“For how long?”
“Hold it under water until it is drowned. Or until we are weary of the micromurder. I pray that I may never be weary of such! Or until it is time for us to leave here for other pleasures.”
James Morey put the little wooden statuette into water and held it under.
“What is the first requirement of a stone block, of a log, of a rough stock for the making of a statue or an icon or a—well, something more alive?” Pilgrim was asking. “What one quality would be most wanted in the blank or the wood or the marble or the clay or the—well, or the blank flesh?”
“That it be completely empty of real personality,” the curator said. “If an unshaped block of stone shows personality, then it is worthless to an artist. If even a stretched square of canvas shows personality, then it will not accept art.”
“Oh, well, I’ve nothing to worry about in my own case, then,” Pilgrim said.
The fact was that Pilgrim Dusmano had been constructing, for a long time now, a statue or an icon or a—well, something more alive. He had been working carefully on this image, and he had put others to work on it also. There was work being done toward it in canvas and wood and marble and clay. But also, and mainly, the statue or icon or image was being made out of flesh—Pilgrim’s own.
And the blank material for the image had indeed been empty of real personality. That allowed a clearer field to work in.
There was in that wardroom or showroom a fine, newly arrived, slightly larger than life-size wooden cigar-store Indian by Finnegan. It was one of the most anomalous, one of the most woodenly vital things that Finnegan had done. And nobody else had ever carved cigar-store Indians like Finnegan. In its mahogany-colored wooden hand the Indian held a clump of very real-looking cigars. Real-looking? No, they were real. Pilgrim took four of the long stogies out of the clump and passed them around. And they all lit up.
“I never noticed that the cigars were real,” the curator said, “but the Indian arrived only this morning, and I hadn’t nearly finished looking at it. Yet I’m nearly certain that they were wooden cigars when first I looked. One of the workmen must have played a trick there. An expensive trick, though. These are very fine cigars: very fruitily cured; and very old.”
“They’re not from this century,” James Morey said. Mary Morey was blowing heart-shaped smoke rings. She could flute her tongue in odd ways to form the various shapes in smoke. It’s one of the lesser-known fine arts.
“I believe that the first thing one should do when setting to work on a rough, empty-of-real-personality stock or log or stone is to fill it with living blood,” Pilgrim said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do. And I believe that as much blood should be poured on the outside of it as on the inside.” Pilgrim’s jeweled eyes glittered.
There were two Adam Scanlon seascapes there in the room. They were good. But it was as if those seas and the skies over them belonged to slightly different worlds than our own, or to our own world a long time ago.
A man brought in a written note and gave it to the curator. Then the man left.
There was a breath-flubbing triptych there. It was titled only Dotty. It showed on the left wing a girl clothed and pretty; in the center was the same girl unclothed and still pretty; on the right wing was the same girl shown cut away or visceral in the torso, and still pretty, even in the viscera. The triptych was signed by “Joe Smith” on two of the three panels. The third panel was not signed; part of it was painted in a different hand. This triptych was almost too good, and almost too nostalgic of something, to be believed. It wasn’t the sort of thing one comes upon in every lifetime.
“If things like this come from the Walk-In Bijou in New Orleans, I wonder what else is there?”
“Very little to be seen,” the curator said. “Melchisedech puts out trash and keeps the good stuff stored away in a lumber room behind.”
There were four paintings by the mysterious Gregory van Ghi, whose works were all suffused with such an unworldly, ghostly orange color. It was as though a full moon had broken and been spilled over everything that van Ghi did. There were some who maintained that van Ghi had been a disciple of Finnegan. But van Ghi had been the older.
There were three Chicago-period wood-texture paintings by Alessandro, who—
“Ah, the note that one of my men has just given me,” said the curator, “—it says that Evenhand is the Consul. It just came over the news.”
“We’ll hound him, we’ll rend him, we’ll tear him to pieces,” Pilgrim cried out with real excitement. “We’ll ruin him, we’ll destroy him, we’ll kill him and dismember him, and then we’ll befoul his nest and his ashes.”
