The Sculptor

by Gregory Funaro

  Then again, there is the theory that Michelangelo might have intentionally sculpted his female figures as such—masculine with female parts—simply because, as we discussed earlier, he viewed the male body as aesthetically superior.

  Masculine with female parts, Cathy said to herself. The male body as aesthetically superior.

  A statement, intentional, a message to the viewer? A message from Michelangelo, from The Michelangelo Killer? A dream, a message from Mom?

  What the fuck?

  Mom. A woman. Dead or alive? Night. A woman. Dead or alive?

  No.

  Mom. Mom’s cancer. Disease. Breast cancer. Breasts? Breasts? The Michelangelo Killer and breasts?

  Am I going crazy?

  Perhaps, replied Sam Markham in her mind.

  Cathy closed the book and returned it to the nightstand—her thoughts now a jumbled mess; the connection between her dream and her search for The Michelangelo Killer—a connection of which she had been so sure upon turning to Slumbering in the Stone—quickly fading into a gnawing sense of foolishness.

  You’re a psychic now, too? asked a mocking voice in her head—a voice that sounded a lot like Steve Rogers.

  Cathy dismissed it and turned off the light. She lay there a long time, unable to sleep—her mind racing with the jigsaw puzzle that had become her life.

  “We’re missing something,” she whispered in the dark. “Aren’t we, Mom? Sam and I, the FBI—all of us. There’s something right there in front of us—just below the surface like the lump in Night’s breast. We see it but we don’t understand. We see it but we look right past it. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Kyon Kim? Please, Mom, help me understand.”

  As if chiseled from the lips of its marble namesake, the brutal silence of night was Cathy’s only reply. She had the urge to call Sam Markham, but because of the hour resolved to wait. Yes, best to talk to him after he gets back today—after she had time to sort things out. And so, with thoughts of Samuel P. Markham—the “P.” standing for “Professor Hildy Has a Crush On”—Cathy Hildebrant fell asleep.

  Chapter 23

  As Cathy finally drifted off to sleep, Sam Markham—at home in his study with his feet on his desk—felt not the slightest bit sleepy when the clock in the bookcase ticked past 3:00 A.M. He would be flying back to Rhode Island in a few hours, and would have plenty of time to once again look over the material from Thursday’s briefing in the FBI plane that would transport him from Quantico to Providence. But something was bothering him; something wasn’t right; something needed to be addressed now.

  In his lap was the report on the Plastination process from Dr. Morris—much of which had been taken from the Body Worlds/Institute for Plastination Web sites. And after carefully reviewing the entire printout, Markham had to agree with Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of Plastination, who said in his introduction that, like most successful inventions, Plastination is simple in theory.

  Simple.

  That was the word that kept bothering Markham.

  Simple.

  Yes, with the right equipment, it seemed to Markham that—at least on the surface—the Plastination process would be “simple” enough for anyone to execute. After decomposition was halted by pumping formalin into the veins and arteries, the key, as von Hagens said, was having the means to pull the liquid polymer into each cell by a process he called “forced vacuum impregnation,” wherein, after the initial fluid exchange step—the step in which water and fatty tissues are removed by submerging the body in an acetone bath—the specimen is placed in a vacuum chamber and the pressure reduced to the point where the acetone boils. The acetone is then suctioned out of the tissue the moment it vaporizes, and the resulting vacuum in the specimen causes the polymer solution to permeate the tissue. This exchange process is allowed to continue until all of the tissue has been completely saturated—a few days for thin slices; weeks for whole bodies.

  Weeks.

  And simple in theory, yes. But even if The Michelangelo Killer did have the money and intelligence to set up his own Plastination lab, unless he had a bunch of body parts lying around—

  Yes. It was that little detail that was bothering Sam Markham the most. The printout from the Body Worlds Web site made it abundantly clear where the Institute for Plastination (IFP) in Heidelberg, Germany, “acquired” its specimens—the majority of which came from its “donation program,” wherein IFP donors legally signed over their bodies to be Plastinated by von Hagens and his crew after their deaths.

