[The following are excerpts from a novel which was never completed. The story takes place over the course of one night: a group of friends meet in lower Manhattan and make a deliberately-orchestrated circuit of the island (in a limousine of course), along the way playing a sort of artistic game in which they hunt for “victims” in one place, “corrupt” them in some way (i.e., transform them or expose them to something they’ve never experienced before), and then dump them someplace else, whereupon they start the game over with fresh victims.]
There was a cocktail
party at a villa on
“Mmm, delicious,” said Vivian, stopping to examine a pendent side of beef.
“Looks like
Lorelei freed one of
her breasts from its armor plate and rubbed the tip of it against the
“Ooh, cold,” she said.
“The thought of all those working men soaked in the blood and gore of innocent animals...!” exclaimed Vivian. She grabbed the nearest person, who happened to be Jane, and started kissing her.
Jane protested: “Stop! You know I’m a vegetarian!”
“So am I!” laughed Vivian. “Meat is just too sexy from beginning to end. Especially if you don’t eat it.”
“I suppose so,” said Jane. “But I just can’t bear the thought of animals suffering. That ruins it for me.”
“But animals that have suffered taste so much more delicious,” said Diego.
Soon they came to a small, asymmetrical block with a wall of orange brick running along the perimeter. At one edge of this block stood the entrance to the villa.
The scalloped planes
of the façade were painted coral and sea-green. Vertical friezes of sharks and
octopi intersected stylized waves which rippled along the parapet. As if the incongruity of its surroundings
were not enough, the structure had an unreal, resort-town quality about it, as
though it might be an antiquated tourist aquarium transported here from old
Servants in tuxedoes and white gloves greeted them at the door and led them through the house to the anterior garden, where the party was in progress.
The garden resembled an ocean grotto, with sandy parterres, tropical flowers, and a dark lazy pondlike pool. The guests were elegantly dressed; their voices echoed against the artificial caverns, laden with dripping stalactites. Submerged lamps projected everywhere a dancing lacework of light and shadow.
The group had scarcely arrived before the lights began to dim and brighten repeatedly, as if to signal the beginning of a performance. With an air of anticipation, everyone began to descend staircases that led about twenty feet down to a chamber beneath the surface of the garden. The only illumination there was a series of tiny lights which curved, about waist-high, along the smooth walls of the underground chamber.
After a while, though the chamber itself remained dark, colored lights hidden beyond the walls increased gradually in intensity. The partygoers murmured their delight: they could now see that they stood level with the floor of the garden pool: the transparent walls formed part of the pool’s enclosure.
But even more astonishing was the tableau that was thereby revealed: it was an imaginary aquatic kingdom. Amorous tritons and mermaids disported themselves amid the treasures of shipwrecked galleons. Live fish and sharks swam alongside fanciful mechanized creatures: giant clams, eight-armed cephalopods, and bright anemones.
The group admired a black cave framed by the enormous jawbones of a great white shark. Curving to a height of seven feet, human bones and skulls were arranged in the shape of shark gods on either side of the cave’s entrance.
Suddenly, a stream of malevolent creatures, half-human, half-shark, emerged from the mouth of the cave. The shark creatures zeroed in on the mermaids and tritons and chased them relentlessly. Some of their prey tried to take refuge amidst the delicate, transparent tendrils of Portuguese men-of-war, only to become paralyzed by the stinging venom; others fled heedlessly into the arms of poisonous multicolored anemones, which entangled, entrapped and consumed them whole.
Those unlucky enough to have their tails caught by the shark creatures were embraced lovingly from behind and had their necks pierced. Clouds of blue blood issued from their fish-like mouths and false gills.
This danse macabre, precious and brief as a music-box scene, ended as the underwater performers floated to the surface of the pool, removed their masks, and took synchronized bows in slow motion.
In the garden, Julian had been sent off, like a lion cub, to make his first catch of the evening. He had settled on one of the mermaids, who had long red hair and whose skin was tinted copper-green. Stretched out on his side in his blue suit on the sandy bank, he flirted with her, while she feigned indifference and swam to and fro in curlicues before him.
“This garden would make a great miniature golf course,” he remarked.
“So would your asshole,” sneered Diego, who appeared suddenly, accompanied by Vivian. He dragged Julian up by the hair and pulled him away from the red-headed water nymph.
“Hey, what’s the deal?” said Julian. “I was just about to reel her in!”
“Here,” said Diego, handing him off to Ambrose, “you lecture the little fisherman. My ‘sister’ and I are going to work some of our black magic.” Diego and Vivian then slithered off at different angles, scanning the garden telepathically for the victims they had already singled out in their earlier sweep.
