Art Imitates Life
I can see the lights in the other buildings, the tenements on the other side of the junkyard. When I pass by, going to and from the convenience store at the gas station, I crane my neck to see inside the windows. Ordinary things, like refrigerators and clocks on the wall, look mysterious and special when they're lit up yellow in the window-frames, surrounded by the dark. Television makes an oceanic play of blue light on the walls. I like to guess what they're watching.
The lights in the tenements are company for me, just as the TV comforts them. They're okay, they're safe. Happiness isn't contagious, but contentment is. If they get to come home to their favourite show and dinner ready in the Crock-Pot, then the world isn't totally broken. I can keep going so long as somebody gets to have a quiet night at home. Only when disaster strikes will I get desperate.
So I keep telling myself. Lately even my sculptures are looking worried, rearing backward on their piston legs, their wire-tendrils curling up tight. Jittery artillery, with broad bony sails of warped metal, like a human pelvic bone. I sit down on my milk crate, eating this damp ham and cheese sandwich that's been sitting in a fridge for too long, and stare at the shape of my current piece of work. It's cryptic, and I no longer know what I meant by it. All I can see is a tilt to the top piece that reminds me of Laurie's shoulders, the way she stands when she's nervous. Did I intend that? My problem is I never start out with a plan.
Hell, I don't know why I kept doing sculptures at all. Who'd buy them? Who'd even come to look at my pieces? At best, and this is only if I got a goddamn miracle, I could be a flavour-of-the-week "outsider artist." Gimmicky bullshit. "He's this mutant kid who lives in a junkyard, but his primitive sculptures exude a life-affirming hope!"
Not too likely. I'm not that kind of outsider, honey.
During the day, my latest sculpture lives with me in pieces inside my shack. I can't leave it outside for long. Lots of people don't know the difference between brilliant art and scrap metal. Ha ha. But what else is going to happen to it, when I finally decide that I'm done? Destroyed, destroyed. Like Serra's Tilted Arc. But unlike Serra, location isn't built into my art. All my pieces want to get out and see the world, sleep in a quiet gallery at night, score some gentle treatment for once. They don't want to stand in a public square and get kicked or spit on.
At least I can put them back together at night, let them stand up together. That's the theory, anyhow. A piece has fallen off the rusted chassis I was using as a frame, so it no longer fits. I kneel down next to it, to feel its lines, its weight. Probably it belonged to a go-cart, until its outriggers weakened. Flakes of dust come off on my gloves when I touch it.
There's no one here. I take my gloves off.
My hands are damp, soft, and wrinkled, as if I'd been drowned. The cool, dirty metal of its spine feels so smooth, so cold. It feels mine. Mine. I'm paid in gas-station sandwiches and scrap metal, and I earned this shaky chassis, the dented car door, the beautiful star-like sprockets. A dumb, menial job, sure, but I'm still part of the universe, the big multicellular organism of humanity: I guard their junk. I don't kill people. I don't weigh anyone down.
What I really miss, though, is clay. I used to work in all kinds of media, before my powers fucked up my life, and I loved sculpting in clay. Mr Bradley said I had a gift with faces, a tactile awareness of the finest details. Good hands, he said. I stayed after school to work in the art room on an enormous Pietà that Mr Bradley had been tinkering with for several years. He let me shape the delicate fingers of the Madonna's right hand, which she held up in a gesture of grief.
"This gesture is the why of the whole piece," Mr Bradley said. "You have to show the weight of her grieving in her fingers. Grief affects the whole body."
The feel of the clay was cool and wonderful, even if it dried out my skin. For three weeks I thought about nothing except the right hand of the Madonna, the weight of her grief. Nothing but hand studies, on paper and in clay. Anatomy drawings from every angle. I even learned the names of the bones in the hand and the wrist, with the traditional dirty mnemonics. Scared lovers try positions that they can't handle.
And then, one morning, I noticed that the clay was getting...sticky. Wet, grainy, too soft. The fingers of my hand studies wilted, the carefully shaped bones of the wrist dissolved into clumsy chunks. Positions they can't handle indeed. Mr Bradley said it was bad clay, but it happened again with the next batch he ordered.
"Your mind's somewhere else, Kevin," he said a week later, when the clay continued to dribble away from me. "Maybe you'd rather try another medium."
So I moved on to my Grey Period, cutting car doors to pieces while they shrieked, welding the bones of outriggers and ultralights into my unholy scrap-heap skeleton army. At least the other guys thought stuff like this was cool, although they kept telling me I should try to make them move. "Kevin builds Decepticons," my friends would say when introducing me to people.
Better than painstakingly tweaking the Virgin Mary's manicure, they thought. But I miss the clay. I miss having my hands on it.
I miss having my hands on anything.
Life Imitates Art
The broken chassis of my latest untitled is crumbling and rusty, and the decay makes it feels almost organic. I'm getting excited. There are tiny organisms in the air, there must be. How else can I explain the subtle tingle I feel in my bare skin, almost teasing? Insult to injury, that I have to like it too. I'm shit at hiding my pleasure—Dani knew before I told her, I'm sure of it. She wouldn't have treated me like she did if she thought I wasn't responsible, wasn't enjoying myself.
