Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

by Jay Lake

  * * *

  Perhaps the most quotidian detail of the print Taking the Rats to Riga (1969) is the eponymous rats themselves. This is somewhat uncharacteristic of the work of the artist Stigmata (b. Crispus Chang-Evans, Nanking, China, 1942; d. Khyber Pass, Pakistan, 1992). The artist was notorious for eschewing both representation and naturalism, noting in a 1967 interview with Andy Warhol, “The dial ain’t set on sketch, and I’ll never be a d**ned camera” (artINterCHANGE; vol. III, no. 4; 1968).

  The unusual inclusion of such readily identifiable elements strongly hints that Rats is based on an actual event. The precise nature of this event is obscured by our distance in time from the origins of this print, as well as Stigmata’s notoriously poor record-keeping. Lambshead’s own acquisition notes on the print are strangely sparse as well. Art-world rumor whispers that the print depicts a scene from Karneval der Naviscaputer, an occasional festival of deviant performance art held within East Berlin’s underground club culture during the mid- to late 1960s.

  The astute observer would do well to attempt deconstruction of some of the other elements in Rats. Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced. In this case, even a close examination is unlikely to reveal the mundane truths behind the print. The emotive truths are, however, most certainly available.

  Consider the chain that the rats are climbing. Why do they ascend? From where have they come? A hook dangles or swings not far below the lower rat. It appears ornamented in both shape and detail. Bejeweled, this cannot be an artifact of the working man. Nor does it conform to the Continental notion of kunstbrukt, that design should be both beautiful and functional. This hook is curious and attractive, but hardly something to lift a bale of opium from the decks of a shabby Ceylonese trawler. One must also consider the possibility hinted at in the print’s title, that these are the plague rats Renfield carries into the world for his master Dracula, as depicted repeatedly in cinema.

  Examine the chain itself. In Stigmata’s rendering, this could just as easily be a motorcycle chain as a cargo chain or an anchor chain. Were that to be the case, we might assume the rats were being drawn upward, toward the top verge of the image. The dynamism of their forms suggests that they are more than mere passengers. Still, is that no different from a man walking up an escalator?

  Once we have evaluated the context in which the rats appear, the image begins to lose its coherence. Most observers consider the smaller lines in the background to be more distant chains of the same sort the rats are climbing, but Priest has advanced the argument that those may be strings of light bulbs (Struggles in European Aesthetics, Eden Moore Press, London, 1978). Her assertion is undercut by the strong front lighting on the primary figures in the composition, but given Stigmata’s well-documented disregard for artistic convention, this is an inherently irresolvable issue.

  The most visually dominant element in Rats is the tentacled skeleton in the left side of the image. Sarcastically dubbed “The Devil Dog” in a critical essay by Robyn (Contemporary Images, Malachite Books, Ann Arbor, 1975), this name has stuck, and is sometimes misattributed as Stigmata’s title for the work. In stark contrast with the climbing rats, there is nothing natural or realistic about the Devil Dog. Rather, it combines elements of fictional nightmare ranging from Lovecraft’s imaginary Cthulhu mythos to the classic satanic imagery of Christian art.

  Priest (op. cit.) nevertheless suggests that the Devil Dog may, in fact, be representational. Presuming even a grain of truth, this theory could represent the source of Lambshead’s interest in acquiring Rats for his collection, given the doctor’s well-known dedication to his own extensive wunderkammer. It is difficult for the observer to seriously credit Priest’s notion, however, as she advances no reasonable theory as to what creature or artifact the Devil Dog could represent. She simply uses scare words such as “mutant” and “chimera” without substantiation. The burden of proof for such an outlandish assertion lies very strongly with the theorist, not with her critics.

