16.

THE NEXT MORNING, up early as usual, I walked out of my little house to find no bright blue dome—no sky at all—but rather wispy swaths of gray-white fog that had settled low and damp over everything. It was like an installation piece I had once seen in which a long room was filled with gauzy scarves and big balls of cotton and heaps of feathers and linen streamers, all in shades of white, with the sounds of fountains splashing and doors squeaking and children calling piped in. Life on Venus, I remember it was called—though I have forgotten the name of the artist—but it could easily have been called Nauquasset Morning with Fog. Standing on the crest of the dune, I couldn’t see the ocean at all, though I could hear it: the low roll of the gathering wave, the tumbling as it spilled itself onto the shore, the heavy water sighing and hissing as it dissipated into the sand.

I walked down to the beach swaddled in fog, breathing in the wet, heavy air, then turned parallel, I hoped, to the shore. The ocean was still mostly hidden, only the lacy foam of the occasional wave reaching, like a tongue, far enough up the sand for me to see. Now and then I heard a voice, but sounds carried oddly, and I was never sure if the person speaking was down on the beach or up on the dune, and the long lamenting note of the foghorn sounded its warning over the invisible world. Once I heard the jangle of dog tags, and an old Labrador trotted out of the white billows and then back into them, paying me no attention at all.

I didn’t see the old man until I was almost on top of him. There, easel set up in the middle of the fog, was the wild-looking painter I had seen before. His white hair floated around his head like the fog itself, a faded bandanna tied tightly around his brow as though it were the only thing keeping his brains from spilling out. His jaw was stubbled a paler gray than his grayish skin, his paint-stained jeans were more hole than denim, and his ropy arms were awash in faded tattoos. He was painting quickly, so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t seem to notice me. He gazed straight ahead into the fog as though—despite the beach and the sea being invisible—he could see the scene he was painting in front of him. The mute otherworldliness of the surroundings and thepainter’s unconsciousness of my presence began to make me feel disembodied, as though I were peering through an invisible mirror. I stepped farther around behind him to get a view of his canvas.

He was painting a jungle scene. Bright garish greens from acid lime to bluish olive pulsed and shimmered in the sinuous forms of leaves, vines, muck, grass, snakes, rivers. There was even a greenish tinge to the skin of the men wearing camouflage in shades of sage and pea, carrying guns—who weaved across the picture plane. And then, in the middle of the canvas, a dark blot: black smoke and red flame and redder blood that dripped and spurted from broken bits of bodies. A hole ripped in the middle of the world. The black and the red flowed into the green, and, on either side of the blot, men screamed, their stained faces painted in incredible detail, miniature portraits of agony. Across the top of the frame, in a margin of lurid sky, ghostly skeletons drifted weightlessly: finely articulated constructions of smoke. Every few moments the painter would look up and stare into the fog, his face a blind mask. Then he would look quickly back at the canvas and make a mark. It wasn’t like watching someone paint out of their imagination. He really seemed to be seeing the scene before him, as though that terrible carnage were happening now—as though he had access to a crack in time, a peephole to a place where men had never stopped dying in the steamy jungle heat.

Suddenly he sensed something behind him. He whirled around. “Get down!” he cried.

“What is it?” I stood frozen in the billowing fog, beyond which, I suddenly half believed, men were crouching with machine guns as bombs hissed from lurid skies.

“Don’t you see?” He gestured frantically into the fog. “It’s a massacre! How did you get here? They’ve been blasting and burning for days!”

Somewhere above us, a gull squawked. The ocean thumped and sighed, steady as breath, and the warm air smelled of decay and salt. “There’s no one here,” I said, struggling to hold this fact steady in my own mind.

He stared at me, his pale eyes laced with red. Then, cautiously, he turned his head, first one way and then the other. Blinking, he seemed for the first time to take in the fog, the quiet, the white empty world. Slowly, he took his hands out of his hair.

“Is it heaven?” he asked tentatively.

