The Electric Michelangelo (41 page)

– Hey! English asshole! Got a bone to pick with you. Hey! I know you’re in there, saw you go in.

Grace held very still for a moment, varnished with calm, as if having been lacquered and set midpoint in the arc of her kiss. Her shoulders were shining. The cursing and banging continued. Then she seemed to wake from the mood and the restive energy rushed back into her. She removed her hands and nodded.

– Yes. Yes. Go.

Cy’s eyes were unconvinced, and loyal to hers, telling her that there was nowhere he would rather be at that moment than absolutely right here with her.

– Go on, go. It’s all right.

After a moment of composure, the unpleasant redirection of his pleasant hardness with his back turned away from the woman who had encouraged it, Cy appeared from behind the piece of vibrating wood. His belly was still out, his white shirt billowing like a sail around the tattooed ship, and he was wearing an expression that informed the intruder he might have been about to discover the divine secrets of the universe before being interrupted. Outside was a man who had been holding his own vinous face in a pose of disgruntlement all afternoon. He was sauced, soused, drunk enough that he could not maintain a plumb line of balance. He pointed to his forearm.

– Not happy, buddy. Remember me? Not happy.

– I can see that. What are the chances of you coming back later this afternoon?

– Hah! It’s a mess, you did a shitty job. And I want my money back.

The man looked dishevelled, wired and exhausted at once, as if he had not left the Island since his visit to the booth four days ago. Coney Island was persuasive when it wanted to be, cajoling its weaker-willed visitors into enjoying its offerings longer than stamina and finances should feasibly permit. Until they were deprived of money and reason and sleep, and then they spoiled, and everything they had done sickened them and they would try to retrace their crimes in order to repair the damage. But this was one argument that Cyril Parks never ever lost. He could not afford to. He took hold of the arm in question and examined it, then pushed it away.

– No. You’ve picked it. You’ve picked the scab off it. I told you not to. I told you it would itch like crazy for a few days like a chicken pox but not to touch it. Did I not tell you that?

– I never touched it. You fucked it up in the beginning and I paid you good money too! Sign says freehand, that’s why I came, thought you’d be a pro.

– No. You picked that scab off, like a little kiddie because it was itchy and you couldn’t keep your fingers off it. I can see the spot where you did it. It’s patchy. That doesn’t happen unless it’s been messed with, right? The colour’s come out just as I said it would. I’ll fix it for you, but you’ll not get a penny back off me. Not a cent, y’hear me. That was quality work when you walked out my door. I should charge you for the time, but I won’t. Count yourself lucky. Now, can you come back later? I’m very busy.

The man had not come down to the booth to be placated or back down. He had come to transfer the responsibility of his rash and ruinous vacation at the fair to another party. He lingered. He wanted his say and to feel that he had won a little victory, salvaged something of himself. At that moment, Grace stepped out through the incomplete entrance of the booth, redressed and scowling faintly. Glad to have an audience for the drama, the man let fly a string of insults.

– You’re a lying English bastard. You’re not touching me again, no way. You did substandard work on me and now it’s fucked and it’ll always be fucked. You’ve probably messed up this poor lady too, goddamn bastard. You Coney freak – I knew not to come down to this wackplace for a tattoo.

There were occasions when Cy had to use his full height, standing up slowly, unfurling, and widening his eyes, to become the professional tough man of the business in order to settle disputes or knock the wind out of a conflict. This would have been exactly one of those times – the complainer was certainly about to get punchy, he wanted nothing less than to fight – and a brawl would have doubtless ensued had it not been for the knife that sliced the air an inch or so past the man’s nose, close enough that he felt its sharp metallic breath on his face, and it struck the boards of the booth with a dull sucking thud as the blade’s tip was swallowed by wood. The weapon’s blue hilt shone like ore in the summer light. A few pedestrians paused on the Walk to observe the scuffle, or to catch the act. Incredulously the rumpled man turned to look at Grace. Cy also turned to her in shock. She had her arms crossed over her chest, as if she had never so much as taken aim. But her face was transmogrified and looked suddenly old though, weathered and deeply lived in, like a caravan tinker widow’s, or as if it had come up like a grim fairytale from under the facade of a younger woman. Her eyebrows were raised high on her lined forehead in questioning and challenge.

– My God! You damn Romany bitch. I oughta call the cops and have you arrested for that. This place is nuttier than a peanut factory. I oughta report that kind of behaviour…

Grace unfolded her arms, walked between the astonished men and collected her knife with an abbreviated tug. As she folded it away the handle and blade appeared to be disappearing into each of her palms, and then, after a quick legerdemain and sleight of wrist, it became uncertain which closed fist contained the weapon. The man did not care to find out. With a look of contemptuous alarm he walked away, two patches of bright discolouration left under the sockets of his eyes. Grace looked at Cy and shook her head.

