Flesh Wounds, page 2
2. Art and Audience
The multitude of voices in the gallery don’t penetrate the acrylic, but the stares do. Faces file by, linger with openmouthed awe. Hesitant, near-reverent fingers trace the crystal block as if they can feel the lines of tattooing. A crowd gathers, and as their lips move, it’s easy to imagine what they’re saying:
“It’s a genuine Ransom, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes! Much better than those imitations across the hall. The guy’s a genius.”
“Genius? You ladies oughta have your heads examined.” The two women appraise this cowboy-type who has come to the fore, their eyes as sharp and cold as the diamonds adorning their digits, wrists, and necklines. “Tell you what I think—” They both knew he would; it’s written on their faces. “—I think he’s a goddamn psycho!”
“Oh, no sir, not Herbert Ransom. Now Moog... Moog, he’s psychotic. All those rearranged pieces. Butchery is all it is. Moog acts out his fantasies on cadavers.”
“God, Moog is disgusting. Katie, did you see the guy with the penis where his nose should be?”
“Sick! And what about Chapman’s reanimated series? Did you see that? Or Pruitt’s ‘Study of the Amputee?’ How do some of these artists sleep at night?”
“It’s all sick, ladies.” The cowboy runs a beefy finger along the brim of his hat as if making some minute adjustment. The one called Katie watches the gesture with sudden fascination. She looks as if she’s just realized where she misplaced something valuable. “The dead should be used for fertilizer, not mutilated and displayed.”
“Oh, no. This is art, people.” A new face crowds up to the acrylic’s surface, this one in an Italian suit and hundred dollar tie. The only thing he probably has in common with the cowboy is the money in his pocket. “You’re all three missing the point. Think of the talent it took to transfer that penis. Not a single seam. To look at it, you’d have thought the guy was born that way.”
“I still say it’s sick. What I wonder is what sorta people contribute their loved ones for these things?”
“Moog probably collects homeless beggars and files disposal rights. If no one comes forward in ten days, the corpse is his, isn’t that right, Betty? Betty knows these things, she works down town at the Bureau.”
“That’s right. It all started with those damn organ donor laws. Find a body, get a new kidney. Kinda’ says something about society, doesn’t it, Katie?”
“No more so than this tattooed nightmare,” retorts the cowboy. “I certainly wouldn’t want my daughter, or sister, or mother—or whatever she was to the person who commissioned this—used for some sick paint-by-numbers exhibit.” He’s moved closer to Katie and she to him.
“No, you just don’t get it. Look at her. It’s all there in the ink. Her whole life. It’s like some sort of spiral galaxy, the events and the connections and the components of her life swirling out around her. She’s the center. All these other people, all these incidents revolve around her. She was the center of their universe... and now they are without her.”
“Shit, what we got here is one of them dead art impressionists, ladies. Kinda fella thinks he sees purpose in a pile of dogshit. I’m leaving before he spews some on my boots.”
“Katie, you’re not going too, are you?” There’s an unspoken level of communication between the two women as they separate, a meet-you-at-the-bar-in-a-couple-hours relayed on some telepathic level. Betty understands that Katie and the cowboy have reacted to the exhibits on some instinctive level. Death dares them to defy his presence, to deny his breath on the neck of every visitor in the packed gallery. Sex is an instinctive defense. See me, Death? If I can enjoy this, you’re a long way from being on my appointment book.
Betty is disappointed that she is left with the art critic, the thinker, the one too aesthetically sensitive and hormonally insensitive to recognize that she’s also ready to leave. With him.
“Let them go. They don’t get it. They don’t see that whoever asked Ransom to do this loved this woman more than anything in the world.”
“And wanted us to see her like this?”
“Maybe not. Maybe he had no choice. Part of Ransom’s standard contract says he gets to display the work for an initial period. She’ll be here a week, two at the most, then she’ll be secreted away somewhere where only the people featured in these tattoos can view her.”
“But to shave her and... display her nude like that—”
“Don’t you see that Ransom needed every inch of canvas? This woman was connected to a lot of people.”
