Crypt orchids, p.4
Crypt Orchids, page 4
I recall thinking the driver is no problem because I can see his class ring hanging on a thong from the rearview. As though he has peaked out in high school, given up on making anything of himself, and so stops wearing the ring because it reminds him of that failure, yet doesn’t have the heart to toss it, so it winds up on the mirror.
My teeth are folded back and my whole mouth is numb. I recall meeting the dashboard head-on before falling base over apex down the hillside. I don’t think I sustained any broken bones. Score one for no seat belts.
When the driver regains consciousness I catch him looking at me and think, okay. Now the masks are off. He’d handled me like he’s used to it. My gag with the tissue didn’t detour him nearly enough.
Call me the Kleenex Killer, I think. Hah. What shall we call you, my truck-driving comrade?
He spasms. Some kind of convulsion, subtle. As the paramedic turns I spot a hemostat on the van’s rubberized floor. I reach down to retrieve it, feeling my muscles work. Some kind of painkiller is amping me.
The ambulance driver says something and the paramedic steps forward. That’s when I catch the pickup driver’s eye again. His expression tells me that, if I want him to, he can arrange another little seizure as a perfect distraction.
I can put out the paramedic’s eye with the hemostat. Jam it into his brain. A hard enough swing will bury it in his carotid. It doesn’t have to be sharp. 1-2-3-4.
The paramedic comes back to check on me. Taps up a vein to give me an injection. More jungle juice. It’ll help me and the pickup driver get our thing done.
“We’re doing you a big favor,” says the paramedic.
As the plunger goes down I see the orange bubbles in the syringe. I smell the gasoline. The pickup driver, tied securely down, begins to make noises.
But the needle empties and I know I’ll never get my fist up in time.
DUSTING THE FLOWERS
It tends to rain a lot in Louisiana, and the closer you get to the rivers, the harder you feel the rain. When downpours spill inches of flood in scant hours, news crews flock, drawn by the magnetism of disaster, hoping for a share of its bounty. Rowboating refugees regard the omnipresent camera lenses with resigned scorn. They mumble blankly about loss, or point out the roofs of their former homes, or press on with the search for lost pets, presumed drowned. It gets grim.
Mr. Gaines is of the carefully considered opinion that such people know little of true loss. They are uneducated and foggy with rage; when it comes to the romantic, they are easy, swift and shallow.
Media never come this far upriver to crank out their livings. No matter how fiercely the rains lash down—floating away automobiles, sluicing corpses smack out of their final resting places, magically vanishing the lower floors of houses, and forcing trillions more insects to gestate and take wing—there are more significant stories to be stumbled across in the place where Mr. Gaines makes his living.
There was a time when the Hand held in its grasp no human remains. Mr. Gaines remembers this, and accepts his responsibilities. He is an adult.
Mr. Gaines is stocky and bald, with long watchmaker’s fingers tapering from thick, wrestler’s hands—an anomaly, like slim bamboo growing from the middle of a boulder. He generally keeps these double-duty hands near the center of his body. This gives him the thumbnail appearance of a compact, upright dinosaur, expression suspended in contemplation of a forthcoming live meal. He rarely blinks in front of people. The bit with his hands is an affection, a guard before the center of his being, the anatomical location Mr. Gaines fancies is the seat of his ka, which, according to the Egyptians, houses the essence of who he is, but is wily and quite able to enjoy an existence apart from his own day-to-day. Mr. Gaines does not want his ka to escape to inhabit some unworthy vessel.
He is actually much stronger than he looks.
He dislikes warm, organic tones, despite the fact that they imbue his existence—greens, browns, rusts, ochres, the tints of metal decay and the spoilage of life. If black is an absence of color, then Mr. Gaines’ preferred color is gray.
Right now, the sky is massy, metallic, laden, and stinking of rain. Mr. Gaines lives on a tugboat, and never wastes time worrying about water that comes from the sky.
The last woman is a near-total phony, her flesh the mealy texture of a diet addict, her blue eyes crisscrossed with blown capillaries.
The propane torch accepts a variety of nozzles; the soldering tip has just cooled from an angry crimson glow. Mr. Gaines touches the tip to the woman’s flank and she stiffens—purely a reflex jolt, very dull.
