“I can explain—” she began.
“Don’t bother. Just come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“You need to pee.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
After we got out of the men’s room, I was kind of in shock.
Jo looked contrite. “I was going to tell you eventually.”
“I believe you.”
“You see, it all started when I was thirteen—”
“I know.”
“You know? How could you know?”
“Never mind. Just come with me. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Chris was just finishing touching up her lipstick.
“Chris, meet Jo. Jo, Chris.”
At first they acted embarrassed. After all, they were both in the habit of moving undetected and unrecognized during such times. But after a while, they were chattering away as if they had known each other all their lives.
Which, in a sense, I guess they had.
I get invitations now and then to dinner at Chris and Jo’s house, and since I still like them both a lot and they put on a swell meal, I usually go.
Unless it’s a full moon.
THE DEATH OF SALVADOR DALI
Salvador Dali, the century’s finest madman, the Great Masturbator, the Holiest Goof, the Critical Paranoid, Saint Salvador the Supreme Surrealist, is dying at last.
In the converted castle in Pubol that was one of his last gifts to Gala, twenty miles outside Figueras, the small town where Dali was born, the old painter lies in bed, attended by his court.
He wears a white satin gown. Around his neck on a blood-red sash hangs the Grand Crown of Isabella, an enormous medal given to him by Franco. Across his withered lap lies one of his favoured canes, the one with the gold head that he always maintained once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.
Sad to say, Dali looks like hell.
The grand rampant moustaches, once lovingly waxed each day, are no more; a few wispy grey hairs, sparsely planted across his upper lip, are the only token they ever existed. Dali’s hair, always worn long, is greasy and lank. Dali’s face, ravaged by the persistence of time, has collapsed. It now resembles a premonitory soft watch, or perhaps the weathered rocks of Cape Creus, not far from Port Lligat, where so much of his best work was done.
A clear plastic tube blocks one nostril and descends down his throat: it carries nutrients and vitamins, for Dali can neither chew nor swallow.
Dali’s court no longer consists of fellow simpatico artists, poets and bizarre nonpareils, but only of museum curators and administrators of his estate, seated or uneasily standing. He has outlived all his old cronies. Breton, Eluard, Picasso, Tanguy, Ernst, Man Ray, Magritte, Gala …
Most especially Gala.
Gala: wife, “sister,” muse, model, protector, companion of fifty years. “Gentle Gala who is also the beautiful Helen of the golden apple … Gala is the one who devours for me, my teeth being very small and feeble … Gala is Trinity … the woman whose glance pierces walls … Gala the indispensable, the vital, the lost …
One final real friend, however, is still present. Antonio Pitxot, who has been Dali’s companion since Gala’s death. Pitxot is a much younger man than Dali, with a head full of dark curls. The Pitxots and the Dalis were neighbours since before little Salvador’s birth. Pitxot is the only one now who can interpret Dali’s feeble Catalan utterances.
The assembled company unanimously stirs at this moment in their vigil, as if blown by an extradimensional wind. They know intuitively that these are Dali’s final minutes of life. The atmosphere in the room is thick with forebodings of transition. The harsh Spanish light the colour of sand streaming in through the thick embrasures is quantified with particles of mortality. The mundane features of the commonplace articles in the room are transfigured as if by a patina of paint.
Dali shifts his head on the pillows, eyeing the seated witnesses to his less than grandiose passage from this world. His dry lips stir, and Pitxot lowers his ear to Dali’s mouth.
“What does he say?” asks a timid goateed man in a conservative dun suit. (This is the local Pharmacist of Ampurdan, invited according to Dali’s express and inviolable—albeit inexplicable—wishes.)
Pitxot replies, “He says, ‘A chair can even be used to sit in, but on the sole condition that one sits on it uncomfortably.’”
The crowd nods solemnly, as if enlightened.
Dali whispers again. Pitxot straightens up and says, “Dali wants us to know that the quicksands of automatism and dreams vanish upon awakening. But the rocks of the imagination remain.”