“And all of them marched into Ransom’s studio and posed for this? I think the guy’s a genius, but I’m only willing to go so far, pal. Come on, he makes these images up for those of us who don’t know any better.”
“They say he’s intuitive, empathetic even. He interviews everyone he can before he starts the job, but in the end he takes most of what he needs from the corpse. They say he has an ‘intimacy with the dead.’”
“Creepy.”
“Yeah. Perhaps that’s what makes his art, and all the art in this gallery, so popular.”
“Maybe we’re looking for the opportunity to touch death?”
“Or immortality.”
“She looks so young. How do you suppose she died?”
“Didn’t you see it in the paper and on the news? She drowned in some kind of boating accident.”
“Oh.” As if that explained something. She taps the acrylic with a manicured fingernail. “How long will she last in there?”
“No air... pumped full of preservatives... I’d guess, maybe, forever.”
3. Loneliness and Judgement
The night holds the garden in a skeletal silence so complete it seems even the insects are loathe to intrude upon it. Herbert Ransom has come like a thief over the garden wall to his customer’s study. He stands now outside the open veranda door, in the shadows, in the half light, in the judicial black of the monochrome realm where he, the artist, comes like a god, a god of color. He watches as his customer inspects the acrylic block, running tentative, trembling fingers across the polished surface. Herbert Ransom runs his own hands beneath his shirt, feeling the landscape of textures spread across his stomach and chest. Where his shirt gaps and the flesh beneath is touched by the light from the study, colors are born to challenge the night.
The customer weeps, spreading his tears across the acrylic surface. The tears bead there, dispelling the illusion that he and his dead wife are separated by a foot of water. He shudders and begins to weep uncontrollably. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, but not so low that Ransom can’t hear.
Clearing his throat, Ransom steps from the shadows.
The husband looks up, wiping at his eyes. He seems unsurprised to find the artist at his door.
“Is the work satisfactory?” Ransom asks.
“Satisfactory?” The husband touches the acrylic and methodically moves from scene to scene across the tattooed panorama. “How could you have known all these things?”
Ransom doesn’t answer.
The husband gestures toward the face of a dark and attractive man occupying real estate on his wife’s chest, just above her left breast, that spot where she would place her hand if asked to put it over her heart. “How could you have ever known about him?” The dark man’s face is caught looking back over his left shoulder, his eyes and mouth set in an expression of incongruent surprise and expectation. It was exactly the way she remembered him best. Exactly as he’d looked that first night she’d called him back when he’d made to leave the bar.
“I wasn’t going to keep her, you know,” continues the husband. “I was going to send her... to him. I thought that... that when you were finished and all the important things about our life together—our life before he came along—were laid out there on her flesh, that I’d send her to him. See what you did? I would ask. You destroyed all this. You were nothing to her. But,” he sobs and slaps angrily at the tattooed face of the dark man. “There the son of a bitch is and... how can I send her to him now? Right there he is. Right there near her heart.
“And it’s me who’s left to ponder my own significance in her life.” He looks up then and finds some strength in the ambivalence writ upon the artist’s face. He wipes his eyes, screws his face into an indignant frown, and asks,“What the hell are you doing here anyway?”
Ransom removes his shirt and lets it drop to the floor.
“Oh my God.”
There, on the artist’s breast: the long, gondola-like boat, the moon and the swamp and the backlit cypress trees, the pole in the husband’s hands, and the white turmoil where the pole enters the water. Beneath the water, at the end of the pole, a face twisted in terror.
And Though a Million Stars
Were Shining
“It grieveth the sun... to shine upon a man defiled by a corpse; it grieveth the moon; it grieveth the stars.”
—Persian Zend Avesta
Bombay, June 6, 1906.
The smell of the gardens rises on the breeze coming in off the Arabian Sea, mingles with the tang of brine and tide much the way I remember the fine perfume of a lady will hang over a London street. The welcome wind is cool as it dries the sweat on my brow. I watch it toy with Kara’s fine black hair and ruffle the dark sentinels that ring the tower’s edge.
