Skin (15 page)

    Peter's quick nudge, hurrying back to his bombs and Jerome moving swiftly past as: the drag of heavy curtain, I believe that's your cue: take up the Magistrate's control: be ready. The dancers clambering along the scaffolding, Paul the last one to rise, coordination off like a drugged bug. Cut-down smoke machine pumping smells as rich as rotten meat, instant dead-food miasma and Bibi, turning in that instant, turning on Tess: to stare, lips back like a dog and no sound at all.

    The soundtrack in earnest, barnyard groans and the beaten whistle of steam and Bibi stepping, goosestepping, ironic priestess in place, facing the crowd with a perfect flourish of black-gloved hands. She was all of a piece, solid and beautiful as a loaded gun; like a mirror that perfection and threat reflecting back to Tess her own ferocious sad apartness, outsider fighting in the end to get back out.

    Shaking hands on the Magistrate:
All right,
she thought, sliding damp thumbs, fingertips:
let's get it over with.

    Half a dozen small explosions, grotesquely loud in this enclosure, echoes punctuation in the soundtrack growl and the stutter of strobes, two bodies like lizards crawling slow down the scaffolding-already swaying a little, what a shitty job Andy had done; never mind. Pay attention.

    To the Magistrate: its first true show and see how easy to work, to manipulate, vacuum burble and plastic hands stuck in wet beseechment against the heavier plastic skin; reaching, vicious dandy, to pinch with alligator clips the long skirt of the curtain, pinch and twist and rip it like skin, tinsnips moving like the beak of a raptor, a killing bird, the vulture who tears forever at writhing Prometheus: bring me fire.

    More bodies off the scaffolding to ring the cutting table, less stylized altar than butcher block and there the jitter begun of steel over twitching flesh, hot trails of blood mingled with the freshet spurt of blood pellets and they were sticky with it, they were slick and grinning and wet. The heavier groan of metal, metal twisting, Salome imprisoned in something like a drum and trying to batter her way out, the battering miked and sampled back into the larger shriek and another victim stripped for the knife and the Magistrate moving to the very edge of the safety ropes, control box in her hands as warm as flesh and squeezing, tinsnips picking at the scaffolding itself, swinging like a beast on the loudest part of the crowd, everyone was yelling, Paul lumbering past for his turn on the table, poisoned yellow eyes like a plague victim and hot, so hot in here, all the windows open and the blowers on full-bore and hot like the slippery cave of a beating heart, a dying heart in the heavy stench of rot, sweat in the grooves of her grin because she was smiling;
why? because this is fun Isn't it?

    Choral voices now, screaming, Salome hard against the imprisoning skin and a sudden bulge, battering juggernaut thump twinned with an explosion that made her ears ring. Half-deaf in the aftershock, heat and grease and atop the butcher's stage the strop of bleeding flesh, Bibi yowling something, bare blood-spattered breasts and the crowd screaming, screaming to urge her on-

    -and now the rhythmic tidal motion of linked bodies: Andy and Sandrine and Raelynne and Paul and the Magistrate's tinsnip fingers chewing, nipping, biting hard and past all the safety ropes, driving the crowd back-isn't this fun? isn't this what you paid to see?-and Salome rocking, the drum rocking, whine of working metal relentless she's getting away-

    -and uncontrolled-
where is Jerome?
loose in a space this small-

    -but no, not entirely, the thrust held back and slamming just past the altar, the block, the dancers' instinctive scatter and for a bald hysteric moment Tess wanted to laugh, how's that for a special effect? Stink in her nostrils and the stutter of the strobe; blood like oil and the crawling dancers now with weapons?

    -some kind of blunt knives, hands and knees and approach like assassins, Tess's gaze narrow through the stench to see the dancers ring first Nicky, kick and slap then pushing and shoving at Peter, someone hit him and then Jerome, distracted at Salome's control, trying to ward them away-

    -and Bibi, halfway up the scaffolding to hang laughing like a bat, like the wingless angel of chaos, laughing at everything and all the stupid half-fake blood and Tess squeezing hard, heat and gristle like bone, metal, blank-faced advance on the dancers like death made manifest:
You want to play?
Play with this. Pulling, costumes ripping, the tines and snips and clips smeared with the pellet-blood, Cerberus nip at their slick new wounds, biting not to hurt but to frighten, to terrify, send them running, freed bodies, dogs in the path of a car, a train, an avalanche;
you don't like the machines? They don't like you, either.