“Why, Mr. Dusmano, why?” the curator asked in shocked puzzlement. “I could never understand the avidity of a whole nation for the destruction of a Consul. The Consul does fill the highest and most worrisome of jobs, without pay, without thanks, and in total anonymity. And he must be a good person and be certified as such. Why should a populace want to murder and destroy him?”
“It’s the devil-revel, curator,” Pilgrim howled. “It’s the pleasure that comes hardly twice in a generation. It’s the murder that a whole nation can take part in and enjoy and remember. It becomes a main part of our national heritage, of our world heritage. Curator, we kill him because he is Consul. And because he is a known man now and is vulnerable to be destroyed. And because it is almost the most burning pleasure of them all to destroy a marked person utterly. The ritual hounds must be set to howling and baying. And it is particularly a pleasure to destroy a high person if he is good. ‘It is more pleasure to kill one good man than a hundred indifferent men’—is that not what the Louden Devil said? This is folk-knitting to form red history.”
“The little wooden statue is being pretty nervous underwater,” James Morey said. “It’s hard to hold him down. He’s in panic.”
“It is only a wooden statue,” the curator said.
“It is not only a wooden statue,” Pilgrim Dusmano contradicted. “It’s more than that. If it were no more than a wooden statue, would I be excited over its drowning in a state of panic? This micromurder will become a sauce for the big feast that we’ll make on the body of Evenhand the Consul.” Pilgrim glittered and glowed like a bonfire.
“I never understood it,” the curator said. “My father tried to explain it to me. They destroyed a Consul in his time. But I never understood it.”
“That’s because you’re a spotless sheep yourself!” Pilgrim barked in savage derision. “I hate your unrotted mutton! I hate any unspotted flesh! There may be a way to destroy you as a partisan of the Consul.”
“I’m not sure I’d care,” the curator said sadly. “If a good man is destroyed to death by a perverse world, I’d as soon leave that world too. But why, when there are so many evil men about, should there be this hysteria? For I can feel just that; I can feel it coming through the walls. Why should there be this hysteria to torture and to annihilate one good man?”
“Where’s the fun in raping a harlot?” Pilgrim asked. “No, no, it has to be a completely innocent victim. It is the bruising and abusing of virgins to death that is such high pleasure. You are an art curator and you do not appreciate the high and pleasant art of this?”
“Why, why do people still do it?” the curator still croaked. “I feel them going for it now. I feel them going for it in every place in the nation. But it is insane. It is irrational. It is unnatural. What has gone wrong with the people?”
This curator was straight corned mutton.
“The people! The people know not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left,” Pilgrim sneered. “Fortunately we have instant agitators, slashing wolves, dialectical experts. They are wild, ravening, and direct persons, unorganized on the visible plane, and with hearts ready for every rampant pleasure. They pour the words, they pour the instigations, they pour the enlivening action into the people; they pour it into all the senses and all the intuitions. They become the churning bloo
d of the bloodless people; they are the deviled brains and the spastic spleens and the goatish gonads. What, should the people forget that they have hackles? Should they disremember that their hands must be red in the red season? Should they ignore what pleasure-music there is to be discovered in an agonizing death cry? We will not let the people forget! We will force the people to partake of the strong pleasure. We will pour it all into them. And in their ignorance they will respond to it. We pour it in now.”
“I wonder what Judas it was who revealed the identity of the Consul!” the curator moaned, feeling the thin anger that even meek men sometimes feel.
“Judas, indeed!” Pilgrim was all glee. “I wonder what those other eleven idiot sheep found that was as good as the red-murder rapture and the self-murder exultation that the real Judas-goat knew!”
“It is like a Greek tragedy,” the curator mumbled. “It is stark evil coming on goat feet. It is the tragos-goat himself. And he is the devil.”