“There’s nothing wrong with your taste,” said Ambrose. “In fact, to your credit, you’ve singled out the most charming of all the mermaids. However, she wouldn’t do for us.”
“Why not? Is she too old?”
“No, no, not at all. It’s just that she’s too much a part of someone else’s production.
“You see, a great part of the excitement of the game is to find specimens of unfinished beauty. Of course they must possess a certain degree of refinement, but they must at the same time be innocent of anything that lies above the plateau they’ve reached.
“Their excessive beauty, and their thinly-concealed vulnerability, will excite in us a predatory vibration much like that of a lioness when she catches the scent of an immature antelope. And the ideas that this vibration generates in us intoxicate us and inflame us to a degree greater than the effect any narcotic may produce.”
“This is getting a bit abstract for me,” said Julian. “Why don’t you show me an example.”
“Of course. Do you see those identical twins over by the hydrangeas?”
Probably no older than sixteen, the girls were mirror images of each other, and, rather than downplaying their similarities, they chose to emphasize them by wearing identical, child-like dresses of white satin. However, the mischievous glances they exchanged suggested that they did so more out of a certain deliberate perversity than any mere silliness. They even went so far as to imitate each other’s gestures, often with uncanny effect.
“Now, do you see what Vivian and Diego are doing?”
Vivian and Diego, acting apart, but in tandem, had traced, over the space of the garden, invisible lines, apparently random, but in fact similar to those filaments spun by a certain species of spider, which likes to suspend, along the flat tops of topiary hedges, irregularly-shaped webs designed to catch trampolining insects. When the twins moved, it seemed as though they caused a vibration in the web that made Vivian and Diego stop and stand perfectly still. Without looking at the girls themselves, the two exchanged glances and idled their way closer and closer, tightening the web, until suddenly they loomed up behind them, their dark and forbidding shapes almost consuming those of the twins in their girlish white dresses.
With malevolent glares, they spooked the boys who had been conversing with the twins, but when the girls turned around to see what could have caused the boys to turn so pale, the two spiders had metamorphosed themselves into charming and innocent-looking characters from a drawing-room comedy. They introduced themselves, maneuvered the twins over to the bar, and ordered sweet drinks for them.
Julian and Ambrose continued on their rounds. “There’s Jane,” said Julian.
“Good, here’s another example. Do you see how she’s placed her body just so? We call that ‘pointing.’”
Julian noticed that Jane’s posture had a peculiar fixity to it, and that she appeared to be enduring the conversation of a rather dull-looking, middle-aged man.
“That?” asked Julian incredulously.
“No—he’s just a prop. It’s the person she’s not talking to.” Behind her, and a little to her left, stood a young woman with dark bobbed hair, pale skin and delicate lips. She had the too-casual air of someone who had lost sight of her friends and who found being left alone for even a few moments among strangers almost intolerable.
“You see, Jane’s usually too timid to go so far as to seduce someone herself, but her senses are impeccable: she’s always the first to sniff out the most delectable of game. While her manner is too subtle to mean anything specific to an outsider, any one of us will recognize it immediately. Then, one of us can swoop in to take care of the rest.” As he said this, Prospero, in his purple tuxedo, appeared before the aforementioned victim, graciously offering her a virgin piña colada with a miniature pink umbrella on top.
Though she had never set eyes on him before, his appearance and boldness pleased her. She accepted the drink and admired a large artificial flower in his lapel. He leaned toward her—though with his head angled back modestly, so as not to give the impression of being too forward—and invited her to inhale its fragrance.
“Now, what Prospero’s doing,” Ambrose continued, “is creating a diversionary eclipse of perfume: he’s about to manipulate an atomizer that’s attached by a tube to the flower’s stigma. The fragrance that issues from the sinister flower is like a whirling cloud of invisible octopus ink, confounding the victim’s senses and rendering her agreeable and subject to hypnotic suggestion. I call it ‘Eau de Chloroform.’”
Julian’s attention was distracted by some splashing and commotion over by the other end of the pool. Lorelei, who had disburdened herself of her clothing, was frolicking, like some voluptuous bathing bird, in the basin of a scallop-shaped fountain. Streams of water, issuing from the lips of three mischievous cupids grouped at the rear, crisscrossed and inundated her like kisses.
“Showtime!” said Ambrose.
Lingering still in their pools for the delectation of the guests, the mermaids, now upstaged by Lorelei, were quite put out: “Ugh, who booked the burlesque show?”
“Must be cheap, since she’s giving it away for free.”
