City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Lake placed 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, Roger Mandible, who, unbeknownst to Shriek, had created his subtle amber shades from the earwax of a well-known diva who had had the misfortune to fall asleep at a cafe table where Mandible was mixing his paints. It made Lake snicker every time he saw it.

  After a moment, Lake walked over to Shriek and the gentleman and engaged in the kind of obsequious small talk that nauseated him.

  “Yes, I’m the artist.”

  “Maxwell Bibble. A pleasure to meet you.”

  “Likewise . . . Bibble. It is exceedingly rare to meet a true lover of art.”

  Bibble stank of beets. Lake could not get over it. Bibble stank of beets. He had difficulty not saying Bibble imbibes bottled beets beautifully . . .

  “Well, you do . . . you do so well with, er, colors”, Bibble said.

  “How discerning you are. Did you hear what he said, Janice,” Lake said.

  Shriek nodded nervously, said, “Mr. Bibble’s a businessman, but he has always wanted to be a—” Beet? thought Lake; but no: “ . . . a critic of the arts,” Shriek finished.

  “Yes, marvelous colors,” Bibble said, this time with more confidence.

  “It is nothing. The true artiste can bend even the most stubborn light to his will,” Lake said.

  “I imagine so. I thought this piece might look good in the kitchen, next to the wife’s needle point.”

  “‘In the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint,’” Lake echoed blankly, and then put on a frozen smile.

  “But I’m wondering if maybe it is too big . . . ”

  “It’s smaller than it looks,” Shriek offered, somewhat pathetically, Lake thought.

  “Perhaps I could have it altered, cut down to size,” Lake said, glaring at Shriek.

  Bibble nodded, putting a hand to his chin in rapt contemplation of the possibilities.

  “Or maybe I should just saw it in fourths and you can take the fourth you like best,” Lake said. “Or maybe eighths would be more to your liking?”

  Bibble stared blankly at him for a moment, before Shriek stepped in with, “Artists! Always joking! You know, I really don’t think it will be too large. You could always buy it and if it doesn’t fit, return it—not that I could refund your money, but you could pick something else.”

  Enough! Lake thought, and disengaged himself from the conversation. Leaving Shriek to ramble on convincingly about the cunning strength of his brushstrokes, a slick blather of nonsense that Lake despised and admired all at once. He could not complain that Shriek neglected to promote him—she was the only one who would take his work—but he hated the way she appropriated his art, speaking at times almost as if she herself had created it. A failed painter and a budding art historian, Shriek had started the gallery through the largesse of her famous brother, the historian Duncan Shriek, who had also procured for her many of her first and best clients. Lake felt that her drive to push, push, push was linked to a certain guilt at not having had to start at the bottom like everyone else.

  Eventually, as Lake gave a thin-lipped smile, Bibble, still reeking of beets, announced that he couldn’t possibly commit at the moment, but would come back later. Definitely, he would be back—and what a pleasure to meet the artist.

  To which Lake said, and was sorry even as the words left his mouth, “It is a pleasure to be the artist.”

  A nervous laugh from Shriek. An unpleasant laugh from the almost-buyer, whose hand Lake tried his best to crush as they shook goodbye.

  After Bibble had left, Shriek turned to him and said, “That was wonderful!”

  “What was wonderful?”

  Shriek’s eyes became colder than usual. “That smug, arrogant, better-than-thou artist’s demeanor. They like that, you know—it makes them feel they’ve bought the work of a budding genius.”

  “Well haven’t they?” Lake said. Was she being sarcastic? He’d pretend otherwise.

  Shriek patted him on the back. “Whatever it is, keep it up. Now, let’s take a look at the new paintings.”

  Lake bit his lip to stop himself from committing career suicide, walked over to the table, and retrieved the two canvases. He spread them out with an awkward flourish.

  Shriek stared at them, a quizzical look on her face.

  “Well?” Lake finally said, Raffe’s words from the night before buzzing in his ears. “Do you like them?”

