Skin (8 page)

    Nervous in a new way, cold outside but the room already too hot and half-whispered curses and quick bickerings as if unwilling to be overheard by those they heard outside: in the hall, against the door, their susurrations endless as a cage of moving snakes: skin against skin. Bibi reminding everyone for the tenth time that this one was pure chaos, they're crazy out there so use it: "Don't stop," her features as if heat-changed behind thick stage makeup, its color the dry pink of spoiling meat. "They're only people. Right, John Henry?" and Tess's rictus smile, all of them waiting for her to signal the beef at the doors: her job, somehow, from the very first: give the go.

    Heat. And steam, wet smoke above their milling heads, they were eyes, eyes, mouths already yelling, hands already overhead. The room filled in minutes and there were, still, more, pushing, underfoot in the soundless whoop of strobes, painful screeching of miked metal twisting slowly past tolerance, long combat legs striped in black and chrome silver, leaping incredible to a soundtrack noise so dense it was blood music, terror and strange comfort, consuming and consummation all in one. Backlit vampire grin, the solo flamenco across a bed not of nails but of chipped and shivering wire, Tess's newest construct, still embryo but forced to service: Mme Lazarus, flipping endless its long file-nails, the looped montage of screams and the booming whip of light and Bibi creeping through the audience with a handful of rusty pins.

    And that same audience responding in a brutal burst of energy, the loop from those who show to those who see a whining circle of current, faster and faster until the show's official end, scattergun Xenon bursts, a dazzle like the end of the world and it was suddenly flesh, hot moving wall and they were everywhere, fighting, shoving, trying to climb the constructs, trying to grab Bibi's arms, trying to take from Tess Mme Lazarus's black-taped control box. No longer content to be viewers, now they were participants, Tess kicking shins, pounding elbows and she scrambled like a cat upstairs, Jerome and Bibi and no one knew where the other three were. The building emptied shouts into the street, "Surgeons!" and breaking glass, yelling their heads off and sailing rocks at the windows.

    Still where they tumbled, staring at each other: Jerome's jellied nose and shirt tom to the nipples, Bibi's makeup highlight for her growing bruises, bright and comic as a clown. Tess's underlip felt strange, sausage-swollen, her arms and legs ached as if she had been running for hours. Tiny glass droplets skittering across the floor like thrown roses.

    And outside, still and continuous as the leathery coughing of beasts in the dark: "Surgeons!"

    Cold, the morning air on her tired eyes; Jerome stretched like a puppy on half a sleeping bag, pale grease-striped face too young in sleep. He had spent most of the night making multiconductor cables, vinyl jacketed, Teflon coated, silent shadow as Tess struggled with Mme Lazarus, wanting more of her than just geek curiosity, just a pair of moving arms and metal files. Still dissected on the worktable and Tess leaning her head against the glass, sighing, then the voice in her ear: "John Henry doesn't get tired."

    Out all night and still those clear pale eyes, handing Tess a plastic cup of coffee. "I found us a place," she said, stepping over Jerome to sit on the unmade couch-bed, motioning for Tess to sit beside her; her smell like sweat and other people's smoke, the peculiar dense aroma of clubs now amplified in the room's chilled stillness.

    "Guess where it is," and then instantly, "That gas station! Remember?" Muffled into her cup, "The one across from the old foundry, that we wanted to use before?" and from her pocket a beignet, miraculously unsquashed; she broke it in half, gave the larger half to Tess. "I tried to get the foundry, first, but the guy who owns it, nobody knows where he is, and the holding company wants money before they'll even talk. A damage deposit," her pinking grin, the bruises gone to faint exotic wash beneath her eyes, fierce prizefighter angle of her jaw. "So there's a for-rent sign on the gas station, I called the number and the guy said yes right away."

    Wiping her mouth, still sore. Jerome twitching, bony hands a-flex in sleep's deepest room. "You still want to do it next month?"

    "Before it gets too cold, yeah."

    

    

    Next month already December, and snow: Jerome had diddled the electric meter, but they would need more heat soon; Bibi's scattered dayjobs, she was already paying more than her half of the rent, Tess immersed so deeply now in Mme Lazarus and hating more than ever the pickup welding she had to do, on and off, the waste of time worse than anything. It was so hard, this work, this fresh new discipline, that to stop at all-even, sometimes, for the shows-was bare-wire frustration. If not for Jerome, so happy with the scutwork, she could not have done it at all.