There was in fact something of the burlesque in Lorelei’s performance, but there was a great deal of art in it as well. At any rate, Lorelei’s body was so excessively rich and perfect in its forms that she resembled nothing so much as an exquisite, animated sculpture of porcelain. Those vivacious islands of flesh, rising and submerging sensuously, at times seemed to possess independent life, like a school of dolphins rollicking near the surface of the sea.
“This one is good,” said Ambrose, who had taken advantage of the entertainment to scrutinize sidelong a dapper youth with dark brown hair and blue eyes. The youth was staring at Lorelei in unconcealed amazement.
“He’s blushing!” said Ambrose, who betrayed a slight loss of composure by spilling a few drops of champagne on his shoe.
“I don’t think you’re his type,” said Julian.
“You shouldn’t take me for one of those people who can’t enjoy a desire unless it’s directed at himself. Vicarious pleasures are commonly thought to be inferior to direct ones; on the contrary, they’re much higher on the scale.”
Then Ambrose, with Julian in tow, introduced himself to the youth and began to chat him up in his congenial way, remarking on the limitless beauty and generosity of his ‘dear’ Lorelei, dropping vague titillations and far-fetched double entendres, pandering delicately and shamelessly to the victim’s touching fascination for the blonde diluvian.
“God,” sighed the smitten youth, “I’d do anything to meet her!”
Ambrose’s left eyebrow rose up like the Arc de Triomphe.
The libertines had
rounded up and “abducted” the victims:
Roberta and Sally, the twins; Julia, the girl with the bobbed hair; and
Martin, the boy who had fallen for Lorelei.
The party was now holed up in a small room in an infamous hotel on
The walls of the box-shaped room were thick with layer upon layer of paint; the most recent coat, a kind of bluish chrome, had been applied in such broad, manic strokes that it made the walls resemble a meteorological representation of metallic windstorms on some other planet. Here and there, in places where the wall had been damaged, or perhaps the paint had simply fallen off, the varicolored topographical lines of previous strata were visible, giving the room a certain geological depth and dignity.
A fine view of the street from the windows had been perversely blocked out by silver electrical tape. On the west wall, a dense row of silver sconces, topped by candle-shaped, incandescent bulbs, illuminated the room so harshly that the libertines were obliged to wear dark glasses. Libertines and victims alike cast angular, moonscape shadows on the rubbery white floor as they lounged on large silver pillows or played various games.
In addition to these visual torments, the victims were subjected to the loud, gothic, rock-and-roll music of a band that happened to be performing in the basement; the unnerving sounds were piped in over the hotel’s antiquated intercom system.
“Some abduction,” said Julian. “These kids were so bored I think they would have paid us to take them somewhere—if they had had any money.” He and Prospero were playing a game of old maid with a deck of pornographic cards.
“Where are you taking us, anyway?” said Martin dreamily. His supine body lay folded among the pillows like a marionette which had been carelessly thrown in a corner; the only part that moved was his head, which, tilted at an odd angle, wavered slowly like a hypnotized bird following the movements of a cobra. He was watching as Lorelei performed, in the center of the room, her own interpretation of the Dance of the Seven Veils.
Diego, who had been contemplating the twins, suddenly reached forward and grabbed both the boy’s ankles with alarming quickness. Before he knew it, the boy’s upper back was pinned to the floor, and his legs straddled Diego in a position that would have been a pure and innocent example of a wrestling hold, but for the lascivious edge given it by Diego’s leering expression.
“We’re taking you to a very, very bad place, little bird,” hissed Diego, pressing his face close to the boy’s. “Pretty bird like you could get lapped up in no time.” His shockingly long and pointed tongue emerged, flicking near the boy’s cheeks. “Just like sugar in water.” He and Vivian exchanged glances, and they both broke into prickly laughter.
“Ooh, I hope it’s terribly risky,” said Roberta. By now both of the twins were quite tipsy.
“We’ve just had our coming-out party,” said Sally.
“It was so tedious, you have no idea.” They sat cross-legged like little girls, symmetrical, with their arms about each other’s shoulders, and served each other sips from very wide and shallow glasses of liqueur. Vivian meticulously ratted and sprayed their hair into matching, finger-in-the-socket bouffants.
Clothes were flying everywhere. Jane and Ambrose had set up a sort of Victorian boudoir screen in the rear, and they were remaking Julia: in place of her yellow silk they were assembling various aggressive pieces from a trunkful of garments. Every few moments they would bring Julia out to parade her before Prospero’s eyes, and he would merely look up, blink noncommittally, and go back to his card game. Taking this as a “No,” Jane and Ambrose would throw up their hands and take Julia back behind the screen for more adjustments.
