The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  She laughed, raised her eyebrows, and watched him for a moment, with the same look of quizzical contemplation that she had worn when they parted the night they had first met. Then she stepped closer and whispered to him as if divulging an obvious if previously unmentioned secret.

  – Well of course it’s going to be you, Electric Michelangelo. Of course you.

  From inside the apartment he could hear the radio or gramophone playing, the soft twine of classical music, the urgency of violin strings. He had no idea what that meant, whether she slept well or suffered from insomnia. He had no idea what time it was but he knew that they existed now like actors inside the shared hours of their building’s theatre. And he knew, with her standing there against silk or satin, a person of collected ideas and injuries against the orchestra, even unknown to him as she still was, that she would never again be a body confined to the frail dimension of nitrate shadows and chalk and dreams.

  There were instances when Cy’s needle unwittingly delved down into a soul and struck upon meaning, then confidential matter came up, unstemmable as arterial blood or gushing oil, and customers confessed the reason behind the art. He caught their stories in a bucket in the shop or booth and mixed it with ink and used the serum to paint translations of the very stories the tellers were haemorrhaging on to them. He could interrogate people without a single word, just via the incisor in his hand, drawing their lives out of them as he drew symbols on to them. The tales were revelatory and awful and enlightening. These were not house walls he was painting, after all, they were empathetic people, made of flesh and bone and experience and tragedy and joy. They had the hearts of his mother’s understanding, tossed-together, torn-asunder. They were broken and healing and abused, careless and worshipping of each other. To tattoo was to understand that people in all their confusing mystery wanted only to claim their bodies as their own site, on which to build a beacon, or raise a rafter, or nail up a manifesto, warning, celebrating, telling of themselves. It was to understand that in order for a body to be reborn and re-yoked, first it needed to be destroyed and freed. It was emancipation and it was slavery, the ashes and the phoenix. It was beauty and destruction, it was that old trick. That was the contract.

  One day he might go mad with the knowledge of too much brutality, the violations, the ripping up of hearts and minds and bodies. All the terrible information his needle bit into, all the secrets it lanced. All the memories of people who had come to him and bled their history, which he recorded like a photograph album or a diary of pictures on their bodies. The roped dead-man’s hand holding the scales of justice that he put on the precipice of one man’s back, whose mother had been raped and killed by her own brothers, who had his revenge righteously against each one in turn, and now he wore his hangman’s history. The red and black garden that he had sown on one woman’s torso, with green thorns around it to keep intruders out; she had been cut by a criminal from her soft parts to her beautiful lower lip, up along the length of her like a fish, like an almost-gutted fish, and her nipples cut away like scrap – she wanted flowers there now because her spirit would grow back and it would keep on growing. One day he might go mad from the twists and turns in the maze of the soul, the variety of human misdemeanour, and his strange role – recoverer and repairer of body, commanding forgiveness of the past as it became a sign on skin, as if in atonement.

  Some customers were simply talkers. They spoke to him with fast care, as if pulling eggs out of boiling water on the spoon of a hand. Some had to babble themselves through the procedure, because the voice was one of the best antidotes known to pain and instinctively it overwhelmed their mouths. Mostly people did not adopt silence, could not manage a place of mind where the body was incidental or erased. Most struggled. Most could not trance. Most did not hear that original tat-tat-tat-to sound of the old way, under the seamless industrial click-clack of machinery, under the flic-flac dance of coils and drive shafts hammering away. So they could not follow the drum and beat track to rapture, hypnosis, the absence of pain from the cutting sensation, the suspension of the brain in nectar.

