CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
He heard the doorbell. He had the sign on his door, so he knew no-one would disturb him.
There was only Roy in the building at present; the girl at the top was teaching in Jakarta for a year.
And Roy himself was going away for a few weeks, so he'd have the whole place to himself.
Through the building, he heard Roy coming out of his apartment on the first floor, heavy-footed. A bit of a klutz.
Next was ‘The Sermon’: a take on those Renaissance paintings where something classical or biblical is going on centre-stage, but the real action’s everywhere else: some dude getting his purse pinched, some chick getting her ass pinched, a monk losing big-time at the card-table.
He’d picked Easter Sunday in East Harlem, the church packed out like a baseball game.
Up in the pulpit, that handsome, angry Latino priest had his fist clenched, berating a congregation who were otherwise occupied.
A woman was picking lottery numbers, her husband was chewing a bit of skin on his index finger.
And their little boy was facing the complete opposite way, staring at the little girl in the pew behind him.
He reminded David of himself. People used to get so mad with him for looking.
They said he looked for too long. His second wife – maybe it was the third – had said he was ‘somewhere on the spectrum’, that he should ‘go and do the tests’.
He’d said she should go and get screwed.
He heard Roy's slightly nasal, Canadian accent at the main door.
Words he couldn't make out. Roy's were surprised, apologetic.
He heard him jogging back inside, down the hall, and up the stairs; he heard keys and coins in Roy's pocket.
He remembered being a kid and running up and down the stairs with two pennies in his pants pocket. So he'd sound like a man.
The same little boy featured again in 'Suffer The Children': there was a life-sized Christ on the cross, one of the grislier, Southern European kind, with genuine agony on the messiah's face and blood dripping from the crown of thorns into his sweaty hair.
The kid was playing with a yo-yo, utter indifference on his chubby face.
As if Christ was saying, 'Look, kid, I'm doing this for you,' and the kid was just saying, 'Yeah.
And? Do that walking-on-the-water trick again. '
Another slam at the top, more jogging down, Roy coming back down the stairs.
Maybe he’d ordered a pizza and was short of change.
That made sense. At the door, again, more surprised noises from Roy, nothing from the caller.
‘Hello?’ Roy called out. Then more distantly, as if he’d gone into the street, ‘Where did you go?’
He hoped to God Roy wasn’t going to knock on his door and tell him the fascinating tale of the man-who-wasn’t-there.
He liked Roy – and actually, he needed to talk to Roy because it looked like someone had tried to pry the back gate open, possibly even to climb over – but now was not the time.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard his neighbour shut the front door and jog back up the stairs.
He cut the end of the film attached to the spool. As he did so, he felt, more than heard, a thump above him. So who could that be when Roy was upstairs? It didn't matter, he decided. Nothing could interfere with the developing process.
Then he heard a step. A creak, in fact. Two creaks. Closer – on the short staircase that led nowhere except to the basement. Perhaps he’d imagined it. He’d heard Roy jog right to the top and slam his own door shut. Things… things just did creak sometimes, especially in old buildings.
He started to pour water into the agitator.
He could only trust that Mieke and the gallery guy – whatever his name was – he could only hope they actually got what he was trying to do here.
That was what worried him about their suggestions.
This wasn’t some kind of crude hatchet-job on religion.
It was an attempt to reveal the unexpected within the expected.
The profane moments amidst the sacred, the hidden flashes of humor and irony, drama and savagery.
And he wanted to call the exhibition ‘Stained Glass’ because he intended it to do exactly what stained glass did: it told a story, but it also took the light and changed it, colored it in unexpected ways.
Whether they believed in God or not, everyone had their expectations about what went on inside a church, and he wanted to subvert them.
A stain, after all, could be two things: you stain a floorboard to give it a richer color, but if you stain your carpet, you need a new carpet.
It was a great title. A fucking great title, actually, though he said it himself, clever in its simplicity.
Provided people weren’t too clever to grasp it.
Suddenly, like someone remembering they’ve left the oven on, he had this hot-and-cold flash.
What if they didn’t get it? And if his agent and a director of the leading photography gallery on the east coast really hadn’t grasped it, what hope would there be for the hack reporter sent to review ‘Stained Glass’ on opening night?
Or for Mr and Mrs Burt and Ivy Kovacs, up in town on a day trip from Squaresville, Connecticut?
Maybe that title was too clever for its own good.
This was crazy. He put the agitator down and sat on the stool, taking slow, deliberate breaths. He was going to screw up the whole developing process if he didn’t get a grip. And then it wouldn’t matter what he called his exhibition, because there wouldn’t be one.
He heard another creak above his head. Then another. How many stairs were there in that last little flight? Six, maybe? He realized that he’d stopped breathing, stopped working; he was just fixated on listening to the footsteps and his own, whirring catastrophic spiral of worries. This was crazy.
Then there was another footstep.
And another.
He started to speak, but found he had to lick his lips before any sound came out. ‘Roy? Is that you?’
Suddenly, the darkroom exploded in light as Roy yanked the door open. David was almost blinded.
And he was furious.
‘You’ve fucking ruined my photos you dipshit!’ he shouted, running at his neighbor as he made his hands into fists.
But it wasn’t his neighbor. It was a guy he’d never seen before: overweight, a little taller than average, light brown hair under a baseball cap and skin pitted with old acne scars.
He sprayed something at David; it smelt of hospitals, no, more like dentists.
He expected it to sting but it did almost the opposite; it felt like being tickled with a feather duster.
Why am I on the floor?
He couldn’t remember falling. And nothing hurt.
But suddenly he was on the floor, looking up.
He had this strange feeling, as if his brain was a very long way away from his body – maybe fifty feet in the sky above, and tight, as if someone was squeezing it in their hand.
The guy with the bad skin was busily unpacking his rucksack.
Why does he carry all those rocks around?
He could still move his eyes, but it required a superhuman effort.
He watched the man, unwrapping a parcel of rags.
Underneath all the rags was a... A kind of gaping mouth or a…
He couldn't find the word. The only word he could think of was agony.
It was a sculpture, but somehow, it was a feeling. It was agony. And that was odd.
Because David Sterling didn’t feel a thing, not even when a thousand voices whispered in his ears, nor when his vision exploded into gold and silver stars, and everything went from red to grey to everlasting black.