Free The Eighth Day by John Case Page A

his purchases the two blocks to where the Bomber was parked and drove to his studio.
    This was on the third floor of what had once been a department store at the corner of Florida and Tenth Street, Northeast. Looted and firebombed in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, the building had become a moldering pile of brick, festooned with graffiti. A fringe of trash and broken glass glittered against the old store’s foundation, which was itself a backdrop for countless petty drug dealers and dozing drunks.
    As mean as the building was, the studio itself was filled with light and remarkably spacious. Not to mention dirt cheap. Though the first floor had been bricked up for twenty years, each of the other tiers was girded round by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out across the ghetto toward the suburbs.
    Danny’s “atelier” (as Caleigh jokingly referred to it) was in the building’s northwest corner, a rectangular space with ten-foot ceilings and a row of floor-to-ceiling windows along both of its exterior walls.
    The northwest corner of the room served as Danny’s “office,” with an old steel desk facing a threadbare couch and a worn leather chair. Nearby, a beat-up TV rested on a recycled filing cabinet, while a few feet away an electric kettle stood on a counter next to a small sink.
    It was the industrial equivalent of the “clean, well-lighted place” that Hemingway had once described, though it was anything but “crisp.” The hardwood floors were spattered with paint, as if Jackson Pollock had suffered a seizure with a brush in each of his hands. In one corner of the room, a welding rig stood before a tangled mass of rebar whose sculptural intent Danny could no longer recall (if, indeed, he ever really knew). Across the room, a soapstone bust of J. Edgar Hoover, an artifact of Danny’s college days, gazed fixedly at the world beyond the windows. Elsewhere, half a dozen canvases leaned against the wall beside the door, which looked as if the DEA had kicked it in—and not just once. Most of the canvases had been painted years before when Danny was just out of college and living on Mallorca with a beautiful (if schizy) Dutch mime.
    As he entered the studio with Terio’s garbage and the things he’d bought at Martin’s, it occurred to Danny that he really ought to make an inventory of the pieces that he had and those that he’d loaned to friends. Then he’d know where he stood when it came time to organize the Neon show.
    Dropping the garbage bags on the floor, he snapped on the TV (the radio was on the fritz) and glanced around the room. What was there? What did he actually have that he could show? Some wire sculptures, a couple of collages, a nascent “installation” whose focal point was a mordant white outline on the floor. At first glance, it seemed to be the taped silhouette of a homicide victim. But closer inspection revealed something else or, rather, two things: a bulge in the shoulders that might have been wings or the beginning of wings, and a carefully painted hand at the end of an outflung arm. The effect of the wings and the hand was ambiguous and disquieting, precisely because one couldn’t be sure if they were coming or going. Were they remains—or portents? Was the figure fallen—or emerging? Even Danny didn’t know.
    It had taken him most of a week to get the silhouette (and the hand) just right, and now he wanted to buy one of those turning red lights that police cars have. With the lights flickering over the outline and Handel’s
Messiah
in the background, the installation would be unsettling. And maybe more.
    Then there was
Babel On II
.
    Standing in a pool of sunlight in the center of the room, Danny’s most recent work was eerie and yet undeniably beautiful—a see-through city with a mysterious hologram at its heart. In daylight, the floating image looked even more like the apparition he’d intended: washed-out and faded, the hologram was hallucinatory,