She is tall and painfully uncoordinated, her horsy body a compromise between cellulite and the scar tissue of elective surgeries—proof that her war had been not to burn fat, but bore it into submission. Her big Irish fifties have been suctioned down to pendant bags, the nipples resectioned to nerve-dead medallions as appealing as raw calves’ liver. Her sagging, almost marsupial pouch suggests vast indiscipline, neurosis, a mean mommy, a vapid life squandered in an empty search for her most colorless inner child. Under normal circumstances, her system would be swimming in prescription antidepressants. Her whole body is shaped like a lead sap.
Naturally, she seeks solace in a church of pain. Her boutique rags are stovetop-dyed in Black 15 and reek of clove cigarette smoke. Make your face a shroud, and your eyes punctures, thinks Mr. Gaines, as he plans to recreate her.
Beneath the pouch Mr. Gaines has exposed a stingy, puckered little snatch, dry and less like an orchid than the lips of a grouper. The listless smear of pubic hair is redolent of urine. She probably wipes back to front, he thinks. Her asshole is more appetizing … not that there is all that much visible or tactile difference.
The intaglio of her scars at first fools Mr. Gaines into thinking that this one might possess fiber or substance. Now he realizes—too late—the shiny islets of healing scab dotting her legs are the result of nothing more than sloppy shaving. Her scalp bears chemical burn patches from too much hair coloring.
Her mouth is nasty, downturned, with an underbite of disapproval. She looks better with all her teeth knocked out. Less smug.
Perhaps inspired by some supermarket magazine on borderline culture, this creature has found her way here, on the seek for vicarious danger. No matter, now. She is poised to eat the humiliation she has been begging all of her superior, wretched non-life.
“I suppose you’ve never heard the story of Phocas?” Mr. Gaines says. “He was a saint.” The woman’s apex of visual focus is centered somewhere behind him, glazed and flat, her eyes cognizant on a galvanic level only. She flinches at the touch of the blowtorch, pupils contracting, and that’s about it.
“Phocas dug his own grave before his executioners killed him, in order that he might feed the soil after his death.” Mr. Gaines leans closer with the torch, smiling, his eyes scanning the woman for some hint of texture, of fear, or resolve, or anything interesting. He finds nothing to engage him. Without control-top panty hose, sneaky tailoring, and an arsenal of cosmetics, she is nothing physical, and spiritually she is just as much of a lie. He has acted impulsively and chosen her badly. Now he sees she has worth only as protein or crude phosphorous.
Bound, ball-gagged with duct tape and lamp cord, hopelessly brimming over with fright appropriate to her true echo-boomer class, her teeth extracted by pliers, this one is stupid enough to still be fretting about rape. Mr. Gaines shakes his head sadly, for her to see.
“No, I am not going to fuck you,” he tells her. “At least, not in any fashion you understand, and certainly not while you’re alive. I have no wish to fight with you, or listen to you carrying on.” He removes his glasses. After polishing the lenses, he gives the bridge of his nose a sinus-relieving pinch. “Forgive me. It’s just that I am distressed because I cannot use you, you see. You’re too vapid, too empty, too self-deluded for my needs.”
Near the porthole side of the cabin there is a flared vase of cut onyx, arranged dramatically with a spray of flowers in vivid, melted-crayon colors. It is an intentional incongruity in this otherwise monochromatic world. Mr. Gaines mists them, using a plastic bottle of biodegradable cleaner, and wipes off the leaves and petals, one at a time, with a paper towel folded into quarters. He holds up the towel so the woman can see the smudges it has picked up.
“You see? Gray—but invisible.” He cleans a few more of the flowers, not gently, but with thoroughness. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the butternut canker? No?” He shakes his head again. This is really sad.
Near the flowers, beneath a drop-down utility seat, a circular steel purifier quietly filters the air they both breathe. Condensation hangs on the grille. Outside, the humidity is a lethal, plotting thing.
“How about the anthracnose? It kills dogwood trees.”
There is no comprehension at all in the eyes that return his gaze, then persist in darting, frantically, to the limits of the boat’s cabin. “Dammit,” he mutters. “Thought not.”
He resumes work with the torch, careful not to make a mess on the deck. Topside, a forty-gallon drum is already prepared to receive her … even if dumping her, along with all the rest, does little to further his cause tonight.
