Stories for Chip (24 page)

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Nelson pulls a machine from one of the deep pockets of his cloak and a small pot of ink. “Can you lie on your side?”

I turn.

“This will hurt a bit.”

“You never said that before.”

“No. But this is different. I'm layering in a line of communication. We're not using any relaxant because I don't want any chemicals to interfere. When we're done you'll go back to sleep and wake on your own.

“Here's a word for you to remember. Did I ever tell you about the time…?” Nelson begins the storytelling path he always travels when inking her body.

◊

“You know how I love to collect historical bits and pieces,” he continues. “So once I stumbled on this picture of the cutest man I ever saw: café au lait skin, dark eyes that were either trouble or were looking for trouble. And he had the most expressive mouth, like cherries I could have sucked through my teeth, pits and all! Turns out he was a queer colored man who wrote books in the 20th century. I tried reading some. Way too smart for me…that's why Society tracked me into visual—not literary arts!”

Nelson's laughter dispels any sense that he thinks himself stupid.

He clicks on the power and the buzz of the machine fills my ears. Facing the window, I concentrate on the curtains dancing in the breeze as Nelson moves carefully on the spokes of the penny-farthing's big front wheel. I feel the needle as if I'm inside that ancient torture machine, its nails digging into me. But now my body opens to it.

◊

“I read an interview with him and he talked about the sensuality of words; I'd never thought about that before. And how he fell in love with a word when he was a kid: Wolverine! He thought it was the most beautiful word in the world. He loved to feel it in his mouth. When I close my eyes I can see his mouth tasting that word. He didn't know what it meant when he first heard it, but it stuck with him. Later, when I found some pictures of him as an old man,that mouth—it was still tasting that word.

◊

“There, all done.”

“So quickly?”

“Just the single word concealed among the bicycle's spokes and curves. It changed his life, it changed mine; now it changes yours.”

“How?”

“Magic. Let me finish. You will go west from Society City; maybe you'll find some Partisans, set up housekeeping in a tree, learn to sew, become a surgeon or carpenter or revolutionary. Who knows.”

“Sounds either ghastly or delightful, depending on who I am at the moment.”

“Ah, finally your sense of humor! I'll take that as a good sign.”

“All of this simply for two lovers?”

“Two lovers is no small thing. And for the others who'll foment change.”

◊

“I'm afraid.”

“That's smart. Society City will not take the disappearances sitting still. When you wake up you'll remember how vicious it can be, you'll remember those who've disappeared. So follow our plan and go. Quickly.”

◊

Through the curtain I see what was moving: not a tree branch, but a pair of athletic shoes tied together and thrown over a power line. For some reason they make me smile.

“Once you're past the mountains, remember the word. It's not one that pops up in common conversation, so it will help you find friends or protect you from danger.”

“Dare I ask how?”

Nelson doesn't respond because he can see she's already drowsy.

“‘Wolverine.' It does taste delicious,” I say, but I can no longer lift my eyelids.

◊

Nelson gently turns her onto her back and drapes a soft cotton sheet over her. He thinks how much he already misses the two women who've become his sisters. He wonders how long before he'll see this new one again. He wants his friends, but he hates to travel.

◊

“Move fast…you listening to me, Tryna West?” Nelson whispers urgently then grabs his cloak and turns to leave.

“Yes, we're listening, brotherlove.”

We sleep.

Nelson double locks the door when he leaves.

Ernest Hogan

Like a miniature Jupiter gone insane, the paint-blob hangs in the middle of the room—a Jupiter whose tides and weather and powerful gravity snapped on the strain of the secret of its monstrous microscopic inhabitants so its regular bands are broken up into gaily swirling asymmetrical patterns of mingling paint with color almost computer-exaggerated—like the glorious unholy mother of all cat's eye marbles, it glares at me.

I try not to see her.

There's no gravity here, but that floating blob has a pull just the same. I orbit in freefall, make ‘em let me paint in the center of these cans where the spinning doesn't suck you to the floor—and like the irresistible pull of Jupiter, so big, so bad, so goddam awesome that you feel yourself fall into those convulsive, frenzied clouds, like you're being sucked
up,
not pulled down (Jupiter is too big, too gigantic for you to ever be on top of it)—and
it
still pulls me.

