Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

The real surprise is how easily the sarcasm and hostility slide out of her throat.

Propp doesn’t respond. Not that she expects him to.

“Let me guess,” she says. “There’s a tunnel that leads under the Skin Palace.”

Still nothing, so she’s forced to swivel to the front and finds him looking out the window down at the street.

“Where’s the gang?” he says, without turning to her.

“Up in the studios,” she says. “They’re filming the big finish to Hugo’s masterpiece.”

“I envy a man,” Propp says, “who knows when he’s at the height of his career.”

“What about a woman?”

“My experience with women,” finally looking, “such as it is, says they don’t measure themselves that way.”

“She nods, takes a sip, says, “You ran off pretty quickly last night.”

He tries to smile and misses.

“I remembered,” he says, “I’d left something back on the stove.”

It should feel like he’s making fun of her, but it doesn’t.

“Come over here, Sylvia,” he says, the voice so resigned, his fingers gently bending down the Levelor blinds.

She goes to the window, takes a seat on the sill. Outside, a crowd is massing in the street. Perry’s horrible little alliance. They’re lining up in their specific pockets, the Women’s Resistance not getting too close to Boetell’s army, but both groups mimicking a pseudo-military stance, a little coiled, a lot of hands on hips, a collective and unnatural posture, tense with the silence of their thoughts. They’re bent into two wings with Perry and Candice and Ratzinger between them, opposite the main entrance to the Skin Palace.

Into the mix rolls a large silver van. Painted on the side in a fluorescent-red script trimmed with glitter are the words.

The Reality Studio

“the fastest news-magazine in America”

now syndicated globally

There’s a mini dish-antenna mounted on the roof. Three people jump out of the vehicle like a SWAT team, but instead of bearing assault rifles they carry cameras and microphones and ropes of black, rubbery looking cable. Perry waves the team over and goes into an immediate huddle with a tall woman in a blue blazer, gesticulating with his hands, thumping a fist into a palm and nodding with conviction. Ratzinger and Candice look on approvingly.

Reverend Boetell paces before his people in a poplin suit that’s too white and light for the New England fall. As he walks he taps his ever present Bible against his right leg and keeps his eyes screwed closed, moving his lips in conspicuously passionate prayer.

Still staring out on the street scene, Sylvia says to Propp, “The other night at the diner, you asked if I’d taken a look at the Aquinas I bought?”

He doesn’t say anything but she feels him turn from the window to look at her.

“The answer,” she says, “is yes. I looked at the camera. I looked in the film magazine. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted me to do?”

After a long time he says, “What did you find, Sylvia?” his voice so close to cracking, like some pathologist who suddenly can’t find his professional distance. Like someone whose last tool for defending himself has irreparably broken.

“I found,” she says, “some pictures from a long time ago.”

She turns and meets his face. One tear has streamed from the corner of his left eye.

“What am I to you?” she asks, as gently as she can.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

“That’s not the right answer.”

He nods, has difficulty swallowing. He says, “You make choices in this life. You make choices. Things happen and you can’t go back.”

“Just say it for me, please. Who is the woman in the photographs?”

She watches his throat quiver. After a while, he says, “Have you ever been out. With the camera. You find a spot. You find your subject. You wait for the moment. You wait for a long period of time. And you find you’ve waited too long.”

“Or,” she says, “you haven’t waited long enough.”

He reaches over, puts his hand just barely on her cheek. His voice goes so low she has to read his lips.

“Can’t you forgive me?”

She covers his hand with her own.

She says, “I’m asking for even less than an apology. I’m asking for a single piece of information. I’m asking for the sound of your voice. A few simple words. One confirmation.”

He just stares.

And she can’t stop herself from taking things one more step, from forcing the progression no matter how badly instinct says what’s to come will hurt her.

She says, “Until I know what to forgive you for, how—”

The window above their heads splinters with a loud thud. They both cringe down to the floor and look up to see a fat shard of glass trapped in the blinds. They stay on the floor for maybe a full minute, then Propp gets up first and looks and Sylvia follows, both on their knees, peering gingerly through the gap their fingers poke in the blindslats.

A small pocket of Boetell’s holy rollers have come forward, stepped out to the front of the crowd. One of them holds a placard, freshly painted by the looks of the dripping red ink, that reads Get Out Now. Sylvia looks for Perry and can’t find him anywhere, though she sees Ratzinger and Candice arguing over the hood of Boetell’s Chariot of Virtue, Ratzinger banging a fist on the Cadillac, uncharacteristically ruffled.

She spots bricks and rocks clutched in various hands. She doesn’t see any police cars or uniforms. She doesn’t even see any of Hugo’s payrolled muscle.

“Something’s wrong,” she says.

“I think we’d better heed their advice,” Propp says.

Sylvia looks from his face to the variant Madonna and Child. She looks back again to his face. She tries to imagine him as a young man holding a camera up to his eye, surrounded by decay, twenty or thirty hours without sleep, possessed by conflicting needs he can’t name let alone control, focusing, again and again, on a woman he’ll soon abandon.

Sylvia leads the way down the corridor toward the rear exit she used on the day of the riot, but before she can push outside, Propp takes her arm, gestures to an old, wooden door on their left and says, “You were right. Down in the basement, there is a tunnel.”

She starts to shake her head no, but he turns the knob and pulls the cellar door open and suddenly Fernando, Reverend Boetell’s chief gofer, is standing in front of them looking shocked and almost losing his balance on the top stair. He’s dressed in a pair of green zip-up workman’s coveralls with some kind of logo-patch stitched over his heart and a red baseball cap too tight on his head. And he’s carrying a bulky, rusty-metal tool chest.

Before Sylvia can say anything, Fernando ducks his head and rushes between them and out the rear door.

Propp and Sylvia look at each other. Propp pokes his head into the darkness of the cellar stairwell, comes back out into the hall and says, “What the hell was that?”

They follow Fernando’s path out into the alleyway next to the Skin Palace and swing up onto the fringes of the crowd, but he’s nowhere to be seen. And now there’s an awful tension in the air, almost the antithesis of the chaos that was here earlier in the week. There’s a feeling of false stillness, this sense of a fraudulent vacuum. There’s no changing, no baiting, not a single catcall. There’s not even much talk, just a lot of abbreviated mumbles and head-nodding. It’s as if a veneer of calm has been painted over everything. There’s a palpable absence of randomness, as if something monstrously harsh has been decided and the decree passed on to the mob without the use of language. As if everyone massing outside the Skin Palace shared one angry brain under excessive and building pressure.