Once more the deathbed spectators wag their heads sagely.
Dali beckons a final time. Pitxot patiently receives this last message, which is a long one, and passes it on.
“The glove of myself is edible, and even a little gamy. I am the most generous of painters, since I am constantly offering myself to be eaten, and I thus succulently nourish our time. Every morning I experience the supreme pleasure of being Salvador Dali, and wonder what prodigies I will accomplish today.”
After allowing enough time for this stubborn assertion of his stature and of his old will to be digested, Dali waves to an old-fashioned phonograph. Pitxot, knowing full well what Dali wants, gets up and moves to the phonograph. On the turntable sits a record whose label is long gone, and whose grooves are worn down by countless playings. Pitxot turns on the machine and sets the needle on the record.
An irritating storm of white noise—which Dali has said resembles “the most beautiful sound in the world, that of sardines frying in oil”—fills the room.
Pitxot returns to Dali’s side.
The old man’s face has relaxed, losing some of its lines of pain. The white noise seems to be facilitating his departure from life.
Dali reaches out. Pitxot grabs his parchment hand—has the man become canvas itself?—and squeezes. The witnesses cease to breathe, as if, drawn by the force even of Dali’s waning charisma and wishing to follow him beyond life, they are ready to commit a kind of spontaneous mass yogic suicide.
“Gala,” says Dali, plainly enough for all to understand. “Gala, Gala—”
Then Dali dies.
* * *
Everything is black. There is confinement. The universe seems infinitely small, like Hamlet’s walnut shell, its bounds located just a few inches beyond Dali’s skin, as he floats in foetal suspension.
The air is stale, and smells of a sun-dried tidal pool in which things have died.
This situation is not without interest. What is going on? Where is he? How does he exist, if exist he does? He remembers dying … Is this heaven or hell, or something else? For once, Dali has no ready answers.
But, being Dali, this does not deter him.
It is amazing how well he feels. Not for decades has his body radiated such healthy messages. He feels like a forty-year-old again. Dali flexes his limbs tentatively in the enclosure. No, make that a twenty-year-old!
The new bodily vigour inspires him. He must escape this prison—assuming it is not the whole of his new existence.
Dali pokes hesitantly at the walls of his unseen shapeless box. They reveal themselves to be rubbery, organic, slimy. Dali thrusts a foot into the shell and extends his bent leg straight out. He can feel the membrane wrap his foot, mimicking its shape. But it refuses to tear.
The resistance frightens him—is he doomed to spend post-mortal eternity in this confinement?—and he begins to flail wildly. He grabs handfuls of the wall and pulls, he butts his head into the shell, deforming it to his own personal contours …
Something finally gives.
Dali’s right hand juts through the shell, into what feels like open air. He extends the rip, producing a crack that propagates with a noise like rotting fabric tearing.
A shaft of light, accompanied by fresh air, enters, spurring Dali on. His arm is free to the shoulder. Somehow, though, in his haste to escape, his head has b
ecome enfolded in the membrane. He cannot see the new worlds beyond his shell yet. Desperately, he pulls free of the pliable material, and falls through the crack to the ground.
Dali stands.
He looks around. He has emerged from an egg-shaped globe on which the familiar continents stand in impasto relief, Tierra del Feugo melting off, and the Cape of Good Hope levitating away. The globe rests on a white cloth. Above it floats a curdled shadowed canopy. Dali’s destruction of the globe has caused it to bleed: an unchanging bright crimson globule lies on the cloth, connected to the globe by a viscous thread.
Dali smiles. How droll. Of all possible afterlives, that he should find himself here … Impossible to say if such a fate is heaven or hell. Or is this all only the phantasm of his dying mind, an illusory eternity in a few milliseconds …?
“Are you ready now?” says a voice behind Dali.
Dali turns.
It is—as he instantly knew it must be—a naked little boy with a shaved head: Geopoliticus Child. The child watches Dali with calm unconcern.
“Ready for what, tiny avatar of my magnificent self?”