Finally, when Prospero made a grimace, probably only because he had lost the game, Jane took it as an emphatic “Yes,” gave Julia a lollipop, slapped an “OK” label on her behind and yelled, in a surprisingly loud, sort of honky-tonk voice, “NEXT!”
When they saw how Julia had been transformed, the twins got a little over-excited and spilled some of the blue-green liqueur on their white dresses. “We want to go next!” Vivian had to shield her eyes from the sudden agitation of their flinty, Gorgonian hairdos, which, when set in motion as now, had become like dangerous weapons left in the hands of careless children.
“Your turn will come soon enough, you little gametes,” said Ambrose. “You!”—he said to Diego—”How dare you lay a hand on that child, you big galoot! He’s my property!”
Diego immediately let go his hold on the boy, though not because he paid any mind to Ambrose; rather, he had become entranced by the thick blue-green stains the liqueur had begun to form on the twins’ white satin dresses. The twins hiccupped in alarm when, without warning, he slid his hands beneath each of their dresses; however, he was merely satisfying an impulse to press together the stained fabric of the two dresses in order to form a kind of Rorschach. He used his tongue to finish off the designs, savoring the taste of the liqueur as well as the vibrations of animal fear emanating from the bodies of the two girls.
Martin immediately picked himself up, wandered over to one of the windows, and tried, absently and ineffectually, to open it.
“That one’s trying to escape!” cried Lorelei, pausing abruptly in her dance to point with gleeful excitement.
“Aww, the poor thing,” said Vivian. “I guess he’d rather hurl himself out of the window than continue to endure all—this.” She made a grand gesture with a hair brush. “Can you blame him?”
“I just wanted a little air,” said Martin. “And besides, I couldn’t do much damage jumping from the second floor, could I?”
“Ooh, cheeky,” said Jane. “You’ll soon get your comeuppance.”
“Next thing you know he’ll be asking for a drink of water.”
“A drink of water? Did he ask for a drink of water?”
“There’ll be no air, water or melodrama for you,” said Ambrose, and he and Jane dragged the boy behind the screen.
“However, you may have a kiss,” said Vivian, who was distributing to the victims chocolate kisses wrapped in silver foil. Protruding from the foil-covered cones like wicks were tiny strips of waxed paper with the message “Eat Me” printed on them in Gothic letters.
“This isn’t going to kill me, is it?” said Martin, as he allowed the sweet chocolate to dissolve in his mouth.
Vivian looked offended. “No, dear, this is not a snuff film. We are interested in more delicate ways of altering your body.”
When the transformations had been completed, the victims were marched through the hallways and down the elevator. In the lobby, all paused while Ambrose composed a family portrait of the entire ensemble: as the libertines posed in the background, august and maternal, in the foreground, the young ones saw themselves, for the first time, made up in mannered versions of high-gothic, rock and roll.
The twins, wobbling on black dominatrix heels, wore identical, black latex micro-minis with round cutouts on the sides. Their hair looked like stiff Chinese bushes made of black enamel, and their high-contrast makeup made them resemble twin succubi. As soon as the tableau broke up, both approached their own reflections in fascination, tried on vicious faces, and practiced kissing and growling.
Julia’s already androgynous face had been made to look startlingly masculine. Her hair was tucked under a black leather cycle cap, and she wore a halter top of silver chain mail, a heavy studded black leather jacket, skin-tight red leather pants and black cycle boots.
Martin had allowed Ambrose to shear off most of his beautiful hair, but only on the condition that Lorelei console him while this atrocity was being accomplished. Silver rings adorned his nose, nipples and earlobes. The fine brownness of his naked torso was interrupted at the neck by a thick dog collar with enormous spikes, and at the hips by dark purple, crushed velvet trousers. His chest and back were adorned, here and there, with scarifications from a Halloween kit, and his face and eyes had been rendered passive, forlorn and ghoulish. Lorelei led him around by a heavy chain attached to the collar.
As it happened, the members of the gothic band which had just been practicing in the basement were at that moment vegetating in the lobby. They observed the spectacle surreptitiously; their gloomy countenances were broken only by an occasional twitch, equivalent of raising an eyebrow.
