City of Saints and Madmen

  Finally, the latches came free. With a grunt, he opened the lid . . . and stared down at familiar, unmistakably patrician features. The famous shock of gray hair disheveled, the sharp cheekbones bruised violet, the intelligent blue eyes bulging with fear, the fine mouth, the sensual lips, obstructed by a red cloth gag that cut into the face and left a line of blood. Blood trickled from his hairline where he had banged his head against the coffin lid. Strange symbols had been carved into his arms as if he were an offering to some cruel god.

  Lake staggered backward, fell against the edge of the couch, unable to face this final, dislocating revelation—unable to comprehend that indeed the Greens were right: Voss Bender was alive. What game had he entered all unwitting?

  For his part, Bender tried to get up as soon as he saw Lake, even bound as he was in coils of rope that must cruelly constrict his circulation, then thrashed about again when it became clear Lake would not help him.

  The Raven stuck his head into Bender’s field of vision and caw, caw, cawed like his namesake. The action sent Bender into a hysterical spasm of fear. The Raven dealt him a cracking blow across the face. Bender slumped back down into the coffin. His eyelids fluttered; the smell of urine came from the coffin. Lake couldn’t tear his gaze away. This was Voss Bender, savior and destroyer of careers, politicians, theaters. Voss Bender, who had been dead for two days.

  “Why? Why have you done this to him?” Lake said, though he had not meant to speak.

  The Stork sneered, said, “He did it to himself. He brought everything on himself.”

  “He’s no good,” the Raven said.

  “He is,” the Owl added, “the very epitome of Evil.”

  Voss Bender moved a little. The eyes under the imperious gray eyebrows opened wide. Bender wasn’t deaf or stupid—Lake had never thought him stupid—and the man followed their conversation with an intense if weary interest. Those eyes demanded that Lake save him. Lake looked away.

  “The Raven here will give you his knife,” the Owl said, “but do not think that just because you have a weapon you can escape.” As if to prove this, the Owl produced a gun, one of those sleek, dangerous-looking models newly invented by the Kalif’s scientists.

  The Raven held out his knife.

  Senses stretched and redefined, Lake glanced at Voss Bender, then at the knife. A thin line of light played over the metal and the grainy whorls of the hilt. He could read the words etched into the blade, the name of the knife’s maker: Hoegbotton & Sons. That the knife should have a history, a pedigree, that he should know more about the knife than about the three men struck him as absurd, as horrible. As he stared at the blade, at the words engraved there, the full, terrible weight of the deed struck him. To take a life. To snuff out a life, and with it a vast network of love and admiration. To create a hole in the world. It was no small thing to take a life, no small thing at all. He saw his father smiling at him, palms opened up to reveal the shiny, sleek bodies of dead insects.

  “For God’s sake, don’t make me kill him!”

  The burst of laughter from the Owl, the Raven, the Stork, surprised him so much that he laughed with them. He shook with laughter, his jaw, his shoulders, relaxed in anticipation of the revelation that it was all a joke . . . before he understood that their laughter was throaty, fey, cruel. Slowly, his laughter turned to sobs.

  The Raven’s hilarity subsided before that of the Owl and the Stork. He said to Lake, “He is already dead. The whole city knows he’s dead. You cannot kill someone who is already dead.”

  Voss Bender began to moan, and redoubled his efforts to break free of his bonds. The three men ignored him.

  “I won’t do it. I won’t do it.” His words sounded weak, susceptible to influence. He knew that faced with his own extinction he would do anything to stay alive, even if it meant corrupting, perverting, destroying, everything that made him Martin Lake. And yet his father’s face still hovered in his head, and with that image everything his father had ever said about the sanctity of life.

  The Owl said, with remorseless precision, “Then we will flay your face until it is only strips of flesh hanging from your head. We will lop off your fingers, your toes, as if they were carrots for the pot. You, sir, will become a bloody red riddle for some dog to solve in an alley somewhere. And Bender will still be dead.”

  Lake stared at the Owl and the Owl stared back, the owl mask betraying not a hint of weakness.

  The eyes were cold wrinkled stones, implacable and ancient.

