Your hands shake harder and harder as you unwind the fabric. I watch the silk growing darker the closer you get to me. I’m sorry I ruined such a beautiful thing.
I can’t see what’s beneath. I don’t want to. There’s a reason I keep the mirrors covered when I go through a shift. But I can see the reaction on your face and on the technicians’ faces, too. They’ve doubtless encountered horrible things in their line of work, and yet this still alarms them.
Thomas Majors’s larynx comes apart. My neck is exposed. I feel cold.
You can’t speak anymore either. You only make a strange panting sound and stare. Terror has stolen your voice. What’s left is something primitive, an instinct going back millions of years. It must be wonderful to know who your ancestors were and that they were something as benign as apes.
One of the technicians is on his cell phone with the hospital, explaining the situation as best he can. I hear the doctor’s voice telling them to bring me in through the basement entrance so the other patients won’t see me.
I know what he wants. Physicians here are required to publish research on top of their grueling schedules and the doctor realizes that he has found an extraordinary case study. He’s already thinking of fame, research grants, possibly another Nobel Prize for China. He won’t have any trouble keeping me in a lab. There are no human rights standards to stop scientific progress here, and my fake UK citizenship will not protect me.
With nothing left to hold him together, Thomas Majors comes undone. The skin of his head shrinks from the skin of his shoulders. His face is loose. A seam opens at his armpit and runs down his torso.
You grab his hand. You can feel me underneath it, squirming. Your wrist jerks but you don’t let go. Thomas’s hand slips off me like a glove. It takes you a moment to understand what just happened, what you’re holding, and when the realization hits, you scream and scream and scream.
The technicians can’t pin me down anymore. They don’t want to. It’s impossible to tell what they can grab on to and whether or not it’s safe to touch. So now they’re trying to get away, pressing themselves against the walls of the ambulance, trying to clamber up to the front. The driver has already fled.
You’re paralyzed. You’ve wedged yourself into a corner. Your eyes whirl about the ambulance, skipping upon me, upon what’s left of Thomas Majors, upon the rear-door latch that’s not quite close enough for you to open, upon the ceiling and the machines and all these things that don’t make sense anymore.
I stand up. The last scraps of the man I wanted so badly to be fall to the floor. You shrink down, down, trying to disappear, but you don’t have as much practice as I do.
You cover your eyes, uncover them, look at me, shut them again. I grab the door latch, averting my gaze from the sight of my own hand.
You’re muttering something over and over again like a Buddhist chant. I listen carefully. My hearing is not what it was just a few minutes ago, but I can recognize the words, “Ni shi shenme?” What are you?
I don’t have a larynx anymore and my tongue can no longer accommodate human language, so even though I want to, I can’t answer “wo bu zhidao” or “ouk oida” or “nga nu-zu” or “I don’t know.”
I get the door open. The outside world is an endless polluted twilight. The driver behind us doesn’t look up from his cell phone to glance in my direction. Two car-lengths away, all I can see are vague shapes and headlights. The smog will hide me well.
I climb out of the ambulance and into the haze. I don’t look back.
I SAW YOU once after that. It wasn’t long ago, I think. I was wearing someone new, a girl with black hair and a melon-seed face. Pretty girls are easy for me. I can slather on makeup if the skin isn’t right, and I don’t have to bother with a backstory or a personality. No one really wants it.
It was at an auto show in Shanghai. I was draped across a green Ferrari, wearing a bikini that matched the paint. I hadn’t expected to see you, but there you were with a group of businessmen smoking Marlboros and ogling the models.
You were older. I’m not sure by how much. Time passes differently for me, and maybe time alone was not responsible for how much you had aged.
I would like to say I will never forget you, but I can’t promise you that. This shapeless matter inside my head shifts and dies and regenerates, and as it does so, memories fade and old incarnations of myself are discarded. Maxwell Stone had lovers, most likely, but I can’t recall their faces, and someday I will lose yours as well.
