Verisimilitude
“You're painting another one?” Aaron's voice swallowed by the high roof and the wood rafters. An old barn, converted crudely. It made her feel like Pollock; so did liquor. “You sure that's a good idea? Maybe you should paint something else. ”
“No, A. I need to finish this. I'll work this out, and then I'll stop.”
“You sure? This can't be easy.”
“I'll be fine.”
She daubed on think paint, broad strokes bringing out the dip in the collarbone of her model, posed from half a dozen photos. All warming and soothing colours, pinks and reds and the watery blue of her eyes. As anyone might paint a good mother.
“God damn, you got her.” Her father stared rapt at the painting when she pulled aside the canvas that covered it, made it into some piece of furniture. “I never thought I'd see that face like that again. I've seen every picture of her we've got a hundred times since, but that... Aaron said it was amazing.”
“I'm not satisfied. The brushstrokes are in the way; it's so painterly.” She looked at her work, the hollow flatness of it, the single strokes standing for a thousand hairs each. “I'm going to try again.”
“It's exactly her. What did you model her from?”
“Do you remember when I was in sixth grade, at parent-teacher night, and I was failing math? And she came out of the class and smiled at me?”
Her father looked at her for a moment. “I don't remember that at all.”
“If I had painted it right you would have.”
After he left – long and late, so eager to stay – she took her largest palette knife and again uncovered the painting. The smile was her mother's, certainly. And the look. But it was by necessity imperfect. She brandished the flimsy trowel and advanced on the painting. “Ceci n'est pas ma mere”, she said, a dark laugh to herself, and started to scratch at the canvas, flaking the paint away, and it feel to the ground, an audible clack as she peeled the thick dried oil of her mother's blouse away, tore it free in one piece and dropped it to the ground.
Treated properly – aerated slightly as it dried, polished, and then coated in thin resin to prevent discoloration – plaster proved to be a good model for bone. It weighed about the right amount, and it had a deeply satisfying whiteness. She had to make sure that the layer of lacquer was flawless, coat after coat, or else just a bit of liquid could ruin the effect. But it was the best as could be accomplished. It was so difficult to get the brainpan to work properly, so many small pieces and cavities held together normally by sutures of cells that she could not replicate; it took ages to piece the whole thing together. She did take shortcuts; no inner ear bones, some of the hand and foot simplified. But it was close, so close that it looked right, looked like a real human skeleton except for the three metal rings sticking out from the spine. She threaded a metal rod through these, attached to a small wheeled tripod, and the skeleton stood leering with empty eyes and a jaw dropped down to its sternum.
“You destroyed it? What the hell were you thinking? It was done, it was perfect!” Aaron's voice harsh and echoing. “Your dad talking about it, it was like he thought that she was in the room again.”
“It was nothing. It was flat, it was lifeless. It was just a canvas. It was shit.”
“That was a fucking genius painting. Don't tell me it wasn't. I'd kill to have painted that.”
She fixed a glare on him, such malice in it that he shrank back. Her eyes seemed deep, black; every time he painted her from then on that hate couldn't be taken off of the campass.
“Get out.” She said it quietly, looking past him to nothing. “Get out of my house.”
He turned and walked to the door. “I'll call you tomorrow.” She hurled the phone at his back, catching him between his shoulderblades.
Muscle was easy; ballistic gelatin, standard mix, dyed red, shaped into the proper form and wrapped in a thin layer – almost nothing – of latex as faschial membranes. They were perfect, flawless, the one part of the work she was truly satisfied with. Every one of the muscles of the body she had reproduced, traced out and molded into shape. She attached them all and the skeleton stood clothed in flesh, muscles hanging from bone by slim tendons that barely seemed up to the task. It stood like Batholomew, unbothered flensed and naked of skin, waiting hopeful for what was to come.
“Aaron called me. He said you won't speak to him.”
“No, I won't again.”
“He said you destroyed your painting.”
“Yes, I did.” He waited, there was a long moment with only the static of the phone passing between them. On one end of the line, a television grumbled indecipherably.
“You shouldn't have done that. It was – it was...” He stopped again, and she heard a hand clamp over the phone's mouthpiece on the other end. It stayed nearly a minute, him holding his hand so tight over it that his racing heartbeat was audible across the line. “It was her, it was her.” His voice was high, sharp.
“No, it wasn't. I'm making a sculpture, now. The sculpture -”
“It can't be her more than that painting was. You cought every bit of her life in that frame.”
