Venera Dreams

by Claude Lalumiere

  Finally, on the Monday afternoon, mere hours before I had to catch my ferry back to the mainland, Fullbright Byrne (editor of the sumptuously designed journal of outré horror, The Illuminated Doom) and I were guided through the mysterious inner-city streets of Venera, where the expat trendsetter Renata Austin unveiled for us the sordid secret history of the mysterious metropolis. Throughout the Dantean odyssey — the Zoological Museum housed creatures whose existence I doubted even as I could see, hear, and smell them; the Gallery of Sexual History celebrated eldritch perversities of which I would rather have remained ignorant; the Vegan Fashion Cooperative engaged in atavistic rites much more disturbing than their genteel, politically correct appellation would suggest; I am not at all convinced that all the politicians I saw seated in the High Parliament of Venera were in fact human; the wares of the Society of Culinary Transcendence (and their enthusiastic use of the psychotropic vermilion spice) affected my consciousness in such a way that much of that afternoon remains a vague blur of disquieting imagery (now when I sleep alone I wake screaming as, in my dreams, those images unfurl one by one into dreadful memories) — Renata used Byrne’s presence to avoid my lustful gaze, my eager hands, or any attempt to rekindle our secret intimacies. My days are still haunted by the coy eroticism exuded by her every gesture.

  The above is only a brief, sadly perfunctory glimpse of the revelries that took place during this latest Venera Fantasy Convention … What of the time Daniel Dimes and I explored the gorgeously decadent and haunted Devilscock Hotel in downtown Venera? What conspiratorial secrets lurked behind the laughter bestselling thriller author Rex Montagnard and I shared in plain view of his publishers and mine? What unspeakable truths did antiquarian Dennis Spider reveal to me? Was the Lost Pages booth in the dealers’ room really a portal to other worlds, or was the whole setup simply an elaborate marketing prank? Do Daniel Dimes and Martin Less, our Darkbright Books publicist, really want me to relate the curious incident of the giant turtle of living marble and all it entails? What of the various colours of Veneran foods shared with, for example, comics scripter Rod Mann and eager groupie Sylvia Stephens — what truly transpired during those “friendly” Mediterranean meals? Did Rod Mann and I really come to blows over the merits of cartoonist Jake Kurtz’s oeuvre, as claimed by an obviously doctored photograph posted online? What Canadian perversities did a subset of the Darkbright Books contingent — myself, Daniel Dimes, Brad Blue, Chas Roberts, Martin Less, Elaine Sherman, Jessica Red, Sanderson Grecko, and Bettina Easton — engage in as we drank bottle after bottle of anything we could get our hands on while intimately and cosily holed up in the guest-of-honour suite? And I must refrain from stating exactly what I did to induce the mistress of gothic zombie pornography Gabriella Jaymes to squee, no matter how insistent your prying might be.

  And yet … Already, I must question my recollections. Memory is an unreliable, untrustworthy mistress who lies, distorts, manipulates, and cheats with wanton abandon, often for no reason other than being able to. Did any of these things actually happen? Venera is such an alien, phantasmagorical environment that anything occurring within the archipelagic city-state becomes improbable at best the instant one has left the lush metropolis and its surreal architecture. I am, with each passing day, increasingly convinced that my entire escapade was nothing more than a fever dream that washed over me as I lay stranded in Chicago, lost among its homeless population while I sought shelter from the flood rains.

  The only physical evidence I possess of my passage in Venera and of its unbridled excesses is a neatly folded tissue left on my hotel bed, gilded with a kiss of vermilion lipstick — a memento I carry with me still.

  But perhaps I’m lying about that, too.

  INTERLUDE

  VERMILION DREAMS: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF BRAM JAMESON

  PIRATES TO NOWHERE (1961)

  IN PIRATES TO NOWHERE, a group of seven plunderers invade Venera, seeking its lucrative stores of vermilion, the euphoria-inducing spice manufactured from a plant that reputedly grows nowhere but in the soil of Vermilion Gardens, an inner borough of the archipelagic city-state. The vermilion plant has never been successfully smuggled out of Venera.

