Numb (8 page)

She knelt by me and caressed my face, her nails pulling quietly from my ear to my chin. “It will be okay. Just breathe with me.” She lay down beside me. At a right angle to me, with her head next to mine, her temple resting against the top of my head. Her fingers played with my neck and cheek. “It won't take long. Just another thirty minutes or so. When it feels cool.”

We lay next to each other. She rubbed my head, and I fell asleep.

Later in the week Hiko shaved both my legs from
the ankle to my upper thigh. I offered to do it, but she insisted. As she worked on my left I watched the razor pull across the hairs and reveal the purple bruises underneath. She traced along my leg with her left hand as her right slid the razor over my skin. “We don't want to have to yank your hair out. If I don't take them off this way, they'll be pulled out by the plaster.”

I sat on the edge of her tub. She knelt in it, in ankle-deep, soapy water.

I asked her, “Will this itch when it grows in?”

“I don't think so. You aren't very hairy.” She used a light green lady's razor. When I asked if she'd gone out to buy it just for me, she said no, it was hers, the one she used on herself.

“Does this mean my legs will be as smooth and soft as yours?” I blushed, sorry I'd said it. She laughed, her eyes toward the ceiling as she rubbed more soapy water onto my leg below the knee.

“Which leg shall we plaster up first?” she asked. Thunder echoed outside as a rainstorm moved in.

“Right…no, left.” I wanted to cover the bruises from the bus.

“How about right instead?” She dipped the blade into the water. “It's the one with the scar.” She reached for my knee and ran her hand up toward the raised lion lines. She wore black shorts and a blouse covered in small sailing ships. I wore only a T-shirt and jockey shorts, but after her casts of most of my body I felt at ease with even less on.

Hiko drained the tub and began to plaster. She dipped the strips into a bowl of warm water and laid them on my leg. She started around my ankle and under my foot. After an hour I was plaster from hip to heel.

“Try not to move for at least twenty minutes,” she said.

“I remember.” I'd ruined the first cast of my right arm when a fly landed on my face. I'd knocked myself off the chair and ended up with dried plaster in my eyebrows.

Outside it started to rain. Heavy drops splattered the bathroom window.

“I have windows open. I'll be right back.”

She left me to stare at the tub, an ancient, claw-footed behemoth. A dent beneath the faucet mesmerized me, the porcelain chipped and the metal underneath rusted. The mark was shaped like Texas, which was odd because I had slept in a tub in Tennessee with a chip in the same place that was shaped like Louisiana.

At the time, Mal and I had been hitching our way north, to New York, the card Michael now had trembling between my fingers as I played with it in my pocket. I could see in Mal's eyes a distrust of the bloody card, so I kept it hidden and only looked at it when alone, in the bathroom, or when Mal left to look for work or food. Mal avoided all talk of my reasons for going to New York and instead focused on becoming famous. He never bothered to explain what “being famous” meant, only that once I started putting nails into myself it wouldn't take long.
At stops along the way we made money performing in small towns. We found small diners or a mall and Mal would breathe fire or juggle. Then I would pull out the staple gun and make mothers scream while kids wanted to know how I did it. Mal's act would get applause. Mine got us money. Often a simple bet would get us a big meal and a hotel room.

In Memphis we'd made enough to stay in a roadside motel before the police chased us off for not having a street performer's license. We didn't have enough for a room with two beds, so we flipped for who got the tub and I lost. I piled a pillow and some towels on the bottom, with my head at the high end and my feet pressed on either side of the faucet. The bathroom had no window, but some light came through from the room, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw next to my right big toe the chip in the shape of Louisiana. I had never been there, but I could pick it out on the map.

I'd fallen asleep thinking about Mardi Gras.

I'd woken up to the sound of a door squeaking and opened my eyes. Mal, backlit, stood in the bathroom door. His hand was on the knob, his face turned to the side, as if looking at my feet. I looked down.

A rat chewed on my big toe. Mal watched me be eaten.

