Authors: Jason Erik Lundberg
Strange Mammals (2 page)
“And what’s my role?” I ask.
Romy, from nowhere, maybe hiding in the shadows all along, sits down beside Ben.
“You are the Trickster,” she says. “You make sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously. You bring laughter, and mystery.”
“And what are you?” I say.
“The Beauty. That who is sought after, pursued, the object of lust.”
Julian sits beside me, and Ty stands at the edge of the table.
“The Fool,” Julian says, hand on heart, “destined to be deluded over and over again. And the Doppelgänger,” he motions to Ty, silent, pale, face smudged with clown makeup, “your opposite and equal, who always gets blamed for your actions.”
“And you?” I look to Ben.
“The Fraud. Scaramouche to your Harlequin. Your lesser version.”
This is all very familiar now, the umpteenth iteration in an endless repetition. I’ve been here before, too many times, a purgatory of repeated experience.
Romy, Julian and Ben produce painstakingly-crafted handmade half-masques from thin air, an archetypal conjuring. They tie the masques to their faces with black cloth, their mouths still visible, but something unmistakably changed in their aspects, a
more
-ness. Ty stands mute, his face pancaked white, a checkered dunce cap on his head.
“The dance must continue,” Julian says, another masque in his hands,
my
masque, my true essence in bright primary colors. I know that I can decline, deny my nature and flee the bar, live a normal life and die in my bed sixty years from now. I could give it all up, refuse to play the cosmic game any longer, hang up my spurs.
I could, but I won’t. I just wouldn’t be myself.
I pluck the masque from Julian’s hands and tie it onto my face with a flourish. Through the eye-holes, the world looks more alive, brighter, energetic, full of sound and fury and slings and arrows, but beautiful all the same. I smile and wait for the music to start, for the amnesia to settle in, for the dance to begin once more.
The Artists Pentaptych
1. batik
Komang looks on as her wares are pored over by the American tourists, as they pick through the fruits of her livelihood and determine whether she will eat this night. The American woman eyes an intricate scarf that took Komang the better part of a month to craft, running her thick indelicate fingers over the fabric, not truly appreciating the artistry that went into creating such a thing. Both the tourists reek of Western wealth and privilege, and Komang knows in her soul that they will be stingy in their purchases.
Hers is the skill of
batik tulis,
the artisan who works in fabric and wax. In her youth, royalty throughout the Middle East and Asia clamored for her designs. Her hand, from a very young age, was the most steady of any that had been seen in a hundred years. When she drew her
canting
over cotton or silk, she needed no charcoal guidelines, and her strokes and curves flowed like perfection. She would outline the leaves of bougainvillea, or trace scenes from
The Ramayana,
and her praises were sung throughout a dozen lands.
But those days are over. Komang is now an old woman, attempting to survive in a land racked by poverty and disease. Her artwork is only seen in the airport gift shops and her own ramshackle road stand. The American woman has picked up a
batik
coin purse, the least expensive product Komang has to offer. She wants to accost the tourist, tell her about the terrible living conditions all over Bali, describe the pervading air of hopelessness, implore her to give more, to share the good luck she has enjoyed. But Komang knows the argument would be fruitless, so she forces a smile, and accepts the American’s pittance for the purse.
Later that evening, after she has given her day’s earnings to her grandchildren so that they might buy rice for dinner, Komang sits at her stool, attempting to bring some beauty to a place that has turned ugly. She dips her
canting,
a gift from the Sultan of Brunei, into the bowl of hot wax, peers at the rectangle of rough burlap in front of her, and begins.
2. surrogate
Susan first thought having a surrogate was great. She wasn’t pregnant, like most of the couples who used surrogates, but her sex drive wasn’t quite up to the level of her husband’s. After five years of marriage, Brad still had the libido of a wild rabbit, and she just wasn’t up to the task anymore. She needed a rest. After talking to her friend Jennifer, who was five months pregnant with her third child, Susan found the company in the phone book and made the call.
Cassie had been a regular surrogate for almost two months, coming over four times a week sometimes. She was in the house now, pleasuring Brad loudly in the upstairs bedroom while Susan tried to watch a television documentary on ocelots. Cassie had gradually gotten louder as the weeks had progressed, which set Susan’s nerves on edge. If she was going to screw Brad, she could at least do it respectfully.
Then it occurred to Susan that maybe Brad liked it loud and raucous. She had always been fairly tame in the bedroom, never making much more noise than heavy breathing. When Brad tried to spank her one time, she wouldn’t talk to him for a week. Maybe she didn’t know her husband at all. If he liked his sex rough, what else was he hiding from her?
