Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “He’ll survive,” RuthClaire said. “Maybe he knows sign language.”

  “What about Adam? Isn’t it awkward for him, too?”

  “He appreciates the situation’s humor. The reporter will blink first, believe me.”

  Blau swept an arm at the walls of the spacious new chamber—careful, though, to keep his elbow tight against his side. “Is Abraxas dangerous? Hell, yes, Mr. Loyd.”

  The white plaster, or Sheetrock, walls rose to a height of ten feet or so. Above them, extending another ten or twelve feet, were the cold red bricks of the old school’s outer walls. Ceiling fans with wooden blades, motionless now, hung down from the shadows of the loft space. Then I dropped my gaze to the banners and paintings of the Haitian exhibit.

  “Witch-doctor territory,” Blau said, laughing. “One of the best collections of primitive Caribbean art ever put on display in the South. We did back flips to get it.”

  “Expensive?”

  Blau shook his hand at the wrist. “Under this administration, military bands receive more government money than does the entire National Endowment for the Arts.”

  Dazzling tropical colors and bustling marketplaces danced in their frames on the Sheetrock. I liked what I saw. This painting was recognizably a portrait, that a landscape, this one a street scene. The banners at intervals among the paintings were more puzzling. They featured beaded or sequined designs on long strips of silk or velvet. Even so, their cabalistic patterns seemed right at home in a gallery billing itself Abraxas.

  “What’s dangerous about these items?” I asked.

  “By themselves, I guess, not much—unless vaudun, the Haitian voodoo religion, intimidates you. The banners you see here are what Haitian priests and witches call vevés. On the island itself, they’re laid out on the ground in meal or corn flour. They’re ceremonial drawings that play a role in creating trance states among vaudun initiates. Ours were made by real Haitians, but they’re only replicas of the vevés you might see in one of the canopy-covered temples during a real ceremony.”

  “What’s dangerous about this exhibit,” RuthClaire said, “is that David and the others have put articles about the Duvalier government and our treatment of the Haitian boat people in odd places around the room. David’s originally from Brooklyn—a radical-pinko-commie with a monthly car payment.”

  Blau put one arm across his midriff and bowed.

  “What made you decide to go after Haitian art?” I asked.

  “Adam did. He’s from a little island off the Haitian coast.”

  “Paul knows,” RuthClaire said. “That’s how we got our surname.”

  “Anyway,” Blau continued, “it seems that Adam’s people—the habiline remnant he was raised among—had occasional contact with members of the vaudun cult. The cult has its roots in West Africa, among the Arada-Dahomey Kingdoms, and even though Adam’s ancestors come from East Africa, they share their continent of origin and their negritude with the voodooists. The African-ness of the habilines and the majority of poor Haitians unites the two groups. It’s a mystical thing, I’m afraid.”

  RuthClaire said, “Paul thought that a show in this old building was tantamount to deep-sixing an artist’s work in the Chattahoochee.”

  “Not a bit,” said Blau, taking her arm. “Let’s show Mr. Loyd what really scares the more conservative members of our board.” We turned left into a small chamber with one strange, inward-curving wall, and I looked a question at RuthClaire.

  “Eroticism,” she said. “Radical politics upsets fewer people than does graphic sex or nudity.”

  “Especially if it has a racial or religious angle,” Blau added.

  “Yeah, you get red faces, resignations, and withdrawn funding pledges.”

  “Especially withdrawn funding pledges,” Blau said.

  “Then why bother to show it?” I asked.

  At which point I discovered that on the chamber’s curved wall, and on the two long straight walls connecting with it, were arrayed thirty or forty large black-and-white photographs in simple chromium frames. A piece of Plexiglas as big as an automobile’s windshield hung eight feet off the floor in the room’s center, and inside it was the word

  STEREOTYPES

  in thick, emphatic red letters, with the photographer’s name—Maria-Katherine Kander—in smaller characters beneath it. The photos jumped out like a sudden angry slap.

  “Holy Christ,” I murmured.

  “They’re best taken in small doses,” Blau told me. “But in here, you’ll have to prepare for a full-scale assault. Have a gander. We’ll stay out of your way.”