“No. It’s just the fog.”

“You’re not an angel, then?”

I smiled. “I’m from the museum.” I pointed back in the direction of the Nauk.

He squinted. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “You’re not the fat one, and you’re not the thin one, and the other one is . . . gone. Hush, though, don’t tell.”

“I’m new,” I said. The fat one would be Agnes, I supposed, and the thin one would be Sloan, and Alena would be the one who was gone. But what was I not supposed to tell—that Alena was dead? Did he think people didn’t know? “I’ve seen you painting here before,” I said. “It must be hard with the wind and the damp.”

“Hard?” he repeated. “No. Do you know what’s hard?”

“What?”

“Dying. And it doesn’t even matter how—whether you’re shot or blown up or drowned or set on fire—it doesn’t make any difference!” He moved toward me, his white bushy eyebrows rising as though in surprise, his eyes as blue as fire.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I’m sure that’s true.”

“I don’t want to die,” he said. “And I don’t want to go back to Brockton!” Taking another step, his foot sinking deep into the soft sand, he aimed his brush at me, the red paint on the bristles wavering. “I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “I didn’t see, I really didn’t.”

“I’m sure,” I said, not knowing what I wanted him to think I was sure of: that he didn’t see, that he wouldn’t tell, that he didn’t want to go back to Brockton, wherever that was.

“I keep my promises!” he said. “You can ask Denise, she’ll tell you.”

“Who’s Denise?”

“My sister. She takes good care of me. Don’t move!”

He lunged, his hand coming down hard on the side of my head. “Don’t touch me!” I yelled. Something dropped to the sand.

“I didn’t hurt you! I didn’t hurt you! I told you not to move!” He pointed wildly with his paintbrush at something on the ground.

I looked down. At my feet lay a big dead horsefly. Its green eye bulged, iridescent and strangely beautiful, among the empty shells.

Sporting an artificial arm and leg, Morgan McManus picked me up at ten in his black Jeep. He wore faded cut-off jeans and a ribbed wife beater in desert camouflage, a leather boot on his real foot. Even though they had been mostly hidden by a button-down shirt and dark trousers the first time we had met, it had been the gaps in his body that had held my eye, the absences, the place flesh became air. Today, with so much more of him exposed, I could see raised scars around his collarbone, the pink ridges where his prostheses attached to his limbs, and, when the wind blew back his thick black hair, the delicate remains of what had been an ear. As I got in, he laid his hand on my thigh. “I’m looking forward to this,” he said.

I didn’t jerk away this time but sat awkwardly as his broad palm burned through my skirt. “Me too.” I cleared my throat, and he smiled his handsome, crooked smile and took his hand away to turn the Jeep around, but I could still feel the imprint on my skin.

I had wondered how he managed driving, but it didn’t look so hard. He had his good leg for the pedals and his good arm for the steering wheel. His prosthesis—the arm one—worked fine for manipulating the turn signal and, presumably, the wiper blades when he needed them, and for punching the buttons on the radio. I had never seen anything like McManus’s prostheses. There had been a girl in my chemistry class in college with a stiff plastic arm several shades tanner than the rest of her, and I’d seen a piece on the TV news about a famous skier with a shiny steel-footed rod that attached below the knee. But McManus’s were different. The arm was a bright jade green, a straight tube from where it attached near the shoulder tapering to a kind of flat paddle, like the end of an oar, where the hand would have been. An assortment of appendages stuck out from the paddle like the attachments on a pocket-knife—one shaped more or less like an index finger, one with a flat ring on the tip like a bottle opener, and one with a sharp skewer. The arm itself was carved—or, more likely, fabricated to look carved—in the manner of a totem pole, with strange squat figures in raspberry pink and turquoise stacked on top of one another. These figures had big staring eyes and peculiar limbs that, looking closer, I saw were depictions of the very limbs McManus was wearing—self-referential self-portraits, then, in a primitivist style, of a new race of prosthetic men. Each figure had a fat red quill slashed across its middle that I took at first to be a knife. But then it came to me that it wasn’t a knife at all but an erect phallus—a priapic animus—a defiant symbol of potency engraved into the inanimate limb. The leg, harder to see from where I sat, was made out of something dark and shiny.

