Elvissey Read online

  "-solution to the Negro problem cannot be found in legislation, but in the minds-"

  Static exploded, shattering their world; all silenced, as if it'd never been. Mora stroked his machine to a stop.

  "At that point the device was apparently observed. Expected response surely ensued. Prospects," Mora summed, "fascinate."

  Not always sure I'd had one, I wanted life; John felt sentenced to his. As we sat there, while Mora gathered his papers, I saw John reread the book's closure, a quote attributed to John Donne. Once I'd been to London, and in St. Paul's seen the preacher's statue, his image sculpted as he'd desired: wrapped within windings, eyeshut as if asleep, smiling as if dreaming of every funeral followed; foreseeing his own, mayhap-the end of a long trial, with the outcome of the appeal ahead assured.

  I run to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday.

  Jake's deconstruction followed; succincted. When time comes, he'd writ, act.

  Class ended; before homing we descended into the crypt of Columbia's St. Paul's to attend an artshow. A marble spiral led to the display; at stairfoot stood artists, smoking and drinking cups of wine, chatting technik. By their abdominal convexities I gathered that they endeavored new projects even while conversing. The other designers, including the woman I'd earlier spotted, had galleried, hovering round their containers. Their sculptures, too, were tabletopped; among them were interspersed bowls of ikebana, lending color no less artificial, however natural.

  "Ugly," an appreciator noted to his companion. Their first date, I inferred; each wore a forced disinterest in any- one's affairs other than their own.

  "Art," she replied, ecstasized.

  Background essentials: inbody pregnancy, when accidental, was inevitably if circumventially terminated; regooding upheld the edicts forbidding the wombed from being untimely ripped, amniotic forecast irregarded. Only through tubed cultures, suitably outbodied, was birthed perfection assured. Mutative nature's inescapables-chemical rain rich with acid and deviant ray, unseeables in food and drink, our radium-blue heaven-certified that trad gestation inevitably delivered into our world fresh deformities, sometimes quick, most often dead.

  "One pill at daybreak, sixteen weeks running," an artist whispered to one of her protegees. Each wore earrings made of tiny silverplated feet, toes splayed apart by diamond chips. "Resulting varietals are of nobler invention than thalidomide's."

  "Side effects?" asked a listener. "Yours, meant."

  "Standard."

  Fetal artists conceived as was once the rule, as deliberately exposing themselves to select media during pregnancy to most appropriately flesh their concepts, which could live only after they'd died.

  "Solipsizers," said John, bareglancing, his eyes so deep socketed that, had I not known, I could never have guessed them to be blue. "Let's shortterm."

  "Hang cool," I said, forever now practicing, in speech, the rephrasing essentialled for our upcoming travels. "Loose, rather. Hang loose."

  "Oh, Iz," he said, frowning so that only I would see. "Straightspeak with me if no other."

  "Forgive," I said; could he? I wondered if for reasons other than chemical my eyes showed so drawn as his; began persuing what was displayed. Within each mother's tabled glass belly floated a freeform manifest, a maternal expression. Some were lava-iit, making the jars' small ones appear self-luminescent as they drifted amid glowing plasmas, resembling warning balloons lofted in advance of toxic clouds, giving all in harmway reason enough to run. Other babies presented to admirers internal organs origamied outward, or the look of ones dissembled and reconstructed by mechanics uncertain of the original arrangement.

  "Unoriginal," a critic noted of one who was unlit, and bore a face emerging direct from a stubbed neck. The baby's arms drifted through its gel as if it attempted to fly.

  "How so?" asked his accompaniment.

  "Similar seen live, begging on Mercer Street, six months past."

  In the eyes of some exhibits I saw duped the eyes of lovers longlost reincarnate, no less painful to stare into now than they'd been when I'd last taken leave of them. All the jugged children carried a feel of specimens recovered from those more distant worlds once imagined extant, far beyond visible stars, stolen from Edens as yet untarnished by the slither of snakes.

  "Postambient," the holoed gallerist explained, her image afloat in room's midst. "As cubism rose from trad Afro styles. Brancusi, exampled. Prim remade proper; rebirth becomes any art."

