove compartment, coming up smiling with a joint and a book of matches. “Give me a hand?” He tossed the matches into my lap and slipped the joint between his lips.

I lit a match and turned toward him, holding it to the tip of the joint till it glowed. There was nobody around. A warm breeze blew through the open windows as he pulled in the smoke. After a long moment, he let it out with a groan of pleasure, and the air filled with the smell of it. Then he offered the joint to me.

“I’m working,” I said.

“Might make you see more clearly.”

I shook my head.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind.” He put the car back in drive and turned onto the main road. I put the matchbook and the spent match back in the glove compartment, wondering if the joint would look like a cigarette to other drivers.

“Wouldn’t a lighter be easier? You could do it yourself.”

“I can generally find someone to help me out,” he said as we sped between the green rippling dunes. “It’s medical,” he added. “Helps with the pain.”

“They don’t have that in this state.”

“Medicinal, then. A case of taking the law into your own hands.”

“Hand,” I said.

He smiled. “Very good.”

After a few minutes the road widened, the old bleached asphalt giving way to a new blue-black ribbon, the dunes beside us changing to scrub. “I like your arm,” I said.

“So, the studio visit begins before we even get to the studio.” He looked at me sideways, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting me back to myself: an insubstantial figure with a wild nest of blowing hair. I scrounged in my purse for an elastic, then remembered Bernard saying he liked me better with my hair blowing. I missed Bernard. I missed how it had been in Venice. I shut my purse again, letting my hair blow.

“Do you have different limbs?” I asked. “For different moods?”

“I do! I often wish I could wear six or eight at once, like those Indian gods. Do you notice how they’re always smiling?”

“Are they?”

“Absolutely. And do you know why? Because they can feel up half a dozen milkmaids at once. Or, you know, stable boys.”

Beach traffic was picking up. A surfboard protruded from the open window of the dusty car in front of us like an enormous tongue. Bicycles passed us on the sandy, treacherous shoulder. The fresh salty air was mingled with the stink of diesel. “Do you know that man who paints on the beach?” I asked.

“Ben?”

“Is that his name?”

“That crazy old vet who talks to himself?”

I hadn’t seen him talk to himself, but I could imagine it. “Who is he?”

“Why?” McManus asked, looking over. “You thinking of showing him? Outsider art?” His green arm twitched, all the wide-eyed heads bobbing mockingly.

“I’ve just seen him, that’s all. So I wondered.”

“He’s nuts. Whacked. Crazy as a loon. PTSD, psychosis, God knows what. He was in the psych ward till the eighties, when they emptied those places out. Now he lives with his sister.”

“In town?”

“When she can keep him there. A lot of the time he sleeps on the beach. Which is illegal.”

“Even if it’s your own property?”

“It’s not his property. It belongs to the Nauk. Alena used to call the police sometimes, but they couldn’t do much. Take him home, fine him. But it’s not like he has any money. His sister would have to pay. And then a few days later he’d be back again. Shit.”

The roach had slipped from his lips and fallen into his lap, and he couldn’t pick it up without taking his hand off the wheel. “Sorry, but can you . . . ?”

Carefully I lifted the damp roach from a fold in the denim as the Jeep hummed along the road. I could feel the heat radiating from him as though he burned inside his body like the sun. I wondered if he had dropped it on purpose.

“It must be cold, sleeping on the beach,” I said. “Even in summer.”