Authors: Jan Richman
“Admiring your handiwork?” Shirley asks casually.
“It is true enough,” Braxo says without missing a beat—though I’d expected him to jump three feet in the air when he heard a voice, since he’d given no indication that he was aware of our presence—“I am a kind of God.”
“A perverse kind, I’d say,” says Shirl with a snort. “Dragging items out of their rightful place in the sky and setting them down on earth wherever it suits your fancy. More like one of those petty Greek tyrants than anything in the Old Testament.”
Braxo finally straightens up and looks down at Shirley, and they both break up laughing. Braxo’s laugh is a loud honk, and when I close my eyes I can imagine that a small flock of geese is experiencing an emergency. When they wind down, Braxo offers Shirley a hit off his fatty—I wonder if the Spanish roll their weed with tobacco like the French—and Shirley waves him away with the slightly overdramatic “safe” gesture of an umpire. He skitters over to me, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the dusty hard earth to present me to Braxo. I feel like a scared kid whose parent is dragging her to sit on Santa’s lap.
“Braxo, this is my new friend, Jan” he announces breathlessly. “She is a fan of clouds in their many diverse locations.”
I try to curtsy in a tantalizing, somewhat ambiguous way, like Plum did to signal the end of our acquaintance. The impulse to appear seductive and cool, unruffled in the presence of a genius, is an attempt to display my own artistic contempt for predictable behavior. Unfortunately, my back foot slides at the last minute on the slippery dirt, sending up a brief spray of ochre sand that blossoms in the headlights like a chrysanthemum, accompanied by an involuntary grunt.
“Are you all right, dear?” is the first thing the famous iconoclastic artist says to me.
“Yes, fine, sorry,” I mumble as I regain my balance.
Coming around the bend, the bend of the cloud, that is, are two lanky androgynes in silver suits and masks, with what appear to be large leaf blowers strapped to their backs. They resemble Stormtroopers, and they are heading toward Braxo. One of them pulls the mask down and unstraps the ominous black welding goggles that are riding on top of a do-rag hair covering. As soon as she takes the goggles off, it is clear she is female, with big brown mournful Winona Ryder eyes. She says something to Braxo in Catalan, and he honks—this time seemingly not in mirth but in frustration.
“Well then, we’ll have to resume in the morning, no? It is two moments before dark anyways.” He claps her on the back with jovial, aggressive force and turns to us. “The pressure in their tanks has fallen down too low to insure proper foam texture. We will have to recharge the tanks at the facility tomorrow.”
“Braxo is renting a hangar from the county to store his equipment,” Shirley explains, “under the condition that he hires off-duty Clark County helicopter pilots to take photographers up once the work is completed.”
“Yes, instead of looking up the clouds, I want to have an imprinted record of what it is like to look down at one.” Braxo crosses his arms over his chest and launches one hip out about a foot to the left as if he is posing for a picture himself.
“Yes,” I say, remembering a detail from some documentary I saw in art history class, “didn’t Christo commission aerial photographs of all his installations?”
Braxo twirls toward me with the whites of his eyes showing all the way around his pupils. “Christo? That hack? You imply that I am taking my cue from a third-rate grade-school dropout?”
It’s clear that I have inadvertently scratched the wrong surface here, and as I notice the Stormtroopers surreptitiously backing up on tiptoe toward the bend in the cloud, I have an idea to change tacks. I ask Braxo whether I can have a quick tour of the project before the sky is completely black.
“I can just tag along with them,” I almost beg, gesturing toward the retreating twosome, “if they won’t mind the intrusion?”
He fires a torrent of Catalan at the pair, and they stop in their tracks. The other silver-suited phantom has pulled off her headgear at this point and is shaking out her thicket of chestnut hair.
“Of course,” she says in English, and smiles at me. “I am Gloria, and this is Pila.” She motions to the other statuesque Trooper. “We will do the continent with the lady friend.”
