L.M. Conkling
The Artist’s Interview
The subject insisted on conducting our interview by video chat instead of in person. When I asked why this was her preference, she replied, “I’m sensitive to smells,” and would elaborate no further.
When I logged in, the picture was hazy and distorted.
“Hello, Victoria,” I said, my voice chipper, “it looks like there might be something on your camera.”
“Yes, there is.” Her amorphous form shifted slightly then stilled.
I waited expectantly, then forced a smile. “Do you need to grab something to clean it with?”
“No. It’s a scarf.”
“Oh.” I licked my lips nervously. “Would you prefer a regular phone call?”
“No.”
“Alright.” Even though I could not see her clearly, I knew her from old photographs. The thin, hawkish nose, large gray eyes, and skeletal frame would not have changed much from her youth. Though now, instead of the rebel’s uniform of ragged t-shirts and dark pants, she seemed to be draped in an assortment of scarves and long robes like an ancient priestess. Her eyes were sharp, and even through the veil she’d draped over her camera lens I could feel them inspecting me carefully, taking in my tight ponytail and twin set. Although I had thought I looked polished this morning, now I felt childish. I should’ve worn a jacket, not a cardigan. It’s the little details that she will zero in on.
“Do you have questions for me?”
“Um, yes, I’m sorry.” I shuffled my papers as I felt my face redden. My preparation for this interview had been rushed, Victoria’s acceptance of the invitation wholly unexpected. Madelaine, my advisor, had told all her students to reach out to Victoria this year, as it was the twentieth anniversary of the Artist’s Pardons, excusing them of any charges that had been applied under the previous administration.
Victoria had been amongst the first handful to be recognized, not only pardoned but awarded the National Medallion of Arts by the then newly elected president, Simone Algeny. Madelaine had been slightly alarmed when I told her I’d been able to schedule time; I know she’d been hoping one of her more politically leaning students would’ve had that honor, if Victoria granted it at all. I knew her name, as did everyone. She was mentioned in most Women’s History classes, which had never been my strongest subject. But I was tired of the assignments Madelaine encouraged me toward: asking children what their favorite flavors and colors were, writing up “This is Your Life” style interviews with the oldest residents in the county. I wanted someone to tell me something that would stick in my brain. I knew Victoria would be the one to do it.
My first meaty journalistic piece.
I smoothed one hand over my ponytail and smiled at the blurred image on my screen. “So, we are interested in what motivates people into extraordinary action.”
She nodded curtly. “You are a student.”
“Yes ma’am. But a senior this year.”
“I’d have guessed freshman.”
I tugged at my cardigan. It was even baby pink, for goodness’ sake. I should’ve gone with the black. “No, ma’am, a senior.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not a ma’am. Not yet. Possibly not ever.”
“Ok.” I bit at my lip, worrying at the tissue. I’d have no lipstick left at this rate. “So, as I was saying, we’re interviewing people about their extraordinary actions.”
“So you said.”
“And, I, um, wanted to ask about one of the bigger performance art pieces you did.”
Her laugh was startling. “Who told you it was performance art?”
I shuffled my papers until I found the articles chronicling her activities. “Well, I thought it was, because of your award? And the newspapers around here—"
“Which ones?”
As I rattled off the names of the three local papers she shifted, leaning forward over her desk. There was a hurried movement; I assumed she was taking notes.
“I’ll look up the pieces; you don’t have to read them to me.” She settled back in her chair. “It wasn’t performance art. It was vandalism.”
“Oh.” I clasped my hands in my lap to keep them from fidgeting. “Well, what made you want to vandalize property?”
She sighed, the sound like rushing water through the speakers. “So many things. We all felt like we had to do something, you know? But what can you do in those kinds of situations? You’re powerless.”
I nodded, past history lessons muddled in my head. I remembered there had been riots. Rights stripped away. But not much else. “Now when you say ‘we,’ you mean—"
“Patty, Hector, Moira, and me. I never could’ve got up on top of some of those things without help. You realized that, surely.”
“Of course.”
I hadn’t. None of the articles, none of the textbooks, mentioned anyone but Victoria.
I cleared my throat nervously. “There have been many questions about where you found your materials, especially at that time, when there were shortages of pretty much everything. Can you tell me where you sourced the raw elements of your pieces?”
Again, she shrugged. “Everywhere. People throw out so much. We found wire coiled by garbage cans or pulled the springs from old mattresses. The wood was old pallets or pieces of disintegrating homes. I’m sure you know how many of those there are in the area.”
