Mana
The end of the Mad Art Project
[Welcome back to Mad Art Project. This is the last story in the series that started back last year with What World Is This. After today we’ll stop sticking needles — like Gibson’s giant, pompadour’d females — into poor Tim. He’s about ready for a break, even if he takes it in a one-stoplight town like Bethlehem in Marion County, Tennessee. We’ll imagine him living a quiet life, no Moon Calves, no being carried away in floods.
He’ll probably hate it.
Anyhow, this story picks up immediately after Thousand-Mile Gaze. Tim and Jethra were making their escape out of Donnie Ross’s cellar through Way Crazy Cave, but as they approached the entrance — boo! Donnie was waiting for them. And if we had any doubt of Tim’s assessment that Donnie Ross is a conjure man, he just made fire leap up from limestone.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Do you look like me? Do you feel like me? Do you turn into your effigy? — Gorillaz, Tranz
The bitter smoke, the flame that wreathed around him a second before — were they illusion? I blinked and there was only Donnie Ross — a big guy but still just a man — lit by the lantern I’d set on the floor of the low shelf where Jethra and I had been resting. The battery was weak; I couldn’t make out Donnie’s face by its light. His white shirt glowed dully. His eyes and teeth glinted in a face that would have been dark terra-cotta colored but was now shadowed. Behind him, under the arch of the cave mouth, the night looked tired. Nearly dawn. It would be a cold morning, too. Dew had fallen on Jethra’s hair while we sat.
As before, Donnie seemed afraid to address Jethra directly. He glanced at her but spoke to me.
“Changeling,” he said, “You’ve had your chance, but you’re almost out of time. If you can’t get her to make magic of her own sweet will, I’ll have her power out of her the old-fashioned way.”
He stepped toward us.
I didn’t see a weapon in his hand and I was having second thoughts about the magic I’d seen 30 seconds before, but none of that mattered. Act now, excuses later.
I unholstered my Sig Sauer and put a .45 ACP round between his eyebrows — as I thought — from somewhere under 6 yards.
Smoke whirled around his broad form, making my eyes smart. As I blinked them clear Donnie Ross strode out of the smoke, almost close enough to touch. My stomach dropped in that panic you get when dream logic fails and the mean uncle you just felled with a 2-by-4 is still looming in the barn door, his foot on his own unconscious form. How could I have missed? It’s not that I’m so very sure of my aim — I mean, I’m not bad — but Donnie Ross was right there.
Beside me, the warm pressure against my leg that had been Jethra was gone.
I fired three more rounds, hitting center mass this time.
Donnie Ross staggered, but I don’t think he blinked. He extended a hand that could have been sculpted my Michelangelo himself.
He grabbed my wrist.
And then I learned why he’d been so cautious of Jethra, and indeed how very wrong I was about her frailty, because she rose up behind him, swung the hand winch I’d noticed piled among the other rubbish by its rusted handle, and felled him.
He lay groaning. Jethra dropped the winch, squatted, fetched him off the ground by his belt and his shirt collar — you remember she played rugby, right? — and straightening her legs heaved him up and drove his skull into the the low stone ceiling above. Then she dropped him.
He lay still.
How in the world? I thought, looking from my pistol to Jethra’s winch like a cartoon dummy.
Her eyes shone crimson.
Oh.
“Come on!” I said, but I was still in the conjure circle and, unlike Jethra, I couldn’t get out. The flame rose to stop me, and as I hesitated to step across, Donnie Ross sat up again like some infernal redneck zombie. Jethra strode forward to grasp my hand but her manic strength was flagging. Donnie intercepted her, wrapping both arms around her body and dragging her down.
I flung myself at them but no good; I hit the barrier like a moth hitting hot glass and writhed back, scorched along both palms and my shoulder. Through the wavering light as the conjure flames rose I saw Jethra wrestling to get out of Donnie’s clasp. I saw him pull her to her knees.
Then up from the stream beside us swarmed a flood of moon-colored, half-dismembered Kewpie dolls, some crawling on four limbs or on three, some dragging themselves with their arms. Through the crazed barrier of the conjure circle I saw the Moon Calves sprout like mushrooms, spread like wild garlic, and surge up over Donnie Ross in a white wave. They covered him.
When they subsided, Donnie was gone except for a greasy black smear on the floor and an inky trail of something like smoke that ribboned back upstream and into the depths of Orme Mountain.
Only Jethra remained. She knelt, eyes closed, palms open, while the Moon Calves bobbed and cooed at her feet. One crowed with glee. After a while she opened her eyes. Now maybe she saw them — I’ll never know, for I never asked. She gazed maybe at them, maybe at greasy stone.
Outside, the sky lightened. The Moon Calves babbled at Jethra a while longer. The roots in the cave mouth hung black against the cold, soft dawn, then showed pale colors: umber, gray, dim green. I realized the sun was shining into the cave through a thick low fog. Light welled all around us. We might have been inside a pearl.
