Last Plane to Heaven (35 page)

This print, known as
Unchambered Heart,
is said to be a copy of one of the lost paintings of Mercer Amistad (b. Taos, NM, 1934; disappeared in Papua-New Guinea, ca. 1971, possibly infected with kuru). Amistad and the infamous gray market art collector Dr. Bentley Maxon toured Europe together in 1964 and 1965, seeking medical curiosities that had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II and secreted in a series of illicit museums operated by Himmler's notorious Section Goat. The secretive paramilitary unit was responsible for much of the Nazi psychic war effort. Himmler and his spiritual advisors placed great faith in the accrued mystical powers of such artifacts as the Bottled Siamese Twins of Turin, the Bile Ducts of St. Boniface, and the sadly distorted skeleton of that Swedish unfortunate known as the Walrus Man.

Amistad's interest in such material ties into her long history of representing the unspeakable through the lens of art. Maxon's pursuits at that time naturally go without saying among the cognoscenti of his life and work. We can only speculate, of course, but Amistad and Maxon could surely have met Redman somewhere in Mitteleuropa during the time their travels overlapped. Internal evidence in the print suggests it may have used another artwork or sketch as its source, which would be consistent with Redman encountering a Bohemian artist wandering Europe with her sketchbook, in the company of a mad doctor.

Controversy arises from two sources. First, the provenance of the print is dubious. Maxon's own records regarding the piece are uncharacteristically vague, given the doctor's more typical prolixity. This leaves open the possibility that
Unchambered Heart
is a forgery of a forgery, or a pseudo-copy. Second, Maxon's interest in the print seems to be connected to his brief and unfortunate tenure with the transgressive German performance art troupe known as Golden Dusk, an episode in the good doctor's biography for which he has more than once publicly stated his deep regret.

In other words, an unlikely vignette of which to hang a reminder in the front hall of Maxon's Long Island conservatory.

—Unsigned curator's notes on
Unchambered Heart,
from the unpublished catalog of the Roosevelt Island Medical Deviance Exhibition of 1997

 

The venue was the basement of a pawnshop that had once served as a bank, centuries earlier. Barrel-vaulted ceilings made for small rooms separated by iron bars in the oddest places. Curious drains interrupted the floor periodically, as if the place also included “abattoir” in its résumé.

Maxon circulated easily through the curled smoke. He identified the usual marihuana, cloves, and tobaccos, but also several rarer hallucinogenic substances. By the end of the evening the crowd was going to be very wired indeed.

The performers had yet to identify themselves, so the audience mingled anonymously. Many wore domino masks or face paint to obscure their identity. Mostly young and beautiful, these were the children of Europe's post-war money. And in truth more than a few scions of wealth built on gold fillings picked from Jewish corpses during the war.

Those latter were of more interest to him and Merce, of course. He had permitted himself to be distracted by the unusual and bizarre, as was his wont, but neither of them had lost sight of their essential objectives.

A pair of men wrapped themselves into a clinch in a dark corner—American officers from the look of their bodies and the cut of their hair. Maxon smiled indulgently. If any place might be safe from persecution, it was the moveable space that was instantiated whenever these events were held.

He pushed into the chamber where the main tank was located. It reeked of rust, saltwater, and a thick, animal musk. Ratty red velvet curtains remained drawn over the glass, but the low, sonorous rumblings from within were promising. Likewise the blood-crusted chains hanging from the ceiling. A winch had been bolted up there as well. Russian military surplus, and capable of hoisting several tons, if he was any judge.

Maxon noted a tense young man who held himself out from the increasingly drunken and naked crowd. No cameras were permitted in here, of course, but the fellow sketched furiously with charcoal pencil in a loose-bound book of foolscap paper.

Drifting over, the doctor took a look.

“Who the hell asked you?” growled the artist, covering the page with his forearm. He spoke in German, badly, with an American accent.

“No one whatsoever,” Maxon replied in the same tongue, well aware of his own overly academic diction. “But then, you did not ask for authorization. Please, indulge me. I am a student of curiosities. Ever on the edge of epiphany.”