  Robyn and other observers have offered the far simpler hypothesis that the Devil Dog is an expression of Stigmata’s own deeper fears. The open jaw seems almost to have been caught in the act of speech. While the eyes are vacant, the detail along the center line of the skull and above the orbitals can be interpreted as flames rather than horns or spurs. For a deep analysis of this interpretation, see Abraham (Oops, I Ate the Rainbow: Challenges of Visual Metaphor, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1986). The tentacles dangle, horrifying yet not precisely threatening to either the artist or the observer. Rising above and behind is an empty rib cage—heartless, gutless, a body devoid of those things that make us real. This is a monster that shames but does not shamble, that bites but does not shit, that writhes but does not grasp.

  The most important element in Rats is, without a doubt, the hand rising up to brush at the Devil Dog’s prominent, stabbing beak. It is undeniably primate, and equally so undeniably inhuman. Still, a strong critical consensus prevails that this is Stigmata’s own hand intruding to touch the engine of his fear. While the rats seek to escape up their chain, this long-fingered ape reaches deeper into the illuminated shadows, touching the locus of terror without quite grasping it. The parallels to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1511) are inescapable and disturbing. Who is creating whom here? Is Stigmata being brought to life by his own fears? Or does he birth them into this print, as so many artists do, to release his creation on an unsuspecting world?

  We can never answer those questions for Stigmata. Reticent in life, he, like all who have gone before, is thoroughly silent in death. Each of us can answer those questions for ourselves, however, seeing deeper into this print than the casual horror and blatant surrealism to what lies beneath. Much as Lambshead must have done when he bought the piece from the court-appointed master liquidating Stigmata’s troubled estate, via telephone auction in 1993.

  What wonder lies in yonder cabinet? Taking the Rats to Riga is a door to open the eyes of the mind. Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us.

  From the Countries of Her Dreams

  WITH SHANNON PAGE

  * * *

  This is a story set in the world of Green and her misadventures. It introduces some characters who become important in my novel Kalimpura. Plus it shows a bit more of the theogeny of this place, which always seemed important to me.

  * * *

  Laris, of late priestess of the goddess Marya, now priestess of Mother Iron, awoke with a sweating, fearful trembling. Solis had been at her side once more, though Laris had laid her sister into the ground two months past. Winter gnawed at her little whore’s apartment over the tack shop in Set Ring Alley. Even with rags stuffed around the shutters the wind found her, while the tapping of the smiths and farriers down below set a rhythm to her days of sleep.

  Prostitutes worked nights. Priestesses never stopped working. It was all she could do to rest in daylight. And here came Solis again. Not a true ghost, nor a sending, Laris was certain, though later she would sacrifice a cup of grain spirits and a silver nail to Mother Iron to be certain.

  No, these visits of her dead sister were from the countries of her own dreams, not the realms of spirit.

  Even worse, she thought she knew why.

  Sleep was gone now, vanquished by the biting chill that cut through her blankets, and the light leaking past the rags and shutters. Winter in Copper Downs was not for the faint of heart nor the flat of purse. Laris reached down by her feet and found her thick woolen gown—skirt buttoned up the front and back for easy access—and slid the garment over her cotton undershift without first turning down her covers. Then she slipped from her bed, kneeling before her tiny iron stove to build a small fire of scavenged scrapwood in hopes of warming both her hands and a bit of washing water. Lucifer matches were a rare luxury in her life.

  Laris sighed. Being priestess of a g
oddess whose worshippers were by definition destitute and desperate left a great deal to be desired insofar as the offertory went. As further insult, their women’s temple was a jumbled pile of bricks that had taken Solis’s life when those saffron-robed bastards had come goddess-killing.

  “Enough,” she whispered, her breath fogging in bright ribbons from her mouth. She could think in circles for hours without finding a better answer. Instead she concentrated on coaxing the little flames to life within their ironwork. Breaking the skin of ice from the top of her water jar. Dipping a small cup’s worth into the tarnished copper pot. All of this, step by step, without thinking of her sister or the death of the goddess Marya or the whirling bricks of the temple as they flew like flower petals before a storm raised on the ancient hatred of men and their gods.

