Though Engales was not in the mood to listen to Arlene, he knew she was right; the doubt was feeding off the strange morning, filling him quickly, sinking him. But he couldn’t take a walk — he had so much to do. He had to make the sketches for his four new paintings, so he decided to cut paper. They had only bulk paper at the studio, which came in enormous sheets, which he would rip, then rip again, then stack, then cut all at once, until he had a bunch of rough-edged squares. When he had ripped the whole roll, he inserted his book-size stack into the guillotine, a paper cutter meant to cut entire volumes, in the darker corner of the studio. He slid the paper to the back edge of the cutter with his hand.
There was a flash. It was silver and slick: a mirror breaking; a window slamming shut. Franca’s body went limp in his arms. His heart stopped. His sister’s heart stopped. Broken music played from somewhere outside. When he looked up, his hand was lying on the counter behind the blade of the guillotine, completely severed from the rest of his body.
For an entire minute, he glares at it. The thick, silver blade, separating one part of him from the other. The wall of the metal up against the hair and skin of his arm. Arlene’s red hair is flying toward him like a fire. Her long skirt with the elephants on it. A scream from one of the students cracks through the heavy air. On the windows, fog spreads and shrinks with the collective breath of the room. His arm, cut just under the elbow, is a cross section of red and white, now bleeding out over the counter and onto the floor.
Arlene wraps the stump of his wrist in a paint rag, her mouth open with frenzied, frantic questions, but Engales cannot hear or see her. Instead, he sees Franca’s face in her face: strewn with sadness because she has dropped a carton of eggs. The rag turns orange rapidly, the stain of blood blooming out to its edges. Franca watches the orange yolk bleed into the sidewalk’s veins. Everything goes white, then red, then white. Engales walks on ahead of her. Hurry up, egghead. They’re just eggs. He vomits, greenish, into the stainless-steel sink.
Arlene knots the hand itself into another rag and places the bundle into a tin canister used for paintbrushes. His dead fingers blacken in the turpentine. He opens his mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. There is his painting hand in a can full of paintbrushes. There is the gaping hole of his mouth.
NO MORE MIDNIGHT COCA-COLA
It is a dream. This was what Lucy told herself when she showed up at St. Vincent’s hospital, coatless, still slightly high from a bump of cocaine Random Randy had given her at the bar just before she’d taken Arlene’s call. The cocaine had felt necessary at the time, a little bump to lift her just a little bit above her circumstance: the front end of her regular Tuesday-night shift, where she was dealing with the 4:00 P.M. — ers, those downtrodden enough to seek afternoon refuge in whiskey and Lucy’s tits. But now the drugs only contributed to the sense that the scene she was living in could not be real. It was only dreams that rooms turned into other rooms so quickly and without transition, that the log cabin of the Eagle could transform into the stark, bright hall of St. Vincent’s hospital in what felt like one seamless instant. It was only in dreams that thin, bruised men, flanked by turquoise curtains and dingy bedside lamps, looked out on you from their rooms as if their diseases were your fault: the sad, almost-ghosts of an epidemic you knew close to nothing about. And it was only in dreams — or perhaps only nightmares — when you saw something like what Lucy saw in the papery bed of room 1313: her lover, sleeping beside the bandaged stump of his own arm, its tip bright red with tenacious blood.
“Finally,” said a voice. Arlene’s New Yorker voice, always adding O’s in where they didn’t belong. F-O-inally. Lucy gulped. That Arlene did not like Lucy was as much a fact as the bloody stump, which Lucy could not take her eyes off of as she approached.
“I came as fast as I could,” she said to Arlene, as if it mattered what she said to Arlene. “I ran here.”
From the foot of the bed, Lucy looked up its lumpy landscape to her lover’s face: so peaceful in sleep, his deep pores filled with paint or dirt, that mouth that she had so recently kissed so carelessly, the way you kissed when you assumed there were endless kisses, a lifetime of them even. Her eyes welled and sprung with tears, which she attempted unsuccessfully to swat away with her sleeve.
“Oh, Jesus,” Arlene said from her chair by the bed. Lucy did her best to ignore Arlene, but Arlene was right. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus was right.
A very tragic reaction to tragedy is to think about what a short time it’s been since things were not tragic. How just last week you were eating tangerines on an abandoned church pew parked outside the squat, throwing the peels onto the heap of uncollected garbage that, in the latest strike, had grown taller than you were. How just last month you were pulling your Goodwill suitcase, full of all your T-shirts and bras and dreams, up the stairs of your lover’s apartment, its ridiculous weight less exhausting than exhilarating: a symbol of sharing a life with the man you loved. How just a few months ago you had basked in the neon PEEP-O-RAMAs and LIVE NUDE REVUEs and XXX’s of Times Square as if they were Idaho moonlight, walked through the maze of rooms and hallways of TIMES SQUARE: ART OF THE FUTURE on the arm of your painter, an arm that felt as sturdy as the branch of a fir. How just after that you were listening to Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (They really are magic! your painter had yelled to you), and watching him dance in the way he danced: defying everything that already existed, making something entirely new with his body. Somewhere in his movements: the tango. Somewhere in his movements: the nothing to lose.
How he’d stopped like he stopped, when something caught his attention and he couldn’t not move toward it. It was a man in the corner, his head holding up a nest of dreadlocks, his face boyish and his grin beautiful. Your painter had pulled a permanent pen from the pocket of his dirty jeans. The dreadlocked man had taken the pen, pushed up your painter’s sleeve, and written on his arm. SAMO says: Never quit, he had written. Then he drew a cigarette after the words, with the smoke reaching down onto your painter’s right hand. That’s Jean-Michel, your painter had purred afterward, the foreign name sparkling in his mouth. A charge, almost electric, had radiated off the arm afterward, a magic.
That moment had been as heavy as a fruit. It was a moment that meant something, you could tell, the kind of moment people would talk about later, when the moment itself was long since gone.
But the moment had passed, and no one was talking about it. The new moment was a severed arm, a hospital room, turquoise curtains, memories of sweet times that now felt sour. Lucy moved around to the side of the bed and crouched in front of Arlene.
“What happened?” she asked Arlene in a little whisper, though she didn’t know if she wanted to know, or if she wanted Arlene to speak.
“A tragedy,” Arlene said dryly. “A fucking tragedy is what happened.”
Lucy gulped; she wished desperately that Arlene wasn’t there. She wanted to be alone with Engales when he woke up, for him to see her face and find solace in it; she wanted to kiss the pain out of him. She reached up to touch the arm, which was moist and hot, like it got when he danced for too long and too hard, or when they kissed for too long and too hard….