Celestial Inventories (3 page)

That day he walked down to the corner to examine the mailbox tree. They weren’t birdhouses or dollhouses—they were mailboxes, and each had someone’s name on it. He was startled to find a mailbox with his name on it.

He looked around to see if anyone was watching, then pulled down the front lid of the box and peeked inside. A dusty letter lay on the bottom. He reached in cautiously, fearful of a nasty paper cut, and pulled out the letter.

According to the return address it was from himself. Addressed to himself. He looked at the postmark: many years into the future.

He opened the letter and read it. It was one sentence, scribbled, barely legible:

Beware the bed slide!

His wife had bought it at a yard sale: a large mahogany coffee table with an aquarium built in. Back then she was always finding bargains to fill their sparsely furnished apartment. She said the coffee table aquarium made a great conversation piece, but they soon discovered it mostly stopped conversation.

Frank would look down through the glass top of the table with its scattered air holes (a removable lid permitted feeding) and the fish would stare up at him with expressions of disgust. He became convinced they didn’
t like the magazines he subscribed to, or the coffee table books he had purchased on “Great Clocks of the World.” When it came time to feed them his wife took over, as the fish refused to respond to any food he personally sprinkled into the tank.

Eventually the fish died, of course, and he talked his wife into replacing them with a bed of sand, cacti, and scattered colourful stones. Now and then he would open the lid and pour a few ounces of water inside: a god bringing rain to the desert.

There came times, however, when he’d be reading a magazine or one of his coffee table books on the glass top, and he’d peer into the glass and see one of those old fish staring up at him with a scowl on its face. Sometimes there would be several of them, floating in the hot desert air, their skin dry and flaking away, waiting for the rain only he could bring.

They’d been married only a few years when his wife gave him the whistle underwear for Christmas. It had been a joke on her part, of course, and she was quite alarmed when it became plain that he liked wearing the underwear. Some nights he would rush down to the basement washer himself—and he’d never done his own laundry before—anxious to launder the shorts so that he might wear them again the next day.

The whistle underwear played various tunes, apparently in random order. He became particularly fond of its Rogers and Hammerstein selection.

Eventually the underwear wore out, as such things do, but for ever after he would whistle merrily when changing his clothes.

When he was a teenager he
’d beg his mother for a television, but she would direct him to the fruit picture instead. On their dining table she always kept a huge bowl of fruit, and this bowl always had at least two or three fresh pieces, and two or three old pieces, souring pieces, pieces that were starting to get bugs on them. And that was a necessary combination. Because if you had all fresh fruit, or all spoiled fruit, you didn’t get the same tensions, you didn’t get the transitions. And those were the qualities that put the pictures into your head.

Probably most teenagers wouldn’t have put up with such craziness from their moms, but he wasn’t like most teenagers. He would sit at the table and watch the fruit picture for hours: a few tiny bugs leaving a recent rupture in the dark brown area of the pear, corruption spreading almost undetectably across the surface of the apple, darkness rising through the plump flesh of the banana.

The changes were just that subtle, but when you reached the end, when he was left staring at a desiccated, rotted bowl of fruit, a cascade of memory was triggered, and suddenly he was weeping over all that he had ever lost, or due to lack of imagination, had never attempted to grasp.

They were the only socks he ever wore as a child. Although his mother insisted on doing his laundry, she never touched his cellar socks: he kept them hidden, in the cellar, down in the dark where they belonged.

Cellar socks were cool on the feet, a little too large, in order to accommodate the atmosphere that always tagged along with them: mushrooms, disgraced underwear, dreams not to be spoken aloud. He put his cellar socks on just before leaving for school each morning, always wearing long pants, even in hot weather, to conceal the grey of cellar that wrapped his ankles.

“Why are children your age so stubborn about bathing?” his mother would ask, and he just smiled as if she had no chance of understanding. Adults had outgrown the need for odour, had lost a child’s fine-tuned appreciation of it. For a child pungent smells were like candy: sharp and specific on the tongue.

He bought the knife from a friend after a week of watching old mystery movies. The victims in these movies were usually young women caught in bathtubs behind white doors that had been carelessly left unsecured, but it might be difficult for a near-sighted deviant to tell a young man with long hair from a young woman from behind, so he thought it best that he buy the knife just in case. It came in an attractive waterproof sheath which he hid under the sudsy water like some sort of deadly water snake. Every time he heard a creaking of the floorboards outside the bathroom door he’d put his hand down on it and make himself ready.

Not once did anyone ever open the door, except for his mother who berated him for leaving it unlocked. He threw the knife away after an incident in which he’d been playing German submarine and accidentally nicked his special place, which would forever seem a bit less special after that.