But the fog lifted at last. Daylight filtered into the cave.
One by one, the Moon Calves turned their crimson eyes to the sun. They held up their arms. First the largest one, then others seemed to spire upward like mist from the cold stream that all this time had been tumbling and plashing past us, out from Way Crazy Cave, over and under boulders, and on down the draw beneath the ferns and wild azaleas.
For a moment one or another of the Moon Calves would hang in the air, attenuated, hair spindling aloft, now-long legs gathering into one, eyes gazing up into a sky that — I’m sorry — looked empty to me.
Sometimes I remember it different and see them flowing up all together like a river of boba tea into the heavens. Then I remember that was later, after I purchased and moved back into the little white house on Bell’s Pond Road. But anyhow, the last moment’s always the same. They all burned off with the sun.
I might have sat there gaping all morning, but about then I realized how much my scrawny ass ached, sitting on a cold stone floor as I was. I crawled forward out of the conjure circle.
In front of me the powerful shadow that was Jethra slumped sideways from her knees and rolled onto the cave floor. Above her, sun glimmered in through cobwebs and the trapped, papery wings of moths.
I dragged myself another couple of feet forward to touch her hair.
“Jethra?”
She didn’t lift her head, but I felt her stir just a bit under my palm.
“Tina?” she asked.
“Come out of there,” I said, “come back out of that light.”
I couldn’t lift her, but I tugged at her cardigan to encourage her, and together we got her dragged onto the worn quilt we’d found there on the little shelf off to the side of the cave mouth.
She looked up past me toward the ceiling that curved just above my head as I bent over her. The rock was marked with faint waterlines, rust and dun and saffron, reminding me of the rings in a tree trunk. Water had once filled this cavern, I thought. I reckoned it still did whenever there was a big gully-washer.
Come to think of it, maybe it would have been better if a hard rain had washed us all away in the night. Jethra was a shred of her former self, I’ve never been much besides a bundle of misery, and the mad art project — a quarter of a century of Jethra’s life — had come to nothing.
Her eyebrows knit. “Tina?” she said again, as if she wasn’t sure of me now. She gazed at me like an infant studying her mother’s face.
I shook my head No, thought too late that a denial wouldn’t help her confusion, then decided I didn’t care.
“You don’t know me,” I said. “You don’t know who I am now, you didn’t know who I was then, and you’ve been making me up all this while. You’re bleeding your heart out and getting in all kinds of predicaments for no reason at all that I can see except to waste my time and make an idiot out of yourself. At that, you’ve certainly succeeded.”
She just kept looking at me. Good god, those eyes.
Her lips parted.
She said what she said to me once long ago, when she started giving me her first Rorschach splotches on soft, homemade paper. “You don’t really understand.”
I almost started abusing Jethra again, rubbing her nose in her stupid life choices, but I already had her answer. Love hopes.
For what? I thought. This? I studied her face, exasperated with her.
I sat cradling her while her weight grew heavier in my arms. After a while I was sure she was asleep. I took her hand and caressed the palm with my thumb. In her twenties, I remembered, she always used to grasp my fingers, even in sleep, when I placed them on her palm. It was as if she’d never lost that infant reflex. Now there was nothing.
I put my hand in front of her mouth and spent a couple of moments second-guessing whether I could feel her breath or not. Then I put my hand on her chest. Her heart fluttered, paused, scampered another pace or two. She juddered lightly here and there, not all at once like a tremor, but different rhythms at different parts of her body.
I’d felt that before — under the hand I placed on the shoulder of my adopted father when he was in hospice care for end-stage prostate cancer. Insects fluttering hither and yon, I thought at the time. A failure of central organization. Not scary, not painful for him, but eerie.
“It’s all right,” I said to Jethra, who was unconscious and could not hear me, “You don’t waste my time. You saved us.”
I licked my thumb and wet her lips with it. The lower one was cracked and had been bleeding. I remembered then how she used to suck my knuckle if I gave it to her while she was deep enough asleep.
I tipped her head towards me again and let her cheek rest against my chest. Her breath rasped. Her lower lip trembled.
Nothing is lost. May everything you have given me flow back to you.
— No. No, after all this I clearly don’t mind what you think of me, but I’m not going to expose Jethra to your prurient imaginings. If you’re my age, you had to read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, right? I’ll leave it at that.
I held her closely and kissed her over and over while warmth came back to her skin and at last her forehead sweated as if dewed by the mist that rose up from Eden’s ground.
After she had spent at least 20 minutes giving me the most painful and profound hickey of my life, Jethra released me and lolled in my arms. I swear she’d gained weight. Oh how I had missed that warm bulk.
With a soft laugh — more like a gurgle — she half opened her eyes.
“You fed me.” Her smile broadened. “You made me alive.”
“It’s just a mad art project,” I told her. “We shouldn’t deceive ourselves. You know I don’t really have — ”
She focused in enough to meet my gaze. “Mana,” she said. “You have mana.”
