The Electric Michelangelo (38 page)

– Are we on fire?

– What’s it called when you finish a game the winner? Checkmate? But what about when nobody can win? That happens also, yes? How about when it’s a draw?

Grace yawned, ran her thumb under the strap of her nightgown which had slipped down off her shoulder.

– Perpetual check.

– Look. It’s not up to me of course, and I would never talk anyone into something permanent that they were not convinced of, but you see, I think that you should do it. I think you should have the tattoos. Even if it’s not by me. Even if you go elsewhere. I think it would be … spectacular.

She laughed, raised her eyebrows, and watched him for a moment, with the same look of quizzical contemplation that she had worn when they parted the night they had first met. Then she stepped closer and whispered to him as if divulging an obvious if previously unmentioned secret.

– Well of course it’s going to be you, Electric Michelangelo. Of course you.

From inside the apartment he could hear the radio or gramophone playing, the soft twine of classical music, the urgency of violin strings. He had no idea what that meant, whether she slept well or suffered from insomnia. He had no idea what time it was but he knew that they existed now like actors inside the shared hours of their building’s theatre. And he knew, with her standing there against silk or satin, a person of collected ideas and injuries against the orchestra, even unknown to him as she still was, that she would never again be a body confined to the frail dimension of nitrate shadows and chalk and dreams.

There were instances when Cy’s needle unwittingly delved down into a soul and struck upon meaning, then confidential matter came up, unstemmable as arterial blood or gushing oil, and customers confessed the reason behind the art. He caught their stories in a bucket in the shop or booth and mixed it with ink and used the serum to paint translations of the very stories the tellers were haemorrhaging on to them. He could interrogate people without a single word, just via the incisor in his hand, drawing their lives out of them as he drew symbols on to them. The tales were revelatory and awful and enlightening. These were not house walls he was painting, after all, they were empathetic people, made of flesh and bone and experience and tragedy and joy. They had the hearts of his mother’s understanding, tossed-together, torn-asunder. They were broken and healing and abused, careless and worshipping of each other. To tattoo was to understand that people in all their confusing mystery wanted only to claim their bodies as their own site, on which to build a beacon, or raise a rafter, or nail up a manifesto, warning, celebrating, telling of themselves. It was to understand that in order for a body to be reborn and re-yoked, first it needed to be destroyed and freed. It was emancipation and it was slavery, the ashes and the phoenix. It was beauty and destruction, it was that old trick. That was the contract.

One day he might go mad with the knowledge of too much brutality, the violations, the ripping up of hearts and minds and bodies. All the terrible information his needle bit into, all the secrets it lanced. All the memories of people who had come to him and bled their history, which he recorded like a photograph album or a diary of pictures on their bodies. The roped dead-man’s hand holding the scales of justice that he put on the precipice of one man’s back, whose mother had been raped and killed by her own brothers, who had his revenge righteously against each one in turn, and now he wore his hangman’s history. The red and black garden that he had sown on one woman’s torso, with green thorns around it to keep intruders out; she had been cut by a criminal from her soft parts to her beautiful lower lip, up along the length of her like a fish, like an almost-gutted fish, and her nipples cut away like scrap – she wanted flowers there now because her spirit would grow back and it would keep on growing. One day he might go mad from the twists and turns in the maze of the soul, the variety of human misdemeanour, and his strange role – recoverer and repairer of body, commanding forgiveness of the past as it became a sign on skin, as if in atonement.

Some customers were simply talkers. They spoke to him with fast care, as if pulling eggs out of boiling water on the spoon of a hand. Some had to babble themselves through the procedure, because the voice was one of the best antidotes known to pain and instinctively it overwhelmed their mouths. Mostly people did not adopt silence, could not manage a place of mind where the body was incidental or erased. Most struggled. Most could not trance. Most did not hear that original tat-tat-tat-to sound of the old way, under the seamless industrial click-clack of machinery, under the flic-flac dance of coils and drive shafts hammering away. So they could not follow the drum and beat track to rapture, hypnosis, the absence of pain from the cutting sensation, the suspension of the brain in nectar.

The talkers talked of anything and nothing. They were desperate for the anaesthetic of their voice and they provided a variety of colourful and obscure information. There was even science or poetry on occasion. One young man had formulated a meteorological theory about the weather below Coney Island’s boardwalk. It affected women sexually, he said. There was a climate change when you went under. The sand went from open-beach broil to cool, private moisture, like being inside the mouth of a whale or the chill of a forest. Men took their sweethearts there to kiss and fondle and that was his intention. His girl had agreed to go with him, a sweet gal, but harder than a bank safe to break into her clothing. It was a realm of striped shadows, arboreal, sap-fresh, all the laughter and the ride sounds were muffled like they were under a canopy of trees. He kissed and pulled her dress down off her. They felt like insects, he said, slowing in the wood shade, not driven into frenzy by the heat. In the cool Atlantic spit of the place he had lifted her skirt and found the corner of her menstruation belt, and thinking that a refusal in itself he had been surprised shortly afterwards to find himself pushed inside her, stinging a little on his tip. And as they made love they could hear the footsteps of the people on the boardwalk up above, like it was another world. The tattoo was of his new son’s name. By the time the story of his conception was finished so was the last letter.

