Crazy for Cornelia (8 page)

“Max, I need your help now. My mother died.” He felt the hollow place in his stomach grow, regretting that he’d used his mother’s
death for sympathy. “I need to make Saint Sebastian perfect so I can sell it.”

“Are you current with the school payments?”

“Only one behind. I can make it up out of my first check,” Kevin said. “I’ve got a new job.”

“The school says no.” He shrugged in a European way, suggesting that he was stifled by unbending authority.

“Max, I’ve been paying them for four years. They can cut me a little slack.”

“Pfft. The money is not for the
school
,” Max said with a sneer. “It is motivation for you. When you sacrifice, you concentrate. You want a cheap education? All
through the city, there are incompetent glass-makers. Go watch them make a bad fire.”

“Max, I really need an hour with you now. Just a little time on the halo.”

Max turned away from Kevin and walked out of the men’s room, letting the door swing back.

“Put a suit on,” his mentor grumbled without turning back. “I’ll give you twenty minutes.”

Kevin first put Saint Sebastian in a safe place, the room where the
students kept their large pieces. He left him between a green sign for Heineken whose red star was too big, making it look
like an old sign for a Holiday Inn, and a respectable neon Fat Elvis in the Las Vegas lounge suit.

He quickly put on one of the Mylar suits, and carried a black Pyrex face mask under his arm.

“Look,” Max told Kevin when he arrived at his instructor’s work-table. “My new pieces. Look at the bends. Perfect bends.”

Kevin studied them, but it wasn’t for the bends. As always, each piece revealed a technical perfection he couldn’t fault.
Who could? They were critic-proof. A neon square. A neon circle. A neon cross.

What dazzled Kevin was the shimmer of that subtle, elusive Max-glow that Kevin couldn’t bring to his own work. Compared to
Max’s little pieces, the colors of Kevin’s saint still looked as crass as the logo for a massage parlor. He could shrug off
the saint’s harshness, like Jessica Fernandez did, as “irony.” But that “irony” crap was for people who couldn’t do any better.
His mom’s saint deserved more.

“I have to make it glow like your pieces,” Kevin said before he strapped on his mask.

“To make neon glow, you must be scalded.”

“Scolded?” Kevin said. “I get scolded all the time.”

“
Scalded
. Your heart feels scalded now, from your
mutter
dying, does it?”

Mutter?
His mother, Kevin realized. “Yeah, that’s how it feels.”

It was the first time Max had ever spoken to him in a personal way.

“Good,” Max told him. “Today, maybe you become a better liar.”

“What?”

“Art is a lie that makes us see the truth,” Max intoned. “You were always a bad liar, so you make crooked halos.”

Kevin felt outclassed in their exchange, as he always did. Max had gone to art school in Europe. He used words like “deconstruct.”

Max motioned for Kevin to switch on the burner. Kevin tightened the mask over his face, pulled his silver hood up over his
head, and zipped it around the mask. He picked up a length of glass tubing for a new, improved halo. Feet apart, he faced
his fire ready to bombard the tube and bend it into shape.

Kevin’s hands didn’t work.

Normally, his hands took over from signals his brain fed them. Today, his fingers inside the gloves felt like fat, mushy sausages.

He tried to focus his mind to send the signals. Place the tube in the fire. Move into it, using the gravity of his body. But
his body seemed to produce no gravity.

A critical light had expired somewhere in his brain. Kevin stepped back from the workstation.

“What is the matter?” Max frowned.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled through the mask.

Then Kevin turned away from Max and walked out of the studio with his space suit on. He reached the freight elevator door,
and as he closed it, he saw that Max hadn’t budged from his flameworking bench, his hands on his hips.

“That suit is school property,” Max shouted in a surprisingly theatrical voice, full of fury.

“I’ll be back,” Kevin mumbled into his Pyrex face mask.

He knew it was a lie when he said it, but the fullness of that didn’t hit him until he stumbled onto the street. His space
suit caused passersby to give him plenty of room. He felt his confusion like cement, hardening in his chest and setting into
his brain. He needed to sit down at the curb.

Inside the mask, Kevin began to cry because he just realized, in his heart, that he would never see his saint or his mom again.