  The talkers talked of anything and nothing. They were desperate for the anaesthetic of their voice and they provided a variety of colourful and obscure information. There was even science or poetry on occasion. One young man had formulated a meteorological theory about the weather below Coney Island’s boardwalk. It affected women sexually, he said. There was a climate change when you went under. The sand went from open-beach broil to cool, private moisture, like being inside the mouth of a whale or the chill of a forest. Men took their sweethearts there to kiss and fondle and that was his intention. His girl had agreed to go with him, a sweet gal, but harder than a bank safe to break into her clothing. It was a realm of striped shadows, arboreal, sap-fresh, all the laughter and the ride sounds were muffled like they were under a canopy of trees. He kissed and pulled her dress down off her. They felt like insects, he said, slowing in the wood shade, not driven into frenzy by the heat. In the cool Atlantic spit of the place he had lifted her skirt and found the corner of her menstruation belt, and thinking that a refusal in itself he had been surprised shortly afterwards to find himself pushed inside her, stinging a little on his tip. And as they made love they could hear the footsteps of the people on the boardwalk up above, like it was another world. The tattoo was of his new son’s name. By the time the story of his conception was finished so was the last letter.

  This was the prittle-prattle of ordinary and eccentric human adventure, the tittle-tattle of the milky lallygagging herd. But always there was the obscenity, the debris of hatred, the fetid curd. More common than compulsive banter and irrational explanation were the bitter revelations, of sin, imposed or sanctioned. Customers revisited old injuries of the mind and body in his booth and he could sense them wanting to slip past that pain with a decoy, or intimidate it with newer pain of his equipment’s manufacture. There were the beatings, the cheatings, the welts from the buckles of belts on the hide of sanity, the ploughing of fists through faces, the avalanche of cocks against orifices, the rapes, the killings, the loss of loved ones from a blade, a gun, poison, lunatic voices in the head. There were the gangrenous scars of the undead. What was he if not a conduit for the brutalized stories and the mending characters of a new country? His needle found out their suffering like a surgeon’s scalpel. People were pricked and spilled their lives like pus. And one day he might go mad from it all. It was a price of the profession Riley had said to him, drunk as disaster on the prom that night, and creating a fuss. He was a fucking midwife, boy, that was his job. Sharp tools were entrusted to his hands, but the demands of the trade required further skill. For unless brought to him howling and bloody and immediately from the canals of their mothers at birth, there was absolutely no such thing as a blank human canvas.

  Because she was not a good match with the way he recalled her in their meetings or imagined her to be, Cy found it was possible to put his hands on Grace’s body professionally and it was not unbearable to have her sit in the booth and remove her clothing. She was in large part a stranger. For the past few weeks he had been courting a figment of his imagination with her vague composition. When he remembered her it was softly, flatteringly. In reality she was harder, with the serrated edges of a lumberman’s saw. It was a complicated thing to have to bring her actual flesh and personality and the unreal flash design he had drawn of her into some kind of correlation. It was similar to battling with drunken split-vision as the lines of what is doubly seen roll apart, distort, roll in and pass each other again. But this reconstitution perhaps distracted him initially from all the things he thought he would be driven crazy with arousal over – the hollow channel down the middle of her upper stomach where flesh dropped off from the sternum, the shadow-line dividing the muscles along her thigh, the bone that rose to the surface here and there in a pleasing skeletal geography, hipbones, nipples, the inviting crease of buttocks. Scenarios he had imagined to death, usually in the morning with his ha
nd shovelling away at his cock – dampness along her back as he reached round her, dampness between her legs as he pushed into her, a kiss that worked her bottom lip with his tongue – were eclipsed by what was in reality quite different and surprising and actual. There were her textures, the thin, fruit-skin dappling on the back of her upper thighs, the blossom soft area where chest and breastbone panelling became something fuller, innumerable tiny pores, the sunken dimple in both her shoulders which were strong and taut from years of holding balances on equine platforms in the circus. There were the things she said, which skirted conformity and politely ordained conversation, choosing grave and often taboo ground instead. He began to realize that there was a hopelessness to any wistful portrayals he might make of her, for he only had to dismantle them in her presence again when her mannerisms, her harsh language, her confrontational proclivities, her spitting casually in the street like a heavy smoker, the tough nodes of her behaviour, and her corporeal immediacy refuted his designs. But damn it if he didn’t begin to fancy her new incarnation also. The livelier, lived-in version.

