City of Saints and Madmen

Lakeslept fitfully that moonless night, but when he woke the moon blossomed obscenely bright and red beyond his bed. His sheets had become, in that crimson light, violet waves of rippled fabric slick with his sweat. He smelled blood. The walls stank of it. A man stood in front of the open balcony windows, almost eclipsed by the weight of the moon at his back.Lake could not see the man’s face.Lake sat up in bed.

“Merrimount? Merrimount? You’ve returned to me after all.”

The man stood at the side of the bed.Lake stood by the balcony window. The man lay in the bed.Lake walked to the balcony. The man and Lake stood a foot apart in the middle of the room, the moon crepuscular and blood- engorged behindLake. The moon was breathing its scarlet breath upon his back.

He could not see the man’s face. He was standing right in front of the man and could not see his face.

The apartment, fixed in the perfect clarity of the bleeding light cried out to him in the sharpness of its detail, so that his eyes cut themselves upon such precision. Every bristle on his dried out brushes surrendered to him its slightest imperfection. Every canvas became porous with the numbing roughness of its gesso.

“You’re not Merrimount,” he said to the man.

The man’s eyes were closed.

Lakestood facing the moon. The man stood facingLake.

The man opened his eyes and the ferruginous light of the moon shot through them and formed two rusty spots onLake ’s neck, as if the man’s eyes were just holes that pierced his skull from back to front.

The moon blinked out. The light still streamed from the man’s eyes. The man smiled a half-moon smile and the light trickled out from between his teeth.

The man heldLake ’s left hand, palm up.

The knife sliced into the middle ofLake ’s palm. He felt the knife tear through the skin, and into the palmar fascia muscle, and beneath that, into the tendons, vessels, and nerves. The skin peeled back until his entire hand was flayed and open. He saw the knife sever the muscle from the lower margin of the annular ligament, then felt, almost heard, the lesser muscles snap back from the bones as they were cut — six for the middle finger, three for the ring finger — the knife now grinding up against the os magnum as the man guided it into the area near Lake’s wrist — slicing through extensor tendons, through the nerves, through the farthest outposts of the radial and ulnar arteries. He could see it all — the yellow of the thin fat layer, the white of bone obscured by the dull red of muscle, the gray of tendons, as surely as if his hand had been labeled and diagrammed for his own benefit. The blood came thick and heavy, draining from all of his extremities until he only had feeling in his chest. The pain was infinite, so infinite that he did not try to escape it, but tried only to escape the red gaze of the man who was butchering him while he just stood there and let him do it. The thought went through his head like a dirge, like an epitaph, I will never paint again.

He could not get away. He could not get away.

Lake’s hand began to mutter, to mumble…

In response, the man sang toLake ’s hand, the words incomprehensible, strange, sad.

Lake’s hand began to scream — a long, drawn out scream, ever higher in pitch, the wound become a mouth into which the man continued to plunge the knife.

Lakewoke up shrieking. He was drowning in sweat, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He tried to control his breathing — he sucked in great gulps of air — but found it was impossible. Panicked, he looked toward the window. There was no moon. No one stood there. He forced his gaze down to his left hand (he had done nothing, nothing, nothing while the man cut him apart) and found it whole.

He was still shrieking.

In “Invitation to a Beheading,” the sorrow takes the form of two figures: the insect catcher outside the building and the man highlighted in the upper window of the post office itself. (If it seems that I have kept these two figures a secret in order to make of them a revelation, it is because they are a revelation to the viewer — due to the mass of detail around them, they are generally the last seen, and then, in a tribute to their intensity, the only things seen.)

The insect catcher, his light dimmed but for a single orange spark, hurries off down the front steps, one hand held up behind him, as if to ward off the man in the window. Is this figure literallyLake ’s father, or does it represent some mythical insect catcher— the Insect Catcher? Or didLake see his father as a mythic figure? From my conversations withLake, the latter interpretation strikes me as most plausible.