    And now Salome working, resistless batter like a madman against the splinter of her chains, let me out let me out and Andy slamming up beside Jerome, shoving, the crowd uneasy now and back against the walls. Retreat, did they smell it, grudge match, grievance,
what? What?
Bibi black fruit astride the scaffolding tree, no more laughter, bloody arms and back and yelling something, yelling at Tess, big pale eyes in the strobing dark and Tess staring as one stares at an enemy unmasked-

    -and on cue-
was it?
-the sound that was no sound at all, noise hot through the body and somebody pushing for the doors-

    -as Salome now unguided slammed once more against the chains and again oh God it's loose-

    -and hard into the first thing in her path-the scaffolding, but not bouncing off as she was made to, instead slamming to stick, intense vibration seen in Bibi's clinging body, electrocution-like jerk and Tess in the watching slapped free of anger by fear: "Jerome!" but of course he could not hear, no one could through that sound, hideous, noiseless, felt in the body and the audience moving, brute surge, the lunatic dance of panic at last begun and Tess wheeling at once, hurry, to aim the Magistrate to intercept the shock of stalled Salome against the teetering scaffolding, Bibi at last on the ground and "Get clear!" Tess's own screaming voice in her ears, like a train, like a truck rolling brakeless downhill Get CLEAR get CLEAR and the noises mercifully off as Jerome on his knees snatching up Salome's lost control, off but too late, the whole structure inexorable in a dance of its own: long skeleton reel of pipe and "Get clear!" through the shrieks of the trampling cwd, the dancers scattering, Peter and Nicky curled undercover in the loud enormity of falling metal-

    -and Raelynne's siren shriek like the cry of the metal itself, the first pole striking final, striking flesh and fragile bone:
Paul
.

    In the back of the head.

    Blood, everywhere.

    

    

    

    
There is a charge

    
For the eyeing of my scars

    
-Sylvia Plath

    

    Paul had wanted to be cremated; Bibi's voice flat flat of hysteria, face pale as her eyes, she had not slept for almost three days… and Tess could not stand to be in the same room with her, had not been alone with her since the hours in the police station; on their return Bibi had gone up to their floor, while Tess turned left into the Zombie Birdhouse; and stayed there. Away from her tools and projects but for once there was no desire in her for tools or projects, nothing but the dry husk of disbelief like an alien new flavor: the falling metal, the heavy leak of blood.

    The EMS tech said that Paul had died almost at once, brain death; token try at revival but he was already past resurrection, vegetable or not. No one had known whom to list as next of kin. Classified as indigent, his cremation was billed to the city; the ashes went to Bibi, in a little tin square half the size of a box of tissues, his name and date of death on a neat white label smeared by fingertips and tears.

    To Tess's dull surprise there were no criminal charges, no legal punishments and it felt wrong, wrong that Paul should die and no one be held responsible. Responsibility and culpability, the road between sorrow and guilt; death: and no one, it seemed, was to blame.

    Sick-hot day, afternoon, no one working. The canvased form of battered Salome in a corner; apparently they had carried it here; Tess had not touched it since the show, would not now, wished never to see it again. Let them tear it up for scrap. Now Peter, slow to start some busywork, Jerome leafing with half-closed eyes through a newspaper and all at once Sandrine's focusless stare around the Birdhouse door: "Bibi says," in a fucked-up voice, slow and blurry like a sleepwalker, like water through a clogging drain, "we're going to do the ashes in a while. In an hour, she says. Everybody meet upstairs."

    Staring back, Tess, Jerome, Peter in various states of silence but Nicky: "Fuck if I will," startling them ail, redeyed and loud, the way a child cries. "Fuck it, she thinks she can run it like a show, like a fucking Surgeons show," and Sandrine shouting back through tears immediate, both of them shoving in the doorway until Jerome grabbed Nicky back and with his free hand slammed the door.

