Skin (38 page)

    "Bibi-" Standing, trying to move toward her, trying to stop her as she bent, again, to Matty's body, bent to cut at the dead face, the hands, wild cuts as another would have hit with fists or open hands, cut and cut and screaming and Tess back to the wall, past Michael, crawling to the door through the screech and batter of Bibi's voice, screaming, and screaming, "He was supposed-"

    And then Nicky's arms around her, dragging her, bundling her into the car; Nicky had seen the exodus, had called 911. Tense idle a bare block away, waiting to watch them arrive; and then gone, grim-faced below the speed limit and beside him Tess's throat working, trying to cry out, vomit, something; hands on the door handle. "Bibi, oh Nicky, Bibi- and I hurt him, I hurt him, and she-we have to go back, Nicky, we have to get her to a-"

    "The ambulance guys will get her. And you didn't hurt anybody," staring straight ahead. His hands on the wheel as motionless as time. "Whatever you did was self-defense and if anybody asks me that's what I'm gonna say. And I'm gonna say I saw everything, too."

    Yellow light and cautious on the brake; light outside the window like the slow rumor of dawn. Her head against the cold plane of the glass as if on the breast of Love itself, throat corseted by pain and wanting more than anything else the last boon, the simple ability to cry.

    

    

    Tess lives in the back of a storefront now, little room once pantry and storage, barely large enough to house her small necessities, sleeping bag and cardboard box, helmet and tanks and welding gear. The two windows, lozenge shaped, are covered with heavy yellowing plastic, reclosable with some effort; there is no heat but there is electricity. The boxes, the sculpture, stand out in the weather and the dark, rain and snow like the cold tears of the murdered, half-tarped like tragedy's mute survivors. At first she sat before them, knees bent past feeling, arms locked in supplicant's crouch as if they still held secrets she might need, but she has not, now, stripped the coverings for that purpose in weeks, weeks; already begun is rust's inexorable crawl.

    She no longer sees anyone, Peter or Jerome, Nita, Edgar-Marc; only Nicky still comes around, tapping and calling, each time less sure; if Tess is present, which is most of the time, she hides, bent silent as dust until he is gone. Even loyalty has it limits; soon he will not come at all, tired at last of the endlessness of the action, dissatisfied, but sure that he has done all he could.

    She never thinks of Michael, but sometimes she dreams, wakes from them not weeping but with the sense of having wept. He is not Paul, in these dreams, but sometimes he lies still beneath scaffolding; sometimes when the flashlight hits him his head shatters like old glass. His head, of course, is not shattered; a closed-head injury, the skull still safely pristine. Only the brain inside it is ruined, beaten by her blow and the subsequent pressure of blood and fluid to a state where thought is less impossible than flight, but as improbable. She does not wish more guilt upon herself, taking only what the dreams provide. Smetimes se forgets it was her hand that swung the flashlight, forgets the sound it made when it struck. Perhaps it is that sound that brings her tears, the screams that bring her finally to wake. His blood is on her hands, will always be, but only she and Nicky will ever know. Perhaps this is why she dreams.

    Her visits to Bibi are as often as allowed: gray hospital room even smaller than her own and warm with a peculiar smell, as if Bibi is decomposing from the inside out; she does not know Tess, does not perhaps even recognize herself, her own moving hands, her labia, her feet; they have removed all the metal of her piercings, stripped her, Tess thinks, of her armor; all her scars are visible now, tiny puckerings and holes. She does not speak in words, as if she, too, is rusting into the moveless torpor of catatonia, life-in-death.

    Her case will come to trial soon: dead Matty, why does he matter more than murdered Paul? They are equally dead. Tess has asked to be kept informed, but has no telephone; her post office box is paid for until the end of the year, but oh how slowly those wheels grind, "soon" might mean next year. They will plead insanity, the court-appointed lawyer-fat and brisk in navy blue, her breath the burnt-oven smell of chronic stomach distress-has promised Tess that Bibi will never spend any time in jail; she is already in jail, of course, but no one seems to notice that. Not even Bibi, who frets or wiggles or whispers in near silence, eyes rolled back in her head, suppurating lips now healed to cabled scars as pink as yarn, as baby booties, as the room of a ten-year-old girl who had once wanted to be a ballerina so much she cut off part of her own body to make the point. Point taken, now, but there is no one left but Tess to understand.

    And she does; she can do that much, after all, and after each visit, each endless minute spent in the company of the only one she loves in all the world, Tess returns to damp gray stillness, her own stillness deepened to a pitch unimaginable, and with a surgeon's care assumes the hood and melts to slag another piece of work. Smoke, and heat; and the blister of light like Armageddon, infernal distillation past the underwater confines of the glass; last time it was the Magistrate, next time perhaps Mater Intrinsecus, or Archangel, that first attempt at motion; see, now, how far she has come, she herself can see it, like a light burning in the distance, white light pouring from an empty room. So much pain itself like burning, melting a place in her heart like that empty room, room for nothing but emptiness.

    

    
Aching back; sweat like blood in her eyes.

    
What will she burn, when all of them are gone?

    
Since the soul in me is dead, Better save the skin.

    
-Archpoet
[translated by Helen Waddell]

    

    
We never know what is enough.

    
-William Blake