“You mistake me,” says the child. “But no matter. Ready to travel, of course.”
“Where?”
“To Gala.”
Dali feels faint. Vertigo overwhelms him, and he falls backward against the egg, his hand smearing Barcelona and all of Spain. Amid all the excitement of being reborn, he neglected to conceive this possibility. If this is indeed the true world beyond death, then Gala must be here also. To be reunited with his beloved—! It seems too rich a possibility.
Yet faced with this intimate landscape, what alternative does he have but to believe, and act on that belief?
“Are you going to guide me?” asks Dali.
“Yes,” says Geopoliticus Child. “For part of the way. The journey is not long, but neither is it easy.”
Dali reaches up instinctively to preen his moustaches. They are there, splendid in their stiff glory! Sensitive feelers aquiver to the numinous passage of pi-mesons! Yes, he is his old self, Dali the invincible! He is ready to travel indeed.
Pushing himself boldly away from the globe, Dali notices for the first time that he is naked. However, he does miss his old favourite red felt hat.
“We must attempt to find some headgear for me,” says Dali to the child. “The painter must officiate with headgear, preferably a model which conceals an electronic and cybernetic apparatus by means of which televised information could be communicated.”
“We shall see. Meanwhile, let us be off.”
“With a will. I am ready to encounter all phantasms of deification which my own deluded brain may project. But be forewarned: the only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.”
Dali steps off the white cloth that lies beneath the World Egg, and onto the gritty, hard desert floor where Geopoliticus Child stands. The glossy bead of blood has not altered, and seems pregnant with a hematinic foetus, ready to give birth to bloody terror.
With the Egg no longer obscuring the foreground, Dali is able to take in the landscape.
The desert stretches away, uninterestingly featureless, to the western horizon. A square tower, dark with shadows on its northern side, looms some distance away in the east. Beyond the structure are mountains. Between the mountains and tower, across the illimitable plain, are scattered mystic figures of indescribable half-humanity, engaged in alchemic conversations and cryptic intercourse. The sky is grey.
“Marvelous,” exclaims Dali. “Although I have never been here, I remember so much!”
The child takes Dali’s hand, and they set off for the tower.
The plain is hot and pebbled beneath Dali’s bare soles, but he does not object to the discomfort, so enthralled is he with his renewed youth and this translation to the scene of his most private imaginings.
“How is it, dear child, that life after death resembles the peculiar prophetic visions of one Salvador Dali? I always realised that, as a genius, I was exalted and privileged in my communications with alternate planes of existence, but even I never dared conceive that heaven’s architecture would spring from my brush.”
The little hand of Geopoliticus Child is warm and alive in Dali’s own. “What makes you so sure you are dead?”
This reply gives Dali pause. He recalls his intuition upon first stepping from the egg that this was only the final hallucination of a cooling brain, a time-shifted pseudo-life that would unravel and disintegrate along with his expiring neurons … Can this be what his diminutive Virgil means?
As if sensing Dali’s hesitation, Geopoliticus Child says in his sweet voice, “What if you have been spirited away by superior beings? Taken from your deathbed to another world? The agents of your fate might be a race other than man, whose members wish to preserve your life amid familiar and reassuring scenery.”
Dali snorts. “Wellsian nonsense! Even I, the great Dali, know that such talk is piffle, fit only for hypergonadic adolescents.”
“I merely propound the theory. Believe what you wish.”
During their talk, the two travelers have drawn closer to the lonely tower by means of strange and disconcerting physical and temporal shifts. Stopping now a few feet from its walls, Dali can see that the structure’s doorless base is cracked, the stucco crumbling, revealing the sand-colored bricks beneath. Above, the sky has gone hyperxiological: composed of some colloidal substance, infolded and wrinkled on itself in a non-Euclidean manner, studded with nails, coral and teeth.
In the upper floors of the tower are square openings. A single iron rod extends across the middle of each.
In one opening, leaning on the rod, is a naked woman.
