Escape (2 page)

Almost as soon as he began, he realized his self-portrait was almost as evocative of Octavio Ocampo as Archimboldo – smoother, more fluid and delicate than the Italian's vaguely grotesque carnality. As he worked, Luka emphasized the sharp angles of the scissors and razors, the cold gleam of their steel, while he brought out the brightness of the paints and pastels representing his creative life he kept hidden behind the door of his room over Željko's shop.

The next night, he forced himself to the edge of the abyss again, made himself confront the disapproving stare of his double in the small round mirror he'd brought up from the shop. What had Van Gogh thought all the times he'd rendered his own mad gaze on canvas? Emerging from those frenetic brush strokes, Luka'd always suspected a fragile, wounded affection for himself. Or was it only self-pity? Frida Khalo's dark eyes, though, always stared from under black brows like a crow in flight with a gaze that accused the world of a dark crime, while simultaneously daring the viewer to resist her strength, her beauty, her will.

Trying to adhere to the instructions for the assignment, Luka did his best to render this self-portrait as objectively as possible, without editorial flourishes. When he finished, he doubted he'd succeeded. Maybe the way Željko had cropped his dark hair so close (with his usual quip about not letting Luka turn into a girl, as long as he was working for him) made his features look too pronounced. Maybe, without meaning to, he'd exaggerated the largeness of his eyes, the shadow cast over his gray-green irises by his lashes somehow suggesting forlornness he hadn't meant to put there. And he knew he had weirdly full lips, especially for a guy, because sometimes Andrej would tease him about having a mouth like a girl, and Željko would laugh along with him while he gave him his shave. In the painting, though, his lips were shockingly plump. He kept looking between the canvas and the mirror, trying to find the distortion, but the proportions were all correct. And he'd placed himself in the simple, spartan setting of his room without giving it much thought, but the final impression was of a lonely figure, isolated in stark planes of space and light, a lost denizen in one of Edward Hopper's broken dreams.

Normally Luka didn't mind if it was after six when he finished sweeping up and making sure the combs were sterilized and put away, even though Željko never paid him for the extra time, but today Željko took the last customer so Luka could have the tidying up finished by the top of the hour, dash upstairs and snatch his backpack and catch the six-thirty bus to the Academy, and get there on time for his eight o'clock class. Hustling toward the bus stop, he mentally inventoried his bag for the third time, assuring himself he remembered putting in his sketch pad, pencil case, the textbook he'd had to buy and Jansson's far more expensive
History of Art
, which luckily he'd found in the library, and the printout of his course schedule, which had the building name and room number of his class.

Would the professor ask to see their work? He'd brought the pieces that had gotten him into the program, just in case. The idea of opening his book in front of the other students and letting the professor scrutinize the drawings he'd poured his soul into made his belly twinge. Of course, that would be easy as giving a bald man a haircut, compared to showing the self-portraits come Thursday.

All at once the nervous tickle creeping around Luka's belly flew into his chest, cramping his heart. A few meters ahead, Pero was leaning back against the wall, talking to Rade and Pavle, all of them in their carmine Vega uniforms, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. He halted dead in his tracks. The stupid bus stop was only half a block away, and when he peered up the street, he could see the bus stopped at a light just one intersection beyond. No way could he miss that bus. He'd have to wait half an hour for the next one, and he'd be late for his first day at the Academy.

Fuck it
.

He waited for a gap in traffic and scurried across the street, hoping Pero wouldn't notice him. Without looking over, he hurried to the end of the block, crossed at the corner, and doubled back to the plastic bus shelter. He cast a stealthy look back, peering around the side of the shelter, covered top to bottom and side to side with an ad featuring a woman in pink lingerie sucking her finger. Pero was laughing while one of his friends carried on, face animated, gesturing comically as he told some joke or story. Luka let out a sigh of relief so loud the old woman on the bench turned and stared at him. When her gaze slid down to the blue band around his arm, she turned away, rolling her eyes.

On the bus, even after three stops, Luka's heart was still banging madly in his chest. Three years. Three fucking years, and he was still a quivering mess, just seeing the guy from half a block away. Luka forced a few slow, deep breaths in and out of his lungs, frantically trying not to cry. This was supposed to be his happy day. The only really happy day since... fuck, since pretty much forever.

Don't let that sadistic shit ruin it.

Luka kept grasping at the nervous eagerness that had been buzzing through him before he'd glimpsed Pero, but however desperately he clung, the memory of his humiliation three years earlier kept clawing at him, dragging him down.

Leaving Obrad alone in his room, just for a minute, while he went into the bathroom to pee.

