Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

What was she thinking with this damnable green and black eye? How would Riley have strutted into her psyche and found that out? What personality-picking remark would he have selected to open her up? And how would she have responded? He could suddenly see the two of them in his mind clearly, Grace and Riley, squaring up against each other, eyes straining open and wearing expressions like fighting cocks about to strut and peck and sever the ligaments in each other’s necks. It was a horrible image. Thankfully, he could console himself that while he found occasional similarities between them in temperament — the blowhard singularity, the egoism, the jingo — he was sure each would have tolerated the other not one jot. No, Riley couldn’t have cracked her if ever he’d have cared to set about it. Not even the great correspondent to human messages as Riley had entitled himself, with his provocative commentary and his manipulative conversations with people that led them to disrobe all their secrets, not even he could have unscrambled her code. And what did Eliot Riley know of women anyway, with his crude ballads mocking their names and his references to their tusses and their sagging tits, trawling his deep-sea nets through the murkier levels of their equanimity and dredging up primordial rage and banshee curses the like of which they had never before issued nor knew they could, and their tempers and their tears? And what of his curious relationship with Reeda Parks, which proved enduringly affectionate but was never converted into proper courtship, instead it was left eternally void? Who did he think he was to have once asked if he’d have to apprentice Cy in the ways of women as well as the trade?

— Fuck you, Eliot.

— You might want to eat something tonight, honey. The shrimp is real good, fresh in today. Shall I have a plate made up for you? C’mon, why don’t you eat something?

Cy shook his head to Mary’s offer, took the picture out of his pocket and opened it.

— What you got there, hon?

— Oh, just some work. It’s a funny thing.

As kindly as her sister was regarding him, Valerie seemed equally cankerous and careless. And he wondered again if a deal had been struck at birth that they would split their personalities where their bodies were not.

— How long you been here?

— About seven years.

— That so. Well. It isn’t right to talk to nobody like you do. You should stop being so broody and so self-involved. Don’t you know it distracts people? Don’t you know they won’t care to have you around, the ones that want you now. Why, you must be about as dumb as dirt.

Cy smiled at Valerie, unoffended, and turned his attention away. He’d a mind that the eye spoke subtly of rejection, looking at it now he felt that quality. It was cold and it unsettled him, and he was not easily unsettled by the work he did. Thinking back over all the strange images he had tattooed on all the odd folk, he could not say this was the most unusual by any means. Not when compared to broadswords slicing open Asian heads and cartoon characters with cocks the size of lampposts and fish and chip packets on a shaved venal mound. But the eye was in a league of its own. It had meaning upon meaning, there were currents writhing under currents where that symbol was concerned, like the sea. He had the distinct impression that Grace possessed a fast-flowing undertow also, a restlessness behind her own dark eyes. His mother had had that feature too, as if she were always busy behind her face. Like she had movement in her which was kept from him behind those two grey, clandestine portals, a river within herself. He thought of his mother’s working eyes, her eyes after she’d walked the promenade with her stubborn, politicking friends, her young son at her side, and her brass plate empty all those years. He thought of her quirks and her strengths, her scruples and her ignominy, that thing about her which had prompted Mrs Kirkstall of the Grand Hotel in Morecambe to grasp her firmly by the wrist and ask, Reeda, whatever’s in you?

He poured more whisky into his glass. His head hurt from concentration, and the drink now decanting his brain cells. He knew he should eat a decent meal, or go home, sleep, wake up the next day without that feeling of parchment and pickle in his body. But he had hold of an idea now, an idea about his mother and Grace. An idea about the eye. And he did not want to let it slip away, he wanted to muster up the answer, and in any case turning his attention to it had made Riley’s marring monologues seem temporarily distant, replaced.

The page on which the eye was printed was old and parchment-like, and it had a serrated edge, a give-away. It had been torn from a book, quite mercilessly. The tear was rough, perhaps the crime had been done quickly, in the presence of those that could punish or disapprove. Cy folded the paper closed. Yes, there was a bit of witchery to that after all, to that theft. The destruction of sacred material was vaguely occult, certainly abhorrent, wasn’t that what he and the boys at school had been taught? And they had been birched hard over an open, suspended palm when any kind of destruction of written script occurred, it was one of Colin Willacy’s pet peeves. His grammar-school standards of comportment were right there now, prancing alongside him like a collarless dog at heel, tame and ludicrous amid the riffraff and rabble of Coney Island. But had Grace not had her reasons for the crime? Had it not been justified?

He imagined her ripping the page from a leather bound book in an old library full of antiquated material written in another language, while guns cack-cack-cacked outside and townsfolk ran about helter-skelter and pell-mell, and fell in the street. Fires swept through buildings. Children were hoisted into the arms of those that they should not be lifted by and carried away from their childhood, and religious men had their throats cut as they prayed. And it was the brutal, old world that had made her do it, the world that was now once again exploding, perhaps reminding her of what, in another life, she had been forced to see. All those stories her eyes had told him when they met! What had she seen, and brought to America like an invisible souvenir of the past? It must be similar to the anguished tales throughout this refugee city. Brooklyn itself was full of recovery and reckoning, was it not? Old and new, the stories of immigrant Poles and Russians and Czechs were told in sorrowful ritual and stitched into the patchwork quilt of the place. Was that the purpose of the eye, a declaration of all that she had seen?

Grace was probably playing chess in the back room right now, he could go in there and pull her up from her seat, shake her and demand that she explain herself, and why she hadn’t come to him that day when she said she would. Or he could kiss her and wait. He stood up, swerved hard to the right and abruptly sat again. He had accomplished what he set out to do. He was drunk. And it was late. The bar was winding down, the last greasy plates of seafood being collected. The picture of the all-seeing, witness eye on the bar counter in front of him was blurry now, shifting like lotus on the surface of water. Two-thirds of a bottle of O-be-joyful and his idea about Grace was almost good enough. Almost a good enough fiction to convince him and make him right about the image, so that by the soft-hearted direction of Providence she would come to him, if he concentrated hard on his invention of her violent, war-torn past. He put his sore head in his hands and closed his eyes and the drastic visions and the tender parable crumbled like a vase under the caterpillar track of a tank on a road through a deserted village, an artefact fallen from a cart and left behind after the exodus of residents, their internment in ghettos and camps, only to be ground to dust.