burned. Most of them had managed to sit up before the flash went off, and many of them had a flaming hand out and stretched toward the camera, a reflexive appeal for help that had been greeted by the laugh Mrs. Gottfried had described to me. There were thirteen of them. One of them, his mouth open so far that the flash had bounced off his uvula, was clearly Abraham Winston. Another was the lady who’d wanted the bath.
The awful Polaroids provided the only color in the collage, and they were arranged symmetrically, like the blacked-out squares in a crossword puzzle of agony. Everything else was reproduced in black-and-white, but the black-and-white was enough. A little Vietnamese girl, arms aflame, raced toward the camera of an Associated Press photographer. A burning monk tilted sideways, putting a hand-already largely bone-against the surface of the road on which he’d immolated himself. Photos of burn victims, clipped from medical texts, puffed at me like beached blowfish, their eyes receding from the world into pillows of swelling flesh. The men, women, and children who had fed the human bonfires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obediently displayed their melted backs and arms with exquisite Japanese politeness.
It was a lot more than I could take, but it was almost harder to turn my back on it. When I did, I found myself looking at a bed and a desk. Well, okay, there was no bedroom. The bed was narrow and monastically uncomfortable, an iron frame and a thin mattress, and the desk was made from materials that reminded me of my own student days: a door over two sawhorses. This door, however, was made of metal. Stenciled onto it were the words fire door. Over the makeshift desk sagged a shelf, bowed downward in the middle, crammed every which way with books.
All the books dealt with fire in one way or another. Gods of the Sun nestled between Franz Cumont’s The Mysteries ofMitbra and a popular history called The Fire-Bombing of Dresden. Next to that was a scientific text economically titled Combustion, and beside that was a biography of Lavoisier. Three books on Zoroaster comprised a subsection in themselves. There were at least fifty volumes in all, and they were all stolen library books.
Pasted to the wall between the books and the desk was the Incinerator’s classical annex.
Paintings, etchings, and engravings of all periods detailed the unhappy career of Hephaestus. A historiated initial or a fragment from a miniature cut from UCLA’s stock of illuminated manuscripts glowed here and there like a little jewel among images depicting the key moments-his being thrown from Olympus by his angry mother, Hera, revolted at her deformed offspring, the gathering of the gods to witness Hephaestus’ cuckoldry as his perfect wife, Aphrodite, writhed with Apollo on her marriage bed, the two of them trapped by a net of Hephaestus’ devising. An oddly masochistic reaction, I thought, making your cuckoldry public. Further along was Prometheus, fennel stalk in hand, creeping toward the forge as Hephaestus, wizened and tilting to one side, absently hammered at a piece of glowing iron.
There were others. Together they comprised an altar to an off-mix of self-loathing and pride. History presents us with a large and sometimes tragic gallery of clubfoots, just as it gives us a surprising number of overachieving epileptics. Wilton Hoxley had chosen to identify himself with the clubfoots, but he’d chosen the only one I knew of who had been a god.
Not looking for much of anything but not wanting to turn back to the collage on the opposite wall, I studied the little classical gallery again. Leading the pack were four images of Hephaestus’ expulsion from heaven, all of them featuring the glowering face of Hera. Hera alone figured in three others.
“Mother trouble,” Edna Vercini had said. Edna had never been a dope.
It wasn’t until I had turned my attention to the desk that I registered that the images above it were of different sizes. I backed off and surveyed it again. The pictures had been clipped from whatever sources he had found them in and pasted to the wall in any which way, big against small, with the tiny scraps from the illuminated manuscripts employed as fillers to block the glow of the red metallic paper beneath the images. If there had been an organizational principle, it seemed to be that the pictures followed the chronology of the Hephaestus myth, but they’d been assembled with no regard to size.
I wondered why that troubled me, and then I turned around and answered my own question.
The first thing I’d thought of when I looked at the other collage, the collage of fire, had been a crossword puzzle. At the time, I’d dismissed it as my mind’s way of distancing me from the content of the pictures, but from across the room I could see that the pictures were all the same size, exactly the same size. They formed a perfect square, about three feet by three feet. A square three feet by three feet covers nine square feet, and that’s a lot of area to cover when your squares are approximately three inches by three inches, which is the size of a Polaroid that’s had its bottom strip, the white strip that you grasp when you pull it from the camera, trimmed off.
Not wanting to do it, hating every step, I pulled myself back across the apartment to take a closer look at the other collage. I hadn ‘t seen police photographs of all the victims, but I’d forced myself to look at enough of them. In some cases, as with poor Helena Troy, I’d also seen photos of them before they were burned.
As nearly as I could tell, the Polaroids were in chronological order.
That meant one of two things. Either he’d glued down the other images first, leaving the careful pattern of empty squares for the Polaroids and filling them in as he took them, or he’d created the whole thing before he vacated the apartment as part of the statement he was trying to make. One way or the other, though, the square was full. No three-inch-squares of ruby gift-wrap paper gleamed at me from anywhere within it. There were no odd images pasted beyond the perimeter of the square. The square, as ghastly as it was, was a finished work.
Outside, I heard children playing and laughing. Children have a higher fat content, relative to total body weight, than do average adults, Nature’s way of storing food in the helpless in case they should be prematurely abandoned. It also ensures that they float. Of course, it also makes them more flammable.
I went back to the desk. Positioned carefully in its center was a volume of Dore’s etchings for The Divine Comedy. I’d always wondered what was comic about an epic packed chock-full of usurers up to their necks in manure and nepotistic popes being fricasseed head-down. When I closed the book and looked around, I realized that Wilton Hoxley had apparently found the laughs; above the door of the hallway that probably led to his bathroom were the words, hand-stenciled and a foot high, ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Getting up, I put what little hope I had on hold, went down the short hallway, and opened the bathroom door.
There was no window, and the room was dark. The light from the hallway barely dented the gloom. The air was heavy with a mixture of odors that made me instinctively want to hold my breath. The light switch flipped up with a rewarding snap, but nothing happened. I wished again that I still smoked; at least then I’d have had a match. Since I didn’t, I worked my way through the living room and into the minuscule kitchen, where I unscrewed the light bulb over the sink. Bulb in hand and feeling uncomfortably like a well-trained rat in a maze, I padded back to the bathroom.
There was an empty socket next to the bathroom mirror, and I wound the bulb into it. I’d left the light switch up, and I had to blink against the sudden glare.
Despite the dire warning, I’d seen worse bathrooms, my own, at times, among them. The toilet was stained and streaked and odorous, the tile was peeling away from the walls, the linoleum floor was as warped and rippling as the sea in a Hiroshige print. It wasn’t until I slid aside the shower curtain that the Dante quote made sense.
The tub was full of rags and metal containers. Each was labeled. A square of white paper had been glued to the side of each, and on the labels, penned in the same metallic gold ink in which he’d written my letters, were the words, GASOLINE, KEROSENE, BENZINE, DENATURED ALCOHOL. Fumes rolled out of the enclosure, heavy and ripe with fire. If I’d struck a match, I’d have been have been blown into memory.
After I closed the door and gave the keys back to the manager, I walked toward Alice, squinting into the bright summer sunlight of Normal Street and trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.
15
“He’s finished with something,” I said. “God knows what it is, but he’s reached a point of completion.”
The curtains in the suite in the Bel Air Hotel had been drawn, and the day had been locked outside. Annabelle Winston, draped in a white sheet, was a dim horizontal silhouette on a long table in the center of the room. A very tall woman, dressed entirely in white, compressed various of Annabelle’s muscles and stretched others, and a very