  “Outside,” Laris gasped. Wondering if she was being driven mad by her sister’s death and the savaging of winter, she stumbled from her little room and down the narrow stairs to seek food.

  * * *

  The lazaret on Bustle Street was the only place in Copper Downs where a woman could seek medical help without inconvenient questions being asked, or permission being required of a husband, father, or brother. The thick-walled, anonymous building served other purposes as well. One of them, quite simply, was a large pot of soup that never seemed to boil dry, but mutated in season from fish stock to stewed pigeon to a vegetable slurry and on and on. A woman could always get a bowl. Though it might taste strange, and sometimes sat poorly on the gut, the soup was ever warm and filling.

  Besides, Laris needed to talk to someone. Neela, the old woman who ceaselessly tended the pot, was a good listener. The priestess took a turn behind the short, splintered counter, filling bowls while Neela chopped something stringy and gelid, occasionally tossing slivers into the great iron kettle.

  Patients and their nurses shuffled by, as did one or another woman off the street. “The blessings of Mother Iron on you,” Laris muttered with each bowl. Marya had been the women’s goddess here in Copper Downs, all Laris’s life and for generations before hers, but those days were gone. Desire, titanic goddess from the beginning of all things and mother to all the daughter-goddesses of women, had raised Mother Iron in the place of lost Marya, and so Laris served the new goddess, strange as she was.

  Some of the women made Marya’s hand sign—whether old habit or protest, Laris could not say. Others popped their thumb upward from a lax fist, the nail symbol of Mother Iron herself. Still more made no response at all. All of them took their soup, though, which Laris took to say more about the needs of women than any amount of prayer or sacrifice might do.

  “You never comes without a reason,” Neela said behind her, startling Laris. “You eats, as they all does from time to time, but you only comes this side of the counter when you needs.”

  “Like praying, I suppose,” Laris replied, recovering her wits. Had she been drifting off?

  Neela huffed. “I wouldn’t be the priestess with the knowing of prayers.”

  “Blessings on you, as well.” The line had faded away, so it was only the two women, a stack of scuffed pottery bowls, and the big pot bubbling quietly to itself while the smells of the dock seemed to play in the steam.

  “Huh. You always was fresh.” The knife, honed so thin it would surely shatter into flakes soon, slammed into the block. “So was your sister.”

  Thusly, Neela cut to the heart of things. “I dream of her,” Laris blurted.

  “Aye, and who doesn’t dream of their dead?” Sympathy stained the old woman’s voice, though her expression was curdled as ever.

  “She comes, she begs.”

  “And you gives, yes?”

  “No.” Laris turned a bowl in her hand, seeing it with her fingers rather than her eyes. Glaze rough in some places, worn smooth in others so that the soapy texture of the clay met her touch. Heavy but unbalanced, much like life itself. Chipped at the rim. “I cannot give what she wants.”

  “That boy, ain’t it.” The words were not a question, coming from Neela.

  “That boy,” said Laris miserably. She’d bedded hundreds of men for coin, loved a few of them for spite, but the hearts of women always drew her closer. Solis had been of a more generous spirit and traditional tastes. She’d had an understanding with Radko, a grocer’s boy—though years past the age when that term was anything but a job title—with a simple outlook on life and a seemingly endless supply of fresh vegetables.

  Laris had never been able to stand Radko. She’d tolerated him for the sake of the food he brought when he came courting, and the happiness Solis seemed to find in him.

  “Ain’t you talking to him since herself was kilt?”

  Two months, thought Laris. “I didn’t let him come to the funeral. That was women’s business.” I have not spoken to Radko in the two months since Solis was killed.

  “Course she’s crying.” Neela was matter-of-fact. “She ain’t said good-bye to him she loves.” The paper-thin knife came close, not a threat, just a pointer at the flaw in Laris’s own heart. “On account of you ain’t let her.”

  As always with Neela, she only repeated the things you’d already told her. Truth from another’s mouth was so much more damning than the doubtful thoughts that chased themselves through Laris’s quiet moments. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Go thank yourself,” groused the older woman. She handed a long wooden ladle to Laris. “And stir a while. I must take me to the small room.”

