Impulsively she flicked on the flashlight. She yelled Jacob’s name into the night. She had no way of knowing then what she’d do if she actually found a lost boy, how her heart would pound, if her blood would go cold, if she could save him or help him at all. She’d have to wait a few weeks for that, until one showed up at her door.
PART THREE
THE ARTIST LEAPS INTO THE VOID
Raul Engales was released from the hospital on the Tuesday that should have been the Winona George show, with an extra roll of gauze and a bottle of painkillers. They had kept him for a week, due to an infection in the stitches that held together the leaves of skin that had been stretched over the stump of his arm. Stitches that railroaded over its foreign peninsula, then halted abruptly, tied off with brackets of wire where everything — the wound and the arm — dead-ended. The infection made the surrounding skin turn black, then red, then yellow. The yellow leaked down his forearm, shored off at his elbow. The whole thing a torch of pain and uselessness.
The irony that his release from the hospital coincided with his would-have-been release into the art world was not lost on Engales. It cut through him like a new knife. It was only two short months ago that Winona George had been popping open what he assumed to be an absurdly priced bottle of champagne in his meager living room, glugging it into mason jars — his only glasses — for him and for Lucy, while Winona rambled a list of incomprehensible attributes of Raul Engales’s that would make the art world swoon.
“You’ve got the I-don’t-know-whats,” she had said. “You’ve got the I-was-born-with-its and the self-taughts and the something-somethings. You’re an insider outsider, do you know what I mean? Do you two pretty young things have any idea what I’m saying?”
Engales had not had any idea what she was saying — Winona had a way of making the English language, which he took pride in being fluent in, completely unintelligible — and he also didn’t care. All he knew was that the most-talked-about gallerist in New York City, the one who had singlehandedly brought up some of the most revered (and now moneyed) artists, who had spoon-fed the art world digestible yet hearty helpings of neo-Expressionism, and who had reminded the world at large that art was and should be valuable, sometimes insanely so, was standing in his poorly lit living room serving him champagne, offering him a solo show that she claimed would drop him like an anvil into the center of everything. He couldn’t help but hate this memory now, as he was swiveled out of the hospital by a set of revolving doors that thwacked to a you’re on your own now stop when he stepped outside. And he couldn’t help but curse Winona George for dropping her anvil in exactly the wrong place.
Though they had technically told him he could leave that morning, he had not been able to bring himself to go out into the world in such bright daylight — for people to see him in such bright daylight—and so he had sat in a corner of the waiting room, pretending to read a magazine, until he was sure it was dark. Now, outside, a stiff wind had started. Wind was the worst of all forms of weather, in Engales’s opinion, its only purpose to knock leaves from trees and create tears in people’s eyes. The wind moved up through the sleeve of his jacket and knocked on the ball of gauze the doctors had wrapped, mummy-style, around his arm, asking to be let in. Oh, of course, the gauze must have said to the wind, opening its little holes just wide enough for the cold to lick at his stitches. Be my guest at the freak show.
That’s what he was now, he knew. A freak. A cripple. One of the people who other people looked at and thought: Poor man. The eyes of everyone he came in contact with this past week — doctors, nurses, sick patients who passed in the hall — all registered that least favorite emotion of his: pity. He already knew these eyes, and too well. These were the eyes of the adults in San Telmo, who gave him and Franca free groceries, who tilted their heads with the weight of their half-baked sorrow. The difference now was that his loss was visible. You wore dead parents inside your body. You wore a dead hand like a badge, a badge that alerted people that it was time to position their heads, eyebrows, eyes, and mouths in pity position. Tilt everything. Try not to wince.
Lucy’s eyes — when she showed up at the hospital that first night, high on cocaine, he could tell from the way her jaw was moving — were the worst of all the eyes. He had understood this immediately upon seeing her, crouching over him in fear, her mascara smeared like Japanese ink. In Lucy’s eyes was the worst kind of pity: pity mixed with love. It was impossible to love someone — or love someone in the way she had loved him before, which was with deep reverence, as if he were king of something—and also pity him. Pity canceled out belief; you could not believe in someone you pitied. Oh, my love, she had said when he had opened his eyes. The pity had sounded in the word oh, and it made him want to hit something. Leave, he had told her. I don’t want to see you. So leave.
She had left, but she had come back the next day, and the one after that. Ripped tights, messy hair, a face that had been up all night or crying or both. A face that he had painted and kissed so many times that he knew it by heart: eyes you could see the reflection of a room in, pupils like black universes, a nose that turned up ever so slightly, and that always reminded him of his sister’s fingernails, which, instead of curving over like an old woman’s, lifted away from her hands like concave potato chips. But all the things he had found beautiful about Lucy changed when he saw her in that hospital room. Her eyes reflected only the disgusting image of himself, lying under a blanket that looked to be made for a child, illustrated with flying pigs. Her red nose pointed up at the spongy ceiling, or toward the television, on which played the same show over and over, whose main subject seemed to be shoulder pads. When Lucy tried to press one of her stupid matchbooks in his palm — one of those things she did to be cute or relevant or intimate, and that he had once believed to be all of those things — he threw the matchbook against the hospital wall. But he had to throw it with his left hand, and it bounced awkwardly from the arm of the chair Lucy was sitting in, and this only enraged him more. For Lucy to see him like this was a complete disaster. To keep himself from crying he had set out to make her cry (he had always been the sort of person who knew how to make another person cry), by saying: Those matchbooks aren’t even your project, Lucy. You don’t have a project. You aren’t an artist, so please stop fucking trying.
It had been cruel, he knew, but then again, so was life. Life was one huge cutting remark, one blade that cut you all the way down. Life was waking up every morning for the rest of your life to ten bright seconds when you thought you had two hands, only to face the tingling, empty terror that was losing one of them, over and over and over, every single time you opened your eyes. Life was the wind licking at your wound through the sleeve of your coat as you stepped onto Greenwich Street and vomited a week’s worth of morphine into an open manhole. Life was trying to decide, as you wiped your mouth with your floppy sleeve, where the hell you would go from here.