  He and RuthClaire withdrew so that I could prowl along the curved wall looking at Ms. Kander’s outrageous photographs. The first I stopped at, and studied, showed an angular black woman lying naked on her back on a sterile white sheet. Stacked between her legs, and in turgid piles around her thighs and belly, lay at least a dozen tiger-striped watermelons, a gang-banging team of watermelons. The expression on the woman’s face suggested nothing short of complacent ecstasy.

  I moved on.

  Another photograph was a frontal nude of a black man from the shoulders down and the thighs up. This faceless man had a daunting erection. At an upward angle paralleling that of his hard on, he gripped the ebony barrel of a submachine-gun. I blinked and moved on. Next, an anorexic white woman in high heels and leather panties was lowering her mouth to the head of a microphone held out to her by a disdainful rock musician with an electric guitar draped across his body. Yet another photograph featured a sunken-eyed man in concentration-camp garb, a Star of David stenciled on his arm band, gripping the bars of a bank vault. Ingots of gold bullion—like so many loaves of gilded bread—loaded the shelves behind him.

  An even more elaborate photograph showed a priest in a cassock speaking to a congregation of naked parishioners, his fingers crossed behind him. Some of the people in the pews were fondling each other, while a few elderly worshipers, pathetic in their wrinkles, frowned or slept. At the altar below the priest—the picture had been taken from behind his head—kneeled a chimpanzee in black tie and tails, a top hat on its head. I wondered at the length of time it must have required to stage that one.

  Blau approached. “What’s the verdict?”

  “They’re actually offensive. They seem to be trying to offend me.”

  “They are.”

  “They succeed.”

  “If you say so,” Blau replied, “yes, they do.”

  “Succeed in offending me?”

  “In offending you and in fulfilling the artist’s intention.”

  “That intention being to offend?”

  RuthClaire appeared at my elbow. “You’ve got it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Until just now I was pretty sure you guys would regard my taking offense as reprehensibly unhip.”

  “No,” Blau conceded, “they’re definitely offensive.”

  RuthClaire nodded agreement. “Intrinsically offensive.”

  “Offensive in an absolute sense,” Blau added.

  We stood in the gallery room looking at the definitely offensive, intrinsically offensive—offensive in an almost absolute sense—photographs of Maria-Katherine Kander. Our abashed reverence before these disgusting artifacts began to irk me. Their “eroticism”—I hadn’t seen anything that truly qualified—seemed to consist mostly of exposed flesh and simulated acts of fetishistic sodomy. Despite RuthClaire’s implied disclaimer, I saw the pictures as pornographic political statements. They were racist, misogynist, fascist, anticlerical, and maybe a dozen other things too twisted or subtle to pinpoint. Antievolutionary? Pro-consumerism? I had no idea. But their offensiveness was beyond question.

  “What’s the goddamn point?”

  “Paul, try not to get ridiculously worked up over this.”

  “You mean there are degrees of offense that it’s unhip to take? I thought I could get as goddamn offended as I liked.” I appealed to Blau. “All I’m asking is, What’s the goddamn point o
f taking pictures that are meant to offend?”

  “Really,” he replied, “it would be out of bounds for me to speak for Ms. Kander. Worse, you’d probably take it as some sort of definitive statement or explanation of her intent, which wouldn’t be fair to either the artist or you.”

  “Criminy!” I said. “Who is this gal? Her name sounds German. Is she a Nazi?”

  RuthClaire, who had an ostensibly calming hand on my arm, said, “I don’t know her ethnic background. She’s from Tennessee.”

  “She doesn’t live in Atlanta,” I hazarded. “She’d be an idiot to show such crap here—in this neighborhood, in a city with a black mayor—and try to live here, too.”

  “She’s based in New York City,” Blau said, “but she could live in Atlanta if she wished. Atlantans are more knowing about contemporary art than you might think.”

  “Unlike your average hick from Beulah Fork?”

  “Paul,” RuthClaire said, “let’s go see Adam’s work.” She put a gentle pressure on my arm. “Before the crowd comes in.”