– You are a kind man. I think if you ever truly had to sting someone, you wouldn’t survive it.

She made a buzzing sound like that of a flying bee, with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, and then she stopped the noise, abruptly.

By midsummer of 1940 there were one hundred and nine tattoos on Grace’s form, from the soles of her feet to the base of her neck, so that she looked like a most extraordinary tree of eyes. She visited the Electric Michelangelo on sixteen separate occasions for him to complete the work. And in retrospect, when Cy would try to relive his journey across her body and remember the revolution of its archaic landscape under his unyielding bevelled brush, perhaps those were the times he was making love to her after all.

The last tattoo went on to the lower portion of her back, in the deep well at the curve of her spine. Cy worked slowly on it, knowing that this piece was, in a way, the conclusion of their affair, the last vertebra of its own backbone after which it would be an independent anatomy, free to come and go as it pleased. Her body was wet and slippery, the humidity of the summer had arrived even on the coastal outskirts of Brooklyn. Her tattoos shone under a sheen of sweat, as if she were oiled for a show. Neither one of them had mentioned the encounter in the booth since it passed. Cy did not know how to bring it up, for his part there was no way to refer to it, her allusive hands, the foggy arousal, the one-sided duel. Thinking back on it, Cy had not known which one of them seemed angrier or more frustrated by the rude interruption, or who had displayed which kind of daft chivalry. And yet she had not touched him again since then. And he not found it in himself to break his professional codes, even as his heart battled with the memory of that initial embrace. There had been few interactions inside Varga, for she seemed always busy or moving quickly or planning furiously in front of her chessboard. There had been no late-night visitations to her apartment door. To have found her with another man would have devastated him now.

When he had finished transferring ink he bent forward and put his lips against the raw skin of the last eye. She tasted of carbon and blood and salt, she tasted of life. She was lying on her stomach on the bench with her head resting on her arms, her dark hair curling damply around her ears and neck. He doubted whether she even felt the touch of his mouth after the precise bitchery of the needle. His lips might have felt like a cotton cloth administered to catch her sore fluids. Or like the ghostly kiss of somebody from another lifetime, a gesture reaching out past the grave.

– So. You’re done. And the best of luck to you, duckie.

It was hot, kettle-steamed June. The smell of the organic city had already begun to ripen, wafting through the sidewalk grilles and gutters, out to the Island. Within a week Grace would be healed and on display in Luna Park, infatuating and unnerving customers with the optical illusion of her body. Within a month she would be gone.

The acid, afterwards that’s what the assailant confessed it had been, sulphuric acid, burnt through her dress and her flesh almost until it reached bone. It would have eaten through her ribcage and sternum also, had it not been for the administration of an alkali directly after the assault. The man must have timed his attack well, it was agreed later, for the offence had a quality of premeditation to it, and perhaps he had practised with cups of murky solution or buckets of soapy water on a piece of sacking, or an old fur coat from the clothes market or on a recently butchered animal carcass, observing the speed of corrosion and imagining it on human skin, timing the two stages of the plan.

Nobody truly saw what happened, but multiple accounts of that night would exist shortly after the incident, twittering speculation and tweedy, academic overviews. Varga was jumping with customers and cuckoo mad as usual. The man’s name was Malcolm Sedak. He had been beaten by Grace in two tournaments that summer season, though this proved to be incidental, for he had been beaten by many other players also. He had seen her revolving on the turntable podium in the Human Picture Gallery of Luna Park with her friend Claudia, the third week of her new career. He had something against her, that much he confessed. Little else was known of the connection, the animosity. But the channels of gossip and gasconade at Coney were as slick and obstructionless as the Human Fountain’s frequently rinsed pipes. Interpretations flushed through the area. There had been a political association or a grudge or an untenable situation of some kind. Amongst other things, Grace was rumoured to have underworld connections, so it was not a slender assumption to make. He had probably seen her working with her horse in the circus long before she became tattooed and had heard some of the dark fables that told of her inner workings or had been involved directly with her iniquitous dealings.

