by John Klima
Of course, I can remind him of how others worry for his health. Absurdly, I say. But they do worry.
—Let’s talk of something else, he says. Have you decided on the designs for the end walls yet?
He takes a drag on his roll-up and I wince as he explodes into another fit, spluttering into a white-knuckled fist. He thumps the table in frustration and I ignore it. The hobben have a phrase—ch’yem—which roughly translates as may it be. The will of God is inevitable, they mean, as I understand it. I think it is a phrase very close to Iosef’s heart these days.
—The end walls? I say. I do have some ideas.
*
The Exile From The Garden
—And whatever will they say at the sight of a whore painted as blessed Queen Titania?
Rosah looks over her shoulder at me with an arched eyebrow; she finds the whole idea both wicked and delicious, but rather than being in conflict over what I’ve asked of her she has thrown herself into it with delight. It is strange, but having heard her say her prayers at night—more open and relaxed with me as she has been in this last year or so—I have discovered a quite pious side to my Rosah, with the little saint statues on the shelf in her room, the single candle that always has a flower at its side, and her tiny bowl of honey and coins. I think now if I’d asked her to be my Titania two years ago she would have refused, saying it was sacrilege, and I would have . . . laughed probably, in shock. Now I’m not sure why she agreed at all; perhaps the deeper the belief in sin, the greater the thrill of courting it.
—They’ll say you are the very image of her, says Brooder Matheus.
She blows a kiss at him and he mimes a catch, grinning, but blushing at his own boldness. At least it brings some color to his cheeks; the two of us got roaring drunk in the tavern last night, after visiting Iosef up at the grounds house, and if I woke up with a hangover, the poor brooder, by the look of him, was at death’s door. The original gray erle.
*
Matheus and myself now pace about the studio, setting up the easels and the paper, arranging the mirrors and shades on the windows. Rosah sits on a bench before us, leaning over an open chest of props, holding necklaces of colored glass jewels up to her throat, throwing feathered boas and fur stoles over her shoulders, trying on a stuffed snake, a tiara—and all the while glancing at herself in the mirror like a child playing dress-up. Every so often, these last few months in particular, I find myself glancing at her when she is not looking and I feel this joy I can hardly explain. It is in moments like this. I try to put my finger on it. She is not performing—no—she is not performing for me, or for the brooder, not seeking our attention, but simply, happily, lavishing it upon herself.
I think that is it. She is no longer my Rosah. Now she is simply Rosah.
When Brooder Matheus and I have everything set up to my satisfaction, she drops the centaurian’s helmet that she’s holding back into the box and stands, walks into the centre of the room.
—You’re ready, yes? Where do you want me? How do you want me?
*
—In white silk, I say. Just a moment.
I dig the dress I want out of the box, not so much a dress as a drapery of veils and ribbons, and while I untangle it, tease out the folds and complexities, she slips off her shoes, hikes up her skirt to peel down her stockings.
—Brooder Matheus, she says, will you help me with this?
Her hands reaching behind, she turns her back to him and the brooder looks hesitant and shy for a second before taking those steps across the room. His fingers fumble with her buttons but after the first couple, the rest come loose easily. I notice the delicate confidence with which he slips the straps off her shoulders, the way he can’t help but smooth the palms of his hands over her skin. Last night, in drunken camaraderie, he confessed to me how unsuited he feels to his vows. He had little choice in the matter; as a second son, the law of primogeniture leaves him no estate, no path to follow but war or religion. And while he has no great urge to go and slaughter, with his noble elven brethren, the demon races that now rule the Holy Lands, he said, chastity was never his strong point.
It’s funny, I suppose; in all the years we’ve known each other now, watching him grow from adolescent to adult, I had always pegged him as, at heart, an innocent naïf. As it turns out our naive brooder lost his virginity two years before I did and spent most of his youth from that point on tupping any girl who batted her eyelashes at him.