Her left forearm rests on the rod, while her right hand clasps her left bicep, thus framing her pendulous full breasts, the nipples of which are perfectly round cherry-colored marbles that float above the skin. Her hair resembles that of Botticelli’s Venus. The iron rod cuts athwart her pubis. She is not entirely naked, for she wears seamed black nylons and scuffed brown loafers. Her left leg supports her weight on the ball of her foot, raising that foot from her shoe. Her right knee is bent, the tip of the right shoe balanced on the stones of the tower floor. Around her in a cluster float bulbous phallic horns.
Her joints are curiously configured, almost as if her limbs could be detached.
The tantalizing woman calls down to Dali. “Come up here, Painter, and consummate our alchemical wedding, the union of mercury and sulphur.”
Dali feels a creeping paralysis and a desire to submit to the beckoning of this siren. At the same time, he wants to turn and flee. But he is aware that this is the first obstacle on his path to Gala, and must be conquered.
Suddenly Dali realizes that his head is level with that of the Geopoliticus Child. He has shrunken to a child himself, clothed in a blue sailor’s suit, clutching a hoop and thighbone. Ah, the Spectre of Sex Appeal!
Dali summons his innermost strengths and addresses the woman. “Young Virgin, autosodomized by your own chastity! You can lean on and play with the unicorn horns morally, as was practised in the time of courtly love! But to embrace the fiery Dali would result in your destruction!”
The woman postures invitingly. “I am unafraid to try it. What of yourself? Climb between my legs, Painter, and see what happens—if you dare!”
Dali quivers with a wash of lust, fear and anguish. He stirs toward the tower, ready to scale its walls with bloody fingers to reach this artifact of his own devising, supreme attractor crafted to his own tastes. Images of rolling her detachable nipples between his fingers inflame him.
At the last moment, however, through some deep access of resolve, Dali instead hurls the thighbone at the temptress.
It hurtles end over end through the space between them, finally smiting the Young Virgin upon the forehead.
At the instant of contact, the woman and tower vanish.
Dali looks down at himself; he has regained his adult stature and nudit
y. He turns to share his triumph with Geopoliticus Child.
The child is gone.
In his place is a giant black ant fully as large.
Dali notices that he and the ant now stand on a beach lapped by a broad sea. Wedged into the sand is a canted wooden crutch holding a black telephone receiver, which trails a wire that ends in midair.
Before Dali can question the ant about the disappearance of Geopoliticus Child, the phone begins to ring.
Dali lifts the receiver off the crutch. “Hello? Yes, who is it?”
Gala speaks. “It is I, Salvador, she who veils herself and walks in mystery.”
“Gala, Gala, my dearest, where are you, how can I reach you? Tell me.”
“You are doing wonderful, Salvador, without any instruction from me. Just remember the paranoiac-critical method.”
“Of course! A spontaneous method of irrational knowledge founded on the critical interpretive association of the delirious phenomena will see me through, as always! Thank you, Galutschka, thank you! Once again, you have put me in touch with my true self!”
“Goodbye for now, Salvador. If you just persist as nobly as you have been, we shall be reunited soon.”
There is a click, and a noise like the sound of sardines frying fills the earpiece.
Dali turns to the magnificent ant. “I assume you are to lead me in place of the child.”
“Yes,” answers the ant. Its voice, unlike that of Geopoliticus Child, is a harsh rasp.
“Onward, then, Admirable Atta!”
The ant and Dali begin to walk along the subtle sands.
Soon, they come upon a scene of frantic activity.
The conquest of the tuna.
In the marine shallows a party of heroic unclothed figures struggle with enormous glaucous tuna fish. The men are composed of golden and silver whorls of energy. Some have visible brains like coral. They grapple with the slippery dying fish, stabbing them with knives and spears. Blood runs from the fish, and from the hemolactic nipple of one of the men, staining the water. On a headland, a group of reserve fishermen watch complacently; a naked woman balances on one leg, like a stork, and hides her face. Gulls screech overhead.
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