I
nteresting bunch of species. Colorful.”

Sergeant DiBlasi tossed out microcomments as she peered into the fish tank in Cornelia’s room. But she never took her eyes
off her, Cornelia noticed, and kept her feet fourteen inches apart at all times, ready in case Cornelia should attack.

“Big tank, too, considering,” the sergeant said. “Like in a seafood restaurant.”

“You have to give fish a lot of space. Usually people just crowd them together.” Cornelia got up off the edge of her bed dressed
in her robe, since her wardrobe closet still had a padlock on it. She stood at the tank with Sergeant DiBlasi and pointed
out the different varieties of exotic fish.

“That’s Alice, the blue one wiggling her tail. She’s always poking around in the other fishes’ business. The big red one I
call the Red Queen. See how she holds court? Other fish come to her.”

“Alice in Wonderland,” Sergeant DiBlasi said, nodding. “You feel like Alice?”

“Sure,” Cornelia said. “She couldn’t leave either.”

Sergeant DiBlasi glanced around Cornelia’s room, probably seeking out telling details, though she would find none. The room
was naked. Once she had personal things, the small pieces of crystal and
other objects her mother had collected from Europe, Central America, Asia, all over the world.

Then, one year ago, when she began her project, the Electric Girl had rolled up her sleeves and redecorated for efficiency.
That way, she could just grab her hard hat every day and go to work with an uncluttered mind.

She had stripped the walls and laid bare the tabletops to keep things simple and avoid distractions. She had given away her
sound system, even very personal things like her yearbook from the Gramercy School. Then she redecorated in functional red
and black like a car battery, for life simplification, but also to put off visitors. Cornelia left only one personal touch,
a photograph of a woman with blond hair to her shoulders who pursed her lips in a little smile. The silver-framed photo sat
on a metal table next to her bed.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Divorced?”

“She died.”

“Sorry for your loss,” the sergeant told her, like a recording.

Cornelia knew exactly when people she had just met made up their minds about her. Something settled in their eyes as though
they had processed whatever data they needed, and would now treat her like a person they had just filed into inventory. These
days, people formed their opinions about her more quickly. She observed that Sergeant Di-Blasi completed her mental file right
after seeing her mother’s picture. She imagined the short form of the file would be
Spoiled Nutcase
with a few minor notations.

It saddened her. At times like this, she would love to share her secrets with a strong person like Sergeant DiBlasi, who did
important work and knew a lot about life.

“What do you do in the police department?” she asked her.

“Armed robbery interdiction. Professional crews that hold up stores.”

“Don’t they shoot at you?”

The sergeant gave her a hard look. “Only if you let ’em.”

Yes. She admired Sergeant DiBlasi. Especially the way she spoke, in clipped sentences to avoid superfluous chatter. She smiled,
seeing
both sides of the Alps in the sergeant’s face. She had a Germanic squareness to her features, but her coloring was olive,
Italian, and her lips rather full. Her hair was clean and glossy, worn without any particular style.

“Grounded tonight.” The sergeant smiled tightly. “See a problem with that, Ms. Lord?”

“No.” That much was true. She would have no problem with Sergeant DiBlasi. “But please call me Cornelia.”

She felt a passing wave of guilt for what she was about to do.

Chester and Tucker Fisk settled into old club chairs, each angled slightly toward the fire O’Connell had built in Chester’s
study.

Tucker sipped mineral water. Then he flipped open the disk drive of his custom laptop, made by their business partner, Koi
Industries. He intended to put on a show for Chester. With visuals.

Chester watched Tucker’s agility on the laptop, feeling a ping of jealousy tinged with fear. The same model always jammed
or crashed when he fumbled with it. He felt a clammy discomfort with the way they relied on their computers, Tucker’s generation
of cyberfiends.

Tucker’s laptop computer was an unfathomable mystery to Chester. Made of tungsten with an eerie, almost extraterrestrial haze,
it was flatter than a comic book. When Tucker popped it open by punching his personal code into the secret clasp, the wafer-thin
halves revealed a flat, heat-activated keyboard on one side, marked with letters and symbols so microscopic Chester would
have to fish out his tortoiseshell half-glasses to read them. Even then, many of the coded commands made no sense. But Tucker
played his machine like an accomplished musician, making incredibly sharp and detailed pictures spring up on the silvery screen.

