The Killer in My Eyes (2 page)

The woman realized what he was doing, and the knowledge that she was part of that creation brought on another orgasm, even stronger than the previous one, which forced her to curl up in a foetal position.

Drained, Jerry slid to the floor until he was lying with his face turned towards the large windows that looked out on the East River. Even though they were on the seventh floor, he could still sense the reflection of the full moon on the dirty water. He moved his head slightly and there it was – a luminous disc in the middle of the window on the left.

The previous evening, the radio had said there would be an eclipse – which would be visible from that part of the coast. At that very moment, a thin black border was starting to gnaw at the impassive circle of the moon.

Jerry started trembling with emotion.

His mind went back to 11 September 2001. The clamour after the first plane struck – the screams, the sirens, the unmistakable sounds of panic – had come in through his open windows. He had gone up to the roof of his building on Water Street and from there had watched as the second plane struck – and then as the Twin Towers collapsed. It was a master piece of destruction, a perfect example of how civilization could only be redeemed through its own annihilation. And if that was true of civilization, how much truer was it of art, which represented the most advanced outpost of civilization. The fact that thousands of people had died in that collapse did not greatly concern him. Everything had its price, and those deaths were small change compared with what the world had gained from the event.

That was the day he had decided to change his name to Jerry Ko, a deliberately transparent play on words, evoking Jericho, the Biblical city whose impregnable walls had fallen at the mere sound of a trumpet. He was going to bring the walls down too, he had resolved – and himself with them.

As for his real name, he had preferred to forget it, along with the whole of his previous life. There was nothing in that life that was worth preserving.

The nameless woman was crawling towards him, her movements made awkward by the paint drying on her body. He felt her hand touch his shoulder, and then her breath, still hot with pleasure, next to his ear, saying, ‘Jerry, that was really—’

Jerry clapped – and a sensor immediately switched off all the lights except for the shifting colours of the TV screens. Then he placed a hand on the woman’s back and pushed her roughly away.

Not now
, he thought.

‘Not now,’ he said.

‘But I . . .’

The woman’s voice faded to a whimper as Jerry pushed her even further away.

‘Be quiet and don’t move,’ he ordered.

She lay there motionless and Jerry again looked at the circle of the moon, by now half swallowed by the darkness. He didn’t care that the phenomenon he was witnessing had a scientific explanation. All he cared about was the allegorical significance of it.

He kept watching the eclipse, sinking into the after-effects of the drugs and the physical effort, until the moon became a black disc surrounded by light hanging in the sky of Hell.

He closed his eyes and, as he drifted into sleep, Jerry Ko hoped the moon would never return.

The woman opened her eyes and immediately closed them again: the daylight coming in through the windows was too bright. She had drunk a lot of champagne the previous night, and now her tongue felt furred and there was an awful taste in her mouth.

She realized that she had been sleeping completely naked on the floor and that it was the cold that had woken her. She shivered and curled up, searching for warmth in the same position in which the previous evening she had sought escape from a truly overwhelming orgasm. It had been a shattering experience. For the first time ever, she had felt completely part of something, something she would remember for the rest of her life. She kept her eyes closed for a little while longer, as if to preserve the images of that amazing event, and her whole body broke out in goose bumps, partly from the cold, partly from the excitement.

Then, with a sigh, she cautiously opened her eyes again. The first thing she saw was Jerry Ko’s back, still naked, the now congealed red paint looking scaly. The loft was lit by the blue glow of early morning, as well as the flashing of the TV screens. They had probably been on all night. The woman wondered if that was the work that had . . .

As if becoming aware of a change behind him, Jerry turned and looked at her with eyes so red, she had the impression that the paint he had smeared himself with last night had gone inside him. He stared at her as if he had never seen her before. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

The question unsettled her, and all at once she felt absurdly embarrassed by her own nakedness. She sat up and put her arms around her legs. Her skin felt strange because of the congealed paint, as though a thousand tiny needles were pricking her simultaneously. A few coloured scales fell on the white sheet beneath her.

‘I’m Meredith.’

‘Meredith, of course.’

Jerry Ko gave a slight nod, as if there was something inevitable about the name. Then he turned his back on her again and resumed dipping his hands straight into the pots of paint and spreading colours on the sheet. Meredith had the impression he was somehow erasing her presence from the room, or from the world.

His hoarse voice surprised her as she was trying to get up without causing abrasions to her skin. ‘Don’t worry about the paint. It’s non-toxic watercolour, the kind children play with. Just take a shower and it’ll disappear. The bahroom’s at the back on the left.’

Jerry heard her steps as she walked away – then, after a while, the roar of the shower.

Wash and go, Meredith
. . .

He knew the kind of woman she was. If he gave her the slightest encouragement, she’d stick to him like a tattoo, and he wasn’t going to have that. She had been a means to an end and nothing more. Now that her usefulness was over, she had to disappear. In his mind, he had a vague memory of meeting her the previous evening at an opening to which his dealer, LaFayette Johnson, had dragged him. Somewhere on Broadway, he seemed to recall. It was a photographic show, displaying the work of a journalist who had lived for a couple of years out in the wilds of Africa, photographing the members of a supposedly unspoiled tribe.

He had wandered for a long time among those faces and voices and clothes without the slightest curiosity as to who was who and what was what. After a while, the boredom of it all had started to cancel the effect of the ecstasy pill he had taken before leaving home and he longed to be somewhere more exciting.

‘Are you Jerry Ko?’

He had turned towards the voice, to be confronted by a woman so grey, she seemed made of vicuna. Her bright red lipstick was the only splash of colour, although the worship in her eyes shone as brightly as it did.

