The day Liz and I moved into the house in Hudson I went to use the downstairs bathroom. Something was holding the door closed. I shoved it open and found some curious boards on sticks, like signs, hand painted, a name and dates on either side. Next to them sat…a pelvis.
Liz clanked down the spiral stairs. “Ray?”
“In here. Check this out.”
She gave a quick look at the booty, then frowned at me. “I want this junk gone before dark.”
I called the previous owner. He laughed nervously. “Uh, those are ‘nun’s gravestones.’ I guess they painted two names on a sign to save wood. And don’t worry, that’s just a cow pelvis. I can come get them if you want.”
“I’ll take care of it.” I drove the stuff over to Bodine’s. He had a lot of space in the old theater.
“Nun’s gravestones, huh?” He grinned. He lined the items up carefully with the rolled-up theater curtain and a few remaining seats. Neither of us knew, but it was the beginning of his museum.
That night I woke around four a.m. and peed in the upstairs bathroom. I pictured the toilet bowl set into that pelvis and laughed.
Liz got a Christmas bonus and took me for her version of the Grand Tour of Europe. On the plane home, the highlights played in my head. Reliquaries in Rome: intricate gold coffers housing the tibia or skull of a saint. The Capuchin Chapel, decorated with the skeletons of thousands of monks. What were they doing there? A placard explained the wisdom of the Memento Mori, “What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be.”
By the time we landed, my path stood before me: I would fashion modern reliquaries. Parodies, with punning names. I made my first piece, “I’m Cross.” A rat skeleton, shrouded in its own gray skin, mounted on a cross, the bar of a rattrap pinching the neck, tiny arms to the sides and tail curling down. I stuck a scalpel in the side from a dissection kit I’d had as a kid and crowned it with thorns fashioned of barbed wire. More followed.
It was good fun for a while. Most of them sold. But after the better part of a year at it, I was getting bored.
It was time to dig deeper. I saw an exhibit at the Met with this baroque masterpiece made of amber. They called it a casket. On the train home, I was on the edge of sleep and images played in my head. That pelvis bone…mahogany paneling in a tearoom in London…that amber casket.
I started awake. A casket was a reliquary. I yanked my sketchbook from a pocket and drew. Back home I stayed up all night, sketching at the desk downstairs, periodically running to the bathroom with a tape measure.
The next morning, I slathered casting resin on the walls and thick in the corners until the space was like a giant bubble in dark amber. I buried bone fragments in the still-tacky substance, like fossils in limestone. When it dried, they were vaguely visible through the translucent surface. I stained the walls and sink housing mahogany and lacquered and polished everything to a silky patina.
I set dim halogen lights like Bodine had in the ceiling. The effect was a room whose lustrous walls cried out to be touched. But when you moved closer, you saw those bones and recoiled.
The centerpiece was the medicine cabinet. I framed it with historical shaving implements, stacked in ascending chronological order, like an archeologist’s section through shaving trash, from straight razors up to Bics. I gilded them with spray paint and capped them with Gothic spires.
The hardest part was setting the toilet in that cow pelvis. I was about to call a plumber—which would have been fun!—when I realized I could saw the bones in half, assemble them around the bowl, then glue it together.
I’d been surfing the artistic flow, pumped on adrenaline. I stopped and frowned into the mirror. It needed one last touch.
I touched my face. Bones beneath the skin. I ran up to the closet and found my Visible Man, a toy from childhood that had followed me through countless moves. It was a foot-high plastic skeleton standing inside plastic skin. I’d apparently saved it for this moment. I replaced the mirror with clear glass and set the mannequin behind it.
A philatory is a transparent reliquary. Here was a full-body one. A Memento Mori.
When it was done I showed it to Liz. She looked for a long time, a series of expressions playing out on her face. Finally she turned to me, smiled, and gave me a huge hug. “Ray, this is truly great.”
Great? That was a big word. But I knew it was the best thing I’d ever done.
My bathroom installation—that was the official art world term for it—became locally famous. People came to the gallery just to see it. It was featured in an art magazine. And then the New York Times.
The critic wrote: “Mr. Watts has tapped into that vast collective memory that has had the living enshrining their dead since the beginning of history. Everyone from shamans with their fetishes of bone and feather, to Christians with their shards of saints, have done the same thing—groped towards immortality.
“The most obvious example of this, of course, is the Egyptians, who elevated funerary art to perhaps its highest point.”
Ray closed out the document. He patted the computer and laughed. It was a reliquary too. A glittering thing that housed the relics of his life—those precious memories.
He frowned. He was just treading water, writing about Liz, about his muse. Ray of Darkness, spawn of Edgar Allen Poe, had a dark tale to tell. It awaited him right inside the door to Karl’s house.
But he was not getting in without a key. The vial was still in his pocket. The shriveled papers sleeping in it woke. As if the drug were already acting on him, he imagined them mewing like kittens. They were already making him crazy, and he hadn’t touched them. But he didn’t flush them down the toilet.
The glazier came the next morning and fixed the window. He said, “Kids, huh?”
Did he look hopeful, that maybe he’d see an uptick in business?
“Yeah.”