And she pulls me.

I take the stick like an Aztec priest wielding a flint knife, or that cop swinging his baton on that cool, starless night years ago in L.A.—crushing the buckle from my gas mask into my skull, leaving a cute little scar on my scalp that I shaved my head for months to show off.

It exploded—like an amphetamine-choked blob. Amorphous little monsters sailed through the air, some colliding with me and sticking to my naked flesh. One sought my eyes in order to blind me. Lucky I have goggles like Tlaloc, the Rain, Water, and Thunder God…and a breathing mask—that's all the covering I need! I wipe away the paint, my vision is smeared with color.

The entire little canvas-lined room is exploding with color. Beautiful.

Like her.

Still, the paint has this sickening tendency to settle into little jiggling globes that just sit there like mini-Jupiters, mocking me. I refuse to allow entropy to happen in my presence, so, like a samurai Jackson Pollock, I scream through my mask and thrash the disgusting little buggers into tinier flying sky-serpents that merrily decorate me, and the canvas on the walls.

And the canvas is raw, unprimed, and the paint is mixed with a base that gives it the consistency of water. Splatter marks don't just sit there looking pretty—no, they grow fur as the canvas absorbs them, thirstily. My work is always wild and woolly.

Soon the colorful swordplay is over and I am victorious. All (except for a few little stubborn, but insignificant B.B.'s) the paint is slapped down to the canvas. I shed my goggles for a while and the furious splatters change into visions.

André Masson, eat your heart out!

Bizarre hieroglyphs materialize in the Jovian storm clouds:
Demonic cartoon characters exhaling balloons full of obscenity—hordes of baby godzilloids crawling through vacuum and eating rocks—endless three-D labyrinths of orbital castles complete with living gargoyles and tapestries you can walk into—large, luxuriant cars encrusted with jewels and tail-fins that race the crowded, tangled spaghetti of freeways with off-ramps all over the galaxy—the vegetal love poetry that an intelligent network of vines sings to the jungle it intricately embraces—the ecstatic rush of falling into an ocean of warm mud that tastes delicious and makes you feel so good—pornographic geometries that can only be imagined on a scale more than intergalactic—the Byzantine plots of surrealistic soap operas that take place outside of spacetime, in Omeyocan, the highest heaven—the ballet of subatomic particles smaller than any yet discovered!

Letting the stick fly, I attack the canvas with paint-covered fingers—desperately trying to record the visions before they fade, but never finishing before they do, so I have to fill many gaps with memory and imagination.

Then I see her face again.

That beautiful, perfect Zulu face, with impossibly intense eyes—beauty that puts the cold, marble-white classicism of dead and buried ancient Greece to shame, causing arrogant statues to crack and crumble to dust—making you see how right the barbarians were in knocking their heads off. A presence that is soft, yet extremely powerful, like the fearful sound of the soft, swishing skirt that reveals that an umkhovu—like a bad memory of apartheid—is roaming the midnight streets of Soweto, making its way past the sleepy suburbs, to the shiny new university, to the Center of Parapsychology….

I find myself drawing that magnificent face. The face of Willa Shembe, a pampered little (she was taller than me, but still, somehow,
little
) psychic from Zululand, from whom I'll never be free. The sorcery that caused her “death” has contaminated me, enslaved me. I will see, draw, and paint her forever.

I should have known the first time I saw her—who knows how long after my surprisingly nonfatal encounter with the Sirens….

Whatever made Calvino send her to me? I guess a little inspiration flickers under that pale, bald head, behind those thick, old-fashioned glasses and fat, gray eyebrows on occasion.

I suddenly saw her—clearly and distinctly out of my feverish delirium and telepathic hangover—dancing galaxies and soft, squishy, organic cities faded to let her power through.

Calvino must have been desperate. I, of all people, survived a mind-to-whatever encounter with the Sirens!