  He always arranged the boards of the doorway when she visited so that there would be privacy – he generally did this for work on breasts or thighs – and he put up a sign with the time that he would be available for un-appointed work again. He placed boards and a sheet atop of the stools to construct a makeshift bench for her to lie on. Maximus, if he was accompanying her, was content to be tied up outside. There were times when Grace would talk to him through the boards, in one or other of her languages, and Cy felt that she may be flirting with the horse or that she preferred communicating with the animal rather than with him. She had meant what she said, she wanted a full body design. She was uncompromising and courageous that way, true circus stock. They arranged that he would work up to her very edges, up to her hands and neck and to the soles of her feet, to the point at which her clothing would seal off the images, but beneath the line of her underwear, as if she were wearing a complete bodysuit. Only her face, neck, and hands would be left unmarked. The eyes would vary in size, depending upon the landscape where they would be hosted. Larger on her navel, smaller on her arms. Her new skin would cost her twenty-five dollars. It was a fair price. She paid him up front, all at once, and he took the money from her with surprise, for it was no mean sum, and he would have worked out a method of layaway payment with her. She observed his expression as he folded the notes and joked with him.

  – What? You thought it would be a new two dollars every week with the corner missing?

  He chuckled at her insinuation. Such bills were considered lucky or seedy in this country, depending upon which circles a person moved in. They had a dubious pedigree – two dollars was the standard bordello rate in the northern states and a torn corner indicated that the prostitute in question had provided a service of lascivious excellence. He locked away the cash. Then he turned his attention to the best commission of his life.

  – Ready?

  – Ready. OK. On y va.

  He began with her legs. He had drawn a stencil from her picture but by the fifth or sixth tattoo on her calf he felt confident he could perfect it without any preliminary tracing. His motion was better controlled if he was not a slave to a line of migration. At the back of his mind he suspected he might encounter scars on her, it seemed likely that an acrobat and an immigrant might have them, but she did not. There were moles like miniature door-handles and creases in her limbs from the repetitive hinging of joints. A sorrel birthmark stained her left hip. Past the line of her clothing the skin paled, like the bleached grass under a lifted rock – she seemed not as concerned with maintaining overall porcelain skin as many women were. With medical discretion he moved back pieces of clothing off only the area under scrutiny. When he needed to pull her underwear up over her more he asked her to do it and he turned his back until she had finished unsnapping closures. When it came to the work on her buttocks and lower abdomen, he ensured his gaze was absent as she undressed, as she lay down and stood up from the bench. She was not tall, but lying down she reached almost the full length of the booth. Its confines kept them enticingly close, always within arm’s reach. And her body moved him, it did, the scent of her was genuinely existent, elemental, occasionally fused with the overtones of a musk-based perfume, but otherwise natural, and she was intoxicating.

  It would have been easy to examine her more closely while he worked, the black hairs at the side of her slip, her soft dark seam, revealed when she pushed the thin material to one side. It would have been easy to brush his hand along an area of tenderness, accidentally or with deliberation, to see if her breathing changed, or if her eyes went under the first glaze of arousal. But he held back. With more difficulty than he ever had before, and with more of a sense than ever that to fail would be contemptible, he remained professional. So it was that her body slowly became known to him, as readily as if they had been lovers, though it was expressionless, voyeuristic discovery. And he fought to keep control of that aspect, swallowing his inclinations, forcing back the longings, denying his end of it. There were erogenous areas that were so alluring and so tightly sewn together with their visual stimulation, the simply seen desire to touch or run his tongue along, that it took appalling discipline to unpick the hem and separate the two, and he wondered if he were not undoing instinct itself. Love was truly one of the oldest feelings in the world, he thought, one of the original emotions, such was its magnitude, so convincingly did it exercise its power.

