Nathan's loft was at the top of a building that rivaled others for domination in the jagged graphic of the city skyline, an artful and minimally ornate steel and glass and concrete splinter pointed at heaven but only high enough to be occasionally graced by the lowest-hanging clouds which fogged the district. New and old money, all of it dirty, had invested in the real estate it occupied some forty years back. It was dark, it was sleek and slender, and it was Sharp. It was a recently-retro memorial to the mathematically efficient prognostications of the future that were inevitably incorrect. Its exterior was not intended to be inviting but rather ominous if not omnipotent, and at night its glossy surface was staggered and striped chaotically with empyrean white lights like defiant, pixelated constellations on a shred of artificial sky.
The elevator trip up to the loft was dizzyingly quick, a burst of momentum that disregarded gravity tangibly and a smooth ascent to the top of the building all at the command of a metal-cut key. It was an anachronism now, but Nathan preferred it to the electrical magic of more current technologies. A small antechamber waited beyond the elevator doors, and on the far side of the concrete gray room, a heavy-looking, sliding metal door.
The interior of the loft was comfortably sparse, a certain take on industrial. It was all reclaimed and resin-smooth wood, clean and black wrought iron and a burnt red brick wall dividing living spaces from studio spaces, buck-skin leather furniture and a menagerie of glass lantern lamp lights all hung from the ceiling at varying heights.
The southern face of the apartment was floor to ceiling windows interrupted only by the structural requirements to support panes of glass that large and that heavy, and an automated Roman blind of white canvas neatly collected upon itself to spare the loft a greenhouse effect when outdoor temperatures blazed. A rooftop garden waited beyond that glass, walking paths of black and gray pebbles and paving stones cut through a thin layer of lush green sod. A pond lurked in the shadow of an overgrown bamboo thicket contained only by a stone planter. A lonely black and silver koi fish named Zelda was the only other permanent resident of the loft.
The literal stars winked through the almost-invisible black metal grate that fenced off the mansard framed glass roof, the automatic blinds scheduled to retract much earlier than this post-midnight hour to unveil the firmament above the spacious cage that was his home. And in the loft proper, the bands of tobacco and pot smoke were not the only intoxicating scents that lazily danced and expanded.
Laurent's man sat sunken into a brown leather chair, occupying his time while Nathan was awake by staring into the glow of a mobile device. Perhaps it was the news of current events, or a novel of some kind, or a film. Nathan hadn't asked after the man had sat down, only answered a question about an electrical outlet near by, and agreed to provide notification when he intended to go to sleep, and otherwise occasional monitoring in case he slipped into slumber before giving that notice.
A king-sized platform bed nested with at least a half dozen pillows was dressed all in silky, coal gray sheets only a few shades paler than the glisten of light off the decorative, smooth iron balustrades at the far side of the open room. It was dressed also with a woman tonight, cast under some preternatural sedative influence and her own willful escape into un- or sub- consciousness, naked. And drips and splotches of inks that muted as they soaked into the fabric.
While Millicent slept, Nathan had sat on the foot of the bed with an ashtray sitting in the palm of one hand and a slimly rolled cigar in the other, calming and soothing his nerves with a mixture of marijuana and some finely-ground white powder, allowing his mind to wander.
It was upon a consideration of what she would feel, what she would say, what she would find when she woke, that he had gone up and down the iron spiral staircase multiple times....And whether he was awake or asleep, there would be more than just the memory of all that they had argued, all that had happened in the midst of their miscommunication, more than just his apartment home to explore. He put the blunt into the ashtray, and both upon a bedside stand where there was already a plastic bottle of drinking water waiting for Sleeping Beauty to begin to re-hydrate herself when she woke.
Nathan collected more than a dozen little glass pots of black and metallic and brightly-colored, water-soluble inks, and brought a few traditional brushes as well as a fudesonuke pen meant for calligraphy, along with some water jars for different washes up into the loft over the course of multiple twists up and down the stairwell.
Over a stretch of four or five hours — there was no clock in the loft, time only existed there when it was intentionally brought or as it naturally occurred in appearance on the face of the sky through the glass ceiling above — Nathaniel sat beside Millicent and knelt over her, using the calligraphy pen's short and fine-tipped brush to trace a myriad of illustrations out on her porcelain skin with stark, bold black ink. He smoked, and he traced, now and again balancing the filter of a cigarette between his lips along with the end of the brush pen in separate corners of his mouth like strange whiskers when he had to turn her body or rearrange her limbs to allow the line-work to flow.
