Will a Change of Owner Change Achilles’ Fortunes?
Someone in the audience yelled, “Get to the show, get to the show,” but at a table near the stage three men stopped drinking and began looking around the room, as if checking for anyone who recognized them.
The Artist—a giant doll, really, not a woman at all—perched on a high stool in the middle of the jerry-rigged stage and sucked in a breath. The Raven wound her hurdy-gurdy more slowly, and after another few seconds fell silent. The Body Artist’s program began.
It’s story hour, boys and girls, girls and boys. And everyone’s stories come together through the Body Artist. She is the blank canvas where your dreams come to life. Your dreams may be nightmares, but you’ll realize them all in the Artist’s body.
The screens began flashing images from embodiedart.com, first the Body Artist’s original Pieces of Flesh, the field of lilies growing from her vagina, the tiger mask, the winking eye. They switched to the more disturbing images of the woman-faced deer being savaged by dogs, the crucified woman with a spike through her vulva. A horrified murmur ran through part of the crowd, but others began yelling explicit sexual commands. At me. At my body.
“For the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance, I’m going to treat you to a fairy tale. It begins, as all good stories do:”
Once upon a time, there was a Chicago boy who loved to play football, loved to fool around with his buddies, loved beer. But, above all, he loved his country. So when his country invaded Iraq, he dropped football and a college scholarship and went off to war.
The screens showed pictures of Chad as a small boy splashing in a wading pool, then in his Lane Tech football uniform, finally as a soldier heading for Iraq.
He served cheerfully through his first two deployments, but the third time he was sent, his squad came under fire, and every one of them died except for him. They’d all worn body armor, but the armor had failed them.
Losing all his buddies at once, that was hard. Our hero served yet a fourth deployment before he was finally released, but he was never the same happy-go-lucky guy he’d been before. He was angry. Odd things set him off.
One of the odd things that set him off was seeing someone paint the logo of the body armor that he and his squad had worn across the Body Artist’s back.
I got up and began slowly revolving as Sanford Rieff followed with a spotlight. Rivka had covered my body with the logo for Tintrey’s Achilles shield, using a paint that showed up under an infrared light. There was a ripple of amazement at the display, while someone who had been to the shows where Nadia did her paintings cried in surprise, “That’s what that dead woman was painting over at the other club, remember?”
My soldier was so angry that he took out his old body armor and shot it. And that was when he saw his armor could no more stop a bullet than—my bare hand. This so enraged him that he wrote about it in his blog.
Man, there’s something I gotta get off my chest. There’s something I gotta get off your chests. All you out there, look at your armor. If it’s got that funny logo that looks like an ear of corn sprouting, get yourself new armor ASAP. My whole squad was killed on the road to Kufah because our armor wasn’t worth shit, and we all wore those corn shields. They’re made by Achilles. So go get yourself Ajax or any other brand and GET RID OF THE SPROUTING CORN!
The blog posting had taken a lot of work. I’d written out what I wanted it to say, and then John Vishneski and Marty Jepson kept rewriting it until they thought it sounded the way Chad would have written it.
I paused, hoping for an outcry from Rainier Cowles or Jarvis MacLean, but they were holding themselves still. Squinting through the spotlight, I saw Gilbert Scalia half start to his feet, but Cowles pulled him back down.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Off to one side, I saw my cousin’s unmistakable spiked hair. She was helping wait tables.
Well, boys and girls, you can imagine how happy—or not—the sprouting-corn company was to see this story going round the blogosphere. The company was making out like bandits, selling the Army sand-filled armor instead of the real deal. They began having corporate meetings, the kind where they muttered, “Can no one rid us of this meddlesome vet?” They didn’t know what to do. Then Fate intervened and played a rotten trick on the soldier.