  “But who are these people?” Markham asked out loud. “What are their names?”

  Markham sifted through the printout again, unable to find the names of donors anywhere. Yes. It was the feel of the information he was reading; the feel of the whole von Hagens/Body Worlds/Institute for Plastination mind-set. A mind-set that, despite a brief and somewhat hollow overture of thanks to its donors both dead and alive, spoke of their bodies simply as a commodity, as material for the wide-ranging industry of anatomical study—an industry that was sorely in need of plastinated supplies.

  Having been around many dead bodies himself, Sam Markham understood the need for objectivity in the world of medicine and anatomical study as much as he did the need for it in his line of work—understood all too well the need for detachment when looking at a murder victim in order to get his job done. So, yes, Markham could on one hand see the practicality of the industry—the need to treat the donated bodies simply as material. However, it was also clear to Markham that, with regard to the Body World exhibits themselves—exhibits in which its skinless subjects were posed sipping coffee, throwing karate kicks, even riding horses—the creators were subconsciously sending a message to the public that they should see the figures not only as “frozen in life,” but at the same time were asking them to look at just the body itself, completely divorced from the real life that had once activated it.

  No, we should never ask who these people really were.

  Markham thought of The Michelangelo Killer—of the kind of mind, the kind of spirit it would take to create the horror that was his Bacchus. Over his thirteen-year career with the FBI, Markham had learned there was always a certain amount of objectification that went on in the mind of a serial killer with regard to the perception of his victims. But with The Michelangelo Killer, things seemed quite different.

  Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick were just material for his exhibition, he said to himself. Just as the epoxy compound and the wood and the iron and everything else was. Just one component of his art, of his message, of his quest to wake us from our slumber.

  Material.

  Markham flipped to the page in Slumbering in the Stone that he had dog-eared a couple of hours earlier—to the quote from Michelangelo which he had underlined in red: “The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.”

  Marble. Michelangelo’s material—some of which he would transform into works of artistic brilliance; some of which, depending on its location in the block itself, he would damn to the studio floor, to the garbage heap. Hence, both a reverence for the material itself, but yet the understanding that some would have to be discarded.

  Dead bodies. The Michelangelo Killer’s material. He had to have experimented on others before Campbell and Wenick, had to have used humans before perfecting his technique—some of whom, perhaps just pieces at first, he transformed into plastinated works of art; others he simply discarded as waste. Hence, both a reverence for the material, the male figure as aesthetically superior, and the understanding that he would need to waste some of his victims to achieve greatness.

  Marble. Material. Waste. Dead bodies. The male figure as aesthetically superior.

  Something didn’t quite add up.

  Something that was so close, so simple, yet still just so far out of reach.

  Markham sighed and flicked off his desk lamp. He would force himself to sleep, to think about something else for a while. And as he crawled into bed, his thoughts immediately ran to Cathy
Hildebrant. Markham hated to admit how much he had missed her over the last three days; he hated even more to admit how much he was looking forward to seeing her again. However, what really bothered Markham was the nagging suspicion that he was missing something very important; something that might put the art history professor in danger; something that might make him lose someone he cared about all over again.

  Chapter 24

  Steven Rogers prided himself on his youthful appearance. At forty-five and with a head full of curly brown hair that he dyed regularly, the handsome theatre professor was still sometimes carded at the bars along with his graduate student girlfriend—a rare but flattering enough experience to which he actually looked forward, specifically, the patented double take from the doorman or waitress upon seeing the age on his driver’s license. Blessed in part with good genes, it was really his deep-seated sense of vanity that kept him looking so young—coupled with an unconscious desire to always be appealing to the opposite sex. Yes, Steven Rogers ran six miles five times a week; watched his fat and carb intake; still used the Bowflex that his ex-wife bought him for his fortieth birthday; and still lived whenever possible by the old adage his doting mother hammered into him as a child: “Early to bed, early to rise, Steven, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

  Healthy? Yes. Wealthy? He couldn’t really complain. But wise? Well, even Steve Rogers would have to agree that the jury was still out on that one.