I leave Shirley and Braxo to sort out their various lingual and litigious concerns and trot over to join the Andorran beauties, intrigued by the promise of a continental tour. I suppose clouds
are
continents, though I’ve never thought of them that way. This one, I find out immediately by examining Gloria and Pila’s backpacks as they walk ahead of me, is made of polyurethane foam shot from industrial cannons, like the kind that do insulation in office buildings. As we walk, I am mesmerized by the cloud. Its texture is incredibly smooth and luscious, like Mister Softee vanilla ice cream. Each scroll of lather melts into the next, creating a random woodgrain-like pattern of barely distinguishable white-on-white, a delicate gossamer brocade you could study for years and never get tired of. I wonder what kind of cloud Braxo is approximating here. Not diaphanous, like those gauzy sunny-day clouds that offer no shade. Not ominous, no hint of gray or pressure mounting, angry tears threatening to spring forth from its massive guts. It is more like those cumulus clouds from Italian Renaissance paintings: fat and muscular, glossy and lit from within, evidence of god’s vice-grip on beauty and power, lush toys floating around heaven’s inconceivable romper room. The structure really does appear to be organic, to have fallen from the sky intact. But the sides of the cloud look to be ten stories high, much higher than backpack blowers could create—unless these bewitching android-senoritas can actually hover like hummingbirds.
“How can you reach ...?” I start to ask, but before I can finish the question we have come upon three large orange cranes hanging their Paleolithic iron beaks in the ether high above the frothy whorl. Behind the cranes I see scaffolding that stretches for half a mile—rickety spiderwebs of steel hugging this hefty chunk of buttermilk sky—looking thrillingly out of place in the middle of the desert, nowhere near a skyscraper or a panoplied city sidewalk. Gloria stops and stands beside me, following my gaze upward.
“That is really lovely, true?” she says.
“Yes,” I agree, nodding toward the tract of quivering scaffolding in the gunmetal sky. “Strangely beautiful.” I turn to see that her stare rests lovingly a few inches to the left of the scaffolding. It isn’t the scaffolding she thinks is really lovely. Duh. “Oh! ... the
cloud
is stunning, so otherworldly, so sensual ... “
“So Braxito must have felt when he looked up like this and felt his inspirations. And that one is so
alone
in the sky there. How big do you think it is?” she asks me.
I realize now that she is looking at neither the scaffolding nor Braxo’s creation, but at a
real
cloud in the
real
sky, the one just skimming the top of the fake cloud on the desert floor where we stand. Gloria has a theatrical way of speaking that I suspect has nothing to do with her limited access to English vocabulary. I imagine that since childhood she has been showcasing her dramatic personality by emphasizing certain words and rolling her eyes aloft in a lazy half circle as though reading from a banner pulled behind a biplane, eyelashes aflutter.
“How many meters across the
belly?”
she asks. The lone cloud is a long, flat one, like a banquet table that hasn’t yet been set.
“I don’t know, it looks quite long,” I reply. “I guess I’ve never thought about the actual dimensions of clouds.”
She looks at me in suspended disbelief, like she’s waiting for the punchline. Then she laughs, and Pila turns to join in, and they enjoy a long, giddy full minute of laughter that is tinged with overwork and lack of sleep. Gloria is bent over with her hands on her knees when she can once again breathe normally.
“I am sorry,” she tells me, and puts her extremely large hand on my shoulder. “Sorry,” she says again, breathing deeply through her aquiline nostrils. “Of course you don’t examine such crazy things. No one looks at clouds and thinks to take out a
measuring
string. It is just that we ...” She looks at Pila—who I suddenly realize is her sister, both of them over six feet tall and solidly hand-some—and they both crack gigantic smiles and seem in danger of again bursting into uncontrolled spasms. “We have thought of little else for the past six months.”