The few pills that he'd taken had started to exert their influence half through his endeavor, a compound effect expanding his pupils under heavy lids, and the entire world for a little while was as slow and soft and wet as the glide of the brush on her skin.
When the outlines had dried, Nathan put the black brush down and began filling in all the colors. He was warm and numb in just the right increment at his core. The inks that he daubed and mopped and swept on her skin were water-color over so much surface tattoo, vibrant jewel tones and some even more energetic hues. He sectioned off parts of her as separate canvases, each a different interpretation or manifestation, another aspect, a simple adorning, a thousand-stroke signature that claimed her whole.
Van Gogh would have adored the glittery vibrant yellow that he mixed and the impressionist shapes of a sun that straddled her throat in a swirling burst, rays running up the underside of her chin and fanning the sides of her neck. Her voice was almost that warm even as an echo of memory in his ears, certainly that clear and bright — when she wanted it to be — and as energetic, transformative....
A pair of cartoonish blue birds perched on her right collarbone, silly and sweet companions. They were as whimsical as the reference to happiness. Nestled closer to her neck on this side, beneath a fan of yellows rays, he had scripted his name.
Her right forearm was covered in a buffet of lip-prints that weren't plump but were still a little bit luscious and orange, from wrist to elbow inside and out. She would understand what these kisses were covering like a loose net glove. Above the elbow, there were very few lines and only even enough to suggest the shapes of clouds and a tinge of pale blue and violet like a sunset or spun sugar tufts, the bank and tinting extending over her breast.
Thin and fine-lined feathers capped her left collarbone laterally as well as the round of her shoulder. Longer primaries plumed down her left arm as a continuance of the wing, and covered half the full length of her back, fanned out across one cheek of her ass. It was too obvious, and some times when she lay beside him on her stomach, he wondered where those wings had gotten lost...
The other half was a silvery shaded, gray moon, and above it an array of comets sprang up toward her shoulder from the small of her back and her spine like a still-captured set of dancing fireworks that hadn't quite popped. Here was nothing but a mature depiction of an immature citation.
A house — a home — the geometry no more complicated than a few rectangles and a triangular roof - overlapping the little swell of her left breast and her sternum. This too, was intentionally basic and simple, and the symbolism was as profoundly raw as the ink lines that shaped it.
Complex clusters of cherry blossoms blushed a rich, pale pink from between her thighs, spreading across the low crescent of her pelvis and climbing up her abdomen under the arches of her ribs. It was a decorative homage, something pretty and tender for the sake of such things, and because perhaps that was what her skin conjured in his mind when he nuzzled his face there.
Behind the blanket of flowers, he drew vertical lines in suggestion of the pipes of a complicated organ and stroked them over in gold-flaked, watered-down ink that made her ribs glitter.
A fractal wave crested just beneath the seam of her left thigh, the white caps outlined and the blue motion melting somewhere mid-thigh into a net of black-lined scales, casting down through her ankle where the top of her foot became a slender fin - cerulean and cyan. She had always been his siren, and that night he gave her at least half a tail to swim with.
Ribbons and tendrils of black, magenta and electric purple smoke began between her toes and traced wandering over the top of her right foot, curling and coiling sybaritic in expanding volumes twisted around her ankle, shin, knee and around her thigh in the swirling color was hiding a scroll of piano song notations (was it playable" would it ever be played" would she see it before it washed off her skin into the shower drain?). The colors and bands diffused among the cherry blossoms threatening the seam of her hip. An Eleusian allusion to her oracular path, stepping either out of or into mysteries and wisdom.
He had smoked through almost half the pack of cigarettes, encouraged by the other drugs he had taken along with a contrarily self-restrained double of bourbon over ice that he had poured for himself on a functional break from his spontaneous inspiration, by the time that the last of the ink was drying on her skin. The darkness of the evening before was all spent, and light began to crawl and creep into the loft even while the blinds and shades made their minuscule adjustments to combat it.
Two spent cartridges of self-developing film and a Polaroid camera sat on the bedside stand next to the patient bottle of water. The little square images were strewn haphazardly: in the bed, on the floor beside it, on the nightstand....A permanent record of his temporary living tapestry scattered all around them.
A broken strand of pearls rested on the opposite nightstand...
When Nathan finally surrendered to the cumulative exhaustion of twenty hours and lingering intoxication, he hung the fudesonuke pen around his neck as a silent invitation or admission, clipped to a thin silver chain. His fingers were stained like the jeans he pushed and kicked off. He called out to Laurent's man below the loft that he was 'passing the fuck out', and then there was just the whisper of a heavy silk sheet drawn up over his latest work and himself, and a flutter of photographs re-settling like stray feathers.
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