The cortège exited
the lobby and proceeded west on
“. . . Of course, the first thing one has to do, is to unfold the map of one’s desires. Not so easy as you might imagine—many never get even this far. But to see only so much, to see only a narrow portion of the spectrum of experience, cannot be to anyone’s advantage. Oh, anyone can get by color-blind, but the rest of us will leave you with skid marks on your forehead, choking in our rainbow dust. You will be penned in by your ignorance, like a blind heifer, with dark glasses and tin cup, waiting blissfully for its own slaughter. The truth is, those of us with the rose-tinted glasses, riding the Harley Davidsons of love, will simply eat you alive in passing—”
“Tenderly—”
“Con mucho gusto—”
“—without your knowing it. You will experience no pain: only a baleful chill, as though a crow were dancing on your grave.”
“And so, to sum up: if you want to take a vicarious spin on our magic carpet, tease up your hair, lift your skirt, spread your legs (so to speak), and see the colors.”
“And if you don’t, then you can just EAT MY DUST!”
“EAT MY ASHES!”
“EAT MY LEAVES OF GRASS!”
At
They came to what looked like the blasted, grimy door of an incinerator. It had great rusty hinges at the bottom and a handle at the top, and it was so low and small that the only way to get through it would be to crawl, and that with some difficulty.
Vivian donned an apron and a large quilted mitten, bent gracefully at the waist, and wrenched the door open. Its hinges screeched, plumes of smoke escaped from its mouth, and lurid red and orange lights flickered out like flames. Reverberations of the music slipped out too, reckless, indifferent and mesmerizing.
The victims were bade to crawl through first. They balked.
“My darlings!” said Diego, “Did our loving tirades fall on deaf ears? Throw off your imaginary chastity belts!
“Flex your synapses!”
“Offer up the virgin orifices of your mind to tease the demons of the world! The world will do anything to have you.”
The last of the victims to go through was Sally, who got cold feet halfway in and started to back out. Diego, however, gave her rump a little shove with the heel of his ankle boot. He and Vivian then quickly shouldered the door shut with a final grating clang, and sat with their backs against it. When they heard Sally’s screams and the pounding of her small fists from inside, they burst into high-pitched cackles, a duet of maniacal laughter that was at once ironic and chilling.
“What was in those chocolates, anyway?” asked Julian. The libertines were on their way back to the hotel.
“Oh, we would never actually drug anyone,” said Jane, horrified.
“It was just a little subterfuge—with affinities to post-hypnotic suggestion,” said Ambrose. “The victims naturally expect to be given narcotics. The unadulterated kisses, then, merely act as catalysts for a state of consciousness which actually originates in the transformation itself.... To be able to apprehend the bliss—and the terror—of the dissolution of one’s personality... what could be more intoxicating than that?”
The rock and rollers hadn’t budged from the lobby. There were six of them all together: a singer, a drummer, and a first guitarist, all of whom were female; and a keyboardist, a bassist and a second guitarist, who were male. In their habitual state of morbid catatonia, they sat still and cruciform as decayed trees. All had extremely pale skin with greenish undertones, and they were dressed uniformly in black, with dark glasses to filter out light and neurosis.
“Roll up your sleeves,” said Lorelei under her breath to Julian, “we’re going to wake the dead.”
The party poured into the room, surprising, surrounding and commandeering the band as a sudden tidal eddy irrigates a clump of desiccated seaweeds.
Lorelei materialized in the lap of the male guitarist, talking and carrying on like a locomotive; then she was up, gesticulating like a teacher trying to communicate with an autistic child; then she had him in her lap, gangling and dumbfounded, while she continued to expound a mile a minute on the subjects of sumo wrestling and roller derby.
Jane and Prospero soon had the drummer face down on the carpet. For her they purported to demonstrate, with their chins and elbows, the infinitely relaxing effects of an esoteric form of shiatsu known as “donkey knees.”
Ambrose pretended to be a slimy music producer for the amusement of the singer and the bassist.
“Yeah, of course I
know your music. Precocious. A little bit too precocious. Which is
why you’re playing the basement of the Tarantula Arms instead of the Garden of
the
Julian managed to engage the female guitarist by intimating an extraordinary knowledge of underground music. Her expression changed from a supercilious sneer to a scowl, thus indicating that her interest had been piqued.
Vivian and Diego worked on the keyboardist, who was the most blasted of them all (like a flower that has been withered by noxious winds). Perched on either side of him like cherubs or gargoyles, they purred into his ears, in a kind of stereophonic dialogue, realistic stories of erotic mayhem that would have made most people’s hair stand on end, but which in his case had the effect only of warming up his glacial blood.
And so the band was revived, invigorated, amused, diverted, loosened up.