I sit on the metal steps in front of an Airstream trailer parked a few yards from the installation while the giggle sisters change out of their fuzz suits into cutoff jeans and T-shirts, and I ponder the basis of a man’s obsession with cloud size. Some clouds must be the size of entire cities, inch for inch. When your 747 goes into a cloud and comes out the other side, you don’t really get an accurate sense of how big that cloud is. A mere minute might pass, but when you consider how big the plane is, and how fast, that minute could represent the diameter of Lake Erie. Our perception of the size of a thing often determines its worldly value; perhaps Braxo’s piece is a comment on our skewed ascription of largesse and worth. Or maybe he wants to put the sky on earth in a surprising way, simply to call attention to the fact that the sky is already on earth. Or perhaps he is playing God the Scientist, proving that he can measure space and beauty, thus claiming these boundless items, making them quantifiable.
“How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” I sing under my breath, wishing Rodgers and Hammer-stein could have gotten a load of this particular cumulus mass of foam before they penned the lyrics to
The Sound of Music.
“A flibbertigibbet, a will-o’-the-wisp, a clown,” I whisper to no one.
“So, I’m kind of amazed that Clark County is willing to house a huge art exhibit on their land indefinitely,” I say to Gloria, who has emerged from the tiny trailer. I have come to understand that Gloria is the sister who comprehends the most English, and so I’ve been iring my questions directly at her. “Or is there a breakdown deadline? How do you dismantle something of this girth?”
She looks at me completely stumped. I must have lost her with “dismantle” and “girth.”
“Does Braxo’s cloud stay here forever?” I rephrase the question and try to remember the universal sign language for forever. I end up rotating my hands around each other like the blades of a lawnmower.
She still fixes me with an amazed smile, but something tells me she understands the question. She shakes her head. She gestures toward the cloud, a sad, slow sweep of her arm that encompasses not only the grandly ambitious half-finished art piece behind her, but the months of tedious measuring and planning, the undoubtedly frequent honking psychodramas with Braxo, the struggles with the absurdity of the English language and the searing desert heat as experienced from inside a hermetically sealed Gor-Tex jumpsuit. “The first rain,” she says simply, with a shrug.
Shirley’s Fiero is still parked by the side of the road with its lights on, and other than the yellowish ladder of gleam in the distance, the only glow is from the moon, that lopsided stranger with a bad rash who is kind enough to see me to the car. My watch tells me that more than an hour has passed since I left the horizon and entered the timeless world of interstellar space. Gloria and Pila take hold of my hands, and we hem the edge of the cloud at a brisk clip. As we round the bend, I see Shirley pacing the short lane of darkness in between the throw of his headlights. He looks anxious, and I wonder if he has been worried about me. Maybe he’s picturing being left out of some hot all-girl menage in the Airstream. Maybe he thinks I’ve been eaten by coyotes. I guess it would look a bit unseemly for a venerated, relatively vice-free Las Vegas lawyer to pick up a girl at a bar, drive her out to the middle of nowhere, and lose her.
“I’m coming, Shirl!” I wail, but my voice is swallowed by the thirsty desert night. I try to imagine my words entering a bubble of silence that wafts over to Shirley’s Fiero and hovers like a spaceship for a moment before it drops to his shoulder and bursts, echoing as it enters his ear,
Shirl, Shirl, Shirl
... I wonder what Shirley’s actual name is—it must be Ezekiel or Nate or Nor-bert, it can’t be anything as mundane as Bill. Whatever his name, this relative stranger is providing the only light for many miles. Despite the fact that we are not attached to one another’s daily lives—in fact, our acquaintance has the quality of a dream alliance, a temporary pairing up for surreal adventure’s sake—he has waited for me with his keys jangling for no reason except that he said he would. Tomorrow or next week the scene before me will be returned to flat monochrome, no different from the surrounding desert plains: the cloud will have dissolved; Braxo and crew will be back in Barcelona; Shirley and his Fiero will be no more than an intermittent shooting star on the road to Zazzle’s, a horny blip on the radar of the quieting land. We are walking fast, and I can feel the breath entering and leaving my body rhythmically, automatically, like a simple song I remember from childhood.