Only Tucker knew about Chester’s technophobia, that he would fire up a space shuttle sooner than he would switch on a computer.
He kept it one of Lord & Company’s darkest business secrets. Investment bankers were expected to be comfortable with technology.
In reality, Chester imagined himself a dumb and frightened turtle, head pulled back in its shell, attempting to cross the
superhighway of global data. Without Tucker, he would be a flattened turtle.

Chester marveled at how easily Tucker Fisk controlled things. He
studied his twenty-eight-year-old protégé, whose veins coursed with the ancient blood of Anglo-Saxon warriors. He was dressed
in an Armani Black Label suit. The fine fabric was a bit vain for Chester, who took a certain pride in buying his suits off
the rack just as he had in college, even though he could afford suits of spun gold if he chose. Tucker’s blond hair, darker
than Cornelia’s, was brushed back in waves from a face with a heavy, pleasing coat of flesh that revealed little in the way
of bone structure.

More than anything else Chester envied about him, Tucker knew how to take risks without hurting himself. At Yale, he had made
quarterback on pure fearlessness. He wore an oversized protective helmet pumped full of air so he could wait that extra second
to snap the ball without getting hurt too badly when they knocked him down. Chester searched his poker-player eyes, sharp
as industrial metals.

He thought of the way those eyes danced on the day Tucker plowed through Lord & Company for Chester like a delighted Grim
Reaper, the smug executives who had sneered at Chester begging to do exactly as he and Tucker instructed them. What a triumph,
walking through Lord & Company and for the first time actually feeling like the boss. Tucker had created that moment for him,
this boy who could forge mega-deals and intimidate older executives. With the magical tungsten wafer on his lap, Tucker could
handle any problem.

With the exception of Cornelia.

“Perhaps you could explain,” Chester finally asked him, “how she wound up in the Plaza fountain.”

“She has a wild streak, but I’m working on that,” Tucker explained in his careful baritone with its faint edge of Young Man
In A Hurry. “I arranged a special Saturday for us. No pressure on her. I invited my college roommate, Tony, and his wife along.
Corny didn’t drink, and I thought I saw her take her medication. Anyway, she seemed okay. We all drove out to the airport
to go dogfighting.”

“Dogfighting?” Chester felt strangled. “My God, what were you thinking of?”

“It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. It’s just for thrills. More like a roller-coaster ride.”

Chester glowered at him in disbelief. “She… hates… flying.”

Tucker’s eyes didn’t even flicker. “I know. But I figured this was a
good way to cure her. Look the devil right in the eye. Watch this video we took. Corny started out a little nervous, but
once we got into a turn fight, she had a great time. Here… My friend Tony has two old fighter planes he keeps out at Teterboro.”

Tucker showed Chester a grainy video on his laptop screen. It was taken from a camera mounted in the cockpit of what looked
like a restored World War II combat plane. Tucker sat in the pilot’s seat with Cornelia behind him, both tightly strapped
in and wearing tan aviator suits and goggles. Chester could see, through the glass canopy of the plane, a crisp blue sky with
puffy clouds circling the aircraft.

“These are T-6 fighter trainers,” Tucker said, “made in the 1940s. They’re in perfect shape, rebuilt engines. The only difference
is, Tony had laser machine guns built on to tell when you score a hit on the other plane.”

Chester fumed. But most of his pique was turned inward. He was the one who had, almost by default, abdicated his responsibility
for Cornelia to Tucker. What did he expect? The boy had led a charmed life. He had no reference point for understanding Cornelia’s
fragility.

“Tucker, sometimes I just don’t know. You had no business putting Cornelia at risk.”

Tucker shrugged. “She wasn’t. We showed the girls how to work their parachutes, just in case. And we gave them radios so we
could all talk while Tony and I fought.”

Now the video showed the yellow plane with Tucker and Cornelia taking off, apparently from a camera mounted on the wing of
the other plane.

“I taxied out and took off with Corny, and we flew in close formation until we got to the airspace they keep clear for Tony.”