  No outsider knows, exactly, how to locate Vermilion Gardens, never mind how to recognize the plant or even find the building (or buildings) where the precious stores are kept. One of the pirates, a Canadian named Bram Jameson, who may or may not be the same person as the book’s author, boasts of having been in Venera as a child. The captain is counting on Jameson’s memory to guide them all to riches.

  To the pirates’ surprise, no-one opposes them; in fact, at first, Venera appears deserted. The would-be thieves almost immediately lose their way in the unfamiliar streets of Venera, their poorly laid plans in shambles. The five men who comprise the rest of the crew blame both the captain and Jameson for this failure. The ensuing mutiny causes Jameson to be separated from his fellow criminals. He tries in vain to retrace his steps, to find the harbour where their ship set anchor. But, as he navigates the streets of Venera, his sense of direction fails him. He loses himself in this alien cityscape, so unlike any other metropolis on Earth and so unlike his memories of it. He loses sight of the sea and cannot locate any of the aquatic vias that so famously serve as Venera’s main thoroughfares. Instead, he is caught in a maze of claustrophobic, cobblestone streets that zigzag through the geometrically confusing architecture of Venera. Often, he can barely see the sky through the overhanging maze of passageways, balconies, arches, bridges, and vegetation. For days on end, the vegetation grows so dense that he comes to forget that he is in a city at all, believing himself lost in a labyrinthine primeval forest. Eventually, albeit temporarily, the jungle becomes more recognizably urban, although the bizarre geometry confuses his sense of logic and, even, of self. Throughout his journey, Jameson encounters visionaries, prophets, lunatics, sadomasochists, holy whores, defective automata, and deformed doppelgangers of his former crewmates.

  Time ceases to have any meaning for Jameson. Eventually, he wends his way into a garden. Cubist paintings hang from trees. The paintings are all different, but each of them is a stylized, distorted closeup of someone’s face, perhaps his own. Each in turn, the cubist heads spring to life, asking Jameson a series of surrealist riddles too arcane for Jameson to answer.

  He ventures deeper into the garden. A path leads him to the edge of a whirlpool made of light. The book ends mid-sentence as the hero descends into the luminous whirlpool.

  THE GREAT DISASTERS (1964)

  Starting in 1965, the US paperback house Full Deck Books planned to release Bram Jameson’s gargantuan opus The Great Disasters as a series of four slim mass-market paperbacks. They published the first three as A World of Ice, A World of Fire, and The Great Flood — and had advertised the fourth, The New World. However, assaulted by lawsuits claiming that most of their line consisted of pirated editions, including sometimes furtively reprinting other publishers’ books by simply changing titles and names of authors, Full Deck Books ceased operations before the series’ final installment could hit bookshops. Presumably, the shady US publisher never actually acquired the rights to The Great Disasters from Jameson or Vermilion Press, which, aside from that one aberration, remains the sole source of the author’s books.

  The original one-volume edition of The Great Disasters sports a cover illustration by the renowned Jake Kurtz, the prolific New York cartoonist who created comics classics such as The Internationalist, The Preservers, The Last Boy, Dinosaurs on the Moon, Destroyer of Worlds, and many others. The cover is split into four quarters, with a title box in the middle. Each vignette illustrates, respectively, one of the book’s four sections.

  The expression “The Great Disasters” usually refers to the apocalyptic hysteria of 1961, when worldwide civilization — capitalist, communist, and preindustrial — was convinced its end was imminent, first by ice, then by fire, and finally by water. Although people who were alive at the time claim to remember the mini ice age,
the scorching droughts, and the great floods that successively afflicted the entire world, and certainly newspaper headlines and magazine covers from that era confirm these memories, current scientific studies point to the whole thing being a hoax — or a strange, shared fever dream — as no quantifiable evidence of any of these phenomena remains. Perhaps worldwide anxiety in that tense Cold War era had reached such a pitch that humanity collectively imagined these primal disasters as a way to cope with the looming threat of nuclear war and the consequent destruction of civilization?