Then she fell asleep. A few minutes later, we heard Donovan tromping uphill along the creek bed.
One project ends. Another begins. Jethra had so used her body that, at long last, she no longer had material for her mad art project. She had also lost her job, gained a bogus but all-too-real felony conviction for false reporting, and exhausted her health. Her built-out single-wide trailer, left vacant for months, was unlivable, and her back yard gaped with open graves where the Moon Calves had emerged.
But now I had a new plan: to rescue my mother from the old folks’ home. I just needed a trained caregiver to make sure Momma didn’t wander off with the fairies, and as I said, Jethra was out of work. I married Jethra for the same reason middle-aged men always marry: to have someone to keep the house and look out for my aging mother. Jethra went along with the business serenely. No protest, no gratitude.
I would have hated gratitude.
Still, when she recovered from her ordeal, she came back dulled somehow: gaze lowered, hair dry, skin sallow. She rarely contributed much to a conversation. Sometimes she’d sit stroking her sweater, a soft rose-pink one I’d given her. She was, in fact, boring, and yet I loved her more than ever, with a despairing love that had nothing much to latch onto. Often I felt like I’d swallowed a rock.
My love for Jethra was a stone in my belly, I thought, too big to get rid of, impossible to ignore. But I was grown now; I knew the feeling was not Jethra, not Jethra’s fault. It was my own, my baby to carry around.
Still, it was a Jethra-shaped rock. Who is it that I love? I wondered, looking at Jethra, perhaps, across the table at Wendy’s. Why do we love at all?
Still, when I moved her and Momma into the little white house off Bell’s Pond Road, she began taking care of Momma straight away, competently as she always did anything. The two of them seemed very crazy and very quiet — Jethra entertained Momma in tea parties without much conversation on either part, setting places for Momma’s dolls at her request. Yet the house stayed tidy and Momma was free again to do as she willed, which mostly meant wandering the fields and woods. Jethra followed like a guard dog, never complaining about the length of the rambles.
Gradually her strength and color returned. She began to find projects of her own, mostly outside, spreading a blanket for Momma nearby. The sharp-eyed old woman would draw plants and animals, always in her precise, flattened style.
In June, Jethra rented a tiller to turn up a new garden in the meadow out back of the house. One evening about twilight, she was on her knees mounding up a hill to plant late squash in when I saw them: pearlescent babies with blood-drop eyes, bobbing and cooing around her ankles and down the irregular rows of fresh earth.
Momma was in bed. I stood up at my desk to see out the window better. There was no mistake: Moon Calves. If Jethra noticed them, she didn’t pay any mind. She just kept digging, bare-handed as always.
But they kept coming around for a few months that summer, clustering at Jethra’s feet whenever she worked outdoors in the twilight. Then one evening in early September they ascended, like a river of boba tea, to their home in the clouds.
When Zara T released the online version of the print zine Mad Art Project, she included four full-color pages of downloadable content. In high resolution, on the right printer, they were spectacular. The azures, crimsons, scarlets, and damsons were so highly saturated you might as well try to suck the page to get at the juice. With the second edition, she could afford to include the color insert in the print version.
Jethra’s fame was established, and women came from Huntsville, Chattanooga, Birmingham — even Asheville — to participate in her next project. The concept was simple, if disgusting. Jethra would take them down to the creek below the little white house on Bell’s Pond Road, strip them as naked as they liked, daub them with wet red clay, and take pictures. I insisted she charge a fee.
“What does it mean?” I asked, looking at some giclée prints spread across the kitchen table. Jethra was getting them ready to pack into a mailing sleeve and send to a client. I turned one print to face me.
A woman, shown from the bellybutton down, knelt on silty willow leaves that rested just under the surface of the creek, which was then low in late summer. The woman was portrayed giving birth to detritus Jethra had probably found nearby, specifically the lower part of a muddy RC Cola bottle. A few soaked strands of pondweed clung to the bottle and trailed from the woman’s body. Wet red earth coated her thighs. A couple of green bottle flies sunned themselves on her clay-gummed pubic hair.
Jethra looked from me to the picture, troubled either by the question or the impossibility of an answer.
“You still don’t understand,” she said, so quietly I thought I’d hurt her by asking. But she was so placid, almost bovine, these days that she seemed impossible to hurt. I’d given up trying. Or maybe I’d just lost my appetite for it.
After a while she smiled. “Explanations are bullshit, anyhow.”
For a minute I saw a flicker of young Jethra again.
Let all you gave me flow back to you.
She thought about the conundrum a while longer.
“The only explanation for an art project is the project itself,” she said, quoting someone or other, maybe. “And this project doesn’t say anything.” She dropped the tissue-wrapped prints into the mailing envelope, added a card, and sealed it.
“You see,” she said, holding it up to me. “Silence.”
I knew the pictures were in there, but I could no longer see them.