Skin (13 page)

    And Michael, shy knock as he opened the door: "Could I come in for a minute? Just a minute," bringing a quart bottle of beer, sitting beside her on the other, broken, stool; to share it, very cold against her lips, somehow even colder going down. One of the Magistrate's arms dissected before them. "Are you using this in the next show?"

    "No. It won't be ready yet." A lie; with Jerome's help it could have rolled directly from the table to a performance; but Jerome was busy with gunpowder, let him do what he wanted, everyone else was. "I'll just use the Triple Deaths again, tear some shit up."

    His hand on hers, on the bottle. Softly, "You don't sound too enthused about it."

    "I'm very enthused."

    Looking once at her and then away, down, at blunt fingernails stained with some new makeup, some fantastic blood-based greasepaint, who the hell knew what they were cooking up now. "The Surgeons is as much you as it is Bibi. You know that."

    Her silence, her slow considering disagreeing nod; right now the Surgeons seemed more everyone than her but what difference, really, should that make; she had only her own work to do, didn't she? Yes. Of course, and Michael pointing out with exquisite gentility that she seemed to be avoiding rehearsals lately, was that due to anything in particular and turning all at once on her stool so it rocked and jittered on the cusp of balance: to stare at him, stare at him hard: "This," one hand in rapid pivot, "is my rehearsal."

    "I understand that."

    Sharp: "Do you?"

    Silence. His gaze down, then up.

    "Yes," he said, very calmly, very simply. "I think I do." More silence. Hair white in the sunlight, dirty windows and pale eyes, his hand moving to slide beneath hers, squeeze upward. "I don't think of things," another squeeze, "as having sides. I try not to, anyway. I don't think it's a good idea. Do you?"

    "Everything has sides," but she squeezed his hand back, hard, released it; the buttery swipe of tension in her grasp. "Front and back. Up and down."

    "Right and wrong."

    "Nicky and Paul," but she had to laugh, it was funny, wasn't it? Lots of things were funny, if you knew how to look. How to laugh. Not many laughs lately.

    "I better let you get back to work," and already the soldering gun, his shape in moving elongation as shadowy as a bruise in motion, as oblique as a shadow cast by a body unseen; before he was fully gone she was back to silent motion, her own motion as long and measured as a dance.

    So: not the Magistrate nor even the Madame again but the Madame's new daughter, Salome, who was in fact a simple moving construct, nothing but pure spin, like a quark Peter said: that's one of the attributes, did you know that? Spin, and color, and charm. And strangeness.

    Nicky: "What's a quark?"

    And, on the other hand, in other hands: the needles. And the knife. And Andreas, his fussy smile and guiding fingers around Bibi's, Paul's guinea pig back stretched bare and painted disinfectant-brown: "Wear gloves," Andreas said. "Always. Wear gloves."

    And Bibi, peevish, "But that makes it hard to feel what you're doing," and Andreas insisting, and Tess moving past all of them like a quality of silence, back in relief to the blunt ferocious juggernaut that was Salome. She had been very easy to make, pure point and shoot; in fact she was fun, in her own blitzkrieg way. The Magistrate now set aside; with Salome and the Triple Deaths she was ready, nothing to do but wait.

    And listen to the sniping, Raelynne and Nicky, Andy and Jerome, and Bibi in motion, double-washed hands and the dull-nickel gleam of surgical steel; and see Paul bleed, and smile, pink flesh puffed around the seeking sites of the needle. And endless in the background like atmosphere itself the long ominous whistle of Michael's new soundtrack, like sirens, thrown stones and running water, metal beaten till it sparks; the whistle Death uses to call us out to play.

    Obscenely hot. Cloudy plastic sheeting like dried sweat on the windows, it had once been a kind of foreman's shack, empty now; only Tess, long fresh burn along her bare calf, head back and in one hand a cracked bicycle bottle filled with warm tap water, her hair so wet it was dripping, metronomic as blood on her shoulders; she was alone.