  Yes, Rogers had done a lot of dumb things in his forty-five years on this planet—the dumbest of all, perhaps, leaving those e-mails from Ali on his computer. It had been an honest mistake. He had to uninstall then reinstall his AOL software, forgot to change the “save mail to computer” setting, and his wife found everything a few months later. That was the worst part, Steve thought: The e-mails had been on there for months before Cathy happened to come across them.

  Stupid stupid stupid.

  No, Ali Daniels was not Steve Rogers’s first indiscretion during his twelve-year relationship with Cathy Hildebrant—his first student, yes, but not his first affair. There had been a handful of others of which his ex-wife was entirely unaware: a summer theatre actress here and there and a regular fling with an old girlfriend he ran into twice a year on the conference circuit. The latter had been going on since before both of them got married, so Rogers did not feel the slightest bit guilty about that one. Besides, she was the one with the kids.

  In fact, Rogers was actually proud of himself for the degree to which he had remained “faithful” to Cathy Hildebrant over the course of their twelve-year relationship—for in his bachelor days he had been quite the satyr. Indeed, Steve Rogers always had a sneaking suspicion that if he had put as much effort into his acting career as he had into getting laid, he might have been the next Brando—or at least the next Burt Reynolds. He had often been compared to the latter in his youth—a comparison that he downright resented while at Yale; and later, one that he used to his advantage in his early thirties as a second-rate regional theatre actor.

  Oh yes, Rogers was very, very vain. But more than his vanity, Rogers carried with him an unconscious yet subtle resentment for the hand that life had dealt him. True, on paper he had much to be proud of—after all, he was a graduate of the prestigious MFA in Acting Program at Yale University, and he was a tenured faculty member and the senior acting instructor in the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance at Brown University. Nonetheless, Rogers secretly felt like something of a failure—felt that for some reason the deck had been stacked against him from the beginning. It really had nothing to do with his mediocre acting career. No, even before entering Yale at the age of twenty-two, Rogers had already begun to feel as if he was somewhat unappreciated by his constituents, as if nobody really understood the depth of his talent. But rather than grow into a sense of bitterness, Steve Rogers’s perception of his place in the world evolved over the years into a sense of entitlement, of being owed something—so much so that when he cheated on Cathy Hildebrant, he actually felt like he deserved some recreational pussy for giving in to the concept of marriage in the first place.

  Yes, cheating was one thing—getting caught was another. It was as if for Rogers only an acknowledgment of the act itself by the betrayed could really define it as adultery—If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, yada yada yada.

  And so, more than the hurt he had caused his ex-wife, more than the guilt of his failed marriage, Rogers would forever curse himself for being so stupid as to let fate get the best of him once again. Sure, Cathy could have screwed him; she could have really taken him for a bath if she had wanted to—so yeah, he had to concede his good fortune with regard to the painlessness of his divorce. However, Steve Rogers could not help but feel somewhat the victim—could not help but feel somewhat abandoned. When it came right down to it, Rogers hated to admit to himself that he wished Cathy had fought just a little bit harder, been just a little bit more aggressive and spiteful to him over the last four months—for that would have proven that he really had meant something to her.

  Yes, as his career as a second-rate actor had taught him, the only thing worse than hate was indifference.

  Ironically, it was with a certain amount of indifference that Rogers held Ali Daniels—that great piece of graduate student ass whose MySpace generation I-have-to-get-an-e-mail-from-you-every-day-now-that-we’ve-fucked neediness ruined his good thing with Cathy. True, Steve Rogers had loved Cathy Hildebrant as much as he could possibly love someone other than himself—probably still did, in a way. And true, he was self-aware enough to realize that he had been jealous of her at times—of her PhD, of the success of her book and, most recently, of the attention she had received as a consultant or whatever-the-fuck-she-was on that nutbag Michelangelo case. Nevertheless, Rogers understood that he would miss Cathy and the routine, the security, the practical convenience of the life they had carved out as a couple. If only he had heeded his working-class father’s advice like he did his mother’s; if only he had lived by that credo, perhaps none of this nonsense would have happened to begin with.

