Skin (5 page)

    "Ouroboros," Bibi still beside the new piece; distracted look, her fingers cautious and sure on the split throat. "That's what that snake is called."

    Sandrine drank beer, pulled down her shirt; this one said LIEDERNACHT above a graphic of a cave. Raelynne lifted her mop of frizz to show her earrings, "Mine don't mean anything, they're just rings. I once had my nostril pierced, but I let it go." Drinking some of Sandrine's beer, leaning back against the couchbed. "I used to go with this guy who had an ampallang, that's like a pierced cock, you know, a little bar through the head on either side? And once when I was giving him head, I felt this pain, right? In my mouth? And I felt around in there and sure enough, one of my teeth was cracked right in two! On the ampallang!" Her clumsy crowns, big horse mouth opened wide in a big dry smile, isn't that something. "Hey," nudging Tess with the bottle's neck, glass sweat on her upper arm. "Hey, I like your stuff. It's real raw."

    "Thanks," and Sandrine shrugging, no offense but she wasn't into sculpture, she didn't resonate with anything static, anything that didn't move.

    "But that's what Tess wants." Bibi and the new piece, the new improved piece in its agony of near motion. Chicken-wire light; the oracle who speaks your dreams speaking now in daylight just to you. "She wants them to move."

    Tess, very still.

    Sandrine and Raelynne, talking around her, before her suddenly Bibi looking down into her face. Not speaking; her own mouth a little open, as if she would break the silence herself; but did not.

    
She wants them-

    Sandrine's laugh unexpected and unexpectedly high, shrill as a little girl's.

    
-to move.

    "Well," Raelynne's rising bounce, her weight gone from beside Tess and "Are we goin' or not?" Hands on her knees, unfocused eyes staring and suddenly Tess looking up to see all of them looking at her. Go where? They had probably already said, maybe more than once. "Sure," off the couch and burned arm newly smarting in the motion, gaze at once to the worktable: the black primary shapes of tools, solder loops, bolt cutters and tinsnips and crack-handled chipping hammer in a scattered rebus telling more than she could read. For now. Tonight. "I'm ready."

    On the stairs, Sandrine's deft clatter and Raelynne's howl, "Hey, they got keno machines!" skittering inside the store to Tess's glimpse, Grace and her daughter. Talking. Bibi touched her upper arm, very lightly. Her fingers were hot, and she said nothing at all.

    

    

    The club was called Infexion; Tess remembered it as the Eldredge Theatre, she had gone there a few times to see thrash bands. Now the seats had been eliminated in favor of an endless dance floor, endlessly tight: the beer was cheap, the lights the hectic flash of Xenon; on the walls industrial signs in red and black: chemical: goggles required. danger: acid, danger: do not watch the arc; that one made her smile. Raelynne and Sandrine danced every song, flying hair and long-muscled legs; Bibi at the table drank ice water and said very little. Tess said less, watching the dancers, thinking of the rhythm inherent in metal, in corroding iron, in the slick long limbs of steel. Could it be found? Could she find it? She had heard of the performing machines, the war machines of Survival Research Laboratories, the ballet mecanique of Denmark, Duchamp's bachelor machines, the robot terrorists of Hunter-Graves. Branches of mastery, hints and feints and driving piston hearts, the drip of machine oil, the stutter of living flesh mechanically enabled; what she wanted-what did she want? Machines that were not robots, moving sculpture that did not mimic the organic but played, somehow, both with and off that distanceless dichotomy, the insolvable equation of steel screws and aching flesh, that wanted people not only as operators but as co-conspirators. See those dancers now, and imagine them locked in ballerina combat with the grip and clench of metal, the sweet smoke of rosin solder like incense around their dripping faces, imagine them lit with a hundred strobes and the subsonic growl of bass-heavy music like the throb of an engine running hot, burning hot, burning like the white heart of the arc.

    Burning. All of it burning.

    The music now a fast pop babble, she realized Bibi was talking to someone, someone sitting at their table. A man, head shaved austere and long earlobes with eighth-of-an-inch grommets glowing gold around the empty space, his front teeth missing in a surprising childish smile. Bibi saw her looking, smiled a very little but did not include her by introduction, spoke only to the man in a slangy slur of names and times Tess did not recognize or place. Her beer gone flat before her, pale gold between locked fingers; the moving dancers like a hot and living frieze before her eyes.