At Prospero’s signal, Jane said: “Hey, I think we should all go for a walk. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Since going for a
walk was about the last thing the band would care to do for a good time, they
had to be coerced, bullied, dragged, carried or wheeled out into the
street. As the group headed north on
“There is no question that rock and roll music has a delightfully malignant influence on young minds,” said Diego. “How easily it infiltrates even the sanctified space of the home—it makes me envious. I love to think of all the chaotic energy that radiates over the airwaves, only to be absorbed by boys and girls with red cheeks and little headphones. Or, better yet, neat incitements to commit debauchery and mayhem digitized on disks and purchased at shopping malls.”
“It’s the modern form of sorcery.”
“I think that Diego takes pleasure in considering the expansive power of rock and roll music: the capacity of a single influence to be multiplied and reproduced in order to corrupt as many bodies as possible. I, on the other hand, like to think only of those very few in whom the music causes a kind of exaltation, an exaltation that, nonetheless, has in it an element of suffering.”
“Yes, I agree. And, while these experiences of music will very likely represent a form of survival for such a creature, the dangerous changes it will effect in her, in her very body, will, paradoxically, bring her even closer to dissolution. In this tremulous and solitary state of being, she must find other food in order to survive and flourish. But we will discuss this higher nourishment at a later time in our travels.”
In the flower
district they padded like cheetahs through sidewalk arbors of tall plants and
trees—still wild and impudent, in spite of having been transported across seas
and continents—awaiting delivery to the splendid salons of Park Avenue
hostesses and the ultramodern loft spaces of
In one particularly immense shop, Prospero allowed everyone to choose bundles and bouquets of flowers, as much as each could carry in his arms, and paid for everything with his Carte Blanche. In the hearse they made of the flowers a “love nest,” and played “baby chicks” with the members of the band. This consisted in disrobing them, tickling them all over with yellow roses, and feeding them, petal by petal, such of the flowers as were edible: Kablouna Calendulas with orange, gold and yellow blossoms; ferny lemon-scented gem marigolds; hardy pansies; and peppery whirlybird nasturtiums.
When the hearse
reached the General Post Office at
The libertines piled hastily into the hearse and burned rubber, leaving the band choking in a cloud of city dust, pollen and face powder.
* * *
In the little park in
“Look!” said Lorelei, pointing some distance down the length of that other island. Immense figures of light and shadow appeared to be flickering near the shore.
“It looks like giant ghosts dancing!”
“Flying saucers have
landed on
“I think it’s a drive-in movie.”
“Impossible.”
“But what on earth could it be?”
“Down here,” said a voice from below. The tall wrought-iron fence prevented them from seeing exactly who was addressing them from the bottom of the stone embankment. Lorelei stood on Julian’s shoulders and leaned precariously over the black spikes.
“There’s a young man with a boat!” she declared. “And he’s cute!”
“Here’s the stairway,” said Ambrose. The way to the stone steps leading down to the river’s edge was guarded by a six-foot iron gate; this, however, had been left mysteriously unlocked.
They descended to river level, where a fetching young gondolier dressed in sailor’s cap, striped shirt and white pants awaited them. Without hesitation they greeted him, boarded the small vessel and sailed off in the direction of the several-stories-high dancing luminous figures in the distance.
As the boat made its
way slowly and easily across the river, the revelers marveled at the clear
black arch of the sky besprinkled with stars and crowned by the heavy moondisk. Behind them,
“Fountains!” It was clear now, as the boat neared the shore, that the images were being projected on the decayed brick façade of an abandoned hospital. The film consisted of shots of splendid fountains from all over the world, jetting water to a height of six stories or more, transforming the ruined façade into a spectacle of jubilation.
Lively music emanated from within, and they could see rambunctious people hanging out the window sills, milling about on the roof, and overflowing onto the balconies and fire escapes.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Julian. “You see that fissure in the façade that zigzags down from the roof almost to the ground? I could swear it’s grown wider in the few moments we’ve been standing here.”
“Nonsense,” said Lorelei. “It’s obviously been painted on in trompe l’oeil.”
Prospero gave the gondolier a generous gratuity and asked him to await their return.
The ground floor was so mobbed that there seemed to be no means of entering in front, so they walked round to the side of the building, where some giddy people leaned down and pulled them up onto the fire escape. From there they decided to climb up to the roof and work their way down to the thick of things.
“I love rubbing elbows with humanity on rooftops,” said Vivian.
The roof was dark but for the moonlight and the flickering of the celluloid fountains. The chorus of talking and laughing voices was almost like one voice murmuring electrically, surrounding one conspiratorially, teasing and beckoning; but finally escaping into the open air and the smouldering orange sky.
They saw a man with an artificial leg of gold wire in which a family of green, yellow and red canaries whirled and twittered like a ferris wheel.
