Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

So the cops came back, and they fiddled and they stared. The younger ones seemed to fixate on the equipment Cy kept in the back room, staring at the vials of ink and the needle head as if intrigued that some people would allow others to stick them in a way that was not medical, as if there was a perverse sexual aspect to it and he was not right in the head. One or two would sneak back later and have work done, usually flags, military symbols and motifs, with names fixed accordingly to them. There was never anything theoretical like justice, nor the essence of an idea. But they seemed calm under the grating needle, as if enjoying the thirty-minute trip into the underworld and the brief freedom from authority, even as its trappings were printed on their arms. The older police never came back. They were tired overweight types, with swollen ankles and tarry coughs. They did not need to bunt confederacy or discipline or any other system of control. They had it under their skins already.

It was at the barbershop that Cy met Henry Beausang, another Southerner. Henry was a talker and something of a nuisance to Den Jones, frequently unable to pay for haircuts, and taking up the revolving chairs for an excessive amount of time while he slept. By some fluke of charm or chancery he managed to wheedle his way into Den’s affections and was able to fast-talk him into a line of credit no other customer was permitted. It could have been that they were born in the same state, Georgia, not fifteen miles from one another, and they could reminisce about local dishes and gossip about old scandals. Or it could have been that here, in New York, a friendship was possible that might still otherwise, south of the Mason-Dixon line, have been disallowed. They bickered and they squabbled but ultimately they got on. Henry worked nights at the psychiatric hospital on the Avenue as an orderly. He was small and handsome and quick about the eyes. He was also a merciless, dedicated, unrepentant drunk.

Henry’s mild curiosity about the tattoo artist in the back room soon got the better of him and one day he slipped through the door, which was off-limits to anyone not undergoing work, and he went unnoticed for fully five minutes while Cy concentrated on the handle of a sword. The customer noticed him first.

— Your apprentice, I presume? He’s a shabby fella, huh? Needs a trip to the steam room.

The hum of the machinery stopped.

— Excuse me? What apprentice?

Cy turned to look behind him. At the back of the room was a stretched bow of a man, leaning too far to one side as if he had run hard and had a keen pain in his ribs. He had a vaunting smile and hooded eyes.

— Why, there’s nothing to it. A chile could paint as very well.

— Excuse me?

Cy had been squatting across a chair and now he stood, gained some height, not in a truly threatening manner, but the intruder flexed upwards himself like a startled cat or as if in mock response. Usually nobody slipped in past Jonesy but he must have been using the restroom or had gone out on a quick errand. Cy put down the equipment he was holding, carefully. The stranger stepped untidily towards him, waving a hand in front of him like a cop directing traffic.

— Whoa there. I don’t wanna hafta kill you. Jus’ came in to see, to see. Tha’s all.

The smile doubled in size. There were scars on the man’s face, like those of a boxer, fat paunches of tissue and thin-cut lunulated marks along the bone. Cy realized the man was drunk and jumpy — a strange combination, usually there was a slurred, diffuse aggression to the anger of drunks, not focus, so perhaps another narcotic was acting as an energetic bedfellow with the booze — and he was quite possibly very dangerous. There was something about American confrontation Cy did not yet know how to navigate, not in the way that he could comprehend the butch inebriated combat, the smut, and the easily classified sober quarrels of his compatriots. It often had qualities of recklessness, wildness and inexplicability that made him nervous and uncertain of his ability to handle the protagonist. This man had an imagined capacity to fight that went well beyond the borders of his physical form, a vainglory, that much was obvious. Something in the foreground of his eyes revealed that a message had been sent down from his brain informing him that he was completely invincible, and therefore fearlessness was the natural order of things. He kept touching his breast pocket as if tapping a weapon stashed within. Cy suddenly got the urge to finish the sword, he wanted to finish it if he was going to fight or perish, he didn’t want to leave an unfinished piece of work. He sat slowly and took up his needle.

— Do you want work done?

— Naw. Not me, sir. Not on mamma bird’s baby. Haha, you’re an Englishman.

— Yes.

— Well I’m a Frenchman by history so that about makes us equally and thoroughly bad, now don’t it?

Cy pulled his braces down over his shoulders so they hung at his sides, he unbuttoned another fastening on his shirt and bent back in towards the sword. The drunk crab-stepped closer in. There was a smell of alcohol on him that had been passed through the skin and mixed with sweat. It was a distinctive odour, like the smell of a man not far back in Cy’s memory. Alcohol fumes in the air and the sense that he was being scrutinized sent a shiver through him. But Cyril Parks continued as he had always continued under pressure. With a steady hand. Red on the sword’s hilt. A broad border of black to keep it from spilling. He switched needles. Yellow blade, yellow blade. The hairs in the pores on the customer’s arms were blonde and dark at their tips, as if he had very recently travelled into old age. Around the delivered ink and under the wiping cloth the skin was beginning to inflame. It took ten minutes to finish, ten minutes of full concentration, slow internal time, with Cy half-believing he would, at any moment, receive a bullet or a blade in his kidney. When he looked around the strange man was sitting cross-legged on the floor sleeping with his chin touching his chest — eastern-god style. Cy leaned over and gently reached into the man’s pocket for the weapon and instead pulled out a hipflask of bourbon.

Den Jones stuck his head round the door.

— O Lord! That no-good kid bothering you? He don’t sleep when he gets off work so he falls asleep wherever he is through the day like a damn stray cat. Starts drinkin’ the minute he leaves the hospital, like he’d rather do that than get some proper rest! Henry! Henry Beausang, wake up and brush off your pants seat and drink some coffee. Black coffee.

After the first winter at the barbershop they might have been considered friends. Cy took to Henry in a quiet, reserved manner, and Henry’s enthusiasm saw little restriction in the face of a tepid foreign temperament. Henry began to re-sell stolen hospital gauze and needles to Cy, at a cut-rate price that was all profit to himself. He even ‘borrowed’ an old hospital steam sterilizer, which Cy used to keep his equipment sanitary, saying it had been sitting idle in the store room for all the years he had patrolled the dull, grey umbilical corridors of the asylum, and it may as well be put to use. For his part Cy inherited Den’s role of benefactor, giving to Henry what money he could spare if his wages had been taken from him in a brawl or he had spent too much that month on liquor, lottery slop, or whatever else lit him up, leaving not enough for rent. When word got back that Henry was in trouble or badly beaten, Cy would arrive on the scene. He was well versed in the skills of salvaging drunks. He did it because, after a decade with Eliot Riley, it was second nature to him, the way a person trained in medicine will be the first one to administer aid if a passer-by falls in the street or burns their hand, the way Reeda tended her consumptives, year after year, from habit. Or maybe there was something else that made Cy do it, the idea that Henry was somehow a redeeming version of Riley, younger, hopeful, benign to others if not to himself.