As we reached the bottom of the lane where the gates were, he put the car in neutral, set the parking brake, and leaned over me to fumble something out of the glove compartment, coming up smiling with a joint and a book of matches. “Give me a hand?” He tossed the matches into my lap and slipped the joint between his lips.

I lit a match and turned toward him, holding it to the tip of the joint till it glowed. There was nobody around. A warm breeze blew through the open windows as he pulled in the smoke. After a long moment, he let it out with a groan of pleasure, and the air filled with the smell of it. Then he offered the joint to me.

“I’m working,” I said.

“Might make you see more clearly.”

I shook my head.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind.” He put the car back in drive and turned onto the main road. I put the matchbook and the spent match back in the glove compartment, wondering if the joint would look like a cigarette to other drivers.

“Wouldn’t a lighter be easier? You could do it yourself.”

“I can generally find someone to help me out,” he said as we sped between the green rippling dunes. “It’s medical,” he added. “Helps with the pain.”

“They don’t have that in this state.”

“Medicinal, then. A case of taking the law into your own hands.”

“Hand,” I said.

He smiled. “Very good.”

After a few minutes the road widened, the old bleached asphalt giving way to a new blue-black ribbon, the dunes beside us changing to scrub. “I like your arm,” I said.

“So, the studio visit begins before we even get to the studio.” He looked at me sideways, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting me back to myself: an insubstantial figure with a wild nest of blowing hair. I scrounged in my purse for an elastic, then remembered Bernard saying he liked me better with my hair blowing. I missed Bernard. I missed how it had been in Venice. I shut my purse again, letting my hair blow.

“Do you have different limbs?” I asked. “For different moods?”

“I do! I often wish I could wear six or eight at once, like those Indian gods. Do you notice how they’re always smiling?”

“Are they?”

“Absolutely. And do you know why? Because they can feel up half a dozen milkmaids at once. Or, you know, stable boys.”

Beach traffic was picking up. A surfboard protruded from the open window of the dusty car in front of us like an enormous tongue. Bicycles passed us on the sandy, treacherous shoulder. The fresh salty air was mingled with the stink of diesel. “Do you know that man who paints on the beach?” I asked.

“Ben?”

“Is that his name?”

“That crazy old vet who talks to himself?”

I hadn’t seen him talk to himself, but I could imagine it. “Who is he?”

“Why?” McManus asked, looking over. “You thinking of showing him? Outsider art?” His green arm twitched, all the wide-eyed heads bobbing mockingly.

“I’ve just seen him, that’s all. So I wondered.”

“He’s nuts. Whacked. Crazy as a loon. PTSD, psychosis, God knows what. He was in the psych ward till the eighties, when they emptied those places out. Now he lives with his sister.”

“In town?”

“When she can keep him there. A lot of the time he sleeps on the beach. Which is illegal.”

“Even if it’s your own property?”

“It’s not his property. It belongs to the Nauk. Alena used to call the police sometimes, but they couldn’t do much. Take him home, fine him. But it’s not like he has any money. His sister would have to pay. And then a few days later he’d be back again. Shit.”

The roach had slipped from his lips and fallen into his lap, and he couldn’t pick it up without taking his hand off the wheel. “Sorry, but can you . . . ?”

Carefully I lifted the damp roach from a fold in the denim as the Jeep hummed along the road. I could feel the heat radiating from him as though he burned inside his body like the sun. I wondered if he had dropped it on purpose.

“It must be cold, sleeping on the beach,” I said. “Even in summer.”

“There’s a kind of shack in the dunes. Sometimes he sleeps there.”

“Oh!” I said. “Maria Hallett’s shack?”