I jumped when Hiko's phone rang. It blared until her answering machine picked it up.

I called Hiko's name but heard only the rain on the
window. I lifted myself from the tub and swung my cast over the edge and onto the floor. The hard heel crashed against the tile. I discovered my left leg had fallen asleep and the plaster on my right had fully hardened, making me unsteady on my feet. My left leg tingled as blood circulated again and my right smashed into the wall, the toilet, the door. It swung like a club. Hiko must have used more plaster than she had on my arm because this appeared indestructible and made a solid, earthy thud against everything I hit. I tried to take a step into the hallway and the heel skidded off the floor. I nearly fell. I called to Hiko again and she still didn't answer. I hopped around the corner, looked toward the front door, and saw it standing open. Rain poured outside and the wind blew in. I called to Hiko again. Panic set in. I tried to use the wall as I brought myself stumbling around the corner. I headed for the door at what might pass for running. My left foot caught on the back of my cast and I knocked myself forward, slid on a throw rug, and tripped as I hit the front door. I fell out, headfirst, down the steps. I landed halfway down the front stoop, facedown, just as lightning flashed overhead.

“My God,” someone said. I rolled over and saw Hiko standing in the doorway of the building next door to hers. Her neighbor stood with her, just out of the rain. The elderly woman said, “A man with a cast just threw himself down your stairs.”

I tried standing and fell the rest of the way. “I'm
okay,” I said. I ended up in a puddle at the bottom of the stoop.

“Oh my,” said the neighbor. “He's the one I saw on TV.” I thought I knew what she was talking about until she said, “You were hit by that bus. Is that how you broke your leg?”

I lay there wondering how she could have known about the bus.

By the time I got back to my hotel several hours later the news clip was running on every local channel. I sat in my room with the television on, the sound off, not really watching. On the screen is a New York City intersection. People gather as cars stream by. A bike messenger nearly clips a guy with a briefcase who turns and shouts. I enter the picture, my back to the camera. I stand behind a group of women in business suits. I look down, step around one woman, and toward the street. A woman in a tank top and tight black shorts runs by and I watch her as I step off the curb. Then a bus enters the picture and hits me. I get knocked to the ground. I could have sworn she was wearing a pair of cutoffs.

NY1 loops its stories, so I watched myself get hit by the bus every ten or fifteen minutes. Each time the clip ended the anchor talked about the weather, or the subway congestion, or city planning projects. I didn't care about that. I left the sound off, waiting for the news to loop back to my clip again, and then I tried not to blink as I watched myself get knocked off my feet, almost gently
given the fact that the bus was tons of steel, aluminum, and glass. I wondered over and over: where had the cameras been to film the bus hitting me?

Despite the late hour I called Michael.

“Yeah, I've seen it.”

The unexpressed excitement in his voice at the free publicity kept me from asking if he liked it or not. “I don't know how they got film of that.”

“There are cameras everywhere. Banks, hotels. It could have been a traffic camera, one that shoots cars running red lights.”

“I don't know.”
Odd,
was my only thought on it. Was I being followed? Michael, reading my mind, coughed into the phone.

“God knows you weren't being followed. Just dumb luck. You were filmed and now people are talking about the strange man who got hit by the bus and walked away.” I remembered him cleaning the spilled coffee, the creation of a still life. “This is good for us. It's part of your story.”

On the last day of my modeling for Hiko she took me upstairs to the part of the brownstone where she lived. In the three weeks I'd been going to the sessions there, I hadn't figured out that she owned the whole building.

With the blinds drawn, cool air pooled in the shadows. In the front room she opened the windows and the shades blew in and out with the breeze. The wooden
dowels at the bottom struck against the aluminum windowsills, clacking regularly, like people knocking at the sill, begging to come in. Outside, a man hosed the sidewalk and watered the plants in barrel halves on his front stoop. The sound of water spraying against concrete made me feel at ease.

Hiko's soft footsteps padded away from me.

“I want to show you something.”