When he was eight years old his mother took his crayons away for drawing on the walls, so he made himself a spit map showing all his secret hiding places. He’d put some lemon juice in his mouth then tried to spit it out onto white paper and draw with his fingers to show the landmarks and directions required. Then once it dried he could read the map by holding it over a light bulb.

What he liked best about his spit map were the splotches and lines he didn’t make on purpose—they were just the accidental things that happened when he spat. He believed there were great and wonderful things marked by these accidental sprays, if he could just figure out how to read them.

Mommy had a feces pantry where she kept every poo poo he’d ever made, each one weighed and wrapped in pretty paper, and then she wrote the date on the paper, and the number, and weight. The feces pantry was like a big refrigerator that kept all the packages nice and cold. The feces pantry stood right next to the avocado refrigerator in the kitchen.

“Look look!” Mommy cried, showing him a teeny little package. “It’s your number one number two!”

The trees in their back yard were old and all covered with big bumps. Mommy said that the trees were sick, that trees got diseases just like people did.

But Frank knew the big bumps were knobs, and when he got bigger he would pull and pull until the trees opened so that he could go inside and play. And maybe that’s where his daddy had gone and if he went there he would see his daddy again.

But he wouldn’t tell Mommy.

There were all kinds of good things on the floor he could eat. There were jelly babies and broken crackers and dust bunnies and marbles and pennies and paper. He decided the marbles were too big and hard.

Paper was the best vegetable he ever ate. It tasted just like paper!

Everybody had a belly chime, but Mommy had the very best belly chime. If he put his ear right on her belly and listened real hard he could hear her heart laughing!

The oven tongue was big and white and hot like the sun. Mommy put water and flowers in and the oven rolled out bread on its hot hot tongue!

Every new day the windows looked at him until they got tired of looking at him and they closed and Mommy told them all a story and Frankie and the windows all went to sleep. Until the very next day when everything was bright and warm again and the windows looked so hard at him they hurt his eyes.

The whistle came from a place a long long way away and it got louder and louder until it made everything so white, so bright, and then there was Frankie just like he’d always been there, and nobody could quite believe he wouldn’t be there forever.

“[B]ecause I couldn’t find the food I liked.”

—Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”

The hardest thing is finding the right way to end. You are weak and in pain, the degree of weakness and pain dependent upon how many of the modern amelioratives you’ve decided to apply to whatever ancient or largely extinct illness you’ve selected for the core of your performance. Too many and your act fails to convince, too few and you are so distracted by discomfort and imminent mortality you lose the perspective necessary to make the performance an art.

He could feel Mickey, his lover of two decades, hovering in the wings off-camera. This
was
a broadcast performance, was it not? For the moment he could not remember, and there was too much sweat in his eyes for him to see clearly. He coughed up a glob of blood and felt it trickle down his chin. The hemorrhagic symptoms had always been the most difficult for Mickey to witness—somewhat strange in a medical professional, but maybe, with modern fluid control, lower level attendants encountered minimal blood outside its proper vessel. Mickey hovered, ready to end the performance prematurely, to apply more neural blockers, to end the mess. Mickey had always hated mess. It made them an odd couple.

Spread-eagled on the see-through bed, tilted steeply as if to launch into the crowd—the position was designed to display the plague tumours in the groin and armpits, a balanced selection of egg- and apple-sized, a variety of buboes, boils, knobs, kernels, biles, blisters, blains, pimples, and wheals.

The lower portion of the bed would be thoroughly smeared with blood and diarrhea by now. The stench would be terrible, but some paid extra for an olfactory broadcast. People in the Dark Ages had believed they were being killed by a magical change in the very composition of the air. Back then everything had smelled, everything had been a mess. Here, all the stage techs would be wearing filters in their nasal passages, Mickey’s the most powerful. Jerome wore the most porous filter possible, to experience his condition thoroughly, but not be overwhelmed by it.

“It’s time to end this one.” Mickey in his ear like the voice of the medieval god.

“Not yet,” he sub vocalized. “I haven’t reached the moment yet.”

“Death isn’t a moment, Jerome. Death is forever.”

Jerome knew his smile would look like either a grimace or delirium. “Not that moment. That peaceful moment when you understand what it means to be mortal.”

“Save the bullshit for the interviews, okay? Let’s get out of here—your vitals are looking a bit less artful.”

Jerome blinked rapidly until his vision cleared. “I want to see some of the audience first.”

God sighed dramatically in his ear. “It’s your show.”

