“Your etchings, they don’t make sense,” I said that first night.
He raised his chin and looked away, face dark like raw meat. “Not everyone knows how to see what’s there.” His face, sunburned, frowned its network of lines. On his forehead a large vein pulsed. He moved close, the force of his presence beating me dizzy. “What, you think I’m new? I’ve had four wives. Four—and they all loved me. That was way back in the day.”
He dreamed me into his life. He pulled a magic marker from his camouflage jacket and scrawled a wide scar across an etching. “All my paintings have predicted tonight,” he said and led me to the sofa, where he fixed me and did me. A week later I moved in, safe, hidden from all the eyes. He was going to be my Poe, my voice, the voice in our heads. “I’ll take you to the Boundary Waters. You can be my muse. I’ve got acres. No electricity, no phone,” he said, sailor’s cap awry, a dog-killing grin on his face. “Electricity supports the monsters. We’ll live like Robert and Elizabeth Browning, like John and Yoko, Kurt and Courtney, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.” I laughed and he grinned. “Just the two of us, by candlelight. We’ll have one another, in the custody of the cosmos.”
***
On Saturday, when he lets me leave the camp, we picnic. I bring chicken, deviled eggs, bread. He takes me where the waves lap ashore. We walk sandy pockets of trees colored like cinnamon; far away, on private land, a beach umbrella stretches people out, stick figures. They get up, spasticate to the shore, and lie at the water’s edge.
“It’s a robot convention,” I say.
He laughs so hard he can’t get back his breath. “What do you think you see?” he says. “There’s nobody out there. It’s just the Boundary Waters.”
He gives me my fix. “You know I stabbed one of my wives? With a Bic pen,” he adds. “She didn’t even need surgery.” He turns and opens his mouth several times like a fish, as though clearing his ears of static. “But that was then. This is now.”
My blood courses like plastic melt in a rubber hose. Patty melt, that’s what we used to call them at the café. Cheese like liquid, burger burned to a crisp, toast. He coos, pulls me into scrub oak and sand, does me good and nasty. Afterward, civil, he slings an arm around me. “To hell with the sexual slave. I want the child. Where’s the child?”
In stop-and-step gestures, I climb out of my dress and dance us home, twirling in leprechaun fashion. I can’t dance. I’m a klutz, fixed or stone cold sober, but it doesn’t matter to him or to me.
“Get the rattle.” He bites his lip, drawing blood. “God, that’s beautiful. Now shake it. Shake it.”
“How long?”
“Don’t question the cosmos!” He roughs me up a little. “Feel how things are.” I start coughing, can’t stop. “That’s what counts.” He cracks his neck. Shadows play on his face, alive in the light of the lantern. His eyes settle on the world inside his head. “Be who you are.” He stands with his canvas. “Outside, though. I need myself.”
No electricity, no running water; only the stove, the well, some kerosene, the lantern’s shifting light. A big steak knife. His canvas is life: He paces, glowers in the light, cracks his knuckles. Agitated, the lines of his face on fire, he crunches to my side. “What have you done? Can’t you see the stars, how they break? Tell me what you’ve done to the waves! Can’t you see?” He heaves a stone into the water. “How many?” he asks, rage twisting his face.
I cringe, wrapped in a sheet, in his crazy vision, and bow my head. It’s the way things are. His hands move in delicate brushlike gestures and he stumbles to the canvas. “Let me be. Can’t you ever let me be?”
Outside on a damp rock I notice the moon change the tide into a new world. The eyes of animals thick under the sea. I smooth wrinkles in the rocks, but they vanish, slippery-green. The water clings to my sheet like the green inside his whiskey. The moon stitches together stars with light as I stroke the rocks asleep.
***
Wind, scissors, paper. One breaks, one cuts, one covers.
“What do you want?” the wind asks.
“Let me be! Let me be! Let me be!”
One sound—the one a sentence makes, the one that belongs to me—rises and falls with the life of his paint.
In the day he takes nothing, doesn’t return until dusk, but the timbre of his voice fills the camp. He’s everywhere—on the mattress, in the food, under the sink, in the cracks between the planks. His cape gestures about me. “You see yourself in everyone’s face. They still live inside you. Your goddamn mama. Your goddamn Serena.” He takes out the strap. “It’s the genes, bitch,” he says. “It’s all in the genes. Let’s clean out those genes.”
“Fix me,” I shout; “fix me good!”
***
The motor launch snuggles into the dock with his buddies, who bring food, alcohol, drugs, a woman. He puts me in the closet.
“Why? Can’t I see other faces?”
“No. You’ve got to get away from eyes.”
In the closet, roaches and mice have eyes that glow in the dark. Voices from another planet tell him the city: the shouts, the jokes, the firefights, the wars, the creeping pestilence taking so many lives, the Marauders in which they all take pleasure. “Where’s the puta?” he calls out. “Where’s the puta? Don’t tell me, let me see! Give me the puta!” He doesn’t mean me. They bring in the woman. He unstacks canvases for her. “Wow,” she says. “You’re an ace. How do you do that stuff? Where does it come from?”
“It’s all where you focus your eyes.”
“Your eyes are as bad as the rest,” I mumble in the closet. He’s no better, no worse. It’s their eyes he wants to keep me from—the others, the old ones, stored in the dusty crates, stretched thin. Tokens of my life, maps of moments. Every creator breeds dissent, my voices tell me. Avatars approach our graves. Only drifters escape respite: He’s a drifter! Not an exile, not an artist! A drifter! From that log, that splinter! I listen, take it all in, turn cryptic advice into code, and when he opens the closet, I stay. There is more time than life, the voices say. He cajoles, subdued, apologetic, senses something has changed. He walks the room, sprawls on the bed.
“Let me be,” he mutters in his sleep and wakes a day late, smiling, brow drawn. “Be the child. I want the child.” He puts the bonnet in my hands. Don’t take it out your soul. I drop the bonnet. “Be the child; let me have the child!” He looks at the sink. “Don’t you want your fix?”
“No. Too much you, not enough me.” My hand brushes the table.
“Bury your voices. I’m the cosmos.” He slaps me. “You feel? You feel how things are?”
I walk to the shrouded canvas. “You don’t spend your days with paint.”
“Don’t you want your fix, sweetheart?” He’s playful, dogface low-down sly. “You shaky?” He turns to the stove, hands clenched, face like a piece of meat. “I’ll take it straight out your flesh.” He bends over. Now or never. I imagine my entire weight putting the steak knife where his heart should be, listen for the sound it makes when I crank it, like gristle trying to speak.
“The monster!” Fixed good, strap in hand, veins a-bulge, breathing hard, eyes a puzzle, he falls at my feet into his own blood and hacks across the floor, one hand caressing the vision before him. “Let me be. You let me be.”
His eyes disappear.
Figures in robes spattered with paint climb into boxes of wood.
“How many do you want?” they shout.
I wake to the moon, an addict longing for a fix. I think of my child, Serena. I say her name. Once. Twice. A thousand times. Time passes. Hours, days, weeks? It’s time to make my way back to where she might be. In the patterns and cycles of sleep, with wind and water an echo, all the voices, for the rest of my life, are like the sound of a sentence, emerging only to fade.