    And Nicky weeping, "I didn't even like him, he was an asshole," Jerome leading him back to the long blanketed bench, better rest a minute, man, just take it easy. And Peter, young eyes old: "Tess. Are we going or not?"

    As if through a distance, the desert of regret: when she spoke at last her voice was flat as the desert floor.

    "Do what you want," she said. "I'm not in charge here anymore."

    

    

    The next day Bibi moved out.

    No argument, no discussion; no knowledge for Tess until the sounds began, the dragging and the dropping and the truck outside; Crane's friend, again? Not much-was there?-to carry but it seemed like a lot, many trips up and down and the cranky hum of the service elevator, Tess alone in the late afternoon heat of the Birdhouse looping listlessly through small twisted piles of solder and cable, pretending to work but: listening for the last trip, the empty elevator thump that would release her to move upstairs, animal-sniffing her way back into her own lair: what has been pissed on, scent-scarred, what left alone? Would Bibi send someone, Andy or Paul-Andy or Sandrine, to give the all-clear, a last message,
fuck you all?
Or just leave?
Listen
; in the silence clear as solvent, cables slim like veins through her cold fingertips and the endless headache knocking dull against her temples, mausoleum forehead:
just listen
.

    And missed it, in the end: Nicky back from his scrapyard wander, bagful of crap and wires protruding, calling her name: "Tess, hey; Tess?" Cautious past the door as if the Birdhouse were her home, not his: "Tess? It's okay. She's gone."

    "Are you sure?" a shaming question like a kid scared to look in the closet; big fucking baby, go see for yourself. Rising, distracted nod past Nicky, looking older now; they all did. Stairs, not elevator, climb into greater heat and see: the door politely closed but unlocked, a path left careful for the clearing: gone. Her bed. Her costumes and clothes, her piles of style books and underground rantzines, her tapes, her tiny cracked black coffeemaker, all the whirlwind detritus and only silence in its place. None of Tess's things were touched. On the worktable, slim oblong folded twice and inside her share, calculated to the minute, of the month's rent. No note; no nothing.

    
What did you expect, a sad good-bye? A forwarding address?
Dust in the light from the windows, message light blinking monotonous: more calls for interviews, the decline and fall of tanzplagen, AntiTrust would be glad to pay for an exclusive. Go fuck yourselves. And a message for Bibi from Linda Joy, yes she would be glad to see her, just come by anytime today.

    The room infinitely smaller now; Tess sat on the couchbed, door open, head in hands and did not cry but felt in her chest the ache folded down through nights and dry days expanding now, rising like vapor to fill her lungs with poison, fill her throat with one long groan caustic 4s slow corrosive, all the words unsaid and sorry, the unwept tears to eat at last like acid until she was empty; and clean; or dead.

    Or worse.

    Two days, she supposed and not unkindly, they would give her two days to grieve, or scream, get it out of her system. And, predictable as a construct (
really? would that be Salome you were thinking of?
) here they came, Nicky, Peter, and Jerome, rubbery stale beignets and coffee; they knew, they said, that she liked beignets and coffee. The plastic cup too hot to hold; bitter steam in her face at the worktable, completely clean and sorted, everything was clean, obsessively so, the kind you get from working nonstop for hours and hours pushing and moving and dragging and sweeping, couchbed and sculpture and constructs and panels and tools, mushroom clouds of dust to blind dry eyes, to stick like gray cancer to your skin, you can get a place pretty fucking clean if you do nothing else for two days. No sleeping, no eating, now biting into one of the beignets, wet cardboard taste: "Good," she said. "It's good."

    Three glances the same, back and back and forth and Jerome, as usual: "Tess, listen. We just wanted to know if, we wanted to see what you were gonna do, what your plans are. You know."

    
No, I don't think I do.
"Plans for what?" around the beignet, tumor-lump in the pouch of her cheek; force it down. "Plans for what?"

    "For, you know," tilted coathanger shrug. "Work."

    "You mean like a show? Like the Surgeons?" Expecting the name to taste bad but it was dull as the beignet, flat in her mouth as she shifted on the stool to better face them all. "The Surgeons are over. You guys are free to do whatever you want, work, put on shows, whatever. I'm not in charge of anything anymore."