They spoke with a woman who claimed to be a direct descendant of Gilles de Retz, whose crimes during the fifteenth century inspired the story of Bluebeard.
Like detectives of love, they followed an anonymous kiss which passed like a whisper from one set of lips to another in a drunken chain across the roof. They observed that the kiss was ultimately blown to the moon by a woman who then laughed, hiccuped, leant over the wall, and threw up twelve hours worth of food, drink and silliness.
Lorelei adopted a charming lad who was only too eager to escort the group through the nether circles of the party.
“Who’s throwing this party, anyway?” asked Julian.
“Nobody seems to know,” said the boy, whose name was Roderick. “I’m not sure I’d want to accept the blame myself.” Two people were trying benevolently to stuff a third into a chimney chute. The recalcitrant person was giggling hysterically.
The party turned out
to be a period costume affair along the lines of Carnevale in
No less striking were the variety of masks which everyone wore. They were, in most cases, pale and animalistic, and on the roof they seemed to dance in the air like disembodied heads.
The members of the rotary club were a little put out at first, since they themselves had no costumes; however, by purloining bits of fabric here and there from costumes so excessive the thefts would scarcely be noticed, the forlorn ones managed in no time to accouter themselves, as well as their protegés, with spare but tasteful semblances of masquerade.
Compared to the tone of the party on the roof, which was not exactly sedate, the tenor of the festivities below seemed to intensify in bacchanalian madness and abandon as one descended from level to level. With the exception of the ground floor, each level was divided into airy rooms and corridors which ran obliquely and in such a disorienting fashion that one easily lost one’s bearings in moving from room to room. The walls, though not unpleasant to look at, appeared to be in such a state of decay that one might just as well have crashed one’s way through them as looked for a doorway, which in fact Diego did on several occasions, though more for effect than out of exasperation. Impromptu windows were created in this fashion as well, in order to afford a better view of the moon.
One noted, moreover, that each level had been painted and furnished in variations on a particular color, and the revelers generally filtered up or down to the floors which best complemented their costumes, as though the party itself were some sort of multilayered fluid in a test tube.
The prevailing color of the top floor was a festive blue; the next lower was a gay purple; the next, lurid green; then came a wild orange. The second floor was an insane violet; and the ground floor, where the festivities had seemed to reach a peak bordering on madness, was crystalline white and brilliantly lit, so bright, in fact, that everyone there was obliged to wear dark glasses over their masks. Moreover, the interior walls of the ground floor had all been knocked down and remained, in piles, where they had formerly stood; thus, a more or less open space had been created, and most of the people who filled it were dancing frenetically to the music which emanated from the enormous amplifiers.
After withstanding bravely for a time the brilliance of the ground level, Vivian said, “All of this is rather invigorating, but I believe this illumination is causing my skin to slough off.”
“It’s true,” said Ambrose. “This interstellar light is unkind to all but those too intoxicated to care.”
Diego obligingly kicked a hole through the rear wall, and they exited, along with the new crop of ingenues.
While investigating the area in the rear of the old hospital, Ambrose discovered a pair of storm doors which opened on a stairway leading to the basement. Illuminating the way with a pair of ivory candelabras pilfered from the party’s furnishings, the assembly ventured into the subterranean chamber.
The music blaring from the ground floor was now dulled to a rather soothing, arrhythmic pulsation. The basement was exceedingly gloomy, and the candles offered scarce illumination. However, Prospero soon managed to switch on a magnificent, electrical chandelier which hung in the center of the lofty space. Though the light thus produced was quite dim, one could now make out with sufficient clarity the interior.
Although the basement had been no less painstakingly decorated than the six levels above, apparently no one else had heretofore discovered it, or, if they had, perhaps the effect had been too macabre to induce them to linger.
The decrepit, penitentiary stones of the walls had been painted a deep scarlet, as though they had been dipped in blood. The walls themselves were hung at intervals with thick draperies of black velvet. The only objects in the way of decoration were a number of raised white marble slabs with names and ornamentation carved in them in the manner of sepulchral monuments.
These slabs moreover served as platforms for a series of tableaux: by means of invisible wires, groups of human skeletons had been assembled, with curatorial rigor, in a plurality of erotic poses. These poses, however, were never vulgar; on the contrary, they were delicate, graceful and evocative of the flesh. It was as though living lovers, carried away in exquisite, momentary gestures of bliss, had been suddenly and painlessly immersed in acid, leaving only their beautiful bones, dry and pure as polished ivory.