“Certainly, certainly,” Pilgrim said briskly. “It is almost overflowing already. It animal-nickers. It bloody-bleats.”
“The statuette is screaming underwater,” James Morey said in his shadowy excitement. “It’s so small, and there’s a whole world in its screaming. I hear it with my fingertips. I wish you could hear it.”
“I heard it,” said Pilgrim, “and I enjoyed it all the way to the hot handle itself. With these things it is always the question of which alternative gives one the most pleasure. Should we enjoy the more and gloat the most over the swift death of the victim, or over the slow death? But you are wrong, curator. This is not a Greek tragedy of which we have gone through the first chorus and now begin the action. It is a Greek Katastrophy or destruction or ruination. It’s a much more pleasurable thing than a tragedy. What is that which you take from your desk, curator? It interests me.”
“It’s the eyepiece from the ritual mask of the Consul who was destroyed in my father’s time,” the curator said.
“It looks like one of the new cracked-glass, jewel eyepieces in your own ritual mask, Pilgrim,” Mary said. “You know that you now wear a ritual mask instead of a face?”
“I know it,” Pilgrim said.
The Consuls were always elaborately masked and swathed and gauntleted while they fulfilled their offices. The Consuls were a series of absolutely good men who worked anonymously and masked upon the earth, undertaking to head up the governments. They made the necessary decisions from behind the veil, as it were. Even when they spoke, in their official and disguised capacity, they had to have a glottle in the mouth to trammel the tongue and disguise the speech. And the masked-Consul system had worked when it seemed as though nothing in the world would ever work again. Rulers had been assassinated so swiftly that rule had disappeared. And then the masked-Consuls had tempered anarchy enough for the world to continue. But if a Consul’s face should ever be seen or his Consul-name should ever be spoken, then he would be known and marked, and he would be destroyed. The devils have the power to seize and dismember an unmasked man.
“Yes, the eyepiece is of polarized shape,” Pilgrim said. “A man could see out of it, and nobody could see into his eyes. The eyes of this particular Consul were burned out with hot spits after he had been unmasked. Part of the smokiness of that event was said to have gone into the eyepieces of the mask. I wish I might have taken part in all that.”
The cigar-store Indian was standing up in the middle of that room in all its unbending woodenness and angular morality. It was really the only moral person there. Pilgrim was not a moral person. The Moreys were not. Even the curator was not quite. The curator was fearful, and at the same time he was drawn to the blood-magnet.
“What was a Greek Katastrophy?” the curator asked in an itching voice.
“Oh, it was the assault, the sack, the rape, the ruin, the destruction.” Pilgrim ticked the things off. “It was much more vital and much more dramatic than the arena games the Romans played. And it could be played out, passioned, dramatized, agonized, by large or small groups. In its classic form, mostly at Corinth, but other places as well, the victim had to be a virgin, male or female. And this victim had to be assaulted as many times as were required to bring it to death’s gate. It was often a three-days-and-nights agony. Then, when the victim had arrived at the extremity, with body clear burst open and ripped apart, and with death howling and gibbering nearby, then every sort of torture was to be applied at once; and all sorts of people, even grandes dames and graybeards and small children, had to be brought to the assembly to add their own species of torture.
“The limbs would be broken clear off the still-living body. The eyes and privates and tongue and glottis were torn clear out by their bloody roots. Oh, we live in a weak age that has forgotten the ancient pleasures! I was born too late and in the wrong place. We organize groups now and we do these things, but they are artificial. The spontaneity is lost. The genuine chthonic roots have shriveled, and they must be restored. Of course, if the victim were not a virgin, the difference would be felt at once. The pleasure simply would not be so rich.”
“And the killing assaults on unmasked Consuls are analogous to this?” the curator asked.
“Yes, they are national solidarity acts,” Pilgrim said. “They are the rich, ritual murders to renew our blood. But if the Consul were not really a good and spotless man, the difference would be felt from the first. The corporate murder-pleasure would not be so rich in that case. Fortunately, Evenhand really is spotless, so the uproar will have its full meaning and its rich, rancid pleasure. Such acts as ours can make the very spheres boggle. You know that.
