Elvissey (3 page)

"They indicate, rather, how far the advances of science
have outraced our social conscience."

Many moments lately passed when I dreamed of conclusion so immediate, and so thorough, as John desired. His pain destroyed us-my pain destroyed us-and all I could
do in response was love: but love didn't limit darkness,
wouldn't shape shadow. Our world shrifted love, ran screaming from its presence, at night turned from its light to fasten
gaze upon the dark, lonely bed. We favored a notion so free
of science as a history class: that the other world held the
answer we needed, if not the one we wanted; that, smashing
through our looking-glass, we might on the other side see
ourselves true, neither as we wished nor as we feared we
were, and so be able to decide, at last, whether we should
disunite.

"-solution to the Negro problem cannot be found in
legislation, but in the minds-"

Static exploded, shattering their world; all silenced, as if
it'd never been. Mora stroked his machine to a stop.

"At that point the device was apparently observed. Expected response surely ensued. Prospects," Mora summed,
"fascinate."

Not always sure I'd had one, I wanted life; John felt sentenced to his. As we sat there, while Mora gathered his
papers, I saw John reread the book's closure, a quote attributed to John Donne. Once I'd been to London, and in
St. Paul's seen the preacher's statue, his image sculpted as
he'd desired: wrapped within windings, eyeshut as if asleep,
smiling as if dreaming of every funeral followed; foreseeing
his own, mayhap-the end of a long trial, with the outcome
of the appeal ahead assured.

I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
and all my pleasures are like yesterday.

Jake's deconstruction followed; succincted. When time
comes, he'd writ, act.

Class ended; before homing we descended into the crypt of
Columbia's St. Paul's to attend an artshow. A marble spiral
led to the display; at stairfoot stood artists, smoking and
drinking cups of wine, chatting technik. By their abdominal
convexities I gathered that they endeavored new projects
even while conversing. The other designers, including the
woman I'd earlier spotted, had galleried, hovering round
their containers. Their sculptures, too, were tabletopped;
among them were interspersed bowls of ikebana, lending
color no less artificial, however natural.

"Ugly," an appreciator noted to his companion. Their
first date, I inferred; each wore a forced disinterest in any-
one's affairs other than their own.

"Art," she replied, ecstasized.

Background essentials: inbody pregnancy, when accidental, was inevitably if circumventially terminated; regooding
upheld the edicts forbidding the wombed from being untimely ripped, amniotic forecast irregarded. Only through
tubed cultures, suitably outbodied, was birthed perfection
assured. Mutative nature's inescapables-chemical rain rich
with acid and deviant ray, unseeables in food and drink, our
radium-blue heaven-certified that trad gestation inevitably
delivered into our world fresh deformities, sometimes quick,
most often dead.

"One pill at daybreak, sixteen weeks running," an artist
whispered to one of her protegees. Each wore earrings made
of tiny silverplated feet, toes splayed apart by diamond chips.
"Resulting varietals are of nobler invention than thalidomide's."

"Side effects?" asked a listener. "Yours, meant."

"Standard."

Fetal artists conceived as was once the rule, as deliberately
exposing themselves to select media during pregnancy to
most appropriately flesh their concepts, which could live
only after they'd died.

"Solipsizers," said John, bareglancing, his eyes so deep socketed that, had I not known, I could never have guessed
them to be blue. "Let's shortterm."

"Hang cool," I said, forever now practicing, in speech, the
rephrasing essentialled for our upcoming travels. "Loose,
rather. Hang loose."

"Oh, Iz," he said, frowning so that only I would see.
"Straightspeak with me if no other."

"Forgive," I said; could he? I wondered if for reasons
other than chemical my eyes showed so drawn as his; began
persuing what was displayed. Within each mother's tabled
glass belly floated a freeform manifest, a maternal expression. Some were lava-iit, making the jars' small ones appear
self-luminescent as they drifted amid glowing plasmas,
resembling warning balloons lofted in advance of toxic
clouds, giving all in harmway reason enough to run. Other
babies presented to admirers internal organs origamied outward, or the look of ones dissembled and reconstructed by
mechanics uncertain of the original arrangement.