  The sculptures, I favored; those employed the interior frames so that the design's more profound aspects might be fully revealed. The ribcage of one draped down over its femurs. Several small skulls evidenced cyclopean features; holiday lights were inserted within the expected openings, to whimsify onlookers. One sculpture, hued waste-green, stood balanced, seeming weightless upon its fourth foot's third, longest toe.

  "Iz, I beg-" John murmured. I kissed; calmed, if didn't settle.

  "Por fav, moment," I said; took his hand in mine, feeling no feeling. "Let's see who's cookin'."

  'iz"

  "Practice perfects."

  The exhibit's centerpiece was wrought by an artist named Tanya, a provincial who'd been living in the Bowl, near the great Indiana dunes; no others so fertiled as she, either in idea or in technik. Tanya bore a look resembling my husband's, that of one who suffered for their art. Her child, whom I took to be one of outbodied origin, sat smiling nearby; she had honey hair, thick and tousled in the back, and skin so pink as to have been boiled.

  "Wordless," others muttered, eyeing Tanya's bodiwork. "Doublestunned."

  Half mobile, half collage, the art was contained within two transparent cones poised tiptipped; the topmost revolved unceasing by way of the gyroscopic motion of two intertwined catherine-wheels afloat within, both armspoked with ten bony lengths, digits directed viewer-outward, striking balance nature neither offered nor intended. In the lower cone four small ones, fullbodied ifemptyfaced, circled round- rosied, their dance forever macabring.

  "Years, making," Tanya said, responding to another's question. "I despaired, sometimes."

  "How'd you bleach the bones?" I asked.

  "China White," she explained. "After beetling."

  Her little girl's face lit as if it, too, generated its own glow, reflecting much more than her mother's glory. "She loves her brothers and sisters," Tanya said, stroking her daughter's perfect hair and hands. "When you're old enough, sweetie."

  "Cost?" I inquired.

  Tanya shrugged; smiled. "If you have to ask-"

  I thought myself no artist; imagined I could have been a good mother, but our marriage's anesthetic was unmarred by creativity. When I wed John I was awared at moment one that we were to remain childless. Though insistent guards, such asJohn, were allowed conjunction, Dryco's concern for familial stability demanded that from Security unions no progeny might spring, to be too early orphaned. By directive, not even seed could be gathered in advance to later plant, pre- or post-retirement; all guards were clipped before being diplomaed, the vasect required before they could receive Jake's book. Often before learning there was one I dreamt of a parallel world, where John was a good father and I, a good mother.

  "Iz," he said, with stiff fingers touching my arm with fly's lightness; as had his old overseer, he avoided my eyes, as if undesiring to see what was lost. "Homeaway now. Age befalls the legs. I beg."

  "Moment."

  In that other world, would our counterparts be birthed? If they were, and if they married, would they create? Or, once joined, would they live as we had, sans art, a cozy couple separate yet equal, sharing an isotope's halflife, clinging to madness to which they'd most familiared, shielding themselves against vaster insanities whirling without?

  Was that love? What was its cost? If you have to ask ... Before homing I charged up an exhibit disk that I could review later at leisure, discerning what I'd overlooked; finding those unintended truths artists so well as critics failed to see even when sho
wn, the ones most meaningful, because most disturbing.

  "Love you," I told my husband, "overmuch." He nodded; he knew.

  Aiming Bronxward up Broadway our car carried us home; through smoked windows we eyed tripleshifters deconstructing the walls between Harlem and Washington Heights as the northern, higher parts of Manhattan underwent their own regooding. So few still lived on either side of the walls that such security had for years been so superfluous as those who'd once lived there; I'd lived there, as a child. We'd grown together in Washington Heights, me and Judy and poor lost Lola, inloading info, streetsmarting, grasping our world's way in a moment's breath if and when essentialled; I regooded myself, once I left.

  Looking upward through the roof I gazed toward Godness; saw no spark, no sign, no flare of St. Elmo's fire. Mundanities blotted the night: clouds aglow with searchlight-shine coagulated on high, no sooner taking the shape intended by those directing groundbound than breezes conspired to deface the fog-scrawled designs. Environads, when successed, allowed Dryco to emboss its logo upon land, sky and sea; that if tongues stilled, and screens blanked, the rocks themselves would forever sing a song of Dryco. Airtrav- elers descending through the yellow zone into the apparent clear vizzed highwayside forests grown on demand, controlling erosion while, in engraven greenery, foliating the corporate sign; streams raced along rechanneled courses that from far vistas the interested might glimpse our name writ in water; knolls were shaved and shifted into the familiar face's leer, eyed with boulders, smiled with a shrubbery curl, and spelling out in hedges circled round our company's rephrased ethos: Do Good. Feel Real. The word was too much with us, too soon: Dryco was the word, and our world was of the word, and with the word, and the world was the word.