Opening the door. Seeing, without understanding, Obrad's bright red face, the weird clash between the fearful scorn in his blue eyes, and his clenched, sputtering laughter. Then the gut-wringing sight of his old yellow sketchbook lying open on the desk, right where Obrad was standing.

Luka kept the yellow sketchbook hidden. Always. He only took it out from behind his small collection of treasured books—the ones he loved so much, he wanted them with him always, not just now and then, checked out from the library—when he felt the urge to create that certain kind of picture. And sometimes when he jerked off. He never carried the sketchbook with him, when he went out. But that morning, he'd forgotten to put it away before work.

Obrad said, “I have to go,” even though he'd just come over and they were supposed to go watch Pero and the older boys play football.

Lead-heavy terror filling up his body so he could hardly move, hardly breathe, Luka let Obrad go without even trying to say a word to stop him. He went to the desk, and that awful, cold weight dragging him to the floor went suddenly, painfully dense and solid at the center of his chest. One ragged spine of fibrous paper was caught, twisted in the wire spiral, severed from its body. When he saw which page had been torn out, he collapsed to his knees and puked.

For more than a week, he didn't leave the building. He haunted the two floors of the narrow building, downstairs by day, an automaton doling out cuts and shaves, upstairs by night, trapped in the gray monotony of his single room, trying to read
Grapes of Wrath
, but his shame and dread were too thick to read through. Even hunger wasn't enough to drive him out to buy food. After a week, though, he was so pale and lethargic from lack of food and sleep and dread, he was afraid he'd blurt out the truth in a sudden lapse of wits.

It wasn't like in Bijeljina. People didn't snigger and whisper when he walked by. He did get a few looks, the first day or two, but once he'd had a few little meals and his pallor had waned and he was steadier, everyone seemed to stop taking notice again. Maybe Obrad hadn't shown the drawing to anyone.

Please.
Luka didn't know who he was begging. Pero? The universe?
Please. Please don't know.

The first time he saw Pero after Obrad took the page from his sketchbook, a sharp pain ripped through his chest, and he wondered if he was too young to have a heart attack. When Pero seemed to notice him, Luka thought Pero twitched, that a spasm ticked across his features, but he and his friends just kept talking and laughing and didn't seem to be paying him any attention.

He doesn't know. Obrad didn't tell him. Obrad didn't show him.

Even clinging to that desperate, improbable hope, for more than a week that treacherous piece of paper was all Luka could think about, all day at work, all night, hiding in his spartan room above the shop. Why had he even drawn it? What the fuck was wrong with him? It had started out regular. Just another study. He did them all the time. His boss, with his graying, curly hair, his weak chin, his steadily expanding paunch. The customers, some young and virile, some old, frail, stooped. His friends, some gangly, still waiting for puberty to catch them up with the early bloomers, others lithe and graceful, some with reddish constellations of acne starbursting across a pale forehead or olive-dusky cheeks. The older boys they watched play football and trailed around town, trying to copy the way they wore their hair, the way they lit their cigarettes and leaned back against graffiti-covered walls as they blew billows of smoke from between their lips with practiced nonchalance.

But Pero was different. He was so strangely beautiful in his angular brutishness, like a comic book hero. Impossibly wide shoulders, even at eighteen. That was the autumn when Luka had first arrived in Sovići and made friends with Pero's kid brother Obrad one Saturday morning, because Pero had been a volunteer coach who spent a couple hours working with the younger boys after school and weekends. Luka never got to play during the week, since he had work, but every Saturday and Sunday for a couple hours, he got to be a kid with the other boys his age, while every year Pero put on muscle, on perpetual display under the thin fabric of T-shirts that were always stretched tight across his broad, cut chest and squeezing his bulging biceps.

Over and over, Luka drew him. Just like he drew the others; sketches in pencil, in charcoal, sometimes fleshed out in oil pastels. He tried different techniques, sometimes struggling to render an image as true to life as a photograph, other times, sacrificing accuracy to the energy of line or blur of shape in an attempt to capture a true feeling rather than objective verisimilitude.

One day, he did something with a sketch of Pero he'd never done with any of his drawing of the other people he drew. Before he'd even finished shading the contours of his muscular thighs as Pero kicked the round white ball out from under another player's sneaker, Luka succumbed to a sudden, desperate urge, and jerked off. Then he worked on the drawing a little more. Then jerked off again.

The next time he drew Pero, he drew him naked. Luka’d never seen him naked, but since nine months out of the year Pero played football in nothing but his shoes, socks, and a skimpy pair of shorts, only one thing was really left to the imagination. Luka pulled down his pants and studied himself in the mirror, then gave Pero his own cock and balls, inflated about fifty percent to suit his obsession's colossal proportions.

