by Sarah Hall
The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn’t working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit. Looking into the room of plastic sheeted cots, where the city’s poor mothers brought their premature infants in the hope that they would be taken and saved, somehow miraculously transformed from the translucent, purple-limbed, bulging-eyed creatures they were into normal opaque, pink, brown or white skinned babies, like the children of fully termed mothers. Then, eventually, they would cry normally, tears of participatory complaint and appetite, not fatality, not like ratsbane-screaming rodents, but like hungry, healthy mammals eager for the breast. And their white drenched eyes would grow coloured telescopes to see the world.
She would stand in the greenhouse hallways, very, very still. She would watch the women dressed as nurses, she did not know if they were actually nurses, in stiffcaps and red-crossed aprons, thick medical shoes, drifting through the room on the other side of the window and monitoring the babies, patient as gardeners in a mushroom factory, gentle in amongst the planted glass beds. Claudia watched with bird-quick eyes and a worried forehead. She watched for the roll of an all-white eye, or for tiny purple hands to reach up and grasp the air – a sign of life, a sign of hunger, a sign of hopeful brain activity. And then when there was movement she would knock on the divider and point and point until a nurse’s attention was raised and the starched woman would move to the baby, smiling. Claudia watched for the mice-fast hearts to beat a little slower, a little less furiously and more privately behind their skin. There were tubes that she did not understand. There were suckling procedures that tugged at her own breast.
Claudia had miscarried six times in her life and Arturas did not blame her, even as she was confounded by her own body and wept for not giving their love issue. He fixed their dead children’s names to her mighty body in black ink, like eulogies on a mausoleum. Though her magnificent, vital anatomy seemed it should allow for the breeding of a hundred robust little warriors, she had not once brought a foetus to term. Six half children in hospital dishes and in the roadways of Germany, of New York and Florida, and lately in the powder room of Varga. Six small babies with tails like tadpoles, with whole souls like bright bubbles as they left her. The doctors said it was unsafe to try for any more. It was unsafe to try again, they said. Her womb was tipped, her womb was now unstable, her womb was very faulty. She had control over all the regions of her body, its power of gesture, its constantly increasing muscle, the coloured skin wrapping up her brawn. But in the secret hidden valley of her reproductive system the rebels still burnt down houses, strangled children and the rivers ran red with blood.
So Claudia watched the little babies in the Coney Island incubators as they raised their purple, webbed-together fingers in the air. And she was not alone. New York’s bereaved and grieving mothers came by the dozen to see the show. They came in the weeks after delivering stillborn babies, unbeknownst to their husbands, or in the days after apnoea or asphyxia had absurdly robbed them of their infants, paying their dimes to enter, which in turn paid for oxygen and milk and sterile warmth and profit. Some came to donate breast-milk, sobbing all the while. The women came to see the babies who had just and so survived, who were made of terrible colours like rust and rose and cardamom, who were raw under tiny handkerchief-sized blankets, no longer than the palms of their mother’s hands, but somehow living. It was a quiet exhibition, except for the croaking of a baby behind the window, and the occasional breakdown of a customer. But there was drama to the delicacy and frailty and the tenacity of the all-too-early lives, and specifically appealing drama it was too, as with every other Coney Island exhibition or ride or show, it hit the corkscrew nail on its tilted, twisted head. It was a show mostly women came to see. And they, and Claudia, loved and loathed the tiny babies, jealous and tender at once, because they were seeing miracles not granted to them, because these were children that were still closed, like mushroom caps, or sprouting bulbs, and their lives were hanging in the balance. There was love and pain and longing in the air, filling the muted exhibition corridor with something thick and enriching like fertilizer in soil, as if the pungent, solicitous emotions of the women might open the premature, closed children, and somehow help them live.
The women, similar, united, but oblivious to each other, came to watch the babies grow and fade into colours more befitting healthy newborn infants, they came because their own were dead, closed and red, and would not ever fully open or fade or grow. Or they came to watch them die, for fairness’ sake, to reassure themselves that God was evenhanded with his rescinding of souls. Sometimes the nurses would find a baby lying too still or too struggling, going from red to blue, squeaking through the tubing like a mouse, and they would smile, and very calmly lift the baby out of the incubator with white cotton gloves, as if to hold it, or comfort it. And then they would remove the child through the back door to a room beyond the view of the spectators, perhaps to see a doctor, and it would be absent when they reappeared, smiling, always smiling.
Claudia was incredibly patient. Claudia always waited. When a baby was removed she would linger all afternoon for the nurses to bring the infant back. They hardly ever did. Towards closing time she would finally slump to the wall, and her body would rumble with thunderous weeping, her eyes smeared black from the wetted shadow, the hairs on her chin dripping with tears, and the veins in her biceps standing stark and tense with suffering blood. She became known to the staff of the show as the grieving giantess.