  Indeed, The Great Disasters concerns itself with this epochal moment in world history. This time around, Jameson is not a pirate but an aviator who made his fortune as a vermilion merchant and now zips around the world at the helm of his solar-powered jet in search of adventure. The book is separated into four sections: Ice, Fire, Water, and the baffling conclusion, The New World.

  At the start of Ice, our intrepid adventurer witnesses a clandestine bomb test in the arctic. There is no violent explosion as such, but concentric waves of energy emanate from ground zero, forcing the aviator to crash his airplane in the snow. The damage to the aircraft is minor. While Jameson repairs his jet, a group of five scientists surrounds him, and, at gunpoint, they take him prisoner.

  The scientists mean to lead him to their headquarters, but they lose their way in the arctic desert (the astute reader will notice a recurring theme). They explain to Jameson that their bomb test has inadvertently set in motion a rapid ice age and that within a few months the entire planet will be covered in ice, possibly ending all life. Soon, they forget their weapons and begin treating Jameson as one of their own. Jameson himself forgets his own past, his identity, and the group increasingly behaves like a hive mind.

  The hive mind eventually reaches the rogue scientists’ arctic lair. For the next ten or so pages, the action is described in a series of geometric tableaux, dense with allegory and challenging to decipher. Gradually, this virtuoso narration segues into a more conventional style, with Jameson, triumphant and individuality regained, flying his aircraft over a retreating ice age.

  Both Fire and Water follow a plot structure similar to that of Ice, each time with Jameson the aviator accidentally encountering a quintet of scientists responsible for the disaster, and each time seeing him involved, always in a similarly allegorical fashion, in saving the world from its latest armageddon. Could these adventures detail the true, secret history of that apocalyptic year? Perhaps — although part 4, The New World, veers off into obvious fantasy.

  The New World, which is itself longer than the three other sections of The Great Disasters combined, opens with Jameson flying over the receding floodwaters, providing clear continuity from the previous section, Water. Jameson spots an unfamiliar land formation and directs his plane toward it. Reaching his destination, Jameson wonders if he has discovered a new continent. Unfamiliar cityscapes appear in the distance. Intrigued by this mystery, Jameson lands his plane in a field and sets off on foot. In this strange land, Jameson encounters tribes, settlements, villages, and even cities populated by humanoid animals, but the species do not intermingle, save for trade or war.

  The various animal species all possess the power of speech, and, even more startling, they all speak a recognizable human language: English, French, Italian, Japanese, German, Arabic, etc. (In the text, all the foreign dialogue is rendered in the original language, with no translation.)

  But Jameson soon discovers that he has lost his own ability to speak. He can now vocalize nothing more than grunts and moans. Typically, he has lost his bearings and can no longer locate his airplane.

  He sees few other humans; like him, none of them can speak. They are slaves to the most privileged animals. The dominant animals recognize that Jameson is different from their servants; invariably, the animals treat him as a guest.

  This long section is marked by Jameson’s predilection for repetition. Every encounter unfolds in a similar manner: as dawn breaks, Jameson wanders into the territory of a new species; he meets a guide who escorts him; Jameson is witness to activities and conflicts whose nature he barely understands; as night falls, he is invited to a ceremony; there, before Jameson’s eyes, a human slave is ritually slaughtered — although the specifics of the ritual differs from species to species, even the herbivorous animals perform this act for Jameson’s benefit — and the meat is offered to him. Always, he refuses to eat the human flesh; he is then cast out. He wanders until he encounters the next group.