The naked bones were in some cases artfully veiled or shrouded with sheer colored fabrics and gauzes. Fresh bouquets of orange, lavender or green roses were arranged on the white slabs, along with a variety of objects, such as books covered in fine leathers, silver keys, astrolabes, nautilus shells and leaves pressed between panes of glass.
The party had passed only a few moments in admiration of this natural history of love, when Ambrose, as if having suddenly deciphered the information carved on the monuments, cried: “It’s all in memory of the Plague Lovers!”
But almost in the same moment, and before the sense of this declaration could be fully absorbed by the others, the great chandelier began to rattle disconcertingly.
“I knew it!” said Julian, his adrenaline rising. “We’re all gonna be buried alive at the bottom of a six-story parfait!”
“Get out from under there!”
The ornament, along with an island-shaped portion of the ceiling, did indeed come down with a melodramatic crash; however, those underneath managed to avoid so operatic a demise.
Fate had likewise spared those on the ground floor, whose dancing frenzies had no doubt only hastened the collapse of that portion of the ceiling that had anchored the chandelier. A few of them, however, were left dangling from the edge of the opening, legs kicking absurdly.
“Hey!” some of the upstairs people were leaning over the edge, gazing curiously at the downstairs party and the amorous tableaux. The light was now pouring in beatifically, and the music filled the basement with its festive reverberations.
“Hey, yourself!” Jane called up cheerfully.
Some ingenious upstairs persons quickly fashioned a sort of rope by tying together pieces of curtains, wigs and other bric-a-brac; they then let down this Rapunzelesque ladder and availed themselves of it to descend through the breach; others followed, likewise heedless of the rules of safety and common sense.
As upstairs thus began to drip downstairs, the seven archaeologists, overwhelmed by all of these marvelous events and sensations, commenced to dance and exult among the bones and the rubble.
Even Diego went so far as to catch up one of the skeletons in his arms and dance a foxtrot with the demure puppet in the island-shaped oval of light.
“My dear,” he remarked to his partner, “I must tell you that, while it may be grand to contemplate the ruins of civilizations, it is grander still to dance with the ruins of a beautiful woman!”
—He thinks places don’t mature between visits.
—How I wish I could invent new senses, new organs to make possible new combinations...
—I wish I had a thousand tongues to lick you.
—Oh, my darling, I could dine on the lice combed from your head of hair.
—I like youngsters in a crisis.
—The Army of Lovers will never be stopped.
—The women attract the men who attract the men who attract the women who...
—I should be out being a spectacle of myself instead of making one.
—Of course we’re hedonists. Isn’t everybody? The only difference is our pleasures are differentiated.
—Horny isn’t romantic.
—It is to me.
—I’d like to arrange your hair on a pillow and then fuck ya.
—No, I never go out. If it were possible to choose the faces one met on the street, I would.
—Adapt! Evolve! Be Fruitful and Multiply!
—I am my own Sugar Daddy.
—I’m happy to be anywhere.
—It’s a fine line between chaos and anarchy.
—All I want is love, love, love and pandemonium.
—You’re a slave to verisimilitude.
—I feel so buoyant after several glancing exchanges with sweet-looking males that I don’t even mind that person’s hair.
—Having a roll with me doesn’t make you gay, it makes you pretty.
—My name’s not Aladdin.
—When you’re in my world it is.
—Oh, the tender pliability, the malleability of the human body!
—your airbrushing eyes
—I wish it were a Mary Kay world!
—They thawed her out and here she is.
—Had an ACCIDENT? DEPRESSED? OVERDRESS!
—Take me right to the meat of things. I want to see what’s on special.
—She was born in a test tube.
—She was born behind the Clinique counter.
—She was synthesized by Dupont—she’s a polymer.
—Sure you can fuck her—if you can get her to hold still long enough!
—Would you like to have sex with my wife?
—He’s mine!
—I picked him out!
—I seduced him.
—Stylist!
—Positivist!
—Anchorwoman!
—She likes to be simonized in an open window with all the neighbors watching.
—I threw a big boulder on her and she fell down dead.
—Sorry—you’re gonna have to take a back seat on the ol’ Bunsen burner.
—Take off your clothes and show us your sporting goods.
—You’re the only living thing here.
—We’re just location scouting.
—Porque es frívola e inmoral.
—It doesn’t seem right to go into a man’s apartment without a chaperone.
—. . . this dilettante desire to point to the beautiful infinity of articulation...
—. . . to experience
—I was only flirting with the idea of being someway.
—Touch me... touch me, or I’ll find somebody who will!
—But, darling, what I want to know is, who’s going to swing by on a liana and take us away from all this?