*
Rosah’s dress slips off her shoulders and crumples on the ground at her feet. She steps out of it and takes the white silk costume from my hands, begins to wrap herself in it. It adorns without hiding, veils without disguising. Every curve of her, every sacred secret place of her is somehow more revealed with it on than in her nakedness, and I’m more sure than ever that this is the Titania of the Exile From The Garden that will go on the wall above the antesanctum’s entrance. This is the faery queen, the virgin whore, the spirit of lush forests, of morning dew like the sweat on a lover’s body, of oceans salty as blood and semen, who runs her fingers over the vine-grown trunks of trees, the green-veined cocks of men, through grass and hair, as the ruler of them all, the mother of all living things, mother of Orphean who died for our sins.
I dip into the box again and pull out the velvet robe, dark purple, long and soft as fur. Brooder Matheus reaches out a hand for it but his eyes are on Rosah, transfixed; it takes him a few seconds of grasping in the air to realise there’s no point in me giving him the robe quite yet, and then he turns to me with a wry, sheepish smile on his face, red with a blush or with the flush of sexual tension. Finally he pulls the cassock over his head and stands there, cockish and puffed with an uncertain audacity. He runs his fingers through the dark-red hair that silks over his shoulders, brushing it back, half nervousness, half pride. I hand him the robe and he pulls it on, leaves it hanging open. Slender and straight beside her curves, he is the dark to her light, the auburn to her titanium white. The Oberon to her Titania.
As they turn to each other, their hands, their bodies, beginning that exploration of the world outside innocence, discovered in an age long before our own, I walk to my easels and look from chalk to charcoal and back again, trying to decide which to begin with.
*
The Last Days
I am on the last panel now. It has taken me four—no, nearly five—years to paint the antesanctum of the Monadery d’il Sanze Manitae and at last it is almost complete. I sketch directly onto the wall now, working as fast as I can and keeping a rag at hand to correct my errors and insincerities. Insincerities? In any painting such as this, in any work of a chiaroscurist such as myself, it is easy to become too bold in the drama, too theatrical, too focused on the power that light and dark have to evoke a profound sense of mystery. Subtlety is lost when the artist blusters his own ideas in forms too overblown, brushstrokes too broad. Of all the panels of the antesanctum, I cannot allow this one to lose its import in mere impact. I will not.
So I draw with chalk and coalstick onto the pink plaster and, again and again, I find myself cursing and taking the rag to the wall in bitter frustration because this structure is too crude, that contrast too bold. Too clichéd. Too unusual. Too trite. Too grandiose. It should be the simplest panel of them all, in some ways, for its subject is the most universal. It is one of the most traditional of scenes, though it is usually placed in some dark area, as a hidden mystery.
I am drawing the body of Iosef, which lies upon the altar now. I am drawing death.
*
I work non-stop for two days finding a form that does not really satisfy me but is, at least, not an insult to his memory, not the self-important sweeping statement of a young chiaroscurist more concerned with the glory of his work than with who and what it is meant to represent. Even as I begin the modelling work, layering on the black and white plasters, building up the relief sculpture of Iosef’s ruined body, I do not know if I can do him justice. Will this reduce his life to no more t
han an empty symbol, only resonating for the viewer because it is so hollow without the totality of his life to fill it? How can I show in the cracks of his knuckles and the stumps of his fingers, the way those hands worked so delicately with the flowers and herbs of the Monadery garden, or rolled his cigarettes with such unconscious ease and precision that half the time his eyes would be on something else, on myself or Matheus, as he lectured us on our many follies? How can I show in the still barrel of his chest, the wheezing up-and-down of it as he lay in his sick bed for that last year and a half, fighting to keep the last breath in his body? How can I show that the smoke that ruined him was not just the smoke of his own creation but the smoke of his destruction, of the temple with his congregation gathered in it on their holy day to sing the word of God, and the mob outside with fire?
I only knew him for four years and there is so much that I did not know.
All I can show are these last days of him, of his remains.