Visualized as tree roots, branches of the Mississippi web out by the thousands. Most terminate in irreclaimable swamp-land, in dead-end lagoons and bayou mud the color of iron. Tributaries are gnarled and treacherous; many open or close on the whim of faraway tides or nearby rainfall, and, like the secret nooks of a Chinese puzzle box, reveal themselves only to the faithful, the dogged, or the damned—and then, only during special ticks of the clock,
Most of the marshland is shallow and lethal; often, simply greedy, teeming with predators and laced with booby traps, snakes and gators, quicksand and suckholes, and deadly brain fevers that can expand the cranium like bread dough in the time it takes coffee to cool.
Below the Thirtieth Parallel, the state of Louisiana degenerates to the consistency of cheesecloth, punctured relentlessly by lake after pond after mudhollow. The water table went insane there a few centuries back, and the Delta resembles nothing so much as a burst organ, not just on maps, but from as far a vantage as synchronous Earth orbit. “Delta rhythm” suggests seductive backwoods music; when applied to brain waves, it alerts to damage, or disorder. Natives razz the Delta as the Colon of America and they aren’t far wrong; whenever some bonehead pisses in Lake Erie, it eventually spews out here thanks to groundwater, fault lines, subterranean seepage, other mutagenic factors never deduced by cartographers. From outer space, it all looks quite innocent.
Incoming air passengers to New Orleans can peer, through portholes, when they are low enough, in mid-approach, and sometimes spot Mr. Gaines’ tugboat, shoving garbage barges upriver against the sluggish tide. That is about as noteworthy as Mr. Gaines ever becomes to the world outside his Hand.
Earlier in the evening, a news hog had captured Curta KIA sneaking out the loading dock door of Spasmodique. Of his tribe of hunter-gatherers of information, this reporter had been the only one hunger-crazed enough to accurately plot Curta KIA’s movements. By next dusk, there would be five cameras on her if she surfaced to grocery-shop, by the weekend, she’d rate an in-depth bloc, national. Five minutes on the evening news, she thought. She’d watched five minutes of film roll through a Moviola once and knew that this amount of time, under the right circumstances, could be an eternity. Five minutes, nationwide, on art. Consider that.
Curta KIA felt challenged and pure. She was skating the cutting edge at last.
The only reason the dolt from Channel 9 had been able to capture her video image was that she brooked no one’s personal guarantee her truck would be padlocked; she’d gone to check it herself. For the viewing public that bit of tape would be frozen and digitally enhanced and repeated numberless times while critics and attackers ran their speculations. The pixels would become exhausted while her infamy, to get basic about it, would swing heftier publicity value.
Inside Spasmodique, she was alone. Her section of the main gallery was now bare. She chose which lights still blazed. Everything had been crated in one night—miraculous enough by itself. She had left behind a single piece, for the gallery’s front show window—evidence that Curta KIA had been here—and another free piece of tape for the truly enterprising, or truly despicable, journalists. Evidence at the scene, for those who sweet-talked outrage and wanted to lap up scandal.
She had chosen which lights still blazed in the display areas. Privately, unobserved, she could appreciate all the time Madsur invested in his lines. Publicly, she could not suffer Abstractionists wrestling with themes of collision. She examined the impossibly huge canvas, the size of some studio apartments, and thought (kneejerk, and selfishly) of the attention she concentrated into a mere cubic inch. Still, Madsur’s new work, titled Eidolons, soothed her in a way she would most likely never have time to investigate further. Her inner dialogue with this painting would end tonight. It would remain a secret.
Curta KIA was short, round, and blonde. She had a large crescent moon tattooed on the nape of her neck; a heavenly body of earthbound inks, gnawed by many lovers. She had kicked Prozac two years ago because she felt it was leavening her creativity. Now she held steady at mildly alcoholic, and had slashed back to five Gauloises per day. She no longer smoked them all the way down to the filter. She had extremely responsive nipples, to compensate for almost zero bosom, and enjoyed claiming she was French as an excuse for being flat-chested. It was her habit to shave her pubic hair into a landing strip of stubble just abrasive enough to pink whoever fucked her. Called “sturdy” in her youth, her body type was beginning to assume control of her metabolism. Overall, her portrait was fading, but gently. She suffered the crying jags less often.