She led me through her living room. It had no furniture except an ugly sofa and a glass coffee table. The walls were all white but covered in stucco with a seashell pattern. In the hallway there were daisies in the plaster. In the kitchen, handprints. I wondered what her bedroom had.

She said, “I wanted to show you the final version of your portrait that will be in my next show.” A box covered with a white towel sat on her coffee table. In here she was practically sighted. She moved around easily. She sat centered on the sofa.

She said, “Uncover it.”

I lifted the cloth. The frame measured about two feet by two feet, a hand width deep. It held a bloodred mess, a three-dimensional plaster profile. It did resemble me, except that it was red, and broken glass and nails had been mixed in with the plaster. It looked jagged, sharp, and dangerous. It resembled a scab, and an infected one at that.

“What do you think?”

Before I could stop myself I said, “I don't know.” I thought she would be offended but Hiko began to laugh.

“Good,” she said. “Have you felt it? People have been taught to be afraid of art, but mine needs to be felt. Go on.” I put my hand against what was supposed to be my face. The plaster felt cold and smooth in between the glass and nails. Like Braille, I thought. For me it offered only chaotic points, but maybe it meant something to Hiko. I sensed something just under its surface, something I couldn't recognize. It felt angry.

I stood across the table from her, my hand on the face. A question popped out, one that had floated at the back of my head for days, waiting for a moment to come forward. “Why were you ever interested in doing this cast of me?”

“I heard about you from Michael. He was so excited about you. Then I read about you and I contacted Michael and he said this would be good cross promotion. I don't care about that. I just want interesting people to model for me.”

“I didn't realize you knew Michael so well.”

“We dated a few times. But I got tired of him. No depth. The last time we went out he said I looked like Marilyn Monroe. Why would you tell a blind person they looked like someone they will never be able to get a sense of?” She smiled. “So, that is the piece I'll be displaying.”

I ran my hand over it again and felt a catch.

“I think I just cut myself on it.”

“You are accident prone, aren't you?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. Now it has your signature on it too.”

She stood and walked down the hall and into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of water, sipped from it, and offered it to me. “Would you like to see the pieces in my personal collection?”

Hiko took me upstairs. In a little room beside the stairs there was no furniture and no lights, just sunlight from an open window. Outside the spraying water had stopped. On the walls were picture frames, the same size as the one downstairs on the long table in front of her ugly sofa. Each frame held a face, or an arm, or a hand over a breast. Each was smooth and calm, lost in its frame, as if wrapped in a womb. Each was a window looking onto someone, or into someone.

“These are mine; they are only for me,” she said. She put her hand across me to find the wall and with her other hand she guided me. We took seven steps. I passed a woman's bust, then one showing the back of someone's head, thick dreadlock ropes resting on a shoulder.

She took me to one, slightly crooked on the wall, and said, “This is you.”

I stood and looked, as if in a mirror, at my face. My eyes were closed, lips parted. I looked asleep. I looked sad too.

“It's amazing.”

“Don't say anything until you've touched it.”

I reached up and gently ran my fingers across my cold features. My face held a secret. It looked like a smooth, solid piece of plaster. Underneath the surface, I could feel the tiniest imperfections. But they weren't imperfections. I felt closely, tried to feel between the sensations at the tips of my fingers. She had worked the creases of my skin and the scars above my eyes. She had the cut in my lip and the wrinkles at my mouth. I couldn't see any of these, but I felt them. Just there, under the surface, in the surface. Like a statue put together out of perfectly fitted pieces that could never be seamless. They could pretend, though.

“Two,” I said. “Why did you make two?”

“The one downstairs is what they will expect, the one that will be shown and be on the cover. It's for them. This one is for me and for you.”

She took my hand and guided me back out of the room, to her bedroom. Without a pause, she undressed. “Are you still bleeding?”

I couldn't stop looking at the curve of her hip and where it wrapped around to her stomach. Without looking at the cut from the first portrait I said, “Yes.”