Skin (26 page)

    "What?"

    "Calm down." Amused, in the dark, gently pushing her head back down onto the shelf of his shoulder; stroking her hair. "Some woman, her gallery specializes in outsider art-she heard about you. The other side of tanzplagen, she said, and-"

    And Tess furious, hinge-backed off the bed and
the other side of shit, that's what you'll get, and I'll take my own fucking phone calls, okay? Okay?
Grabbing the topmost blanket to sit trembling at her worktable, would not come back to bed; slept there, head down and powdered faint with shavings, dreaming of nothing but black and blood and waking exhausted to emptiness; Michael gone, and she was late for work.

    A rare rebellion: sick of work, spent the day instead with art: the eye-box now coated past paint with a thin skin of melted plastic as sickly as slick caucasian flesh, then scraped meticulous vision into less than one percent of the etched steel eyes, just finishing up when Nicky and Bryan at the door: unsmiling, unshowered, she stank and was starving, left them there to go for coffee and a red pepper sandwich, ate it on the corner with big angry bites, wind and dirt in her squinting face and then went back to work harder; harder. Knotted hands and knuckles like bad welds, dry eyes seeing past, what? The work she did, would do, the burns and the broken wire, the limbs like metal stretched tormented and
why? Why so sad? You ought to be happy: love and work, isn't that the prescription? Don't you have both? Don't you?

    Four messages on her machine.

    Three were from galleries; one was for Michael. Someone she didn't know, man's voice from that wide and subtle network into which he disappeared, an hour here, half the night there but always home, sweetest smile voracious and his dick hard as metal;
where have you been, bad boy?
And to herself:
Do you care?

    
Tell the truth.

    In the silence of the worktable, her watchers ignored as she bent like a priest exhausted and still as gray silt beneath the desire not to know; not to admit that she knew what she knew.

    
Why don't you just get back to work.

    Nicky; and Bryan; and now Nita, all wires, tendons, and narrow blue-eyed stare, the soldering pencil dwarfed in her huge knuckle-cracking hands, she had the largest hands Tess had ever seen in a woman. A club friend of Nicky's, sometimes-helper with the Zombie shows; she talked hardly at all and thought Tess was God.

    To have students at all was ludicrous in itself, almost funny unless you considered Bibi: the mirror backward in dreadful yin, her own actions eerie mimic of Bibi's fast-growing coterie, a Surgeons split in two. Tess's new trio, Bibi's-how many now? Five? Twenty-five? She would want more, Bibi, would need more, but then her ambitions were so much more flamboyant, her view so much more encompassing; Tess trying, almost, not to teach at all, while Bibi made a cult. An army. For what?

    "Shows," Michael again, sharing the takeout food supplied by Nita: good stuff, rich sweet Szechuan. "Supposedly she wants to start doing stuff soon." His thigh warm against her shoulder, Tess crouched on the floor like a tired child, her plate beside her and untouched; not hungry. She had worked all night and into the morning, completing the eye-box, starting-again-another. She was so tired she kept having the same thoughts over and over. Paper napkins imprinted with Chinese astrological signs, What Year Were You Bom? The pig, the rat, the horse. The dragon.

    "Tess?" Nita's high, slightly hoarse voice, her earnest smile: arms into coat sleeves, "You need anything else?"

    "No. No, thanks, Nita. You sure you don't want any of this?"

    "No thank you," as if slightly shocked; and gone, missing Michael's long smile, his toothy burlesque surprise: " ‘No thank you, Tess!' " hands to either side of his open mouth and Tess poked him in the thigh with the end of her chop-stick, poked him hard.

    "Stop being such a prick."

    "If you say so." Slippery gloss of sauce on his lower lip, in the worktable light his hair, longer now, seemed almost white; beautiful gray-eyed albino; Bibi-eyed. Her demon lover. "I ran into Matty," spearing some vegetable shaped like half a heart. "He says they're about ready to start."

    "Hurray."

    "Tess." Setting his food aside, bending, angel from the clouds, to take her face in his hands. "Listen. Go out with me tonight."

    "No."

    "Yes." Firm. "You need to take a break. All you see is this room. And work. A bunch of dumb guys in helmets." Hard hands now on her shoulders, the flesh moving back and forth, back and forth, a tide, and coral bones beneath. "I'll show you a good time, little girl."