After the noise died down, and the special on ocelots had given way to
The Crocodile Hunter,
Susan heard two pairs of footsteps descending the stairway. Brad and Cassie stood in the living room entryway, dressed in bright colors and holding suitcases. Brad informed Susan that he and Cassie were going away, maybe to a tropical island, anywhere away from here.
Susan sighed and remembered that she was the sole breadwinner in their partnership, that it was she who supported him while he tried to make a career as a performance artist, which he always managed to screw up by laughing or scratching or moving in some way as to totally destroy the illusion. She would cancel all his credit cards later that afternoon, and transfer the funds from their joint bank account into one that was solely hers. Then, she would leaf through the Yellow Pages again, and this time request a surrogate who was male.
3. scrumtralescent
They huddled around the rugby ball, heads down, grabbing, hitting, elbowing, anything to get possession, to feel the polyurethane kid grain and synthetic leather rubber compound material in their hands, crushing against each other, crammed so tight that molecules shifted and mingled and bled into each other. Instead of ten individual, manly, sweating testosterone factories, there was now one organism with ten heads, twenty arms, twenty legs, one hundred fingers and one hundred toes. The scrum shrieked with self-knowledge and attempted to tear itself into its ten original components, but the damage had been done.
It was then that the ball began to glow and shift and iridesce. Under those ten pairs of hands, the ball transformed to hydrated silica, infecting the scrum quickly, traveling up the fingers to the arms, coating skin with opalescent light, over chests and legs and heads, glowing and hardening and making beautiful.
And that is how we got the statue that resides in our town square. Underneath is a plaque that lists the names of the ten brave men who gave their lives in order that we continue to appreciate art.
4. lepidoptera
You pass over your credit card without a second thought, not caring how much the special exhibit in front of you will set you back, only impatient that it takes so long to make the transaction. A swipe, a smile, a rip, a hurried signature. One gentleman in a sharp Italian suit hands you the receipt as another pulls back the heavy velvet curtain and waves you through with a bow. The temperature immediately plunges twenty degrees and you shiver in your thin tee-shirt and cargo shorts. The lights are dim here as well, and bluish, reinforcing the atmosphere of coolness.
The main attraction lies in front of you, an enormous semi-permeable barrier enclosing a virtual forest. On every tree trunk, every leaf, every available surface are the iridescent purple lepidoptera you came to see, big as a human hand, endangered and nearly extinct. Their wings open and close slowly, a false impression that they are waving at you. Despite the sign on the wall that prohibits flash photography, you dig your camera out of a hidden pocket and raise it, eager to capture these majestic creatures in halide silver. A click, a flash. The sudden intrusion of light evaporates the barrier, and the butterflies erupt from the enclosure, fastening onto your clothes, your hair, your skin, shrieking all the while, the noise pitched so high that it blinds you. They flap hard and a glittery golden dust puffs from their wings, choking you, making you sneeze until you pass out.
When you awaken in the hospital three days later, the doctors say there is nothing they can do, and when they provide a mirror you see skin purple as a bruise, eyes nothing but iris, and thin translucent wings that itch where they join the flesh of your back. If you had listened while they were scanning your credit card, you would have heard that there is a reason you shouldn’t use flash photography, that the way this species reproduces is quite special, and that if you are not careful, one day soon you will join your brothers and sisters behind the barrier, to be gawked at and trivialized.
5. matryoshka
Sergei, the last of the
matryoshka
masters, sat in his workshop, putting paint to his final masterpiece. He was the only artisan left in the world to craft his embedded dolls by hand, and after this one, he would retire. The post-Singularity world no longer made sense for him, where anyone could create anything by the slightest whim; art was no longer valued except as a curiosity. Things had no permanence when matter was manipulated at the nano-level.
Sergei’s grandson Nikolai burst through the front door of the workshop, audibly surrounded by a cacophony of sound, of a dozen different musical pieces being played simultaneously. Nikolai stomped over to the almost-finished
matryoshka
doll, rolled his eyes and exhaled.
“Aren’t you done yet?”
“Patience,” Sergei yelled to be heard over the din. “It is something you never had. Great art requires patience.”
“Not anymore,” Nikolai said. He stabbed a finger into the still wet paint, then licked it off slowly. “The days of toiling over art are over, Grandfather. Just this past month, I’ve created four new symphonies, all brilliant.”
Sergei looked up slightly. “How have you done this?”
“Brainbox upgrade.”
Sergei shook his head. “Your generation has no soul.”
