Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She steps back and says, “Get out of my closet.”

He complies and starts to walk past her for the bedroom door. She grabs the back of his sweater and yanks him to a stop.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

He turns around to face her.

“I’m so sorry, Sylvia,” he stammers. “If there was any other way. I’m begging you, please don’t call the police.”

“You broke into my goddamn apartment.”

“I didn’t take anything. I swear to you. You can check. I didn’t take a thing.”

“You broke in, you bastard.”

“Please, Sylvia, try to understand our position—”

“I don’t see anyone here but you, Gaston.”

“You left the key over the door—”

“That gives you the right to come into my apartment.”

He stares at her, prematurely ready to give up. He says, “You’re going to call the police?”

“Are you going to tell me why I shouldn’t?”

He looks around the bedroom, pulls on his beard. “I wasn’t going to take them,” he says. “I just wanted a look. I just wanted to see, to confirm for myself …”

“See what?” she says.

“The pictures.” he says.

“And confirm what?”

He looks at her, suddenly more confused than afraid.

“That they’re Propp’s,” he says in a soft, kind of reverent whisper.

Sylvia stares at him and refuses to speak for a while. Then she steps over to the telephone on the nightstand and lets her fingers rest on the receiver. Gaston looks from her hand to her face and back again.

Sylvia says, “You look different when you’re not in your pajamas.”

“For God’s sake,” he says, “I didn’t even find them. I didn’t disturb anything. Can’t we just leave it be?”

“No, we can’t just leave it be. You broke into someone’s apartment, Gaston. That’s a serious breach. That’s a crime. You can’t let things like this go.”

“Please, Sylvia,” his voice breaking and his eyes starting to blink too fast.

She lets him struggle for a few more seconds and then steps away from the phone and says, “Let’s go in the kitchen.”

They sit at the table with glasses of tap water in front of them and stare at each other.

“Why did you come here tonight?”

“I told you,” Gaston starts, “I only wanted—”

“No,” Sylvia says, “I mean what makes you think I have any Propp photos. I told you the only place I’ve ever seen a Propp was at the Skin Palace.”

He draws in a doubtful breath and says, “Please, Sylvia—”

She cuts him off and says, “Mr. Gaston, you’re not in a position to dictate how this discussion will go. We’re not sitting in Der Garten tonight. You want to screw around with me? I can have the police here with a phone call.”

“All right,” he says. “Calm down.”

“Quevedo told you the story, didn’t he?”

He shakes his head. “I told you before, I never heard of a Mr. Quevedo. Call the damn police if you want. I don’t know the man. Nobody in the group knows the man.”

“Please, Gaston,” mocking him.

“We know this much. We know you were the last person to visit Jack Derry’s before he stripped the store and ran. We know you left the store with a camera. An Aquinas. And we know you showed up at our door the next day.”

She takes a sip of water and gets overwhelmed with a metallic taste. She gets up and goes to the sink and dumps the glass.

“Back up. How do you know Deny? How do you know I went to the store?”

“Jack Deny has been in the Zone for years—”

“So has Quevedo.”

“I don’t know a Quevedo,” he snaps.

“All right,” she says. “You don’t know Quevedo.”

“Look, Sylvia,” he says. “We’re like the apostles after the crucifixion, okay? The group tries to live on faith. We look for signs, little traces that Propp’s still around. That there might be more—”

“More what?”

He looks at her, either annoyed or confused. “More images. More clues. More messages.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“We can’t get enough, Sylvia,” he says. “There have to be more pictures. We go on in the hope that there are more pictures.”

“Look, we’re getting off track here—”

“What would you think?” he says, kind of a challenge. “A stranger comes to Der Garten. She asks questions about Propp. She’s evasive about her reasons and her existing information.”

“I’d think that she wasn’t telling me everything. That maybe she knew something I didn’t.”

“Exactly,” he says with a little pound of his fist on the table.

“But I wouldn’t necessarily break into her apartment.”

“But then,” he says, “you haven’t been infected as long as I have.”

“Infected?” Sylvia repeats.

“After a time it’s more of a burden than a joy. That’s probably true about every obsession. But it’s worse with Propp.”

She comes back to the table and sits down.

“Did you ever think,” she says, “that maybe Propp wouldn’t want all this devotion?”

“Did you ever think,” he answers, his voice on the edge of a sneer, as if she’s the fool for trying to reason with a fanatic, “that perhaps that doesn’t matter?”

She lets a beat go by and then changes the subject

“So Derry’s been a link to Propp information in the past.”

He nods. “A very tentative link. But at times he’s all we had. You have to understand that there are a lot of shysters in this area. People who will lead you on, tell you they know of someone who knows of someone, that there are rumors of a print in Europe. It’s like pulling teeth and it’s always expensive. More often than not it all leads to a dead end or a forgery.”

“But that wasn’t the case with Derry?”

“It never appeared to be. Once or twice he grudgingly supplied us with a tip. A phone number. An ad in a catalog. Nothing ever materialized, but it wasn’t a case of fraud or deceit. Things just blew up in our faces. People didn’t show up for meetings. That kind of thing.”

“Do you think Derry personally knows Propp?”

“Now that,” he says, “supposes that Propp is among the living.”

“So it does.”

“What do you think, Sylvia?”

“I’m new at this, remember?”

“Tell me you’ve got some prints, Sylvia.”

The look on his face is so earnest and really almost desperate that there is this sucker part of her that wants to take him by the hand and lead him down to the darkroom and hand him the salvation or narcotic that’s hanging on the dry-line.

“I wish I could, Gaston. But I’ve got nothing. Yes, I knew a little more about the myth than I let on at Der Garten. And yes, I bought a camera from Jack Derry. But that’s all I bought. I’m more in the dark than you people.”

He looks down at his lap and says, “You know I don’t want to believe you.”

She gets up and crosses to the back door and opens it.

“I’ve got to get some sleep now.”

He sits staring at her, finally rises out of the chair with a weary effort, walks past her out to the back hall, then stops and turns back and says, “I’m sorry, Sylvia.”

She doesn’t say anything and he moves down the back stairs.

In the cellar, Sylvia sits on the step stool. Her head has started to ache again. Her eyes are so tired and dry that each blink brings a sting like a wound. But she looks out on the line of pictures. She keeps looking at the pictures. She keeps staring at this woman and this child and this cavernous ruin.

She thinks about a Friday night long ago, attending the Stations of the Cross with her mother down at St. Brendan’s. She thinks about the Stations, the carvings, hung on the walls of the cathedral, hung in a specific order, each a story unto itself, and yet, each one connected to the next, connected by a ceremony, linked by a chain of interrelated events, and telling a larger story, the sum greater than the parts. And now the drying line is like the Stations of the Cross, hung this way, seven stories, seven segments of one story: Sylvia’s Stations.