"Unoriginal," a critic noted of one who was unlit, and
bore a face emerging direct from a stubbed neck. The baby's
arms drifted through its gel as if it attempted to fly.

"How so?" asked his accompaniment.

"Similar seen live, begging on Mercer Street, six months
past."

In the eyes of some exhibits I saw duped the eyes of lovers
longlost reincarnate, no less painful to stare into now than
they'd been when I'd last taken leave of them. All the jugged
children carried a feel of specimens recovered from those
more distant worlds once imagined extant, far beyond visible stars, stolen from Edens as yet untarnished by the slither
of snakes.

"Postambient," the holoed gallerist explained, her image
afloat in room's midst. "As cubism rose from trad Afro
styles. Brancusi, exampled. Prim remade proper; rebirth becomes any art."

The sculptures, I favored; those employed the interior frames so that the design's more profound aspects might be
fully revealed. The ribcage of one draped down over its
femurs. Several small skulls evidenced cyclopean features;
holiday lights were inserted within the expected openings, to
whimsify onlookers. One sculpture, hued waste-green, stood
balanced, seeming weightless upon its fourth foot's third,
longest toe.

"Iz, I beg-" John murmured. I kissed; calmed, if didn't
settle.

"Por fav, moment," I said; took his hand in mine, feeling
no feeling. "Let's see who's cookin'."

'iz"

"Practice perfects."

The exhibit's centerpiece was wrought by an artist named
Tanya, a provincial who'd been living in the Bowl, near the
great Indiana dunes; no others so fertiled as she, either in
idea or in technik. Tanya bore a look resembling my husband's, that of one who suffered for their art. Her child,
whom I took to be one of outbodied origin, sat smiling
nearby; she had honey hair, thick and tousled in the back,
and skin so pink as to have been boiled.

"Wordless," others muttered, eyeing Tanya's bodiwork.
"Doublestunned."

Half mobile, half collage, the art was contained within two
transparent cones poised tiptipped; the topmost revolved
unceasing by way of the gyroscopic motion of two intertwined catherine-wheels afloat within, both armspoked with
ten bony lengths, digits directed viewer-outward, striking
balance nature neither offered nor intended. In the lower
cone four small ones, fullbodied ifemptyfaced, circled round-
rosied, their dance forever macabring.

"Years, making," Tanya said, responding to another's
question. "I despaired, sometimes."

"How'd you bleach the bones?" I asked.

"China White," she explained. "After beetling."

Her little girl's face lit as if it, too, generated its own glow, reflecting much more than her mother's glory. "She loves
her brothers and sisters," Tanya said, stroking her daughter's perfect hair and hands. "When you're old enough,
sweetie."

"Cost?" I inquired.

Tanya shrugged; smiled. "If you have to ask-"

I thought myself no artist; imagined I could have been a
good mother, but our marriage's anesthetic was unmarred
by creativity. When I wed John I was awared at moment one
that we were to remain childless. Though insistent guards,
such asJohn, were allowed conjunction, Dryco's concern for
familial stability demanded that from Security unions no
progeny might spring, to be too early orphaned. By directive, not even seed could be gathered in advance to later
plant, pre- or post-retirement; all guards were clipped
before being diplomaed, the vasect required before they
could receive Jake's book. Often before learning there was
one I dreamt of a parallel world, where John was a good
father and I, a good mother.

"Iz," he said, with stiff fingers touching my arm with fly's
lightness; as had his old overseer, he avoided my eyes, as if
undesiring to see what was lost. "Homeaway now. Age befalls the legs. I beg."

"Moment."

In that other world, would our counterparts be birthed? If
they were, and if they married, would they create? Or, once
joined, would they live as we had, sans art, a cozy couple
separate yet equal, sharing an isotope's halflife, clinging to
madness to which they'd most familiared, shielding themselves against vaster insanities whirling without?

