Free Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes Page B

all the things he had squirreled away in his basement over the years; pieces made of clay and wire and newspaper and reclaimed wood. Strange and beautiful work, like he’d never made before. The sculpture he’d promised Patrick languished untouched in the yard. It seemed brutish and clumsy now. But he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t trust himself to judge. He could be going mad, he decided.
    The last time he had blackouts was nearly ten years ago, when he was drinking too much at the squat in Eastern Market. He’d hustled his way in among the youngsters, because it felt alive and vibrant: a real arts scene, like Paris in the twenties, or New York in the seventies, nineties Berlin. But he didn’t fit in. He was too old, his work was too strange, he didn’t know how to talk to the endless stream of girls, with their tattoos and bright hair, who came to hang out, to pose for portraits or be photographed, usually topless, sometimes naked.
    He never took to acid or any of those other drugs, although they were going around among the kids. Coke, speed, mescaline. The late-night parties where he was always the odd one out, sitting on his own on the couch. They would come and sit right next to him and not talk to him. He would drink to make it bearable, and wake up oblivious to whatever had happened the night before, stumbling out into the shared living space to ice-cold vibes. He would spend the day miserable, waiting for someone to finally confront him about what he’d done. Some inappropriate thing he’d said, some dumb practical joke that everyone had taken too seriously.
    But he hadn’t been drinking. Or sleeping, or eating, or taking his pain pills. He avoided the refrigerator, the thin Plexiglas shelves yanked out and set beside it. He also took care not to look at the black stains on his wall, which seemed to swell when he passed them. A trick of the light, mold from the newspapers piled up in teetering stacks in the hallway.
    He opened a can of beans in tomato sauce, poured it into a dish and put it in the microwave. The device hummed and the glass plate turned around and around and around until PING. He was reassured by the normalcy of this, even if the act of eating seemed repulsive.
    Spooning the food in, chewing the soft pulp, his tongue rolling it back toward his throat, swallowing—it was all automatic, like he was functioning on the muscle memory of someone he used to be. He patted his pocket for cigarettes and realized he didn’t want them, the chemical taste in his mouth, the way they sucked away his breath.
    He felt unlike himself. “Unlike.” He said it aloud. Words sounded strange. The meaning unraveled. It was as if Clayton was the skin and bones he pulled on.
    He had to get out of the house. He had to talk to someone. Show them what he’d done.
    (Don’t look in the refrigerator.)
    He had to fire these clay figurines—the ones he doesn’t remember making, but that seem familiar. It’s why he doesn’t normally work in clay—because he doesn’t have an oven, but he assumes Miskwabic Pottery would let him use their student kiln. He used to help pack tiles into boxes and move big bags of wet clay for Betty Spinks in exchange for pottery lessons.
    He packed up the figurines and took them out to the garage, ignoring the cracks webbed out across the windshield—he’d have to get that fixed. He hauled the tarp out of the back and flipped it over to hide the rusty stains.
    Yanking up the garage door, some part of him expected it to open onto nothingness. But it was a bright late-autumn day, the low cloud cover catching the sunlight and spreading it around.
    He drove past rows of wooden houses with peeling paint and overgrown grass, the bare trees reaching up their branches as if to rip a hole in the sky, and took a shortcut through Indian Village, where the houses got a lot nicer, and all dolled up for Halloween, with pumpkins in the windows and spooky floss draped over the big old oaks and elms