McManus barked a laugh. “Women love that story. It has everything. Forbidden love, the fair-minded outlaw, a hint of the supernatural, and a tragic ending.” Awkwardly, I raised the stub to his lips, but he shook his head. We were through the town now, the Jeep purring smoothly. Not sure what to do with the roach, I just held it, moist from his mouth. Still hot. Then I thought, What the hell, and I raised it to my own lips to see if it would draw.

“Did Alena like it?” I asked, trying not to choke on the harsh smoke. “The story, I mean.”

“Alena? Alena ate it up,” he said. “Who would have thought. She wasn’t usually sentimental. She liked to say she saw Maria’s ghost walking on the shore at midnight, when she went for a swim.” I waited for more, and after a moment or two he added, “I could never tell if she was making it up on purpose or if she believed it.”

“So it’s true?” I asked, looking at him sideways, feeling how tight my muscles had been as they began to relax. “She liked to swim at night? Alone?”

“It’s true.”

“She must have known it was dangerous.”

“That’s why she liked it. Sometimes I went with her, and then she would show off, swimming out till she was just a glimmer on the horizon. I’m awkward in the water, if she got into trouble there wouldn’t be much I could do. Then after a while she’d swim back, make circles around me. Oh, she was beautiful in the ocean! White and silver, her hair like black seaweed, her breasts floating on the surface, salty and silken as oysters, glowing like moons.” He looked to see what effect he was having on me.

“I guess she was a strong swimmer,” I said.

“She used to say she couldn’t drown if she wanted to. Not that she would want to.”

“But she did,” I said. “Drown, I mean.” I paused. “Anyway, that’s what I heard.”

He said nothing.

“You don’t believe it?” I looked at him: the handsome crooked face and the thick black hair; the flesh arm and the totem arm; the threadbare denim cutoffs hiding the seam between skin and shine. And what about the rest of what that denim might hide? Was that intact, or blasted away like his ear? My eyes slid down, but it was impossible to say.

“I have a different idea,” he said, and it took me a moment to remember what we were talking about. Oh, Alena.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Can’t prove it,” he said. “No point spreading rumors.” For a while he was quiet, but then he said, “It wasn’t as though there was a storm that night. Big waves or strong currents. And oh, she could swim! She was a rusalka. Do you know what that is?”

“No. What?”

“A Russian water sprite. A spirit of the water. The ocean was her element. She might swim for an hour or more, and I mean swim, not just float. And then, when she was done swimming, she would get out and stand on the beach, water streaming down her body, and dance herself dry, naked under the stars. You could almost hear Old Ben in the dunes rubbing his paintbrush! She was more alive than anyone I’ve ever known. She relished everything—art, sex, clothes, pain. Beautiful things, ugly things. She would try anything. She was always waiting for the next thing, the new thing. The thing she’d never seen or done before.” He turned and looked at me for longer than I liked, given that he was driving. Driving under the influence, even. Then he said, “She called me the night it happened, but I was out. She couldn’t reach me. She left me a message saying she wanted to show me something, but she didn’t say what. I’ll never forgive myself for not being home.” Then he jerked the wheel, hardly slowing as he swerved into a driveway where a mailbox, shaped like the head of some kind of beast, was nailed to a weathered fencepost, and roared to a stop near a dusty clump of rose of Sharon bushes, white flowers with blood-red throats. Using the little hook on one of the paddle appendages, he removed the key, tossed it in the air, and caught it with his hand. “Here we are.”

McManus’s studio was a long, ugly, flat-roofed building made of cinderblock and aluminum siding. The concrete floor was spotless, the ranks of low metal shelves along the wall filled with cans and tubes, jars and bottles, rolls of tape and boxes of tools. There was a big table saw and a lathe, and a lot of other equipment, only some of which I recognized. A heavy curtain of clear plastic divided the room in two, and on the far end I could see a rank of computers and tape recorders, monitors and projectors.