“Redman.” The artist's voice was grudging.

“My pardons?”

“Name's Redman.” The young man had a truly magnificent scowl. His heavy, dark eyebrows would have given Frida Kahlo pause. He switched to English, with a decidedly Midwestern American accent. “This is the part where you tell me your made-up name, then we pretend to get along.”

“Oh, I assure you that there is nothing made up about my name.” The doctor offered his hand, for a shake or a kiss as seemed appropriate. “Bentley Y. F. Maxon. Physician, collector, world traveler.”

Redman did not take the bait, instead eyeing Maxon's hand suspiciously for a moment. “You part of this freak show?”

Maxon put aside the temptation to say he
was
the freak show. In any event, that was not true. At least not here, not tonight. And youth was not to be blamed for its callowness. “I play my roles in life,” he said. “Really, I must insist you permit me to view the sketch on which you are working.”

With a final, blistering glare, Redman pulled his arm away and showed Maxon the sketchbook while still keeping a firm grip on it.

Surprisingly, the scene was not naturalistically representative of the increasingly raucous and abandoned crowd. Maxon recognized the face of the woman in the foreground. Here on paper, her breasts were pointed, each nipple exaggerated into the nosecone of a V-2 rocket. But when last he'd seen her, while she had indeed been naked, she had not been astride an orthocone cephalopod like some unicorned squid out of the depths of time. Nor had there been thousand-eyed Buddhist demons in Soviet uniforms dancing behind her.

Admittedly, anything was possible here.

Maxon glanced around to be sure. Then, “Do you plan to sketch the performance?”

“These are studies,” Redman said defensively. “Cartoons. In the old sense of the word.”

“And excellent studies they are.” He reached out to lightly grasp the young man's elbow. “I am a patron of the arts. Please do not neglect to inform me of whatever work proceeds from your evening with us tonight.”

*   *   *

A few minutes later, Maxon located Mercer again. She had stripped and was painting her body with whitewash in preparation for the show. It was a surprisingly sensual process with even more surprisingly attractive results. As such Merce had drawn the attention of a portion of the crowd.

He stepped in close to speak low, pitched for her ears only. “Watch for the angry young man with the sketchbook. You should like to meet him.”

“I love artists,” Merce replied. Maxon wondered if she would use a human canvas to make her body prints tonight. If so, he had an inkling whom the woman might be rolling back and forth across.

A quiet signal from the ringmaster summoned the players to their places. Rather to his surprise, Maxon noticed Redman tucking his sketchbook away into a niche in the ancient, slime-crusted stones of a pillar and moving into position.

Really, the whole point of Golden Dusk was that you never did know.

When the red velvet parted like the lips of a woman's vagina in the moment of passion, the thrashing tentacles within were a most satisfying sight indeed. The audience screamed.

It was only a beginning.

*   *   *

Three days later, a fussy little man from the Swiss embassy made Maxon's bail. He'd seen or heard nothing about Mercer Amistead while in the custody of the
volkspolizei,
and had so declined to ask questions lest he draw unwanted attention to his traveling partner.

The bruises from the drubbing he'd received still smarted. The tear gas, thankfully, was only an unpleasant memory. Maxon still was uncertain whether the raid that had ended the show was planned or unplanned, but he had to admit it was a spectacular conclusion to the whole affair. He hoped the American officers had not been caught up, or at least had been fully clothed by the time they were. The U-Bahn would have saved them if they'd escaped. Courts-martial could be such a messy business.

His only regret had been his fascination with the specimens. Some of them were clearly part of what he and Merce had been searching for. Possibly even the legendary unchambered heart cross-bred between cephalopods and rodentia by Section Goat's veterinarians.

The streets of East Berlin were as obsessively clean as ever. The air was smoggy but cold, a curious combination. As always in this season, the city was redolent with diesel fumes and the pungent aroma of boiled cabbage.

He determined to head for West Berlin and find a
bierstube.
Some decent food would be welcome after the GDR's institutional hospitality.