Every evening after work, Luka rendered a fresh vision of Pero, then jerked off to it. Sometimes he used paintings of famous mythological heroes collected in books he checked out from the library. Pero as Achilles slaughtering Hector. Pero as centaur, as minotaur. As Poseidon.

Luka would stand in front of the mirror, grasping his cock, fingertips and the side of his hand black with graphite, and get himself hard. Then he'd give Pero a Titan's erection, a longer, thicker, more heavily veined version of his own. In the one he jerked off to most, the one he'd accidentally stained half a dozen times with errant spatters of his own spunk, an obscenely abundant gush of semen spewed up from the hyper-engorged tip, shaded in livid vermilions and dusky purples.

Now there was just a tattered remnant of the thick paper tangled in the coil of wire binding the sketchbook.

One week and three days after Obrad ran off with the purloined page, Luka was walking home from the grocery store, after waiting until the last minute before they closed at eight, hoping to avoid running into anyone he knew, when something hard hit his shoulder, driving him off the sidewalk, into the shadows behind Vlasic's pet supply shop. A stray softball from the field across the road? A crashing cyclist? Startled, almost blind in the dark, he tried to catch his breath and his bearings. A glimpse, a man lunging toward him. A massive hand swung in from the dark, flinging Luka's bags to the ground.

Pero.

“You sick little shit.”

Luka's blood turned to lead, his heartbeat, his breath, all thought caught and stilled in its congealing mass.

“I'm gonna break every bone in your hands for drawing that perverted garbage.”

Luka had been afraid ever since Obrad had run off with his drawing. Terrified of Pero's anger. But that look. That voice. he couldn't quite believe such hate was radiating from the same Pero who'd spent hours coaching him through feint and dribble drills all those Saturday and Sunday mornings. As much as Pero's athletic beauty, it had been his quiet patience, the way he'd counseled fairness and teamwork over scoring and winning that had captured Luka's admiration, then fascination.

“Please, Pero.” Luka had composed and practiced a hundred lies, excuses and apologies since Obrad had run off with his drawing, but now his thoughts were smothered under his terror. “I didn't... I didn't...” He was already crying.

Pero swung at Luka's face, but when Luka threw his arms up to shield himself, Pero pulled his punch, grasped Luka's right wrist and yanked his index finger back until it snapped. Hot agony tore through his hand, ripping a scream from his chest and knocking him to his knees.

For one suspended moment while Pero leaned over him, on the edge of his own agony and terror, was confusion tinged with hope because what he saw in Pero's eyes looked more like fear, or shame than anger or hate. Something was eating away at Pero's vengeful wrath. But even though some dark pain twisted those lips stretched open and baring white teeth and pink gums, Pero grabbed a fistful of Luka's hair, bent down and hissed in his ear, “When I'm done with you, you'll never draw another nasty picture, as long as you live. And you won't be pulling on that little dick of yours while you think about me, either.”

When Pero caught his wrist again, Luka writhed and flopped and squirmed until he got loose, but Pero spiked his elbow brutally into his ribs, crushing the air from his lungs. By the time he was able to draw a breath again, Pero was sitting on his chest, stuffing the hem of Luka's shirt into his mouth. Almost crushing Luka's forearms under his knees, Pero kept his promise—almost—and broke every finger on Luka's right hand.

“If I ever catch you anywhere near me, next time I'll break your fucking arms.”

*

In large block letters, someone had written on the blackboard in white chalk:

No one has ever written,

painted, sculpted, modeled,

built, or invented

except literally to get out of hell.

Waiting for the professor to arrive, Luka caught himself rubbing the second bone in his right thumb. Sometimes after working in Željko's shop all day, it still ached. But Pero had been wrong. He was drawing again. Of course, technically, that only made Pero half wrong. Not that it was scarred tissue still keeping Luka from doing the other thing.

Even after being dragged unwilling but powerless back to the terror and pain Pero had inflicted on him three years earlier, half an hour into class, Luka could hardly sit still, blood charged with adrenaline making his muscles twitch, his knees bobbing up and down as he sat behind a drafting table, weight on the balls of his feet perched on the rung of his stool, rocking his heels up and down. Every slide the professor showed stimulated a fresh charge of nervous anticipation, another ache of desire to create something beautiful, or something ugly and haunting, something provocative. He'd enrolled, hoping to learn the techniques that would let him express the hundreds of ideas he already had, but that modest aspiration was crumbling to dust, burst apart from the inside by the swelling inspiration of new, enormous possibility.