The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  Instead of getting angry with Joan—she’s kind of a mother figure here, and older than Mr. Hailey—he starts talking about Sam, telling us what she was like as a baby, how she had to be held all the time, how he had to get permission to wear her in a pouch to work. She secured him a toy account with China. Barry tells him that she was that image of what they were looking for in a caring, paternal ad campaign. He said that the Chinese even suggested that they allow this child to grow up through their commercials. They loved Sam. Her Chinese name—they gave her one that day—meant fruit because she looked like a fruit attached to Mr. Hailey. When Charlie writes this scene, he has Mr. Hailey say that he always looked at the campaign as the fruit of his fatherhood. But this is essentially wrong. It’s because, I think, he couldn’t make those metaphorical leaps that he lost it.

  Starla tries to ask about the weeks leading up to this morning, tries to get him to think of what his daughter was doing, what she was thinking. There was no diary that he knew of. But she’d had a best friend end a relationship with her. She had come home crying, shut herself in her room, but that was more than a week ago, and she had been pleasant the last few days—not happy, but friendly and calm. Starla tells him that this is sometimes what people who are planning suicide do—they become resolved, happy, because they’ve figured out what they will do. How they will leave the pain. And I almost think that he could have walked out of the café a calmer, happier person himself—and maybe he did in the car—but he remembers the poetry, and even if Emily was going through a hard time, why did she take his daughter with her?

  He stands up and points the gun at Starla—not Joan, but Starla, the woman I see nearly every day. She teaches a private workshop in a basement apartment for three women. Their work is getting popular out here, and we print it like mad because we’re happy when any fiction or poetry, or any real writing gets out of the city. She has red hair, curly, down to her shoulders, and we have been seeing each other for a few years. So like Sam meant something to Dylan Hailey, Starla meant something to me. And I knew that the gun would have to go off sometime. This is where I played hero and maybe changed things.

  I am faster than I think with the coffee mug, but I’m sloppy and Starla could have been killed. It hits him in the head. The gun does not go off, but the man falls over in his chair. I get down on top of him and, originally, I was just going to hold him down so he wouldn’t hurt anyone. He looks at me pitifully, as if he wants to be punched, to be shot, and won’t I do it for him. Charlie and Barry both have me wrestling on the floor with him, and I think they wrote that because they were doing an homage to my adventure fiction, but I really hate that part in their narratives. They claim I punched him. And I don’t remember. I do remember thinking, I don’t want this power you think we have. This power to hurt you with emotions. So I thought I didn’t touch him. I didn’t hurt him. But maybe I did. I took away some dignity, some different resolution he might have been coming to. He wrenches his arm from under mine and sticks the gun in my stomach and everything in the room stops. I can hear the acoustic radio overhead and the toilet in the bathroom that never fully stops running water. I swear I never punched him. But I almost did. After he gets the gun in my stomach we both stand up and he leads me to the door. We walk out of the shop into the daylight and he pushes me into his car and tells me to drive.

  And this is the part that only I can tell. Other writers have speculated on just what happened, what was said, where things went. I wish he had taken Barry, or even Charlie or Joan (though I’m not wishing danger on these people), because they could have better explained to him what they were thinking. I knew what effect I wanted to have on him. I wanted to say things to get him to drop the gun. I raced through all the ways a writer has to make people feel things—it’s what we’re good at, right? Then why did I start talking about how he had to contextualize things?

  I try to tell him how to tell a story to himself. I don’t know what else to do. The car races down the street as I drive, and he keeps telling me, Faster. I say that stories can heal you, too. They don’t just have an effect on making you do something, but when something bad happens to you, you can write it down and find some meaning. But he says there is no meaning in suicide. There is no Emily and so he doesn’t know whom to blame, and he can’t blame Sam. She was just a child. Maybe, I say, if you write something from Sam’s point of view . . . ? I don’t know what I’m saying. I am not so much concerned for myself. I see that he is in terrible danger. We aren’t going toward the city, but away from the OutSkirts, toward the desert where there aren’t any provisions or roads, and there are dunes and canyons.

  “My daughter is dead and I can’t figure out why she died,” he starts, and I encourage him to continue, nodding, yessing. “She was so beautiful,” he says. “And she would have been a great person. She wanted to be someone who designed space ships—did I tell you that? She drew pictures of spaceships, beautiful ones designed after flowers. She said that would be prettier in the sky than the metal ones. If maybe she could see a flower floating down to the ground, she wouldn’t be afraid of aliens, or of space travel. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t it? If a flower-shaped ship blew up in the air, the petals would be okay, because they would still be beautiful.” I turn to him, and his eyes are tearing up again. “That’s my daughter. My Sam said that. She wanted to make flowers in the sky.”

  He twists his wrist suddenly and puts the gun in his mouth, pulls the trigger while I drive over sixty miles per hour, yelling and yelling and yelling, No. The car spins out because I’m scared; the blast is so loud, much louder than you expect. The glass behind his head shatters and the car careens into a ditch because I look away from the road, from the shot.

  The others have already jumped in their cars and followed. I don’t remember them pulling me out of the car, but I remember standing and holding Starla, getting blood everywhere, some of it mine.