“I didn't. I caught a simulation that meant nothing. This time, it'll be right. This sculpture – this will represent her. This will be it.”
“If that wasn't her, this won't be.”
“I'll try anyways.”
Blood was difficult. The substance itself came easy, but her early attempts had the blood pooling around the feet; she could not make veins function properly. Gravity was too powerful for no beating heart, and like a corpse's the blood flowed down. She devised a system of veins that weren't a circulatory system, instead a representation of one; closed tubes, each filled with the red gloppy liquid; sealed and capped, the blood didn't have a chance to dry. She filled the body, tracing every vein and artery and even simulated networks of vessels flowing through the body. She lay open the visceral cavity and, around her sponge rubber liver and lungs and heart, lay sacks laden with the liquid, glistening and wet, shining among the ropey tubes of gut. When she finished her hands were red and sticky up to her elbows, the floor spattered with droplets of gore. She mopped carefully.
“Sorry I can't come to the phone right now; I'm probably painting or maybe I just couldn't be bothered to stand up and reach for it. It's all the way over there. Anyways, leave a message, and I definitely won't check it, but maybe Aaron will tell me you called in a week or so.” The tone sounded.
“Hi, sweetheart. I don't expect you'll call me back. You didn't call me back after the last fifty, after all. We're worried. We're all worried. Hell, worried is nothing. This is, it's, can't you just let it stop?” His voice was so far away; the phone muffling and crackling, the machine taking his calls down from god knows how long ago, voice tinny and thin. “I'll be by tomorrow to drop off some more food. I'll leave it on the doorstep like usual. I've got the plaster you asked for in your note. Just – nothing will bring her ba-” She put down the phone, sharp, and the voice continued only in the wires.
She had found that latex took on the colour and texture of skin if applied in thin coats of differing thickness and tint. She made sheets, hung from the walls, testing the formula, before she perfected it; four coats, each thinner and lighter in colour than the ones below; fading as they came to the surface. A few freckles on her shoulders, a few red capillaries behind her ears. The light diffracted and diffused through the plastic to produce that faint glow of human flesh in sunlight. She had devised a way to reproduce the wrinkles that had been incipient at the corners of her mother's eyes, attaching the skin with a layer of water beneath, so that it shrank back as it dried, the sculpture aging as it dried. She shaved her head, the long brown rings, carefully, slowly, keeping the curls intact, and applying them whole to her mother's scalp as they came off her own. She drew out the hair of her arms and used it to apply the faint blond down of her mother's upper lip.
She stepped back and looked at the finished sculpture and her mother stared at her with dead fish eyes of gelatin, looking up out of a face with all of the complexion of life. But when she touched her, ran a fingertip across her cheek, the skin was just the warm of the room, and her fingers squeaked a little on the plastic. She was perfect, and precise, and the tight-lipped smile that she held showed no emotion, the playful tilt of her head was less alive than a photograph. She lay on the ground, and her clothes – favourite white blouse, long brown skirt – pooled around her like they lay on a chair. Her chest didn't rise.
She threaded her stand rod through the three metal rings that stuck out of her mother's spine; the body hung there, head flopping down and arms puppet-loose. She led the cart out the front door, struggled the small runner wheels across the loose gravel of the country road. She kicked up a cloud of dust, and as the stand sputtered across the ground her mother jittered limply like a bowl of jelly, her flesh and bone moving like a slice of fish in oil, dancing like it were alive. She placed her mother standing in the middle of the road, watched her dangle for a moment to make sure she wouldn't go anywhere; and walked back to her garage. She started her car, felt it thrum underneath her. She waited a moment, and pressed her foot down on the gas; the engine roared, and she leaped towards her mother, a clear path to her a hundred and fifty yards up the road; almost imagining that she saw her eyes widen, almost imagining a fragmentary memory of her mouth opening. She remembered the roar of tires braking uselessly on gravel, and so she slammed on the brakes just before she felt the car shudder, watched her mother's head strike and send ripples of broken glass across the windshield, saw the white – such bright, pure white – of her bone where her scalp peeled back from the blow, saw the rush of blood – surprisingly little, it was always surprising it was such a thin coat – spreading from where her skull split all down the side of the right temporal bone to show its contents loose and oozing and viscid. The head lay on the windshield, body sprawled across the hood, arm twisted right backwards and out of its socket, tongue lolling out from a shattered jaw. It was exactly as she remembered her.
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