July 3

ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you’re about to pick your nose.”
He takes Misty’s hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”
Just for the record, they’re a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They’ve crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner’s waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel’s wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it’s in your back pocket while you’re driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that’s how Angel’s leather pants smell pressed up against her.

Every so often the homeowner standing outside, she kicks the wall and shouts, “You want to tell me what you two are up to in there?”
Today’s weather is warm and sunny with a few scattered clouds and some homeowner called from Pleasant Beach to say she’d found her missing breakfast nook, and somebody had better come see right away. Misty called Angel Delaporte, and he met her when the ferry docked so they could drive together. He brings his camera and a bag full of lenses and film.
Angel, you might remember, he lives in Ocean Park. Here’s a hint: You sealed off his kitchen. He says the way you write your m ’s, with the first hump larger than the second, that proves you value your own opinion above public opinion. How you do your lowercase h ’s, with the last stroke cutting back underneath the hump, shows you’re never willing to compromise. It’s graphology, and it’s a bona fide science, Angel says. After seeing these words in his missing kitchen, he asked to see some other houses.
Just for the record, he says the way you make your lowercase g ’s and y ’s, with the bottom loop pulling to the left, that shows you’re very attached to your mother.
And Misty told him, he got that part right.
Angel and her, they drove to Pleasant Beach, and a woman opened the front door. She looked at them, her head tilted back so her eyes looked down her nose, her chin pushed forward and her lips pressed together thin, with the muscle at each corner of her jaw, each masseter muscle clenched into a little fist, and she said, “Is Peter Wilmot too lazy to show his face here?”
That little muscle from her lower lip to her chin, the mentalis, it was so tense her chin looked pitted with a million tiny dimples, and she said, “My husband hasn’t stopped gargling since this morning.”
The mentalis, the corrugator, all those little muscles of the face, those are the first things you learn in art school anatomy. After that, you can tell a fake smile because the risorius and platysma muscles pull the lower lip down and out, squaring it and exposing the lower teeth.
Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn’t such a great skill to have.
In her kitchen, the yellow wallpaper peels back from a hole near the floor. The floor’s yellow tile is covered in newspapers and white plaster dust. Next to the hole’s a shopping bag bulging with scraps of busted plasterboard. Ribbons of torn yellow wallpaper curl out of the bag. Yellow dotted with little orange sunflowers.
The woman stood next to the hole, her arms folded across her chest. She nodded at the hole and said, “It’s right in there.”
Steelworkers, Misty told her, they’ll tie a branch to the highest peak of a new skyscraper or bridge to celebrate the fact that no one has died during construction. Or to bring prosperity to the new building. It’s called “tree topping.” A quaint tradition.
They’re full of irrational superstitions, building contractors.
Misty told the homeowner not to worry.
Her corrugator muscle pulls her eyebrows together above her nose. Her levator labii superioris pulls her upper lip up into a sneer and flares her nostrils. Her depressor labii inferioris pulls her bottom lip down to show her lower teeth, and she says, “It’s you who should be worried.”
Inside the hole, the dark little room’s lined on three sides with yellow built-in bench seats, sort of a restaurant booth with no table. It’s what the homeowner calls a breakfast nook. The yellow is yellow vinyl and the walls above the benches are yellow wallpaper. Scrawled across all this is the black spray paint, and Angel moves her hand along the wall where it says:
“. . . save our world by killing this army of invaders . . .”
It’s Peter’s black spray paint, broken sentences and squiggles. Doodles. The paint loops across the framed art, the lace pillows, the yellow vinyl bench seats. On the floor are empty cans with Peter’s black handprints, his spiraling fingerprints in paint, they’re still clutching each can.
The spray-painted words loop across the little framed pictures of flowers and birds. The black words trail over the little lace throw pillows. The words run around the room in every direction, across the tiled floor, over the ceiling.
Angel says, “Give me your hand.” And he balls Misty’s fingers together into a fist with just her index finger sticking out straight. He puts her fingertip against the black writing on the wall and makes her trace each word.
His hand tight around hers, guiding her finger. The dark creep of sweat around the collar and under the arms of his white T-shirt. The wine on his breath, collecting against the side of Misty’s neck. The way Angel’s eyes stay on her while she keeps her eyes on the black painted words. This is how the whole room feels.
Angel holds her finger against the wall, moving her touch along the painted words there, and he says, “Can you feel how your husband felt?”
According to graphology, if you take your index finger and trace someone’s handwriting, maybe you take a wooden spoon or chopstick and you just write on top of the written words, you can feel exactly how the writer felt at the time he wrote. You have to study the pressure and speed of the writing, pressing as hard as the writer pressed. Writing as fast as it seems the writer did. Angel says this is all similar to Method acting. What he calls Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of physical actions.
Handwriting analysis and Method acting, Angel says they both got popular at the same time. Stanislavski studied the work of Pavlov and his drooling dog and the work of neurophysiologist I. M. Sechenov. Before that, Edgar Allan Poe studied graphology. Everybody was trying to link the physical and the emotional. The body and the mind. The world and the imagination. This world and the next.
Moving Misty’s finger along the wall, he has her trace the words: “. . . the flood of you, with your bottomless hunger and noisy demands . . .”
Whispering, Angel says, “If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”
Stanislavski, Sechenov, Poe, everybody was looking for some scientific method to produce miracles on demand, he says. An endless way to repeat the accidental. An assembly line to plan and manufacture the spontaneous.