I give in to the desire, and that's my mistake. I touch the rough grass and thistles growing next to me, pushing through the gravel and the old tires to the sun. Ash, dust, dust right down to the roots. It's good, but I barely feel it. Nothing else compares to the stopping of a heart, and that's why—that's why I'm out here alone.
There are rats all over this junkyard, and I'll tell you right now I don't feel guilty about them. People get paid to do what I do to them. Traps aren't as fast as I am, and poison hurts them even more. Would you rather die of internal bleeding from warfarin, or would you rather just feel my fingers on you for a second before the corruption reaches your heart? It doesn't take long when you're small. It's not like it was with Pierce, or Laurie. Or my dad.
That feels long ago. My dad. It's like I'm growing backwards, in a weird way. With every day that goes by, I was younger when it happened. Now it's as if I were thirteen or fourteen when my power struck, now as if I were twelve, now as if I were ten. Because I feel smaller, more depleted by his absence. I never had a father, he's been retroactively rotted out of my life.
But the other catastrophe gets closer and closer. It didn't happen months ago, it happened last week. It happened yesterday. It's still happening—I'm still looking into a rotted face, the blonde hair mysteriously incorruptible, her teeth grinning at me—that's the worst thing about bones, how they smile at you—it's still happening but I can't stop it.
Dani had no idea how it feels. And she didn't have to suffer for it the way I did, and she didn't even try. Fake apologies when it was over. That long gaze down her nose that says you wanted this, you did it to yourself. Put your damn gloves on. She didn't want me to embarrass her by leaving, that's all. If I could have been replaced with some harmless replica, a robot that would go to class and keep its gloves on, that would have been fine with her.
I thought I could do it. I really had the best of intentions. And I do understand that intentions don't count for much when someone destroys your face. Absolutely. It's just that there's not much room left in between those options for me to manoeuvre.
They call this sort of thing harm reduction. The rats are tame in the junkyard, big and fat and bold. The dog is too old to chase them, and they compete only with the squirrels and the gulls, which are just as slow and stupid. I'm faster. Dead for a ducat, dead. The scrabbling little legs stop clawing at my sleeve, the squeak dries out. I think about the Black Death, and that makes it easier. All contagions destroyed. Maybe I could get a job sterilising equipment for doctors. The rat's tail pinwheels around, then goes limp.
Life comes from the sun, and it came from lightning first. A bolt of fire striking the primordial soup. I believe that. Every nerve in my body feels that electricity when I touch a living thing. The cold goes away. I wish I could show you that energy, that burst of life. It's how I feel when I look at Laurie.
My sculpture's about her, my latest one. Did I tell you that? The guys at school would laugh at me for it, because they take everything literally, but if you look at this piece, how it slouches forward and turns its head away—you have to understand that even a chassis has a head, if you look at it like a person—you want to console it. You want to be kind to it. But I wish I could still work in clay. Then I'd really show you something. I'd show you how delicate her hands are.
I'm free to think about doing things like that now, without the guys at school or even the other kids at Xavier's to worry about. They'd have thought it was weird to make a sculpture for some girl you barely know. Weirder still to see a girl you like in a rusted chassis and a bunch of sprockets.
Well, you can psychoanalyse it all you want. There's nothing weird about it. Bernini made the light of heaven with metal rods, streaming down around his beautiful orgasmic saint, and there was nothing weird about that either. (By weird I mean: twisted, wrong, creepy, ugly. Not just strange, unusual, foreign. Lord knows a guy like Bernini is always going to be a stranger in the world.) Picasso looked at a bicycle and saw a bull's head.
The human mind has the best facial recognition technology there is, although that's not saying much. Sometimes a mustache or a dye job will throw us off, and sometimes we'll see faces everywhere. On Mars, in a tree, out of the corners of our eyes. Jesus and Mary in stains on the walls. I still see my dad sometimes. Electrical outlets look like faces to me. We are always reaching outwards, infecting and infusing the world with faces, always and especially the faces we love. That's why we can stand to live in a mechanical world in an all-but-lifeless universe. We look for the resurrection of the dead, the life of the world to come, and the eyes and mouths of our machinery.
I bring the chassis inside my shack with me, lean it against the wall, and stretch out on my bed. Synthetic blanket on a stained plastic foam mattress, but I always sleep in my clothes anyway, for warmth. There's no insulation, not real barrier between inside and outside. Once I came in and heard a violent thumping noise that scared the shit out of me until I realised it was wings. A blackbird, the red bars on its wings flashing even in the darkness—who knows how long it had been in there. There was birdshit on my bed, but nothing I could do about it. Birds in the house are bad luck, but I'm used to that too.
I don't know what I'll do when winter comes. Maybe I'll hitch back down to Georgia.
White light streams down through a crack in my roof, clean as a white canvas. I fall asleep looking at this scrap of blank sky.