  When the Raven offered Lake the knife, he took it. The lacquered wooden hilt had a satisfying weight to it, a smoothness that spoke of practiced ease in the arts of killing.

  “A swift stroke across the throat and it will be done,” the Raven said, while the Stork took a white length of cloth and tucked it over Bender’s body, leaving exposed only his head and neck. How many times had he drawn his brush across a painted throat, the model before him fatally disinterested? He wished he had not taken so many anatomy classes. He found himself counting and naming the muscles in Bender’s neck, cataloging arteries and veins, bones and tendons.

  The Raven and the Stork withdrew to beyond the coffin. The divide between them and Lake was enormous, the knife cold and heavy in his hand. Lake could see that tiny flakes of rust had infected the center of each engraved letter of Hoegbotton & Sons.

  He looked down at Voss Bender. Bender’s eyes bulged, bloodshot, watery. The man pleaded with Lake through his gag, words Lake could only half understand. “Don’t. . . Don’t. . . what have I. . . Help. . . ” Lake admired Bender’s strength and yet, as he stood over his intended victim, Lake found he enjoyed the power he wielded over the composer. To have such control. This was the man he had only the other day been cursing, the man who had so changed the city that his death had polarized it, splintered it.

  Voss Bender began to thrash about and, as if the movement had broken a spell, Lake’s sense of triumph turned to disgust, buttressed by nausea. He let out a broken little laugh.

  “I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

  Lake tried to drop the knife, but the Raven’s hand covered his and, turning into a fist, forced his own hand into a fist that guided the knife down into the coffin, making Lake stoop as it turned toward Bender’s throat. The Stork held Bender’s head straight, caressing the doomed man’s temples with an odd gentleness. The Owl stood aloof, watching as an owl will the passion play beneath its perch. Lake grunted, struggling against the Raven’s inexorable downward pressure. Just when it seemed he must succumb, he went limp. The knife descended at a hopeless angle, aided by Bender’s mighty flinch. The blade did only half the job—laying open a flap of skin to the left of the jugular. Blood welled up truculently.

  As if the stroke had been a signal, the Raven and the Stork stood back, breathing heavily. Bender made a choking gurgle; he sounded as if he might suffocate in his own blood.

  Lake rocked back and forth on his knees.

  The Owl said to his companions, “You lost your heads. Do you want his blood on our hands?”

  Lake stared at the knife and at Voss Bender’s incompetently cut throat, and back at the knife.

  Blood had obscured all but the “Hoeg” in “Hoegbotton.” Blood had speckled his left hand. It looked nothing like paint: it was too bright. It itched where it had begun to dry.

  He closed his eyes and felt the walls of the study rush away from him until he stood at the edge of an infinite darkness. From a great distance, the Owl said, “He will die now. But slowly. Very slowly. Weaker and weaker until, having suffered considerable pain, he will succumb some hours or days hence. And we will not lift a feather or finger to help him. We will just watch. Your choice remains the same—finish him and live; don’t and die with him. It is a mercy killing now.”

  Lake looked up at the Owl. “Why me?”

  “How do you know you are the first? How do you know you were chosen?”

  “That is your answer?”

  “That is the only answer I
shall ever give you.”

  “What could he have done to you for you to be so merciless?”

  The Owl looked to the Raven, the Raven to the Stork, and in the sudden quaver, the slight shiver, that passed between them, Lake thought he knew the answer. He had seen the same look pass between artists in the cafes along Albumuth Boulevard as they verbally dissected some new young genius.

  Lake laughed bitterly. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You’re envious and you want his power, but most of all, you fear him. You’re too afraid to kill him yourself.”

  The Owl said, “Make your choice.”

  “And the hilarious thing,” Lake said. “The hilarious thing is, you see, that once he’s dead, you’ll have made him immortal.” Was he weeping? His face was wet under the mask. Lake watched, in the silence, the blood seeping from the wound in Bender’s throat. He watched Bender’s hands trembling as if with palsy.