    Shadows, the new box split left to right like a chambered brain. His sweetest smile.

    "All right," and he kissed her, shards of food captured warm in his mouth, sauced tongue; shadows, everywhere. She took the kiss like medicine, scraped his taste off her teeth; and smiled.

    

    

    Club, small as a bedroom: sweat humidity and hectic neon overheads jammed in one idiot sequence, plywood walls scabbed heavy with decals: killbilly and mode sauvage, doktor jest in thin crimson caps, they had to push to get in. Michael, angel, white from head to toe, beatific smile and sharp elbow to clear the way: for Tess, paradoxically in gray, gray as his eyes, cerement gray at the bar and Michael wanted to buy her a vodka.

    "For old times' sake," smiling.

    "No," smiling back; she ordered ouzo. Syrup, heavy licorice taste and on her lips as Michael kissed her, vodka tongue in her mouth; bright eyes. Sharp music. The guy next to her was laughing the same laugh over and over, beer bottle jittering on the bar.

    "-to dance?"

    "No," again. Was it imagination or was her eye specially drawn to those who were pierced: there, bald and barechested, nipples ringed; or him, cockatoo hairdo, nose ring like a bull and some kind of gauntlets, or the woman in leather jeans with overlapping rings and, yes, the gauntlets again, leather wound on her arms and knuckles;
must be a new fashion, must be-

    A singular laugh: ice crystals, breaking; breaking glass.

    Bibi.

    One tremendous lurch, heart in carwreck rhythm and: there, in the thready wash of neon, silhouette moving into moving light: changed. Grotesque new waspwaist, cinched hard past airlessness to some shocking constricture, where were her bones? Gone? Backlit and black and bristling shiny with hooks, spined with them, hooks in her ears and tusked tiny at nose and lip, anemone steel all over and down her bare back the thready spill of chains, ten, twenty, dozens like strange metal hair surrounding the raised scars, white ridges of hard tissue emphasized with red: makeup? or infection? turning to speak to someone, a man beside her and in the turning saw-Tess watched her do it-Tess herself.

    Michael, hand on her arm like the touch that pulls us back through sleep, through death on the operating table, the hand that holds the paddles that shock: "Tess. Take it easy, okay? Just-"

    Tess did not answer. Bibi still now, waiting, moored and yet alone: wearing the gauntlets, too, wrapped and strapped like a boxer; breastlessly thin, clavicles in gaunt relief and bracketing her mouth the long swollen lozenges of a fresh scarring; she had done something to her mouth, too, something Tess could not put a name to, as if in subtle duplication of the ravages of stroke. Tess toward her through the press and mumble, Michael behind saying something but she didn't hear; didn't listen. Like the granting of a wish unspoken, red wish, her presence; and beside, beneath it all the strange singular pleasure: seeing Bibi again. Nerves like wires, arcing, sparking, and then Bibi before her, right before her, right before her eyes.

    "Tess," and did not put out her hand. Heavy new rings, silver, one set with a cheap blue stone; birthstone. "How are you?"

    "Busy."

    "Me, too."

    "I heard." Half-conscious of Michael behind her, breath on her neck like a fly on her skin:
stop it. Forget him.
"You're bringing back the Surgeons."

    "No," that instant anger; remember? "You're wrong. It's nothing like the Surgeons." One hand raised to brush at her face, ring shaped like the blunt claws of a hammer; shaking. Bibi's hands were shaking. "It's way more than that, it's about ritual, it's-"

    "Tanzplagen," coldly. Michael's hand squeezing hers; shut up. "Blood dance, right? All the fun stuff you couldn't do before?"

    And from behind Bibi, pop-up grin, "Why don't you come to a show?": Matty Regal, appropriately gauntleted, heavy with chains and hooks like Bibi, trying to be Bibi. "See for yourself," he said, and chiming, Bibi's own soft jeer: "See for yourself."

    Now her hands were shaking, too. "I told you. I'm busy."

    "Oh right, your private practice, art for art's sake. Right," bright sneer in the open, clot of smilers around her and then, abrupt, "I don't have time for this shit," and turning so quick she almost walked into Matty, Tess opposite away and in her throat constriction, the muscles tight and a feeling like burning, like something on fire. Anger; and swiveling to Michael's gaze, raised eyebrows and "Well. You really pissed her off."

