“Finally giving up, Starkey?” Bam asks, when she catches him studying it later that night. “Ready to be unwound?”
He ignores the suggestion. “This harvest camp is in Nevada, north of Reno,” he tells her. “Nevada has the weakest Juvenile Authority in the nation. It also has the highest concentration of storks waiting to be unwound. But check this out: This particular harvest camp has a shortage of surgeons. The population is bursting, and they can’t unwind them fast enough.” Then he gives her the boy-next-door grin. He’s kept this to himself long enough. Time to start sowing the seeds of glorious purpose. He might as well begin with Bam.
“We’re not going to take down individual homes and liberate one stork at a time anymore,” Starkey proudly tells her. “We’re going to liberate an entire harvest camp.”
And God help anyone who gets in his way.
16 • Risa
* * *
HUMAN INTEREST NEWS CLIP
Today Eye-On-Art focuses on the provocative sculptures of Paulo Ribeiro, a Brazilian artist who works in a radical medium. As you can see from these images, his work is stunning, intriguing, and often disturbing. He calls himself an “Artist of Life,” because every piece of work is crafted from the unwound.
We caught up with Ribeiro at a recent exhibition in New York.
“It is not so unusual what I do. Europe is full of cathedrals adorned in human bones, and in the early twenty-first century, artists like Andrew Krasnow and Gunther Von Hagens were known for their work in flesh. I have simply taken this tradition a logical step further. I hope not just to inspire but to incite. To bring to art patrons an aesthetic state of unrest. My use of the unwound is a protest against unwinding.”
Pictured here is what Ribeiro considers to be his finest piece—both haunting, and intriguing, the piece is a working musical instrument he calls Orgão Orgânico, which now resides in a private collection.
“It is a shame that my greatest work should be privately owned, for it was meant to be heard and seen by the world. But like so many unwound, it now will never be.”
* * *
Risa dreams of the stony faces. Pale and gaunt, judgmental and soulless as they gaze at her—not from a distance this time—but so close she could touch them. However, she can’t touch them. She’s sitting at a piano, but it will not bring forth music because Risa has no arms with which to play. The faces wait for a sonata that will never come—and only now does she realize that they are so close to one another they cannot possibly have bodies attached. They truly are disembodied. They are lined up in rows, and there are too many for her to count. She’s horrified, but can’t look away.
Risa can’t quite discern the difference between the dream and waking. She thinks she might have been sleeping with her eyes open. There’s a TV turned low, directly in her line of sight, that now shows an advertisement featuring a smiling woman who appears to be in love with her toilet bowl cleanser.
Risa rests on a comfortable bed in a comfortable place. It’s a place she’s never been, but that’s a good thing, because it can only be an improvement over the places she has been lately.
There’s a lanky umber kid in the room, who just now turns his gaze to her from the TV. It’s a kid she’s never met, but she knows his face from more serious television ads than the one on now.
“So you’re the real deal,” he says when he sees she’s awake. “And here I thought you were some crazy-ass crank call.” He looks older than he does in the commercials. Or maybe just wearier. She guesses he’s about eighteen—no older than her.
“You’ll live. That’s the good news,” the umber kid says. “Bad news is your right wrist is infected from that trap.”
She looks to see her right wrist puffy and purple and worries that she might lose it—perhaps the pain being the cause of her armlessness in the dream. She instantly thinks of Connor’s arm, or more accurately, Roland’s arm on Connor’s body.
“Give me someone else’s hand, and I’ll brain you,” she says.
He laughs and points to his right temple and the faintest of surgical scars. “I already got brained, thank you very much.”
Risa looks to her other arm, which also has a bandage. She can’t remember why.
“We also gotta test you for rabies because of that bite. What was it, a dog?”
Right. Now she remembers. “Coyote.”
“Not exactly man’s best friend.”
The bedroom around her is decorated in gaudy glitz. There’s a mirror in a faux-gold frame. Light fixtures with shimmering chains. Shiny things. Lots and lots of shiny things.
“Where are we?” she asks. “Las Vegas?”
“Close,” her host says. “Nebraska.” Then he laughs again.
Risa closes her eyes for a moment and tries to mentally collate the events that led her here.