The sky was cloudy, but the temperature was in the upper forties. Not too cold for painting. And it would be nice to be out in the spring air.
The new Ray of Darkness sign was just as good as the old. It was fun simply pushing a brush without the burden of having to make art. And by the time he was done, his dilemma didn’t seem so dire. He’d figure something out. He went back in the gallery and checked his email.
Lou: “You get the advance? And I don’t want to be a noodge, but do you have some stuff for me? That editor wants to see more.”
He answered, “Check received. I’ll have more writing for you very soon.”
And he was back in the soup.
The potion in the vial stopped mewing. It started humming—a quiet but utterly demented tune. Taking this acid was a ridiculous idea. As far as Ray knew, it was fine for Bodine. But Bodine had never stopped dropping it, was used to its effects. For Ray to take that shit after all these years? And with the state he’d been in? He might as well just stick an icepick in his forehead.
The drug burst into song, nonsense syllables, on the pitches of some unearthly scale. He did his best to ignore it. He finally climbed upstairs to the couch with the acoustic guitar. Strummed up a storm and the vial finally shut up. His fingers got sore.
He went down to the gallery, flipped the sign to Open and dusted the art works, starting at the front.
Liz called. “It’s what I feared. I’m not exactly downsized, but they’ve shrunk my hours to nothing. If I don’t get your check today—all of it—I’m driving up to a realtor tomorrow at nine a.m. and putting the house on the market.”
He threw the dust rag on the floor. “I’ve got your goddamn money. A bank check work for you?” Your banker fuck buddy can cash it. He leaned against the wall, tapped a fist on it.
“You really have it? I need it on my desk by five today.”
“I’ll drive it down.”
“No. You don’t have to do that. FedEx it, I’ll get it tomorrow morning.”
Was she easing up on him, or did she just not want to see him? In either case it was his cue to explode. “I saw your new boyfriend.”
“You what? Where?”
“So, you don’t deny it. I Googled you, and…”
Somebody on the street was looking in the display window. Ray turned and stomped to the back of the gallery.
She said, “I can’t believe it. You’re stalking me. Do I need to remind you that I’m an attorney?”
“I’m not stalking you. Anybody can search for pictures on the internet. I imagine it’s quiet legal.”
“Ray, I’m going now. Don’t look me up online anymore. And send me that check.”
“I’m doing it this fucking minute.”
He hung up on her. He stomped down to the bank, then the FedEx office and sent her the money.
He flew out onto the street. Slowed down. Where was he going? Not home, back to the couch and cold laptop.
He stopped on the sidewalk, closed his eyes, and pictured the blackness inside The House. He changed channels to Liz and her lover on some king-size hotel bed, then slammed the dial away to the Nutso Channel, the vial in his pocket.
He opened his eyes. Fuck. He had just committed to the book. Ten minutes ago he could have still returned the advance. Now he’d spent a good chunk of it.
The tempest in Ray’s head stopped. He sensed the early March sun on his face, radiating actual warmth for the first time since the fall. He drank it in.
Orange Sunshine. The “brand” of the first acid he’d dropped. Back then, a bunch of loony acidhead chicks liked to sing that old song: “Please don’t take my sunshine away,” with a spooky quaver in their voices that suggested somebody ought to take it away, right now. The same genre of music the vial was into.
He strolled down to the river. At the park he stood at the railing atop the cliff. Sun glinted off the swollen river. He’d been here just yesterday, but something was different: the lightest dusting of red on the narrow island midstream.
Spring. He sat on a bench, slid a hand in his pocket, and rolled the vial between thumb and forefinger. He flashed on Aladdin with his lamp. What was inside might as well be a genie. He imagined it waking and whispering to him. Telling of how back in May of ’68—in the springtime of his life—LSD had transformed Ray of Darkness for a few hours into Ray of Sunshine. He’d stepped out into the May sun, grass and flowers so bright, so alive that it was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps from black and white into color. He felt as though he’d suddenly woken from a dreary lifelong sleep to a miraculous day.
But those ecstatic hours had never returned, any more than his youth would now.
The genie whispered. What have you got? No Liz, no art. Only a ghost house. And you need that money.
But never say never. It’s never too late.
He imagined the vial growing warm in his pocket, starting to glow, the color of the sun, and suddenly the song it sang was sweet and rich.
He returned home, slowly, with a final pretense that he was still deciding. By the time he arrived at the couch upstairs, the vial had gone silent. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at it. Just a couple of wisps of paper curled in an old glass bottle. He popped the cork and used his pinky to tease out a single paper. Before he could change his mind, he tossed it onto his tongue and chewed it up.
He’d asked Bodine, “Why two?”
“I’m not sure of the strength anymore. If one doesn’t do you, two will.”
When you’re taking a trip, you want to make sure you’ve pumped enough gas to get there. He swallowed the second one. Flutters kicked up in his stomach. It must be like this skydiving, when you’re about to jump. I’m gonna fly! Better hope the chute opens. He waited. If he remembered, it took about twenty minutes. He was already thinking trippy thoughts.
This round window, this eye, was about to become magic.
The genie was about to overpower Karl’s spell, and Ray would see into The House, into that lost time. And then he would write.