She cultivated “sharp” as a personal adjective—a sharp appearance incorporating sharp industrial jewelry, sharp heels, sharp nails, very sharp gray eyes behind sharp-edged shades. These last had been a gift lacking weight or commitment, as were most of her accoutrements, offerings from merchants and wannabes, costly tokens from pushy fans, god, you could just smell the hunger on these people, the despair of being unspecial and untalented, as they tried to own her, be seen with her, pissmark her.
And today, at last, she could flush all the hangers-on, because she was on her way to becoming truly famous.
After her own art-o-nym, Curta had named her show Killing Inaction. Some butt-scratching little dog-eaters in Korea had recently burdened the automotive market with a rollerskate car also dubbed a “Kia”; J.C. Christ, Esquire, didn’t their advertising idiots do anything to justify their dole?
On the other hand, perhaps they were being market-smart … subtly, gruesomely.
Curta KIA’s work was based on a synergy between organic decay and inorganic decomposition, her design schema wholly motivated by the dictates of found art. Hardwired, for example, first manifested itself as a spit-and-paste of bones and rust. In essence, it was half a skull, a puzzle-piece of a face, from the superciliary ridge where the eyebrow would be to the buccinator shelf, just above the upper canines. It was split right through the center of the nose hole. Other bones included were a few weathered ribs, a handful of vertebrae, and most of a pelvic saddle. Curta mirrored the missing portion of the skull in machine parts solidified to rust. Dozens of oxidized copper threads emitted from gaps in the skull, in bunches, to flare out and travel to different plug-in destinations on the bonework. Imprinted iron tubes and scabbed fixtures provided a superstructure that was not whole, at best, truncated, that tapered from top to bottom like an angular crosscut view of a robot woman, supporting itself upright on impossibly spidery wisps of rotten cable. The trick of the assemblage was in not utilizing clunky junk parts that evoked the doodads from some plumber’s truck; the effect had a mantis elegance, flowing from the stark cyber-skull above to the spindly trifles of wire below, in mandarin curls like odd new forms of antennae.
The unofficial story went that Curta KIA scavenged in cemeteries for her raw material, particularly after floods liberated inadequate crypts and buoyed forth their entombed prizes. The notion was the stuff of urban legends; given Curta’s tendency to spin-doctor her own image, it was a gentle untruth worth perpetuating—the kind that sometimes brought home checks to cash.
The disillusioning fact was that she purchased her bones and skulls mostly from junkies, who mainlined in the nooks and crannies of St. Louis Number One, or from clueless Goth kids who thought coyoting around graveyards was cool. She had a file on cash disbursements invoiced to names like DiSang or Nepenthe or Mr. Lucarda, when a name was left at all. Whatever.
You could bleed into your paints in public, but if you painted nothing significant, who would ever give a shit beyond the carefully crafted, sensational rep? An artist was a vendor of illusion. The craft part was in Curta’s use of solvents and stain, carpet beetles and oxyacetylene. She was fond of the deep, penetrative textures of heavy, vintage rust, and never burnished away such deposits unless she was shooting for some specific editorial point. She called one style “erosion strata,” an impasto technique that went beyond the limitations of mere oil paint.
She had lost out on a show at Galerie to a pair of urban primitives from Queens whose idea of art was a dysfunctional hearse covered in coal tar, below a suspended mass of old sofa cushions, their interstices caulked up with cake and frosting. It took up a lot of room, just as its barely articulate creators had taken too much energy to dislike. Not the scene Curta sought, at all.
The opening at Spasmodique had been fairly sparkly. Many cameras, many eyes looking. Then, in the time it took to run a byte of libel on News at 11, Curta KIA saw her much-craved artistic notoriety become the tripe of tabloid TV.
The piece from which they could not deter their unblinking lizard notice was titled Hidebound. It was Curta’s retrofit of the papery bones of a child, swaddled in mote-thin NASA instrument packet foil that boldly declared every wrinkle and contour. A big triangular piece in the contour of a widow’s peak had been missing from the skull, so Curta had laced it back to wholeness with hundreds of microfine braids of lightly rusted wire, first joining strands, then marrying braids, then twining braid groups, in seemingly bottomless recombination.