Yes... sentinels. I find no better name for them. Dark, silent watchers. Patience takes on new meaning in the depths of their unwavering eyes. Their demeanor is that of one acquainted with an infinite experience in the art of waiting. Though I am an unknown factor in an equation they’ve solved countless times before, they know how to deal with me. No one ever out waits them.
The majority of them are Himalayan griffons, the most common scavenger in this part of India. Griffons have served the Towers of Silence for centuries, their long, thin bills making short work of the Parsee dead. Pale-brown, sociable birds, they cluster in groups of six or more on the parapet, preening and pecking at each other, whispering among themselves. There’s also a strong contingency of Indian white-backs, a few Indian and European blacks, and, remarkably, there’s one monstrous lammergeier.
The other vultures have surrendered an ample stretch of parapet to the elusive lammergeier, as if they doubt his documented timidness. Perhaps they’re among those who, as I, believe it was a lammergeier that tortured Prometheus for Zeus. Tibetan shepherds have named him “lamb vulture” because they don’t believe him shy at all. Campfire tales warn of lammergeiers carrying off sheep and, worse yet, children. Looking at the wingspan on this one, easily ten feet from one primary to the other, and the wickedly curved beak and talons, the tales are not hard to believe. The warm russet of the lammergeier’s under-plumage all but fades against the sunset behind him, so that for a moment I think he’s left us, but the stirring of his massive wings assures me that he’s still there. Waiting, like all the others.
Just last week, what wouldn’t I have given to be this close to a lammergeier?
I pull Kara closer, with my arms seek to shield her naked body from their sight. Her flesh is incredibly cold for such a summer night.
As the sun fades, a full moon rises to bathe the hill of Malabar and its seven towers in pale, clean light. Before me spreads a view seen by none but the Nasasalars, the Parsee corpse-bearers. The maze of squat white buildings and crooked streets that is Bombay seems richer in this light—as if the buildings are silver; the running sewage, streams of gold; the waste dumps, the burial mounds of ancient kings.
But the Parsees do not bury their dead.
“The prophet Zoroaster taught us that the elements created by God are sacred, Nathaniel,” Kara once told me. I recall imploring yet again that Kara call me Nate. Though she did not seem to mind my shortening her name, she always used my full Christian name, as if the word Nate were a Parsee curse of which I was ignorant. “Because the elements are pure, earth, air, fire, and water must never be defiled by a dead body. Our Towers are an efficient and safe method of handling a problem you British are loathe to even acknowledge.”
“It’s bloody barbaric is what it is, Karamiri!”
The lammergeier huffs and spreads his wings, agitated at the sound of my voice. I eye him coldly. “You’re free to take your leave at any time.” Several birds do. But the huge lammergeier stays.
“You shan’t have her,” I hiss, and it seems his black eyes narrow slightly. We shall see.
Morbidly fascinated by the Towers and the Zoroastrian solution for disposing of the dead, I researched the issue while in Paris. I was there at the request of the French Ornithological Society to lecture on vultures, specifically those I’d been studying in India for eight months. My Indian assistant, Rajah, accompanied me. It was his first time outside of India, and to my surprise the usually reserved young Parsee found Paris deliciously decadent. While I spent hours buried in a library overlooking the Seine, Rajah did the town. The morning we were to leave, he looked to have been through the Apocalypse.
“You won’t tell my sister?” he asked.
So he knew with whom I’d been spending most of my free time. But in his bloodshot eyes there was no anger. “What sort of friend would I be then?” I replied.
“You love her, Nate, don’t you?”
Even then, before I’d once held her, before I’d kissed her and felt the velvet touch of her hair and brown skin, there was no doubt in my heart that I loved the delicate Karamiri. I suppose it was written just as clearly on my face, for Rajah had no need to wait for my answer.
“They’ll never let you marry her,” he said.
“We shall see.”