  Later, when Barry writes dialogue into that scene, I explode during workshop time. I mean he’s got the man still alive, barely speaking, hanging out of the car, and I know he’s writing it that way to bring some sort of closure. But the man—he had no head. Part of it was on me. I was there. And how can they take that moment and try to work it differently? And later, I’ll repent profusely, give him free coffees, which he turns down, but at the moment I can see why we were banned from the city. We’re heartless, soulless.

  “This was a man’s life,” I tell them and throw the manuscript across the table. The papers hit Barry. I’m half standing and I know what all of us are thinking at that moment, and it hits me like an oncoming train.

  I’m the man now.

  Like I caught what he caught from his daughter. I’m sitting at the same table and I am angry because I’m threatening and they don’t understand my pain. Starla has risen just like me, and it reminds me of how Hailey first pointed the gun at her, and I wonder who will beat me up and hold me down and stop me from doing something stupid. But no one has to, because I can see myself and Hailey, and I know what I have to do. Starla says, “You write about it, hon. Go back and write it out, figure it out.” And I knock over a chair and go to the back room, and I look in the mirror and think I see some blood that didn’t come out of the shirt I’m wearing, or the apron, or my face. But I’m smarter than Lady Macbeth. I know that washing will never get it out. Instead, I take a clean white sheet of paper and I dirty it with my story, and Hailey dies again, so I can live.

  You Will Draw This Life Out To Its End

  Last week, Trois Frères, a gallery in Persévére, the city at the centre of culture floating above Enceladus, showed your work The Water-Miners of Détermination, and last night you were feted at the Orange Buddha until you were tired, so tired that you could not sketch another face on the tablecloths they’d provided for the party. You begged off the late night screening of a colleague from Uranus’s film, The Lifetimes of Clouds, and were escorted back to your room, the highest suite in the
massive Passepartout Hotel overlooking the Persévére skyline, a sight too exquisite to draw because one needed too much time to do it justice, and all you could think about were the mining cities on Ganymede and how much your body needed sleep.

  Lying there, on a bed big enough for three, you knew Marie and Francois-Jacques took good care of you now that you were entering the “edges of your body’s gravity,” as the author Morole would say. They watched over the doddering artist during receptions, travel among moons and planets, but there was a weight they could not fully support and you knew it. You’d often said to yourself, “I am on a course, on a ship, I cannot get off of. I can’t even steer it.”

  You could veer to projects on Uranus and Saturn and to the moons of Jupiter—you were well established and had the money to travel.

  “You can paint anything you want,” Marie told you one morning when you seemed the most insecure, handing you a cup of peaches and whipped cream with a dusting of orange rind. “You can find passage on any ship going anywhere.”

  And you had done that. But there was a responsibility in becoming widely praised. You were in sight of others, and you must keep moving for them. Weren’t artists cursed to be sharks and swim, swim, swim for their very lives? After tonight, there were shows you were expected to attend across the system, appearances you needed to make, so much marketing between painting times. Your life was not your own.

  “Nonsense,” Marie told you. “Besides, I don’t think you could stop.”

  You were the artist most well-known for painting the cities of the solar system. All of them. You gave their narrative, their histories, their people, all woven into your paintings, and you connected them to Earth. You travelled and painted; you were to the art world connective tissue for a rapidly fraying human culture.

  You liked it. You found floating cities like this one—fifteen around Saturn, ten around Uranus—attractive. You’d visited the Emirates, the twelve colonies, on Mars and Earth—you were always praised there and well taken care of. Ariel, Titania, Titan. You painted the cities, the people, their worlds. For most of your career, you did not have to spend much time in the mining ships that hovered closer to the surface, or the asteroid belt of restaurants and hotels and fuelling stations for travellers. You could always float above that.

  Until that day you decided to draw them. Instead of painting the cities against a backdrop of planet, instead of the patrons’ daughters and sons, instead of the shopping districts with their hanging gardens, you decided to draw the miners on which these floating cities depend, on which the missions within and beyond the solar system depend, and so you went there. Not without controversy from your friends, agent, and representatives. You brought your pad and your charcoal and your paints and your easel. You loved there. And then, when the work was done, you moved on from there, mining the miners for art, in a sense. And tonight, in your dreams, you go back there again, because you left something there.

  But when you dream, you dream in charcoal.

  >?

  This is the burnt arm of Ajax Connolly, the scar a river of tissue up his bicep, little rivulets around his deltoid. He doesn’t mind them. “Battle scars,” he calls them. “When you do battle with the plugs and the lingers, and the drones that jaw the strafe need fixed, you gotta fix ’em. Sometimes they needs your arm, at least parts of it.”

  He’s proud of his arm, so you make sure to draw the scar perfectly, of course you do—you can’t stop looking at him, or talking to him, so this will be an exquisite portrait. You take your time at his elbow, at the arm that disappears into the dark grey shirt with his name in crimson and his company—Helios—in yellow ochre. You notice how his shirt is unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, and how his beard merges with his chest in a darkness that compels you, and your charcoal, to create the darkness drawing you in. But you realize that you are sixty, and that your life is moving from moon to moon to moon to planet for an award, to a city for celebration, and that your life and his life are incompatible. They can’t even exist in the same picture, you believe.

