Every morning that I woke up without anyone on my team having been shot or stabbed, I was relieved. And every night when we’d made it through yet another day intact, I had a moment to relax, however short, before the next day’s maniacal routine began again.
Chad Vishneski’s welfare was a big worry, too. John and Mona Vishneski decided to take him to John’s apartment for the weekend. Chad was definitely on the mend. He was alert for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch now. But he had no recollection of the night of the murder, and there were big gaps in the rest of his memory, too.
John and Mona wanted to see the show, and two of John’s construction buddies agreed to stay with Chad, but it made me nervous to move a vulnerable man away from a doctor and closer to killers. Lotty wasn’t happy, either: although she didn’t want the burden of his protection falling on Beth Israel, she also didn’t want him far from medical help at such a fragile stage in his recovery.
When Sunday afternoon finally arrived, when the webcams and the security cameras were in place, the microphones set up, the screens for projecting the images hung over the shuttered windows, I couldn’t sit still.
Rivka didn’t help: she kept saying, “I told you she wouldn’t come. I don’t know why I believed you and did all this work when it was all just a big con job.”
By eight-thirty, when the doors opened, I felt as though every nerve in my body had pierced its sheath and was dancing naked on the surface of my skin.
TONIGHT and TONIGHT ONLY
At the
GOLDEN GLOW
***
The Body Artist
***
in her FINAL CHICAGO APPEARANCE
THE RAVING RENAISSANCE RAVEN at 9
THE BODY ARTIST at 10!
Doors open at 8:30 P.M.
$20 COVER
52 The Naked and the Dead
Under the bright spotlights, the thick foundation stripped the Artist’s face of expression. The cream paint covered her completely, obliterating her race, her age. Her hair was pulled back from her face, lacquered heavily so that it stood straight up like a small shrub. Peering out from the middle of its leaves were a couple of Barbie dolls. Their plastic high heels bit into the Artist’s scalp.
The crowd on the other side of the lights whistled and catcalled. The Artist turned slowly. She felt exposed, powerless, and it took all her concentration to hold herself upright, to pretend that if she noticed the audience at all, she disdained it.
Behind her, two giant television screens kept changing slides. One zoomed in on a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis on her left breast, another showed her shoulder with Alexandra Guaman’s face, surrounded in flames, as Nadia had painted it.
Off to one side, the Raving Renaissance Raven played her amplified hurdy-gurdy. The words were so out of harmony with the Purcellinspired melody that it took some time for the audience to realize what they were hearing:
Little girl, little girl
What’s your sister?
A toy
Played with by big boys
Until she’s broken
Little boy, little boy
Where’s your brother?
Dead
Blown up by big boys
Into small pieces
As the Raven sang, the images on the screen began to change from the pictures painted on the Artist’s body to shots of soldiers’ bodies, maimed and charred, in a desert; a woman clutching a torn dress around her bleeding body; a group of men, roaring with laughter, toasting one another at a black-tie dinner.
Text replaced the images.
Will a Change of Owner Change Achilles’ Fortunes?
Someone in the audience yelled, “Get to the show, get to the show,” but at a table near the stage three men stopped drinking and began looking around the room, as if checking for anyone who recognized them.
The Artist-a giant doll, really, not a woman at all-perched on a high stool in the middle of the jerry-rigged stage and sucked in a breath. The Raven wound her hurdy-gurdy more slowly, and after another few seconds fell silent. The Body Artist’s program began.
It’s story hour, boys and girls, girls and boys. And everyone’s stories come together through the Body Artist. She is the blank canvas where your dreams come to life. Your dreams may be nightmares, but you’ll realize them all in the Artist’s body.
The screens began flashing images from embodiedart.com, first the Body Artist’s original Pieces of Flesh, the field of lilies growing from her vagina, the tiger mask, the winking eye. They switched to the more disturbing images of the woman-faced deer being savaged by dogs, the crucified woman with a spike through her vulva. A horrified murmur ran through part of the crowd, but others began yelling explicit sexual commands. At me. At my body.
“For the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance, I’m going to treat you to a fairy tale. It begins, as all good stories do:”
Once upon a time, there was a Chicago boy who loved to play football, loved to fool around with his buddies, loved beer. But, above all, he loved his country. So when his country invaded Iraq, he dropped football and a college scholarship and went off to war.
The screens showed pictures of Chad as a small boy splashing in a wading pool, then in his Lane Tech football uniform, finally as a soldier heading for Iraq.
He served cheerfully through his first two deployments, but the third time he was sent, his squad came under fire, and every one of them died except for him. They’d all worn body armor, but the armor had failed them.
Losing all his buddies at once, that was hard. Our hero served yet a fourth deployment before he was finally released, but he was never the same happy-go-lucky guy he’d been before. He was angry. Odd things set him off.
One of the odd things that set him off was seeing someone paint the logo of the body armor that he and his squad had worn across the Body Artist’s back.
I got up and began slowly revolving as Sanford Rieff followed with a spotlight. Rivka had covered my body with the logo for Tintrey’s Achilles shield, using a paint that showed up under an infrared light. There was a ripple of amazement at the display, while someone who had been to the shows where Nadia did her paintings cried in surprise, “That’s what that dead woman was painting over at the other club, remember?”
My soldier was so angry that he took out his old body armor and shot it. And that was when he saw his armor could no more stop a bullet than-my bare hand. This so enraged him that he wrote about it in his blog.
Man, there’s something I gotta get off my chest. There’s something I gotta get off your chests. All you out there, look at your armor. If it’s got that funny logo that looks like an ear of corn sprouting, get yourself new armor ASAP. My whole squad was killed on the road to Kufah because our armor wasn’t worth shit, and we all wore those corn shields. They’re made by Achilles. So go get yourself Ajax or any other brand and GET RID OF THE SPROUTING CORN!
The blog posting had taken a lot of work. I’d written out what I wanted it to say, and then John Vishneski and Marty Jepson kept rewriting it until they thought it sounded the way Chad would have written it.