Shirley finally sees us and waves, a hand raised in the air, fingers quivering. It is a wave hello, it is a wave good-bye. It is Plum’s wave, and imprinted a hundred times it is the wave of the lucky ones on the deck of the departing ship, sailing to a new world. The air rippling through his fingers creates a passageway, a door that flips its hinges, in and out privileges for everyone I’ve traveled with. Even those few who are lost to me (the boy who taught me Cantor’s diagnalization argument for the countability of rational numbers, the girl who lent me her Eskimo coat in the rain) leave an occasional flash of white, as though the tail of their flowing garments got caught in the barbed turnstile of love.
I
’ve wanted to fuck someone with Tourette’s ever since I can remember. At first the longing was simply a sexual-ized appetite for my father’s proximity, a desire to feel the quakes and shivers of his regular Tourettic implosions from a box seat a few yards behind first base. I was disgusted by the compulsive jerking of his limbs, but I craved it, too: the tics and moans and perpetual knocking on wood, the heat that emanated from his seizures like sparks from machinery.
As a kid, long before I knew that there was an exotic French name for his condition, I’d imagine what it would be like to be continually wracked by uncontrollable shudders. I locked myself in my bathroom and created an elaborate ritual: I’d go about my regular bedtime routine—change into my pajamas while listening to Shotgun Tom on KCBQ, brush my teeth with cinnamon gel toothpaste—but every time the clock’s little black rolodex flipped over to the next minute, I’d incorporate a carefully choreographed series of spastic jabs and expletives. First I’d shake my head
no—no, no, no, no, no, no
—delighting in the little twig-breaking sound my neck made with each oscillation. Still quivering, I’d vibrate my hands, palms out, hip-level, speeded-up jazz hands. Then I’d punch myself in the crotch, the way I’d seen my father do, first with one fist, then with the other, in an alternate 3/2 rhythm. Three with the left, two with the right, hard enough to leave a little necklace of bruises along my pelvic bone. At the time I had no idea that with my flying fists I was perfecting a modern jazz time signature—one two three
four five,
one two three
four five
—that would have made Dave Brubeck proud. Finally, I’d gasp out a few expletives, “God
damn
it! Motherfucking cock-sucking shmendrick of Christ!” Mostly I’d just ape the weird and nonsensical swearwords I’d heard my father moan, but sometimes I’d get creative and splice my own pairings?”Jesus-dick! Bitch sucker! Cunt-nosed pee-sprayer!” (To this day, batty epithetical amalgams occur to me in episodes of real rage, and it takes some effort to keep from lapsing into a wordy dance of neurological fury.) I must have cut quite a pose, skilled mimic and apprentice to the master, in my yellow baby doll nightgown.
But even highly adept masturbation gets old, and at some point I found myself wishing to be railed
against
instead of railing. I wanted to stay perfectly still and absorb the sparks and barks of someone with an intense boy-smell who convulsed in my general direction. I craved the scent of fast motion, the frenetic fission of a body lost in time and space, puppeteered by a stuttering, OCD-addled god, a god without even rudimentary manners. The idea that I could be the landing bed for all this unbridled flailing, was—and still is—the crucial detail of my erotic notion. I am heat; jagged icicles melt against my skin. I am a smooth target; arrows grow kind as they pierce. In fantasy, my part in the sexual act has evolved from being a kind of screen door to be flapped against to being an integral and emotional partner in crime, a trusted benefactress of wildness. When I find him, I thought, he will be like a dream: I’ll feel compelled to stay in any situation just to see what will happen next. There will be no explainable reason to get into the taxi, board the plane, follow the man into the Windex-colored river inhabited by flesh-eating neon tetras—I’ll just do it. He will hold onto me as though I am a last raft in a Biblical torrent; he will know my sturdy, buoyant edges and my hard-won survival skills. He will know me underneath my skin. He’ll know how I was formed, the capillaries that tap at the basement membrane of my blood-brain barrier. I already know him.
