Noah’s party’s raging all around me. Dad’s off at his parasite conference for the week. Christmas was a bust. And I just made an early New Year’s resolution, no, it’s a New Year’s revolution, and this is it: to return to Guillermo Garcia’s studio tonight and ask him to mentor me. So far since winter break began, I’ve chickened out. Because what if he says no? What if he says yes? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if the English guy is there? What if he isn’t? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if my mother breaks stone as easily as clay? What if this rash on my arm is leprosy?
Etc.
I put all such questions into The Oracle a moment ago and the results were conclusive. No time like the present, it was decided, egged on by the fact that people from Noah’s party—Zephyr included—kept knocking on my door, which was locked with a dresser in front of it. So out the window I went, sweeping the twelve sand-dollar birds I keep on the sill into my sweatshirt pocket. They’re not as lucky as four-leaf clovers or even red sea glass, but they’ll have to do.
I follow the yellow reflectors in the middle of the road down the hill, listening for cars and serial killers. It’s another white-out. It’s way spooky. And this is a really bad idea. But I’m committed to it now, so I start to run through the cold wet nothingness and pray to Clark Gable that Guillermo Garcia is just a regular sort of maniac and not a girl-murdering one and try not to wonder if the English guy will be there. Try not to think about his different-colored eyes and the intensity that crackled off him and how familiar he looked and how he called me a fallen angel and said, “You’re her,” and before too long all that not-thinking has gotten me to the studio door and light is pouring out from beneath it.
Drunken Igor must be inside. An image of him with his greasy hair and wiry black beard and blue calloused fingers fills my head. A very itchy image. He probably has lice. I mean, if I were a louse I’d choose him to colonize. All that hair. No offense, but ick.
I take a few steps back, see a bank of windows on the side of the building, all lit up—the studio space must be back there. An idea begins to take shape. A great idea. Because maybe there’s a way to spy inside his studio undetected . . . yes, like from that fire escape in back, I think, spotting it. I want to see the giants. I want to see Drunken Igor too, and from behind glass seems perfect. Brilliant, really. Before I know it, I’m over the fence, and hustling down a pitch-dark alley, one in which girls get bludgeoned with chisels.
It is very unlucky to fall on your face
(This is an honest-to-goodness entry. The wisdom of
Grandma’s bible knows no bounds.)
I reach the fire escape—alive—and start climbing, mouse-quiet, toward the light blaring from the landing.
What am I doing?
Well, I’m doing it. At the top of the stairs, I squat down and scoot like a crab under the windows. Once I’ve cleared them, I stand back up, hugging the wall as I peer into a huge brightly lit space—
And there they are. Giants. Giant giants. But different from the ones in the photographs. These are all couples. Across the room, enormous rock-beings are embracing as if on a dance floor, as if they’ve all frozen mid-move. No, not embracing, actually. Not yet. It’s like each “man” and “woman” were hurling themselves at each other passionately, desperately, and then time stopped before they could make it into each other’s arms.
Adrenaline courses through me. No wonder Interview had him taking a baseball bat to Rodin’s The Kiss. It’s so polite and, well, boring, in comparison—
My train of thought’s interrupted because bounding into the large space as if his skin can’t contain the uproar of blood within is Drunken Igor, but utterly transformed. He’s shaved, washed his hair, and put on a smock, which is spattered with clay, as is the water bottle he’s holding to his lips. There was no mention in his bio that he worked in clay. He guzzles from the bottle like he’s been wandering the desert with Moses, drains it, then tosses it into a trash can.
Someone’s plugged him in.
To a nuclear reactor.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World.
He moves toward a clay work-in-progress in the center of the room and when he’s within a few feet of it, he begins circling it slowly, like predator on prey, speaking in a deep rumble of a voice I can hear through the window. I look at the door, assuming someone’s about to follow him in, someone immersed in this conversation with him, like the English guy, I think with a flutter, but no one joins him. I can’t make out a word of what he’s saying. It sounds like Spanish.
Maybe he has ghosts too. Good. Something in common then.
All at once, he seizes on the sculpture and the suddenness of the action makes my breath catch. He’s a downed power line, the way he moves. Except now the power’s been cut and he’s pressing his forehead into the belly of the sculpture. No offense (again), but what a freak. He has his large open hands on each side of the work, and he’s just staying like that, unmoving, as if he’s praying or listening for a pulse or totally out of his gourd. Then I see his hands begin to move slowly up and down and across the surface of the piece, dragging clay off, bit by bit, throwing fistfuls onto the floor, but as he does this, he never once lifts his head to look at what he’s doing. He’s sculpting blind. Oh wow.
I wish Noah could see this. And Mom.
Eventually, he steps back in a stumbling kind of way as if pulling himself out of a trance, takes a cigarette pack out of a pocket in his smock, lights up, and, leaning against a nearby table, he smokes and stares at the sculpture, tilting his head from left to right. I’m recalling his bonkers biography. How he came from a long line of gravestone cutters in Colombia and began carving at the age of five. How no one had ever seen angels as magnificent as his, and people who lived near the cemeteries where his statues watched over the dead swore they heard them singing at night, swore that their heavenly voices carried into their homes, their sleep, their dreams. How it was rumored that the boy carver was enchanted or possibly possessed.
I’m going with the latter.
He’s the kind of man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down. Agreed, Mom, which puts me back at square one. How am I going to ask him to mentor me? This him is far more frightening than Igor.
He flicks his cigarette on the floor, takes a long sip of water from a glass on the table, then spits it from his mouth onto the clay—ah, gross!—then he works the moistened section furiously with his fingers, his eyes now glued to what he’s doing. He’s lost in it, drinking and spitting and molding, drinking and spitting and molding, sculpting like he’s trying to pull something he needs out of the clay, needs badly. As time passes and passes, I begin to see a man and a woman take shape—two bodies tangled up like branches.
This is wishing with your hands.
I don’t know how much time goes by as I and a handful of enormous stone couples watch him work, watch him rake his hands, dripping with wet clay, through his hair, over and over again, until it’s not clear if he’s making the sculpture or if the sculpture is making him.