*
The decay of the body is quick in the heat of summer. Skin of Payne’s-gray blotches phthalo blue and viridian in the shadows; it dulls with the yellow ochre, burnt umber, burnt sienna of rot. Maggots wriggle, iridescent and ivory white in the slick of him. The surface of the altar is stained with the blood pooled and coagulated in the lowest areas of his body in the early stages of decay, now transformed by the process into some thicker, darker fluid. I see haematic red in it, alizarin crimson. It glistens aemberic orange in the candlelight. Every color in my palette is mixed in the putrefaction of the corpse and I paint them on the wall in layer upon layer. I mix paint with plaster and sculpt with my fingers until my nails are filthy and broken by the scratching.
Fader Pitro sits vigil over Iosef’s body while I work, because this is the tradition of the hobben and there are no others in the town to perform the rites. I think that Iosef would have wanted the Fader at his side anyway, but this is cold comfort to the monk; he frets that he is failing, that he cannot do it properly, that it should be done properly. The brooders recite verses from the Old Book in Litan but they do not know the hobben words or the soaring wavering tunes this poetry should be sung to, so as I work their choral chants echo in the antesanctum, giving the same sentiments in the words and song they know.
We have sent word to Matheus and Rosah but I do not think they will arrive before the burial.
*
I am laying a stone on his grave when I feel the hand on my shoulder. Rosah. Matheus stands behind her. I embrace my Titania, kiss her on the forehead. Matheus and I shake hands, both of us two-handed, clasping each other’s grip firm and tight as if anchoring each other. We talk for a while, words that we forget as soon as they have been spoken. Sometimes there is laughter, sometimes tears. Matheus is still not sure of what he will do now he has left the Order, but the two of them seem, even in sorrow, to have found their true vocations in each other. Have I really finished now? they ask. Yes. And did I really paint the Death Of God as the very focus of the whole chapel, the work you see first as you enter through the doors? Yes. They will see how the structure of light and shadow in the antesanctum demanded it. When they see it they will understand, I hope.
After a while I leave them to have some time alone at the grave and return to the antesanctum.
The walls are filled with the townsfolk and the brooders, every character based on one local or another—the Nerjeas, Rosah and Matheus, even Fader Pitro as a saint in one high corner—but it is Iosef whose face holds you as you walk in, not in the moment of creation on the ceiling but on the wall behind the altar, on a dead body, lying on its back but with its head turned towards you so that face stares out with hollow eyes, eaten away to bone here and there, a white skull cloaked in the shadows of flesh and night. I do not know if I am satisfied with it. I could not hope to paint, in his death, the whole reality of his life; all I can show are his remains, on the painted artifice of an altar on the wall behind the real thing as if it were a dark mirror still reflecting what is no longer there.
Maybe those few precious glimpses that I had, in the years of moments that I knew him . . . maybe these are enough to know the form of someone, even if the rest is darkness.
The Way He Does It
Jeffrey Ford
You’ve got to see the way he does it. It’s pretty remarkable for a man his age. He does it with a cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth and a look in his eye like there’s nothing finer in all creation than doing it that way. There’s a certain grace to his movements, a certain cosmic aplomb in his manner. Occasionally he’ll grunt, and some claim to have heard him call for his mother when he’s almost finished. His eyes get really wide, his lip curls back, and you can see the sweat form on his brow. He probably uses more muscle groups while doing it than he would if he were swimming the butterfly. On special occasions he will do it by candle light with soft music playing in the background, but it’s more expensive to see him do it that way.
There was a time when he didn’t charge for the sight of it, but that was back when he was perfecting his method. Then, when he’d do it, he’d become red in the face and would often wet himself with the exertion, but he seemed to do it more out of obsession than any sense of advancing his craftsmanship. A fellow by the name of Roger Brown, one of his old neighbors from that earlier time, has said, “When he would do it in those days, he wasn’t nearly as refined, but, my God, the energy with which he did it. You’d think he was going to go right through the back wall of the house.”
