Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

The first answer is Perry.

And then everything else lines up behind

The Berkshires nightgown .

The Snapshot Shack

Old movies.

The last answer is Memories of my mother.

Last, not because she’s exhausted the subject, but because she sees there might be no end at all.

What she needed was for Rita Hayworth to look out from the screen just once, just one time during the tenure on mother’s couch, during the Lost Months, the zombie-time. She needed Rita H to turn away from her on-screen co-star and peer into Ma’s dim living room and take the cigarette from her lips and say, “The world does not revolve around you, Sylvia.”

She takes the snapshots of Perry and Candice from the pocket of the robe. She gets off the stool and walks to the dry-line and pins one color snapshot over each of the Madonna and Child shots. She moves back to the stool and sits down and looks. There’s no reaction, chemical or otherwise. No interaction between the two series. Nothing that will give up an answer, a way to act or react.

So, what to do? Confront Perry? Wait for him to come home, be sitting maybe in the living room, silent and coiled the way he was the day of the Skin Palace riot. She could glue the pictures to the TV screen until the whole tube was covered, stay frozen as he walked in loosening his tie, wait until he noticed the new station she’s found on the cable band. The infidelity collage network.

Or maybe she could get dressed right now and go down to Walpole & Lewis, march past the receptionist’s warning that Mr. Leroux is in an important meeting, throw open the doors on the conference room where Reverend Boetell and the FUD-heads are huddled down with Perry and Candice trying to decide how to rid the world of Hugo Schick and all things lewd and lascivious. She could throw the pictures on their fat walnut table, watch Boetell’s face go white and red, see Candice run for the partners’ washroom, feel the vibrations of Perry’s future crashing and burning around him.

But if she really doesn’t love Perry, these photos shouldn’t mean much beyond hurt pride and embarrassment. And if that’s true then the only motivation for attacking him with the pictures is vengefulness.

Still: three feet in front of her is a photograph, the last photograph in the series, of her lover, the man she’s lived with these past two years, the man who supposedly wants to marry her and buy a house together and have kids together. And he’s naked, in their bed upstairs, having sex with someone other than Sylvia, with a woman he very likely finds more attractive.

Sylvia wants Rita Hayworth to appear out of the blackness of the darkroom’s corner, done up in that dress from Gilda. Wants her to step in front of the dry-line and say, “This is a place for vengefulness, Sylvia.”

But Rita, all of this is taking me away from the more important questions .

Hugo Schick called on the phone to say that the pictures existed. Schick’s biggest enemy is Reverend Garland Boetell. And Boetell’s point man, his newest tool, his latest creature, is Perry Leroux.

Hugo and Sylvia need to have a talk.

Back upstairs Sylvia unplugs the phone, lies down on the couch, relieved the sky is overcast, turns the TV to the Peter Lorre Festival and watches They Met in Bombay and Invisible Agent, then dozes off halfway through Hotel Berlin.

At seven-thirty she gets up and it’s dark outside and she’s still alone in the apartment. She goes into the bathroom and throws water on her face and pulls her hair back. She puts on jeans, a pair of ankle boots and a sweater. She grabs the Canon off the counter and a new roll of film from the fridge, then pulls a very old yellow rain slicker from the hall closet.

She heads outside just as the Wolcott Street bus pulls up. It’s one of the ancient, small and boxy, green-and-red buses with the porthole-style windows and the antiquated exhaust system that belches black clouds every time the driver accelerates.

She gets on, drops the change in the fare box and moves all the way to the rear bench seat. The driver grinds gears and they start to roll downtown. She takes the Canon out from under the slicker, loads the film and sets the speed, brings the camera up to her eye. She starts to focus on the framed advertising placards hung near the bus ceiling. She shoots

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Vixens & Virgins Unlmtd .

Box 99

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and

Yat-sen Footbinders Inc.

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and

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Custom Orders Our Specialty

Call 1-800-COVER-ME

She moves her focus from the advertisements to the spray-painted graffiti and street art marking every free foot of wall space. And it starts to feel like she’s being overloaded, attacked by images, messages, signals, until none of them make any sense and she pulls the camera from her face, closes her eyes and rubs at them. She takes a breath, brings the camera back up, but this time focuses on the backs of human heads. She wonders if the other riders can feel her looking at them, magnifying the rear of their skulls, pulling in the wet, slightly matted hair, enlarging the flecks of dandruff, the patches of scalp that show through the thinning spots.

She puts the camera down in her lap and looks out the window. The rain has obscured everything and as the bus starts to approach the business district, the colored lights from neon signs are fragmented across the windowpane, made to sparkle more, to flare out and pinwheel a bit.

When Sylvia looks back to the other passengers, she comes eye to eye with an old woman who’s turned around and is staring at her. The woman is bundled inside a tan raincoat with the collar turned up. Sylvia smiles at her but the old lady just gives this dour, threatening look, then reaches and pulls on the stop-cord and the bus lurches into the curb to let her off.

Sylvia looks out the rear window and finds the woman still staring, standing motionless in the rain, hands pushed into the pockets of her raincoat, waiting for the bus to pull away.

When Sylvia turns back around to face front, three other riders are perched sideways in their seats looking at her. All of their faces have a kind of beaten quality to them. One is gaunt and bony, another puffy, and another bland, nondescript. But all of them seem tired and angry and most of all, worn-out, as if energy has been chronically stolen from them in small doses but over a long period of time.

She looks out the window, watches a black limousine pass on the left, looks back a second later. More faces have joined the trio. They all look malign, like they wish her harm, but they’re too listless to actually attack. And yet it’s as if their bad intentions were adequate, as if their sluggish malevolence was enough to bring her down and cause her trouble.

“What?” Sylvia blurts out, loud and annoyed and scared. She focuses on one young guy in a leather jacket and bristly flattop and matching ear and nose rings connected by a silver chain. They stare at each other until he lets a horrible grin break slowly over his face.

Sylvia pulls on the stop-cord and there’s a frantic moment when she wonders if the driver will let her leave, but the bus cuts in to the curb and she grabs the camera tight and slides from the back bench, runs down the aisle as all the other passengers start to laugh in unison. She jumps to the curb as soon as the doors spring open.