McManus had walked from the Jeep to the studio—he could walk quite well on his prosthesis—but once inside, he dropped into a low wheelchair in which he zipped around the room with the speed and agility of a big cat. “I thought we’d look at some slides first,” he said. “Older work. All right with you?”

“Whatever you like.”

We went into a kind of office off the main room. An old metal desk held a laptop, a telephone, a metal basket of papers, a cluster of pill bottles, a big bottle of whiskey, and an out-of-date calendar with photographs of buxom surfing amputees. “Pull up a chair,” he said.

It was a mistake to have smoked, even just the one toke. My mind didn’t seem quite tethered inside my skull, as though it might go floating away at any moment, like a balloon clutched by a child.

“This is some of the work from my last show,” McManus said, powering up the laptop. On the screen, images like the one Sloan had shown me clicked by: brightly colored bits of things that seemed at first abstract—patterns, smears, blobs—or like extreme close-ups of life under a microscope. Except that, as you looked more closely, you began to find yourself identifying some of the parts. A fingertip. A bit of hair clinging to a bit of scalp. Those were clear. Also, more mysteriously, names drifted up from my brain and attached themselves to things I knew I’d never seen: ligament, kidney, kneecap. Or who knew? Maybe I’d seen pictures—illustrations—in some high school biology textbook. Not that there was anything illustrative here. These images demonstrated nothing useful about the kneecap except that it was better to keep it, if possible, inside the knee.

“Of course, you can’t really get a sense of the scale,” McManus said. “But this is an installation image, and you can see the person standing in front—there. So that gives you some idea.”

My God—the pictures had to be ten feet high! Better not to imagine it. I cast about for something to say. “How did you make these?”

“Different ways. I used Photoshop to collage a lot of the individual images together, and to manipulate the elements in various ways. To make them brighter, or change the color, or to make the outlines sharper. The raw material, I got some of it from the internet, and some from guys I know. Combat photographers, but also just guys who are over there with phones. They save things for me. They know what I like.” He wheeled closer in the dimness, the little laptop wheezing. He was like an air mass, I could feel the pressure of his closeness in a tightening band around my head. “You see that?” He pointed to a ragged pink thing on the screen with something round and whitish protruding from it. “You see what that is?” I shook my head. He tapped the keyboard to enlarge it, and then I saw. It was an eyeball, swimming in a ragged sea of flesh. “Sometimes you get a gift like that,” McManus said.

“A gift?”

“The man it belonged to is dead. It doesn’t matter to him whether I use it or not. The eye is a miraculous organ. You, more than most people, should know that.” He reached out and touched my eye, the tip of his finger coolly tracing the brow, the lid, the hard ocular bone. I felt sure, had I not closed it, he would have touched the jellied eyeball itself. “I bet you’ll never look at an eye the same way again,” he said softly.

I pulled away, blinking. But I knew it was true, what he had said. “That’s not enough. It’s not enough to make someone say they’ll never look at something the same way again. You have to do more.”

“More, like what?” His breath made currents in the air I could almost see, as though he were blowing smoke through water.

“Transform it. Make it yours. It can’t just be the material, it has to also be you.”

He took my hand from my lap and pulled it toward him. Gently, he placed it on his left arm and closed it around the border where flesh met prosthesis. “What about that?” he said. “Would you say that’s the material and also me?”

I ran my fingers lightly across his arm, the soft and the hard. What had Celia Cowry said? If you could make a sculpture the texture of skin . . . But you couldn’t, it wasn’t possible, not if you tried for a million years.

Now he leaned forward again. His hair grazed my ear as he reached across me for my other hand, then took it and laid this one on his thigh, again straddling the flesh and the nonflesh. It was as though we had invented a new form of dancing. “Feel it,” he said, pressing my hand into his leg. “Sculpture is made to be touched.”

I pressed my palm into the seam, feeling the give on one side, the resistance on the other. I stared down at our hands, mine touching the cloth, rubbing it, the broad oblong of his covering mine, and I thought: This is the place where life and art meet! Literally!