In my teens, my father and I would have shouting fights on either side of the bathroom door. I don’t know why I trusted that he wouldn’t dismember the cheap lock, but he never did. Even when he beat and kicked at the door, I always knew that he would stop just short of breaking and entering. The lock on the bathroom door gave me license to my emotions, no matter how unscrewed. As soon as I’d pushed in that little button like a thumbtack into a corkboard, thrilling to its attenuated click, I was free to unravel like a baseball, unpeeling parts of myself that hadn’t felt the slap of air in years. There was an unspoken agreement: we would no longer allow our hate to fester. The locked door was the mediator, the priest, the family counselor. As long as it stood solid, we could vent our darkest fumes, howl our sepulchral duet, breathe our cleansing fire. More than once I screamed, “Fuck you! I hate you!” and more than once he replied, “I hate you too, you little bitch!” These were no Tourettic outbursts—if they had been neurologically induced, he would have said “cunt”—but indictments belched from his anger like demons, Bosch’s grotesque gnomes borne into language. I remember being surprised that he said he
hated
me. I thought raging hormones could at least partly account for my regression into infantile insults, but he was an adult, an outspoken advocate of the rational mind, a seeker of Vulcan jurisprudence. Besides, I knew that he didn’t hate me at all, but that he loved me. He loved me too much, loved me more than was tolerable.
Sometimes these fights would spring from his wielding his authority in what I felt were inappropriate ways, i.e., he wouldn’t let me go to the movies or to a slumber party. More often, though, they would begin in a neutral zone, the den or the living room, as “discussions” of some current event and then escalate into rabid volleys of personal accusations. We were too much alike; we both wanted to get out there and throw the punch, to embody the killer argument. Neither of us wanted to admit that we were confused or underinformed. We raged at interdependence. He would knock down the infrastructure of my testimony with petty arrogance, then cross his arms with such satisfied superiority that I became engorged with rage. “You’re pathetic!” I would yell. “Is your life so empty that your greatest joy is to feel smarter than your teenage daughter?”
Though we banged together our hardnesses, we also knew where to reach between the ribs, under the bone and cartilage, for the soft places, the hot spongy areas where the needle fit. He would look me up and down slowly, owning each part of me as his gaze illuminated every flushed inch of my vibrating flesh. I couldn’t breathe. I’d run to the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it in an instant, before he could wedge his foot or his arm in to prevent me. He would be right up behind me like a tailwind, bulldozing the door. It was a scary game, an all souls’ dance. Many times we would struggle for what felt like hours but was probably minutes, both of us pushing with all our might against the object of hate, the agent of discovery, on the other side of the door. I had superhuman strength.
Sometimes I craved this intensity so badly that I would play the part of the dumb daughter, the opinionated but ill-informed brat who needs firm counsel. I would leave a hole in my acumen, a trail of crumbs scattered behind my brainpower, with gaps as wide as my father’s footsteps. I needed some event to correlate with my avid emotional life. I needed my small world to thunder and shake, booming as my father hit and hit it with his bare fists; I needed to be under siege.
