Part 14

He has fallen. This does not surprise her. But the lack of feeling she experiences while watching him stumble does surprise her. She moves forward, covering the distance between them in about twenty paces, until she stands over him. He rolled from his hands and knees onto his back and now looks up at her. She gazes down into his face. A breeze touches her briefly, drawing her hair across her eyes, and she looks up at clouds scudding across the moon. She can only see one or two stars, the moon is so bright. Her left hand lifts to brush the hair back from her forehead and she realizes her right hand is still raised. She lets it fall to her side. He flinches.

She inhales deeply, still looking at the moon. A luminous night, the moon sheds its silvery radiance across everything from her own face to the fallen form at her feet to the weed-choked, vacant lot where she stands. She knows he must be in an agony of conjecture as to what she will do next. No reason to prolong his torment.

She sighs, a slow exhalation of breath that accompanies her eyes back to his pale face. The fingers of her right hand quiver, loosen and then release their grip on the nine millimeter. It falls, no longer needed, into the dirt very near his arm. He looks fleetingly at the gun and then back at her, his eyes wide in a fusion of disbelief and fear. She knows he won’t even try to reach for the weapon, his hands clutching desperately at his abdomen. She bends down momentarily, feeling in the rough gravel for something that will serve. Her fingers close around a chunk of broken concrete and she hefts it as she turns to him.

His breath catches in his lungs. Her face is emotionless as she straddles his body. He groans in pain as she does this.

“What….?” He begins weakly.

But she puts her index finger to her lips.

“Shhhh…” she whispers, reaching the finger out to touch his temple, in an attitude of tenderness, running it down the side of his face, over the strong cheekbone, tracing his jaw. She continues the delicate touch further downward, past his throat, along his chest. It feels strange, having him between her legs again.

His breathing begins to quicken, as if he knows what she is thinking.

“Please,” he gasps.

She blinks slowly, pursing her lips almost in disappointment. “Oh come now, “she says to him. “Take it like a man.” And with that, she slams the chunk of concrete into his face.

The crunching impact of rock against bone, and the first spurt of blood, sends a shock up through her arm to explode in her brain. Rage suddenly flares to vaporize the numbness. She drives the concrete into his face once more, and his body shudders.

She raises her hand again and again, smashing the rock downward with all of the force in her being; over and over, crushing anything recognizable from his skull. She keeps doing this until she realizes she is no longer striking bone and tissue, but solid, blood-soaked earth.

Gradually, the rage recedes and gradually her arm ceases its destructive rhythm. She becomes conscious that she is still sitting astride his lifeless body. As the power drains away, a cold emptiness remains. She rises and staggers a few feet. Sinking to the ground, she holds up the rock in one trembling hand. It glistens in the moonlight. She wrenches back her arm, and throws the bludgeon as far as she can across the empty lot.

She wipes the back of a weary hand across her face, leaving a dark smear on her forehead. Feeling they are wet, she looks at her hands. They are crimson to the elbows. Bathed in the grey moonlight, her arms appear black. She knows she is spattered with blood. The thought makes her head swim. She closes her eyes as a tear slides down her cheek…

The windows rattled. Eleanor opened her eyes. Moonlight shone through the blinds, forming a disturbingly regular pattern on the ceiling. She sat up, blinking and leaned forward for a moment to rest her head in her hands. It was windy again outside. She remembered that it might rain. Visceral images flashing across her mind. She shook her head in an attempt to clear them.

The bathroom floor was as cold, like the water she splashed on her face. Once the light was switched on, she was oddly surprised as she looked in the mirror to find she wasn’t covered in blood. She was tired. And the memory of the dream made her feel ill. Her hands still shook. She cast her eyes around, but Harvest and the others were still missing. She wondered what they were doing, away for so long. Eleanor felt perversely lonely when they weren’t around and hated herself for it.

She glanced across the counter at his old things, still arranged in an orderly fashion under the mirror. Shaving cream, straight razor, toothbrush. Why do I keep these things around? Certainly not to inspire any warm reminiscences. Stepping across to his side of the counter, she reached out for the razor, picking it up gingerly, as if it would jump out of her unsteady fingers. Eleanor held it up by the handle, and then turned her hand so that it fell open, the blade reflecting a twisted segment of her face back into her eyes.

She wondered at how tenuous her hold really was. If a thin, polished sheet of metal was all it took to dissolve her life away in a matter of minutes, should she even really be here? She wished Harvest were here, so she could pose the question to him. The blade winked at her, flashing cheerfully in the fluorescent light.