    And Bibi, in sudden chime: "You know what, we ought to start thinking about charging. To get in, I mean," and when Tess did not answer at once unique Bibi combination of diffidence and truculence, "Better idea?"

    "No," stretching into a long yawn as if all her muscles woke at once; sharp sunny flare through the window, the ghost of summer's arc. Jerome sniffling into wakefulness in his tattered cocoon and her arm around Bibi, half a smile: "Of course we should charge them. By the pound."

    Bibi: prominent in
AntiTrust
magazine, black-and-white stare and her theory of tanzplagen, the quote beneath her picture "Chaos must be met with greater chaos." Another photo, she and Tess like the gods of disaster, posing before the ringed rubble of the foundry: Bibi as changeling, heavy wire earrings and sharp new studs bored in either nostril, lips drawn back and Tess austere behind, all in dun gray and chapped cheeks stretched unsmiling against the freshet wind, fist light to her lips like the breath that breathes the secret. Paul bought a dozen copies; Raelynne said they looked like thugs. Jerome cut the picture out and taped it above the worktable until Tess made him take it down.

    The article appeared a bare week before the new show, the last one, they decided, done for free; hard to keep people out of an outdoor show, anyway, and anyway they would need help to start charging, everyone was already pushed, time-squeezed between dayjobs, performances, rehearsals; even Jerome had acquired an assistant, Peter: more silent than he, thinner and taller. They both lived on the first floor now, the dog woman having vacated without fuss or explanation: fast-food wrappers and their own worktable, Tess's contributions and what they could scrounge; they were excellent scroungers. Scrapyard duty, setup and teardown, ran errands, put up flyers; Tess had insisted they become full members of the group, "I can't shit without them," and their wordless shine, Bibi joking in private: our first children.

    Not much private time, anymore, for jokes or anything else. Bibi the demon choreographer, besieging Tess at the worktable to show ideas, ask advice, slumped at last to sleep, Paul sometimes-quilt and Tess still up, working. Mme Lazarus far evolved, now, past her original sketchy persona, become the walking emblem of mastery, Tess's proof to herself of her own worthiness to play this harsh new game; evolution and culmination, she had to be right. Modification: the distorted landscape where function does not follow form but creates it. Centerpiece of the new show,
Crazy Brainchildren
and perhaps the Madame was in some gray sense an offspring, she had mocked the notion but perhaps: child of her blistered palms, blisters and burn sores, hour after hour behind the mask; deep green goggle-world from which she emerged with a diver's dazed care; surfacing. Even Bibi said she was working too hard, Bibi with her own frantic agenda, more than her share: spreading the word, seeking-what? Inspiration? Sandrine said she always conjured their most stringent costumes after nights in the piercing bars; what did Bibi see, what stringencies did she court from which she roamed home sweaty and bright as the false sparkle of the studs in her nostrils? "Come with me," but from behind the green Tess shook her head, no, she had work to do. Maybe after the show was over, take a breather, take some time; not enough time. The Madame had to be perfect.

    CRAZY BRAINCHILDREN in fat black letters strung on wind-jittered wire between the empty gas station and the foundry gates, eerie parade sign. People had begun gathering two hours before the show, hands in pockets and the weather unseasonably brutal, wind tuned up a notch, another, the temperature going down.

    Behind the store, abandoned stepvan in which they waited, stamping feet, cracking anxious jokes. Sandrine's last-minute makeup, slopping black under Paul's eyes, Raelynne's, long diagonals down chattering cheeks. Tess in cracked black and seam-split leather, going over it one more time: Bibi over her shoulder like a ghost familiar, scarecrow mummy in handmade cerements, fast and back and forth:

    "-and the Madame-" Bibi's runny nose, sore ears pinked from new piercings, for good luck she said. "Starting up there-"

    Frowning, the construct still swathed; would it work? Tests, even last bitter midnight and her fingers frozen on the switch, putting Mme Lazarus through paces; Bibi had come out at last to bring her in. "Here," agreeing now, "and the stones-"

    "And Peter's up here-Peter!" Baseball cap, red nose, peering around the stepvan door. "You ready?" and his solemn nod, tapping the neat square of the camcorder beneath his too-big parka. Bibi had brought it home with a shrug for its origin, obviously stolen somewhere but Tess had not asked, no time, she would ask later. As soon as the show was over.