Expunging the arrest record was a problem for later. Maxon knew he would have to take the necessary steps; otherwise the Basil Chantilly passport would be useless. He liked that identity, had taken quite some trouble building it out in the sort of elaborate and meaningless detail that made such things convincing.

Merce caught up with him near the tram line. “Enjoy your stay in the vopo hotel?” she asked with a grin, speaking Arabic to maintain some privacy for their conversation.

“Naturally,” he answered in the same language. There had been some fine specimens of abnormal psychology among his fellow prisoners. Maxon was never one to pass up an opportunity for a little field research, even under uncontrolled conditions. “I trust you managed to retain your own freedom.”

“I have just spent three marvelous days with that vile little creature you discovered at the affair.” She took Maxon's hand.

“So at least you profited from the business in the basement.” Maxon found himself blushing, both for the messiness there, and for the lingering sense of her in the chambers of his own heart. He was
not
a jealous man. “I am sorry to have lost those amazing creatures in the tank. Wherever did the ringmaster find them?”

Mercer shrugged. “This is East Germany. What can't you find here? But I do have a surprise for you.”

“I am not so fond of surprises.”

“You will like this one. I am in the midst of a painting that recaptures the spirit of that evening. Redman is drafting a pen-and-ink piece from the same theme. We shall see which you prefer.”

“Something was saved, then,” Maxon said. “Will we ever see their like again?”

“They will live forever in art,” Mercer replied joyously.

His own heart pounded anew. “So shall we all, my dear. So shall we all.”

 

Angels iv: Novus Ordo Angelorum

Here are more angels, wrapped in archetype and heaven's light.

Desire

The angel of Desire bares her breasts, nipples hard in the dreaming wind of night. Her hair flows from her head like smoke in the autumn sky. It is every shade of black and gray—desire is the province of each age of life, not just callow youth nor addled dotage nor even obsessed middle years.

Desire's wings stretch wide as any angel's, but their plumage is rare. They look to have been patched together from a very congeries of birds: the mountain teratornis and the lammergeyer, the great golden eagles of the Arabian desert and the condor in his snowbound fastness. Every child dreams of flight, waking to be mocked by the birds. Her wings bear the burden of those dreams, which unfold in later life to the wretched obsessions that drive men mad.

But it is in her eyes, the gaze of Desire, where this angel's true power lies. They are rimmed with kohl, draped with lashes like a dark spray of rust. Their brown depths are drowning pools of lust. To catch her glance is to feel your heart stop, to feel blood cold in your arms and hot in your groin. No one, no age or gender, is safe from her eyes, so Desire wears a mask of silk and leather with a coiled snake worked upon it in tiny rubies formed from the blood of those she has loved.

In her hooded beauty she reminds us that Love is the greatest and most terrible of God's gifts.

Despair

Desire's fraternal twin, Despair, is a young man with hollow eyes and a sunken chest. His hair is the eerie pallor of the starving, the icy white frizz grown by a corpse in its coffin. His skin is so pale as to be almost blue. Despair looks like every student pulled from a morgue freezer, caught on the wrong side of that balancing point between potential and disaster.

His wings are different from his sister's, composed of what might be called the ghosts of feathers, only brittle shafts and lacy ribs, without soft plumage to fill them out. Despair wears them wound close and tight to his body, just over the leather greatcoat that flaps around his calves. He dresses in torn black denim and an array of ropy scars. Everyone who ever cut themself in his name has inflicted their own wound upon him.

Despair's power is in his body. Even in shadow, the angle of his repose can cause a man to slump, a woman to turn away with tear-burned eyes. To meet Despair full on, his every muscle broadcasting the hopeless music of the world, is to lay down meek in the street and end your struggle.

He is both God's invitation and warning to stray from faith.

Chance

There is another angel, distant cousin to those already named, the angel of Chance. Chance is an elegant young man. His blond hair flips back in a wave. He favors pastel polo shirts and stylish white slacks. His wings are discreet, a clever accessory to be admired by the matrons of River Oaks or Telegraph Hill, while granddaughters at the country club blush behind their Shirley Temples and whisper youthful scandal of Chance's single silver earring.