Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

It was such a strange plan. Damnation and salvation in tandem. Because he had not wanted her dead, Sedak told the doctors, the police, and the press. That would have been murder, that would have been wrong, in his mind. He had wanted her body altered, put back to how she belonged, restored to grace and femininity, restored to God’s blueprint for her kind. As if the acid might have licked off the tattoos like the tongue of a mother cat, leaving behind a blank white skin to be preserved by the salve. As if she would not be scarred or seared or turned in part to soup before she set. As if any pain during the procedure might return her in penitence to God’s original purity of naked cleanness, as if the desecration of her was really a baptism, an annunciation, a rising from her unleavened state. So there was an innocence of terror to the confession and explanation Sedak gave. He was the Lord’s hired lunatic, the Divine One was paying the wages of his mercenary heart. He had met Grace in Varga one night. There was something unholy about her from the beginning; that guile, the heretical bile that lifted in her mouth when she spoke, the gall in the gut of her words, the retch of her dark hair, the very peccancy of her sex, that thousand-fanged stare, and she might have been his, once, but for herself, but for her cloven-kolo self in the centre of her being. It was the bark of her cunt that put him on edge. And in her absence, in the appropriate light of his room, he knew that what he had seen were demons inside her, multiplying, and he went down on his knees to face the salivating snarling teeth, loud at the entrance of her womb, and he prayed for intervention, prayed until the voice of God came, until the voice of God came in comfort like the sound of his own mind. The Lord said gather all the evidence you can. So he went to her place of work; it was all some kind of duty to God, the stalking, the watching. And there he saw her monstrous body, with its living orbs that watched him back, that struck him impotent from that moment on. When he touched himself for pleasure it burned. She was Satan’s daughter. Satan’s whore. She put the blackness of hell on him with her Argus eyes and he knew she was far beyond grace. He wanted the curse on him lifted and her anaphrodisiac power gone. He wanted to rid the woman of her sin and sickness even, for he did not blame her, in this matter she was securely the Devil’s victim, a pawn in his deviant game.

All this came out calmly across the interrogation table. By the time of his police interview Sedak had regained consciousness and was just able to speak again through the orthopaedic wire in his jaw. But at the time of his mission he was speaking quickly, desperately, in a language not English, even though his hands drifted, drifted through the final motion of their slow parabola. His words sounded almost like a chant. One or two of the people in the bar could understand what he said, New York after all had dozens of tongues spoken in every single one of its corners, the city was encyclopaedic and there were translators everywhere. They said the madman had been using an exorcismic verse from the Apochrypha. And his enemy had been the evil eye.

Somebody found Claudia next door to Varga, eating her clams outside where the sky was navy blue and peaceful, while others held the man down and Grace screamed on. They dragged her enormous pounding body off Malcolm Sedak only when he began to lose consciousness and it was feared she’d kill him, and the wail of a siren bit through the air near by as a police van turned into the alley. Until then her shoulder muscles looked like crankshafts, mechanical and covetous of the work. Claudia stepped through the back room doorway at the urging of Mary and Valerie just as the cops came in the front, as if in a choreographed comedy, though nobody laughed, leaving the man on the floor looking like matzo paste. So at first the police were confused about who exactly the casualty of the attack was: two human wrecks had liquid around them on the floor made by their own sick and seeping bodies. The emergency telephone call had been confused at best, part-lost against the racket of the establishment. Thinking the man with the slack bloody grin that ended clear up by his ear lobe on one side of his face to be the likeliest candidate they went over to him and stooped to observe the damage. Remembering the India — China chess dispute not three years hence, the detective said right then and there that he hated coming down to Varga on account of all the crazy Polack folk and the Russian reprobates and the sorry-assed circus freaks. And he wished he could leave them all to their fucked-up Coney Island carnage.

Grace was quiet by now, diagonally across the board from them, behind the gaze of the authorities. Someone had already given her a hefty, hushing dose of morphine, injecting it into the nape of her neck which she always massaged when she played at the gaming tables, some kindly wayward doctor with access to syringes and vials, or some light-fingered hospital goof or junkie, though nobody saw who administered it, or admitted seeing as much. Seemingly Coney had ambulanced and taken care of its own. Around Grace was the strong tang of acid, tart-sour like the sprinkling vinegar for the oysters and fries served on the boardwalk, making people choke instinctively. Some of her colourful skin had flooded into the air as sulphur smoke. She was a struck match. Her body had almost finished leaking when the police got round to her and it was trying to congeal its outer layer, like a newly shed serpent. She had the look of a sleeping snake too, dead-eyed from the drug. Some people were blasé, still playing chess and drinking at the bar. Varga’s chess tournaments had once again become the scene of unimaginable and accommodating violence.

Of the six tattooed women on the Luna podium Grace had been the newest and the least demurely dressed. The gallery had put in for a nude licence for her and been refused by the city authority, though she was always willing to do it, she said. She wore only a feeble bandeau around her breasts and a pair of short silks. The others, including Claudia, whose stage name was Mrs Bismarck, were clad as if for bathing, in long suits, and each had a circus card next to her foot. Their names were Nell Nerona, who had fake body make-up rather than authentic tattoos but said she had been abducted by Indians out west and painted while held hostage inside their wigwams, Texas Bobbie, Lovely Loretta, who had been at one time a bearded lady and had worked with Barnum and Bailey, Polly the Painted Pear, and the Lady of Many Eyes. Most were moonlighting from other circus professions, and they made more money than they knew what to do with, some had even bought stocks and shares. All but the last were dressed under their costumes in a jumble of assorted images — they had bootlaces tattooed on ankles, and portraits on their legs, hearts, doves, roses and ribbons, Allied flags, apostles and stars. Grace was the only attraction to consist of a single repetitive image. She was all eyes. And since there was a mesmerizing, confusing quality to her body, all the eyes watching the show were hers. By the third week in the gallery she had made close to a hundred dollars, four times as much as the tattoos had cost her. She had been booked to appear in a show at the Grand Theatre in Greenwich Village, and had even been invited to enter a beauty contest in Philadelphia.

Henry arrived at the booth as Cy was putting the last board up for the night. There was an awful, clear sobriety about him, though he had drunk almost a half bottle of Grey Goose in the bar by then on his night off, and in addition his blood was shimmering with several other ephedrine or opiate chemicals. He had a beautiful, soft, southern voice, Cy remembered thinking that night, like down on a Georgia peach, and that made the ensuing story seem like one even children would be entranced to hear, frightening and monstrous elements though there were. If anyone else had told Cyril Parks of the events minutes ago he might have laid out his fists before thinking of the guiltless messenger. Like Eliot Riley would have, when anger got the better of him, disabling his reason and he’d go about duffing the air, too drunk to reach the offender. Cy might have hooked the words right off another man’s face with his knuckles, having suddenly and fully inherited the bare-knuckle legacy of Riley, when he heard about Grace. But for that soft southern voice that made the story he was hearing into a happier imitation of the truth. Then, when the tale was told, Henry said he couldn’t truly tell how much morphine he’d given Grace. And that he might have given her so much morphine as to accidentally kill her, if the acid hadn’t killed her already. But her pain had been so bad it had made him sorry for her, sorry enough that his thumb went down twice on the plunger, once to the postoperative millimetre marker, then beyond it to that privileged realm meant for only those long acquainted with the lag. And what would Cy recommend he do with this?