  “Wait a minute. I want to know David’s interpretation of Ms. Kander’s intent.”

  “But that would be to preempt—”

  “RuthClaire, for God’s sake, let me talk to the man.” I rounded on Blau. “Look, I’ve got a mind of my own. You won’t unduly influence my own final stance. I’m trying to understand—to appreciate—these photographs. Isn’t that what an exhibit is for, to prompt greater understanding and appreciation of an artist’s work?”

  Blau surrendered to my tirade. “Okay, you’re passionate about this. You deserve an answer.”

  I waited.

  “I think Kander’s attempts to offend are motivated by a desire to heighten our outrage at the stereotypes she presents. It’s satire, Mr. Loyd, not a call to embrace what you see as, God forbid, accurate depictions of the people involved. Her technique forces you to reassess your basic attitude about each image. The art’s not only in her skills as a photographer, but in the outrageous scenes she stages for the camera. I get off on that. The young lady’s droll.”

  “That’s one word for it,” I said. “But is that how everybody who walks in here will finally interpret her work?”

  “Oh, no. Some will take one look, turn around, and walk out. Others won’t see anything but naked flesh. For them, it’s pornographic, and they’ll either enjoy it or scorn it as such.”

  I waved at the walls. “Is this stuff for sale?”

  “Well, prints are. That’s how Ms. Kander makes her living. By today’s standards, they’re dirt cheap—but Kander’s popular and sells in volume.”

  “Who’s she popular with? Voyeurs? The artsy-fartsy crowd?”

  “Both, I guess. There’s no form to fill out to buy one. So far as I know, you don’t even have to be twenty-one.”

  “Where would you hang these things? The bathroom?”

  “That’s up to you. Are you thinking of ordering one?”

  “Hell, no!” I virtually shouted.

  Adam arrived in the company of a staff member named Bonnie Carlin, but I was still hot about the rub-your-nose-in-your-own-smug-prejudices strategy of Kander’s “art.” Everything Blau had said about it made a kind of backasswards sense, but I kept thinking that, for all her cleverness and technical skill, she was really accomplishing the Unnecessary, often for the Uncomprehending, and almost always with a (pardon me) Drollery that bespoke a superior smugness all her own.

  Phooey, as Lester Maddox used to like to say.

  Bonnie Carlin delivered a message—it was time to let the clamoring crowd in—and departed. We, too, abandoned the M.-K. Kander Room, crossing the corridor into the third and final gallery room, where Adam’s paintings hung. This room was like the first, but not so large. A single darkened studio loft brooded above us. Below it, all four walls seemed to resonate with the vitality and prehistoric wildness that Adam—who had even begun to wear deodorant—would no longer permit himself to reveal in his day-to-day relationships with others.

  I saw the huge barbed baobab that he had painted at Paradise Farm. I saw rolling silver-brown mounds that could have been either the Lolitabu foothills or a herd of headless mammoths on a dusty African plain. I saw grass fires, volcanic eruptions, jags of icy lightning, and a crowd of silhouetted human (or semihuman) forms either fighting or feasting or copulating. I also saw a series of ambiguous mother-and-child portraits that could have been of RuthClaire and Tiny Paul, or of a baboon female and her capering infant, or even of a genderless adult attacking a smaller figure of the same unidentifiable, but monkeylike, species. There was also a painting of a hominid creature with the head of a dog or a jackal or a hyena, and around its head there glowed a brilliant orange-red light. The exhibit as a whole communicated energy and excitement.

  By my standards, very good stuff.

  Demurely, Adam hung back, his hands behind him. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if he was fearful that I would ridicule this painting or take umbrage at something and walk out. At Paradise Farm, he’d had no such qualms. Here, though, as the only artist on the premises, he appeared to be suffering a terrific bout of the butterflies.

  “They’re good,” I told him. “I like ’em all.”

  Adam smiled. His lips drew back to reveal teeth and gums. Then, flustered, he pursed them shut again.