And then I thought, I’ve got to get ahold of myself.

I let go of his body and stood shakily up. I folded my two reclaimed hands in front of me. “What else did you want me to see?” I said.

He looked up from the chair, grinning. His totem arm rested in his lap at such an angle that all the wide-eyed faces seemed to gape at me. “It’s an installation,” he said. “It’s called Battlefield III, with Screams.”

“Where is it?”

“You sure you’re ready?”

“Just show me it,” I said.

Back in the main room, he pulled the dividing curtain open like an impresario. A section of the space was marked off with black electrical tape, forming a sort of stage. At the back of the stage, on the wall, was a photograph, eight feet high and perhaps twice as wide.

My first thought, as my mind scrabbled to postpone recognition, was to wonder how he had mounted it. And then the picture careened into focus, the images slamming into my mind.

The photograph showed a battlefield: a wide dusty-beige expanse of ground under a dusty blue-white sky. It was like a hundred of the works I’d just been looking at stitched together into a single coherent scene. Bodies, mangled or burned, lay in impossible positions, ripped open, missing vital parts, visible in stunning detail. A shattered and bloody arm hung in a bush. A foot with part of a leg was propped on some rubble. There was blood—raw streams and dark lurid puddles of it—crimson and rusty, a study in red—and what I took to be guts, though I’d never knowingly seen human guts. Some of it, thankfully, was concealed by oily smoke that billowed and ballooned across the brown dirt and the flat sky like charcoal scribbles in a Cy Twombly.

And then there were the faces. The parts of the faces.

The objects lying on the studio floor were easier to look at only because you knew they were false—made by hand or machine from plastic or foam, paint and glue and God knew what else. At least, despite the real forays into flesh by Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, and others, I presumed they were fake. Even so, they were revolting—pink and oozing, blackened and bilious green with specks of yellow and white. A bloated, blasted torso extruding slimy strings of viscera. A leg split open from thigh to ankle, with the bone sticking through. A pink seashell-like ear. A white hand. My eyes skated across the surface, unwilling to settle. Look, I told myself. Look!

That was my job.

“Wait a sec,” McManus said. He spun himself to the sound wall and hunched over it, pressing buttons, turning dials. From all corners of the room, like a sudden wind from hell, the sounds of human wailing and groaning swept through the space, increasing in volume, pain, number, and intensity like a vise tightening or a migraine blooming. Wanting to run, I stayed where I was, the sound clinging to me like an odor, abrading my skin, invading my synapses so that I couldn’t think. McManus was watching me: his handsome mask, his totem arm, his shiny leg, and his leg of flesh. Here was a man who had lifted himself from the ashes and literally remade himself. I stood still, pretending attention. Was this art? Was it obscenity, propaganda?

Was it a hostile, manipulative scam?

“There you go,” he called. “The full sensory experience! Every channel engaged, every receptor on the body enthralled. The pores on your skin blazing with sensation.” He wheeled himself over to where I stood, drenched with sweat as if I were melting. It was true, it was a full sensory experience. My body was a drum, my heart a fist pounding on a locked door, my breath a ragged sheet flapping on a line. The noise was so loud it was hard to breathe—my pursed lips sipped air like a rabbit sipping water from a bottle—and like a rabbit, caught in an open meadow by the yellow eye of a hawk, I stayed very still and prayed to be invisible. This was lightning, this was acid. It was a single engulfing flame.

The cool metal of McManus’s chair grazed my thigh. I could smell him—him and his work, indistinguishable: perspiration and burning plastic, hard steel and salt and pot. The pungent oceanic stink of whale’s breath. “I doubt you saw anything like this at the Midwestern Museum of Art.”

“Is all your work about war?” I asked, taking a step sideways.

“War is just an occasion,” he replied, “not a subject. My work is about the human body. It’s about abjection. You know. The gossamer line between beauty and decay.”