The lammergeier nods his head as if in agreement. “Gypaëtus barbatus,” I call to him. “Lamb vulture. Bearded vulture. Killer of Aeschylus. I know you.” He shakes his wings, unconcerned.
Perhaps I should not be so offended by the Parsees’ chosen method of cadaver disposal. Certain of the Kaffir tribes abandon their dead to the tender consideration of the jackal, as do nomads of the plains of Central Asia who even go one step further: they cut the body into small pieces first. In Siberia, the flesh of the dead is given to the dogs, while bones are preserved and religiously treasured. Packs of dogs are kept just for this. The rich have the privilege of owning their own “undertakers.”
And what of those cultures who refuse to let go of their dead? In the Islands of Haiti the dead are smoke-cured, dressed in their finest, and hung in the homes of relatives. Egyptians and Etruscans mummify their dead and leave them in house-like tombs. At the monasteries of Krewzberg at Bonn and Capucine at Palermo the mummified bodies of deceased brethren, dressed in the habit of their order, are displayed in the vaults in various life-like attitudes, forming a horribly fascinating exhibition.
Who’s to say what’s right or wrong when it comes to relinquishing the dead?
The Parsees aren’t unique. The vulture also plays a role in the ceremonies of Tibet. With the Himalayan ground frozen most of the year and wood too scarce and expensive to be squandered on cremation, the dead are taken to a “disposer of bodies.” He cuts the flesh from the corpse and hand feeds it to Himalayan griffons. The bones are broken and set out for lammergeiers which are known to be especially fond of the marrow. The lammergeier’s tongue is a strong, grooved tool specially formed for sucking the marrow from bones.
There are, I suppose, still worse ways to dispose of a cadaver.
Several griffons wheel about the tower in the last bit of light, finally settling among the others. “Gyps himalayensis,” I dub them. “I know you too.”
The stars are just beginning to appear, dampened somewhat by the intensity of the full moon, but brilliant none-the-less. Bathed in their light, Kara’s body is as sleekly beautiful as a gazelle.
“See,” I whisper to her, “to the north there’s Polaris, with Draco and Hercules.” I trace their outlines in the warm air between us. “Leo and Virgo overhead. Gemini to the west. Serpens to the east. There’s Hydra and Centaurus to the south. Look, you can see Venus and Mars. There. To the northwest.”
And a million stars in between.
“Stars are eternal,” she told me once as we lay beneath this same night sky, “like my love for you. As long as there are stars in the sky, I will always love you, Nathaniel.” I remember holding her, smelling her hair, warm and content against the fragile curve of her body, satisfied with the fact that we’d always have stolen moments like this... oblivious to the dark towers rising above us on the hill, obstructing our view of countless more stars. “I wish we could be wed,” she added.
I smiled at her there in the moonlight, kissed the down at the nape of her neck. “Your parents will eventually come to accept me, Kara. We need but wait another year or two.”
But we weren’t given that long.
One of the black vultures suddenly drops from the tower’s low wall and hops several feet toward us. I hiss at him and he retreats, but he does not reclaim his original position. Several others join him. The lammergeier merely watches.
“How is it that I once found you so intriguing?” I ask them. Their bald heads and scrawny necks gleam in starlight that refuses to shine from their black beaks. Hundreds of impenetrable eyes, unblinking, focus on me. Leave. We have work to do.
“You shan’t have her,” I repeat.
A ruffling of feathers. A shifting of talons and a snapping of vicious beaks. They can wait.
Everyone wore white. They wouldn’t let me see her. “The women will prepare the body,” Rajah explained. Even so, I would not have been allowed to be alone with her. Zoroastrian superstitions. As soon as someone dies, the demons of corruption, the dreaded Nasu, take control of the body. Anyone near the corpse is in danger of corruption. The body is washed by women, dressed in clean white clothes, and placed on a stone slab to shield the sacred earth from evil. Throughout this process, no one is allowed to be alone with the corpse for fear they might be overcome by the Nasu. Sacred fires, fed sandalwood chips by Parsee priests, are burned to clear the room of infection and help keep the evil spirits at bay.