Entire blocks of my hometown had been abandoned after the first wave of clashes turned violent, the empty husks of dilapidated homes still unclaimed to this day. Often, I wished a fire would break out, get rid of all of it. I think most people felt that way; everyone just wanted to forget. The cameras were the only thing protecting the remaining pieces of the old world.
“Other bits would pop up without us looking and we’d always find a way to use them. Broken ceramics were my favorite.” Her sigh was wistful, memories rippling like stones thrown in a pond. “They were the best, at least for aesthetics. They weren’t the best for strength.”
“There are so few photos of your work, and they’re grainy. Newspaper archives.” Behind the scarf, Victoria didn’t move. I shuffled my paper notes again, head ducked. “Um, to me, it looks like you used cement in a lot of your work. Is that right?”
Victoria nodded. “When we could find it. It wasn’t as available then as it is now. People used it for so much then—building walls, lining moats. It was insane.”
My fingers flew across the keyboard as I took notes. “So when there was no cement, what did you use?”
Her laugh this time was genuine, crystalline. “Oh, it was so perfect. Hector—a brilliant mind, truly—came up with this mixture. It was so, so awful! But it set fast and set hard. But the smell!” She waved her hand in front of her face. “I picked up masks whenever I could, but even they didn’t help much.”
“Do you know what was in it?”
“No idea. We used to try to get him to tell us, but he’d refuse every time. But he could make vats of it anywhere, as long as he had water, dirt, and a drugstore.”
I pulled out my favorite photo of her work and held it up to my camera. “Can you tell me more about this piece?”
It was a dimensional mural, textured and rippling, plastered onto the brick wall of a tidy suburban home. Black lines and circles suggested a crowd clustered around the giant figure of a woman, her mouth open in what looked like a scream. Fangs curved beneath her cracked lips, dark liquid dripping from their points. Behind those bloody crescents, deep in the darkness of her throat, there were flames. Destruction.
Victoria leaned closer to the monitor. Through the thin scarf, I think I saw her smile at the memory. “That was Patty’s design. Always the artist, though of course she couldn’t use it in those days, not for any legitimate purpose. Women weren’t supposed to have voices of any kind.”
The veil over the camera wavered, sliding across my screen. Victoria reached for a large black creature I assumed to be a cat and settled the animal on her lap.
“We spent the entire first night sketching. We used glow in the dark paint, can you believe it? So all day, before we added the textural elements, the design was right there, but they couldn’t see it.”
She stroked the cat slowly. The gauzy barrier of the scarf slipped a bit more, and half of her face showed clearly. Her smile was dreamy, interrupted only by a ragged scar that started on her cheek, bisected her lips, and ended at her chin. I held my breath as I stared, this new image of her so different from the smooth-faced young woman in my old textbooks. My readers would be fascinated. Could I ask about the scar? How, without telling her the scarf had slipped?
“I think about it sometimes, why we did it.” Victoria continued, oblivious to my curiosity. “It could’ve been so bad, then. We could’ve been locked up, or worse. You girls are so lucky now, but we weren’t. They sold some girls, I’ve heard. To other countries or gave them away as bribes. Girls who were supposed to be on their way somewhere—usually jail or the asylums they had built—but never arrived.”
Victoria was quiet again, and her gray eyes grew glassy and distant. “I never thought about it at the time, not until Moira’s sister Angela went missing. Over something stupid, really. She was thirteen and shoplifted a lip gloss. They were sending her to juvie, but she never arrived. Moira never got answers, not in all these years. When she tried, she was told to let it go, that her sister was gone. But Moira had always been a painter, a talented portrait artist, and she decided to put her sister’s face everywhere. At first, I was just the lookout, made sure no one caught us. But the pictures of Angela would be painted over the next day. Which is when Hector got involved, and we started using cement, mud, things that were harder to erase.
“Angela, though, she was gorgeous. Even though she was only thirteen, she turned the heads of grown men. Which is dangerous now, but then?” Victoria shook her head. The sliver of clarity the shifted scarf provided allowed me to see the anger tightening the skin around her eyes. “Girls would do anything to not be beautiful, did you know that? Wear ugly, dirty clothes. Not wash their hair for weeks. We couldn’t cut our hair at that point without persecution, though I know some wanted to. Some women even tried to pose as men, but that didn’t go well for them. As you know, right?”
I nodded slowly. Had this been taught in school? I couldn’t remember. This had all happened before my time. My parents hadn’t talked of those times, certainly had never been a part of the uprisings. It had never been a part of my story.
Victoria continued, her voice low. “As for Angela… I sometimes wonder if she’s still out there, or if she got away. I hope she’s dead.”