The windows rattled again. She shivered and softly replaced the razor. Her hand clicked open the medicine cabinet. In an orange pill bottle, she found two small, white tablets which she swallowed. Her own eyes replicated in the glass looked out at her. At last, she went into the hallway, wondering how she should pass the rest of the night.

As she climbed the stairs to her studio, she thought that if the red ground she’d put across the canvas earlier were dry, she might do some more work on the piece. Halfway up the stairs, she stopped. A pair of red Mary-Janes sat exactly in the center of one of the steps, twinkling in the yellow light from above.

She stared down at the shoes, unable to place them in reality in this precise moment. She almost reached out one finger to touch them, then felt the action would be ludicrously silly and picked them up instead. She carried the shoes to the attic door and opened it hesitantly. Hadn’t she just done this very thing? Her feet took the attic stairs deliberately, two at a time. Once the bare light bulb was lit, Eleanor shuffled through the boxes. Finding the right one, she pulled it open, half expecting to find the shoes already inside. With hands that shook, she put the shoes back into the box and replaced it once again.

With the attic door locked behind her, she moved thoughtfully down the hall into the studio. The easel stood before her in the dark, awaiting her as thunder growled in the distance. Her hands itched to create something. Create or destroy, she decided. It didn’t matter which.

She picked up a paintbrush and grabbed a tube of paint, squeezing a mountain of white onto the palette. She jabbed the brush into the paint and began to lay it on the canvas in broad vertical strokes. She painted the shape in segments first, like pieces of a skeleton, adding more and more layers. Building up a heavy impasto, she worked feverishly, using shades of grey to create form, imply shadows. She plunged the brush into the water jar and then rolled it through some red, pushing the water-laden bristles onto the top of the canvas and letting the thin paint run down the surface of the image, droplets outlining the thick build-up that formed the main subject. She did this again and again. Finally, she dropped the brush to coat her hands with black paint, smearing two hand prints onto the canvas. When she stood back to see what she had done, Eleanor was breathless.

Out of the depths of a black abyss, two white and delicate arms reached upward, palms aloft, fingers curled. The wrists were crisscrossed with pale lines, the hands seeming to plead in a gesture of agonized supplication. Lines of red ran down from the top of the canvas, sliding through the fingers and along the palms and down the wrists like rivulets of blood. A black streaked wall behind the hands was marked by two dark hand prints with elongated fingers, as if whoever made them was being pulled downward. Eleanor sank to the floor, staring up at the easel. She couldn’t say how long she had been there when she heard a familiar voice.

“Look what you’ve been doing.” Harvest leaned into the room, stepped around her and put one hand to his chin, studying the painting. “Now this I like.” Baz and Pitchtongue followed behind and sat on either side of him.

She blinked slowly, the very effort of looking up at him through red-rimmed eyes making her head hurt.

“What do you call it?”

She shrugged.

“Well, we have to call it something,” prodded Harvest. “It can’t be one of those untitled paintings. That’s just stupid.”

“How about Rhinoceros Candy?” suggested Baz.

“Right,” said Pitchtongue, laughing. “Cuz that’s not stupid.”

Eleanor put her blackened hands to her head, which was beginning to pound.

“It looks like a rubber chicken,” said Pitchtongue critically.

Eleanor rubbed her temples. “Shut up, Liar,” she told him faintly.

He turned around and focused his catlike eyes on her. “Did you paint it with your eyes closed? What’s it supposed to be?”

“It’s a lobster!” exclaimed Baz.

Harvest chuckled. “Oh, come now,” he chided gently. “You two know better than that. It’s quite obvious what Eleanor has painted here.”

“Oh, really?” asked Eleanor ironically. “Do you mind telling us what I’ve painted here then?”

“Of course,” his reply was smooth. “You’ve painted The Question. The great human question. The question every man on earth has plied his intellect on.”

Baz’s mouth hung open as he watched Harvest. “What’s the question?” he wondered aloud.

Harvest turned to Eleanor. “The question…,” in the moment he said it, his voice seemed to multiply, not growing in volume, but seeming to speak out of twenty different throats, “…is there a god?”

Eleanor shuddered a little at the sound, then shook it off. She smiled humorlessly. She went to the sink and ran her hands under water.

“Well hell, Harvest,” she told him, reaching for a towel to rub her hands dry. “That’s not a question that bothers me. I had the answer to that a long time ago.”

“What’s the answer?” piped Baz.

Cocking his head to one side as he studied Eleanor’s painting, Pitchtongue told him.“That God is a giant incorporeal pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves."