The Electric Michelangelo (44 page)

– They better have good hotdogs in Los Angeles. It’s all I can say. Will you join us, my English friend?

– No. I’ve been thinking of joining up. Going back over. May as well be of some use.

Arturas gave Cy a look that was set painfully between disbelief and hazardous comprehension. As if something latent between them, a tiny, precious, unifying thing, which they had both always tried to protect in the middle of a nest of unmentionable conversation, in the middle of their professional rivalry, and in the middle of a grotesque and sundering war, had now been broken. Turo took Cy’s offered hand and shook it, and with his other hand he reached for the back of Cyril Parks’s neck, pulling him forward until their foreheads met.

– We will have a drink then in Varga, for old time’s sake?

– I can’t. I’m barred.

What he wanted to do was take hold of Grace’s hand and into it pass something of his own heart, but instead he held back, and he found himself watching her remove a cotton dress, a garment softer than candyfloss from a spinning machine which some friend or nurse had been thoughtful enough to get for her, to cover the fraught body. She unbuttoned it down and open through the front, making it into one long piece of material, and she slowly peeled and unwound herself out of it. Then she was naked in front of him but for her shoes. She had not put on underwear, her breasts and pubic region had been included in the savagery of the acid and were still healing. Before he could harness his horror, Cy was crying openly, an uncontrollable weeping that forbade neither his voice nor his face from expression. Grace stood before him, on the sidewalk next to his booth, with her dress in her hand and her scars open to the sky. She stood there as if she were a peep-show whore in a film about the undead. Or one of Coney Island’s monsters. Litter tumbled past them with an insistent, autumnal breeze behind it, empty wrappers, paper bags and cartons once containing food. And there amid the trash she was extraordinary against the familiar background of the alley but no less ruined.

She had walked with absolute care up to Cy as he was opening the booth, like someone recently woken from a spell of being knocked unconscious, and it was further than she had walked in three months, from the station to the end of Oceanic Walk, though he did not know of her small victory. He had not seen her once during the period of rehabilitation, having recoiled from the effort of trying to get to her as hard as he had initially made it. He was removing the lock from the hinge of the booth when he turned and saw her walking towards him, at first not recognizing her, for she moved like an old lady with well-retained posture and rheumatic difficulty. Then it was her hair with its traces of red and the dark features of her face that gave her away, and his blood froze for a moment before lurching forward again.

– Grace? My God, is that you!

She was almost to him when he spoke, treading with rigid care on the pavement, so even before she revealed her body to him he knew the damage must be extreme. And without a word she stood before him and stripped away her clothing.

If her eyes said love, if they said it to him then in accompaniment with the gesture, his clamouring heart and the racket of his blood drowned the message out, so he would never know for sure. He could not fathom the bravery of that exposure, somehow stronger than the twenty men and the team of Clydesdales it look to drag that ridiculous runaway motorbus from the sands of Morecambe Bay when he was a boy, after its steering pin had snapped and it had careered through the prom wall, decapitating passengers on its tumble. Stronger than the brawniest arm in the fairground slamming the mallet down on to the Beef-o-Meter to ring its bell. Stronger than diamond or atomic propulsion or wrought iron. Her. Naked. Scarred. The boards of the booth were not even fully down yet to provide her with some privacy inside. But her expression said that the landscape was irrelevant, she might have been lost in a desert or on the presidential lawn or on the moon for all she cared.

Early passers-by slowed to see if this was some kind of radically casual, unorganized treat, a show of Coney’s titillating spontaneity, shameless when it came to human dignity and the rules of physical conduct. Perhaps she was one of the ugly bodies they had been promised they would see, escaped from the big top. But Cyril Parks knew this show was for one man alone and no carnival barker would call a roll-up, roll-up. She gave him a full, wordless minute to see her, while his mouth contorted and he wiped at his eyes and tried to control himself.

Her stomach was tight and hard as wood ash, collected in lumps and ridges, so she would never be able to bend over and slip a strap through the buckle of her shoe again, she would always have to retrieve a dropped item by bringing her upright body down on bent legs, blind to whatever was underneath her. Her pubic hair was mostly gone, just a few strands remained below a bald patch, so she looked like a little girl. He could see the slit line of her against a stripped membrane. Her left breast was made smaller than the right by the acid, which had swept through fatty tissue with abandon, and the nipple there looked like a piece of misshapen rock, chipped glass. The tattooed eyes on her torso had been erased in places, in others they had washed together in bizarre, nondescript patches of concentrated dye. Green from the largest ruptured iris on her abdomen had collected above her appendix, and it seemed in comparison a beautiful emerald seam against the strip-mined earth of the rest of her. No. She was like a fresco with a jar of paint stripper knocked over her. She had run, dried and hardened. Several of the eyes on her arms, legs and back had survived, but otherwise she was as streaky as an abstract painting. She put a hand up to his face and moved his tears away with the heel of her palm. She gave him those moments before she spoke, she had probably not in any case known how to prepare him verbally for the sight. Nothing she could have said would have cleared the way.

– So. The doctors can move skin around on your body now. From here to here, they cut it off and put it back on. This is called a skin graft, they can only just do this thing. Mostly it still doesn’t work. It is amazing that they can do that, I think.

Cy took a chestful of air and nodded, his diaphragm shuddering. He put his hands on his hips and tried to breathe calmly through gritted teeth, he felt as if he had been running fast for the last few minutes. But he did not look away from her. And then she reminded him of something. Her voice with its different, unlocated accent and the dark white and grey body with its patches of green – she was like a thing which he had encountered only twice as a boy from the train window as he rode to his Aunt Doris’s house, and he had thought it haunting and raw even then. It was the rock pavements of the Yorkshire moors where the earth’s bone surfaced in bands and petrified rivers against the swaying grass and the living ground. She was now in part dead, like the stone of the moors, while regions of her still grew, and her tone was the dirge-like song of the wind.