The mystical meets the Industrial Revolution.
The way the rag smells after you polish your boots, that’s how the whole room smells. The way the inside of a heavy belt smells. A catcher’s mitt. A dog’s collar. The faint vinegar smell of your sweaty watchband.
The sound of Angel’s breath, the side of her face damp from his whispering. His hand stiff and hard as a trap around her, squeezing her hand. His fingernails dig into Misty’s skin. And Angel says, “Feel. Feel and tell me what your husband felt.” The words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”
The way reading something can be a slap in your face.
Outside the hole, the homeowner says something. She knocks on the wall and says, louder, “Whatever it is you have to do, you’d better be doing it.”
Angel whispers, “Say it.”
The words say: “. . . you, a plague, trailing your failures and garbage . . .”
Forcing your wife’s fingers along each letter, Angel whispers, “Say it.”
And Misty says, “No.” She says, “It’s just crazy talk.”
Steering her fingers wrapped tight inside his, Angel shoulders her along, saying, “It’s just words. You can say it.”
And Misty says, “They’re evil. They don’t make sense.”
The words: “. . . to slaughter all of you as an offering, every fourth generation . . .”
Angel’s skin warm and tight around her fingers, he whispers, “Then why did you come see them?”
The words: “. . . my wife’s fat legs are crawling with varicose veins . . .”
Your wife’s fat legs.
Angel whispers, “Why bother coming?”
Because her dear sweet stupid husband, he didn’t leave a suicide note.
Because this is part of him she never knew.
Because she wants to understand who he was. She wants to find out what happened.
Misty tells Angel, “I don’t know.”
Old-school building contractors, she tells him, they’d never start a new house on a Monday. Only on a Saturday. After the foundation is laid, they’ll toss in a handful of rye seed. After three days, if the seed doesn’t sprout, they’ll build the house. They’ll bury an old Bible under the floor or seal it inside the walls. They’ll always leave one wall unpainted until the owners arrive. That way the devil won’t know the house is done until it’s already being lived in.
Out of a pocket in the side of his camera bag, Angel takes something flat and silver, the size of a paperback book. It’s square and shining, a flask, curved so your reflection in the concave side is tall and thin. Your reflection in the convex side is squat and fat. He hands it to Misty, and the metal’s smooth and heavy with a round cap on one end. The weight shifts as something sloshes inside. His camera bag is scratchy gray fabric, covered with zippers.
On the tall thin side of the flask, it’s engraved: To Angel—Te Amo .
Misty says, “So? Why are you here?”
As she takes the flask, their fingers touch. Physical contact. Flirting.
Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.
And Angel says, “It’s gin.”
The cap unscrews and swings away on a little arm that keeps it attached to the flask. What’s inside smells like a good time, and Angel says, “Drink,” and his fingerprints are all over her tall, thin reflection in the polish. Through the hole in the wall, you can see the homeowner’s feet wearing suede loafers. Angel sets his camera bag so it covers the hole.
Somewhere beyond all this, you can hear each ocean wave hiss and burst. Hiss and burst.
Graphology says the three aspects of any personality show in our handwriting. Anything that falls below the bottom of a word, the tail of a lowercase g or y for example, that hints at your subconscious. What Freud would call your id. This is your most animal side. If it swings to the right, it means you lean to the future and the world outside yourself. If the tail swings to the left, it means you’re stuck in the past and looking at yourself.
You writing, you walking down the street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It’s all art. What you do with your hands, you’re always blabbing your life story.
It’s gin inside the flask, the good kind that you can feel cold and thin down the whole length of your throat.
Angel says the way your tall letters look, anything that rises above the regular lowercase e or x, those tall letters hint at your greater spiritual self. Your superego. How you write your l or h or dot your i, that shows what you aspire to become.
Anything in between, most of your lowercase letters, these show your ego. Whether they’re crowded and spiky or spread out and loopy, these show the regular, everyday you.
Misty hands the flask to Angel and he takes a drink.
And he says, “Are you feeling anything?”
Peter’s words say, “. . . it’s with your blood that we preserve our world for the next generations . . .”
Your words. Your art.
Angel’s fingers open around hers. They go off into the dark, and you can hear the zippers pull open on his camera bag. The brown leather smell of him steps away from her and there’s the click and flash, click and flash of him taking pictures. He tilts the flask against his lips, and her reflection slides up and down the metal in his fingers.
Misty’s fingers tracing the walls, the writing says: “. . . I’ve done my part. I found her . . .”
It says: “. . . it’s not my job to kill anybody. She’s the executioner . . .”
To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Gericault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.
The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray paint. She shouts, “You can tell Peter Wilmot he’s going to jail for this shit.”
Beyond all this, the ocean waves hiss and burst.
Her fingers still tracing your words, trying to feel how you felt, Misty says, “Have you ever heard of a local painter named Maura Kincaid?”
From behind his camera, Angel says, “Not much,” and clicks the shutter. He says, “Wasn’t Kincaid linked to Stendhal syndrome?”
And Misty takes another drink, a burning swallow, with tears in her eyes. She says, “Did she die from it?”
And still flashing pictures, Angel looks at her through his camera and says, “Look here.” He says, “What you said about being an artist? Your anatomy stuff? Smile the way a real smile should look.”