Skin (30 page)

    "Hi," and the ferocious seismic jitter like a held-back scream, she wanted to run, she wanted to take her in her arms and say
Bibi, oh Bibi oh God
. Touch the brittle skin that looked as if it might split beneath the barest pressure, little head heavy with hooks and chains from ear to nose and nose to lip, like a child roped and buried in spun steel, gift of some cruel angel, evil fairy over the cradle: you will be as gods. The scars at her mouth heavy as a frown perpetual; a charm hung from the ring in her lip, little silver death's head, death's cherub with spiny silver wings.

    "What, what're you," Tess dry-voiced, gesturing with the can but Bibi seemed barely to be listening, or listening as if through music, through the rushing inner cataract of blood.

    "I saw the flyers," Bibi said, nodding up, one double-sized above the Zombie door. "For your show."

    "It's not my show. My students-"

    "Students," slowly, no mockery but something there, unreachable as a knife underwater. "Right, I-someone told me. Right," and a pause disconnected, the whole of her like a hidden picture, find the things that are wrong. Hands picking, digging at a cuticle already shredded skinless. Wrong speed, as if she was breathing some vapor different than air, methane, monoxide; breathing with something less than lungs; or more. Even her voice sounded different, as if the muscles used to make it had dried taut as jerky beneath her lessening skin. "Listen, I just wanted to tell you, it's not my fault. I wanted you to know that." Plunging sense of wariness, worry, what now? and tried to ask, say something but Bibi in motion, back to the car, back with a handful of papers, folded pamphlets: she gave one to Tess. "Here," gravely, their fingers almost touching in the giving movement, "you should read this." urban primitives in loud fluorescent green, the subtitle so smeared Tess could not make it out and now Bibi sitting down on the curb, ankles crossed, cheap boots coming apart at the soles. Boots. In this heat. If Tess touched her, would her hands be cold? "It explains a lot about what I'm doing, it talks about the rituals, all the religion behind it." Tess paging to a random paragraph, half-scanning: machine culture deadens the soul, which in turn can be reclaimed only by the knife. The blood journey never ends. "Who wrote-"

    "It's all about religion," and rubbing roughly at her face,

    Tess's start involuntary, would she catch her hand in the heavy crisscross of wires and chains, rip something free; but no. Sunglasses off, blinking like a mole; a hedgehog. "I wanted-you know we never got a chance to talk, before."

    Oh, Bibi. Tears in her eyes, so many things to say and saying nothing, gazing up and down, that wasted face and something canted wrong in the cast of her shoulders, her ribs; strange, like bones broken and set deliberate to angles unnatural, meant to cause pain. And Bibi's wise nod, "I had some surgery done, that's what you're seeing." Patting the region above the belt, heavy belt below the tiny waist. "It was something I couldn't really do myself. By myself."

    Silence; Tess at worse than a loss and then Bibi again, asking if Tess had ever heard of the Popsicle man: frozen mummy, he's four thousand years old, like a mantra, four thousand years and you know what? He's tattooed. Like runes, it's power, they knew it: it's ancestral knowledge, passed down in the genes, maybe they're code for something, instructions, like Micronesian face tattoos, like a dream we should all be dreaming-"I dream of you," with sudden animation, her first real smile and so wrong, somehow, some way unspeakable. "You're always screaming."

    "I bet," and Tess did not smile. "I bet I know why, too."

    "You know it's really just another kind of engineering, body engineering, the kind of modifications plastic surgeons talk about… you ever hear of Interplast? Working on deformed people, congenital deformities. They don't do this kind of work, you know-most of them won't," with a sudden professorial air, stranger still in contrast to that weird blank scattering, that voice that seemed to speak from somewhere else. "They're afraid of malpractice, you know? You have to find the ones, you know, without licenses… but anyway, the people they work on, those deformed people? They're the ones, they're already tapping into the power. Without even knowing it. Like tapping into a vein, see?"

    
I see plenty
; Tess's heart beating hard, one hand clenched tight and separate against her lip. Something is wrong with you, Bibi, bad wrong and nobody did it with a knife. "Listen," and without thinking she took Bibi's hand, little hand cold with rings, her own felt like leather around it, rough glove of flesh. "Bibi, listen a minute, I want to tell-"

    And turning in the sunlight, sweat like blisters across her forehead, mascara clumped hard on her blinking lashes, hearing nothing but her own thoughts: "It's like bloodletting, the shows, that's what I'm trying to do. Like reclamation, that pamphlet tells a lot about it. But there are so many limits!" half-wail, frustration and she beat her free hand lightly against the curb, against her thigh. "I want to use some people with deformities, but I can't find anybody that'll do it. I told them I'd pay them, I said they-"

    And sickened, without thinking: "Bibi, my God" (and the same tone she had used before, memory's turn like a snake's coiling but no time to retrieve it). "You can't use people that way."