Silence descended between us. The scarf slid a little more and I held my breath to keep from gasping. They must have smoothed this over in the photographs I’d seen, or this had happened after she’d gone into hiding. Victoria’s face had more than one scar. The right side of her face was a pattern of dots and dashes, spiraling out into a fanned flower. The scars were pink and ridged, precise and calculated.
It was beautiful.
And it was horrible.
“I like your twin set.”
Victoria’s voice caught me by surprise. When I glanced up, her gray eyes were staring directly into mine. I wasn’t sure if she’d noticed that her cat had upset her scarf, and I wasn’t going to tell her. I needed more time to study her face, her reactions, her eyes. If I was going to communicate to my readers what this legend looked like now.
“Thank you,” I said, tugging at the edge of the pale pink cardigan. “I wanted to look professional.”
“It’s better to look like yourself,” she said, her hand sliding down the cat’s back. “But you still look nice.”
Looking like myself would’ve meant pajamas pants and a stained t-shirt. I doubt that would’ve inspired much trust from a woman like Victoria.
“Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “So, about this piece?”
“Yes. That piece.” Victoria smiled again, the scars around her eye crinkling into the folds. “We only did the doors and windows that time because we wanted to seal them in. Every section was inspired by something he’d said or done, a reflection of his hate. I wanted him buried under it. My idea had been to do a mosaic across every inch of the house, making it impossible for them to get out. But it would’ve taken too much time. I was still happy with what we did, and in the end, I rather liked the negative space the open walls gave.”
“Me too!” I held up the picture and pointed. “My favorite is the front door. I like these bits here, where it looks like bars.”
“That’s dog shit, encased in mattress springs.”
I stared at the photo. “Seriously? That is disgusting.”
“Hector’s idea.” Victoria’s lips tilted, her scars rippling as she smiled. “He said that’s what the man living in that house was, and the mattress springs were because of the abuses we suspected at the time. Which were confirmed later. Besides, smells didn’t bother Hector like they do me, so he sometimes used very nasty elements in his pieces.” She leaned forward and the cat was dumped on the floor. He stalked away with a meow of protest, his black tail fluffed and upright.
“I did the side door. Do you have a picture of that?”
I held up a photo to the camera. The door frame and steps were covered with hundreds of small U-shaped lumps, of various colors and sizes. Some were thick and plain, others delicate and ornamental. It seemed a hodge-podge, unlike her other pieces.
“This one?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes flicked from the photo to me. I tried not to indicate I could see her clearly.
“Do you know what those are?”
I shook my head.
“Most people don’t, not anymore. At the time, the man who lived in that house had made a silly little statement, something that no one remembers. He’d said that the strong drink coffee, like real men. The weak drink tea, like subdued women. So for months before we did this project, I collected the handles off every teacup I came across. Then I bound them to his door, making such a thick, strong slab he could not escape.”
Victoria’s voice was angry as she remembered. “He probably didn’t notice. He was that kind. But I knew. I knew it took machinery tearing the door from its hinges to let him out.”
My fingers flew across the keyboard as I recorded her story. It seemed obtuse, distant even. My professors had told me that art that must be explained was not really art.
“Why did you use teacup handles for this? I mean, I understand that you were trying to play off his statement, but—"
“That’s not what it was about at all.” Her gray eyes were sharp and disappointed. I felt as though I had failed her.
“I’m sorry, I just thought you were trying to, um, cover him in tea since he said it was too feminine?”
“No.” Her sigh was magnified in my cramped apartment and I hunched down in my seat, trying to be as small as possible.
“He said that tea was weak, like women. The multiple handles—and their representation of all women, since they were of all colors, sizes, and shapes—is what that was about. How all of us together, even broken, were able to trap his hateful heart in that prison he called home.”
“Hmmm, okay.” I thought of President Algeny, her presence throughout my entire life as she navigated her way to an unprecedented sixth term. The men she managed, the way she deftly squashed any disrespect with guillotine and firing squad. The world Victoria was describing felt like the fever dream of raving dissident.
“So you’re not an artist,” Victoria said.
It was a statement, not a question.
“Well, not myself, no. I did take art classes in school. But mostly I’m a writer.” I shifted under her scrutiny. After a moment she sat back in her seat, her smile adding new textures to her scarred face.
“So you’re an artist, just not a visual one. That’s actually a relief. I don’t have to explain my art to other artists. If I do, I know they’re morons. But a writer…that makes sense. It’s not your scene.”
“But I thought you said it was vandalism, not art.”
“But you choose to see it as art, so it is for you. In my time, that opinion could’ve got you arrested, and a sweet thing like you, in your pastel pink twin set, would’ve gone the way of Angela for such opinions.”