After five months of this routine the management of the baby incubator exhibition decided to put a ceiling on the amount of time allocated to the entrance fee. It was considered unhealthy for some women in particular to spend all their time in there, too tempting a self-destruction for hysterics. They could not be relied on for self-regulation and the discipline required not to torture and torment themselves. Also medical costs had risen, more money was needed to maintain the exhibition, they said, so now a dime would only get an hour. Claudia did not care. Her muscled tattooed body made her plenty of money, as her husband’s ink and needles made him plenty of money, so there was more than enough to support her obsession. She revolved through the rooms hourly on her day off, repaying, weeping, repaying, weeping.
Grace always knew where to find her when her husband did not and she was missing. Grace could be relied on for discretion, she did not tell Turo why Claudia could not be found. They let her into the show for free, knowing she was there for the sole purpose of removing the weeping whale and not, in any case, daring to demand payment from her – for she had that look of Sonderkommando to her: detachment, appallingly intrepid workmanship. She would follow the wailing to find her friend collapsed on the floor. Then she would take the big, barbell-callused appendage, which had the astounding capabilities for hurling iron for the crowd’s enjoyment, in her own small hand. Claudia would pull Grace close and cradle her on the floor, holding her in her strong arms, and crooning.
– Kleines Baby, kleines Baby, zu klein.
And Grace would allow the psychotherapy and she would soothe Claudia’s crackling orange hair if she could free herself to reach, and make her promise not to come back any more. It wasn’t good for her, she said. It was as salt in an unhealed wound. Not come back, Claudia would repeat, but then the next week she always did return.
– And why is it that you ask about my friend?
Cy shrugged his shoulders, smiled at Claudia and turned back to watch Grace at the chess table. She was leaning far back on her chair waiting for her opponent to move his piece, with her hands on the table top, her fingers splayed out and lifting erratically as if she were playing the piano.
– No reason. I thought perhaps I … it’s not important. She lives in my building. I only recently found that out. She seems to be quite an ext
raordinary person. It’s sudden, but I thought perhaps I might quite like to, well, to learn to play chess. I never have.
He felt Claudia’s hand on his back, pressing along his spine. She forgave him the lie.
– Good. Don’t let her teach you, though, she’ll spoil it for you. And don’t listen to the rest of what you hear. It’s not important. She is just a person who knows about many things.
Three weeks after they met by the fountain Grace came to see Cy at his booth. A small midweek crowd had gathered, rowdy military boys, looking for relevant undertakings on their first official days of leave. Six or seven uniformed young men were waiting for their tattoo, the same dagger stencil for each of them, sharp up on its bloody tip on six or seven shoulders. All were gauging by the face of the first man on the stool – the smallest of the group, a blond, pockmarked chip of a lad – how it would be to get the work done. They had all taken their shirts off at once, solidarity in preparation, they said. Cy could smell the cheap, army-issue soap on them, the sweat and the scent of unwearied leather. Stiff army fatigues had left patches of dry irritated skin on their bodies, and were it not for their obvious excitement to be soldiers he could have ascertained simply from the telltale bands of eczema around the waist and cuffs and necks that they were newly signed. The skin could always be relied upon to provide information – battery, disease, scars over failed organs, souvenirs from assaults and from pubescent conditions, race, combined race, sustained dependence on alcohol, diet, and the marks of love, old and new, good and bad. Other than the superficial damage caused by the chafing uniforms they seemed healthy, their bodies were firming, becoming refined, and adjusting to a regime of less sleep, hard drills, economy of food. They would be broken only to the point where they would become good soldiers before eventually being shipped off to Europe, he guessed.
The noise of their voices rose when Cy started work, a swell of bravado to address the streak of colour being set indelibly on the youth’s shoulder. It was a ritual of no return that always elicited jeers, jibes, cheers, or laughter from groups of men who were taking part in the ceremony together. The boy began by taking the line-work well, on the verge of a smile, seeming more relieved that the discomfort was manageable than proud of his pioneering accomplishment. Then the smile turned into a half grimace as the needle nicked over the same red dripping patch again and again for the full deep colour of the shading. Sweat came on to his skin and blood, so that there was a time when rendition and reality were one and the same. His muscles began to quake uncontrollably.
– Oh! Easy up there. That’s not good, kiddo. Steady as you can, steady as you can. It’s honestly better if you don’t clench that hand.
Cy wiped up the fluids and gave the boy a chance to catch his breath. The others, beginning to bore or hunger, strolled shirtless over to the sausage stall. They had been suspicious of Cy when they arrived, they hadn’t trusted him to freehand them or hadn’t had the extra money for it. Or perhaps it was just his profession that worried them, made them skittish, he was after all the bogeyman. But he’d spent so long wading through the muddy bog of disapproval that he was beyond its reproach and could not separate out the various components any more. His long, trussed-up hair was too obvious in contrast to their similarly shaven heads. They were based upstate, outside the city. They must have headed out to Coney for the sole purpose of getting tattooed, having heard that’s where it was best or easiest or cheapest done. It was early in the day when they arrived, and already they were planning the rest of the excursion. One of them addressed Cy with gusto.