The air in front of him was suddenly layered with images of crowds, small groups, individuals lounging in comfortable chairs, just a selection of those who permitted, or demanded, a two-way feed. Jerome recognized a number of the regulars: a wizened old man in antique lounging pyjamas, the middle-aged French couple with their three teenagers, a small group of adolescents, several people with the image of The Disease Artist as the biblical Job emblazoned on the front of their robes along with the inscription
He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. JOB 9:22.

Despite his convictions about the importance of his performances, he believed there were things children did not need to see, but he’d had little luck controlling their access. An increasing portion of his following consisted of children and teens, with particular interest from The Filthies. Having decided to forego contemporary personal hygiene technologies in favour of an unwashed look, the Filthies professed a belief in the “natural realities” of dirt and odour, and claimed that the bulk of contemporary society had removed itself from the “real” world.

“You put this stuff out there,” Mickey would say, “and you have to live with the fact that people are going to make of it what they will.”

Normally he would end a performance simply by closing his eyes for thirty seconds or so. Often at that point, the transformation of his body would appear to accelerate, skin turning colour and erupting, sometimes showing actual decay faked within the transmission in order to show the eventual progress of the disease.

Sometimes a private client would request a demonstration of old fashioned embalming techniques after the disease had completed its work. Such demonstrations were completely canned, differing from each other only in the diseased appearance of the apparently dead body. He’d never told anyone that these embalming shows were essentially reruns, but then no one had ever asked.

The children’s stares were attentive, questioning. This time he just started crying. Somewhere in his head God cried “Cut!”

From
The Disease Artist: A Performance Chronicle
:

His first performances were in prisons, for the population at large, or sometimes for an individual inmate whose crime was particularly heinous. In perfect safety, of course, his act broadcast from a studio to protect him from the inmates and the inmates from the disease he had chosen to nurse along and bring to some spectacular and dramatic conclusion.

These performances, not surprisingly, were some-what controversial. It seemed now that there were as many prisons in the world as universities, with a commensurate number of advocates and activists. Everyone had at least one friend or relative in such an institution, and the common belief was that the performances of the Disease Artist constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

The warden who had ordered the performances claimed they cheered the inmates by demonstrating how much worse their conditions could be, and by putting them in touch with the “absolute value” of life itself.

The Disease Artist had his doubts—he could see the look on the faces of his captive audience when Ebola made him cry tears of blood. But at least he was performing, and that was what mattered. He appeared in a black-barred cage, pleased with how the backdrop showed off his poses.

The Disease Artist always made his talents accessible to members of the scientific community. But he insisted that they pay like any other customer.

As he passed through the restaurant Jerome could hear the intermittent whoosh of air jets: scent and disinfectant, so prevalent anymore that people rarely noticed them. Jerome noticed them. With each of his steps a push of air followed. He’d stop, and the jets in his immediate vicinity would stop. He had long believed that this daily orchestra of nozzle and pump paid him particular attention, tracking his progress through the world. When he’d start walking again, the hissing breath of dozens of hidden vents pursued him.

Intent on his lunch of steam, Mickey appeared not to notice his arrival. Mouth open over the wide nozzle, careful to avoid accidentally grazing his straining lips against the spout, he inhaled deeply. No mess, no worry, nothing to mar the teeth or stain the mouth.

“Have you ever thought,” Jerome said, “about what it takes to turn a cow into steam? I mean the mechanics of it, what they have to
do
to that cow?”

Mickey glanced up, closed the spout. “Jerome, don’t start.” He wiped his lips carefully with a disposable disinfect, although there was nothing to wipe. “This is beef now. Beef, Jerome. I can’t remember the last time I saw a cow.”

Jerome glanced at the menu, as usual couldn’t find anything he liked, put it down again. “I’m doing cholera next week,” he said. “Symptoms show up in 12-48 hours so you’ll need to infect me at the last minute. I’ll spend the next few days preparing mentally.”

“Cholera’s old news. You’ve done it half a dozen times already.”

“It was important,” Jerome said. “It was the world’s first global disease. India to Russia to Europe. It was a full partner with the Industrial Revolution.”

“People didn’t know how to handle their excrement. It made its way into everything, including the drinking water.” Mickey inserted his fingertips into his front pocket, which buzzed as sonics scrubbed the fingernails and tips. When he removed them they looked as transparent as glass. “I’ll get everything ready. But don’t let this one go on too long. You’re doing too many performances. Your resistance is down.

“It’s what I do.” He wrapped his arms around Mickey, felt him shrinking away in aversion. Jerome could not remember the last time he had really held Mickey. As if Mickey’s very flesh feared that some of him might rub off.