  * * *

  She didn’t seek out Radko that day. Knowing and doing were not the same thing. Her years before the altar had taught her much about the difference.

  Instead Laris spent her afternoon tending the temporary fane of Mother Iron, in a Temple Quarter alley behind the temple of the Frog God. They still had rights to the lot where the old temple of Marya had stood, but no money or labor to clear away the wreckage, let alone rebuild. The Frog God priests had taken pity on the women—their concerns stood outside the politics of daughter-goddesses—and allowed Mother Iron’s followers the relative shelter of their midden area.

  One could make much combing the trash of wealthier people, but mostly Laris was glad for a stout wall with a small chimney that almost always blasted warm, smoky air. A light framework of scavenged timber, topped with ragged strips of sailcloth sewn together, made up the sanctuary. The altar was little more than a clump of still-joined bricks lugged from the nearby ruins, topped with an increasing pile of rusty iron nails.

  No one had yet vandalized it. Women came by in the cold afternoon in ones and twos—mothers and daughters and maids and maidens and cooks and prostitutes and an actress off a foreign ship and a banker’s wife and one woman cloaked so tight Laris had no sense of her, except that she walked wrapped in that strange insulation that money creates about the very wealthy.

  Each brought their mite or measure. Each prayed for guidance, or protection, or just sobbed a while. Laris listened to those who would speak, and comforted those who would take the circle of her arms around them, and shivered in the cold between times. She never counted the offerings, not until it was time for her to pack away what could be packed and seek her own living in the taverns by night.

  Food in the form of withered apples, a strip of dried fish, and several stale rolls—enough for her to eat the next two days. Also three copper taels, half a dozen iron nails, and improbably, one silver obol. Laris was certain that last had not come with the wealthy woman, and probably not the banker’s wife. People with money always understood just how little was needed to get what they wanted from people without.

  Laris set the coins in an inner pouch for the strongbox back at the lazaret where Mother Iron’s meager funds were kept against the future. The rest she put in a roughspun bag before heading for her usual evening haunt.

  * * *

  Winter crimped the flesh trade as surely as it crimped shipping or any other pursuit that required men to bestir themselves out of doors. Also, working without her sister see
med to make Laris less desirable, less interesting, except to those so drunk or bemused that any woman with a damp sweetpocket was good enough. Unless she was starving, she never went with such men. Half of them turned violent, the rest cried for their mothers and would not leave her bed when their time was up.

  She sat at the shadowed end of the bar in the Poison Fish and sipped from a tumbler of watered wine. Undine behind the bar had given it to Laris on credit, but when she turned a man, Laris knew the drink and the cost of an upstairs room would leave her with little more than she had now.

  The bowl of mashed chickpeas had been pure kindness.

  Then Radko came stumbling from the frozen street. A voice murmured in her ear, and for a shocked moment, Laris thought Solis was still beside her. “What, sib?” she whispered in return, unsure if she was more afraid of an answer or the lack of one.

  He brushed fresh snow off his tan corduroy coat, then slipped out of it, hanging it on one of the hooks alongside the door. The man didn’t even look toward her—Laris was relieved that he hadn’t pursued her into the Poison Fish with a purpose, at least—as he placed his hat, gloves, scarf, and face mask in the pockets of the shapeless jacket, leaving his upper body clad only in woolen undershirt, long-sleeved work shirt, and stained sheepskin vest.

  When Radko stepped to the other end of the bar, under the hissing lantern Undine hung there to better see each new customer, Laris got a good view of his profile. Slightly hunched at the shoulder, as if he were half a lifetime older. Long, narrow nose out of alignment thanks to some argument with a teamster years past, if she recalled the story correctly. Curly hair greasy-dark with the sweat of labor, that he washed in the spring and again in the fall each year. Thick eyebrows under a deep forehead that hid eyes she knew would glimmer a dull brown.