There are many theories as to how he came up with it. Of course, as with anything this remarkable, there is plenty of sensationalist speculation. One such item of foolishness is that it had been taught to him by extraterrestrials who’d contacted him by way of an AM radio channel, and another is that when doing it, he is possessed by the Holy Ghost. The most bizarre conjecture has to be that it had been a common practice among the populace of the lost civilization of Atlantis and that he had dreamed the ancient technique through his collective unconscious. When interviewed in 1989, he, himself, attested, “I just got down on the floor one day and started doing it. As I was doing it, I asked myself the question, “How can I do it better?’”
Others had tried it, both male and female, attempting to copy his methods. To name two prominent examples, there were Nettie Stuart and Branch Berkley. Stuart got farther along with the process than Berkley, but in the end they both killed themselves doing it. Berkley inadvertently set himself on fire, and Nettie Stuart broke a rib doing it, which in turn impaled her heart. Their families got together and started a fund, the proceeds of which would be used to try to bribe people away from trying it. Few took the money, and the ones who did not perish in their bid for glory, you can see today, hobbling down the street or talking to themselves outside of convenience stores. We tend to treat these failures with equal parts of the tenderest pity and the sharpest derision.
He swore he would never fully disclose his secrets, but back in the ’70s, before his fame became manifest, he did release an audio tape in which he described each step of the act while doing it. Although he narrates as if you are there in the room watching him, and, therefore, is never quite specific enough for the listener to visualize what exactly he is doing, it is said that from his voice alone a certain mystical energy can be garnered. The following is an excerpt from a crucial part of that recording:
. . . so when you utilize the tongue and eye in unison, man, it feels good. Then you take this and put it around behind, like that. When you’ve got that where you want it, then you’ve got to quickly grab this and tense up like it’s all there is in the universe. You’ll start to notice a little swelling and that’s when it gets creative. If you feel like screaming here, go ahead and scream. Be my guest. At the last second, just let it all go and snap your head back. This will lead you to do it the way it was meant to be done.
Once, when he was asked by the press what his wife thought of it, he quickly replied, “Oh, she loves it. The kids love it too,” but by then
everyone knew that his wife had left him because of it. Still to this day, she is bitter over the memory of it and told me, “He’d do it right there in the living room with the kids running around him. Call me old fashioned, but how many times was I supposed to be witness to that? The day he did it in front of my parents, I gathered up the kids and went home with them. In the months that followed, he would call me late at night and tell me he was going to do it to me. I didn’t see how that was possible, but still I went out and bought a gun.”
It wasn’t until the early ’80s that he came to the conclusion that his abilities were a proverbial gold mine. He started doing it in public when he’d lost his regular job as a night watchman at a chemical factory. One lonely morning when his refrigerator held nothing but a half a beer and a head of cabbage, he went down to the corner of 8th and Dupin and just started doing it, right there on the sidewalk. In no time a crowd gathered, and within minutes bystanders were tossing handfuls of change; one- and even five-dollar bills. One old gentleman in the crowd threw him coupons to Burger King.
It was only six months after the historic 8th and Dupin performance that he got his first gig in a cocktail lounge. He was the scourge of many a torch singer and hypnotist. Who could top him? And he always demanded to go on first. He would take half the door money and a quarter of the liquor profits of a given night. His public loved to drink while they watched him, and he requested that they drink Pink Ladies. This alone was the reason for that drink’s great surge in popularity in the mid-80s. The T-shirts he sold at his shows, bearing a photograph of him in the midst of his passion were the creamy color of Pink Ladies.
An anecdote which is often recounted about these nightclub years concerns his preoccupation with handsome women. One of the acts that he worked with at The Republic, a seedy place down on the waterfront, was billed as Prince Mishby and His Virgin Bride. Mishby, a lanky young man, wearing a high-collared shirt and a bow tie, with arms as thin as pipe cleaners and a high reedy voice, tap danced while his beautiful wife sang arias. The couple would then break into a patter wherein Mishby would speak to his bride in lascivious double entendres and this would set the crowd of sailors and waterfront toughs into paroxysms of laughter. On their third night of sharing the same bill, Mishby caught our subject besmirching the Virgin Bride in her dressing room.
