I’ll Give You the Sun(38)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Drunken Igor must be inside. An image of him with his greasy hair and wiry black beard and blue calloused fingers fills my head. A very itchy image. He probably has lice. I mean, if I were a louse I’d choose him to colonize. All that hair. No offense, but ick.

I take a few steps back, see a bank of windows on the side of the building, all lit up—the studio space must be back there. An idea begins to take shape. A great idea. Because maybe there’s a way to spy inside his studio undetected . . . yes, like from that fire escape in back, I think, spotting it. I want to see the giants. I want to see Drunken Igor too, and from behind glass seems perfect. Brilliant, really. Before I know it, I’m over the fence, and hustling down a pitch-dark alley, one in which girls get bludgeoned with chisels.

It is very unlucky to fall on your face

(This is an honest-to-goodness entry. The wisdom of
Grandma’s bible knows no bounds.)

I reach the fire escape—alive—and start climbing, mouse-quiet, toward the light blaring from the landing.

What am I doing?

Well, I’m doing it. At the top of the stairs, I squat down and scoot like a crab under the windows. Once I’ve cleared them, I stand back up, hugging the wall as I peer into a huge brightly lit space—

And there they are. Giants. Giant giants. But different from the ones in the photographs. These are all couples. Across the room, enormous rock-beings are embracing as if on a dance floor, as if they’ve all frozen mid-move. No, not embracing, actually. Not yet. It’s like each “man” and “woman” were hurling themselves at each other passionately, desperately, and then time stopped before they could make it into each other’s arms.

Adrenaline courses through me. No wonder Interview had him taking a baseball bat to Rodin’s The Kiss. It’s so polite and, well, boring, in comparison—

My train of thought’s interrupted because bounding into the large space as if his skin can’t contain the uproar of blood within is Drunken Igor, but utterly transformed. He’s shaved, washed his hair, and put on a smock, which is spattered with clay, as is the water bottle he’s holding to his lips. There was no mention in his bio that he worked in clay. He guzzles from the bottle like he’s been wandering the desert with Moses, drains it, then tosses it into a trash can.

Someone’s plugged him in.

To a nuclear reactor.

Ladies and gentlemen: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World.

He moves toward a clay work-in-progress in the center of the room and when he’s within a few feet of it, he begins circling it slowly, like predator on prey, speaking in a deep rumble of a voice I can hear through the window. I look at the door, assuming someone’s about to follow him in, someone immersed in this conversation with him, like the English guy, I think with a flutter, but no one joins him. I can’t make out a word of what he’s saying. It sounds like Spanish.

Maybe he has ghosts too. Good. Something in common then.

All at once, he seizes on the sculpture and the suddenness of the action makes my breath catch. He’s a downed power line, the way he moves. Except now the power’s been cut and he’s pressing his forehead into the belly of the sculpture. No offense (again), but what a freak. He has his large open hands on each side of the work, and he’s just staying like that, unmoving, as if he’s praying or listening for a pulse or totally out of his gourd. Then I see his hands begin to move slowly up and down and across the surface of the piece, dragging clay off, bit by bit, throwing fistfuls onto the floor, but as he does this, he never once lifts his head to look at what he’s doing. He’s sculpting blind. Oh wow.

I wish Noah could see this. And Mom.

Eventually, he steps back in a stumbling kind of way as if pulling himself out of a trance, takes a cigarette pack out of a pocket in his smock, lights up, and, leaning against a nearby table, he smokes and stares at the sculpture, tilting his head from left to right. I’m recalling his bonkers biography. How he came from a long line of gravestone cutters in Colombia and began carving at the age of five. How no one had ever seen angels as magnificent as his, and people who lived near the cemeteries where his statues watched over the dead swore they heard them singing at night, swore that their heavenly voices carried into their homes, their sleep, their dreams. How it was rumored that the boy carver was enchanted or possibly possessed.

I’m going with the latter.

He’s the kind of man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down. Agreed, Mom, which puts me back at square one. How am I going to ask him to mentor me? This him is far more frightening than Igor.

He flicks his cigarette on the floor, takes a long sip of water from a glass on the table, then spits it from his mouth onto the clay—ah, gross!—then he works the moistened section furiously with his fingers, his eyes now glued to what he’s doing. He’s lost in it, drinking and spitting and molding, drinking and spitting and molding, sculpting like he’s trying to pull something he needs out of the clay, needs badly. As time passes and passes, I begin to see a man and a woman take shape—two bodies tangled up like branches.

This is wishing with your hands.

I don’t know how much time goes by as I and a handful of enormous stone couples watch him work, watch him rake his hands, dripping with wet clay, through his hair, over and over again, until it’s not clear if he’s making the sculpture or if the sculpture is making him.

• • •

It’s dawn and I’m sneaking back up Guillermo Garcia’s fire escape.

Once on the landing, I again crawl along under the sill until I’m at the same vantage point as last night, then rise just enough to see into the studio . . . He’s still there. I somehow knew he would be. He’s sitting on the platform, his back to me, head hung down, his whole body limp. He hasn’t changed his clothes. Has he slept at all? The clay sculpture beside him appears to be finished now—he must’ve worked all night—but it’s nothing like it was when I left. No longer are the lovers entwined in each other’s arms. The male figure’s on his back now and it looks like the female figure’s wrenching herself out of him, climbing right out of his chest.

It’s awful.

I notice then that Guillermo Garcia’s shoulders are rising and falling. Because he’s crying? As if by osmosis, a dark swell of emotion rises in me. I swallow hard, accordion my shoulders tight. Not that I ever cry.

Tears of mourning should be collected and then ingested to heal the soul