  "Watch!!" John shouted. Our driver swerved slidelong, rushing through the reds; at 156th escaped blindsiding by another Bronxbound limo. John clasped the man's shoulders, steering him curbways as he slowed to a stop. "You're risking," he told the driver, a reassigned Security staffer; as he told him that I knew that it was my safety, not their own, that so concerned my husband.

  "Known," the man mumbled, barely audible.

  "I'll cruise us,"John said. "Shift." Stepping out, wheeling himself, John eased our driver into shotgun position; spoke to the dash so kindly as to his co-worker, and when the car responded we moved on: righting, lefting, rivercrossing, passing from the gone world into the one which would be.

  Under Dryco guidance, at inestimable cost, our city rebuilded atop the Bronx hills, designed half trad, half in the style Eurotrenders termed Dreizinuovy. New New York's nightlight made lurid its host of shades, pastel and primary: apricot and aubergine, lemon and lilac, cerise and cerulean and deep emerald green. Betowered and lowdomed, the city showed so spired as a bed of nails; tubes bridged streetcanyons eighty floors over, sodastraw elevators ran along building-sides toward rich azimuths bedecked with fauxcurlicue and neo-arabesque. Clouds of tiny copters circled midge-like round those grown and growing hothouse flowers, our garden town. The Met, at intervals, displayed fading comic panels, whereupon more conservative appreciators of art would see inked, half a century past by those in the know, our city's image: sealed within a bottle, one candid among many miniatures lifted from a farrago of worlds.

  Old New York would in time be sea-swallowed, as Chicago would go Nineveh as each daily dust-storm laid down another coat, as LA would in time smother beneath its Jovian atmosphere's weight; Moscow might crumble, Lagos and Karachi burn anew with nuclear fire, Cairo and Bangkok and Brazzaville depopulate at one hundred souls per hour. Yet as in Tokyo, as in Berlin and London, new New York would-upon completion-show as all in our world should have shown, had so many not slowed along the roadway to view the accidents previous onlookers caused.

  New New York would hold a million. Its presentiment screamed the unstated, that its inhabitants had been retrofitted as well, to assure perfection. In outlanders' minds-in the Bowl and among the Coasters and down in the vast Southern delta-New Yorkers underwent a most complete regooding: they were reimagined as reflections, new Atlan- teans plucked landward from water; their wet hair so blond as mine was becoming, their moist eyes so blue as my contacts feigned. We who lived here knew true; our hills' city provided only new jars for old specimens, who, when pricked, yet gushed red and not gold-vermilion.

  John and I had a fiftieth floor place in a Concourse tower; twenty other families lived in our building. We sidewalked ourselves, watching empty trolleys race down the boulevard's gardened aisles, their ads' neon belettering the dark, the bulbed glow of Dryco's face tracklighting fore and aft, the sign of its word; everybody heard about the word. Our driver, deafened, sped into his night, two red lights on behind.

  "How long?" I asked, watching his meteors skid out of sight.

  "Week," John said. "He's edged. Let's up ourselves, Iz."

  The seven million of old New York could have roomed here in comfort, high atop the hills. Mooted: in new New York, those not regooded weren't there anymore.

  We lay in our single bed's separate worlds. John's wide white back lifted high on my left, its crags appearing as an iceberg around which I could never maneuver in time. He shivered; mayhap his own coldness chilled too bonedeep. Stroking him, pulling our comforter around us, I warmed him as I could.

  "Sleepaway," he murmured. "Deepdead shagged, Iz. Dreamtime calls. Listen."

  "Talk to me, John," I said. "Talk."

  "Sleepaway, Iz," he repeated. "Places to go, people to be. Sleepaway."