    "I don't mean making fun of them, nothing like that. You always do that, why do you always do that?" All at once shouting, her hand twisting in Tess's, twisting hard but she did not pull it free; perhaps she did not feel it; her eyes very wide, wide pupils fixed and fixed on Tess. "It's like bloodletting, I said! It's to understand!" and without even a breath, a viciousness sliding before her eyes like screens: "I don't know why I bother talking to you about it, what do you know about it?" and at once pain, Bibi's held fingers pinching hard, nipping like a handful of crabs, of biting spiders and Tess cried out and pulled her hand free, back to her body and Bibi, raging now, it's not a circus, it's not a freak show, it's catharsis! The SPIRIT, the POWER in the SPIRIT and screaming into her face, Tess up now and too alarmed to yell back, this was something more than anger, this was something wrong wrong wrong and bitterly, "I tried to tell you, I wanted you to understand, he said not to but I wanted to," and abruptly tears, slippery as glycerin, as abruptly on her feet to shove past Tess and into car, crying loud as a child and gunning the engine so hard it stalled, the smell of gas and Tess grabbing at the passenger side door, "Bibi, don't- Bibi, wait a-" and the car jerking forward and Tess, balance lost, one hand out in ludicrous empty grasp and then hard to her knees, falling on metal, gravel, broken glass, bare kneecap bright as fresh-cut meat. Staring at it and "-you okay?" Three people, kids, two girls and a boy, hands wary and gentle to help her rise and back to the curb, arms and legs loose and silly as a puppet's. "Your leg's really fucked up, " and it was, jelly-thick, warmer than her sweat, hot as tears shed in anger and "No, I'm okay, I'm fine."

    Resisting their hands to rise, heavy limp to the door and pull, back inside, leaning hard against the wall; and slowly as a victim take the stairs, one by one by one, toll like a bell or a circlet of beads, a brace of memories and all of it terrible with the feeling of having done terrible wrong.

    And on the machine, message blinking:
Michael
. Cool as a voice anonymous, a stranger's voice free to say anything: "I hope I'll see you at the show," and nothing else, nothing but dial tone as she passed by to slump round-shouldered on the couchbed, to watch through dull eyes the blood on her leg dry to a thickening pattern, chiaroscuro, secret and rough as graffiti, as the new-gathered guts of a box at last begun. And think of Bibi: screaming: and crying: and something so wrong there were no words to pin it, nothing but the feeling, the way the wind from the pit brushes light as poison gas across your open sightless eyes.

    Bandage white, absurdly so and pink at the center like the last chocolate in a gaudy box but the clinic doctor had warned her about infection, the cut was very deep. Keep it clean, the doctor said and she was trying, prim against the rust-scabbed door, hardhat area in slanted screwless red above her head. Hands in pockets, watching the crowd: easily two hundred people and most not Zombie regulars, word had gotten around and around.

    Now Nita trying for cool beside her piece, Edgar-Marc in a semicircle of crushed cigarette butts, Jerome joking with Nicky, calling him Art. The others, her students, talking loud or slow or nervous, looking back and back again to where she stood, Tess Lodestone, their dim north star. Right. As they looked to her, she looked to the door, surreptitious swing of compass jaw, dreading, longing, would Bibi come? and what if she did? Again and again the scene in the street: something is wrong, wrong; past the inner echo, Raelynne screaming in the chopped-tree fall, was dead Paul driving Bibi, too? Reclamation; redemption; redemption from what? He was mine anyway.
You can't just use people like that
.

    A hand on her arm, woman's hoarse voice: "Hey," and as if memory was summons Raelynne's smile, a Raelynne so different that Tess had trouble recognizing her: bleached hair skinned back in a punishing ponytail, heavy raccoon makeup; she had lost weight, too, skinny maybe as Bibi now. The voice, though, was the same, the same friendly nudge: "How you doin'? Looks like you hurt yourself, there."

    "Yeah, I fell down. On some glass." Awkward, "So what do you think of it?"