The first sign that the acid was coming on was the sensation of that glass chunk in his throat. It had never gone away, just become so constant that he was no longer aware of it. He was aware of it now. Suddenly he was that chunk, every ounce of consciousness concentrated in that centimeter of aching gristle.
But things were moving right along. A tingle of electricity raced up into his head then down into his body, growing in intensity by the second. The chunk of glass throbbed with his pulse, glowed and hummed like the vial in his pocket had, as if he hadn’t swallowed the magic paper, but it had stuck to his vocal chords.
Was this pain or pleasure? With sensations this strong, who could say?
A knot arose in his belly, an angry fist, competing with the throat for attention. Another chakra, what was its name? Never mind. This was definitely pain.
Which was somehow connected to the terrible disappointment that his oculus had not transformed into a magic window. Instead it had become a fritzy old TV. He’d never seen a round one before, but there was an awful familiarity about it. Unbelievably, it was tuned to the same idiot channel as when he’d last tripped long ago. It was still playing the same fucked-up program!
Somebody needed to tell the assholes running this station that this wasn’t the seventies any more. The colored patterns on the set rearranged themselves over and over in the same order. How could something be both terrifying and colossally boring at the same time?
His throat and stomach roared at the peak of every pulse in an explosion of noise, radioactive light, icy fire, and physical agony.
An agony which acidhead wisdom told him was the somatic analog for a feeling. Dread, the knowledge that the very worst was about to happen any second. When the next second came and it didn’t happen, the feeling just grew. All his muscles twisted like rubber bands, tightening and tightening, bracing themselves for some executioner’s blow.
The thought: This was a bad idea. The homunculus occupying his couch laughed.
Bad? He was supposed to be a writer now. Where was his thesaurus? Let’s see, it was a moronic, hideous, nincompoop-ish idea. If memory served, there was no unplugging this idiot box for at least another twelve hours.
As dusk crept up outside the oculus, the channel finally switched to endless cascades of diamonds the color of blood and sewage. A sizzling sound—was his brain catching fire? No, just rain against the window. The wind had picked up and turned the drops to the burst of a thousand machine guns.
It was full dark outside. He fumbled around on the floor, found a candle, and lit it. The TV was off. His window was now a mirror. A real mirror. He gazed in, and a long, weary face with salt-and-pepper stubble and messy hair stared back. Like Escher’s “Hand with Reflecting Sphere,” a man who also looked at himself, aghast, in a round glass, as though seeing a ghost. Except its coloring was a lot more Van Gogh than Escher.
Ray’s body had the sudden impulse to move. He rose and crept silently past the studio curtain. It wouldn’t do to wake whatever was in there tonight, not with a rack of cold chisels at its disposal. He hit the steps, a hand tightly gripping either railing. He bridged the missing step like it was a bottomless chasm. Why had he moved? A deep, deep question. Ah. Because that chakra between his legs—the sixth, or was it seventh?—was screaming.
He needed to pee in the worst way.
The upstairs toilet was closer but through the bedroom. Demon Liz was in there, hiding behind the door. He reached the downstairs bathroom. The splashing in the bowl was deafening. He was about to leave when he glanced at the medicine cabinet. With all the other psycho-crap going on in his head, he hadn’t noticed that the Imp of Bad Jokes was lurking. It pounced. I don’t need any more medicine, Doc, I took a double dose!
Be gone, asshole.
When Ray had erected this trick mirror, it had been no more than an arti
stic conceit. Now he looked at the Visible Man, at this bag of bones, and for the first time in his life really got the truth: that all his flesh and hopes and suffering were soon enough going to be gone, leaving that skeleton. No, not that plastic one, but this one, every bone of which presently ached within its temporary coating.
This was the reason for his dread. It was the fear behind all the other fears, cold and black, growing with each breath and tick of the pulse in his neck, as he moved ever closer to the end.
That wise-ass devil returned, picking up one of those giant Mexican guitars and strumming some awful mariachi tune. The skeleton in the mirror—his skeleton—started shimmying, doing a little dance. A cut-scene of a blackened corpse in a wrecked car, barbequed flesh melting away, then Susan’s skeleton stood beside his. She wasn’t in the mood for dancing, and who could blame her? But the devil picked up the tempo, her bones trembled, and now the two of them were shaking it side by side, like south-of-the-border puppets.
They turned to each other. Embraced. And they made chattering, clacking love.
Ray was a glutton for this kind of punishment. But enough was enough.
He climbed back up to his couch. Though it seemed an eternity, only three hours had passed since taking the drug. He tried to play the Telecaster, but it sounded like insects chittering. The next moment, he felt them nibbling on his fingers. His hands flew up, and he stashed the guitar under the couch where he couldn’t see it or them.
The trip finally wound down. Bargain-basement hallucinations still cobwebbed the window, but their colors were fading. The dread crawled down the dial to nine, and his body began to loosen.
He assisted. Poured the last of the absinthe into a glass. As he finished it, he felt the first tendrils of weariness pull him down into a slouch.
He’d been dozing when, with a shock that practically stopped his heart, he sprung straight up from where he sat.
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 11