  By the terms of his contract with Abraxas, Adam had to stick around long enough to meet some of the general public at the opening. Members of the board of directors who had not been able to attend the reception would want to greet him, as would some of the wealthier patrons who always arrived late. Moreover, Blau encouraged his artists to talk to students, impulse visitors, reporters from the Atlanta papers, and other media people. Temperamental aloofness could hurt fund-raising efforts.

  The reception officially ended, and the crowd swarmed in. Adam and RuthClaire withdrew to Gallery Three to receive congratulations and autograph Abraxas flyers. I retreated to Blau’s office and poured myself the last half-glass of Asti Spumante from the only decanter not already empty. Then I drank it up and wandered into Gallery One.

  Haitian art was scoring heavily tonight. I had to reposition my shoulders every few steps to slide through the pockets of people discussing it. Gallery Two, featuring Kander’s work, was also packed. Flushed with admiration or chagrin, two women squeezed out of that gallery into the hall.

  “It’s a wonder the place hasn’t been raided,” one of them said.

  “Goodness, Doreen, the woman’s making a statement.”

  I followed Doreen and her scandalized friend into Gallery Three. The Montarazes, huddled together for mutual protection, stood at the front of a ladder-like contraption giving access to the loft overhead. The sight of one particular hanger-on surrounding them brought me up short.

  There before me—in checked shirt, green knit tie, dun pants, and fake suede jacket—slouched Brian Nollinger, the anthropologist from Emory, the Judas who had tried to turn Adam over to an agent of the INS. He had shaved his Fu Manchu, but his granny glasses and his air of unflappable belonging—“Why would anyone be unhappy to see me here?”—identified him more surely to me than a fingerprint check. And it was no comfort remembering that, but for my own jealous meddling, Nollinger might not have come into any of our lives. In a sense, I had created him . . . as an ongoing annoyance, if not as a human being.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Nollinger turned. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I came to see the show.”

  “How long does it take you to see it?”

  “Well—”

  “You don’t know a damn thing about art. You’re the kind of gallerista who thinks Winslow Homer was a blind Greek poet.”

  “Look, if it’s okay with you, I came to apologize.”

  “For calling me an enemy of science?” RuthClaire asked. “For accusing me of keeping my own private slave?”

  For a moment, Nollinger looked profoundly embarrassed. “Yes, ma’am, I regret that. I was feuding
with Alistair Patrick Blair.”

  I shooed off the other hangers-on. “A scholarly feud excuses you of slinging mud at an innocent woman?”

  “I had no idea she’d marry Adam, Mr. Loyd. At least I believed the creature—the person—under her roof was a living representative of Homo habilis. That was more than Blair was willing to concede. Give me that much credit.”

  “Are you still shooting monkeys up with No-Dōz?”

  That was a rabbit punch. The whites of Nollinger’s weary eyes swung toward me. “I concluded those researches long ago. I’ve been trying to obtain a grant for some field work outside the States. But this isn’t an easy time to find funding.”

  “So you showed up here to put the pinch on RuthClaire and Adam, I take it.”

  He shook his head, less in denial than in pity for the depth of my pettiness and suspicion. But one amazing consequence of this exchange was that RuthClaire had begun to turn a sympathetic eye on the man. She lacked the constitution for a sustained grudge, a character trait from which I, too, had benefited.

  Nollinger gestured at the painting nearest us. “Another of my reasons for coming was professional. I’ve always taken an interest in documented cases of the creative impulse in collateral species.”

  The poor fool was digging his own pitfall. I decided to lend him a hand. “What kind of cases, Dr. Nollinger?”

  “Well, some years back, a chimpanzee in the London Zoo learned to draw and paint. He became proficient at putting circles and crosslike designs on canvas.”

  “A chimpanzee?” RuthClaire said.

  “That’s right. I believe his name was Congo. They gave him his own show. He even sold some paintings. The literature calls it the first documented exhibit of subhuman art in history.”

  RuthClaire’s eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to say that this is the second?”

  Nollinger was not an utter idiot. His face turned red. “N-no, of course not. It’s just that . . . well, w-w-we’re all primates, you know. The impulse for self-expression may be b-basic to every primate species.”