  Eventually, in a city of cats, the ritual is preceded by the intake of vermilion. When the meat is offered to him, the intoxicated Jameson enthusiastically agrees to consume the flesh before him. The sacred food is delicious. Once Jameson has chewed and swallowed, the mayor of the cat city says: “Now, speak your name.”

  The novel ends with the hero saying: “My name is Bram Jameson.”

  WHY I WANT TO LOVE (1969)

  Why I Want to Love is a difficult, experimental book. Here, the author eschews such writerly conventions as chapters, paragraph breaks, sentences, and punctuation. For the entirety of its 475 pages, Why I Want to Love consists of one uninterrupted string of words. Set entirely in Venera, this book, unlike Jameson’s first two releases, is narrated in the first person, although, paradoxically, the protagonist and narrator is never explicitly identified as Jameson and remains nameless — at least in the text itself. The introduction by Lee Williams, who also appears as a character in the narrative, namechecks Jameson as the protagonist and claims that Jameson’s text is the real, accurate, and uncensored record of life in Venera, circa 1967. Jameson’s text is vague on personal details, but the Williams intro mentions Jameson’s Venera mansion, with its throngs of naked, young, beautiful sycophants, both male and female, as eager to sample Jameson’s stores of vermilion as they were willing to give their bodies to whoever desired them.

  In the 1950s, Williams was better known as the international guntoting costumed vigilante Interzone. After the tragic death of his wife and crimefighting partner, the archer Arrowsnake, he reportedly retired to Venera, although this has never been officially confirmed. Why I Want to Love is the only document authenticating this rumour.

  This is the first time a Jameson book is explicitly touted as nonfiction, but that claim is suspect. For one thing, despite the well-documented sexual openness of the late 1960s, especially in Venera, legendarily notorious for its history of unbridled promiscuity, the story — a nonstop hedonistic display of sexual excess, perversity, and depravity described in bluntly explicit anatomical detail — stretches credibility. For another, it’s hard to believe in the parade of celebrities the three protagonists (the narrator; the now homosexual Williams; and a shockingly teenage Tito Bronze, who already displays the enthusiasm for spanking female derrieres that made his later films so scandalous) encounter on their orgiastic odyssey: Ronald Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Richard Nixon, Doris Day, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Orson Welles, Ringo Starr, Jayne Mansfield, Fred MacMurray, Federico Fellini, Nico, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Ursula Andress, Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot, Pablo Picasso, Diana Rigg, Salvador Dalí …

  Perhaps Jameson (and Williams) really do remember the events as described, regardless of what actually occurred. Both the Williams intro and the Jameson text mention that the three protagonists were at the time constantly under the influence of vermilion, in a state of perpetual imaginative euphoria that would certainly lend itself to hallucinatory experiences. As some studies have shown (see, for example, Jasmine Cockney’s 1974 counterculture bestseller, The Vermilion Fix, published by Albion Pulp Press), it is possible, although not definitely proven, that prolonged communal consumption of vermilion can produce shared hallucinations. And if that is the case, then Why I Want to Love might be simultaneously memoir and fiction.

  MOTORCRASH (1974)

  Few remember Venera’s brief and disastrous attempt to join the car culture of the twentieth century. Renowned for being a pedestrian haven, the archipelagic
city-state has never repeated the experiment.

  Motorcrash is Jameson’s personal account of those events, which had transpired the year before. The book’s first-person narrative has the ring of authenticity — especially given what is on the public record regarding the period in question. More tragic and affecting than anything to that date in Jameson’s eclectic bibliography, Motorcrash opens with Jameson driving on the newly constructed elevated highways of Venera, his recent bride, Kara Hunger, in the passenger seat.

  At the end of the first chapter, which otherwise describes the view of Venera from these new roads, their car collides with another automobile. In the aftermath, both Jameson and Hunger, having suffered only minor bruising, find themselves sexually aroused; every aspect of the process — the collision; the exchange of insurance information with the other driver; going to the garage for repairs — only increases the couple’s sexual tension.