I could again feel her studying me through the camera, and I steeled myself enough to meet her gaze. We hung in silence for a moment, our eyes locking in that fraction of clear space. Then she reached forward and straightened the scarf, again establishing the hazy division between us.
“Do you have any more questions? I don’t like to stay on these connections too long. It’s too easy for someone to figure out where I am.”
“But you were forgiven for all your crimes when Simone Algeny became President.”
“Forgiveness on paper is nice. Forgiveness from the government is nice. But all those men that were ousted when Simone got the seat? All their followers, and the sects and militias and nationalists and traditionalists? They didn’t just go away. They’re still there. And someone like me, who made fools of them when they were at their most powerful, would be quite a score for them nowadays. So let’s wrap this up.”
“Um, yes, just one more question.” I started to flick through my notes again, but then glanced up at Victoria’s still form. The blurred division between us gave me courage to ask the only question that mattered to me. “Why did you accept my interview request? You must get a lot of them.”
She was quiet for so long I did not think she would answer.
“You’re right. I got hundreds. Thousands, maybe. This anniversary really seemed to rile up the journalists. So to be honest? I didn’t want to go with a major media source, so I just picked a student’s request at random. That happened to be you.” Victoria smiled, and even through the scarf’s barrier I could see that it was small, tight. “I’m sorry if you thought it was because there was something special about you. Anything else?”
I was barely able to stutter out my thanks before Victoria ended the call. Madelaine was right to doubt my ability; I hadn’t been able to get enough to write a decent piece. I always took notes during an interview to jot down any thoughts for angles that might come up, and as I glanced at my screen I saw I had written a list of names.
Hector.
Patty.
Moira.
Angela.
Angela. The vanished girl. The beauty who didn’t try to hide behind dirty hair, who was vain and young and silly enough to steal cosmetics during a harshly fascist regime that sneered at the rights of women. This much I remembered from school, though I always felt like they harped on it a little too much. It certainly couldn’t have been that bad, not when less than thirty years later women were so solidly in power.
But Angela… of course she was my angle. Her disappearance was the epitome of how things had been in Victoria’s younger years.
My hair was still in a ponytail when I heard a key unlocking my door. I hadn’t even had time to change out of my cardigan before they came in swiftly, silently, their clothes ordinary, their faces clean shaven. Most of them were young, though a few were grizzled, close to Victoria’s age. They looked like the men I saw waiting tables, pushing strollers, installing cable lines. They were unremarkable.
One crossed the room to crouch down beside me. “We will not hurt you if you are still and quiet.”
Hurt me? My mouth opened to protest and his hand was suddenly on my arm, heavy, hot, and squeezing. The spike of fear running through my core was unfamiliar, nauseating. A glimpse into another world, one that I’d been told was eradicated before my time.
One of the men lifted my laptop from me, seating himself at my battered table, his fingers flying over my keyboard. After a moment I heard my own voice, tinny and high, as I greeted Victoria. My stomach clenched as I realized that my call had been recorded.
The men huddled around my table, their presence taking up so much air I fought to breathe. My hands gripped the edge of my chair as they silently watched my screen, their smiles brilliant when the scarf slipped, giving them a view of her face.
“I told you this was the right place,” one of them said softly.
They left as quietly as they came, filing out my door into the hallway. I could still feel that heavy hand imprinted on my skin long after their footsteps faded.
I tried to reach Victoria again, but she would not accept my calls. My emails to her went unanswered. The cops were uninterested since there had been no theft, violence, or even threat.
A month later when the piece ran about Victoria, highlighting her artistic efforts and ongoing behind-the-scenes activism, I began to receive the phone calls. At first, the silence would only be broken by a wet, salacious panting, like a dog on a summer day. But they soon changed, a woman’s screams shattering like broken glass down the line, a reminder of what could be. I was relieved that Madeleine had edited out the bit about the men swarming my apartment.
Graduation came with its scratchy cap and gown and when I left town to start a new job, I changed my number and the calls stopped. I wondered about Victoria and remembered what she’d said about Angela: that she hoped she was dead. I hold that same hope for Victoria, too.
I don’t walk alone at night anymore. There is a tide turning, and I wonder how many will drown before it ebbs. I keep quiet, pray for safety, and hope no one realizes that I see them. Really see them.
I am only one. There is nothing else I can do.
L.M. Conkling is an author of speculative, corporate, and supernatural horror. In her free time, she enjoys exploring new restaurants and haunted locations, challenging herself with difficult recipes that last several pages, reading, and creating quilts that cause viewers to stare for much too long. L.M. Conkling resides in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Will, and their black hellhound, Val. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Cal Poly Humboldt.