    Heat aplenty, there on the foundry grounds, site of old burnings, old metallic immolations, at first Tess had thought it a wonderful kind of omen: the biggest burn of all, metal running rivers, pleased and impressed that Michael had secured the site without any sort of release or liability statement; Michael was good at things like that, liaison work, both sides of the street. Very good, and she was even able to get into the foundry itself, do a little scrounging, nothing that would ever be missed; no one was ever coming back here. Cathedral industrial and all around her the abandoned furnaces, cranes and ladles, heavy ghosts of hot metal, were there still gods in these machines? Dust and rust and reverence, out blinking into the daytime heat like Vulcan's daughter, bom at the forge, born for the burn. It would take an act of will to go back into the warehouse, the workspace, to be among the bickering again.

    Sweat prickling on her back like the tiniest needles, her shoulders in quick irritable motion to shrug it away. Thinking of Bibi, somewhere, where? Perhaps they had left already, she and Michael, gone back to work, back without her; good.

    Their last talk so brief, yesterday at rehearsal and Bibi strangely stilted, Bibi barely there and it's hard, she said, all of it's hard. "I see stuff in my head, how I want it to be, but-" Glancing back over her shoulder, back at the big room: back to work and Tess urging, "Try to get done early," but shaking her head again: time's wasting, can you believe there's still no costumes, that half-ass Sandrine; restless with some combination of excitement and nervous rage, Tess heard her curse in cantering dream long past dawn.

    

    

    And waking to hot morning, the two of them off ostensibly to check the site, and Michael literally between them, unsmiling, gentle, sucking water from a waxy cup of melting ice. The show-what show? her own irritable question unasked, they were no closer to a show than they had been two weeks ago, two months-was to begin with a pair of small explosions, the skitter of scattershot plastics, beads like BB's and the dancers emerging one by one from a fat cocoon of heavy netting to crawl, and continue crawling, about an altar where priestess Bibi masked in black as a horned beetle would cut various designs onto their disinfected skin. Paul would receive the most extensive cutting, of course; and Andreas aboard as well, as backup. Of course.

    And more explosions, growing progressively larger, mimicked by the spray from Nicky's scattergun, plastic to glass as the Triple Deaths prowled the edges of the crowd and Salome threw herself against a rusty cornucopia of found objects, trash barrels, scrap metal, treadless truck tires like giant rubber grommets. One last large explosion would coincide with an orchestrated Salome-crash into the Triple Deaths who would then seize and toss her, still thrashing, into an empty Dumpster, as the dancers returned in bloody triumph to their cocoon as Bibi mimed suicide atop the altar and the Triple Deaths faked one final headlong rush into the crowd. Who were to be sequestered behind crash barriers, one of Michael's tasks and would they be strong enough, was he sure and "Don't worry," his faint sweaty smile; everyone was always telling her not to worry; why was that?

    Walking silent as trespassers through the city of rust, she had mumbled something, some false brief excuse and turned away, down an avenue twisted as the shapes that formed it, old machines left to rot in slow unspectacular decay and pushing into this shack, get out of the sun for a minute, just a minute alone. And the minutes stretching, silence and time enough, now, for the sun to slip behind clouds, the morning's threatened rain and cupped mask of sweaty hands across her face, absurdly close to tears; why tears? Stop it, just stop, fist rubbing hard against her lips, stop it and the sudden noise, the door banging open: Bibi, impatient: "Where were you? We were looking for you."

    Turning on her heel and Tess standing, slow, pushing out of the shack and into the first of the storm, dark water on split trunks and beams and iron bodies and on her own face, her shoulders, legs in deliberate step behind the other two who ran, it seemed, in tandem to the shelter of the waiting car.

    Still no show, and the hot uneasy summer dragging on in a morass of shouts and silences, the group's first anniversary deliberately unmarked; only Michael seemed immune to the bad will; only Michael had a foot in both camps.

    And Tess, pausing over and over in the shielded heat of the burn, silent in smoke and distracted once again by worry: was it somehow her fault, desires divisive to twist the Surgeons' energy down her paths particular; was it right to choose for others, too? Even Jerome, and Peter and Nicky, flashpoint emulation but should they be off on their own, was she their crutch? Should there even be a Surgeons anymore, had it served whatever purpose it might have had and thus earned the right to be dissolved? Or was it wrong to think of dissolution, was there a path that would accommodate them all? Bibi believed there was a way to do both, but not a reason; she wanted, she insisted, Tess to see it, too. Strange to think that this new brawling might in the end drive them closer together; but for now more sparks when they met: edges meeting: the tip of the flux, the point of the knife.