“Maybe,” Nikolai said, “but your generation never did anything with theirs. What’s worse: not having a soul, or having one and wasting it?”
Sergei turned back to his work and smoothed out the paint that Nikolai had disturbed.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” Nikolai said, stomping back out the door. “Have this shit ready by then. I have ten other deliveries, and I don’t want yours making me late.”
The door slammed and Sergei was alone in silence again with his creation. He would finish his last
matryoshka
doll, hand it over to the Mexicali Museum of Static Art, then find a sparsely-inhabited island in the Mediterranean, and live out the rest of his days in peace, hoping that someone somewhere would find value in his vision.
One last brushstroke to the outer shell of the doll, then a fine mist of anti-deconstructing lacquer, then his name laser-etched to the underside. He knew that his art would not be appreciated like it would have been had he been born even fifty years earlier, but he still took pride in his work. He boxed up the three-foot doll, left it on his porch for Nikolai to pick up in the morning, then turned out the light to his workshop, and went home.
Don’t Blink
“New to the building?” the well-dressed man asked in a reedy voice. He had been waiting at the elevator as Winston approached.
Winston awkwardly shifted the box in his hands and said, “Yeah. My wife and I just moved in this afternoon. Last box.”
“Very good, very good,” the man said, brushing a hand through his bright orange Einsteinian hairdo. He seemed to be in his early-forties, sharp jawline, thin lips. When the man smiled, the corners of his mouth pulled back almost to his ears. “Name’s Lucas Ettins. I’m up on ninth.”
“Winston Brown. We’re on seventh.”
“Well then,” Lucas leaned in conspiratorially, “I shall have to drop by sometime.”
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Lucas stepped inside, and Winston followed, putting the box down as the doors closed again. He stood up and winced; it felt as if every muscle in his arms and back had been stretched in a taffy puller. A large keyhole over the button for the ninth floor—presumably the penthouse—glinted in the washed out fluorescent light. Lucas pressed the button for seven and they started up.
The elevator took its time in its ascent; neither man spoke during the ride up, the tension in the air palpable, occasionally broken up by a cough or throat-clearing. After they passed the fourth floor, the hairs on the back of Winston’s neck prickled as the temperature in the elevator seemed to rise; abruptly, he felt the urge to get out of there. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but all at once, he wanted to rip the doors open and flee. He looked over and saw a wavery aura surrounding Lucas’s head and shoulders, like a heat haze; Lucas’s grinch smile stretched impossibly wide and his teeth gleamed. Winston’s breath quickened and his heart accelerated, pulsing hard in his neck and ears. It felt like a dozen spiders were dancing along the base of his skull. Winston clenched his fists and tried to breathe slowly through his nose.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened out onto the seventh floor. Winston picked up his box and stepped into the hallway, then turned back briefly. Lucas plucked a strange-looking iron key out of a pants pocket and plugged it into the wall above the buttons. He waved goodbye with a waggle of his fingers, and the doors closed. The feeling of claustrophobia dissipated and Winston let out a long breath.
He lurched down to 7C; the door was slightly ajar, and he nudged it open with the toe of his shoe. Diane sat on the floor of the living room, unwrapping framed photographs and categorizing them neatly into stacks. Her hair was gathered into a brunette swirl at the back of her head, held together with a slim watercolor paintbrush. Fully half of the photos were ones Winston had taken, almost all in black and white, more than a few of Diane.
The apartment was as oppressively hot as the elevator, but Diane had already set up the box fans, which hummed and rattled and made sheets of brown wrapping paper whisper in the breeze. The fans were left over from their college days, from Winston’s un-airconditioned graduate dorm room, and the cacophony was nearly deafening.
“Hon? When’d the super say the air conditioning was going to be fixed?”
Diane looked over her shoulder at him. “Tomorrow, you big baby. It’s only temporary, a short in the wiring or something. You can take one day of roughing it.”
Winston put the box down with a grunt, then collapsed onto the floor in a dramatic flourish. The plush carpeting tickled his bare legs and arms. Diane laughed and edged over.
“My husband, the he-man,” she said and bent down to kiss him. She tasted of the pineapple lip gloss she always used. He put a hand to the nape of her neck and turned the kiss into a deep one, a desire for reassurance more than anything. After the incident in the elevator, he needed the reality of Diane’s physicality. After a few moments, they separated, both slightly out of breath. “What was that for?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said, his fingers tangling in her hair. “I guess I just needed it.” She smiled and kissed him again, a quick peck.