  But we do, you think then. We do exist in the same picture. People forget that the miners and the floaters are part of the same picture, and you’re going to remind them of the people they’ve forgotten. You are hailed as “seeker of justice,” as a “recorder of the forgotten” by the people who live in clouds, and you sit through elaborate dinners as others proclaim your unending, tireless mission as ambassador for the “working men and women.” But you don’t feel at peace.

  >?

  This is Ajax in his bed, a picture that will never be in a show—a gift to Ajax from you. He is wrapped in the silk sheets, a luxury every miner affords himself. His are deep-water blue, and they contour and fold to hold his thick legs and body as you paint. A quick study this time. For a later painting. “Do you have a dom of yours own?” he asks you. “An artist like you has a sleek dom, for sure. But you’ve not spoke of a love, or a dom, so I’m just asking to know you better.”

  But he had known you better, earlier, and you chuckle sadly, knowing that you wouldn’t be staying. You admit that you don’t have a home so much as an exchange. You pay a monthly fee for a room in any hotel and the exchange allows you to move from hotel to hotel as your home. “Yours a skipper!” he laughs. “Skipping from one place to the other. That must be grand living. You don’t have to be trapped.” He sees that you are concentrating, maybe, that you don’t laugh with him.

  “Or rooted,” you say.

  Maybe he is sincere, but you are afraid of the sincerity, so you will later say to yourself that he was saying it to be polite—“You can always skip here, dom down with me if you like.”

  But you bury it and his torso in phthalocyanine blue, because it scares you to think how long this moment could last. Or what it would cost.

  He makes cabbage and sausage for you, with garlic. You drink beers. The scent of bergamot stays with you for years. So does the sound of his laugh.

  >?

  You sketch a hundred men in charcoal. You paint twenty men in acrylic, some of them in their jobs, suspended from molybdenum-super-alloyed steel girders above the clouded Ganymede hundreds of miles below. You are often hovering yourself, safe inside a sitejet, when you take the photographs that will later be used as the model, a bubble around you, steel separating you because you are a famous artist and you are documenting the great miners of the solar system.

  “Can I have a copy when yours finished?” the young men will ask because they want to hang this in their dom—a single room with a bed and a kitchen and a beautiful view of the rigs on which they work—and this painting or charcoal that you do will be to them, and to their dom, a family crest, giving them a sense of ownership and title, a way of marking their territory with art. They are all young to you, but they are twenty and thirty and forty, and they are decently paid, mostly happy, and within a single two-hour transport of a floating city like Ruckus or Chattle or Trouble or Skirmish, to meet their needs for social activity, which is where you meet many of them. The older ones have been there for twenty years or more because it’s decent pay, and “because I don’t belong floatin’ above it all.” Most of them have not heard of you—until you do a drawing of them. And then, “You are Renault, the people’s painter.” They buy you drinks. They sit with you. Crowd you with camaraderie. And you spend a month there, doing portraits, paintings, all for a show—paintings that will sell for more money than the miners make in a year because you knew people liked to have pictures of others working hard on their walls to give themselves a familial connection to labour—and you shell out some of your own money to make copies for them for their doms, because it’s easy, and it’s friendly, and it’s the least you can do.

  But these days, as you succumb to your own “gravity,” you don’t want to be in the great cities of the Ceinture of Saturn, of Uranus, because something caught your attention on your way by. Instead you want to ret
ire in a place that does not want retirement, a place where one cannot retire, because one is working fast enough and hard enough, and playing hard enough, that there will be no stopping for the miners—they will die and wear out young. If you do this, you will have to live faster now, draw faster, if you want to capture a new life. Do you want a long life alone, Renault? Or a shorter one with someone?

  >?

  When the morning comes and the reflectors carry the hazy sun to you in the penthouse suite of the Passepartout, you have come to the end of a life. You are writing a letter on your pad telling Marie and Francois-Jacques of your best and last project, and what they must do. When the jawline of the other of the city’s spires glint in that reflected sun, you will have dressed, packed, and made reservations for transport to a Moonline, to head back to Ganymede.

  What will they say? He has buried himself in his last great project! Yes, they will say that. But for you, you will be living, and the payment for that life will be this clever art distraction. Call it a project, not a retirement. “Look over here! I will soon show you their lives,” you will say to them, even while you take all the time to live your own.

  On the way to the transport, two women from Hérédité on a holiday will want your autograph.

  It is okay to give your signature away, but you are going to keep walking. You know, as the woman who takes your suitcase leads you to the top floor of the transport, that you cannot help the miners by merely drawing them, merely making the moneyed worlds aware of the people who support them. You realize that now. You cannot change life for the miners by appealing to those who buy your paintings because for them, the painting is help enough; you decide you can only change the lives of the miners by drawing for the miners, giving them something. You will sink much faster in the colonies around Ganymede than you would in a floating city, you think. But you might be happier. And you are sinking fast in the floating cities anyway.