    "I want you with me," stretched damp and dour across the couch-bed, muffled through her laced fingers, "I want to take you with me. Tess, if you could only see! If you would just try it, once. Just once."

    So little impetus to fight, again, the same old battle, so many reasons to say no; she chose the easiest. "And end up like Paul?"

    Bibi's impatient headshake, but the pale stare did not rise to challenge; could not: for Paul the cutting gone awry and now the skin of his shoulders sausage-tight and red, heavy pus beneath. He was taking Bibi's old antibiotics; hot compresses, Raelynne said, tea bags to draw out the infection and he was trying that, too. Without complaint, which was somehow sadder; instead pleased by his illness's capacity to draw Bibi's strictest attention, not seeming to understand that she saw him without tenderness, a symbol of failure to be corrected.

    "No," shortly. "Not like Paul. Oh, shit, John Henry," the smallest smile of all, "there's so much we could do. You know it?"

    "I don't know anything," meant mea culpa but received as a rebuff, Bibi rising stone-faced to leave the room, leave the building, slamming back hours later half-raging, half in tears, bright new cutting on her shoulder, strange glyph like a pound sign split in half. Sitting down hard on the couch-bed, humid hands on dirty knees: "We're both too good for this," and Tess beside to hug her, careful of the blood, unable to think of comfort, the single word that might restore balance, might bring again the ground to stand together. Trying for it, trying to talk about the Magistrate as if work's totem might heal, but all Bibi could think or talk of was her cutting; ending, again, mutually misunderstood.

    Michael tried: with both, Tess was sure without being certain, using surely the same calm tactics of kindness and diffidence: brown ghost at rehearsals, fiddling with his handheld boombox, distant by miles from the sulks and stinks, noises human and mechanical; but. Afterward, one arm loose around Bibi, dandelion head poking up from under into her extravagant frown, talking; soft voice talking.
Explicating?
as he did on the floor above, arm now around Tess: disposable respirator hung fetishlike around his neck and his slow sweet banter, always the questions she most wanted to answer:
Is it? Why? Show me.
Beside the worktable to watch the thump and jitter, the frisky gush of sparks, saying very little, really, never very much at all but always the things she needed to hear:
your work is good. Surgeons or no Surgeons, your work is good.

    "Now? Bibi, we're not ready."

    Tess's flat disbelief, and Bibi hunched, white-headed gargoyle on a chair broken backless, ticking points off her fingers: we need the work, they need to work, there's a new routine to try. And the money, too. "Anyway we can't let them sit around," peevish, her stare up, down, like searchlights sweeping a yard. "They get all fucking twitchy."

    "Translation," setting aside the tangle of cable, mouth in a frown and she felt above her lip a little mustache of sweat and dirt, it was unconscionably hot up here. Gray bandanna harsh against her face, rubbing, scraping, fist in echoing motion rubbing harder yet: "What you mean is, you want to work, you want to cut, right? Right? Just be honest."

    Instantly defensive, up and off the chair: "What's wrong with that? You work plenty, up here, you're always working. You do what you want and to hell with the shows."

    "That's not true! That is not true and you know-"

    "I know you're pretty fucking selfish, that's what I-" and both at once aware of Paul and Michael, watching from the doorway, Paul yellow-sick but grinning, Michael obviously distressed. And Tess hectic with the same old angers, slamming the cable down on the workbench, things falling and to Bibi, up off the chair, "Time to take your dog for a walk." Pushing past them all, downstairs with no clear idea where she was heading, into the car and on the way to the scrapyard; it was where she belonged, alone with sharp edges, the slow corrosion of rust like the seeping blood of the dinosaurs at the bottom of the pit. She stayed until it was dark, crawling planes and peaks of scummy iron, crawling like an insect up the garden wall until a guy with a flashlight chased her away, down and through the gates: and waiting there in a funnel of street light, Michael.

    Head wrapped in white like a mummy, ugly sunglasses around his neck on a braid of shoelace thong; unsmiling, waiting on her mood.