Me, Pablo Cortez, infamous guerrilla muralist from the wild, crumbling concrete and stucco overgrowth of L.A.—who refused to be absorbed into the decaying society I satirized in my work long after my fellow wall-defacers were caught, arrested and offered a chance to become honest artists who paint on neat, clean canvases that are displayed in sterile galleries and bought by the affluent to show everybody how sensitive they are by what they choose to decorate their expensive, prestigious apartments with. I, who tattooed the Picasso quote, “PAINTING IS NOT DONE TO DECORATE APARTMENTS. IT IS AN INSTRUMENT OF WAR FOR ATTACK AND DEFENSE AGAINST THE ENEMY” on my own left arm with a felt-tip pen and a safety-pin. The guy who
really
meant it when he helped paint—fast, so we could get it done and get the hell out of there before getting our heads busted—Quetzalcoatl choking on smog, Uncle Sam holding up the heart of a draftee for the “disturbance” in South Africa (soon to be Zululand—again) to the gaping jaws of a Biomechanoid War God, mutilated/spacesuited corpses and countless mass portraits of the ever-growing throngs of the homeless to decorate the featureless, empty walls of the blank architecture where Mr. and Ms. Los Angeles could see them as they did the freeway boogie to work. Siquerios and Orozco and every spray-can wielding vato would've been proud!

That fast, slashing, hit-and-run style of the Guerrilla Muralists of L.A. was mine—a direct outgrowth of my rushed, rabid scribblings of monsters from my id that I leave on any available surface. Moe, Desiree, Johnny, Maria, LeRoy, Buck, and Estela were all really quiet
artistes
at heart. They preferred to work quietly, in air-conditioned, sound-proof studios with neat, meticulously laid-out materials. Just a bunch of nice kids pushed to the edge of a demented society—but I had fallen off that edge long ago. I
really
believed in our rebellion, and wouldn't be satisfied with becoming a darling of rich liberals. If any one of them was lowered down into the Great Red Spot, their sensitive, humane, artistic minds would have blown out so fast they'd have sprayed out of the exoskeleton and coated the entire inside of the dirgiscaphe with their gooey remains.

No, it took a maniac like me.

They could be comfortable lapping up the regurgitated wealth in the center of the Hollywood Empire, or fly out to the colonies to help create the new official art of the Space Culture Project, while I created splatterpainting, my Freefall Abstract Expressionism, and got my ass kicked out.

It didn't bother me. Not me. I had to keep going. Keep wandering. Volunteered to go to Ithaca Base and get lowered through the dangerous radioactive magnetosphere of the Big Planet, down to the Great Red Spot, into the heart of the Sirens' sphere of influence, let their alien thoughts flow through my skull
and
survive!

But I did need her to bring me out of it. Willa Shembe, the pride of the scientific community of Zululand. A girl used to experiencing the universe through other peoples' minds.

She keeps showing up in the images, in the paint. Unexpectedly. Automatically.

Just like the first time she showed up in my life. When I was still lost in the influence of the Sirens. After they locked me into the exoskeleton, into the dirgiscaphe, and lowered me by remote control down into evil, heavy gravity and big, beautiful stormclouds out of Turner's wetdreams, or Chalchiuhtlicue's most passionate rituals of whirlpools, violence, growth, and young love.

“Do you feel anything yet?” Dr. Calvino buzzed into my earphone on that day.

“If only those bastards could go through this,” I said into the throatmike. “They should all come here and see this planet up close before they call me undisciplined!”

“What are you talking about?” The doc never understood me.

“This sight! Jupiter up close! Wagstaff and the rest of those tight-assed idiots at the Space Culture Project should see
this
. That is what space art should be about. This energy! This power! This freedom! This is what I had in mind when I created splatterpainting.”

“What about the Sirens? Are you feeling any effects?”

“In my mind? No. This gravity is a bitch, though. If only I could see these clouds while weightless! If only I could come here and paint! Can't they build one of these exoskeletons with more freedom of movement?”

“The one you have on is the state of the art. The instruments show a high concentration of Sirens in the clouds around you. Do you feel anything yet?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it. The gravity. It's getting hard to move, breathe…”