    "The show? 'S good, I guess; you know I don't care much for sculpture. I always liked what you did, though." Lighting a dark brown cigarette with a red plastic lighter: Classy's in scratched script down the side. "How come there's none of your stuff here?"

    Shrugging, lying a little but not a lot, she had always been comfortable with Raelynne; that earliest rehearsal, Raelynne's easy twang, you can sit there. And Paul's hauteur; remember? Poor Paul. "What about you?" soundless wince as she bent her leg to give more weight to the lean. "What are you doing now?"

    With a shrug: "Some titty dancing," and then the laugh, but toned down, way down, edged now with something dry: "You should see your face. Come on, Tess, I used to shake 'em for you and Bibi, remember? And this pays one hell of a lot better." Pause. "You ever see her anymore?"

    "No," and not a lie at all. "Do you?"

    "Nah, I'm done with all that." Long exhalation, a bitter scent. "I filled out my fantasies, I'm not goin' back and you better not either, Tess, she's messing with some real fuck-ups this time, makes poor old Paul look normal, you know? Stable… I mean those people worship her, you know it? All that tribal shit, power in the knife. You ask me, they're crazy as a shithouse rat, all of 'em." Toeing the butt to dark scraps. "Especially that Matty Regal guy, what a sack of snakes he is. And then there's-"

    "Tess, hey," Jerome's wave, pinwheeling, "c'mere a minute," and Raelynne's hasty hug, you take care now, girlfriend, you stay off that leg and then gone, rangy hips and the bleached swing of her hair and Edgar-Marc there to offer the crutch of his arm: walk this way.

    And afterward, the performance begun but she limping

    out to the splurge of a cab: no one saw, busy smoke and bursting bottles, heavy clatter of rolling metal and all of it too much, tonight, ripe not with ghosts but their memories, less true pain than its nagging prescience: there is worse to come. In the dank backseat, cheap helpless dangle of the tree-shaped air freshener jouncing like fringe with each turn; through the window the presence of lightning, heavy in the deeps of the sky.

    "Looks like rain," the cabbie said. Tess did not answer. The cabbie put on the radio, glittery Spanglish pop bright as the lightning, Tess's head against the window as loose and tired as the rolling wheels beneath her, the endless rolling circle of her thoughts.

    "It's called Sidestep to the Mind." Nicky's slow reading voice, " 'The body as sidestep to the mind. In Jung-' " pronouncing it phonetically. "Jung?"

    "Just read it."

    "Okay. ‘In Jung we learn that the dream is the theater: the dream of the mind unconscious, bringing us back to a more primitive reality, where we use our bodies not only as homes but as tools. Come experience with us that urban primitive vision.' And underneath, here," grimy pointer nail, "it says 'power in the knife.' What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"

    "I don't know." Aspirin residue on the back of her tongue; weary swing of tired legs around the tripod of the stool. "Is there any more coffee left?"

    "No. I could get some on my way out, if you-"

    "No, no, that's okay. I have to go to the scrapyard anyway."

    "The scrapyard's closed now, it's after six."

    "Already?" It seemed she had just sat down, so little accomplished; so much to do. Half the morning spent with those two kids, girl and boy, red caps and earnest frowns, they had been at the ARThouse show, they wanted to work with her. Hand over one eye as if she had a headache, what kind of work do you do?

    "Guerrilla art," the girl said, nasal and proud. Tess wrote down their phone numbers, said she would call; I'll call you, nodding and smiling at the door like the more loathsome kind of puppet. She had wanted to go to the scrapyard, sweat and stink, heavy boots and metal like the fins of prehistoric sharks; she had wanted to work. Now it was too late, after six and still hours before the poisoned sunset, heavy yellow, it had rained all night and would rain again this evening; already she could see the clouds. Bibi's show was not outdoors. "Are you going?" to Nicky, so quietly she had to say it again, forcing the words like a cough: "Are you going?"

    "Are you?" Her sideways stare; he shrugged a little, as if to say Anything's possible. "You never know."

    "Yes, I do. Have fun."

    And alone then, Nicky's clattering echo and then street silence, the occasional car or curse like a smell through the open windows, sitting down to work and finding with weary surprise that she did not want to work: did not want to examine what this box, this particular new box with its snapped-bone interior and false gold-leaf sides, was leading to; someone,
Bibi? Michael?
had called them Skinner boxes.
Was that true?
and if so, to whom was the conditioning applied?
Me
, Tess thought, setting down the screwdriver she had been holding, thoughtful as an added finger. That's who it's working on.