“Well, there’s another for good measure,” she said and moved back over to the stacks of photos. The muscles of her back danced underneath her tank top as she sorted, and he caught his breath. It was little moments like these that made him realize just how much he desired her.
“I met someone strange in the elevator just now,” he said.
“Who?”
“Lucas somebody. He lives in the penthouse.” Winston sat up and groaned; he’d be sore the next day. “I don’t know, Dee, there’s something about him. Just keep an eye out, okay?”
~
It had been love at first sight, or more accurately, at second sight. At the prompting of his roommate Carl, Winston had gone to a party for the Dance department on Carl’s assertions that “dancers are sooooo flexible, man. Lightweights too. Wink wink.” Winston’s motivation had been to meet Erin Altan, the NCSU prima ballerina whose performances he had never missed, on account of how she moved in a leotard. Instead, after an accidental bodily collision and spillage of drinks, he came face to face with Diane. Looking down at the spreading red wine stain on her blue skirt, Diane had laughed and said, “Hi,” and Winston immediately and completely fell in love.
During their courtship, Winston often went to Diane’s practices and always to her performances. She became his favorite photographic subject. Light always bent to the most flattering angles across her face and body. He took rolls and rolls of film, and one evening about three weeks into the relationship, after they had together polished off a bottle and a half of wine, she slid out of her clothes and asked to be photographed nude. Afterward, they made love for the first time, and it was as if Winston’s soul had been set on fire.
He was worried that a relationship between two artsy individuals wouldn’t last beyond the initial infatuation, but to his pleasant surprise, it deepened into something wonderful. They took a trip to Bali for summer break their last semester and he proposed on the beach of Nusa Dua. Graduation came a few months later—Winston with an M.F.A. in Photography and Diane with a B.A. in Dance—and the wedding a month after that. They lived in New York for almost three years before realizing that the relentless pace of the city didn’t suit their personalities, and Winston found a staff photographer job at the Raleigh
News & Observer
, prompting the move back to North Carolina.
Throughout it all, the thing that drew him to Diane was her trusting nature. It wasn’t that she was naïve, it was her simple optimism, her belief in the goodness of others. She truly believed that people were innately good, and this simultaneously astonished Winston and made him love her more. It was a bright blue flame that glowed within her, and his biggest goal as a husband and partner in life was to make sure that flame never went out.
~
Lucas showed up at their door that evening, a blue pyramidal bottle in his hand. After Winston pulled away from the peephole in the front door, Diane looked through and shrugged her shoulders. “He looks okay to me,” she whispered.
“But Dee, I never gave him our apartment number,” he whispered back. “How’d he know where we are?”
“Maybe he knocked on all the other doors first.”
“Right.”
Diane elbowed him in the ribs. “Win, stop being a jerk and let the man in. We don’t want to alienate the neighbors on the first day.” Winston exhaled and opened the door.
“Hello, Lucas,” he said.
“Hello again,” Lucas said and grinned wide. His bottom teeth were crooked in front, and his breath smelled of cinnamon.
“Come in. Lucas, this is my wife, Diane.”
Lucas offered his hand and Diane took it in hers. “A pleasure, madam,” he said, then bent down and kissed her knuckles. Winston’s cheeks burned briefly. “I brought over some lovely mead to apologize for my abrupt behavior earlier. I was hoping we might toast your first evening in a brand new apartment.”
“I think I know where we put a few glasses,” Diane said, and hurried into the kitchen. Lucas stepped through into the living room and looked around at all the opened boxes and unpacked detritus that covered the floor. Winston closed the door just as Diane walked back in, holding three plastic cups. “Looks like these are all we have at the moment,” she said.
“That will do fine.” Lucas pulled a bartender’s corkscrew out of his pocket. He stabbed down, then rotated the corkscrew five times clockwise, so fast that his hand became a blur. There was a wet plop as he yanked out the cork. Lucas took one of the cups from Diane and poured an amber-colored liquid into it.
After the cups were distributed, Diane and Winston sat on the couch, and Lucas perched on the edge of the coffee table. The room filled with the almost imperceptible aroma of spring, of sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and apple blossoms. “Welcome to the building,” he said, and they thwacked the cups together. The mead was unlike anything Winston had ever tasted. It was sweet with a tang, and went down smooth as milk. His jaw muscles contracted involuntarily. As the alcohol hit his stomach, he felt a supreme warmth, as if he’d just taken a shot of brandy. He looked over at Diane and could see sweat beading on her brow and in the hollows of her collarbones, though the air in the apartment had cooled after sundown. Diane spoke first.
“Wow, Lucas, this mead is amazing. Where did you get it?”