– We heard there was Chinamen freaks and Negroes with plates in their lips and tiny pin-head men down here.
– Is that right? Well, go to Luna Park and catch a show. All the wonders of the world in there.
Cy had taken money from all of them before starting the first, so that they would know a contract had been agreed upon. They liked this, it added to the sense of brotherhood. He had locked it in the metal box and put it in the counter drawer behind him. With his friends having briefly deserted, the blond’s mouth was now belying him his pain. His thin upper lip was riding high on his two front teeth and gums. Cy paused his work and leaned back to light a cigarette. He wasn’t one for encouragement or sympathy usually but today he felt generous.
– Try to think about something else, lad. Let your mind wander along. Talk it out if you like. But relax, it’s easier. It’ll pass through you better.
For his advice he received a look of sceptical disbelief. The boy wanted only for it all to be over. Cy shrugged and lifted the needle back into position, placing the cigarette in a comfortable corner of his mouth.
– Try to think of those things that make you fall asleep. So you are no longer really in your body.
Both men looked up. It was Grace’s voice. She was standing at the entrance of the booth in a tobacco coloured dress. Cy lifted the needle off again, smudging the frail black stencil a little as his pinkie passed over the traced image. Smoke stung him sourly in the eye and he removed the cigarette. She had one of the bound books of flash in her hand, was browsing through the skull page with a finger moving from one skeletal orb to the next, as if testing for ripe fruit. Her eyes moved to Cy for a time and she observed him with jurisdiction, as if he was in the wrong place somehow, intruding on her interaction with the man on the stool. He thought at one point she might be about to ask him to leave. Then she looked back at the soldier.
– What did you say?
– Nothing ma’am. I didn’t say a word. It was you who talked to me.
– Don’t you realize that soon you’re going to have to be able to put your mind in a box and bury it in the ground and remember where you left it? Otherwise you’re going to lose it, one way or another. You can practise now, this man here will help you, he will oblige you with some pain. So do it, think of those safe things that make you sleep.
She was a bully. She was either a bully or some kind of blunt, combative angel, too concerned with issuing warnings and reinforcing weak spots in the spirit of her wards to waste time with pleasantries. She repeated her demand. Hearing a single female addressing their comrade the other army boys came back to the booth with mouths full, wiping splashes of ketchup off their bare chests, and they wound up their noise to declare their presence. Had they been walking round Central Park or the Upper East Side they would have tipped their hat at an unescorted woman and stood back off the sidewalk. At Coney there was licence to depart from the polite rules of etiquette. It was a flophouse, a brothel-style place for satiation, or like a music-box populated by performing characters who defied regular social ordinance, beings who slipped into the chained sack of the underworld with a key to the lock in their teeth, they knew the deal, so why bother with courtesy, why court the whores?
– What’s that, lady? Sure, Donny, what d’ya do before you sleep – think about that buddy, just don’t take your hat outa your lap when you stand up.
The friend was rocking his groin back and forwards in a quick motion to much laughter.
– Margie! Helen! Oh, Fraaances …
Grace turned to the man behind her. She smiled.
– You’ll see. You’ll also be trying to get away from the pain. Look at you, so fresh in your uniform, you think you understand what it is to fight.
– Well I have an idea, but why don’t you inform me, colonel.
– Let me tell you then. They tie the tubes off in your stomach with small metal clamps before you die, so that your shit can’t come out of the bullet holes while the priest reads last rites. It’s not possible to have a priest vomiting over a dying man because of the smell of guts and food turning into shit, you see. Have they told you what the most common injury is in the war? It’s your brain. The war punches an asshole in it and whenever it feels like it, it fucks the asshole. Always it feels too small, like it’s tearing open. You’re never going to get used to it – like a virgin will make herself stronger and stop bleeding. It always hurts when the war fucks y
ou, but you know it’s rubbing on a place in your brain that you can’t control so you’re going to respond like you want to be fucked by it – maybe you’ll beat your wife when you get home or put your fingers in your little daughter, put her up on the table and make her dance for you in her mother’s shoes and pearls. And when the war is done fucking it comes, this stinking mess, this juice just like your own, and then the children of the war will live in your brain too. Even when you’re an old man with your polished medals, all bent over and can’t get hard and smelling of piss, sometimes the war will want to come back and fuck your brain in its asshole. All your life. Or until you put your gun up to here and pull the trigger. Yes. Yes.
Only the noise of the bobsled chicaning on its runners and the screams of its jubilant riders and the creak of shutters and signs leaning into the breeze on Oceanic Walk could be heard in the ensuing quiet. Grace was still smiling, broadly now, with her ringer pointing to her temple like a gun barrel. And it was a terrible smile, terrible for the lack of psychotic characteristics, for the peaceful crescent moon it made of her mouth while the words escaping it had been rank. Cy could smell the tide coming in four hundred yards away, though he was holding his breath. She removed her hand and nodded again.
