Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— My God! You damn Romany bitch. I oughta call the cops and have you arrested for that. This place is nuttier than a peanut factory. I oughta report that kind of behaviour…

Grace unfolded her arms, walked between the astonished men and collected her knife with an abbreviated tug. As she folded it away the handle and blade appeared to be disappearing into each of her palms, and then, after a quick legerdemain and sleight of wrist, it became uncertain which closed fist contained the weapon. The man did not care to find out. With a look of contemptuous alarm he walked away, two patches of bright discolouration left under the sockets of his eyes. Grace looked at Cy and shook her head.

— You are a kind man. I think if you ever truly had to sting someone, you wouldn’t survive it.

She made a buzzing sound like that of a flying bee, with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, and then she stopped the noise, abruptly.

By midsummer of 1940 there were one hundred and nine tattoos on Grace’s form, from the soles of her feet to the base of her neck, so that she looked like a most extraordinary tree of eyes. She visited the Electric Michelangelo on sixteen separate occasions for him to complete the work. And in retrospect, when Cy would try to relive his journey across her body and remember the revolution of its archaic landscape under his unyielding bevelled brush, perhaps those were the times he was making love to her after all.

The last tattoo went on to the lower portion of her back, in the deep well at the curve of her spine. Cy worked slowly on it, knowing that this piece was, in a way, the conclusion of their affair, the last vertebra of its own backbone after which it would be an independent anatomy, free to come and go as it pleased. Her body was wet and slippery, the humidity of the summer had arrived even on the coastal outskirts of Brooklyn. Her tattoos shone under a sheen of sweat, as if she were oiled for a show. Neither one of them had mentioned the encounter in the booth since it passed. Cy did not know how to bring it up, for his part there was no way to refer to it, her allusive hands, the foggy arousal, the one-sided duel. Thinking back on it, Cy had not known which one of them seemed angrier or more frustrated by the rude interruption, or who had displayed which kind of daft chivalry. And yet she had not touched him again since then. And he not found it in himself to break his professional codes, even as his heart battled with the memory of that initial embrace. There had been few interactions inside Varga, for she seemed always busy or moving quickly or planning furiously in front of her chessboard. There had been no late-night visitations to her apartment door. To have found her with another man would have devastated him now.

When he had finished transferring ink he bent forward and put his lips against the raw skin of the last eye. She tasted of carbon and blood and salt, she tasted of life. She was lying on her stomach on the bench with her head resting on her arms, her dark hair curling damply around her ears and neck. He doubted whether she even felt the touch of his mouth after the precise bitchery of the needle. His lips might have felt like a cotton cloth administered to catch her sore fluids. Or like the ghostly kiss of somebody from another lifetime, a gesture reaching out past the grave.

— So. You’re done. And the best of luck to you, duckie.

It was hot, kettle-steamed June. The smell of the organic city had already begun to ripen, wafting through the sidewalk grilles and gutters, out to the Island. Within a week Grace would be healed and on display in Luna Park, infatuating and unnerving customers with the optical illusion of her body. Within a month she would be gone.

The acid, afterwards that’s what the assailant confessed it had been, sulphuric acid, burnt through her dress and her flesh almost until it reached bone. It would have eaten through her ribcage and sternum also, had it not been for the administration of an alkali directly after the assault. The man must have timed his attack well, it was agreed later, for the offence had a quality of premeditation to it, and perhaps he had practised with cups of murky solution or buckets of soapy water on a piece of sacking, or an old fur coat from the clothes market or on a recently butchered animal carcass, observing the speed of corrosion and imagining it on human skin, timing the two stages of the plan.

Nobody truly saw what happened, but multiple accounts of that night would exist shortly after the incident, twittering speculation and tweedy, academic overviews. Varga was jumping with customers and cuckoo mad as usual. The man’s name was Malcolm Sedak. He had been beaten by Grace in two tournaments that summer season, though this proved to be incidental, for he had been beaten by many other players also. He had seen her revolving on the turntable podium in the Human Picture Gallery of Luna Park with her friend Claudia, the third week of her new career. He had something against her, that much he confessed. Little else was known of the connection, the animosity. But the channels of gossip and gasconade at Coney were as slick and obstructionless as the Human Fountain’s frequently rinsed pipes. Interpretations flushed through the area. There had been a political association or a grudge or an untenable situation of some kind. Amongst other things, Grace was rumoured to have underworld connections, so it was not a slender assumption to make. He had probably seen her working with her horse in the circus long before she became tattooed and had heard some of the dark fables that told of her inner workings or had been involved directly with her iniquitous dealings.

He came into Varga an hour or so into the Wednesday chess evening. Not to play. Not to spectate. It was ten o’clock at night, a still hour outside, with just the ocean’s nocturnal lilt and levy sounding, but noisy and crowded in the bar as always. He moved between bodies on a leisurely heading towards the bar, unhurried, enchanted, as if moving the wrong way through a carousel of animated creatures, because his mind must have been musical and cog-like at that stage, the carnival having become his ordinary streetwalk to work. Then he climbed down from the ride at the point which he wanted to get off, by Grace at her table with the buffed-horn chess set, up by one pawn only on her opponent and playing the sly Russian game that contributed to the rumour that she slept with a black queen under her pillow at night.

The man had on a long overcoat, curious for summer, some may have thought, sinister, it was deemed afterwards. Safe inside the garment was a colourless-brownish liquid in a sealed container. It was removed congenially like a full money wallet, opened, and directed by an appendage as smooth and elegant as an orchestra conductor’s. Lento acid. The contents of the slow-flung vessel seemed dense and oily at first to Grace when she looked down at her soaked midsection. Like the buttery juice of a bowl of chowder, accidentally spilled over her. Until the dress dissolved. Then it seemed as red and thin as fire’s very centre on her stomach, her breast, her upper legs, her core. She began to scream. She had the voice for it, which was another surprise. Customers who knew her said they were amazed how well she suited that level of inserenity and panic. Usually such a constitutional woman, masterly in all things including a raised voice, was their aphorism. How long did he wait, the man with the antidote? Four seconds, five? Ten? A lifetime for Grace, being consumed by the ravenous acid. Then the disintegration of her body was arrested by another sweeping gesture, this coat-kept container releasing an ammoniacal dilution over her. Lento alkali. And for a moment she was chemistry. And witnesses swore they saw her smoke, reacting, changing matter. Malcolm Sedak was four feet away, less. He could have hit a barn door twice with his eyes closed and hung upside down like a bat. He could not have missed.