Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She says, “I promise I’ll give your offer every consideration.”

He sits back, sinks into the couch and crosses his legs. He holds his arms out in the air and says, “I suppose I can’t ask for more than that.”

As if on cue, Leni comes up from behind and puts her hands on Sylvia’s shoulders.

Hugo cocks his head back, looks up at her and says, “I’m very upset with you, Ms. Pauline.”

She leans down, hands still on Sylvia, and kisses the top of his bald skull. It’s possible she’s left the red imprint of her thick lips, but from this angle Sylvia can’t tell.

“You can spank me later,” Leni says and Hugo looks around with semi-mock exasperation.

The actors and crew start to file into the studio. Two men disrobe as soon as they’re in the door and start to walk toward the couch. Sylvia tries to stare at the floor.

“You’re welcome to stay and watch me work,” Hugo says, standing up.

Sylvia gets up and says, “I’ve really got to be going.”

He takes her arm and walks her to the foyer, then with almost a fatherly stroke, he gives her cheek a soft brush with the back of his hand and in a low voice he says, “I’ll wait for your decision, Sylvia. I know you’ll fit in perfectly here at the Palace.”

Without waiting for a response, he turns on his heels and heads back inside. Sylvia walks down the spiral staircase on shaky legs, thinking suddenly about what she’s going to make for Perry’s dinner.

In the basement of the Hotel St. Vitus, Little Jiri Fric is laid out on top of a dusty Ping-Pong table. He’s covered by two black wool blankets that bear the white words Property of the Diocese of Quinsigamond. The boy’s entire body is quaking, vibrating in a constant, ever-growing shiver. Even in the dimness of the cellar, Jakob can see the glow of sweat running off the forehead.

Dr. Seifert is at a tool bench, repacking his duffel, shrugging in Jakob’s general direction and trying to hide his theft of a rusty pair of needle-nose pliers.

“There’s nothing more I can do,” the doctor says. “Even if we could get him to a hospital, it would make little difference.”

Jakob suspected the diagnosis from the start. Jiri lost so much blood on the way back to the St. Vitus that the doctor’s questionable medical background is beside the point.

“Jakob,” Seifert says, “if your father learns that I’ve come here—”

“Don’t worry about Papa, Herr Doctor. I will take full responsibility.”

“It’s just that, you know his rules about treating gang casualties. He—”

“I couldn’t let him die on the street,” Jakob interrupts, then fishes in his pants pocket, pulls out a hundred, shakes Seifert’s hand, pressing the bill into the old fraud’s palm. The rumor is that Seifert was just a second-rate meat cutter back in Maisel. But he speaks the old tongue and he knows all the superstitions, so he’s the only acceptable doctor for most of the Bohemian wing of Bangkok Park.

Seifert starts to climb the stairs to the kitchen, stops halfway up.

“If someone should see me—”

“Tell them,” Jakob says, “I ran out of the camphor injections.”

He turns and looks at Little Jiri, the youngest of the Grey Roaches, not sure if the boy is called “Little” because of his age or the deformed right leg that helped determine his stature.

Jakob moves to the old soapstone wash sink, takes his handkerchief from his back pocket, turns on the spigot and soaks the rag. Then he walks to the Ping-Pong table, sits down on the edge of it. Jiri is moving his mouth, trying to give words to the pain of his last dreams. Jakob leans in, brings lips near the boy’s ear and whispers, “It’s all right, I’m here, I won’t leave you alone.”

He holds the handkerchief above Jiri’s mouth and squeezes just a bit, lets water trickle onto the lips. Jakob folds the cloth and lays it on the Roach’s forehead, takes the boy’s hand and simply holds on.

And he finds himself thinking of Felice Fabri.

At the moment she touched him — in the back row of the Kierling Theatre, at that exact instant on-screen when Ralph Meeker, bigger than life, crushed the hand of some craven and greedy pathologist — Jakob’s life turned a sudden, dislocating corner.

If Jakob’s existence up to this point was to be viewed as an ongoing film — and, in fact, this was the primary way he viewed it, a piece of celluloid looped into a Mobius strip: a film about a boy who lives only to watch film — Felice’s hand falling between his legs was a plot twist he never could have anticipated. A story-curve that took the narrative of his life in a completely new and unknown direction, that employed techniques and stylistic innovations he had never dreamed of.

Passionate to this point only about movies, the heat of sexual initiation propelled Jakob into a realm where the entire city of Maisel became a fiction he could simply ignore. He stopped hearing his father’s harsh voice drone on about this promised land titled America. He became oblivious to Felix’s increasingly detailed descriptions of hit-and-run thugdom in the alleys off Kaprova. He failed to even comprehend the frightened babble of the neighborhood fish-wives as they gossiped over their washlines about the now daily street-beatings or the bombing of the Altneu Synagogue.

None of the miniature pogroms could impact him in any way. The images of the Hasidim being harassed and shoved to the ground could not compete with Felice’s body. The stoning of Rabbi Meyer on Moldau Lane just could not rival the power that ran along the surface of Felice’s skin. The burning of Hilsner Kosher Meats, just a block from Papa’s shop, simply didn’t penetrate the heady realm of pubertal, animal passion that culminated between Felice’s legs.

Everything boiled down to the essentials — the mysteries of Felice Fabri’s body and the images projected day and night on the screen of the Kierling Theatre. And, importantly, those two elements were tied together in a primary, fundamental way. The films led into Felice and Felice led back into the films. They were almost one and the same: Sanctuary. Satisfaction. Epiphany.

And so, of course, all their consummations took place inside the Kierling. The theatre, always a holy place, now became the altar for the sacrament of their coupling. Jakob became a kind of high priest prone to visions by way of ecstasy. He wished to consecrate as often as possible. And Felice, enraptured by this insatiable mystic she’d created, obliged him to the point of an aching, wonderful exhaustion.

Their affair lasted for a month, though it was never so much an affair as it was a bizarre, insatiable pilgrimage into the limits of the carnal. They both found it particularly exciting to move slowly, settle into their back-row seats, begin by simply feeding each other candy and popcorn, the dispenser’s fingers occasionally being sucked by the ingestor’s mouth. They attempted to enforce a limited fondle for the first reel of film, allowed a more rigorous groping through the second reel. And finally, if discipline was possible, surrendered to consummation only during the movie’s final moments. They copulated while watching Nightmare Alley and Peeping Tom and Kiss of Death and Kiss the Blood off My Hands and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

For four rapturous weeks, Jakob left the Kierling with his lungs in a sweet pain and his head dizzy with sensation and vague, racing impulses. Felice would pull him to a favorite bench across the street in Dvetsil Park where they would embrace in a post-coital, post-cinematic warmth. Within the soft heat of this embrace, Jakob allowed himself to fantasize an idyllic future beyond anything he could previously imagine, an Eden where he and his lover would purchase the Kierling from Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill, restore the entire building, and fashion a honeymoon apartment out of Yitzhak’s Zionist work-office. The boy gave full berth to these vivid dreams of a coming paradisaical time when his lungs were restored to normalcy by the power of love and the inhalation of fresh celluloid stock, an era when Maisel would supercede Hollywood as the motion picture capital of the world. When the Kierling would be seen as the crowning jewel of film institutes and archives everywhere and he would have to hire workmen from the Schiller ghetto to pour a long cement walkway so actors and actresses could forever come to leave their hand-and footprints as testament to the ultimate seat of imagistic power.