Lucas drained his glass and said, “It’s from my own private collection. I have five bottles left, and I only bring them out on special occasions. I think this qualifies.”
“Well, it’s phenomenal,” Winston said. “I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.”
“Or likely will again,” Lucas said. “My five bottles are the last anywhere in this country. The mead is Scandinavian, and is difficult to acquire.” Lucas picked up the bottle again. “Have another glass.”
“So what do you do?” Diane asked, handing her cup back to Lucas.
“An interesting question,” he said, filling the cup and passing it back, full almost to the top. “We spend our lives learning many different things, broadening our cultural horizons, soaking up as much as we can. We take interests that often have nothing to do with our day jobs so that we will not be defined as a draftsman or receptionist or technical writer. And yet, invariably, the first question we ask strangers is what they do.”
“That’s a complicated answer,” Diane said and drank deeply. She swayed slightly on the couch, her cheeks flushed.
“It’s a complicated question. Do you want to know what I do for a living? Or do you want to know that I keep a pet ocelot, or collect expressionist paintings, or write epic poetry that no one will ever see? Because all of these things are a part of me, yet no one thing defines me. You are a dancer, yes?” He motioned with his head to the top photograph on the nearest floor stack, an action shot of Diane in a leotard and tutu, captured in mid-flight across the stage, a gazelle in black and white. “But I can see from the paintbrush in your hair that you also dabble in watercolors. So would you call yourself a dancer or a painter? In truth, you are both, and much more, I am sure. Another glass?”
Diane had emptied her second cup of mead, and Winston could tell she was well on her way to getting hammered. Lucas plucked the cup from her hand and grinned at the contented smile on Diane’s face. She leaned against the couch, stretched her arms over her head and arched her back, her breasts thrust forward. Winston took the cup from Lucas’s hand before he could pour, and placed it down on the coffee table.
“Honey, we don’t want to drink all of this man’s extremely rare mead, do we?” Winston said. Diane finished her stretch and shrugged. He turned to Lucas in time to see the smile falter and something strange come into the man’s eyes, only for a fraction of a second, and then the smile was back, but a clipped one without showing any teeth.
“That’s all right, Winston,” Lucas said, rising from the coffee table. He corked the bottle and moved to the door. “It was lovely to meet you both, and I hope we’ll get together again soon.”
“Sure,” Diane said. “We’ll have to all go out together sometime.”
Winston got up off the sofa and walked Lucas to the door. The room tilted slightly to the right, and Winston stumbled a bit before catching himself. The mead had done a number on him as well.
“Oh hey,” Diane said as he opened the door. “You never said what you do for a living.”
Lucas grinned again and his eyes gleamed. He winked at Winston and said, “Women pay me to have sex with them,” then stepped out the doorway and disappeared down the hall.
~
“Wow,” Diane mumbled into Winston’s chest, her arms wrapped around his midsection. They lay tangled up in the sheets of their bed, the sweat from strenuous lovemaking cooling on their bodies. She had been more aroused than usual, and the sex had been wild and primal. He breathed heavily and stroked her shoulder.
“I know,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead. “That was amazing. You’ll wear me out.”
He could feel Diane’s smile against his chest. She ran a finger down his side, from armpit to hip. The faint light of the room wavered in and out of focus as he breathed, and the air itself seemed to shimmer. Stripes of yellow were painted on the ceiling from the glow of the streetlight outside. She rubbed her foot against his shin and he hugged her tightly.
“So Lucas didn’t seem like such a bad guy,” she said, and pulled back to look at Winston. Flecks of light caught in her hazel eyes and sparkled.
“That’s because he was trying to get you drunk.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, making a fist and chocking him lightly on the nose. “Why would he do that? He could see that we’re happily married.”
“Maybe it’s just something intrinsic to his profession.”
“Oh, man,” she said, tracing a lopsided figure-eight on his ribcage, “that was so weird. Do you really think he’s a gigolo?”
“I don’t know,” Winston said, thinking about how Diane had warmed automatically to Lucas, as if she couldn’t help it. “Somehow I don’t doubt it.” He stroked her spine with the tip of his index finger. She purred and arched her back, pressing hard into him, rolling him onto his shoulder blades. Her lips still tasted of the honey mead as she pushed her tongue into his mouth. He wriggled underneath her and ran his hands over her smooth back and shoulders. Just as she was settling on top of him, he looked past her and saw Lucas standing in front of the armoire in the corner of the room, arms crossed, grinch smile stretched all the way to his ears. Winston jerked up into a sitting position, reflexively clamping Diane in a bear hug.