He came into Varga an hour or so into the Wednesday chess evening. Not to play. Not to spectate. It was ten o’clock at night, a still hour outside, with just the ocean’s nocturnal lilt and levy sounding, but noisy and crowded in the bar as always. He moved between bodies on a leisurely heading towards the bar, unhurried, enchanted, as if moving the wrong way through a carousel of animated creatures, because his mind must have been musical and cog-like at that stage, the carnival having become his ordinary streetwalk to work. Then he climbed down from the ride at the point which he wanted to get off, by Grace at her table with the buffed-horn chess set, up by one pawn only on her opponent and playing the sly Russian game that contributed to the rumour that she slept with a black queen under her pillow at night.

The man had on a long overcoat, curious for summer, some may have thought, sinister, it was deemed afterwards. Safe inside the garment was a colourless-brownish liquid in a sealed container. It was removed congenially like a full money wallet, opened, and directed by an appendage as smooth and elegant as an orchestra conductor’s. Lento acid. The contents of the slow-flung vessel seemed dense and oily at first to Grace when she looked down at her soaked midsection. Like the buttery juice of a bowl of chowder, accidentally spilled over her. Until the dress dissolved. Then it seemed as red and thin as fire’s very centre on her stomach, her breast, her upper legs, her core. She began to scream. She had the voice for it, which was another surprise. Customers who knew her said they were amazed how well she suited that level of inserenity and panic. Usually such a constitutional woman, masterly in all things including a raised voice, was their aphorism. How long did he wait, the man with the antidote? Four seconds, five? Ten? A lifetime for Grace, being consumed by the ravenous acid. Then the disintegration of her body was arrested by another sweeping gesture, this coat-kept container releasing an ammoniacal dilution over her. Lento alkali. And for a moment she was chemistry. And witnesses swore they saw her smoke, reacting, changing matter. Malcolm Sedak was four feet away, less. He could have hit a barn door twice with his eyes closed and hung upside down like a bat. He could not have missed.

It was such a strange plan. Damnation and salvation in tandem. Because he had not wanted her dead, Sedak told the doctors, the police, and the press. That would have been murder, that would have been wrong, in his mind. He had wanted her body altered, put back to how she belonged, restored to grace and femininity, restored to God’s blueprint for her kind. As if the acid might have licked off the tattoos like the tongue of a mother cat, leaving behind a blank white skin to be preserved by the salve. As if she would not be scarred or seared or turned in part to soup before she set. As if any pain during the procedure might return her in penitence to God’s original purity of naked cleanness, as if the desecration of her was really a baptism, an annunciation, a rising from her unleavened state. So there was an innocence of terror to the confession and explanation Sedak gave. He was the Lord’s hired lunatic, the Divine One was paying the wages of his mercenary heart. He had met Grace in Varga one night. There was something unholy about her from the beginning; that guile, the heretical bile that lifted in her mouth when she spoke, the gall in the gut of her words, the retch of her dark hair, the very peccancy of her sex, that thousand-fanged stare, and she might have been his, once, but for herself, but for her cloven-kolo self in the centre of her being. It was the bark of her cunt that put him on edge. And in her absence, in the appropriate light of his room, he knew that what he had seen were demons inside her, multiplying, and he went down on his knees to face the salivating snarling teeth, loud at the entrance of her womb, and he prayed for intervention, prayed until the voice of God came, until the voice of God came in comfort like the sound of his own mind. The Lord said gather all the evidence you can. So he went to her place of work; it
was all some kind of duty to God, the stalking, the watching. And there he saw her monstrous body, with its living orbs that watched him back, that struck him impotent from that moment on. When he touched himself for pleasure it burned. She was Satan’s daughter. Satan’s whore. She put the blackness of hell on him with her Argus eyes and he knew she was far beyond grace. He wanted the curse on him lifted and her anaphrodisiac power gone. He wanted to rid the woman of her sin and sickness even, for he did not blame her, in this matter she was securely the Devil’s victim, a pawn in his deviant game.

All this came out calmly across the interrogation table. By the time of his police interview Sedak had regained consciousness and was just able to speak again through the orthopaedic wire in his jaw. But at the time of his mission he was speaking quickly, desperately, in a language not English, even though his hands drifted, drifted through the final motion of their slow parabola. His words sounded almost like a chant. One or two of the people in the bar could understand what he said, New York after all had dozens of tongues spoken in every single one of its corners, the city was encyclopaedic and there were translators everywhere. They said the madman had been using an exorcismic verse from the Apochrypha. And his enemy had been the evil eye.