    And coming home, she and Bibi, to find her door broken open, its obvious gape seen from the bottom of the stairs and she scrambled, half-falling, to the landing, slammed inside; a moment's dumbstruck terror-robbed -but no, pushing past her ludicrous stall Bibi found a note spiked hard to the couchbed: evicted. And now she saw the tools jumbled in cardboard boxes, frito-lay and sunbelt juice, saw her three-suiter wardrobe balled like a bedroll and set conspicuously by the door.

    Bibi read the note out loud. " 'Tess. This is not a factory it is a store. I am charging you for all the burn holes.' What a cunt. Let's see her charge you for a fucking thing."

    Tess, still frozen, all ideas quivering now, now with no place to work. No place to go. She went to her worktable, tried sorting through, moving the tools through her hands as if their familiar heft might slow her moving mind, too fast to sort ideas, one question only like a mantra, where where where. And Bibi, drawer by drawer, pulling empty the green metal rack, looping the cables into tight circles.

    "One of Crane's friends has a truck," she said.

    For a minute this meant absolutely nothing, as if Bibi had begun to speak backward; then it made some sense but not enough. "Bibi," louder than she meant, "I have nowhere to take this shit, I don't-"

    "Raelynne's already moving." Hands balancing two rolls of solder, acid flux and a Grainger's catalog thick as a phone book. "She can just move a little faster."

    Big windows, long and thin like an old-fashioned church; they opened with cranks, cool air higher than before, third floor in this warehouse half-restored and then abandoned. Room, ventilation, wired to handle what she needed; there was even a service elevator. One of the downstairs dogs in the doorway, black-spattered beige and cocked ears and a woman calling, "Cocoa! Cocoa, come down here now! Cocoa, now!"

    The dog ignored her. Bibi silent in the window, Tess pacing out the floor space, pacing one way twice, confused: she had not slept, sat out the night guarding her broken door. Coffee, more coffee, wordless and knowing she could not afford Raelynne's place; but that could not matter, she would have to hire herself out, let the new ideas burn internally; not good, but no help for it. Bibi, helping her pack, working until near dawn, when she left for Crane's; Tess could not question this help, did not in brutal fact have time. Grace had come up with the sun to ask when she would be gone.

    "Tonight," in flat bravado, slamming the unlockable door in her face. Her stomach hot and burning, thinking, thinking.

    Now the woman at the door, "Cocoa, you bad girl. I'm sorry," leash in hand, another puppy under her arm. Her sweat shirt read I'M OWNED BY A… with a dog's head, breed indeterminate, wash-faded and huge beneath. She took the dog away. Less than a dozen of Raelynne's boxes still building-block scattered, Tess's reflection exponential in Raelynne's left-behind mirrors, cranking wide the windows to the sonata of barking dogs.

    The first few days were transformation, dance studio to workspace, it was not so hard; she used the ballet barre to hang scrap pipe; she tried not to think what she must sell to keep this place. Bibi stopped by, once, twice, perched still while Tess ran cables, hung lights, positioned panels; sere and brief in her conversation, apparently the troupe had become intolerable.

    "Some director," chewing at her lip, sharp little teeth. Head wrapped in black like a mourning mother. "He's just a drug addict, he's hardly ever there anymore and when he is he's so fucked up he can barely watch the show. We had a big fight about it. Again." Silence. "I want to break away; it's time." More silence. One leg swinging back and forth, tight metronomic motion. "And I'm taking those guys with me.

    Nailgun in hand, sunlight in long rows across the concrete. A curious resin smell here, as if the space had recently been used to store wood. "Who?"

    "Rae and Sandrine. And Paul. And you."

    "What?" Gracelessly loud, pivoting gun in hand to stare at her; saying it again, what?

    "I want you to come with us." Crossing to the worktable, one hand in a stop-sign gesture: "Wait, I know, I know what you're going to say. But see, it doesn't matter if you're not a dancer. I don't want to just dance anymore, it's a dead end. It's empty," fists opened to show nothing but the retreat of clenched blood. "I'm sick of being empty, Tess. I want to do my own work, and I want us to work together. As partners."