But to what can we attribute the single clear window in the building’s upper story, through which we see a man who stands in utter anguish, his head thrown back to the sky? In one hand, the man holds a letter, while the other is held palm up by a vaguely stork-like shadow that has driven a knife through it. The scene derives all of its energy from this view through the window: the greens radiate outward from the pulsing crimson spot that marks where the knife has penetrated flesh. Adding to the effect,Lake has so layered and built up his oils that a trick of perspective is created by which the figure simultaneously exists inside and outside the window.

Although the building that houses this intricate scene lends itself to fantastical interpretation, and Lake might be thought to have recreated some historical event in phantasmagorical fashion, the figure with the pierced palm is clearly a man, not a child or mushroom dweller, and the letter held in the man’s right hand indicates an admission of the building’s use as a post offi ce rather than as a morgue (unless, under duress, we are forced to acknowledge the weak black humor of “dead letter office”).

Further examination of the man’s face reveals two disturbing elements: (1) it bears a striking resemblance toLake ’s own face, and (2) under close scrutiny with a magnifying glass, there is a second, almost translucent set of features transposed over the first. This “mask,” its existence disputed by some critics, mimics, like a mold made from life, the features of the first, except in two particulars: this man has teeth made of broken glass and he, unlike his counterpart, smiles with unnerving brutality. Is this the face of the faceless man from “Albumuth Boulevard?” Is this the face of Death?

Regardless ofLake ’s intent, all of these elements combine to create in the viewer — even the viewer who only subconsciously notes certain of the more hidden elements — a true sense of unease and dread, as well as the release of this dread through the anguished, voiceless cry of the man in the window. The man in the window provides us with the only movement in the painting, for the insect catcher, hurrying away, is already in the past, and the bones of the post office are also in the past. Only the forlorn figure in the window is still alive, caught forever in the present. Further, although foresaken by the insect catcher and pierced by a shadow that may be a manifestation of his own fear, the light never forsakes or betrays him.Lake ’s tones are, as Venturi has noted, “resonant rather than bright, and the light contained in them is not so much a physical as a psychological illumination.” —From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Lakespent the next day trying to forget his nightmare. To rid himself of its cloying atmosphere, he left his apartment — but not before receiving a stern lecture from Dame Truff on how loud noises after midnight showed no consideration for other tenants, while behind her a few neighbors, who had not come to his aid but obviously had heard his screams, gave him curious stares.

Then, punishment over, he made his way through the crowded streets to the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations, portfolio under one arm. The portfolio contained two new paintings, both of his father’s hands, as he remembered them, open wide like wings as a cornucopia of insects— velvet ants, cicadas, moths, butterflies, walking sticks, praying mantises — crawled over them. It was a study he had been working on for years. His father had beautifully ruined hands, bitten and stung countless times, but as polished, as smooth, as white marble.

The gallery owner, Janice Shriek, greeted him at the door; she was a severe, hunched woman with calculating, cold blue eyes. This morning she had thrown on foppishly male trousers, and a jacket over a white shirt, the sleeves of which ended in cuffs that looked as if they had been made from doilies. Shriek rose up on tip-toe to plant a ceremonial kiss on his cheek while explaining that the short, portly gentleman currently casting his round shadow over the far end of the gallery had expressed interest in one of Lake’s pieces, how fortunate that he had stopped by, and that while she continued to enflame that interest — she actually said “enflamed,” much to Lake’s amazement; was he to be some artistic gigolo now? — Lake should set down his portfolio and, after a decent interval, walk over and introduce himself, that was a dear — and back she scamper-lurched to the potential customer, leaving Lake rather breathless on her behalf. No one could ever say Janice Shriek lacked energy.

Lakeplaced his portfolio on a nearby table, the art of his countless rivals glaring down at him from the walls. The only good art (besides Lake’s, of course) was a miniature entitled “Amber in the City” by Shriek’s great find,