  “Hmm?” Shriek said, looking up from the paintings as if her thoughts had been far away.

  Lake experienced a truth viscerally in that moment which he had only ever realized intellectually before: he was the least of Shriek’s many prospects, and he was boring her.

  Nonetheless, he pressed on, braced for further humiliation: “Do you like them?”

  “Oh! The paintings?”

  “No—the . . . ” The ear wax on your walls? he thought. The beets? “Yes, the paintings.”

  Shriek’s brows furrowed and she put a hand to her chin in unconscious mimicry of the departed Bibble. “They’re very . . . interesting.”

  Interesting.

  “They’re of my father’s hands,” Lake said, aware that he was about to launch into a confession both unseemly and useless, as if he could help make the paintings more appealing to her by saying this happened, this is a person I know, it is real therefore it is good. But he had no choice—he plunged forward: “He is a startlingly nonverbal man, my father, as most insect catchers are, but there was one way he felt comfortable communicating with me, Janice—by coming home with his hands closed—and when he’d open them, there would be some living jewel, some rare wonder of the insect world—sparkling black, red, or green—and his eyes would sparkle too. He’d name them all for me in his soft, stumbling voice—lovingly so; how they were all so very different from one another, how although he killed them and we often ate them in hard times, how it must be with respect and out of knowledge.” Lake looked at the floor. “He wanted me to be an insect catcher too, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to become an artist.” He remembered the way the joy had shriveled up inside his father when he realized his son would not be following in his footsteps. It had hurt Lake to see his father so alone, trapped by his reticence and his solitary profession, but he knew it hurt his father more. He missed his father; it was an ache in his chest.

  “That’s a lovely story, Martin. A lovely story.”

  “So you’ll take them?”

  “No. But it is a lovely story.”

  “But see how perfectly I’ve rendered the insects,” Lake said, pointing to them.

  “Yes, you have. But it’s a slow season and I don’t have the space. Maybe when your other work sells.” Her tone as much as said not to press her too far.

  With a great effort of will, Lake said, “I understand. I’ll come visit again in a few months.”

  The invitation to a beheading was looking better to Lake all the time.

  When Lake returned to his apartment to work on Mr. Kashmir’s commission, he was decidedly out of sorts. In addition to his disappointing trip to the gallery, he had spent money on greasy sausage that now sat in his belly like an extra coil of intestines. It did not help that the image of the man from his nightmares blinked on and off in his head no matter how hard he tried to suppress it.

  Nevertheless, he dutifully picked up the pages of illustrations he had torn from discarded books bought cheap at the back door of the Borges Bookstore. He set about cutting them out with his rusty paint-speckled scissors. Ideas for his commissions came to him not in flashes from his muse but as calm re-creations of past work. Lately, he knew, he had become lazy, providing literal “translations” for his commissions, while suppressing any hint of his own imagination.

  Still, this did not explain why, following a period of work during which he stared at the envelope and the invitation where it
lay on his easel, he looked down to find that after carefully cutting out a trio of etched dancing girls, he had just as carefully sliced off their heads and then cut star designs out of their torsos.

  In disgust, Lake tossed the scissors aside and let the ruins of the dancing girls flutter to the floor like exotic confetti. Obviously, Mr. Kashmir’s assignment would have to await a spark of inspiration. In the meantime, the afternoon still young, he would take Raffe’s advice and work on something for himself.

  Lake walked over to the crowded easel, emptied it by placing four or five canvases on the already chaotic bed, pulled his stool over, retrieved a blank canvas, and pinned it up. Slowly, he began to brushstroke oils onto the canvas. Despite three years of endless commissions, the familiar smell of fresh paint excited his senses and, even better, the light behind him was sharp, clear, so he did not have to resort to borrowing Dame Truff’s lantern.