“How is the carved wooden figure, James? Ah, it is our token lust and our token murder.”
“We will see,” James Morey said. He took the wooden figurine out of the water. The wood limbs had moved and redisposed themselves, though it wasn’t a jointed figure. The members were displaced and deformed and distorted from the killing water-torture. The eyes were open and dead, but they were dead in horror and torture and desolation. The wooden drowned thing would almost have moved one to pity, had not one already decided to move in another direction. It was one of the strangest and most haunting little woodcarvings that Groben ever did.
“The eyes of it were the last remnant of the real Pilgrim, and now they’re dead,” James Morey said flatly. But James, however much he understood that Dusmano was making himself devilishly artificial, was still a leading member of the Pilgrim Dusmano cult.
6
Eclectic outrage is our rule:
To strain at gnats that soil and sin us,
And pass huge camels to the stool.
And still there are great camels in us.
“Song of the Golden Shovel”
Pilgrim Dusmano had midday dinner at the Media Club. He was an honored member of that body. Even the forbidding words written in flame over the entrance of the Club, “For the Lords Spiritual Only,” were no obstacle to him. Pilgrim was a Lord Spiritual as well as a Lord Temporal. By his commerce and his money-shuffling he was a high Lord Temporal. But in his influence on mores and manners, on cults and quackeries, on modes and styles, he was a Spiritual. In his creative deviations and his decadent deformations, in his riotous dismantlings and numinous ambivalences he was a Lord Spiritual. And as a high “Pioneer of Pleasure” he was a certified Lord. For his scatterfield philosophy, for his promulgating of dynamic rutting as a fine art, for his kinetic taste and vectored variances, he was a real Lord Spiritual, bemedaled and cultified.
The Media People needed such persons as Pilgrim. And he, empty of real personality and interested in acquiring the finest cultic and electronic personality in the world, needed the Media. The production of such as himself, the chopping down of uncultic and unelectronic persons, that was what the Media had been all about for a long time, and that was what Pilgrim Dusmano consisted of. He was the Newest of the New Men.
A younger Lord Spiritual, one of the tinsel group of communicators, came to Pilgrim at table th
ere. “We have uncovered and unraveled the three men, Gut and Blut and Flut,” this young Lord said. “We have nailed their hides to the barn door, as the ancient saying has it. And we have published their names and faces for all to see and hear. ‘Plague-Rats behind the Masks’ is the way we label them. Unmasked they die! Nothing can save them. Who would want to save them? They are the unelectronic people, the nontinsel people, the folks of the unfractured flesh, and they never showed a deep love for us of the Media.
“Blut has already been killed. The people got to him before we had hardly started on our instigation. It was almost too easy. They tore him to pieces.”
“Good.” Pilgrim laughed with smacking pleasure. “Blut was a minor one, but we will quickly come to the main. What a pleasure-filled exit for me this will be!”
Pilgrim, a studied expert of innovative foods, was eating pipe clay soup, which is made of the vermicules that burrow into that white clay. The soup has naught else except Holland onions and a salting of the white pipe clay itself.
“And, Mr. Dusmano—” the young Lord began, with the hint of rich secrets.
“Yes, Cordcutter, the people tore Blut to pieces?” Pilgrim gave him his attention. “And then?”
“We have one of the pieces of Blut here, Mr. Dusmano. Here at the Media Club. And a fairly large piece it is.”
“Oh, sweet, sweet! How long until?”
“Within the hour.”
“Good. I’ll dawdle and I’ll wait. Oh, good!”
“Mr. Dusmano—” Cordcutter, the young Lord, began to ask, and other young Lords were interested. “These things do not open out of themselves. And you are always a source of information like no other. Give us our momentum again. Have you not some further piece of activating information?”
Not To Mention Camels Page 7
