Tourmaline
and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere,
the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s,
as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by surgical
perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye
was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the
gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed
ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go with their marvelous
creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany
whatever she saw through their marvelous and finely crafted sight.
Click, click, click.
An eye like that should have been
in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell
had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better
gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations
of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow
paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.
That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.
Pell
didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the
technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of
ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that
she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.
But later,
right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant,
the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray, penetrating right
one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold
machine.
She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman,
and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap
junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.
* * * *
She
wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly
created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman
where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly
saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that
had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was
cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but,
still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the
cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and
scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that amid
clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a discordant
tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of Market
studio.
The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She
wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very
ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s
paintings.
Holding her wine tight enough to gently
fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell watched her,
stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with
the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too
intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off –
or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of Pell. Through a sad
ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a
glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that
would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.
Pell had
already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d
stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground.
Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around
Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution, delicately
testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible, murky lines
of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden falling of
knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that
had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on
the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.
But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.
The
plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first
into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the
white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red,
freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto
her.
Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit
with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she
knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony.
White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her
stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people
dressed in all colors, combined.
"Looks good on you."
The
shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an
avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white that
night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had
surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that
fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.
And
so Pell responded, "Not as good as you would" to the tall, leggy, broad
shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not
as beautiful as the rest of her.
* * * *
Pell’s
reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never wrap
her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when
he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but
then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they
could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another –
no stable job history, thus conscription.
All it took
were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till
that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole
death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.
Foxhole
buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around
him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly
(and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell was sure
that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a
band of too-mortal kids.
That was Jare. While the rest
of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and
Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there
was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that
refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad
strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were
more convoluted.
Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier
that evening (before turning a white blouse red and seeing the woman
with the artificial eye for the first time) both man and his work were
simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch
attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention –
an explanation too simple to be easily seen.
In the
tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse.
Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water.
The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.
The
woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile
on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if
throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from
drowning in embarrassment.
"Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”
"You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”
"Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?
"Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls."
Cold
water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was
aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill
water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal
moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation.
Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where
she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her
clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the
door.
The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and
strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length,
strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the
hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to
her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.
Her
eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its
limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense
examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her
belly, the weakness in her knees.