  What did the genius composer see in those final moments? Lake wondered later. Did he see the knife, the arm that held it, descending, or did he see himself back in Morrow, by the river, walking through a green field and humming to himself? Did he see a lover’s face contorted with passion? Did he see a moment from before the creation of the fame that had devoured him? Perhaps he saw nothing, awash in the crescendo of his most powerful symphony, still thundering across his brain in a wave of blood.

  As Lake bent over Voss Bender, he saw reflected in the man’s eyes the black mask of the Raven, who had stepped nearer to watch the killing.

  “Back away!” Lake hissed, stabbing out with the knife. The Raven jumped back.

  Lake remembered how the man in his nightmare had cut his hand apart so methodically, so completely. He remembered his father’s hands opening to reveal bright treasures, Shriek’s response to his painting of his father’s hands. Ah, but Shriek knew nothing. Even Raffe knew nothing. None of them knew as much as he knew now.

  Then, cursing and weeping, his lips pulled back in a terrible snarl, he drew the blade across the throat, pushed down with his full weight, and watched as the life drained out of the world’s most famous composer. He had never seen so much blood before, but worse still there was a moment, a single instant he would carry with him forever, when Bender’s eyes met his and the dullness of death crept in, extinguishing the brightness, the spark, that had once been a life.

  “Through His Eyes” has an attitude toward perspective unique among Lake’s works, for it is painted from the vantage point of the dead Voss Bender in an open coffin (an apocryphal event—Bender was cremated), looking up at the people who are looking down, while perspective gradually becomes meaningless, so that beyond the people looking down, we see the River Moth superimposed against the sky and mourners lining its banks. Of the people who stare down at Bender, one is Lake, one is a hooded insect catcher, and three are wearing masks—in fact, a reprisal of the owl, raven, and stork from “The Burning House.” Four other figures stare as well, but they are faceless. The scenes in the background of this monstrously huge canvas exist in a world which has curved back on itself, and the details conspire to convince us that we see the sky, green fields, a city of wood, and the river banks simultaneously.

  As Venturi writes, “The colors deepen the mystery: evening is about to fall and the river is growing dim; reds are intense or sullen, yellows and greens are deep-dyed; the sinister greenish sky is a cosmetic reflection of earthly death.” The entirety of the painting is ringed by a thin line of red that bleeds about a quarter of an inch inward. This unique frame suggests a freshness out of keeping with the coffin, while the background scenes are thought to depict Lake’s ideal of Bender’s youth, when he roamed the natural world of field and river. Why did Lake choose to show Bender in a coffin? Why did he choose to use montage? Why the red line? Sabon suggests that we ignore the coffin and focus on the red line and the swirl of images, but even then can offer no coherent explanation.

  Even more daring, and certainly unique, “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” creates an equivalence between sounds and colors: a musical scale based on the pictorial intensity of colors in which, according to Sabon, “color is taken to speak a mute language.” The “hero” rides through a crumbling graveyard to a frozen lake. The sky is dark, but the reflection of the moon, which is also a reflection of Voss Bender’s face, glides across the lake’s surface. The reeds which line the lake’s shore are composed of musical notes, so cleverly interwoven that their identity as notes is not at first evident. Snow is falling, and the flakes are also musical notes—fading notes against the blue-black sky, almost as if Bender’s aria is disintegrating even as it is being performed.

  In this most ambitious of all his paintings, Lake uses subtle gradations of white, gray, and blue to mimic the progression of the aria itself—indeed, his brushstrokes, short or long, rough or smooth, duplicate the aria’s movement as if we were reading a sheet of music.

  All of this motion in the midst of apparent motionlessness flows in the direction of the rider, who rides against the destiny of the aria as a counterpoint, a dissenting voice. The light of the moon shines upon the face of the rider, but, again, this is the light of the reflection so that the rider’s features are illuminated from below, not above. The rider, haggard and sagging in the saddle, is unmistakably Lake. (Venturi describes the rider as “a rhythmic throb of inarticulate grief.”) The rider’s expression is abstract, fluid, especially in relation to the starkly realistic mode of the rest of the painting. Thus, he appears ambivalent, undecided, almost unfinished—and, certainly, at the time of the painting, and in relation to Voss Bender, Lake was unfinished.

