It Rides a Pale Horse by Andy Marino

Author:Andy Marino [MARINO, ANDY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

14

It didn’t click for me until you mentioned Hirst,” Asha says. “It was like you invoked him, and everything fell into place. I was conceiving of the worm and the dogsbody much too literally, which I blame on Justine’s recent obsession with a certain kind of cranky Russian formalism. You should see the angles in our town house, it’s like I’m always being poked and prodded. But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m getting at is, Hirst’s work floats over what the psalter is asking of you, conceptually.” She shakes her head. “I’m not expressing this properly. Justine and I speak a different sort of language, I’ve become accustomed to a certain—now it sounds like I’m blaming her for everything, but I assure you—never mind.”

Lark takes a hard right on what he hopes is the road that will take him past the skate park where the Czerpak kid just OD’d, the one-story Midway Motel, Ian’s newly sober sister’s newly shuttered bakery (which, depressingly, sucked). He thinks of Asha’s pupils, round black pools, and wonders if she re-upped her microdose since they left the house. He’s suspicious of her sense of wonder, even though it’s justified. The echo of the waterfall churns through his mind. You did this. “Can you boil this Hirst thing down for me?”

“Hirst’s work is executed by dogsbodies. He’s a factory operation, assistants in Mexico doing the assembly, the sourcing, while he squeezes out the conceptual juice from his house in some druidic UK hinterland.”

“So you want me to—” Lark is struck by deep resonance. “Goddamn.”

“What?”

“It’s like I told you—my sister’s a forger. A Method actor. She becomes artists.”

The jar with his birthday gift is still sitting in the dark, wedged between Krupp’s feet.

“And now you’re asking me to do the same thing.” He shakes his head. “But that’s not me, Asha. You know that.”

Asha lets out a sigh as only she can—clipped and brief and haughty and sympathetic, all at once.

“Lark, I don’t know how else to say this. You know I have your best interests at heart, yes?”

“Yeah, I’m your favorite client. Hold on.” Lark hits the brakes as shining eyes, hovering for a moment at the edge of the road, float smoothly across it, attached to a bounding silhouette. “You always gotta look back the way it came,” Lark says. “Where goes one deer, more follow.”

“Syntactically a nightmare,” Asha says, but her heart’s not in the insult. The wonder’s there. She keeps her wide eyes on the empty road. No deer follow the first. Krupp snores softly.

Lark eases his foot down on the gas pedal. “Anyway.”

“You’re a rare talent, Lark, but you don’t possess the rugged individuality that you’ve internalized about yourself over the years.”

He laughs. “I’ve never pretended to be anything special, Asha. You know that.”

“What I mean is, your outsider bent—”

“None of this is an act. I don’t do acts. It’s just the way I live. The way I work.”

Asha seems to brace herself, then the words come in a torrent. “You should be able to slip into something Hirst-adjacent now with ease, is what I’m saying.

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