Somebody found Claudia next door to Varga, eating her clams outside where the sky was navy blue and peaceful, while others held the man down and Grace screamed on. They dragged her enormous pounding body off Malcolm Sedak only when he began to lose consciousness and it was feared she’d kill him, and the wail of a siren bit through the air near by as a police van turned into the alley. Until then her shoulder muscles looked like crankshafts, mechanical and covetous of the work. Claudia stepped through the back room doorway at the urging of Mary and Valerie just as the cops came in the front, as if in a choreographed comedy, though nobody laughed, leaving the man on the floor looking like matzo paste. So at first the police were confused about who exactly the casualty of the attack was: two human wrecks had liquid around them on the floor made by their own sick and seeping bodies. The emergency telephone call had been confused at best, part-lost against the racket of the establishment. Thinking the man with the slack bloody grin that ended clear up by his ear lobe on one side of his face to be the likeliest candidate they went over to him and stooped to observe the damage. Remembering the India–China chess dispute not three years hence, the detective said right then and there that he hated coming down to Varga on account of all the crazy Polack folk and the Russian reprobates and the sorry-assed circus freaks. And he wished he could leave them all to their fucked-up Coney Island carnage.

Grace was quiet by now, diagonally across the board from them, behind the gaze of the authorities. Someone had already given her a hefty, hushing dose of morphine, injecting it into the nape of her neck which she always massaged when she played at the gaming tables, some kindly wayward doctor with access to syringes and vials, or some light-fingered hospital goof or junkie, though nobody saw who administered it, or admitted seeing as much. Seemingly Coney had ambulanced and taken care of its own. Around Grace was the strong tang of acid, tart-sour like the sprinkling vinegar for the oysters and fries served on the boardwalk, making people choke instinctively. Some of her colourful skin had flooded into the air as sulphur smoke. She was a struck match. Her body had almost finished leaking when the police got round to her and it was trying to congeal its outer layer, like a newly shed serpent. She had the look of a sleeping snake too, dead-eyed from the drug. Some people were blasé, still playing chess and drinking at the bar. Varga’s chess tournaments had once again become the scene of unimaginable and accommodating violence.

Of the six tattooed women on the Luna podium Grace had been the newest and the least demurely dressed. The gallery had put in for a nude licence for her and been refused by the city authority, though she was always willing to do it, she said. She wore only a feeble bandeau around her breasts and a pair of short silks. The others, including Claudia, whose stage name was Mrs Bismarck, were clad as if for bathing, in long suits, and each had a circus card next to her foot. Their names were Nell Nerona, who had fake body make-up rather than authentic tattoos but said she had been abducted by Indians out west and painted while held hostage inside their wigwams, Texas Bobbie, Lovely Loretta, who had been at one time a bearded lady and had worked with Barnum and Bailey, Polly the Painted Pear, and the Lady of Many Eyes. Most were moonlighting from other circus professions, and they made more money than they knew what to do with, some had even bought stocks and shares. All but the last were dressed under their costumes in a jumble of assorted images – they had bootlaces tattooed on ankles, and portraits on their legs, hearts, doves, roses and ribbons, Allied flags, apostles and stars. Grace was the only attraction to consist of a single repetitive image. She was all eyes. And since there was a mesmerizing, confusing quality to her body, all the eyes watching the show were hers. By the third week in the gallery she had made close to a hundred dollars, four times as much as the tattoos had cost her. She had been booked to appear in a show at the Grand Theatre in Greenwich Village, and had even been invited to enter a beauty contest in Philadelphia.

Henry arrived at the booth as Cy was putting the last board up for the night. There was an awful, clear sobriety about him, though he had drunk almost a half bottle of Grey Goose in the bar by then on his night off, and in addition his blood was shimmering with several other ephedrine or opiate chemicals. He had a beautiful, soft, southern voice, Cy remembered thinking that night, like down on a Georgia peach, and that made the ensuing story seem like one even children would be entranced to hear, frightening and monstrous elements though there were. If anyone else had told Cyril Parks of the events minutes ago he might have laid out his fists before thinking of the guiltless messenger. Like Eliot Riley would have, when anger got the better of him, disabling his reason and he’d go about duffing the air, too drunk to reach the offender. Cy might have hooked the words right off another man’s face with his knuckles, having suddenly and fully inherited the bare-knuckle legacy of Riley, when he heard about Grace. But for that soft southern voice that made the story he was hearing into a happier imitation of the truth. Then, when the tale was told, Henry said he couldn’t truly tell how much morphine he’d given Grace. And that he might have given her so much morphine as to accidentally kill her, if the acid hadn’t killed her already. But her pain had been so bad it had made him sorry for her, sorry enough that his thumb went down twice on the plunger, once to the postoperative millimetre marker, then beyond it to that privileged realm meant for only those long acquainted with the lag. And what would Cy recommend he do with this?