  As he progressed, Lake did not know the painting’s subject, or even how best to apply the oils, but he continued to create layers of paint, sensitive to the pressure of the brush against canvas. Raffe had forced the oils upon him months ago. At the time, he had given her a superior, doubtful look, since her last gift had been special paints created from a mixture of natural pigments and freshwater squid ink. Lake had used them for a week before his first paintings began to fade; soon his canvases were as blank as before. Raffe, always trying to find the good in the bad, had told him, when next they met at a cafe, that he could become famous selling “disappearing paintings.” He had thrown the paint set at her. Fortunately, it missed and hit a stranger—a startled and startlingly handsome man named Merrimount.

  This time, however, Raffe’s idea appeared to be a good one. It had been several years since he had used oils and he had forgotten the ease of creating texture with them, how the paint built upon itself. He especially liked how he could blend colors for gradations of shadow. Assuming the current troubles were temporary—and that a drop cloth would suffice until that time—and even now giving a quick look over his shoulder, he worked on building color: emerald, jade, moss, lime, verdigris. He mixed all the shades in, until he had a luminous, shining background. Then, in dark green, he began to paint a face . . .

  Only the Religious Quarter’s evening call to prayer—the solemn tolling of the bell five times from the old Truffidian cathedral—roused Lake from his trance. He blinked, turned toward the window, then looked back at his canvas. In shock and horror, he let the brush fall from his hand.

  The head had a brutish mouth of broken glass teeth through which it smiled cruelly, while above the ruined nose, the eyes shone like twin flames. Lake stared at the face from his nightmare.

  For a long time, Lake examined his work. His first impulse, to paint over it and start fresh, gradually gave way to a second, deeper impulse: to finish it. Far better, he thought, that the face should remain in the painting than, erased, once more take up residence in his mind. A little thrill ran through him as he realized it was totally unlike anything he had done before.

  “I’ve trapped you,” he said to it, gloating.

  It stared at him with its unearthly eyes and said nothing. On the canvas it might still smile, but it could not smile only at him. Now it smiled at the world.

  He worked on it for a few more minutes, adding definition to the eyelids and narrowing the cheekbones, relieved, for now that he had come around to the idea that the face belonged in the world, that perhaps it had always been in the world, he wanted it perfect in every detail, that no trace of it should ever haunt him again.

  As the shadows lengthened and deepened, falling across his canvas, he put aside his palette, cleaned his brushes with turpentine, washed them in the sink across the hall, and quickly dressed to the sounds of a busker on the street below. After he had put on his jacket, he stuck his sketchbook and two sharpened pencils into his breast pocket—in case his mysterious host should need an immediate demonstration of his skills—and, running his fingers over the ornate seal, deposited the invitation there as well.

  A few moments of rummaging under his bed and he had fished out a collapsible rubber frog head he had worn to the Festival of the Freshwater Squid a year before—it would have to do for a costume. He stuffed it in a side pocket, one bulbous yellow eye staring up at him absurdly. Further rummaging uncovered his map. Every wise citizen of Ambergris carried a map of the city, for its alleys were legion and seemed to change course of their own accord.

  He spent a nervous moment adjusting his tie, then locked his apartment door behind him. He took a deep breath, descended the stairs, and set off down Albumuth Boulevard as the sky melted into the orange-green hue peculiar to Ambergris and Ambergris alone.

  We find this quality of illumination in almost all of Lake’s paintings, but nowhere more strikingly than in the incendiary “The Burning House,” where it is meshed to a comment on his fear of birds—the only painting with any hint of birds in it besides “Invitation to a Beheading” and “Through His Eyes” (which I will discuss shortly). “The Burning House” blends reds, yellows, and oranges much as “Invitation” blends greens, but for a different effect. The painting shows a house with its roof and front wall torn away—to expose an owl, a stork, and a raven that are burning alive, while the totality of the flames themselves form the shadow of a fire bird, done in a style similar to Lagach. Clearly, this is as close to pure fantasy as Lake ever came, a wish fulfillment work in which his fear of birds is washed away by fire. As Venturi wrote, “The charm of the picture lies in its mysteriously suggestive power—the sigh of fatality that blows over the strangely contorted figures.” Here we may hold another piece of the puzzle that describes the process of Lake’s transformation. If so, we do not know quite where to place it—and whether it should be placed near or far away from the puzzle piece that is “Invitation to a Beheading.”