Mickey modified the cholera strain so that the illness would last a week and a half rather than the usual two days, giving him more time to ease into the role, and time for more people to attend. This tampering was well documented, of course, but no one seemed to mind. Ticket sales, especially for the live seating, were way up. Several entertainments concerning the early nineteenth century had been popular recently, and the kids, especially the Filthies, liked the clothes from that period. Whole troops of them climbed into the cramped seats. Jerome didn’t believe anyone should be too comfortable at one of his performances, so he controlled the seating where he could. He also didn’t like to see the same people in the audience for extended periods of time, but he gave discounts for repeat tickets.

Some people wanted to see The Disease Artist for a short visit each day, to note the subtle progress of the disease and form their own appreciation of its changes. Some liked to sit in the audience for an eight-hour stretch, content to listen to The Disease Artist’s own chronicle of symptoms and perceptions. Many appreciated most his careful attention to details and set design. For the cholera epidemic he had replicated a Paris of costume balls and mass graves.

And for a small additional charge they could touch the bare flesh of The Disease Artist himself. All inoculations included.

“It chose its victims erratically and suddenly,” he announced, gesturing toward his legs and rib cage. “See how the skin becomes black and blue, how the hands and feet shrink within their gloves of skin.” Suddenly he collapsed under the pain of extreme muscular cramps. The audience gasped and pressed closer.

Jerome felt his mind slip in and out of dementia much like a change of clothes. Long ago he’d recognized that first putting on a new disease was like putting on a new suit, being acutely aware of where it fit and where it didn’t, in general feeling a little uncomfortable, and not quite yourself. But eventually the suit becomes you, and you gradually become something other: a lizard or a bird or a dragon. You become the body trying to find its kinship with the world. Through disease he had become the universe temporarily made conscious, so that the universe might know its own suffering.

He opened his eyes. People were rushing around. A small girl had crawled forward, trying to kiss him. “No!
” he screamed. Trying to push himself away from the child, he had a sudden vision of filth leaving the body, of oils and hair and a variety of blood products pulled skyward in a silent exodus of fluids and skin flakes and white cells and sweat and this dew of urine and fecal fractions rising out of the mass of humanity and smearing the lens of God’s eye.

He blinked. Blinked again. God’s lips to his ears. “I’m getting you out of here,” Mickey whispered.

“The problem, the problem is . . .” He felt himself choking.

“Jerome, calm down!”

“The problem is people have forgotten how to honour their mortality.”

Jerome’s sister had died five years ago, just before the height of his popularity. One of Mickey’s colleagues at the hospital had called to say she was failing, but by the time Jerome reached the hospital his sister had already passed, to use the old word now back in common parlance. He almost didn’t recognize her, wrapped in that thick, bluish, so called “life blanket
” the hospitals always used. The blanket appeared to have its own respiratory and circulatory systems, breathing in and out with groaning sighs and subtly changing shade like a living thing. It supplied oxygen and some medication, but more importantly absorbed the mess: the fluids, the odour.

Of course a death blanket was what it actually was—it was the clothing the contemporary dead person was expected to wear. But Jerome thought his sister looked better than she had in years. And that there was something terribly wrong with that.

He stepped up and kissed her on the lips. She seemed dry as a mummy, liable to flake away at any moment, that the blanket had taken something out of her.

He was struck by how thick the blanket was, how organic—it looked like some great flat fish or manta ray. Tentatively he reached down and touched the thing. It felt vaguely fish-like. He could feel something like scales. It seemed to push toward him slightly, gradually gripping his finger, then letting go, as if realizing he wasn’t on the day’s menu.
Sorry
, he thought,
some day you’ll get your chance. But you already know that, don’t you?

He lifted the blanket away from her. He picked her up gently and carried her to the window, an astonishing thing to do. Her body in his arms was lighter than his memories of her.

The Disease Artist watched as images of himself washed across the bedroom wall, having followed him there from every other wall in the apartment. Mickey had always insisted that they must keep informed. The coverage was of the panic at last night’s
Cholera!
performance. Suddenly the images focused in on an old interview: he marvelled at how young he looked. Since then he’d accumulated a number of scars he had chosen not to repair.

The caption along the bottom read
Interview excerpt, The Bulletin
:

Q: Do you feel pain when you take on the full symptomology of a disease?

A: We now have extremely effective painkillers, of course, so theoretically I wouldn’t have to feel any pain at all. But the look of a disease depends as much on the physical constraints that pain imposes as it does on the smell, colour, and distortion of flesh. Pain also imposes certain attitudes which are necessary to a good performance. So part of the art comes from inviting pain into the performance, but regulating it so that the artist’s perceptions remain clear.