Your group strolled by my Ferrari, making the obligatory lewd remarks, flashing their brown teeth in leery grins. I wore my generic smile and offered up a vacant titter. I told them about the car.
You stood a little ways behind the other men with your hands in your pockets. I knew that look: you were too tired to pretend to be having a good time.
I smiled at you as hard as I could. Finally, you looked up. I thought maybe you would recognize me somehow. Maybe you would cry out, “It’s you!” and take me in your arms. Or maybe, at the very least, you’d let your gaze linger on me a little longer than normal.
But you didn’t. You made that nervous grimace you do whenever a woman pays too much attention to you. Then you ambled off to look at a Lexus—a four-door with lots of cabin space. Good for families.
I watched you move. Your shoulders were slumped as though you carried something very heavy.
Then more bodies flowed between us, wealthy men and their school-aged mistresses, nouveau riche wives and their spoiled bachelor sons searching for a car to attract a pretty bride, broke students in designer knock-offs come to take selfies in front of BMWs so they can pretend to be rich on Weixin.
I lost you among them. I did not find you again.
CRISPIN’S MODEL
Max Gladstone
Max Gladstone (www.maxgladstone.com) has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated twice for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award. He is best known for the Hugo Award nominated Craft Sequence of fantasy novels, which began in 2012 with Three Parts Dead and was followed by Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, Last First Snow, and most recently The Ruin of Angels. His short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine. His most recent project is the globetrotting urban fantasy serial Bookburners, available in ebook and audio from Serial Box, and in print from Saga Press.
THERE WERE NO monsters at first, only “Arthur Dufresne Crispin,” who met me on the front steps of his apartment in the Village: towheaded, tall, and lean, with long spidery fingers that closed mine in a strangler’s handshake. He had an accent that would have told someone from Boston or Providence a lot about his parents and the pedigree of his dog, but told me jack-all, except that he was the kind of guy who introduced himself with his middle name. He wore a green Brooks Brothers shirt, and men that pale should be careful wearing green. It seeps into the skin.
“I’m Deliah Dane,” I said, and followed him up three flights of stairs to his studio. “Good light in here.” Crispin kept the place neat. A few still-life setups in corners, a shelf of sketchbooks and anatomy texts and older leatherbound tomes. A folio of Dali prints, another of Bosch, and one of a Swedish painter whose name I don’t remember. Canvases draped with light silk leaned against walls and doors and furniture. Through the silk I could see the canvases were painted, but not much more. The floor was strewn with lights: lamps, reflectors, mirrors, even a kerosene lantern. “Bet your landlord doesn’t like you having this.” I nudged the lantern with my shoe.
“I have no landlord,” Crispin said, which told me more than the accent. “Ms. Dane, we should discuss the nature of my work. Previous models have expressed reluctance to operate under the conditions I require, and if this will be the case, I would rather find out now before we waste our time. Don’t you agree?”
I’d been afraid of this when I couldn’t find pictures of his recent work. My hand tightened around the cell phone in my jacket pocket. “I don’t know what conditions you require, but
I won’t take any drugs for you, and no pegs go in any holes. I show up on time, I sit still. You paint, and you pay me.”
“In terms of your responsibilities, our visions align. No drugs will be involved. Reality interests me, not psilocybin abstractions. As for”—and there it was, the dust of blush that meant maybe even Arthur Dufresne Crispin was human—“as for the rest, I will require no more of you than any other artist, insofar as poses are concerned.”
A gorgeous red leather divan lay upon on the stage, with a scrolled wood headrest and a fringe of trailing beads like a flamenco dancer’s skirt. I stroked the leather. “Why the conditions, then?”
“I do not converse with my models. Your form interests me. Personal connection distorts perspective.”
“I doubt I’ll want to talk with you much, either.”
A ghost smile at that, faint as the blush. “I require exact duplication of poses from session to session. I may touch you, to restore a finger or an elbow to its proper place.”