  A less ambiguous link to “Invitation” can be found in the person of Voss Bender, the famous opera composer nee politician, and the tumult following his death—a death that occurred only three days before Lake began “Invitation.” In later interviews, the usually taciturn Lake professed to hold Voss Bender in the highest regard, even as an inspiration (although, when I knew him, I cannot recall him ever mentioning Bender). More than one art historian, noting the repetition of Bender themes in Lake’s work, has wondered if Lake obsessed over the dead composer. Perhaps, as Sabon suggests, “Invitation” represents a memorial to Voss Bender. If so, it is the first in a trilogy of such paintings, the last two, “Through His Eyes” and “Aria to the Brittle Bones of Winter,” clear homages to Bender. —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.

  The dusk had a mingled blood-and-orange-peel scent, and the light as it faded left behind a faint golden residue on the brass doorknobs of bank entrances, on the coppery flagpoles outside the embassies of foreign dignitaries, and on the Fountain of Trillian, with its obelisk at the top of which perched a sad rose-marble cherubim, one elbow propped atop a leering black skull. Crowds had gathered at the surrounding lantern-lit square to hear poets declaim their verse while standing on wooden crates. Nearby taverns shed music and light in equal quantities, the light breaking against the cobblestones in thick shafts, while sidewalk vendors plied passersby with all manner of refreshments, from Lake’s ill-starred sausages to flagrantly sinful pastries. Few outside of Ambergris realized that the great artist Darcimbaldo had created his fruit and seafood portraits from life—stolen from the vendors, who arranged oranges, apples, figs, and melons into faces with black grapes for eyes, or layered crayfish, trout, crabs, and the lesser squid into the imperious visage of the mayor; these vendors were almost as popular as the sidewalk poets, and had taken to hanging wide-angle lanterns in front of their stalls so that passersby could appreciate their ephemeral art. Through this tightly-packed throng, occasional horse-and-carriages and motored vehicles lurched through like lighthouses for th
e drunk and disorderly, who would push and rock them at every opportunity.

  Here, then, in the flushed faces, in the mixing of dark and light, in the swirling, shadowy facades of buildings, were a thousand scenes that lent themselves to the artist’s eye, but Lake, intent on his map, saw them only as hindrances now.

  And more than hindrances, for the difficulty of circumnavigating the crowds with his cane convinced Lake to flag down a for-hire motored vehicle. An old, sumptuous model, nicer than his apartment and prudently festooned with red and green flags, it had only two drawbacks: the shakes—almost certainly from watered down petrol—and a large, very dirty sheep with which he was forced to share the back seat. Man and sheep contemplated each other with equal unease while the driver smiled and shrugged apologetically (to him or the sheep?), his vehicle racing through the narrow streets. Nonetheless, Lake left the vehicle first, deposited at the edge of the requested neighborhood. The nervous driver sped off at top speed as soon as Lake had paid him. No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.

  As for the neighborhood, located on the southeastern flank of the Religious Quarter, Lake had rarely seen one grimmer. The buildings, four and five stories high, had a scarcity of windows that made them appear to face away from him—inward, toward the maze of houses and apartments that contained his destination. Such stark edifices gave Lake a glimpse of the future, of the decay into which his own apartment building might fall when the New Art moved on and left behind only remnants of unkept promises. The walls were awash in fire burns, the ground level doors rotted or broken open, the balconies that hung precariously over them black with rust. In some places, Lake could see bones worked into the mortar, for there had been a time when the dead were buried in the walls of their own homes.