    "She pissed me off," shaking off his arm, let go of me. "I want to go home," and for the door, looking at no one, out in the street and Michael catching up, saying something and this was your idea, asshole but she didn't say that; instead, cold, "She didn't say anything to you. I thought you said you see her sometimes."

    As if he were tired: "Hardly ever."

    "Does she ever-" but she would not say it, would choke before she said it. "What do you talk about? When you talk?" And when exactly is that?

    More tiredly still, "We talk about her, Tess. You ought to be able to figure that out for yourself."

    No more talk, now, back through a night half-winter or maybe it was just because she was hot, she was burning the air around her, tearing open her coat and up the stairs, each footfall a driven nail, up and up and Michael behind her, saying nothing, silent in the wake of her heat. Burning.

    And grabbing him as the door swung to, shoulders against the door-he was her size, just her size-kisses like biting, his kind of kisses, she could already feel him getting hard and she yanked at his clothes, just enough to open them, just enough to feel him against her and she fucked him that way, standing up, hips hard and driving him back against the door because he wasn't Bibi, could never be Bibi, good for him, good for both of them, good.

    His breathless head against her shoulder, moist air. Was Bibi fucking Matty? God. She had said before she was not, but she was a liar, wasn't she? First and last and only; a liar then, too. Had she fucked Michael?
Michael, too, was a liar, come to think of it; but don't think. He doesn't lie to you, does he? Does he? How should I know?

    "Tess-"

    Eyes closed. Tears against her lids; burning.

    "What."

    "You need to see her again. You need to have a-"

    As if from a great distance, like a breath from her lungs: "No." Pushing him away, half-dizzy, yanking up her pants. To the worktable, tools' orderly scatter and the box upon it, just begun: metal hook-shiny, red-jacketed wire as slim and sweet as open veins.

    Just get busy.

    "-like this, see? So you get a clean weld. Not so fast," and Nita's earnest nod, if she listened any harder her head might explode, slow steam like a cracked reactor; calm down, Tess wanted to say, it's not the end of the world, it's just welding, it's just me. Okay? But of course to Nita, to the others, Tess was Tess-Capital T, Teacher Tess, grandly estranged and made by them to be so; her intrinsic value lay in the fact that she could never be just Tess.

    The others; Nita's friends, willy-nilly her new students: six of them now, all of them all eyes on her every move: watching the boxes grow; watching them change. More than a figure boxed, now, more than metal: more, sometimes, than even she knew until they were done, till they had had time to sit and grow dust and cook a little: and then she would discover them, explorer's touch and mouth a little open: Oh. There in her hands the puzzle explicit, pain and hunger, sacrificial want: oh. I see. Bird bones, a curious twist of wire, a scrap of burned paper, a seed pod dried to mummification and strangely spiked: like Bibi's piercings, like Bibi herself; hedgehog.

    Busy hedgehog: Michael had already brought home a flyer. Flash new production values, slick black and mined with hints of silver; she had named them Skinbound. In goth lettering, lettering, too, around her flyer face seemingly more knife-sculpted, more painfully bizarre; her face as well in
AntiTrust
, in
Scuff
a picture of them all: beyond tanzplagen, Bibi in unsmiling black and white surrounded by shiteating grins, there must have been twenty of them, all wearing the gauntlets: cestus, Bibi called it, from the Latin for beat, worn lead-loaded, brass knuckles for the boxers in ancient Rome. The marriage girdle, too, Venus's girdle empowering the wearer to excite love. There was more; Tess did not read it, tried not to remember the date of the first show. Enough was enough. Wasn't it?

    Now: "You don't want too much heat," and Nita's nod, again, laser-blue stare somewhere behind the helmet glass. "You try it now." Teacher Tess. Box on the worktable, Michael out somewhere, gone, he said he had a job this week. Doing what? Soon she would be done here, send them home; and work. Till she slept, and woke to work again; no more machine shop; she had tuition now. Bibi would have laughed till she screamed, but Michael insisted on it and the others did not seem to mind, in fact agreed: Nicky said it: "Otherwise you'd have to be out working. This way you can stay home and teach us, right?"