“Ask my permission first.”
“Fair. And the last: You will not view our work while it proceeds. You may never see the pieces for which you pose. Should you happen to do so, you may not recognize yourself.”
That rang alarms I didn’t know I had. “What do you mean?”
“I paint the noumenal—that which lies beneath appearance. Some models take offence at my depiction, but no offense is meant.”
“So, what, you paint me as subhuman and I don’t get to call you racist afterward? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That is not my intent.”
“I want to see an example.”
“I have no finished model work,” he said, “and if I show you a still-life, I will be unable to sell it.”
No sense asking artists why. They’re a weird breed. “Show me, and I’ll decide whether to sit for you.” The power had shifted in the room, as it always does when you learn someone needs you.
His eyes were gray and cold as fish scales. At last, he turned to a canvas propped near a setup of a bowl and rose. He peeled back the silk as if peeling off his skin. Beneath—
It wasn’t a bowl and rose. It wasn’t not a bowl and rose, either. Take the bowl, and take the rose, and shatter them, cubist-like, through time as well as space, so in one facet the rose blooms and in another it’s rotten, the bowl here tarnished and there radioactive gleaming. But that doesn’t capture the twisted, callous distance of the effect. There was more time than time in that painting, and more space than space.
There’s this Chinese story about a bird called p’eng, really big damn bird, flies so high the earth below fades to blue for it just like the sky does for us. To that bird, we’re motes in a sunbeam, sparks kicked up by a campfire, insignificant painful specks that vanish back into the burn. And that was what he’d done with a bowl and a rose.
What would he do with me?
It was disgusting. Exciting too.
“Let’s go,” I said, and unbuttoned my pants.
YOU HAVE THE wrong idea about me already.
I moved up from Savannah to be on stage. I write. I act. I love the way an audience looks when you have them stuck, I mean skewered, to their seats. When they’d stay for at least a second even if someone did shout fire. And yes it isn’t practical, and yes Mama writes letters every week and each one holds some allusion to this cousin or that who’s doing whatever with herself. Mama’s plumbed Michael Baysian depths of subtlety. I’m workshopping a one-woman show. I sent spec scripts around. An agent wants to see my next.
None of which counts for much rent-wise, in this city.
So, modeling.
Not the clothes kind, which work I doubt anyone would give me anyway on account of my having a body. But painters pay, and they like bodies, or at least they don’t seem to care whether you stop eating after the first half of the M&M.
Yes, painters. They still exist. I mean the ones who paint people who look sort of like people, or at least paintings that involve people, not the squares-of-solid-blue shit.
Here’s what you need to be an artist’s model:
1. Body.
Here are some things that help:
2. Pride (If you get embarrassed when folk stare, this isn’t the line for you.)
3. Honesty (Good artists draw what they see, so you might as well get to love that belly.)
4. Active imagination (You’ll spend four hours at a time holding still.)
5. Bathrobe (To wear on break.)
6. Wristwatch with alarm.
The last is so important it should be first. Artists aren’t timely people as a rule, but if they’re paying for you, they expect you to be. A painter takes forty-five minutes to set up her easel, get the light just so, mix the paints—she expects you right at two, clothes off and in position, not at three thirty complaining about the subway. Get a watch. Or use that fancy phone for something other than taking pictures of your banh mi.
Some folks model to commune with an artist’s tortured soul, to be the fulcrum between created and increate. All that mystery goes out the door the first time they get off a four-hour sit and can’t feel their left butt cheek. For me, this was Something That Paid Twice as Much an Hour as the Restaurant. Each four-hour sit gave me a day to audition, to write, to please Ms. Agent.
