A Spark of Light(66)
Where are you?
The longest moment in Hugh’s life was the breath he held until he saw those three little dots that meant she was typing. He sank to his knees, his body singing.
Hiding, she wrote.
Stay there, Hugh typed. I’m coming.
He should recuse himself. The whole point of hostage negotiation was to be clearheaded, and he couldn’t be objective if his own daughter was a hostage. Staying in charge here would be against the rules.
He also knew he didn’t care. There was no way he was going to trust Wren’s life to someone else.
He started to run toward the clinic.
—
TO BEX, AIR HAD BECOME fire, and every breath was charring her raw. Some tiny cell of self-preservation warned her to crawl somewhere, anywhere, that she could hide. But when she tried to roll to her side the agony that stabbed through her made it impossible; the world went white at the edges.
She stared overhead, her brain making patterns of the fluorescent lights and the tiles of the dropped ceiling. That was what artists did, they arranged the unarrangeable into something that made sense.
When she created her canvases, with their giant pixels, she was filtering impressionism through technology. The key to her technique was that the human eye—the human brain—did not have to see individual parts to imagine the whole. It was called Gestalt theory. Similarity, continuation, closure—these were some of the principles that the mind craved. It would complete lines that weren’t fully drawn; it would fill in boxes that were empty. The eye was pulled to what was missing, but more important, the eye finished it.
Maybe Hugh would be able to do that, too, if she were gone. Finish her work.
And yet she also knew that there was another tenet of art: the observer could easily miss what wasn’t obvious. An optical illusion worked because the brain focused on the positive space of a chalice, and not the negative silhouettes of the two profiles that formed it. But just because the viewer saw a goblet didn’t mean the artist, while creating the piece, hadn’t been wholly focused on those faces.
Maybe one day Hugh and Wren would hold a gallery retrospective of her work. Maybe she would achieve fame by dying relatively young. And only then, maybe, would they realize they were the subjects of every one of her pieces.
This was the worst pain she had ever felt.
She opened her mouth to say their names, but found her throat was filled with the words of Leonardo da Vinci: While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
—
LOUIE COULDN’T HEAR. THE SHOTGUN blast had left him with a heavy, seeded silence pushing on his ears, the absence of sound hammering in his head. He rolled over, which hurt his leg so much his vision went blurry, and he thought he was about to lose a second sense. He found himself looking at Harriet, the nurse who’d been working with him in the procedure room that morning, who was sprawled on the floor as well. Harriet’s brown eyes were wide and her mouth was open. There was a bullet hole, neat as a thumbtack, in the center of her forehead. A feathered fan of blood sprayed the wall behind her.
Louie turned his head and vomited.
He found himself thinking of Bras Coupé, the most famous runaway slave in Louisiana, who couldn’t be killed by a bullet. His real name had been Squire, and he had been a bamboula dancer. When he stomped and whirled at Congo Square, the voodoo ladies would rise up like spirits called to service. As a slave, he had been owned by General William de Buys and would join the general on hunts and expeditions. He was even allowed to carry arms. But that wasn’t the same as freedom, as Louie’s grandmama told him, so Squire ran away over and over and over. During one recapture, he had been injured and had an arm amputated, earning him his nickname. The next morning, he’d run away again from his hospital bed into the swamps. There, he pulled together a ragtag group of escaped slaves, and at night, they’d descend on the plantations, carrying off female slaves and even white women.
Bras Coupé had become a legend of infamy. Slave hunters told tales of shooting him, yet seeing the bullet pass through his body. A city guard claimed to have shot him and beaten him to death, but when lawmen came to the spot where it had happened, Bras Coupé was gone again, leaving only a trail of blood that disappeared into the swamp.
Maybe to survive now, Louie had to become a ghost, too.
He pushed himself up on his forearms, intent on hiding, grunting at the pain that tore through his leg. Dr. King joined Bras Coupé in his head: If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving. Based on the radiating center of the pain and the rhythmic pulse of the bleeding, he would guess that he’d been shot in the superficial branch of the femoral artery, that his femur had been shattered. He might be able to crawl somewhere and conceal himself, but he’d bleed out unless he could fix this first. He gritted his teeth and inched forward on his elbows, until he could grab the handle of a cabinet.
Inside was the sterile tubing used to connect the cannula to the suction machine. He tore the packet with his teeth and tried to tie the clear rubber around his thigh. It was like trying to make a Christmas gift bow alone, though—no matter how hard he worked at it, he couldn’t knot it tight enough. And the pain, it was like no pain he’d ever felt.
The edges of his vision began to go dark, like the borders at the end of one of those old-time silent movies, just before they shrank into a pinpoint of darkness. Louie’s final thought before he passed out was that this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.