Was that love? What was its cost? If you have to ask ...
Before homing I charged up an exhibit disk that I could
review later at leisure, discerning what I'd overlooked; finding those unintended truths artists so well as critics failed to
see even when shown, the ones most meaningful, because
most disturbing.

"Love you," I told my husband, "overmuch." He nodded;
he knew.

Aiming Bronxward up Broadway our car carried us home;
through smoked windows we eyed tripleshifters deconstructing the walls between Harlem and Washington Heights as
the northern, higher parts of Manhattan underwent their
own regooding. So few still lived on either side of the walls
that such security had for years been so superfluous as those
who'd once lived there; I'd lived there, as a child. We'd
grown together in Washington Heights, me and Judy and
poor lost Lola, inloading info, streetsmarting, grasping our
world's way in a moment's breath if and when essentialled;
I regooded myself, once I left.

Looking upward through the roof I gazed toward Godness; saw no spark, no sign, no flare of St. Elmo's fire.
Mundanities blotted the night: clouds aglow with searchlight-shine coagulated on high, no sooner taking the shape
intended by those directing groundbound than breezes conspired to deface the fog-scrawled designs. Environads, when
successed, allowed Dryco to emboss its logo upon land, sky
and sea; that if tongues stilled, and screens blanked, the
rocks themselves would forever sing a song of Dryco. Airtrav-
elers descending through the yellow zone into the apparent
clear vizzed highwayside forests grown on demand, controlling erosion while, in engraven greenery, foliating the corporate sign; streams raced along rechanneled courses that
from far vistas the interested might glimpse our name writ
in water; knolls were shaved and shifted into the familiar
face's leer, eyed with boulders, smiled with a shrubbery curl,
and spelling out in hedges circled round our company's
rephrased ethos: Do Good. Feel Real. The word was too much
with us, too soon: Dryco was the word, and our world was of
the word, and with the word, and the world was the word.

"Watch!!" John shouted. Our driver swerved slidelong, rushing through the reds; at 156th escaped blindsiding by
another Bronxbound limo. John clasped the man's shoulders, steering him curbways as he slowed to a stop. "You're
risking," he told the driver, a reassigned Security staffer; as
he told him that I knew that it was my safety, not their own,
that so concerned my husband.

"Known," the man mumbled, barely audible.

"I'll cruise us,"John said. "Shift." Stepping out, wheeling
himself, John eased our driver into shotgun position; spoke
to the dash so kindly as to his co-worker, and when the car
responded we moved on: righting, lefting, rivercrossing,
passing from the gone world into the one which would be.

Under Dryco guidance, at inestimable cost, our city rebuilded atop the Bronx hills, designed half trad, half in the
style Eurotrenders termed Dreizinuovy. New New York's
nightlight made lurid its host of shades, pastel and primary:
apricot and aubergine, lemon and lilac, cerise and cerulean
and deep emerald green. Betowered and lowdomed, the city
showed so spired as a bed of nails; tubes bridged streetcanyons eighty floors over, sodastraw elevators ran along
building-sides toward rich azimuths bedecked with fauxcurlicue and neo-arabesque. Clouds of tiny copters circled
midge-like round those grown and growing hothouse flowers, our garden town. The Met, at intervals, displayed fading
comic panels, whereupon more conservative appreciators of
art would see inked, half a century past by those in the know,
our city's image: sealed within a bottle, one candid among
many miniatures lifted from a farrago of worlds.

Old New York would in time be sea-swallowed, as Chicago
would go Nineveh as each daily dust-storm laid down another coat, as LA would in time smother beneath its Jovian
atmosphere's weight; Moscow might crumble, Lagos and
Karachi burn anew with nuclear fire, Cairo and Bangkok
and Brazzaville depopulate at one hundred souls per hour.
Yet as in Tokyo, as in Berlin and London, new New York
would-upon completion-show as all in our world should have shown, had so many not slowed along the roadway to
view the accidents previous onlookers caused.