‘Do I have any alternative?’ he had replied.

The woman had not picked up on the dismissal implicit in his words. She had kept going – in love perhaps with the sound of her own voice, like all the people around them. ‘I know your work. I saw your last show. It was so . . .’

Jerry would never know exactly what his last show had been like. He had continued to stare at the woman’s red lips as they moved, without hearing the words coming out of them . . . and that was when the idea had come to him.

Taking her by the arm, he had drawn her towards the door. ‘If you like my work, come with me.’

‘Where?’

‘To be part of the next one.’

Jerry remembered how readily she had obeyed when he had asked her to undress, and her excitement when he had started to splash her with paint.

He could still hear the sound of the shower. The paint was swirling down into the drain, like excrement.
Art and shit are the same thing
, he thought.
And there’s always someone who can sell either.

His exhaustion was starting to make itself felt. His eyes were stinging, his neck muscles aching. He needed something – anything – to help him out of this physical impasse. And there was only one person who could get it for him. He stood up, went to the telephone and lifted the receiver without caring about the fact that he was staining it with the fresh paint on his hands. He dialled a number, and before long a drowsy voice answered.

‘Who the fuck is this?’

‘LaFayette, it’s Jerry. I’m working and I need to see you.’

‘Christ, Jerry, it’s six in the morning.’

‘I don’t know what time it is. What I do know is, I need to see you – now.’

He put the receiver down without waiting for an answer. LaFayette Johnson would curse for a while and then get up and come running. Johnson owed most of what he had to Jerry, and it was only right for him to take care of his needs.

Jerry looked up and stared at his own image reflected in the mirror over the telephone. His painted face looked demonic. ‘It’s all going according to plan, Jerry Ko,’ he grinned. ‘All according to plan.’

Meredith’s return, also reflected in the mirror, jolted him out of this dialogue with himself. She had washed her hair and was wearing one of his robes, which hadn’t been laundered for a long time and was caked with paint.

Now that she had removed both the paint and any last trace of make-up, she looked vulnerable in the pitiless light of day. Jerry felt a kind of hatred for her, for the adoration in her eyes whenever she looked at him. He hated her profoundly – and at the same time envied her for being such a total nonentity.

‘Get your clothes and go. I have work to do.’

Meredith went red in the face. In silence, she started gathering her clothes from where they lay strewn on the floor, holding the robe with one hand to stop it opening as she bent. She turned her back on him and started getting dressed. Jerry watched as her nondescript body miraculously disappeared beneath her clothes. When she turned round to face him, she was again the grey woman of the previous night, but drained of the idea that had made her attractive to him for a few hours.

She held up the paint-stained robe. ‘Can I keep this?’

‘Of course.’

Meredith smiled. She hugged the robe to her chest and walked silently towards the door. Jerry thanked her mentally for sparing him a last look and a last nauseating farewell as she went out.

He was alone again. When he heard the noise of the elevator starting on its way down, he went and lay on his back in the middle of the sheet on the floor. Opening his arms wide, he gazed up at the image of his crucified body in the ceiling mirror.

He did not have the strength to pull himself together and get back to work. The TV screens continued to transmit their splashes of colour and their cruel, obscene images. The work – he thought of it as a totem – had been commissioned to be displayed in the huge lobby of the New York State Governor’s Residence in Albany. The day it was installed, in the presence of the governor and a distinguished audience, there had been a murmur of anticipation when it was switched on. As the images had succeeded one another, however, the murmur had gradually been replaced by a stony silence.

The Governor was the first to pull himself together. His stentorian voice had echoed through the vast space.

‘Turn that filth off!’

The totem had been switched off, but that did not put an end to the scandal. Jerry Ko was charged with defamation and obscenity, which had the effect of making him famous overnight. LaFayette Johnson, the gallery owner who was on his way now to supply him with drugs, had started to add noughts to the prices of his works.

The doorbell rang, and Jerry, without even bothering to put on any clothes, made his way through the chaos of his loft to the door. He was surprised to find it ajar. That idiot Meredith couldn’t have closed it properly on the way out. But if it was LaFayette, why hadn’t he come straight in without ringing?

When he opened the door wide, he saw a man standing out on the landing, shrouded in shadow. The light must be out of order and he couldn’t quite make out who it was. It certainly wasn’t LaFayette: this man was taller.

There was a moment’s pause, a sense of time suspended, like the lull before a summer storm. Then:

‘Hello, Linus. Aren’t you going to let an old friend in?’

It was a voice he hadn’t heard for a long time, and yet he recognized it immediately. Like everyone, Jerry Ko had fantasized often, especially under the influence of drugs, about his own death. He had wanted what every artist wants: to be the one to decide how it would happen – to choose, as it were, the colour and material of his own shroud.

When the man on the landing entered the room, Jerry knew that his fantasies were about to be overtaken by reality. As he looked the man in the eyes, he was barely aware of the gun he was holding. What he saw rather was a hand throwing a bucket of black paint over the questionable artwork he had called his life.

LaFayette Johnson parked his brand new Nissan Murano on the corner of Peck Slip and Water Street, took his keys from the ignition and bent down to pick up a small package hidden in a compartment under the driver’s seat. He got out of the car and locked it with the remote, then stretched and took a deep breath. A warm southerly breeze had risen, bringing with it a slightly brackish air and sweeping away the grey clouds of the past few days. Now, above his head, the sky was incredibly blue. But when you looked up, whether in the middle of the skyscrapers or in narrow streets like this one, all you could see was a small rectangle of it. In New York, the sun and the sky and a decent view were the privilege of the rich.