After one such fight, I finished my diatribe in the bathtub, revising and improving on any less-than-lucid points or unarticulated enmities, twirling the tip of my poison tongue with a flourish—all inaudibly, of course, not wanting to give satisfaction to any possible ears at the door. (I had become a master of the whispered yell. I knew how to do insane and perverse things quietly; it was a skill that came in handy in my family. In lieu of privacy, I had volume control. On long car trips, I would sit in the back seat with the window rolled down and sing at the top of my lungs, but almost silently; I’d pull out all the stops on “New York, New York” and never be noticed above KBLX Newstalk.) I dried myself off, inspected, squeezed, and prodded all current and potential blemishes in the magnifying cosmetic mirror on the sink, applying Cleara-sil where necessary. I was naked. My bedroom was next to the guest bathroom, so I could streak from one to other without much fanfare. But not yet—not enough time had passed since our fight. I applied a fingerful of strawberry perfume to the backs of my knees and in a sticky pink line from my chin to my breastbone. Strawberry perfume was, I thought, the greatest smell ever invented. I wore it for all social occasions. It smelled like jello without the water. It smelled like the essence of jello, like jello boiled down to its soul. You wanted to eat it, and yet you couldn’t eat it because it wasn’t really there. Sexual allure, I’d figured out, was bound up with paradox. If it didn’t make sense, if it cut off its own legs and walked with crutches, then it was probably to be desired. I looked at my nipples in the full-length mirror. They were small and peach-colored, a little swollen, standing out from the rest of me, ready to run. I rubbed them up against the cold mirror, and they shriveled like walnut shells. I breathed warm air into my palms and covered each breast firmly, coaxing back softness. When they were once again smooth and plump, I painted each nipple with oily perfume, slowly circling around and around, until they shone like planets. I shook my shoulders like a stripper, or like how I imagined a stripper would shimmy, based on a few R-rated movies I’d seen that featured strippers who never really stripped, who wore string bikinis like the ones every girl was wearing at the beach that summer. I wondered why men would pay to see what they could see for free driving down Pacific Coast Highway in August. I was shaking my small breasts, giving them all my attention. Usually I was afraid to think about them at all; it was daunting and distracting just knowing they were there under my sweater. But it felt good to shake them, I liked watching them jiggle back and forth and up and down. I liked feeling the air on them, the weight of them, how they were attached to my body and yet had a solidity of their own, a separate life. I decided I could understand why strippers chose their line of work.
I heard rustling outside the bathroom window. The only window was small and slatted, overlooking the backyard patio. A lemon tree stood directly in front of it, obscuring any coherent view either in or out. I had gotten used to the shadows of branches and the ripe-sweet smell of lemon flowers penetrating my privacy, but this was a new sound, a sound too fidgety and irregular for nature. Before I could swing around to locate the source of the noise, I was distracted by something in the mirror; something was floating behind my head, stenciled onto my image like a halo or a superego.
It was a face full of being human, a pair of eyes that dug hollows into mine. I saw the Condor’s face rise in the dull late-afternoon light, pressed like a polestar up against the window, branches in his ears and eyebrows, lemons sprouting from his head. I didn’t know how he got there without my hearing him. Perhaps it was when I had the water running for the bath. Could he have been standing there for so long, clutching a branch to stay aloft? Had he heard all my whispered comments? Seen my display in front of the mirror? Had he stared unmov-ing while I perfumed my breasts, ground my hips into the mirror, pumped up and down on my knees like a piston? I grabbed my towel and clutched it to the front of my body. Then I remembered the mirror; my bare ass would be facing him. I reached behind me, aiming for the dangling terry cloth. But the more I tried to catch the tail of the towel, the further it flew from my body, and I twirled in a furious dance with rage and modesty—all my frustration was poured through that solid gold funnel: covering my nakedness seemed paramount. I finally managed to wrap the bath towel around all vulnerable parts of my flesh. I was shaking so badly I thought the sloppy knot would vibrate off, so I kept clutching the ends together with one hand. With the other, I turned the creaky handle to the window slats until I heard them squeak shut. Then I gave it an extra turn, to insure air-tightness. I did all this without looking out the window, forcing my eyes to the sink, the tub, anywhere except the world outside the powder-blue bathroom, with just my arm thrust out to make the irrevocable gesture, as though the rest of me was oblivious.
I didn’t have to look. I knew he was gone. It was a flash meeting, a bolt of lightning that lit up what had long lived in darkness, invasion and lust, green lemons on a knife-sharp tree.
I had danced for him. I had danced because it was the only way I knew to win an argument. Even if he hadn’t been standing in the branches of the lemon tree, he would have been perched on a bleacher somewhere in me, applauding wildly for the one strategy he couldn’t compete with: my body. It was the only way in which he wasn’t me.