  If “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” is not as popular as even the experimental “Through His Eyes,” it may be because Lake has employed too personal an iconography, the painting meaningful only to him. Whereas in “Invitation” or “Burning House,” the viewer feels empowered—welcomed—to share in the personal revelation, “Aria . . . ” feels like a closed system, the artist’s eye looking too far inward. Even the doubling of image and name, the weak pun implicit in the painting’s lake and the painter Lake, cannot help us to understand the underpinnings of such a work. As Venturi wrote, “While Lake’s canvases do not generally inflict a new language upon us, when they do, we have no guide to translate for us.” The controversial art critic Bibble has gone so far as to write, in reference to “Aria,” “[Lake’s] paintings are so many tombstones, so many little deaths—on canvases too big for the wall in their barely suppressed violence.”

  Be this as it may, there are linked themes, linked resonances, between “Invitation,” “Through His Eyes,” and “Aria . . . ” These are tenuous connections, even mysterious connections, but I cannot fail to make them.

  Lake appears in all three paintings—and only these three paintings. Only in the second painting, “Through His Eyes,” do the insect catcher and Bender appear together. The insect catcher does appear in “Invitation” but not in “Aria . . . ” (where, admittedly, he would be a bizarre and unwelcome intrusion). Bender appears in “Aria” and is implied in “Through His Eyes,” but does not appear, implied or otherwise, in “Invitation.” The question becomes: Does the insect catcher inhabit “Aria” unbeknownst to the casual observer—perhaps even in the frozen graveyard? And, more importantly, does the spirit of Voss Bender in some way haunt the canvas that is “Invitation to a Beheading?” —From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

  Afterwards, Lake stumbled out into the night. The fog had dissipated and the stars hung like pale wounds in the sky. He flung off his frog mask, retched in the gutter, and staggered to a brackish public fountain, where he washed his hands and arms to no avail: the blood would not come off. When he looked up from his frantic efforts, he found the mushroom dwellers had abandoned their battle with the pigs to watch him with wide, knowing eyes.

  “Go away!” he screamed. “Don’t look at
me!”

  Further on, headed at first without direction, then with the vague idea of reaching his apartment, he washed his hands in public restrooms. He sanded his hands with gravel. He gnawed at them. None of it helped: the stench of blood only grew thicker. He was being destroyed by something larger than himself that was still somehow trapped inside him.

  He haunted the streets, alleys, and mews through the tail end of the bureaucratic district, and down a ways into the greenery of the valley, until a snarling whippet drove him back up and into the merchant districts. The shops were closed, the lanterns and lamps turned low. The streets, in the glimmering light, seemed slick, wet, but were dry as chalk. He saw no one except for once, when a group of Reds and Greens burst past him, fighting each other as they ran, their faces contorted in a righteous anger.

  “It doesn’t mean anything!” Lake shouted after them. “He’s dead!”

  But they ignored him and soon, like some chaotic beast battling itself, moved out of sight down the street.

  Over everything, as he wept and burned, Lake saw the image of Voss Bender’s face as the life left it: the eyes gazing heavenward as if seeking absolution, the body taking one last full breath, the hands suddenly clutching at the ropes that bound, the legs vibrating against the coffin floor . . . and then stillness. Ambergris, cruel, hard city, would not let him forget the deed, for on every street corner Voss Bender’s face stared at him—on posters, on markers, on signs.

  Eventually, his crippled leg tense with a gnawing ache, Lake fell down on the scarlet doorstep of a bawdy house. There he slept under the indifferent canopy of the night, beneath the horrible emptiness of the stars, for an hour or two—until the Madame, brandishing curses and a broom, drove him off.

  As the sun’s wan light infiltrated the city, exposing Red and Green alike, Lake found himself in a place he no longer understood, the streets crowded with faces he did not want to see, for surely they all stared at him: from the sidewalk sandwich vendors in their pointy orange hats and orange-striped aprons, to the bankers with their dark tortoise-shell portfolios, their maroon suits; from the white-faced, well-fed nannies of the rich to the bravura youths encrusted in crimson make up that had outgrown them.