This was the prittle-prattle of ordinary and eccentric human adventure, the tittle-tattle of the milky lallygagging herd. But always there was the obscenity, the debris of hatred, the fetid curd. More common than compulsive banter and irrational explanation were the bitter revelations, of sin, imposed or sanctioned. Customers revisited old injuries of the mind and body in his booth and he could sense them wanting to slip past that pain with a decoy, or intimidate it with newer pain of his equipment’s manufacture. There were the beatings, the cheatings, the welts from the buckles of belts on the hide of sanity, the ploughing of fists through faces, the avalanche of cocks against orifices, the rapes, the killings, the loss of loved ones from a blade, a gun, poison, lunatic voices in the head. There were the gangrenous scars of the undead. What was he if not a conduit for the brutalized stories and the mending characters of a new country? His needle found out their suffering like a surgeon’s scalpel. People were pricked and spilled their lives like pus. And one day he might go mad from it all. It was a price of the profession Riley had said to him, drunk as disaster on the prom that night, and creating a fuss. He was a fucking midwife, boy, that was his job. Sharp tools were entrusted to his hands, but the demands of the trade required further skill. For unless brought to him howling and bloody and immediately from the canals of their mothers at birth, there was absolutely no such thing as a blank human canvas.

Because she was not a good match with the way he recalled her in their meetings or imagined her to be, Cy found it was possible to put his hands on Grace’s body professionally and it was not unbearable to have her sit in the booth and remove her clothing. She was in large part a stranger. For the past few weeks he had been courting a figment of his imagination with her vague composition. When he remembered her it was softly, flatteringly. In reality she was harder, with the serrated edges of a lumberman’s saw. It was a complicated thing to have to bring her actual flesh and personality and the unreal flash design he had drawn of her into some kind of correlation. It was similar to battling with drunken split-vision as the lines of what is doubly seen roll apart, distort, roll in and pass each other again. But this reconstitution perhaps distracted him initially from all the things he thought he would be driven crazy with arousal over – the hollow channel down the middle of her upper stomach where flesh dropped off from the sternum, the shadow-line dividing the muscles along her thigh, the bone that rose to the surface here and there in a pleasing skeletal geography, hipbones, nipples, the inviting crease of buttocks. Scenarios he had imagined to death, usually in the morning with his hand shovelling away at his cock – dampness along her back as he reached round her, dampness between her legs as he pushed into her, a kiss that worked her bottom lip with his tongue – were eclipsed by what was in reality quite different and surprising and actual. There were her textures, the thin, fruit-skin dappling on the back of her upper thighs, the blossom soft area where chest and breastbone panelling became something fuller, innumerable tiny pores, the sunken dimple in both her shoulders which were strong and taut from years of holding balances on equine platforms in the circus. There were the things she said, which skirted conformity and politely ordained conversation, choosing grave and often taboo ground instead. He began to realize that there was a hopelessness to any wistful portrayals he might make of her, for he only had to dismantle them in her presence again when her mannerisms, her harsh language, her confrontational proclivities, her spitting casually in the street like a heavy smoker, the tough nodes of her behaviour, and her corporeal immediacy refuted his designs. But damn it if he didn’t begin to fancy her new incarnation also. The livelier, lived-in version.

He always arranged the boards of the doorway when she visited so that there would be privacy – he generally did this for work on breasts or thighs – and he put up a sign with the time that he would be available for un-appointed work again. He placed boards and a sheet atop of the stools to construct a makeshift bench for her to lie on. Maximus, if he was accompanying her, was content to be tied up outside. There were times when Grace would talk to him through the boards, in one or other of her languages, and Cy felt that she may be flirting with the horse or that she preferred communicating with the animal rather than with him. She had meant what she said, she wanted a full body design. She was uncompromising and courageous that way, true circus stock. They arranged that he would work up to her very edges, up to her hands and neck and to the soles of her feet, to the point at which her clothing would seal off the images, but beneath the line of her underwear, as if she were wearing a complete bodysuit. Only her face, neck, and hands would be left unmarked. The eyes would vary in size, depending upon the landscape where they would be hosted. Larger on her navel, smaller on her arms. Her new skin would cost her twenty-five dollars. It was a fair price. She paid him up front, all at once, and he took the money from her with surprise, for it was no mean sum, and he would have worked out a method of layaway payment with her. She observed his expression as he folded the notes and joked with him.

– What? You thought it would be a new two dollars every week with the corner missing?

He chuckled at her insinuation. Such bills were considered lucky or seedy in this country, depending upon which circles a person moved in. They had a dubious pedigree – two dollars was the standard bordello rate in the northern states and a torn corner indicated that the prostitute in question had provided a service of lascivious excellence. He locked away the cash. Then he turned his attention to the best commission of his life.

– Ready?

– Ready. OK. On y va.

He began with her legs. He had drawn a stencil from her picture but by the fifth or sixth tattoo on her calf he felt confident he could perfect it without any preliminary tracing. His motion was better controlled if he was not a slave to a line of migration. At the back of his mind he suspected he might encounter scars on her, it seemed likely that an acrobat and an immigrant might have them, but she did not. There were moles like miniature door-handles and creases in her limbs from the repetitive hinging of joints. A sorrel birthmark stained her left hip. Past the line of her clothing the skin paled, like the bleached grass under a lifted rock – she seemed not as concerned with maintaining overall porcelain skin as many women were. With medical discretion he moved back pieces of clothing off only the area under scrutiny. When he needed to pull her underwear up over her more he asked her to do it and he turned his back until she had finished unsnapping closures. When it came to the work on her buttocks and lower abdomen, he ensured his gaze was absent as she undressed, as she lay down and stood up from the bench. She was not tall, but lying down she reached almost the full length of the booth. Its confines kept them enticingly close, always within arm’s reach. And her body moved him, it did, the scent of her was genuinely existent, elemental, occasionally fused with the overtones of a musk-based perfume, but otherwise natural, and she was intoxicating.