Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Grace had been outnumbered by the men of history, she had neither the political strength nor the support of her own people, but she had found a way to win her freedom, and for a time she had celebrated the identity of her body as her own sovereign state. And now the land had been razed again, it was desolate, death-soil. But her eyes, those dark, solemn, prolific eyes still glimmered and said her mind had not lost that spirit of rebellion and never would. She was gathering the last few insurgents, the hardiest survivors in their caves and forest hideaways, and they were forming a pact of defiance, they were stockpiling arms. The revolt was far from over. She’d damn herself. She’d go to the gallows bloody and brutalized but unbroken if she had to.

He knew the only pity and consolation she would accept, the only tears she would stand for, were his. He could see that in her face, the finite sympathy and tolerance for him. Her flag-maker. Her ally. The man who rewrote her body’s history. The man who loved her. She gestured to herself.

— They moved skin from my leg to here above my ribs. They said it would die or continue to live, but either way it would protect the inside. It was not cosmetic, they tried a few things. I signed forms saying they could. I don’t know how they did this, Electric Michelangelo. It is a miracle. I had to stay covered until it was healed enough for the air — even the air can bring infection to you — or I would have come sooner. They want me to put a liniment on that will make it hard, with some kind of metal in it, but I can’t reach so well. You must stop this face now. I need your help. Here. You can do this for me.

She took a tube of cream from the pocket of her dress and held it out to him.

— I don’t want to hurt you. It looks so … painful.

— No. I can’t feel it any more, sometimes an itch, but mostly it’s like this …

She took his hand in hers and placed their two first fingers together like the steeple of a church, while the rest intertwined to make its roof. Then she made him slide his other fingers up and down the joined steeple. It was the dead-finger trick that the boys of his school had once done to make each other squeamish, the sensation was of a lifeless body part and now it seemed doubly awful. He took the cream from her, put a small amount into his palm and smoothed it as best he could over the rocky patches at the top of her legs. The skin was less absorbent than slate. Skin was supposed to drink in moisture and hers would not take a sip. She put her hand in his hair, stroked it while he anointed her. He felt his eyes begin to brim again and he pulled her towards him gently and began to kiss her stomach, her hips, the ruined abdomen and breasts, his mouth soft and damp on her, her body tough as granite until his tongue found the safer, softer channel of skin inside her. He felt her hand close in his hair and pull on it gently, mooring them closer together. She whispered a word to him, twice, which defied any liguistic pronunciation he had mastered, but he knew it was an affirmation of some kind. Kedvesem. Kedvesem. For a few moments he felt her body swaying exquisitely against him, like the lip of a wave breaking at his mouth. Her breathing became husked within her chest, constricted then ameliorated from the errata of her respiratory condition, and her head fell back. Her rhythm was overcome by a series of small jolts, electrical currents, as if her body had been shocked, her life being taken or given back by a connection of energy, and then she was still.

— Grace … I’ve wanted to say …

— No, just this. Dziekuje, Cy. Tell Claudia that she must have Maximus now. But I can’t take care of him any more, you see. He will like to see all of America and if they take him to California he will like to see a different ocean. Tell her there is no other horse fit to carry her but Maximus … because … because he is as magnificent as she is and she will be his queen …

Her voice broke then, suddenly, shattering apart like glass with her last words, and for a moment all the sorrow of Europe came flooding out. Cy looked up at her, expecting to glimpse a little girl or an unmade woman, the smallest in a stack of matrushka dolls. But already that pure, hatchling, embryonic thing was gone. Grace was staring at a point in space, forcing water away from her eyes to its underground channel, sealing the marrow of her spirit back up. Then she took a step away, picked up her dress off the counter and put it on, prohibitively across her shoulders, and buttoned it up the front.

— Tell her she can put molasses in his oats and it will keep him strong. For you Electric Michelangelo, I think you don’t need molasses. I think your heart is very strong. But I wonder if it is strong enough for just one more favour that I will ask of you before I go?

She was saying goodbye, almost. He had always believed that knowing her would include her walking away and it was true. Soon she would be leaving and he could not ask her where she was going because he did not even know where she had come from. He wanted to tell her to stay, that he wanted her, that she had haunted him like the wind on the pavements of rock on the Yorkshire moors since they had first met. The mechanical bobsled whooshed past on its first run of the day with people laughing in its carriages and a lost hat spun down from above and rolled on the pavement as if procuring for change. And he knew if he said those things to her now his voice would be as absurd as that hat.

Coney Island would have had her back, in all her damaged, viable glory, because of the new horror of her body even, but that she would not be taken back. And Brooklyn would have cared for her intensively as its own, always. But something in her was shifting, already travelling, as if this place was now the province of an old failed world, a nameless country that had crawled its way after her from some undesignated spot on another continent, wherever she started from, wherever she had first kicked out the camp fire and mounted her horse. Grace was a refugee again, perhaps she had always been so, with a refugee’s identity that was defiant and pliable and eternally battling just as it was perpetually saddened and disinherited, raped and stripped of its homeland wherever it went. Her ethnicity was everything and nothing. She was beyond even America in that respect. And he did not understand how she existed at all. And yet, and yet, it did not matter. She had him still.

— Yes. Of course, I’ll help you in any way I can. You know I will.

— OK. It was a good move he made, crude though effective, but it can’t end here. Meet me tonight. The fountain at twelve o’clock. If you come, you will have to give up your sting, I can ask for nothing less. So think about it carefully. And if you can manage, don’t drink anything, it must be done cold in our minds you see. We’ll embrace now — there will not be another appropriate time.

She kissed him on both cheeks and smiled.

— Remember to look for that star, you will find it. And remember to tell Claudia about the horse. Oh, Electric Michelangelo. A szíved mindig emlékezni fog rám.

She placed the fingers of her right hand gently on his chest, against the ship, above his heart, just as she had touched him within the booth months before. Then she turned away. He watched her walk carefully down the alley, her body stiff, the cotton dress soaked through at the waist, and he was unable to call out to her. He needed her to be somehow more broken by what had happened, because she was so valuable to him, and that left him silent. He watched her go and it was ordinary. Not the profound departure of lovers on the screen separating a last time, not the muted light of evening on the set of Brooklyn, not even piano music drifting down from Varga to accompany their alba. Just human blood in his veins and the shadow of the booth getting smaller as the sun rose in the sky. The smell of new grease on the runners of the bobsled coaster, onion butter from the sausage stand, and salt in the sea air.