  “Remember, Steven, you don’t shit where you eat.”

  Looks like all that shit is blowing over now, anyway, Rogers said to himself, his feet pounding the pavement.

  And so, despite his brief moment of weakness the week earlier, Rogers peacefully resigned himself to the fact that it was now time to move on for good—from both Cathy Hildebrant and the annoyingly needy, pseudo-intellectual Ali Daniels.

  Now that she’s graduated, Steve thought, now that she’s got her fucking useless Masters it’ll be easier to just let it drop. Won’t say anything unless I have to—maybe tomorrow when she calls from her new digs in New York City. Or maybe I’ll break the news to her in an e-mail. Wouldn’t that be a little poetic justice?

  Rogers checked his time and kicked his pace into high gear as he usually did during the last mile of his morning run. He was ahead of schedule—might even make it home before it was light. That was good. More than anything else—even more than sex—Steve Rogers loved that feeling of having finished his run before most people were even awake; of having a leg up on the day ahead of him—a leg up on all those fat lazy slobs who stayed up the night before watching Letterman. It was a feeling that helped to ease the unconscious but palpable resentment that fate had forced him to be an actor; moreover, that fate had forced him into the actor’s schedule, into those late hours at the theatre which sometimes prevented him from staying ahead of the game the next morning.

  “Early to bed, early to rise, Steven, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

  Rogers rounded the corner onto the street that would loop him back to Garden City Center—the outdoor shopping mall in Cranston to which he made a special seven-minute drive from his house five mornings a week, and where he always parked his BMW Z4 roadster by the big gazebo at its center. Rogers had been coming here for years; the uneven terrain and low traffic of the surrounding middle-class neighborhood was ideal
for his strict running regimen. Yes, he was making incredible time today, would make it back to the big gazebo, would sit on the bench, and breathe the cool May air and drink his Gatorade before any of the other runners even arrived—perhaps even without having seen a single light flick on in the kitchens of the houses as he passed. It was Monday morning. The people in this neighborhood worked. And it gave Steve Rogers a great sense of satisfaction to know that he had already accomplished more in a little over an hour than they would all week.

  Depending on what time he started, the last leg of Steve Rogers’s run had the potential to be the darkest—especially in the winter, when he would reach the poorly lighted loop around Whitewood Drive well before sunrise. On this particular morning, Steve had risen at 4:00 A.M., was on the pavement by 4:15, and thus hoofed it onto the heavily tree-lined street just as the sky was beginning to change color out of sight beyond a jagged curtain of oaks and pines. Now that the semester was over, now that he had made the decision to move on from both the women in his life, Rogers kicked off his first official summer as a bachelor right on schedule. He had honored his pact with himself that he would have to work extra hard to get himself back on the market for some younger pussy. Yeah, he was going to take his buddy back in Chicago’s advice: he was going to try the Internet dating scene; would make a profile and shave ten years off his age and play the field of late-twenty-to-early-thirty-somethings in Boston for a while. Yeah, better to play that game on the road than to damage his reputation on his home turf any further.

  “Remember, Steven, you don’t shit where you eat.”

  His heart pumping powerfully, his thoughts clear and precise, Steve Rogers was deep in the zone when he came upon the blue Toyota Camry. The car was parked between the streetlights, at the side of the road in the shadow of a large oak tree—just one of the many cars he had passed that morning. No, the avid runner and born-again bachelor did not even give the blue Toyota Camry a second glance as his Nike Air Max sneakers carried him into the shadows and straight into the arms of The Sculptor.