The pacing sleepless halted and raised his voice, “Shuguang Zhang Zhang told us, ‘We have had the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the plastic age. The future is the designed materials age.’”
The gallerist nodded toward the sleepless and smiled at us, “Mr. Afronzo, have you met Ian Berry?”
Cager shook his head and faced the sleepless man and stuck out his hand, “No, that’s why I’m here.”
A wave of twitches, Rose’s doctor called them fasciculations, ran over the man’s body. He stuck out his own hand, but it waved from side to side. Cager took it in both of his and held it steady. “Thank you,” he said.
“Thank you for showing me something new.”
Either the man pulled his hand free or it jerked free of its own will, I couldn’t tell which. Just like I couldn’t tell if the expression on the man’s face was true disgust or if it was the result of his musculature run out of control.
Cager turned to me and gestured at the man and smiled and said, “Haas, meet the artist.” Ian Berry offered me his jerking hand, and I took it. His eyelids kept fluttering. He said to me, “Don’t be afraid, it’s just the suffering.”
I pulled my hand back, but he didn’t let go. He asked me, “How long has it been?” I shook my head. He asked me, “How long have you been sleepless?” I shook my head again. He let go of my hand and started pacing again and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just the suffering. It’s just the future coming.”
20
THERE WERE THREE TABLES IN MY LIVING ROOM. LEST THIS be thought cluttered, please keep in mind that the house was open floor plan, the kitchen, dining, and living areas all sweeping into one another. Keep also in mind that one of the tables was the very small chrome Dadox cube on which I kept my business phones. The large oval Thor coffee table was central to the room, planted diagonally in the middle of a luxuriously shaggy white alpaca rug. The third table was a rather cheap Sui, chosen because its light color offset the dark hardwood it stood on, and because its ten inches of height placed its surface just slightly over a foot below the top of the Mies van der Rohe daybed it complemented. That difference in height was perfect for Saturday afternoons when I would sprawl on the daybed while listening to live broadcasts from the Met. Without looking or stretching I could find my espresso, any pastry I might have allowed myself, or a bowl of in-season grapes. On the rare occasions I had dinner company we generally ate on the deck or removed our shoes and sat on the rug at the Thor table.
The men in the room with me at this time had not removed their shoes. Nor had they placed me on the floor and tied my ankles to the thick sculpted end pieces that flowed directly out of the base into the upper surface of the Thor. For that matter, they had not pilloried me on the Dadox cube, arching my back across it, wire running from my neck, lines stretched to my wrists and ankles, the tension of my own muscles keeping my limbs splayed. Instead, they had sat me on the daybed and tied my ankles to the legs of the Sui. Nothing wrong with this arrangement in principle, until the lights went out.
Curling, I hunched my shoulders so that as I rose I would minimize tension on the wire that ran from my neck to my wrists. The weight of my upper body coming forward was not enough to lift me from the daybed, but my ankles had been tied with my feet quite flat against the floor. Pressing down with the muscles in my upper legs, I lifted myself, lunged, and fell over the Sui table atop the man kneeling between my legs with the soldering iron.
For a moment the man was pinned between my body and the table. I heard a clunk that might have been the soldering iron, then a cracking of wood as our combined weight splintered the rather delicate piece and I tumbled, tucking my head, turning my shoulder, feeling the wire dig into my throat, the rope on my ankles snagging before slipping loose from the broken table legs.
Pain cannot be ignored. However, it can be endured. When necessary, a great deal of pain can be endured. Just ask any mother.
Naked on the floor, in a litter of kindling, third-degree burns on the backs of my knees and inner thighs, I had a moment of instability at the thought of a world that could twice see a man unclothed in such circumstances in the span of a single life. Pain returned me to a semblance of balance. Indeed, I experienced a tremendous amount of pain in silence while listening very carefully for the voice of the man who had been burning me. There was a shuffle of movement that quickly subsided, the other men in the room shifting their positions slightly from where they had been when the lights went out, followed by a single spoken syllable coming from that man on the floor as he made them aware of his own position so as not to end up in the line of fire.
“Here.”
“Here,” as it turned out, was just a foot or two away. I knew this already because one of the protrusions poking his shoulder wasn’t a bit of broken table, was, in fact, one of my toes. But the word did serve a purpose, allowing me to develop a clear mental picture of just where his face was. So that when I lashed out with the heel of my other foot, I felt the very distinct sensation of a man’s nose caving in.
He made another sound, long and loud, and I used it to cover the noise I made as I kicked both legs high into the air, brought them down, and rolled up to my feet, pulling the wire yet deeper into my flesh.
The initial shock of darkness was fading from my eyes. The canopy of stars that might have given some light during a typical blackout was screened by the smoke that was capping the basin after a day of fires. That left the fires themselves to illuminate the room. A handful of blazes, flickering, none closer than half a mile. There was little at all that could be seen. Shadows of various thickness.
I changed my ground, keeping close to the north wall to avoid the spot where the floor creaked, and scurried to the kitchen. There was similar shifting happening in the living and dining areas. The scream of the man whose face I’d ruined had passed, settling into a series of moans and grunts, punctuated by gurgles as the blood ran out of his sinuses into his throat and he hacked it up so as not to drown.
The other three would be attempting to seal the room. The one who had been standing watch at the windows would be very near that same position to cover the glass door. In fact, I could see a small hump of darkness against the slightly brighter darkness outside, not a regular part of the room’s silhouette. The man who had been going through my possessions would be moving to block the hall that led back to the bedrooms and bathrooms. He had the greatest distance to traverse, the most obstacles to avoid. And he would, no doubt, make the most noise. The battle-scarred man would position himself at the entryway that opened from the front door into the living area. A short direct path that would put him closest to me.
I crouched behind the kitchen island; heard when the man crossing the room stepped into the wreckage of the table and cursed involuntarily; felt the surge in the room’s tension as his coworkers mentally scolded him; and gently ran my fingers over the kitchen tools hanging on the side of the island until I was fully confident that I understood the orientation of the poultry shears on their hook. Lifting it free, I undid the clasp at the end of the grips with my pinkie. The spring bolt opened silently. I drew a long, slow breath and, with a minimum of arching, slipped the upward-curving lower blade between the wire and the small of my back. Nonetheless, the noose around my neck had been drawn beyond the point where it would allow any more arching at all. Tugged a final three centimeters, it sealed my larynx. The wire dropped into the bone notch at the base of the lower blade, I squeezed, there was a moment of resistance, and the wire snapped with a clear twang.