    Peter was pictures, Jerome the smoke machine that- already?-began its steady bellow of ugly oily smoke, impossible indoors but now it formed a fat delusive cloud, the crowd shouting as Paul cued up the music, amped-up carnival blare that would replay at increasingly faster speeds with a sampled track beneath featuring Paul's dead-baby shriek. Sandrine and Raelynne linking hands and out, Paul squeezing Bibi in a good-luck hug, brief nod to Tess and into the cold.

    And their twin stare, co-conspirators in smoke and screech and suddenly Bibi was laughing, Tess's shoulders rock-tense under her grab and "Come on!" and out, Tess skinning off her gloves, Bibi climbing manic as a monkey atop the gas station, where the heads were.

    Chainlink faces, shrinkwrapped wire tied with clothes hangers to the bolt-cut length of the fence, each one had taken Tess precious hours to sculpt from the balky wire. Bibi there, now, snip snip, tinsnips, cutting a nostril here, a sharp eye there, cut, cut like the surgeon she was as below Paul and Sandrine bore a kicking Raelynne to the smoke-machine inferno, the trio disappearing and: Tess's cue to reappear behind the mobile doom of Mme Lazarus, and the instant skitter of thrown stones, Jerome's job. Somewhere close by, Peter: taping.

    Control in cold hand, shouts and straining coughs, Mme Lazarus moving: exactly as meant to, off-balance rolling stride, files flipping in cold rotation, arms extending to catch at spectators, to snatch at the bits of smashed concrete ringing the thrice-roped performance area; Tess behind humble as an acolyte, priestling drab in skinned braids and black, the smoke making her slit eyes water. She had done it; made the Madame work, and work for real.

    Stones in the air like dead birds. Bibi clipping above, Raelynne's rhythmic screams and now Paul and Sandrine fitting the tom wire faces to their own, the smoke iron blue, the veined blue of blood below the landscape of white flesh. Soundtrack groans and a sudden shriek when Mme Lazarus plucked too close, someone falling, not hurt but scared. More stones, more screams, the last face free and Bibi sailing it in vicious flying arc, bare-edged wire against the cold sky like a decapitated angel and her own banshee cry, leaping from the gas station roof to follow it down and landing graceless and sure beside the makeshift pyre where trussed Raelynne struggled and swore.

    Mme Lazarus now bending to choose a yard-long toothpick of iron and an eerie moment as if the construct itself stood considering, what to do before turning toward Raelynne, rolling close to raise the spike, long iron in slippery grip and Raelynne below, Tess's lip caught in nervous bite-

    
-careful now-

    -and bring it down hard, splinters of rotten wood and in perfectly, perfectly, Tess's bleeding grin and glee aloud: Yes! And Raelynne as untouched as she should be, miming freedom and pain and rolling over to choose from the littered discards a warped-wire face, hold it up to her own, strange masquer, as she capered away.

    And Tess's endless smile, wind-burned and the rest of the show a glare and a blur and cheers, Bibi beside her, wide cracked lips saying "Wave to the nice people" and grabbing her static arm to move it, once and twice and down, Madame's control still hot in her hand like the key to the kingdom of continuous light.

    "You promised," dragging on her arm, put down the fucking tools for once and Tess's sigh, all right. All right. Bibi in her Madame Defarge chic, shiny new earrings, slippery little bells and needles and pulling her out the door.

    "It's great," skittering into traffic, "wall-to-wall skin. They all know about the Surgeons, too," and on and on, Tess's head against the cold window, half listening, half back with her new project, a smaller, faster construct all pinching fingers like a manic crab, a fierce chrome crab with fine-tuned eyes to see, search, in the smoke and the dark-and Bibi's hard little fist, whack against her shoulder; it hurt, too.

    "Pay attention," little white grin. "I said that guy called again, the one from Underground. "

    Ugh. "What'd you tell him?" The stream of lights, billboards defaced and relettered like cryptic collage, half messages to make fever-dream sense of the sense of motion.

    "I told him I'd call him back." Swinging around a dented delivery truck, scuttling back into traffic like an insect into webbing cracks. "You know, you can't keep avoiding shit like this."