That was what I told my friends. This other part I didn’t realize myself at first, and later it felt too private to share: my time modeling, standing or leaning naked in front of some desperate kid with an easel and a nose ring, belonged to me. It didn’t slip off like time does in your apartment where there’s always some damn thing out of place, or out in the world where fear’s a phone tap away. In those thirty minutes of pain and brush scratch, thoughts stretched long, and memories ran like rivers. I remembered being five, keeping time and singing on the back porch while Daddy played guitar. I remembered running when the grade school kids came for me, and how it felt to fight and lose and win. I remembered strawberries firm and rich as kisses. Hell, I remembered things that never happened. I climbed mountains on planets orbiting a distant star, with a purple sky overhead and a long fall below. Memories like that make you want like you have to, to do any kind of real work: you want from the bones out. After those sessions I’d write and write, and some of what I wrote I’d see the next day and think, good.
To those of you out there who think I could have earned more stripping:
1. Fuck.
2. You.
I started modeling for Steve, who my roommate Rache knew, and I showed up on time for his sits, and he told his friends and I showed up on time for theirs, and though I couldn’t quit the restaurant I did take fewer shifts. The play took shape. I sent what I had to Ms. Agent, who sent back a sticky note with a smiley face that I took to mean, keep going.
But I never thought about the increate, or holes in worlds, until I met Crispin.
CRISPIN WASN’T LIKE the others. Even that first time, I could tell.
There was no music, only the hush of his apartment. Neither of us spoke. His work was an exercise in stillness, a pressure of knife against skin. Into that stillness came the brushstroke, a rasp that ran goosebumps up my shoulders and back, like sandpaper drawn lightly over a nipple.
Stare at your own face in a mirror in halflight and it will warp to something hideous. Staring at his that first afternoon I saw his skin bubble off the bone, his forehead bulge and birth curving horns, his jaw distend like a snake’s about to devour the world. And then he looked up, and his face was a face again.
His brush left trails of poison paint—lead in the whites, mercury in the reds, fumes of alcohol and turpentine.
Sitting always hurts, but sitting for him hurt more. He’d asked for perfect stillness, so I had to show him. My heart beat against my will. People aren’t made to freeze like that. Our ancestors hunted by jogging, chasing prey over open grassland until it died. We live by movement, and when you stop us, we hurt. Even that first pose, simple, seated, felt like pincers piercing the musc
les of my butt, back, shoulder, neck, and spreading.
And then his gaze. The stress of her regard, the poet wrote. His whole body leaned into me through the points of his eyes. I didn’t feel seen. I felt peered through, like the near lens of a telescope.
My watch chimed the end of our last period. It felt as if I’d sat forever, and for no time at all. I guess no time at all is forever, because no time means no time passing, and if time doesn’t pass then the moment just goes.
“Thank you, Ms. Dane,” he said, and passed me a cash envelope containing—yes, I looked—twice what I’d made on any other four-hour sit.
“Thank you, Crispin,” I said, and we set our next date.
I’d reached the street and made it halfway to the corner when I heard a crash behind me, of broken wood and torn cloth. I turned back, curious. The painting of bowl and rose Crispin had showed me lay broken on the sidewalk. Several floors up, his window closed.
WE SAW EACH other often that summer: I saw him behind the easel, and he saw me on the divan. We painted even through swampy August. He painted. I endured.
Crispin was slow. The first portrait, head and shoulders alone, a face made large as canvas, took twelve hours, three times longer than Steve needed for a whole-body nude. As we neared the end, he was soaked in sweat, eyes bloodshot. Done, he turned the canvas to the corner of the room so I couldn’t see myself. I thought the painting cast light into that bare cobwebbed corner.
We started the nudes next. He wanted a pair, three-quarter sized, my leg up on a block, one hand resting on my thigh. By the end of the first day the hip of my raised leg hurt like I was sixty. The whole time he stared through me. I might have been a piece of tissue paper held to a halogen bulb, smoking, almost aflame. After those sessions I rode the subway home, gazing blank faced as a junkie at the wall, staggered back to my apartment, drew a steaming bath in spite of the heat, and waited for my body to return. I floated like a fetus in the womb.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 27