  Rolling off I eyed our ceiling's slate, an unreadable heaven too close to comfort. We lay separate but equal, together yet apart, one and divided; I wished he was with me, fearing he'd never be again. The living room's TVC came on by itself; it needed rechipping but a workperson essentialled for that and so we let it play as it wished. From the words I gathered that a speaker representing one sect of the C of E-that is to say, the Church of Elvis-was preaching; the congregants called out for their imagined savior, crying for him to step from his world into ours.

  "E," they chanted, intruding themselves throughout our space. "Save us, E.-

  As I lay there I listened to wind scratching the window; then I heard the wind drop to the carpet and land on a shoe. Pressing on the light I soaked our room until all appeared freefloating within an amber sea. A mouse sought succor beneath my dressing-table.

  "John," I said, shifting him with no greater ease than if I'd tried pushing a mountain. "The room's wildlifed. Heard and seen, present and accounted."

  "Wildlifed," he replayed. "Two feet or four?"

  "We're verminized," I said. "A mouse, undertabled. Go, do, please-"

  "Untouchable, Iz," he said. "It's life."

  "It'll breed and bedcrawl," I said. "Cruise it and bruise it, John. I beg."

  The mouse's head appeared, resembling a shoetip; it froze, seeming fixed by my stare. I didn't move; it did, racing crossroom, vanishing under our bed. Awakened full I bounded high, tumbling John floorways.

  "Godness, Iz-" His insomnia disrupted, John rose with clear, if troubled, mind.

  "Ex it, John," I said. "It'll warm itself with us."

  He stared bedways, considering my question even as I asked it. "Impossibled, Iz. Even with peewees. Can't think-"

  "A mouse!" I shouted, balancing myself upon our mattress, alerted to sounds of scratch. "Try, John. Show it what for."

  My husband stamped his good foot, rocking the room. Our intruder darted out, shooting into the quarter-meter's width between dresser and console. Kneeling, grasping one of my boots, I tossed it, jamming the heel into the mouse's only exit. Isolate now, it attempted to scramble up the surrounding smoothness, seeking grip, finding none, sliding floorways again and again, outsplaying tiny feet no larger than earrings.

  "Send it up the flagpole and fly it, John," I screamed. "John, please, I beg, I don't want to have to-"

  "Can't think. Can't. No-" he began to say; leaning forward, his sentence pending, clutching himself stomachways, he balled inwar
d as if to keep his innards from gnawing themselves free. A medication side-effect was tenfolded gastric output at mere notion of violent response; if the notion prolonged, even sans action, he'd be eaten away so physically from within as I had been emotionally.

  "Living must live," he said, replaying his new-learned lessons. "Live with purpose. Must live. Must-"

  'John" I cried, aware of what necessaried, were we to know peace. Something in the mouse kept it living against every odd; I'd hoped it would keel, but it didn't. John's white face drew deathshade as his blood streamed inward, seeking release.

  "Iz," he said, sinking his teeth lipways, reddening them, "I can't. Can't, can't, can't-"

  "I'll settle," I said, climbing down, smoothing his damp hair. He attempted to go blank, eyeshutting, surely constructing in mindeye images of sunshine and meadows and all else neverseen, that he could recover enough to lie at rest without hemorrhage. I hated him so for my having to do what essentialled; pushed deeperdown my own rage with the ease experience brings. I was never so good at hurting as was John. "Rest, angel. I'll settle."

  In my bedside drawer were scissors; my choice of weapon was no less impromptu than any guard's. I trod gentlefooted to where the mouse flung itself against the walls within which it was bottled. I clenched; lifted my scissors. Bringing them down, I realized I'd grasped them widdershins, as if to safely present them to another, who might then with ease stab me with my own gift. Feeling the points sharp within my hand, closing my eyes, imagining myself as a child again, I struck the mouse with the rounded handles; hit it repeatedly, allowing myself sight enough only to certify my strikes, that I didn't overdraw another's pain overlong, regardless of my own.

  Done, then: the mouse lay fetuscurled upon the darkened carpet as if sleeping, its nostrils crimsoned. Cringing from sight of my handiwork, feeling no satisfaction of artistic accomplishment, I saw John rub his face sweatless against our sheets; wondered for whom I felt sorriest, feeling possessed with numbness I hadn't remembered I could so easily summon.