    Confused, gazing down like a child abashed, the nailgun hanging from her hand like a bizarre prosthetic. On some dry level unsurprised, there was buildup aplenty and the offer made sense: Bibi's drive was surely her own, ambition expressed through another medium like blood through a sister vein. But Tess had never worked with anyone else, distrusting collaboration, suspicious of the inherent sublimation. In theory, two wills worked unto symbiosis, creating a third independent; but what if both wills were very strong?

    Gray marble eyes staring at her, a muscle jittering slow a tempo in the length of that long thigh. Ambulance noises through the window, the endless barking reminiscent of the keno machines. Bibi, waiting for an answer; Tess knew she would not ask more than once.

    Two strong wills.

    The sensation of motion. Bibi juggernaut, that colliding body; and steel: what collision might it make?

    "Okay," and Bibi's widest smile, bright feral teeth and hugging Tess one-armed, "I knew it, I knew it! I saw your face, I saw the way you were in the bar. You had the idea then, didn't you," not a question and Tess gave no answer, shrugging with the gun, smiling in tandem with Bibi's exhilaration, already plans, plans. "We'll start today, tonight-I'll call you," and gone, and Tess, smiling, not sorry but curiously regretful, raising up the nailgun, hollow thump into the framing wood of her new worktable, nails counterpoint and the stately movement of the sun across the floor, gentle as flowing water, slow as flowing blood.

    

    

    Partnership: Tess had not known it would mean Bibi moving in, but: two months' rent already paid, gripbag and toothy smile. Boxes, the long splintery bed, heavy black garbage sacks trussed full of clothes, piles of magazines and books like blocks to build a city of their own. Tess had not had a roommate since Peter, but that was different, they had been lovers. Now half the living area was partitioned off, for now with crude cardboard walls that Bibi herself did not strictly respect, moving quick and silent in the mornings past Tess on her couch-bed, the shower's blurry sound the static border between sleep and consciousness, head still heavy with dreams of the night before, their talk, plans like scaffolding blended with the images they aroused: Bibi a long fierce spider, made of metal and moist rag, herself crouched on some swaying catwalk, blackbox in hand and some demanding vision etched just beyond waking memory's reach. They talked late, sketching, planning, no idea too complicated or grotesque: "It's all seeds," Bibi's nod, "just seeds, we'll see what grows." We. It was fun, talking to Bibi, planning; there was no one like her: a pair of eyes, a hungry little mouth that kept saying
More, more
.

    Still much to adjust to: Bibi's dawn returns from one of her endless forays, dance clubs and street theater, under the underground and bright eyes, whispered reports to half-wakened Tess, too much fun to hold till morning. Bibi on the phone for an hour at a time: to Sandrine, Raelynne. To the ex-director, yelling so loud it spooked the dogs below to whining. To Paul, who came without warning, "just stopping by" each time, dour and silent, Bibi's barkless dog. Listening to them fuck behind cardboard; listening to them argue, Bibi quick, so very quick to plant the knife, Paul's exit always with a virulent slam of the door. It was not always fun, after all.

    But, again: Bibi silent as Tess struggled, never intrusive, never disrupting either Tess's schedules or her frustration when the work went poorly; which was often, this new discipline so clumsy in her hands she must learn everything all over again, even the things she took for granted. Modification was more than this here, and this here, and this gone altogether; it was an art in itself, demanding a new eye: scrapyard scrounge was, here as well, the first step, but she had to be able to see motion as well as line, inherent and possible. Sometimes in frustration she paced, worktable to her makeshift metal rack, again and again through the manuals that could no longer help her, studying the new books designed for disciplines she did not need; sometimes sat staring at the pieces scattered before her as if by sheer rage she would force assembly. And the muscular spectacle of Bibi, silently stretching, bending, long legs in positions asymmetrical, seemingly arranged to rack bones from flesh, they had horrified Tess when she first saw them but now she saw them differently, as sculpture, a template of sorts for her machines; or, as now, curled into that peculiar graceful C-shape-fetus-bent, wrapped arms and legs bound each to the other by hooking ankles-an insect mummified in silk, she could sit like that for hours, Tess called it hedgehogging-keeping others away with a peremptory "No: Tess is working."