A man in front of them on the other side of the street whistled in their direction and crossed over to get a more intimate view of the nude woman.

– Turn around girly-girl, let’s see your better side.

Grace obliged him, turning around inanimately like a gigot on a spit, and the man stopped coming and took his eyes off her. He adjusted his collar and hurried away.

Cy took the boards of the booth down quickly, his hands shaking as he stacked them, and they both stepped into the small enclosure. He offered her a seat and she shook her head.

– It takes too long. Up and down. Not worth it any more. But, I’m finding ways.

He sat down on the stool. He had to sit. He had to remember to breathe, to tell his lungs to operate. He was now in a direct line with her midriff, the region of the worst damage. There was amazing detail to the scarring. The hospital gauze had left cross-hatching on the plateaus of skin. There were peaks like miniature mountain ranges, black gullies. Those wounds! She had always said it would be about body, hadn’t she, that the battleground had been chosen by others and a war would be fought there, and won or lost? Hers had been the site of an almighty uprising, on a territory mapped out and claimed by an administration that had every intention of preserving empire and dictating the law of the land to its colony. So all she could do was find a way to overwhelm the government with quick wits, a trick of the light in battle using shields and mirrors and superb body armour, blinding them for long enough to disable their forces and vanquish them. And for a time the victory flags had flown across her body. How must that have felt for her, he wondered. Like a full brass plate and a cheer from the crowd? Like Liberty’s fiery torch? And he had known what she was up against all along, hadn’t he, him with his booth walls drowning under images of sex and stylized female bodies? Yes, he had known.

Grace had been outnumbered by the men of history, she had neither the political strength nor the support of her own people, but she had found a way to win her freedom, and for a time she had celebrated the identity of her body as her own sovereign state. And now the land had been razed again, it was desolate, death-soil. But her eyes, those dark, solemn, prolific eyes still glimmered and said her mind had not lost that spirit of rebellion and never would. She was gathering the last few insurgents, the hardiest survivors in their caves and forest hideaways, and they were forming a pact of defiance, they were stockpiling arms. The revolt was far from over. She’d damn herself. She’d go to the gallows bloody and brutalized but unbroken if she had to.

He knew the only pity and consolation she would accept, the only tears she would stand for, were his. He could see that in her face, the finite sympathy and tolerance for him. Her flag-maker. Her ally. The man who rewrote her body’s history. The man who loved her. She gestured to herself.

– They moved skin from my leg to here above my ribs. They said it would die or continue to live, but either way it would protect the inside. It was not cosmetic, they tried a few things. I signed forms saying they could. I don’t know how they did this, Electric Michelangelo. It is a miracle. I had to stay covered until it was healed enough for the air – even the air can bring infection to you – or I would have come sooner. They want me to put a liniment on that will make it hard, with some kind of metal in it, but I can’t reach so well. You must stop this face now. I need your help. Here. You can do this for me.

She took a tube of cream from the pocket of her dress and held it out to him.

– I don’t want to hurt you. It looks so … painful.

– No. I can’t feel it any more, sometimes an itch, but mostly it’s like this …

She took his hand in hers and placed their two first fingers together like the steeple of a church, while the rest intertwined to make its roof. Then she made him slide his other fingers up and down the joined steeple. It was the dead-finger trick that the boys of his school had once done to make each other squeamish, the sensation was of a lifeless body part and now it seemed doubly awful. He took the cream from her, put a small amount into his palm and smoothed it as best he could over the rocky patches at the top of her legs. The skin was less absorbent than slate. Skin was supposed to drink in moisture and hers would not take a sip. She put her hand in his hair, stroked it while he anointed her. He felt his eyes begin to brim again and he pulled her towards him gently and began to kiss her stomach, her hips, the ruined abdomen and breasts, his mouth soft and damp on her, her body tough as granite until his tongue found the safer, softer channel of skin inside her. He felt her hand close in his hair and pull on it gently, mooring them closer together. She whispered a word to him, twice, which defied any liguistic pronunciation he had mastered, but he knew it was an affirmation of some kind. Kedvesem. Kedvesem. For a few moments he felt her body swaying exquisitely against him, like the lip of a wave breaking at his mouth. Her breathing became husked within her chest, constricted then ameliorated from the errata of her respiratory condition, and her head fell back. Her rhythm was overcome by a series of small jolts, electrical currents, as if her body had been shocked, her life being taken or given back by a connection of energy, and then she was still.

– Grace … I’ve wanted to say …

– No, just this. Dziekuje, Cy. Tell Claudia that she must have Maximus now. But I can’t take care of him any more, you see. He will like to see all of America and if they take him to California he will like to see a different ocean. Tell her there is no other horse fit to carry her but Maximus … because … because he is as magnificent as she is and she will be his queen …

Her voice broke then, suddenly, shattering apart like glass with her last words, and for a moment all the sorrow of Europe came flooding out. Cy looked up at her, expecting to glimpse a little girl or an unmade woman, the smallest in a stack of matrushka dolls. But already that pure, hatchling, embryonic thing was gone. Grace was staring at a point in space, forcing water away from her eyes to its underground channel, sealing the marrow of her spirit back up. Then she took a step away, picked up her dress off the counter and put it on, prohibitively across her shoulders, and buttoned it up the front.