  – How are you managing? Need a break?

  – Nope. You need a break?

  – Just a quick cigarette. Helps me concentrate.

  Her coat on the stool smelled faintly of the horse and sometimes outside the booth Cy could hear Maximus clopping a hoof on the alley paving as he turned to face the frothy breeze off the sea, grinding his teeth or whinnying or shaking his mane, and they might have been sharpening stone together or skinning rabbits in a peasant shack on the wild Mesolithic moor of another age, not situated at the last riotous edge of a vast modern city.

  Grace was not immune to pain. It pierced her eyes and deepened the horizontal lines in her brow. For the first few minutes of every session her hand would agitate against the closest surface or the fingers would seize into fists, becoming knaggy and rigid. Her muscles quivered, protested. Her breath was now and then drawn quickly and blown out with difficulty, if in the barbed tension she had forgotten to breathe or his equipment had hit a sensitive, easily offended area of flesh, a spur of bone. It gave him imprecise satisfaction to know that she was human after all, that while she had the will and wiles to make any argument mature, demanding all-out warfare or surrender, while she spoke a dozen languages and was hard boiled with mystery, she could also be hurt. But she quickly pushed past the discomfort, making herself relax as she had herself instructed the unfortunate soldier to, letting her body absorb and dilute the pain of incursion into its skin. She endured long, long sessions. And he worked slowly, meticulously on her.

  – You’re doing very well. Must have had your Bovril.

  – My what?

  – Never mind, it’s just an expression. It’s what they forced us to take as children telling us we wouldn’t get rickets and polio. That and cod liver oil. I just meant you are taking it well. Never mind.

  – Sometimes it’s like burning. Today just nails. I prefer the nails.

  This was a strange period of work for Cy. Soft. Honest. Intimate. He put away all the barking and braggery of the trade, the slapdash rhetoric, the rude commentary. It was not necessary in any case to sideshow her; she was in it for the duration. They conversed about many things, cultural, political, the new psychology of warfare, subjects which ordinarily found no relevance at his place of work. Or they remained quiet, contented to be so. Grace liked to call him by his moniker, as if she thought it was appropriate or humorous or simply more valid than his true name, and it was how she always addressed Cy. The irony was that during the hours spent with her in the booth he neve
r felt quite so much himself as he worked.

  – Look at these things on your wall. Do you think these symbols you have will always remain appropriate, Electric Michelangelo?

  Grace was on her back looking up at the flash designs. They were midway through a session. Only an occasional bluster of wind made its way into the booth, lifting the corners of the papers delicately, so the walls seemed to be covered with bright, twitching-winged butterflies.

  – Oh, I don’t know, I suppose so. Some are hundreds of years old, and everybody understands them. I’ve been here several years, and I’ve been doing this for a lot longer than that, and they’ve not gone out of fashion yet. I hope you aren’t trying to put me out of business, petal.

  – Petal! So funny! No, but look, I’ll give an example. Lots of people do not believe in God. He’s a joke, a big hole. Almost gone. They have money now, in their lives – no need for a heaven lined with gold any more. That was just to get the poor to believe.

  – People will always believe in God. They need to, especially lately. We’re all weeny in the grand scheme and unsatisfied, money or not. Besides, have you seen how many new temples are going up in Brooklyn?

  – OK, yes, yes, when you are getting persecuted and killed for your faith abroad you have to make it mean something, otherwise why did you die? But what about these little girls? So silly – not like any girl I know. Who goes round with the boots of a pirate and tits out like balloons? Huh? Shouldn’t they be different? Since they have discovered that we have brains and we can vote now and work and we don’t have to marry you stinking brutes to buy a house.

  Cy smiled. Quickly, he had come to realize that there was no matter, no issue, no problem which she considered unnavigable by human intellect. She was the least agnostic person he had ever met.